An earlier version of this notebook was published by the Argentina office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research in September 2020; the data that follows corresponds to the date of the original publication. It was edited and subsequently translated into English and Portuguese in June–July 2022.

Introduction

Fernando González is a member of the Research Collective on Socio-Environmental Crisis and Dispossession of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Argentina) and a researcher and faculty member at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of the University of Buenos Aires.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on how the transformation of the environment is central to the spread of viruses and the spawning of pandemics. Reflections on a post-pandemic agenda are an opportunity to attach greater importance to issues that are generally pushed to the margins of the public agenda. These issues are among the systemic causes of the health crisis as well as of the food, energy, and climate crises. Some social and political forces have managed to raise doubts about the dynamics of multinational agribusiness, which drives intensive and industrial livestock production that creates the conditions for viruses to mutate and then spread to humans, while other issues have not yet been addressed in the post-COVID debates.

The relationship between agribusiness, deforestation, and the climate crisis is among the issues that have received attention. As we saw in August 2021, forest fires were once again in the news. This was the case not only in Argentina, or even in the region as a whole (with the fires in the Pantanal and across the Amazon), but practically all over the world. In the Arctic, temperatures once again exceeded 30°C, causing even more fires. Tropical forests of the sub-Saharan region in Africa burned while Asia and Oceania suffered major wildfires and California (United States), as well as European countries such as Spain, France, and Greece, battled fires of varying magnitude.

By adopting a long-term perspective, we can identify the relationship between these phenomena and the climate crisis. The journal Nature published a study indicating that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km² (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in the global mean fire weather season length from 1979 to 2013.¹ This phenomenon is due to the increase in weather variables that the system itself has altered (temperatures, humidity, total precipitation, and wind speed). The increase in wildfires in turn feeds back into the climate crisis that causes them. This exposes us to the risk of releasing viruses buried by the cold temperatures of the Arctic ice (permafrost) and makes it more likely that diseases linked to the change in temperatures (dengue, Zika, etc.) will emerge.

It is in this context that debates on the necessary adaptation to climate change emerge. These debates are being addressed across the world with different approaches and models by international organisations and by some nation states. At the global level, we hear talk of the European Green Deal, the North American Green New Deal, and the Global Green New Deal. Latin America is beginning to speak both in these terms as well as of the Ecosocial Pact or the Ecosocial Plan, different narratives that contribute to the same discussion. In Argentina, the discussion even extends to sectors of the national government, which are seeking to address issues such as the energy transition and commitment to ‘green’ industrialisation. Popular movements and different civil society actors have begun to debate the implications of this policy framework. Those whose working and living conditions are changing are immersed in this debate, including socio-environmental movements, peasant and farmers’ movements, trade unions, and committed researchers who have forged a rich experience of alternative practices and programmes. Lastly, some of the central concepts addressed by these debates are also part of other proposals. This is the case with the Plan de Desarrollo Humano Integral (‘Comprehensive Human Development Plan’), which was presented by a group of social movements and trade union organisations and includes ecological transition as a central overarching concept. We believe that this publication can contribute to these debates.

It is in this vein that the Research Collective on Socio-Environmental Crisis and Dispossession of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Argentina) decided to produce this notebook. We consider it to be an initial approach aimed at gathering different opinions from those who are immersed in the discussion and initiatives surrounding these issues, particularly on the meanings and effects of the so-called Green New Deal and the debates that arise from it. For this reason, we invited Thea Riofrancos (United States) and Sabrina Fernandes (Brazil) to participate as leading figures in the field of ecosocialism in their respective countries and included an article by researcher and activist José Seoane, a member of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and this collective. We thank them for participating with their thoughts and hope that these texts serve to strengthen the essential debates for the collective production of revolutionary theories and practices.

Socioenvironmental Alternatives in the Face of the Pandemic and the Crisis: Discussing the Green New Deal

José Seoane is a sociologist and doctor of social sciences, professor at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), researcher at the Institute of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (IEALC), and osé Seoane is a sociologist and doctor of social sciences, professor at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), researcher at the Institute of Latin  American and Caribbean Studies (IEALC), and member of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Among other works, he has published: Extractivismo, despojo y crisis climática [Extractivism, Dispossession and Climate Crisis] (2013, co-author); Las (re)configuraciones neoliberales de la cuestión ambiental [Neoliberal (Re) Configurations of the Environmental Question] (2017); and, as a co-editor, La potencia de la vida frente a la producción de muerte. El proyecto neoliberal y las resistencias [The Neoliberal Project and Resistance] (2020).

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened ­– in some cases dramatically – the multiple dynamics of the crisis of civilisation that has characterised the spread of capitalist neoliberalisation in recent decades. At the same time, the gravity of the health, social, and economic situation has exposed the catastrophic effects of these same policies on the health and precarisation of life for working-class sectors. The spread of the virus and the re-emergence of the threat of death as a population management issue – in addition to the attempts to naturalise these processes in biological terms – draw public attention to the socioenvironmental conditions and the forms that the reproduction of social relations and life adopt when faced with the threat of commodification and dispossession. An examination of the repeated cycles of epidemics and pandemics that have affected nations and regions in recent decades points precisely to these processes. The neoliberal production of food and the destructive effects of contemporary extractivism on native forests and jungles are particularly responsible for these cycles.

In both respects, the debate over the real causes of the current crisis and the alternatives to it emphasises the significance of the socioenvironmental question and perspective. In a way, this has appeared in the practices of popular movements and their responses to the health and social catastrophe that is affecting the subaltern subjects of Latin America.² These movements have once again taken up and brought life to the programmes of popular ecology and buen vivir (‘living well’), which marked the most pivotal cycles of popular struggles and rebellions in the region.³

Similarly, the proposal for a Green New Deal has re-emerged and taken on new relevance as part of the debate on public policy alternatives. The term New Deal alludes to the socioeconomic policy developed by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1933 onwards in response to the effects of the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. This policy was characterised by strong state intervention in the economy aimed at mitigating the effects of mass unemployment and the social crisis as well as reviving economic activity through public sector employment, social policies, and stimulation of consumption. Combined with other measures, we could say that this policy was a form of Keynesianism years before Keynes published his General Theory.⁴

The current addition of ‘green’ to this term is generally understood as a way of highlighting the need to consider the ecological dimension of this economic recovery, stimulated through state intervention and public investment. The dissemination and use that the term Green New Deal has acquired in our circles indeed raises a question about the current and future effects of considering and restricting our scope of change to this perspective. In addition, it leads us to consider the significance and consequences that this could have for the Global South and the peoples of Latin America, especially when it comes to the challenges faced by the subaltern sectors of the population and their central role in constructing alternatives for social transformation that are so urgent today. Responding to these questions undoubtedly begins with an awareness of the discursive and extra-discursive framework in which the notion of the Green New Deal emerged as well as an awareness of the different meanings and implications that it had and has. This article aims to offer some reflections on this subject in particular.

A Green New Deal with a History

One of the first iterations of the Green New Deal leads us to the work prepared by the environmental economist Edward Barbier in 2009, commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in the context of the international economic crisis that has been unfolding since 2008. This report, entitled ‘Global Green New Deal’, argued that ‘an investment of one percent of the global GDP over the next two years’ – equivalent to a quarter of the total size of the fiscal stimulus packages proposed at the time to deal with the crisis – ‘could provide the critical mass of green infrastructure needed to seed a significant greening of the global economy’. The proposal was to redirect part of the public investment announced internationally to promote green economic activities which would ‘make a major contribution to reviving the world economy, saving and creating jobs, and protecting vulnerable groups’ and simultaneously ‘promote sustainable and inclusive growth’. This was an initiative in favour of ‘the active “greening” of proposed fiscal stimulus packages’.⁵ Indeed, at first glance these objectives do not appear to be far removed from the meaning that the Green New Deal proposal has adopted in many cases today, when it is in the midst of the crises sparked or deepened by COVID-19.

Barbier’s proposal, which was adopted and promoted by UNEP from that moment onwards, was part of the ‘green economy’. Barbier himself had been part of the team led by David Pearce, which included Anil Markandya and which wrote the 1989 report that would become the first consistent expression of this proposal, published in the same year as the book Blueprint for a Green Economy.⁶ The green economy was presented as the solution to a series of clashes and contradictions that had cut across environmental debates and policies since the 1970s and 1990s and that created a false dichotomy between economic development and the economy on the one hand and the conservation and protection of nature on the other. This contrast between the economy and nature – which shaped discussions about the socioenvironmental question during those years – thus appeared to have been overcome by integrating nature into the economy. Addressing the environmental question was thus reduced to promoting certain economic activities considered to be ‘green’ to the detriment of other activities considered to be harmful to the environment. As has been pointed out many times, the green economy meant reconsidering how the environmental question is handled solely by modifying the distribution of different forms of capital. In other words, there would be a shift from favouring the ‘brown’ economy to prioritising the ‘green’ economy, thus reconfirming the rationality of profit, competition, and the market, as well as capitalist social relations themselves, and ultimately making caring for the environmental a way of doing good business.

When it comes to the global debate about how to approach the environmental question, the proposals of the Global Green New Deal and the green economy and their adoption by UNEP represented an attempt to reformulate and overcome the reference to sustainable development that continued to guide the agreements of international agencies in those years. This would mean accepting some kind of regulation or limitation of economic activity with the aim of preserving nature and reproducing natural capital. As witnessed in the debates preceding and during Rio+20, also known as the Earth Summit 2012, promoting the green economy became the new neoliberal paradigm for dealing with the environmental question. It is no coincidence that this took place alongside a renewed offensive for the transnational appropriation of natural resources and the deepening of extractivism during those same years in Latin America.

The Echoes and Challenges of the Green New Deal in Latin America

Once the Green New Deal was launched, references to it spread alongside neoliberal crises, even reaching progressive and critical sectors in the United States and Europe. The worsening dynamics of the climate crisis, with its catastrophic prospects and the growing importance of its present effects – as seen in the intensification and spread of extreme weather phenomena – meant that addressing this dimension of the socioenvironmental question became a central issue even for the world’s elites. On simply rereading the latest reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a body thought to be politically impartial – one can grasp the terrifying panorama that the immediate future holds for us if significant change is not implemented. At the same time, data provided by the World Meteorological Organisation shows that, while environmental agreements and policies have progressed in recent decades, the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has simultaneously persisted.

Just as there was a bourgeois concern with the preservation of nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, today there are different traditions of liberal or even neoliberal environmentalism. In this context, the gravity of the climate crisis has also been one of the focal points of the disputes between different factions of the global elites and even within the US itself. For example, the policy of denial of the anthropogenic causes of climate change advocated by former US President Donald Trump as well as his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Accords goes against the policy promoted by his predecessor, Barack Obama, who had been in favour of those agreements and the promotion of renewable energy and the green economy. These agreements and policies were questioned by popular movements. Ever since Al Gore promoted the campaign against climate change as vice president under Bill Clinton (1993–2001), for which he even received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, leading sectors of the Democratic Party have adopted this proposal for a ‘green deal’. The recent work of Jeremy Rifkin (adviser to Al Gore) was precisely entitled The Green New Deal.

Although Rifkin is best known for his 1995 book The End of Work, his aforementioned book The Green New Deal recognises the threat of a sixth extinction of life on Earth and the importance of mobilising young people around these issues. Rifkin concludes with a call for a bold economic plan to ensure the effective transition from a civilisation based on fossil fuels to one based on the use of renewable energy. The proposed shift is based on the fact that renewable energy has become an increasingly attractive and profitable business, indicating, as Rifkin wrote, that ‘The marketplace is speaking, and governments will need to adapt if they are to survive and prosper’.

It is in this context that the Argentine province of Córdoba, the heart of agribusiness, hosted the first two Latin American summits on the green economy in 2016 and 2017, organised by the Advanced Leadership Foundation, a US organisation linked to the Democratic Party. As Córdoba’s governor, Juan Schiaretti, clearly noted in the inauguration of the Second Green Economy Summit, ‘nowhere is it written that care for the environment is at odds… with productive development… [I]t’s time that both merge… as there are business opportunities in the sustainable economy… [T]he number of green economy companies in the US itself is proving… that it is absolutely compatible and profitable for the business sector… to work in the green economy’.⁷ Obama’s presence at that second summit indicated the imperialist corporate interest in this initiative, while the participation of then President Mauricio Macri and many of his officials demonstrated its influence on his government’s neoliberal policy.

This is the context in which the Cambiemos government⁸ put the issue of renewable energy on the public agenda, calling to participate in these projects through the RenovAr I, II, and III tenders.⁹ The proposal to do good business with renewable energy was well understood by the Argentine president himself. As a businessman, he reaped enormous profits through the Macri Group with the purchase and resale of six wind farms without having to bid for a tender. In just a few months, he made at least $15 million, representing losses to the state of several hundred million dollars, for which there is an ongoing legal case against him. This is just one example of how profit impacts public assets as well as the application of the law.

The development of renewable energy under corporate control replicates the processes of the private appropriation of natural resources and the resulting dispossession, environmental degradation, and dependency without effectively securing the energy transition. A more dramatic example of this is the corporate interest in the control of lithium reserves, which was behind the 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia and is also behind the developments in electric cars announced by Tesla and Elon Musk. In the same vein, the green economy and the Green New Deal also express the emerging attempts of corporate power to control and develop these activities.

The Construction of the ‘Green’ Concept: The Neoliberal Turning Point in the Environmental Question

As we have noted, rather than embodying a ‘greening’ of the economy, the green economy is more accurately an economisation of the ‘green’ concept. The green economy promotes processes of monetary valorisation of the environment and nature. These processes are evident in the importance awarded to environmental accounting, building natural capital, and the extension of ecosystem services and market mechanisms that address environmental issues, such as carbon markets linked to climate change. This is a reflection of the commodification or capitalisation of nature and the environment, which, as we have already said, does not conflict with the definitions of the Green New Deal that we have examined.

The other dimension of the neoliberal approach to the environmental question is precisely what we have previously referred to as the naturalisation or biologisation of the environment. This process, which dates back to the interventions that were developed when the United Nations convened the Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, includes a series of mechanisms aimed at de-socialising and de-historicising the socioenvironmental question.

The very notion of the environment was established in the nineties as a reference to a non-human physical and natural world, emerging in the midst of a narrative about sustainable development and the substitution of the ‘problems of the human environment’. The appearance of this notion marks a watershed moment in this long process, which dates back to the dualisation of nature and society that is characteristic of capitalist colonial modernity.¹⁰ Today, the construction of the ‘green’ concept and the reduction of the socioenvironmental question to this concept represents a new step in the process to strip the environment of its social and historical dimension – in this case, even by (artificially) reproducing certain biological processes. It is this ‘green’ reductionism of the environment, of the diversity of human and non-human life forms and their ecosystems, and of nature that can be integrated into the economic dynamics of the market and capitalist production. This should warn us of the consequences of critical and progressive sectors adopting this ‘green’ label.

Likewise, we should be wary of seeing the current crisis as an opportunity. One of the characteristics of neoliberal governments lies precisely in the ability to turn the crises it causes into catalysts for deepening its own transformations. Tragically, this has been an immediate result of the COVID-19 pandemic: a dramatic deepening of the dynamics of social inequality, the deterioration and destruction of the living conditions of large sectors of the population, extractivism and authoritarianism that characterise capitalist neoliberalisation in general, and, in particular, the neoliberal offensive that has been unfolding in the region since 2015. To a certain extent, we could say that this represents the exacerbation and naturalisation of a crisis that was already present in the ‘normality’ that existed before.

The People’s Alternatives

In the current context of the pandemic and the crisis of civilisation that it deepens, ideas of a Green New Deal have been gaining ground in the progressive and critical camp. The demands that counter-cyclical public investment consider the ecological question and that the solution to the social emergency incorporate environmental concerns are well-intentioned. But this would require an awareness of the meanings behind the notions of a Green New Deal or Green Pact and the effects that they have or could have on emancipatory practices and horizons.

In Latin America, the actions of subaltern subjects and people’s movements in recent decades have forged a multiplicity of practices and programmes built on the strong coordination of social and environmental factors within a perspective of social change. References to natural and social common goods, social and environmental justice, living together well or good living (el convivir bien or buen vivir), and comprehensive and popular agrarian reform are examples of this. These practices also include popular and democratic reformulations of sovereignty and their expressions through food sovereignty, with links to peasant, indigenous and family-based agricultural production and agroecology, community markets, and popular access to food in sufficient quantity and quality. Yet another example is the concept of energy sovereignty, under whose banner renewable energy is developed through communal models of production and distribution as well as public state control. These reformulations are even more important today in the face of the social and reproduction crisis that the pandemic has accentuated. Furthermore, with regard to the climate crisis, we must start with the contributions of global networks and platforms as well as the agreements reached at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (2010) and the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Defence of Life (2015), both held in Tiquipaya, Bolivia. Faced with the deterioration and destruction of the conditions for the existence of human and non-human life posed by the current neoliberal phase of capitalism, these proposals and experiences illuminate the path of essential alternatives that we must collectively build.

The Ecosocialist Green New Deal in the US
An Interview with Thea Riofrancos

The Research Collective on Socio-Environmental Crisis and Dispossession of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research interviewed Thea Riofrancos, a member of the steering committee of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Ecosocialist Working Group in 2020. Thea is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Jacobin, and other media. Her published work includes A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (2019, co-author) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (2020).

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: How did the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) come up with the Green New Deal policy to address the environmental crisis?

Thea Riofrancos: In 2017, a group of DSA members established the Ecosocialist Working Group to address environmental and climate crisis issues. Since then, the group has grown substantially and is now one of the largest in the organisation, with over a thousand members (the organisation has a total of 70,000 members). In the first year of the group, we worked a great deal in the area of ‘energy democracy’: the proposal to democratise, nationalise, and de-commodify electric companies (to establish public utilities and services). We now have about 15 local chapters with energy democracy campaigns. When the Green New Deal (GND) theme emerged in late 2018, we began developing ‘An Ecosocialist Green New Deal: Guiding Principles’, which was published in February 2019. The principles pick up on the GND paradigm while simultaneously radicalising it, declaring that the root cause of the climate crisis is global capitalism and that our society must be rebuilt to value human needs and the health of the planet instead of the profit of the ruling class. Our next step was to draw up a proposal to prioritise the ecosocialist GND as a central campaign of the DSA. We achieved that at our 2019 convention. There, over 1,000 delegates representing local chapters made decisions that would guide the organisation’s activities over the next two years and elected the new National Political Committee. One of those decisions, which received an almost unanimous vote of support, was to launch a campaign promoting the ecosocialist Green New Deal. From this moment on, the working group has strived to implement that resolution by supporting local chapters with their ecosocialist efforts, designing new platforms to facilitate coordination between chapters, and developing strategies with the participation of our members.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: Could you summarise the fundamental features of the proposal for a GND?

Thea Riofrancos: First, the GND proposes to decarbonise the economy within the time frame presented by climate science, which means halving global emissions by 2030. In order to do this, we propose that the countries of the Global North reduce their emissions even more quickly, given their historical role in the accumulation of emissions. To achieve this goal, we must transform the energy system (from fossil fuels to renewable energy), electrify many processes (transport, heating/cooling, industrial activities, etc.), and change the agricultural system (from an energy-intensive and polluting system to agroecology), among other profound changes.

On the other hand, we propose massive public intervention and investment as the driving force for this transition, which would occur in many social and economic spheres. This would be comparable to the mobilisation of resources that took place in the years following World War II. The type and pace of transformation required cannot be brought about by market mechanisms or private companies, much less by individual acts of change. On the contrary, it requires state planning and coordination at all levels of government, financing with public resources, and the momentum of social mobilisation and collective action.

Finally, the ecosocialist GND paradigm firmly links the issue of climate change to that of socio-economic inequality. The proposal not only talks about reducing emissions, but also about guaranteeing health insurance, employment, housing, public transport, and the right to unionise. It envisions a massive transformation to make urban, suburban, and rural planning more equal and more democratic and to create an environment that includes more public green spaces and is guided by the well-being of people and the planet, not by real estate profit.

From the beginning, policy surrounding the GND has been marked by a dynamic process between social movements and progressive politicians. In November 2018, the young democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined members of the Sunrise Movement, a movement of young people mobilising around the issue of climate change, in occupying the office of Democratic Congresswoman and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

This move demonstrated that the GND has sparked a battle within the Democratic Party between the more left-wing and the more centrist factions. More moderate Democrats, and obviously the Republican Party, reject the link between climate change and social inequality presented in this GND; they also reject the massive scale of public investment prescribed.

But it is worth noting that Ocasio-Cortez did not invent the GND paradigm. For years, environmental justice movements have linked climate change and its environmental impacts to the unequal structure of our societies. In fact, Ocasio-Cortez attributes her commitment to climate policy (and her decision to run for Congress) to one such movement: the mobilisation of indigenous nations and their allies against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota. These movements point out that the wealthy classes and countries bear most of the responsibility for emissions and environmental damage while the victims of global warming are indigenous communities, African Americans, the working class, and, broadly speaking, marginalised sectors.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: From here (south of the South), there is an idea that the GND is linked to proposals for green capitalism or the green economy, at least in its initial expressions. To what extent does this GND differ from the proposals of the green economy model? What are the key elements that can take on this paradigm?

Thea Riofrancos: ‘Green capitalism’ purports to mitigate the symptoms of capitalism – global warming, the mass extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems – without transforming the model of accumulation and consumption that caused the climate crisis in the first place. It is a ‘techno-fix’: the fantasy of changing everything without changing anything. We see this kind of proposal now in the European Green Deal. We also see it in the electromobility model of companies like Tesla, for example. In this vision, nothing would change apart from swapping our conventional vehicles for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, we would maintain the domination of highways and cars over our urban and suburban spaces while reproducing an unsustainable pattern of extractivism (to produce an electric car requires more than 80 kilograms of copper, plus lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other natural resources).

In stark contrast to this false solution, ecosocialism understands that the environmental crisis lies in capitalism itself. This is why we at the DSA developed the ecosocialist GND. This vision recognises the physical limits of the planet, the impossibility of ‘green growth’, and the urgency of changing not only the mode of accumulation but also: a) daily patterns of consumption, work, transport, housing, planning, food, and more in order to guarantee a dignified life for all; b) de-commodifying basic services for survival and well-being and changing a privatised, individualist, and unequal consumption model to a collective and democratic consumption model within the limits of the planet; c) democratising the economy and control over natural resources and technology (including green technologies such as electromobility and solar panels); d) transforming our communities to serve working-class sectors, ecosystems, and the planet rather than the profits of the ruling class; and, finally, e) demilitarising, de-colonialising, and working for a future of global cooperation and solidarity.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: In your opinion, what would be the first steps towards the construction of a GND in the short term?

Thea Riofrancos: In the United States, the first steps in terms of a public policy toward a GND would be to: 1) end subsidies for and dismantle the fossil fuel sector; keep oil, coal, and gas in the ground (through strong regulations); and nationalise oil companies; 2) invest in the public sector on a massive scale to decarbonise the energy system; and 3) guarantee jobs for all, with a focus on green sectors.

However, we will not achieve this without a strong, constant social mobilisation in all spheres of life. In 2019, the US witnessed a historic scale of mobilisation against police brutality in African American communities. In 2018, we saw a historic wave of strikes by teachers and nurses, among other sectors. We would need something similar in magnitude and militancy to implement the proposals of the GND. We know that there is no social progress without social struggle from below led by the working class. In the history of leftist governments, we have seen that struggles can be institutionalised in public policies, although always provisionally.

We are currently at the crossroads of multiple crises. We are faced with a pandemic, an economic crisis, and the climate crisis. In addition, in the US we are witnessing an uprising not only against police violence in African American communities, but also against a society based on racial oppression and against a government that does not invest in the basic needs of communities, all while investing in police, prisons, and wars.

Therefore, it is crucial that the next steps towards a GND address the concrete problems that the working class is facing in their daily lives. To this end, we have been working on a proposal called the Green Stimulus, a platform that applies the principles of the GND to the immediate crisis we face. This is a proposal to use public money to fuel the energy transition, at the same time creating millions of decent jobs in economic sectors with the least, or even a positive, environmental impact. This is a proposal that would benefit marginalised communities suffering not only from the pandemic but also from economic despair. The idea of the green stimulus is not to push for ‘green growth’ but to seize the moment and put us on the path to a socially and environmentally just society with a low-emissions economy, more sustainable planning, and food sovereignty.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: Which social actors does the possibility of setting this process in motion depend on? What alliances do you think are necessary?

Thea Riofrancos: We know that social transformation only comes through people power. This power comes from social movements: trade unions, small farmer organisations, indigenous movements, neighbourhood organisations. In the case of the US, the social forces to secure a GND are found in urban struggles for the right to housing, public transport, and green and public spaces. Education, health care, and care work unions are essential: most of these workers are women of colour and migrants, and therefore their work is marginalised and undervalued. Their unions are generally supportive of the GND and have a vision of collective well-being. Understood in the broadest sense, care work is key to an ecosocialist society; communities and the planet must be cared for. It is worth noting that the mobilisation of young people is extremely important. By and large, not only do young people today recognise the environmental emergency and play a leading role in the climate justice movement; living through one crisis after another has also made them more radical. On the other hand, indigenous movements as well as allied movements are fighting against extractivism, which threatens indigenous territories and collective rights. And then there are the environmental justice movements fighting against toxic pollution (from factories, power plants, petrochemical plants, etc.), which primarily affects African American communities and other marginalised sectors.

Lastly, the DSA plays an important role in mobilising young leftists, radicalising public debate on the environment, and recruiting candidates for election campaigns. There are elected officials in many US states and cities who are DSA members, and they are pushing the GND, among other transformative policies. There are two DSA members in Congress alone: Alexandrio Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: How is the transition to an ecosocialist society envisioned within the DSA? Can the GND serve as an opportunity for this transition? What is the role of the working class in this process?

Thea Riofrancos: Firstly, union organising is important. In the US, there has been a renewed wave of strikes, especially in the education sector, but also in the health care and supermarket sectors, among others. We are witnessing new ties between the trade union and environmental movements. In January 2019, for example, there was a historic strike of thirty thousand teachers in Los Angeles through which they won green spaces for schools, among other demands. Before that, striking teachers in West Virginia demanded that coal companies with mines in their state pay more taxes. Beyond these specific demands, it is worth emphasising that the education and health sectors are absolutely essential to a more equal and sustainable world. The other victories of these strikes, such as an increase in the public education budget, are also ‘green’ victories and are essential to a GND. It should be noted that unions in the service and nursing sectors have shown their support for a GND. Obviously, the most complicated sectors of workers to bring on board for an energy transition are those who work in the fossil fuel industry. This is an incredibly complicated issue, but the most important paradigm in this area is the ‘just transition’ model, which emphasises that workers who would lose their jobs due to the energy transition must be protected.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: You co-authored a book on this transition called A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. In the book, you call to ‘recharge internationalism’. What can you tell us about this proposal?

Thea Riofrancos: In the book we published, we write that the climate crisis is a planetary crisis and that the scope of the GND should therefore be planetary as well. But we are not referring to the Paris Agreement or other agreements among elites, which are too weak and too slow, and which protect the interests of the most powerful economies and corporations. Instead, we propose a new type of ‘internationalism’, one that is from below and on the left, and we focus on the issue of global green technology production chains – especially lithium batteries, which are key to the energy transition. They are needed to charge cars, buses, bicycles, electric scooters, and more and to store energy in renewable grids because solar and wind power are intermittent and variable. For these reasons, the global demand for lithium is going to increase significantly, mainly due to the growth of the electromobility market (particularly private electric cars). Chile is one of the world’s leading exporters of lithium; the Andean salt flats in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia hold more than 50% of the world’s known reserves. Although lithium is essential to combatting the climate crisis, in Chile lithium extraction has a number of socio-environmental impacts both on ecosystems and on indigenous communities living around the Salar de Atacama, Chile’s largest salt flats. The combination of the lithium and copper sectors has resulted in severe water depletion in the salt flat and has also decreased the population of species such as the Andean flamingo. The collective and territorial rights of indigenous communities and their livelihoods have been violated. In addition, lithium production has been marked by the repression of workers.

Given these impacts and the local movements against ‘green extractivism’ (such as the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats), the GND cannot reproduce the same patterns of production and consumption as contemporary capitalism. In the book, we emphasise that we must shift from a car-centric model, in which each person has his or her own private car, to a public transit system which uses resources much more rationally under a collective consumption model (an electric bus makes much more ecological and social sense than millions of Teslas). The current international trade model must also be transformed. We reject ‘free trade’ deals and favour fair and green trade models that prioritise labour and indigenous rights and protect ecosystems. And, because we do not believe that change comes from above, we propose new, cross-border relationships of solidarity between workers and communities working and living in the nodes of production chains who are reclaiming their rights and coordinating visions of an alternative world.

An Ecosocialist Vision for Decarbonisation in Latin America

Sabrina Fernandes has a PhD in sociology and is an ecosocialist activist in Brazil. She is an editor at Jacobin Brasil and a researcher at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

We are in a race against time to combat climate change. In order to curb it, we need to fight for another kind of change. We must change the system we live in, but this is not a simple task. An anti-capitalist position is not enough without a plan for what we want in the future. However, time is against us. To avoid climate change, we have to change the system, but the political conditions today are not conducive to this. The right wing is strong in many countries, as is the denial of climate science. We need to come up with a plan that quickly makes changes possible in the power grid and in cities, transport, and food production in the coming years. A decarbonisation plan would create the conditions for deeper changes in another political conjuncture, since it would slow down our race against time.

It is impossible to think about decarbonisation without considering the historical conditions of Latin America as well as the impact of development processes and extractivism on the region and its capitalist production cycle. If we intend to change the world to build an ecosocialist society, it is essential that we start from the South.

A Green New Deal That Addresses the Roots of the Problem

The discussion surrounding a Green New Deal (GND), whether in the United States or in Latin America, is very diverse. While everyone talks about decarbonisation and investment in renewable energy, what this actually means varies according to who is making the proposal.

When I think of a GND, I think of a decarbonisation plan that is urgent for this decade and the next. It is a plan that demands boldness. Whether it is the GND in the United States or a similar project under a different name in another country, the most important consideration is that it is not possible to talk about decarbonisation as if it involves just a few adjustments here and there. Nor should we accept that large corporations set the terms for this change, as they see ‘green’ schemes as an opportunity to profit and reposition themselves in the market.

The climate crisis is the result of a long process of economic expansion and its environmental impacts. Under capitalism, nature is treated as a source for resources – even its protection must be legitimised by profit or correspond with the interests of capital. It is not surprising that many ‘carbon offset’ initiatives serve a function in the financial market and can be used to justify emissions in another area. While public funds can help preserve biomes, the market insists on promoting solutions that make the state a partner of business, the stock market, and the credit and lending systems. Therefore, we argue that capitalist ecology is a false ecology, as it fails to identify the root cause of the climate and ecological crisis.

As ecosocialists, we think about the importance of regulating the social metabolism together with the metabolism of nature so that we do not forget that we are also part of nature. For this reason, we seek to question the trends of climate transition projects. This includes the GND and other plans. We also emphasise the need to build these projects from the bottom up.

Popular organisations must be at the heart of decarbonisation plans. If this does not happen, we will see projects that are insufficient and slow and that hold back the transition by subordinating it to market interests. Capitalists know that oil cannot last forever – that is why some of them are also committed to seeking alternatives. That is also why they seek to achieve decarbonisation, but they do so under conditions that guarantee the sovereignty of the private sector and a convenient pace for securing profits to the very last drop. As ecosocialists, we argue that a good transition plan must include important reforms, but also that these reforms must always be attentive to the conditions necessary to change the entire system and guarantee a different model that does not copy the productivist tendencies of capitalism.

The Answer Lies in Solidarity among Exploited Peoples

It is indisputable that there is no time to first achieve socialism and only then invest in the ecological changes that we need. Little time remains to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before the damage is irreparable. There is even less time for the exploited peoples of the world, who already live under harsh conditions and are the ones who will most suffer from the impacts of the climate crisis. Studies suggest that the average temperature will rise by 3°C, and it is possible that many people will experience an increase of as much as 6°C. Those who have more money will be able to pay for air conditioning to be installed in their homes and offices, which will also increase the demand for electricity. Those who work outdoors, such as farmers, street sweepers, street vendors, delivery workers, construction workers, and many others, will find it increasingly difficult to work and will be exposed to the risk of disease and even death.

Consequently, trade unions have a fundamental role to play in building a decarbonisation plan. We are well aware that the capitalist system sees Latin America’s natural resources as mere assets. Workers in state-owned oil and mining companies are constantly fighting against privatisation attempts. In the fight against climate change, there is no guarantee that a state-owned company in the dirty energy sector will be more sustainable. Many changes are needed to transform the polluting energy sector, which is already obsolete. But state companies must be protected, firstly because organised workers can assert their demands more forcefully in the public sector, and secondly because a major decarbonisation plan requires more control of the energy sector (which will not be possible in the private sphere). It is possible that those who know the sector best because they work in it will also become climate activists, as their inclusion is essential for a just transition with more jobs and strengthened public actions.

In fact, a just transition is a concept that must always be addressed in the discussion about a green deal. A just transition is more likely to be addressed if we ensure that organised workers are part of these discussions. Can we really expect capitalist companies that claim to be committed to the planet to promote the creation of green jobs in the renewable energy sector? Are these even good jobs? Will companies give up their profits to guarantee jobs and make the necessary investments, even when this results in economic losses? Of course not, because the private sector is driven by profit. The ‘green’ aspect of these ‘green jobs’ in major companies only refers to the green technologies employed and does not necessarily represent a genuine concern for nature.

In our region, we must understand the tremendous importance of the Latin American indigenous peoples and peasant movements in this task. These movements warned of the ecological crisis long before governments began to act. That is why the teachings of traditional buen vivir and teko porã (‘living well’) inspire researchers and socio-environmental activists all over the world.¹¹ But these perspectives cannot be allowed to be reduced to mere pleasantries. Talking about living well today requires addressing the demands of indigenous peoples and respecting their knowledge while also accepting that words alone are not enough and that it is necessary to create the conditions for radical change in society – especially because there is even less time left for these groups. Of course, this also means analysing the economic contradictions and demands for development that are present in Latin America and proposing a different concept of development that guarantees a decent quality of life as part of a paradigm of sustainability.

Women workers must also be included in the discussion about decarbonisation. It is not possible to talk about a just transition without recognising the fundamental role of women in caring for families and nature. When there is no water, it is common for women to have to fetch it. When children fall ill, our society still expects women to take care of them. Women are the majority in strategic service sectors in many countries, especially in health and education. Investments in these sectors can contribute to alleviating women’s excessive workloads in the field of social reproduction while producing social value with less of an environmental impact. Moreover, such investments have a greater impact on the groups that are excluded from conventional development plans. The Black population in many Latin American countries does not have adequate access to health care and will suffer even more from the consequences of climate change due to this social vulnerability. The proposal for our decarbonisation must also unquestionably include the fight against environmental racism.

A decarbonisation plan built from below is of vital interest to the exploited peoples, as it addresses both the climate crisis and their material conditions of life under capitalism. We know that the private renewable energy sector and other green technologies will be a central part of the transition due to their economic strength. However, these sectors cannot be the leaders of this process.

People’s solidarity is key to connecting struggles against the impacts of climate change, from the millions of refugees to the difficulties growing food, the issue of securing work, and the emergence of new diseases. A people does not need to experience the same situation as another to recognise the importance of these struggles. A global decarbonisation plan must be able to bring about changes that do not only favour the rich or that simply screen out the sun.

The immediate debates on decarbonisation should include popular assemblies that address the demands for a just transition, from the need for jobs to the struggle for land, so that those responsible for writing the bills and action plans do so in harmony with the peoples expressing these demands. This is important in order to avoid producing a purely technocratic plan that can be easily appropriated by capital and, in particular, to ensure that we have the political force capable of pressuring right-wing or moderate (or sometimes even left-wing) governments for a just transition as quickly as possible.

Popular assemblies are a very common element of popular organisations and struggles in Latin America. Recent experiences such as the Alternative World Water Forum (2018), the People’s Summit (2017), and the People’s Nature Forum (2020) serve as examples of the importance of bringing together diverse groups, from socio-environmental activists to indigenous organisations. Ecosocialists in Brazil and other countries are committed to building spaces like this because we know that the possibilities for radical change depend on collective organisation.

What Can We Do Today?

The coronavirus pandemic has affected the dynamics of commodity production and the organisation of life. Especially in impoverished countries living under far-right governments, the pandemic has meant death caused either by the virus or by hunger. In Brazil, for example, unemployment affects about 12.6% of the working class.¹² Informal work is the only option for many workers, meaning that they have no way to pay their rent or put food on the table if they stay at home during the pandemic. The situation is worse for the Black population. The Bolsonaro government has taken advantage of this situation to promote private sector intervention in the sanitation system; meanwhile, deforestation continues at a disconcerting rate. In Chile, the pandemic meant more repression against the population with harsh lockdown rules at the same time as there is a water crisis in the regions of Coquimbo and Valparaiso.

The pandemic exposes the daily social inequalities that many choose to ignore. There are so many crises occurring simultaneously that we cannot be misled when it comes to the solution. We must not return to ‘normal’ as advocated by governments and corporations: ‘normal’ is part of the problem. It is time to demand strategic changes that represent more radical responses and create conditions for other changes in the future. Major decarbonisation can help us today. However, it will not be easy to demand structural reforms without working-class mobilisation. Here, we see the important role of social movements in Latin America in demanding the impossible, especially when any other perspective could push us even further into the abyss.

Starting with the debate on the employment issue can help to engage more people, even more so if the main demands include quick and simple improvements to the quality of life. If unemployment is a problem, the task of governments is to invest in job creation, but not just any kind of jobs. It is possible to create new jobs that pay better, require fewer hours of work, and contribute to sectors where growth is needed. Since we are in a hurry, we must work with both long-term and short-term goals. In the short-term context, this means immediate investments whose results can be seen in a few years in at least three sectors: energy, transport, and food.

The countries of the South, which have dependent economies, export raw materials and import manufactured goods including fuel from foreign refineries. New jobs can be created and energy distribution improved if we instead promote renewable energy projects while combating the economic dependence and trade deficits that make our nations more vulnerable to the will of international capital. Energy transition in Latin America requires that we address not only the problems of the oil or natural gas industry, but also those of the large mining industry, whether domestically or foreign-owned. In this field, local investment regulations and protections for state-owned companies are necessary so that the demand for minerals and fossil fuels is not based on the pressures of the world market, but rather on a social rationale that determines the extraction of these goods according to their use value and not their exchange value. Renewable energies are not a panacea. There is no perfect solution that is without an impact on nature, but, with good planning and investments made by the public sector, it is possible to set feasible goals for the power grid transition while also promoting research in science and technology that can help with the challenges of achieving efficiency and avoiding waste. This process must include a discussion about strategic degrowth; this is not about degrowth as a rule, which would make life on our continent worse, but about perspectives that allocate energy production to activities that improve our quality of life, such as health, education, culture, and recreation, as well as to changes in transport and food production.

At the same time, the consumption of environmentally harmful products as well as the unbridled consumerism stimulated by marketing must be combated. The highest rates of consumption are in the richest countries, but big industry knows that it must push consumers in the South in a similar direction if it wants to make more profit. Changes in local production sectors as well as in advertising regulations can help to ensure that the middle and upper classes do not consume at the problematic levels of countries like the United States. Simultaneously, a better quality of life can be guaranteed to the poorest sectors of the population, especially for people who do not have access to basic goods such as refrigerators and computers or to affordable, quality health care and housing.

In addition, state investment in public transport is a way to change the norm of private cars in cities in favour of pedestrians, cyclists, and buses. New quality jobs can be created by having more buses on the streets, as well as by producing electric buses or building underground lines. A decarbonisation plan for cities will also be a plan for good jobs. It is clear that many ‘green jobs’ also need workers with specific kinds of knowledge, which reinforces the need to invest in education.

The food production sector is also strategic in the fight against climate change as well as for ecosocialism: food sovereignty must be a priority for any sustainable society. Deforestation resulting from agribusiness practices, as well as the impacts of the use of chemical fertilisers, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, and the advance of agribusiness destroys traditional ways of life and plays an active role in violence against indigenous people and peasants.

Any ‘green plan’ in Latin America that sets out to be radical and considers itself to be an alternative to the plans of ‘green capitalism’ (also known as the ‘green economy’) has the obligation to address the question of agrarian reform. Land concentration in the region is responsible for the destruction of nature and for the great inequality between classes. The voices of the movements fighting for agroecological and popular agrarian reform must be heard and their leaderships must be included in public policy and other developments. Only then will a ‘Green New Deal’ in the region succeed in connecting the different struggles taking place, from those demanding land to the citizens of big cities who yearn for healthy food free of agrochemicals.

A far-reaching ‘green plan’ in Latin America may be the response required of people today. Although there are many blows that must be resisted, movements are strongest when they make constructive demands capable of expanding ties of solidarity that go beyond defensive moments. Combining the different forms of resistance of our time and the radical demands against climate change would be very powerful. Certainly, it would be much easier if most countries in our region were not experiencing such harsh conditions. However, there is no time to lose, and all responses to crises must also be solutions to find an exit from a system of crisis. We must be careful: what we have today is not a window of opportunity, because a global politics and scenario of death do not offer opportunities. Those who talk like this based on capitalist ideology are too cynical. There is, however, a window of responsibility; it is up to us to fight for strategic changes in the face of the health and economic crises and to address the ecological crisis. After all, any politic that does not address the climate crisis is also a politic of death.

Endnotes

¹ W. Matt Jolly, Mark A. Cochrane, Patrick H. Freeborn., et al., ‘Climate-Induced Variations in Global Wildfire Danger from 1979 to 2013’, Nature, 14 July 2015. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8537

² Translator’s note: In this text, Nuestra America, or ‘Our America’, is translated as Latin America. Nuestra América is a concept stemming from Cuban national hero Jose Martí’s 1891 essay on Latin American nationalism calling for unity among nations to foment a Pan-Latin American identity opposed to the cultural values of Europe and the United States.

³ Translator’s note: ecología popular or ‘popular ecology’ focuses on defending community access to natural resources in the face of market-led depredation. Examples of this have been developed in India, Kenya, Brazil, Malaysia, and other developing countries. Many of these struggles have at their core the defence of their own natural resources against depredation by corporate giants in the North or in their own country.

⁴ Translator’s note: General theory refers to John Maynard Keynes’ book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).

⁵ Edward Barbier, ‘Global Green New Deal’, United Nations Environment Programme, March 2009, p. 1. https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/7903/A_Global_Green_New_Deal_Policy_Brief.pdf?amp%3BisAllowed=&sequence=3

⁶ David Pearce, Anil Markandya, and Edward Barbier, Blueprint for a Green Economy (London: Earthscan, 1989).

⁷ José Seoane, ‘Obama, Macri y la economía verde: la neoliberalización de la cuestión ambiental’ [Obama, Macri and the Green Economy: The Neoliberalisation of the Environmental Issue], Observatorio Petroleo Sur, 9 October 2017. https://www.opsur.org.ar/blog/2017/10/09/obama-macri-y-la-economia-verde-la-neoliberalizacion-de-la-cuestion-ambiental/

⁸ Translator’s note: In 2015, the conservative political coalition Cambiemos (‘Let’s Change’) was founded, made up of the Republican Proposal, Radical Civic Union, and Civic Coalition ARI parties. In 2019, the coalition was renamed Juntos por el Cambio (‘Together for Change’).

⁹ Translator’s note: The RenovAr renewable energy auction programme was launched in 2016 to increase private sector renewable generation capacity.

¹⁰ For more on this, read: José Seoane, Las (re)configuraciones neoliberales de la cuestión ambiental. Una arqueología de los documentos de Naciones Unidas sobre el ambiente 1972-2012 [Neoliberal (Re)Configurations of the Environmental Question: An Archaeology of United Nations Documents on the Environment 1972–2012] (Buenos Aires: Ed. Luxemburg – IEALC, 2017). http://gealyc.blogspot.com.ar/

¹¹ Translator’s note: Buen vivir or ‘living well’ is a concept stemming from indigenous peoples in Latin America that favours community over individual interests and seeks ways of life that are ecologically balanced. Teko porã is a similar concept of collective good living originating from the Guaraní indigenous peoples of Paraguay.

¹² Cristina Índio do Brasil, ‘IBGE: desemprego cai 1,6 ponto percentual e atinge 12,6%’ [IBGE: Unemployment Drops 1.6 Percentage Points to 12.6%], Agência Brasil, 30 November 2021. https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/economia/noticia/2021-11/ibge-desemprego-cai-16-e-atinge-em-126-no-primeiro-trimestre

Introduction

The first case of COVID-19 in Brazil was officially registered on 26 February 2020. Since then, life in Brazil has become even more difficult not only because of the disease’s disastrous impacts on human health, but also because of its social impacts. CoronaShock has brought more austerity, deepened financialisation, aggravated the harmful effects of the neoliberal State, worsened labour relations, and wreaked havoc on the education sector. [1]

One and a half years since the beginning of the pandemic in Brazil, it is possible to better evaluate some of its effects. The most visible immediate aspect of the pandemic has certainly been the sudden suspension of in-person activities and the temporary closure of schools and universities. As a result, emergency remote teaching activities were put into place, generally without the adequate technological infrastructure, didactic material, or prior training of teachers. All of this unfolded in the midst of an economic and social crisis in which educational institutions played a fundamental role.

This dossier – the result of a broader research project entitled CoronaShock and the Financialisation of Education in Brazil and conducted by the Front Institute for Contemporary Studies and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) – seeks to begin to assess the effects of CoronaShock on education. To achieve this, we talked with three specialists and militants who work in the education system: Roberto Leher, a tenured professor at the Faculty of Education and the Postgraduate Programme in Education of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ); Margot Johanna Capela Andras, a chemistry professor, director of the Union of Private Education Teachers of Rio Grande do Sul (SINPRO-RS), and coordinating member of the Federation of Education Workers’ Associations (FETEE-SUL); and Bia Carvalho, who has a degree in pedagogy from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSC) and is a militant of Popular Youth Uprising (Levante Popular da Juventude)[2]. We talked to them about the various effects of the pandemic on Brazilian education, in particular seeking to understand how mercantile logic advanced through the pandemic and how large corporations in the sector took advantage of the crisis. In addition to briefly contextualising the education system in Brazil, we mapped four principal axes that came up time and time again in the interviews and systematised the dossier into four main themes: 1) the actions of private corporations; 2) changes in the model of education; 3) consequences for workers in the sector; 4) the challenges facing a programme for the struggle.

Brazil’s Education System

Free public institutions and paid private institutions coexist at various stages of Brazil’s complex education system, the regulation of which was strengthened by the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (LDB), part of the 1988 Constitution. Early childhood education covers the first five years of a child’s life and is compulsory from the age of four. It is divided into nursery school (until the age of three) and pre-school (ages four and five), and it is the primary responsibility of the municipal government. Next comes basic education, which is made up of two stages: primary and secondary education. Primary education is mandatory and universal starting from the age of six for a minimum of nine years and it also is a primary responsibility of the municipal government, followed by secondary education, which lasts for three years and, in 2013, became mandatory for students until they turn eighteen and come of legal age. Secondary education is the primary responsibility of the federal government. In Brazil, along with secondary education, students are given the option to attend some form of technical and vocational education. Higher education is optional and the primary responsibility of the federal government.

Nurseries, schools, and universities, especially public ones, serve multiple purposes for students and their families. In addition to the learning process, they provide access to information and communication technologies, spaces of sociability, and sports and cultural activities, and they prevent violence, support students in developing their path in life, and in many cases, guarantee adequate food for children and youth. Even though the educational institutions are in a precarious state, they play a fundamental role for collective life, especially for the poorest sectors of the population.

The crisis of Brazil’s education system has a long history marked by severe inequalities, including problems such as a lack of access to education, school dropout rates, underfunding, the poor quality of class materials in educational institutions, low literacy and functional illiteracy, the advancement of commodification, and the presence of a dual structure divided between the public and private sector. It would be misleading to believe that such problems were created by the pandemic: CoronaShock aggravated pre-existing problems and accentuated the disarticulation of the education system as a whole.

The Role of Private Corporations in Education

Brazil has approximately 211 million inhabitants. About 8 million of them are enrolled in early childhood education, 33 million are in basic education, and 8 million are in higher education. One of the particularities of Brazil’s education system is the presence of private companies coexisting in parallel with the public sector. Clearly, for the private sector, these millions of students are seen as a huge potential for growth and profit. In 2019, roughly 19% of the country’s basic education students were enrolled in private schools and 76% of university students were enrolled in private institutions.

Some of the most important education companies are public limited companies (sociedades anônimas) listed on stock markets, as shown in Brazilian Education on the Stock Market, which focuses on mapping these large companies – especially Cogna Educação SA, YDUQS Participações SA, Ser Educacional SA, Ânima Holdings SA, and Bahema Educação SA.

Such corporations are linked to a dynamic of financialisation and reproduce the interests of investors – be they individuals or investment funds – subjecting the quality of education to a speculative logic and the periodic crises of the capital market. These companies operate on different levels, controlling basic education schools, colleges, universities, language schools, preparatory courses for public exams, selling learning methods and digital platforms, and marketing books and didactic material through their editors.

With the emergence of the pandemic, these corporations saw an exceptional opportunity to cut costs and expand their markets. This is largely due to a systematic policy led by the government of Jair Bolsonaro (who is not affiliated with a political party) that systematically puts public education in a state of precarity. According to Professor Roberto Leher, it became clear that in the context of the pandemic, the Brazilian State proved itself to be out of touch and incapable of producing objective answers to a problem that various other countries have handled much more adeptly. As an example, he points to the absence of a policy that provides universal public and free internet access: ‘Unfortunately, resources for the Universal Telecommunications Services Fund (FUST), which is a very robust fund, were vetoed by Bolsonaro. This produced an inequality that is difficult to qualify. But it is brutal and unbelievable that in such a difficult moment, more than half of Brazilian students – about thirty million students in various levels – effectively do not have the conditions to keep up with proper learning interactions and a virtual learning environment’.

Leher reminds us that not only is there inequality and a lack of access to information and communication technologies; there has been no plan to return to in-person activities once the pandemic is under control. This requires a considerable investment in school infrastructure, which includes basic things such as reforms to offer adequate ventilation in classrooms as well as water dispensers and bathrooms. Data from the School Census of 2020 allows us to better understand this reality: roughly 20% of schools did not have adequate internet, 26% did not have sewage collection, and 3.2% did not have bathrooms. In addition to being a historical and longstanding problem in Brazil, the low level of investment in education has become worse over recent years with the policy of fiscal austerity implemented by the constitutional amendment approved in 2016, which put a cap on public spending for twenty years. In this context, Leher compared Brazil’s approach with that of the United States: while the US allocated around R$122 billion to public education in 2020, in Brazil, the only plan presented in Congress by lawmakers allocates the value of R$40 annually per student, which would clearly not allow for adequate infrastructure.Private groups saw new business opportunities in the defunding of public education. The pandemic accelerated a process that already was underway, allowing these groups to continually expand by acquiring smaller companies.

Margot Andras describes how this happened in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where many groups from the centre of Brazil bought smaller companies. For example, she points to the Raiz Educação SA, which bought schools from the Unificado and Leonardo Da Vinci groups, and observes that higher education also provides these companies with a very large return. ‘Here in Rio Grande do Sul, Laureate bought UniRitter, even before the pandemic. There are groups coming from Chile, most of them sociedades anônimas of which nobody knows the owners or shareholders, and they are taking over private education’. She emphasises that, for those with money, the pandemic is an opportunity to grab companies that are in trouble – and this is happening all over the country.

One of the most recent activities that propelled the big education groups in Brazil was the sale of the university chain Laureate Brasil, which had until then been controlled by an American company. After intense disputes with other groups, Anima Holding SA bought Laureate by the end of 2020 in a R$4,4 billion transaction.Public-Private Partnerships – a mechanism through which governments hire the services of private companies – also progressed significantly throughout this period. Through these partnerships, agreements are signed between states and municipalities as well as companies to set up learning projects, didactic programmes, and teaching platforms.

Government financing of student enrolments in private institutions is another model of expansion of the private sector that has become common in Brazil. The most well-known examples of this are the Student Financing Fund (FIES) and the University for All Programme (PROUNI). These programmes were promoted by the governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), who have been widely recognised for democratising access to education for young Afro-Brazilians, poor families, and/or those who come from public schools and are going to private colleges and universities. However, they have also received ample criticism for spending public resources on private institutions. Leher explains that, as a result of these programmes, public funding was used to back the expansion of corporations in the financial sphere; it was precisely in the years that the most public resources were invested in FIES and PROUNI that these companies grew the most.

Today, other proposals of this type progressing on the state and municipal levels. According to Margot Andras, this explains ‘why basic education is the only sector that did not have much of a shortfall in revenue. Why? Children stay in school until the end of secondary education by obligation, or at least until they reach the age of eighteen. So, this is an opportunity for the business community. They found a niche market’. Andras is referring to the voucher programmes through which municipal governments pay for admission in private early childhood and basic education institutions instead of creating more capacity in public schools. Now Bolsonaro’s government is seeking to legally tie the distribution of these vouchers to the beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, a programme to distribute income to the poorest sectors of Brazil’s population.In other words, through the structural depreciation of public education and its virtual paralysis as a result of the pandemic, private education groups saw new opportunities to grab a larger share of the market, intensifying processes that destroy the concept of education as a right and transform it into a commodity.

Changes in the Educational Model 

Capital’s offensive against education did not start with the pandemic, but it gained important momentum because of it. One of the factors that favoured corporate groups was the cancellation of in-person classes and the establishment of remote activities that are completely dependent on the use of digital technologies. One and a half years without in-person classes has meant a learning ‘blackout’ for a large number of children and youth. One of the reasons for this was school dropouts: a UNICEF study shows that by the end of 2020, roughly 1.5 million children and adolescents had abandoned their studies and 3.7 million were formally enrolled but were unable to access remote classes. This reality represents a historic setback in the universal access to basic education in Brazil, whose impact on the learning process and sociability of new generations is difficult to measure.

Access to information and communication technologies has become a key element in democratising education. As soon as the pandemic started, corporate groups – which had already accumulated experience in distance learning methods with the development of virtual platforms – managed to transition more quickly to remote activities. ‘The private sector’, Leher explained, ‘was much more adept at adapting to the logistics of virtual classes than the public sector’. The private sector also started remote classes much more quickly than the public sector, where this process was much slower and more tortuous.

For Bia Carvalho, there are also economic reasons for this heavy investment in distance education: ‘For these businessmen, distance education is more profitable because it allows them to cut a part of their expenses and it gives them access to a much larger number of students. From the point of view of [looking at] education as a commodity, where they sell classes, distance education makes a lot more sense’. An example of this pattern is the growth of educational technology or ‘EdTech’ companies that invest in the development of technological tools for education. Corporate media tries to give the impression that these companies are created by young entrepreneurs with an innovative and adventurous spirit who found start-ups to develop virtual learning platforms, when in fact it is the big corporations that are driving this process. In other words, corporations in the sector make a strong ideological appeal that education is not keeping up with technological development and that its future depends on the intensive use of digital tools.

This discourse projects the idea that criticism of the current model of distance learning is a retrograde and conservative stance. In the words of Roberto Leher:

we cannot forget that [businessmen] are strongly tied to an ideology that favours globalisation, [and] that it is technology that moves history forward. It brings us back to the ideology of progress – that the future of nations is linked to technological revolutions, and that education wasn’t keeping up with this path. Their main criticism has been that education, especially public education but also private basic education, still followed an analogue educational model from the twentieth century, which has to be updated. And now they have found a way, being a bit pushy, to get their foot in the door of schools.

Leher adds that all of this is linked to the perspective that knowledge can be objectively quantified cognitively and emotionally through discrete units called competencies. Technologies, then, would be a way of delivering these competencies to children and young people, and the teacher would basically become an operator of technologies.

If in higher education distance learning is the model being promoted, in basic education it is the hybrid model that is gaining steam, combining in-person classes and virtual interactions. An example of this tendency is the foundation of a new business association in Brazil that defends the expansion of the hybrid model in basic education.

Public institutions have also become a potential market for the consumption of digital platforms. Another shocking problem, Leher stresses, is that there has been no support from the State to make public platforms available to education systems, whether for city halls, states, or universities, which were being held hostage by corporations. ‘It became clear that without the private platforms of these big corporations, it would not be possible to maintain virtual interactions in the Brazilian education system. And it is important to remember that this does not stem from an absence of technological knowledge, of ways of developing public platforms. We would be able to enhance existing platforms, which are open systems and not under the control of corporations’. Similarly, Margot Andras asks: ‘Did the Uruguayan government not distribute tablets? So, here in Brazil, they should at least distribute cell phones in public schools for those who do not have access so that they can use this tool in the educational process’. Not only has Jair Bolsonaro’s government failed to put forth any positive public policy in this arena; he has also ideologically persecuted teachers, students, and public servants in educational institutions, pushed a programme to put public schools under the management of the military (so-called civic-military schools), and worked to pass a law in Congress that would regulate home schooling.

This combination of factors has resulted in a truly disastrous scenario. In addition to the material and technological difficulties that have led to mass student dropouts, the pandemic has also had major pedagogical and didactic consequences. Leher points out that the public and private sectors have great difficulty in thinking about the idea of virtual interaction in a more dignified and less rigid way. ‘We end up adapting ourselves to a logic of replacing in-person classes with virtual ones. And clearly this was not a shift that could have taken place in a simple manner. Very few schools and universities have tried to have more open interactions with the whole of society when it comes to [organising] open study series and having discussions about major problems, major themes, in-depth studies, study groups, etc’. Similarly, Bia Carvalho states that distance learning carries with it a technicist concept that seeks to turn schools and universities into training spaces solely for the labour market. This perspective is gaining steam because a more comprehensive education in which values, knowledge, and experiences are exchanged is much more difficult to put into practice at a distance. Therefore, Carvalho explains, education is reduced to the classroom, ‘which is very bad because being in a school or university provides experiences that distance learning does not. [In distance learning,] the interaction with teachers is greatly diminished, not to mention the immeasurable loss of experiences that take place outside the classroom’.

As we have seen, teaching through digital platforms, which has become an emergency need in the context of the pandemic, is presented by the business sector as a chimaera that represents a new, positive stage in the development of education – and CoronaShock acted as a sort of catalyst for changes that were already underway towards a type of mass and standardised education in compliance with the needs and values of dependent Brazilian capitalism. Despite this, it is interesting to note that, throughout the pandemic, education corporations systematically pressured the Brazilian government to bring back in-person classes, ignoring the health risks of students and education professionals, a push that came largely from the industry’s business associations in line with the political interests of the Bolsonaro government.

According to Margot Andras, this seemingly contradictory behaviour of the business community is explained by the fact that, although distance learning is presented as the great salvation, in-person activities continue to be the only guarantee of income in a context of crisis and impoverishment of the population. ‘It turns out that many schools gave tuition discounts to families as long as there was distance learning. It’s all about the money. The business community’s interest is: “I need to open the school because if these students come back, I will be able to charge what I used to before”’. Carvalho adds that even with all the hype, distance learning has not been able to completely replace the roles and function of in-person education. ‘The business community has not yet succeeded in establishing distance learning as the solution. Society is not convinced of this. They must have realised that a significant proportion of students were uncomfortable with remote teaching. Perhaps this resulted in school dropouts, which will not be the case when returning to in-person classes’. Since the second half of 2020, these contradictory pressures have resulted in a decentralised and unorganised back-and-forth about the return to in-person activities on a national level at the whim of local lawmakers and without the necessary care or preventive health measures.

The Impact on Education Workers   

CoronaShock has also had a profound impact on workers’ lives. As with other activities, teaching was mostly carried out from the workers’ homes. According to data from the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE), in July 2020 roughly 10% of the employed Brazilian labour force was working from home. However, the situation is very different when we look at educators: COVID-19 data from the Brazil National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) shows that more than 96% of teachers worked from home between May and November 2020.

As Margot Andras explains, most of the educators who have approached the union complain about the increased workload and fatigue. ‘Everyone is exhausted, completely exhausted. Because we no longer have our defined work environment. We get the feeling that we are always working. I think this is happening to everyone. We are stuck at work’. She adds that there is widespread physical and emotional exhaustion among her colleagues and that, as a result, those who have an alternative are looking for another type of job or a change of profession. But this reality is not only psychological in nature – it is part of a qualitative change in the way that work is being carried out as the time and space of work have changed. Education workers have felt this strongly. On top of that, there is also generalised stress:

The workload has accumulated a lot because the teachers have had to spend more time joining WhatsApp groups to reply to students. And this is happening outside of working hours. Now, with the return of in-person classes, teachers are working twice as hard, because in addition to in-person classes they are having to keep up with students in remote classes. And we cannot make the schools – their employers – understand that this is still work.

In other words, the educator’s work is no longer located in one place – the school – and no longer has a defined temporality – the class period. Work has therefore become diffuse and almost permanent, in line with platform capitalism, which encroaches on different social activities – including education. In other words, the pandemic has meant the intensified exploitation of the labour force, robbing educators of part of their lifetime. This time is unaccounted for in the working day and is therefore unpaid, guaranteeing an extraordinary profit for the sector’s entrepreneurs. This change seems to be here to stay: even with the return of in-person classes, teaching platforms and working remotely will still be part of teachers’ daily lives.

Of course, this is only possible because workers fear unemployment. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) shows that the unemployment rate has grown sharply from the beginning of 2020 to the present day, breaking historical records. According to data from the General Cadastre of Employed and Unemployed Persons (CAGED), from March to September 2020 approximately 36 thousand teaching positions in the country were removed. The labour reforms approved by Congress in 2017 under the government of Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), which withdrew rights and relaxed labour regulations, also contributed to this. As a result, many teachers today are employed through temporary contracts or service provision contracts that deny workers a formal employment relationship with the contracting company. This work is generally more intense, the pay is lower, and there is no guarantee of labour rights or job security.

There is immense despair coming from teachers who want to keep their jobs as well as those who have had their income greatly reduced, as Andras points out. Regarding teachers of specialised classes, he said:

[F]or example that guy who used to teach football classes after school no longer teaches football classes. What are the schools doing? They are reducing his workload. The same thing happened to the teacher who used to teach music after school. The businessmen say: ‘You can’t live off that? I’m sorry! There are no students going to music school’. Of course, the fact that there is an internet lag complicates teaching music remotely. So, they reduce these teachers’ workloads. And the vast majority of higher education institutions are combining classes because they have the authority to reduce the workload by cancelling classes.

Reports of educational institutions reducing their teaching staff have become common during the pandemic. Professor Rodrigo Mota Amarante, who has taught for over twenty-four years, shared that in some cases, the dismissal came unexpectedly as a pop-up message on a computer screen. Examples such as these elucidate how large corporations are using technology to intensify the exploitation of labour. Methods for distance learning require teachers to record their lessons and make them available on teaching platforms. As Bia Carvalho explains, ‘These institutions already used to put a hundred people in the same classroom for in-person classes. Now they teach a virtual class with a thousand people from all over Brazil. The classroom is basically restricted to accessing content’.

This new form of exploitation is accompanied by the expropriation of knowledge. Roberto Leher warns that when knowledge is under the political control of governments or large corporations, ‘we have a loss of sovereignty, didactic-scientific autonomy, and pedagogical pluralism, all of which are constitutional principles at the root of academic freedom. Because of this, we are institutionalising the absence of academic freedom’. A drastic example of this type of expropriation was denounced in April 2020, shortly after the start of the pandemic in Brazil. Teachers linked to Laureate Brasil, a company that controls more than eleven educational institutions in the country, reported that the company had begun to operate an artificial intelligence system for correcting exams called machine learning that is capable of recognising patterns in written text, which was used to correct dissertations. All of this was done without the students’ knowledge. Yet other ways that academic freedom is restricted are politically motivated: in recent years, the Brazilian right wing has been persecuting teachers who develop critical teaching methods through conservative movements such as the School without Party’ (ESP), or even through the direct use of the repressive police and judicial apparatus.

In Brazil today, there is a harmful convergence between the kind of teaching that has become predominant (especially in private institutions), the increasing precariousness of the work of educators, and the profile of the professionals being trained by these institutions. In fact, Brazil’s education system is turning into the training grounds for a cheap and precarious workforce for a country that is in an underdeveloped and dependent condition. This kind of education makes sense in a country that stands out as a commodity-exporting platform that is undergoing a striking process of deindustrialisation, and where the workforce has become a cheap, low-skilled commodity deprived of social and labour rights.

What Can Be Done

The working class, left-wing organisations, and progressive forces have suffered profound defeats over recent years and have not been able to be anything other than defensive. There is a need to construct an alternative project for education in Brazil as the struggle against Bolsonaro’s government and its unpopular measures continues – and as the national elections of 2022 approach. With this in mind, we asked our respondents which main points a programme to transform education should focus on. They highlighted three key issues that need to be addressed: the struggle over the educational project and for a new pedagogical concept, the need to renew investments in educational infrastructure, and the need to value, train, and support the professional development of teachers.

First, the pandemic raised a question about the purpose of education – a front on which, Carvalho says, we are losing:

The situation is so severe that the prospects of what people can achieve in life with an education have been diminishing. This issue is not only related to education; it also has to do with the economic crisis that forces families to define their spending priorities and time commitments, etc. I think that the pandemic has also impacted access to higher education. We will begin to see colleges and universities becoming more elite in the years to come. From the student movement’s point of view, we will lose the university experience and the involvement of students who play an important role in struggles and social mobilisations. Because there are people who started university two years ago without ever setting foot there. It is difficult to resume these processes.

Carvalho defends the importance of moving beyond an educational model that is centred on training the workforce and advocates focusing on a more comprehensive model: ‘A popular programme for education begins with the assumption that we understand what education has to be and what role it should fulfil in society. We have to emphasise that education goes beyond preparing for the job market. We have to understand education as a training process that is critical and political – this is an important starting point’.

A new educational model also relies on new pedagogical concepts. According to Margot Andras, a positive aspect of this conjuncture is that the difficulties experienced during the pandemic have helped to clarify what works and what does not work in education: ‘This new kind of school will have to have a more multi-pronged in-person class that is more connected to the reality of the students. Because the teachers have realised that the kind of class that only focuses on content does not work. Those who had not realised this yet have now seen that there is no other way’. That is why she insists that a new educational model must be open to other aspects of life beyond traditional class content, which will require a higher degree of students’ autonomy. In the same vein, Roberto Leher argues that ‘Increasingly more children and young people want to be at a school that reflects the vibrancy of life. They do not want to be in a bureaucratised school with a standardised education model that is “McDonaldised” … This is not compatible with the lives of children and young people today’.

The second key issue in the educational system that must be addressed is the need to invest in educational infrastructure. Leher points out that we cannot normalise the idea that it is possible to maintain a robust public system that responds to social demands, to civil, technologic, scientific, artistic, and cultural problems without doing what other countries have done – structure and fund a national public network. He argues that it is necessary to guarantee the allocation of 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to education, a goal that was approved by the Brazilian Congress in 2012 and is projected to be reached in 2024. However, members of the Ministry of Education of Bolsonaro’s government have already expressed their intention to reduce this target.

Margot Andras argues that the struggle over the educational system should include the upgrade and democratisation of technological infrastructure. It is fundamental that students have internet access at school and that they can use digital communication tools for learning, which – as it became clear during the pandemic – can be useful educational tools.

Lastly, valuing teachers is an essential condition for the transformation of Brazilian education. It is fundamental to create regulations that can regulate the new kinds of work that are emerging with the use of information technology. Andras insists that it is necessary ‘to consider everything that a teacher does to be “work” and to remunerate it. That is an objective of this programme. Everything that a teacher does has to be valued, all of their work has to be remunerated, and a limit has to be established for the use of these digital tools’.

Another part of the process of valuing education work relies on the continued training of teachers and the strengthening of the teaching career, especially in the public sector. According to Leher, it does not make sense that a teacher who works in municipality A earns salary X, while another teacher who works in municipality B earns a salary Y, less than X, while having the same qualifications and working the same amount of time. There has to be a turning point in the country about what it means to be a teacher, and dignified work has to be guaranteed. This touches on the issue of the career. Teachers must have a career that values their unparalleled commitment – that values the professional who undertook this path in life – and that offers specialisation, extension, masters, and PhD courses.

Whether the three principal axes of the fight to transformation education – the struggle over the educational project and for a new pedagogical concept, the need to renew investments in educational infrastructure, and the need to value, train, and support the professional development of teachers – move forward depends on the broader context of the class struggle. Without defeating Bolsonaro’s government, any democratic alternative for education will be impossible to realise.

Endnotes

^[1] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock: A Virus and the World, 2020a.

^[2] For information about Roberto Leher, see his curriculum at http://lattes.cnpq.br/6873414697016839; for information about SINPRO, see https://www.sinprors.org.br/; for information about FETEE-SUL, see http://www.feteesul.org.br/; for information about Levante, see https://levante.org.br/ (accessed on 11 June 2021).

^[3] INEP, Censo da educação básica, 2020b.

^[4] INEP, Censo da Educação Superior, 2020a.

^[5] Tricontinental, A educação brasileira na bolsa de valores, 2020b.

^[6] Elida Oliviera, ‘Cresce número de escolas públicas sem banheiro e internet banda larga; 35,8 mil não têm coleta de esgoto’, 21 March, 2021.

^[7] Ivan Ryngelblum, ‘Cade aprova compra de ativos brasileiros da Laureate pela Ânima’, 25 April 2021.

^[8] Igor Mello, ‘Novo Bolsa Família prevê substituir verba de creches públicas por voucher’, 16 May 2021.

^[9] UNICEF, Out-of-School Children in Brazil, April 2021.

^[10] We referenced the National Association of Basic Hybrid Education (ANEBHI). For more information see https://anebhi.org.br/ (accessed on 11 June 2021).

^[11] Among these associations, it is worth noting the pressure exercised by the National Association of Private Universities (ANUP), the Brazilian Association of Maintainers of Higher Education (ABMES), and the National Confederation of Educational Institutions (CONFENEN). For more information, see https://anup.org.br/; https://abmes.org.br/; and https://confenen.org.br/ (accessed on 11 June 2021).

^[12] DIEESE, Ocupados em Home Office, July 2020.

^[13] IBGE, Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios – Covid-19, 2020.

^[14] IBGE, Taxa de desocupação trimestral, 2021.

^[15] Luigi Mazza, et al., ‘Pandemia do desemprego’, 9 November, 2020.

^[16] Elida Oliveira, ‘Professor com 24 anos de carreira é avisado da demissão por uma janela pop-up: ‘Visto como um custo’, 15 October 2020.

^[17] Thiago Domenici. ‘Laureate usa robôs no lugar de professores sem que alunos saibam’, 30 April 2020.

^[18] Mariana Tokarnia, ‘MEC quer alterar meta de investimento de 10% do PIB,’ 11 July 2019.

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What is a vaccine?

Infectious diseases can cause serious illness and death. Those who survive the infection often develop long-lasting protection from that same disease. About 150 years ago, scientists discovered that infections are caused by microscopic ‘germs’ (what we now call pathogens), which can spread from animals to humans and from person to person. Could a small or weakened portion of these pathogens trigger changes in the body that might protect people from severe infections in the future? This is the principle behind vaccines.

A vaccine, containing microscopic molecules that mimic parts of an infection pathogen, can be injected into the body to activate this pre-emptive protection against the disease. Although one vaccine protects just one individual against just one pathogen, when many vaccines are considered together in organised, large-scale vaccination programmes, they become crucial to community-level interventions.

Not all infections can be prevented by vaccines. Despite huge financial investments, we still do not yet have (and may never have) dependable vaccines for certain infectious diseases – such as HIV-AIDS and malaria – due to these diseases’ biological complexity. It has been possible for COVID-19 vaccines to be rushed into use because – for the most part– they are based on well-understood biological mechanisms in less complex disease situations. Vaccines are an important measure to contain infectious epidemics. However, genetic changes in the infectious microbe can make vaccines ineffective and necessitate development and deployment of new vaccines.

Why aren’t COVID-19 vaccines being provided to all of the world’s 7.7 billion people?

Not long after the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2), Chinese authorities sequenced the virus and shared that information on a public website. Scientists from public and private institutions rushed to download the information to better understand the virus and to find a way to both treat its effects on the human body and to create a vaccine to immunise people against the disease. At this stage, no patent was issued on any of the information.

Within months, nine private and public sector firms announced that they had vaccine candidates: Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi/GSK, Sinovac, Sinopharm and Gamaleya. The Sinovac, Sinopharm, and Gamaleya vaccines are produced by the Chinese and Russian public sectors (by mid-March, China and Russia had provided 800 million doses to 41 countries). The others are produced by private firms that have received vast amounts of public funding. Moderna, for instance, received $2.48 billion from the US government, while Pfizer received $548 million from the European Union and the German government. These firms put the public funding towards making a vaccine and then extracted enormous profits from their sales and further secured these profits through patents. This is one example of pandemic profiteering.

Information about the numbers of vaccines sold and transported to different parts of the world changes rapidly. Nonetheless, it is now acknowledged that many poorer nations will not have vaccines for their citizens before 2023, while the Global North has secured more vaccines than they require – enough to vaccinate their populations three times over. Canada, for instance, has enough vaccines to vaccinate its citizens five times. The Global North, with less than 14% of the world’s population, has secured more than half the total anticipated vaccines. This is known as vaccine hoarding or vaccine nationalism.

The governments of India and South Africa approached the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in October 2020 to ask for a temporary waiver of patent obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). If the WTO had agreed to this waiver, these countries could have produced generic versions of the vaccine to distribute at low cost for a mass vaccination drive. However, the Global North led the opposition to this proposal, arguing that such a waiver – even in the midst of a pandemic – would stifle research and innovation (despite the fact that the vaccines were developed largely with public money). The Global North successfully blocked the application for the waiver in the WTO.

In April 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO), with other partners, set up the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access or COVAX. The point of COVAX is to ensure equitable access to the vaccines. The project is led by UNICEF; GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the WHO. Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s countries signed on to the alliance, vaccines are not being distributed to the Global South in sufficient numbers. A study from December 2020 found that, during 2021, nearly seventy countries in the Global South will only be able to vaccinate one in ten people.

Rather than supporting the India-South Africa application for the waiver, COVAX backed a proposal for patent pooling called Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-Tap). This process would involve two or more patent holders agreeing to license their patents to one another or to any third party. COVAX has not received any contributions to date from pharmaceutical companies.

In May 2020, the WHO proposed to establish an international COVID-19 vaccine solidarity trial in which the WHO would coordinate trial sites in multiple countries. This would have led emerging vaccine candidates to enter clinical trials rapidly and transparently; they would have been tested in multiple populations and comparisons could have been made for specific strengths and limitations. Both Big Pharma and the countries of the North suffocated this proposal.

What would it take to produce basic vaccines for the world’s 7.7 billion people?

The production of vaccines varies based on the actual technological platform required for creating the particular infection mimicry to be used for the specific vaccine. For COVID-19 vaccines, there are many successful platforms. Two such instances have been the RNA vaccines (in the case of Moderna) and adenovirus vaccines (in the case of AstraZeneca). These technology platforms are robust, meaning that if the know-how (including trade secrets for the vaccine production) and skilled personnel are available and manufacturing lines are scaled-up and efficient, the vaccine could be produced for the people. The word ‘if’ is in italics because these are the most important impediments that stem from the capitalist logic of intellectual property rights and the long-term drive to undermine a public sector that centres the social good.

One intermediate approach to vaccine production attempts the large-scale manufacture of mimic proteins in fermentation tanks (the Novavax vaccine, for example, is manufactured in this way). For this platform, the absorption capacity and personnel with skills are more widespread. The quality control and assurance issues are more varied batch-to-batch in these platforms, which is a hurdle for widespread decentralised production.

There is a much simpler way to produce the vaccines: to grow the infectious agent, inactivate it (namely, to make it non-dangerous), and inject that into the body (such as Covaxin, the vaccine developed by Bharat in India). But there are problems here since it is not always easy to inactivate the harmful pathogen whilst still keeping it whole to develop the antibodies.

What would it take to administer vaccines for the 7.7 billion?

To widely administer the COVID-19 vaccines across the globe, we need to consider three elements:

1. Public Health Systems. Effective vaccination programmes require robust public health systems. But these have been eroded by long-term austerity policies in many countries across the world. Therefore, there are insufficient numbers of skilled and practiced personnel to administer the vaccine; since these are sensitive vaccines, preparation and administration of the vaccine must be done by trained public health workers (both to ensure the vaccine is delivered optimally and to prevent side effects).
2. Transportation and Cold Chains. Since regional and national vaccine production lines are not available, the vaccines need to be transported over long distances. Some COVID-19 vaccines that require an ultra-cold chain are simply impractical in much of the Global South.
3. Medical Monitoring Systems. Finally, there need to be well-developed systems to monitor the impact of the vaccine. This requires long-term follow-up and both personnel and technologies that are often lacking in poorer nations, which have long been disadvantaged by the global economic order.

Ailén Possamay, What they call love is unpaid labour, Buenos Aires, 2019.

Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus

The pandemic has sharpened and transformed pre-existing inequalities, reconfiguring the processes that sustain and guarantee life. Networks of care work in working-class^[1] neighbourhoods play an important role in this context, as do those who lead them, despite the scant social and economic recognition that they are awarded. Across the world, new forms of organisation are born to redefine and create processes to sustain human life.

Rooted in an understanding of the need to politicise the realities elucidated by the pandemic, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the collective Mapeos Feministas (‘Feminist Mapping’) created Uncovering the Crisis, a podcast that explores the uneven impact of the pandemic on different bodies and spaces through a feminist lens. We set out to analyse the impact of the pandemic through the eyes of grassroots feminists at the margins of society who support and create networks, build grassroots infrastructures, and fight to make our dependence on each other and our surroundings visible. In this dossier, we systematised this work and researched the resistances that emerged from a broad range of experiences and realities. Today, these realities are faced with the deepening of exploitation, pillage, and violence as well as the collapse of the economy, health, and food security. We structured this research around three main areas: communities, houses/homes, and domestic and care work. In all of these areas, the commodification, privatisation, precarisation, and feminisation of care work manifest in different ways.

Our ideas, understanding, and drive to do this work come from a commitment to collaborative learning through listening and dialogue. This would not have been possible without all of the women fighting for the people and people’s struggles who inspired us to share their experiences and realities.

Ailén Possamay, The world has not stopped; we continue to sustain life, 2019.

Part 1: Community Care Work Is Essential Work

A New Map of Labour, Neoliberalism, and Resistance

During the international feminist strike in Argentina in 2017, women workers of the popular economy^[2] spread the slogan ‘If our lives are worthless, produce without us’. Through this slogan, they revived and revised the feminist debate of the 1960s and 70s about invisible labour in our societies; activities that, though they are fundamental in the production and reproduction of life, are not always recognised or remunerated.^[3]

But much has changed since the 1970s. Salaried work has become scarcer, and women and LGBTQ+ people have played a leading role in creating economic strategies of survival to provide for their families. Many of these strategies centre on the needs of working-class neighbourhoods and the reproduction of life within them, from caring for dependents (whether in infancy or in old age) to the entire framework that guarantees basic services for the subsistence and urbanisation of rural and urban peripheries such as food, clothing, housing, and even water.^[4] Deolinda Carrizo of the Peasant Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE) spoke about her own experience:

We had to go to work with our children in tow and put up with looks of indignation as we sifted through bags of garbage. We had to open the doors of our homes so that the children in the neighbourhood could have a snack and we had to create ollas populares [community kitchens].^[5]

These strategies, which are born from our own processes of organisation in our neighbourhoods, have the particularity of centring the construction of community infrastructure.

These experiences come into being as a response to neoliberal dispossession, which places a particularly heavy burden on women. It is women who step in to fill the void created by the state when social services and protections are cut. The community solidarity networks provide a platform to coordinate work-related demands, the right to a clean environment free of violence, and the right to health, education, housing, food, and arable land.

Centring Community

Necessity wrenched women from the home, but the politicisation of their needs led them to recreate home in community. The community is the site from which economic, political, and care strategies develop. These popular and feminist economies produce food, pathways, paved streets, sewage systems, and houses. But, above all, they produce struggles, dreams, and emotional care networks for survival. In the words of Janet Mendieta of the Argentine Workers’ Central Union (CTA):

It is us, the women, who organise and carry out care work, who support our families in a myriad of ways. Not only do we provide them with food and cook and serve the food, but often we support ourselves and others; we try to find solutions to all of the problems.

Networks built by the transgender community to confront discrimination and stigmatisation are a part of this community work. Solidarity keeps them alive, as Luz Bejerano of the Transgender Movement of Argentina (Movimiento Transexual Argentino) explains:

A transgender comrade opened her outdoor restaurant in one of the … most conservative towns where there is the most gender-based and machista violence. … Despite the discrimination and everything else she had to put up with, she set herself up there in order to be able to help the transgender people and children and give them snacks and something to eat.

The Feminisation and Essential Nature of Community Work

The inequalities that are engrained in the sexual division of labour are also reproduced by new spatial configurations of work that emerge as a result of – but also in resistance to – neoliberalism. By the sexual division of labour we mean the historic, social, and political process through which abilities, skills, value, and/or work have been assigned according to biological characteristics associated with a particular sex. This translates into a certain distribution of work that is fundamental to social organisation according to biological characteristics.

In modern capitalist societies, this process is accompanied by the unequal value and recognition assigned to certain kinds of work over others, which has concrete consequences on the unequal distribution of power to some bodies over others. In this process, the areas of the production of commodities and the reproduction of life were divided into a hierarchy, placing the latter in a subordinate position. Women were ‘officially’ tasked with all of the aspects of reproduction. Men, on the other hand, were tasked with the ‘outside world’ of productive work, studies, politics, and law. Along the way, the understanding that work was divided between ‘men in the workplace and women in the home’ became common sense. This dynamic is an important site for understanding the subordination of women’s social power in modern capitalist societies.

The community, as an extended domestic realm, is sustained through the work of women and LGBTQ+ people. Shirly Britchez of the Popular Movement for Dignity (Movimiento Popular La Dignidad) spoke to this point:

The overwhelming majority of us are women … and the majority of us didn’t have work; so-called housewives, this kind of work was never recognised because it is also a form of work, so, better said, we didn’t have formal work. We had this opportunity to be able to further our political education and train ourselves. We started on the weekends because we didn’t have a lot of time during the week since we were busy with other tasks, like being vendors at street markets or doing domestic work and housework. We built upon our political education and training year after year. Now we are working in our neighbourhood, we have work, and we are all women.

‘We move the world, we stop it’, an intervention that took place during the 8M March based on a photograph taken of comrades from the Movement of Excluded Workers, La Plata, Argentina.
Colectivo Wacha

In these communities, reproductive work is approached collectively. Through its politicisation, new meaning is given to these tasks as socially necessary work. However, this work is still unequally distributed and continues to be upheld mostly by women. As Janet Mendieta explained, ‘It is mostly like this because we live in a patriarchal system and even more so because we live in a working-class neighbourhood. Work has always been carried out by women; we are always tasked with the responsibility of knowing how to cook and clean’. The activities, processes, and community networks are fundamental for sustaining life in dispossessed areas. Britchez elaborated on this point; ‘[Our work] is essential because we are the ones who live here in the neighbourhood, who know what is needed, who know what the problems are, who live next to our neighbours every day … and we care for those who need it.’

Without these grassroots networks and infrastructures there is no life, no markets, no food in the house, no vaccines, masks, or social distancing. Silvia Campo of Encuentro de Organizaciones (meaning ‘a wide network of social organisations’) explained that ‘If no one was doing this [work], we would be starting from zero; there would be no cleaning in the neighbourhood, everything would be turned upside down, many of the kids and neighbours would go without dinner at night, or a glass of milk in the afternoon; there would be a meal less per day.’

This weaving together of work sparks a powerful transformation for those involved. The work that is necessary to organise the conditions for subsistence spurs the creation of strategies of resistance that question and transform the premises upon which this system is built. In these collective processes, something more than care work is produced: ‘these are spaces where we think deeply about the way that we live … where people and the group in the neighbourhood question the system of domination, of oppression, of patriarchy; what we have is a wide, open space for the community’, Analia Jara of La Enramada (meaning ‘entwined branches’) explained.

Recognition and Remuneration

These popular feminist economies do not always receive the recognition they deserve, even though we know that their work is essential for the community and that they are always on call. They are often not given their due despite being key pillars in the community. For many years, they have been fighting for social and economic recognition for this work. Janet Mendieta expanded on this point:

First, they should recognise that we are essential workers, and then that we should be recognised with wages for our work because we work much more than we should have to. We do a lot of work promoting gender equality and health; we work as cooks in canteens and in eateries; and none of this is recognised or made visible. If it isn’t made visible, it certainly won’t be recognised or remunerated.

These women give new meaning to the slogan ‘what they call love is unpaid work’, which appeared on murals across Argentina during the international feminist strikes. As María Benitez of Federación de Organizaciones de Base (‘Federation of Grassroots Organisations’) said, ‘What we give is unpaid work; no one values our work as women, but to me it is very important, even though they say that we don’t do anything. That isn’t true.’

Redefining Community Care Work

The pandemic has shown us more than ever that inequality and precariousness are the reality for the majority of society. Working-class neighbourhoods that abided by ‘community isolation’ rather than individual isolation sought to overcome material inequalities and guarantee access to rights through this collective construction of strategies and networks. For example, women and LBTQ+ people on the frontlines are running community kitchens. Even so, this has not been enough since needs have dramatically increased as a result of the pandemic. Hunger is one of the main issues being addressed in this context. As Luz Bejerano explained:

We had 200 transgender comrades registered [with the community kitchen] before … all of a sudden, since the pandemic, there are more than 500 comrades in the region who started to call us because they are in need of food since they lost their source of income. The municipality isn’t providing them with food assistance and other support, which the lockdown has exposed.

They get the materials, prepare and distribute food, and manage the difficulties of abiding by the lockdown measures. Lucero Ayala of the Popular Movement for Dignity explains how they saw themselves as being obligated to diversify their tasks and create their own protocols, putting the phrase ‘we take care of each other’ into action: ‘In the neighbourhood, I am a community health advocate. I clean the streets and I also support the community kitchens by helping comrades assemble packed meals, [explaining] how we have to adhere to protocols, giving information’.

Hundreds of health advocates carry out house visits to detect the virus, attend to the elderly who are living alone during the lockdown, and carry out campaigns in the neighbourhood about how people can take care of themselves, and they communicate the responses with hospitals and health centres. Silvia Campo explained that:

We are also looking for information about where there are cases of COVID and in nearby areas … [and] the care that must be taken to avoid getting the virus. We have also been disseminating information about which days health clinics attend to the public, which days they distribute milk, which days they vaccinate children, where people have to go to if they are experiencing symptoms, that they can call in order to seek or receive medical attention, and where they can get information.

Ailén Possamay, Domestic disobedience / What they call love is unpaid labour, Concepción, Chile, 2019.

It is also these women who put a stop to the eviction of neighbours who cannot meet rent payments in the face of scarce employment and new challenges to carrying out already-existing subsistence economies. Britchez recounts these efforts in more details:

Since we’re here in the neighbourhood, our neighbours told us that they were facing eviction because of the rent payments. We know well that we don’t have work; they were not able to pay rent and the landlords demanded rent or they would be evicted and have to find another place to live. So, we organised around this issue among ourselves and the community … to be able to go to the house and talk to the landlords and tell them that they can’t evict families during the pandemic.

Hundreds of advocates for women’s rights and members of feminist networks accompanied women and LGBTQ+ people who were facing violence in the context of the lockdown; they recreated meetings and spaces of trust in many ways. Lourdes Durán of the Feminist Assembly of Soldati (Asamblea Feminista de Soldati) explained that ‘The feminist network was organising how to intervene in cases of gender-based violence, creating a common protocol throughout the neighbourhood to protect women who are the victims of gender-based violence. In these situations, a comprehensive approach is necessary’.

All of these networks, work, and organisational processes have proven to be even more essential than ever today in confronting the crisis deepened by the pandemic. Supported by community practices that they have developed over time to organise social goods, the guardians of the community in these community networks of support show that – now more than ever – sustaining life requires interdependence and solidarity. But it also brings attention to that community care work, which is not always visible and almost never remunerated, and in which women and LGBTQ+ people play a leading role.

Part 2: The Home as a Site of Struggle

Every Home Is Political

Throughout history, feminism has had the task of politicising that which is already normalised and has organised to change the configuration of the home and the relations within it. Since the 1970s, the slogan ‘the personal is political’ has served as a key phrase among feminists to question everything that purports to be hidden in the so-called private sphere.

Furthermore, the household has always been an economic unit: within it, there is production and exchange. Who produces and who exchanges the product of this work has changed throughout history alongside the changing ideas of the public and private sphere until arriving at the construction of the current classification of the typical household.^[6] As Paula Aguilar of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) put it:

What is expected is that the ideal family household is made up of a provider – the man – and a housewife who is willing to raise the children and take care of the chores. In the notion of the home, there is a utopia of social life. However, the limits of the household run up against many criticisms, resistances, challenges, and tensions. Is this the only possible way of organising the sustenance of life?

Despite this stereotypical image, which we see replicated in advertisements, the household is designed as a world of its own by public policy and in all arenas. Aguilar explains that:

The home has historically been configured as a symbolic and material nucleus of modern domesticity. It is not the same as the family. The qualities and method of organisation that the home has adopted go beyond kinship bonds. A home can be made up of one or various families and this too can vary according to social class, region, and customs.

The responsibility of care and domestic work varies tremendously in each kind of home. In the vast majority of cases, the lockdown has reinforced the familial responsibility of care and of bonds in general. The minimal contact with others required by the lockdown has limited every form of organising care that exceeds the physical limits of the home and has forced the prioritisation of some relationships over others.

The pandemic puts our interdependence in the spotlight and redefines who becomes part of our homes: what we refer to as family is created in many ways. In one of many examples of this reality, when Pamela Cutipa, a sex worker, was not able to go to work during the first weeks of the lockdown, she was evicted from her home. It was Margarita, a domestic worker, who offered her a place to live.

Economic dependence and housing insecurity are realities and constrictions that continually reappear in the stories of thousands of women and LGBTQ+ people. In these cases, a safe home is built beyond the walls of their house; networks are weaved together that sustain, accompany, and transform. However, lockdown measures limit the possibilities of finding support outside of the home when these homes are unsafe spaces. This is why Casa Anfibia (‘Amphibious House’), a social organisation that is dedicated to the construction of feminist housing and spaces, food, and support, did not waver when faced with how to address a case of violence that occurred during the pandemic. One of its members, Ileana Fusco, explained their approach in more detail:

There is no possibility of thinking of an exit from gender-based violence if we don’t think about housing, about a home, about how this household came into being, about who is giving me the possibility of having this house. In this moment, it was us comrades who organised ourselves and, with what we had – which was technical skills – and with other comrades in the same neighbourhood, we decided to build a house.

The Sexual Division of Labour

Both within and outside of one’s own home, essential care work falls disproportionately onto the bodies of women and LGBTQ+ people. As Silvia Federici points out in Patriarchy of the Wage (2018), domestic work is much more than cleaning the home. It is to physically, emotionally, and sexually serve those who earn a wage.

This is clear in the case of Rita, one of the 1.4 million domestic workers employed in private homes in Argentina.^[7] Rita is seventy years old and has been a home healthcare worker for the elderly for the last forty years. Her work has been considered essential since the beginning of the pandemic. She didn’t go home for the first two months of the pandemic out of fear that she would give COVID-19 to her family. Although she worked her whole life, just like her husband, Rita was always the one responsible for organising and carrying out domestic tasks:

Before the pandemic, my life was very different. … I went in [to work] on Wednesday afternoon and stayed until Monday afternoon and then I went back [the following] Wednesday. When I went home on Monday, I started again because, since my husband worked, the house was a mess; he couldn’t do much because he went into work at 4 AM and left at 8 PM.

Even in cases where biological family steps in, other challenges present themselves, as was the case for Mariana Rojas, a health worker. Mariana decided to increase the hours she was working because that is what the pandemic called for, even though she went months without seeing her children except through a window on her way home as a result. When she made this decision, she said, ‘[my ex-husband] told me “yes, that’s no problem. I will not go to work.”’ But, despite this agreement, she recalled the challenges that arose during this time:

My ex-husband had no problem; everything was all set, but when it came time to deal with the [kids’] school, schedules, and everything else, he didn’t know how. He was always committed only to his work and to being with the kids in their free time… From one moment to the next he found himself asking: what do I do with the schedules? Homework? Why do they call me the mom of the school? At a certain point we couldn’t do it because everything was falling apart. My mom had to step in: [now] she is in charge of everything that has to do with schoolwork, scheduling, medical responsibilities, homework, meetings…

‘Dignity is not evicted’, an intervention that took place during the March of the Unhoused, 15 January 2017,
Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Colectivo Wacha

For Mariana and her family, the change in roles led them to question and talk about what had become normalised: ‘the bonds between family must have been different’, she said, not ‘“I’ll take care of this and you take care of that”’. The division of responsibilities is solidified over time; it doesn’t change from one day to the next. A neighbour, an aunt, a grandmother; this is who generally comes to the rescue.

When feminists ask each other about the connections that sustain life, at the same time we ask ourselves, which lives? As Marta Dillon, a lesbian, journalist, and feminist activist described:

To me, family has to do with bonds of care and how our actions impact each other. It’s not something set in stone; it’s something that is always in motion. It’s not love that makes a family – it’s love and mutual care, sharing responsibilities among each other. It’s creating a community of affection and shared responsibility. … Parenting and caring are tasks that can be taken on in many different ways. We need to be able to think about caring for people in a more collective way.

The daily challenge is to build social and emotional relationships that sustain others’ lives that are not organised around the needs of a labour market or the profits of the few. This challenge is embodied in the slogan that says that we want to change everything ‘in the streets, in the plazas, and in the sheets’.

Part 3: The Robot Girl

That Which Is Not Named Is Not Seen

Little recognition is given to how this social reproduction has undergirded the accumulation of capital in the invisibilised and feminised spaces where women perform housework and care work.^[8] Considered to be a shortfall, a problem, or an expense, both men and states have avoided addressing this kind of work. It is not accidental or natural that house and care work are characterised by violence and inequality across the globe. Rather, they are social constructs that stem from a paradigm that is defined by a false notion of self-sufficiency and that denies vulnerability and interdependence as innate conditions of life in all of its variations.^[9] This is the ‘hidden side’ that sustains the entire socioeconomic system. ^[10]

The fact that the work and workers who are the most indispensable for enabling society to function are the least recognised provokes indignation: as Evelyn Cano of the Workers’ Collective of Nordelta, Argentina (Colectivo de Trabajadoras de Nordelta, Argentina) pointed out, ‘all of these chores – having clean clothes, preparing food, raising kids – are necessary to live, and the pandemic has shown this.’ Behind the ‘robot girl’, as Quintana and Roco (2019) put it, there are women and LGBTQ+ people with their own lives, emotions, and projects.

House and care work have always been devalued, privatised, and informalised.^[11] Even when this work is paid, it maintains these characteristics, which become further exacerbated through unequal regulations and laws as well as the violation of fundamental rights. The scant social, cultural, economic, political, and institutional recognition of this work exacerbates social inequality in this sector. According to the International Labour Organisation (2016), 80% of domestic and care workers across the world are women – the majority in Asia, Africa, and Latin America – and almost 90% work in the informal economy with no social protections. This inequality has largely come to define this work, as Evelyn Cano explains:

The preconceived notion that the relationship between domestic work and women is natural results in 97% of this sector being women; this should speak for itself. We don’t have union rights and 75% of us work under the table with no legal protection in the case of an emergency, work accident, or whatever else that might happen to us.

As a result, she said, as a domestic worker during the pandemic, ‘I contracted coronavirus cleaning someone else’s house … our situation got worse and this happens because we are working in completely informal conditions. During the pandemic they do whatever they want with us’.

Legal gaps, omissions, and ambiguities are part and parcel of this societal blindness, which allows – by action or omission – for a multitude of vulnerabilities and abuses of fundamental rights. As Pilar Gil Pascual of Undomesticated Workers (Trabajadoras No Domesticadas) explains:

Domestic workers … don’t know where to start our work or where it ends … because it’s not written in the law as it should be. There are many things that are ‘forgotten’ … [like] regulating the night shift. [This work] is much less regulated than other kinds of work, and there is no monitoring system. We continually depend on the good will of those who hire us.

House and Care Work from an Intersectional Perspective

Domestic work and care work expose the brutality of the racism that pervades throughout our societies.^[12] Poor women and LGBTQ+ people of colour bear the brunt of this perverse reality. In the current systemic crisis, we see how capital is managing, once again, to reinforce its sites of domination and exploitation. Patriarchal violence, fascism, and racism are being rebranded as the mechanisms and technologies that they employ adapt to shifting circumstances. Multiple forms of oppression are the currency and product of a historic debt that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, isolating, objectifying, discriminating, and abusing life, bodies, and fundamental rights.

Different manifestations of violence intersect and overlap, searing themselves onto the bodies of these workers. Mercedes of the Workers’ Collective of Nordelta, Argentina spoke of her own experience with this violence:

Nothing else mattered to me; it didn’t matter if they fired me … I couldn’t put up with the humiliation and discrimination any longer that I was subjected to when we go and carry out what they call ‘essential’ work during the pandemic.

For many women workers, this degradation is further exacerbated by the historical impact of colonialism. This domination weighs on each person and subject in a variety of ways, which are even more pronounced when it comes to women migrants who are subjected to racialised and violent circuits of modern-day slavery. As Rafaela Pimentel Lara of Domestic Territory – Madrid explained, ‘Migrant women carry this racism like a weight … black women, indigenous women … the way this work is carried out is reminiscent of slavery. When it comes to migrants, their work is not recognised.’ Mercedes expanded on this point, calling our attention to the connection between the regulation of labour and social rights and migrants’ exposure to violence at the hands of their employers:

I worked with immigrant comrades who are provided lodging by their employers and the discrimination that they are subjected to is twice as bad as what we face. They don’t let them rest, they take advantage of their situation because they are on their own … They have asked me a thousand times for girls and when they ask you, they say, ‘if they are from Paraguay or Peru that’s better’ and to myself I say ‘… of course, because if they are migrants, you’ll be able to exploit them even more.’

These women workers are on the frontlines of care work and the ‘weakest link’ in a chain of vulnerability, violence, and abuse. In the global economy, precarity and violence are not only ignored, but actively encouraged in order to retain economic hierarchies.

Labour, social, and economic violence are realities all too familiar for migrant workers in different sectors of the economy. Delia, a feminist immigrant and member of Ni Una Migrante Menos (‘Not One Migrant [Woman] Less’), talked about this reality:

The exploitation that people are experiencing is going to get much worse. If we don’t have work now, we certainly won’t later. Then of course we will end up accepting whatever we can get: the wages they offer, the conditions they impose on us. We will end up accepting it because we need to bring money back to our families. And those of us who are migrants need some way to try to get this money to send to our families so that they can survive. … Surely many of those who came back [to Argentina] after migrating to other countries … are going to migrate again. But they will migrate in worse conditions than before.

They will migrate in worse conditions because the conditions of life became increasingly precarious as workers’ rights were rolled back as a result of suffering local economies during the pandemic. For this reason, workers with the least protections are the ones who are employed. Despite this, workers continue confronting and stymying the perverse logic of the advance of capital, whose role in deepening crises is abundantly clear.

Ailén Possamay, Untitled, González Catán (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina), 2019.

Migration is a strategy of survival, but it is also a multidimensional and non-linear path that presents itself to those who decide to escape sexual, economic, institutional, and familial violence. Domestic work is often the only choice for those who take this path and who seek the opportunity to achieve economic autonomy, to obtain a legally recognised work status, and to reclaim their self-esteem and agency. In collective workspaces, they find sisterhood, friendship, and acuerpamiento, the collective energy to resist.[13] In these spaces, they are able to reach beyond sacrifice and obligation and find learning, enjoyment, and collectivity.

Despite the multiple processes of exploitation that these workers are exposed to, thousands of comrades have creatively built power and emancipatory resistance. As workers cleaning private houses in Buenos Aires say, ‘Patriarchy should tremble. [We are not] domestic or domesticated; not subjugated or devoted. [We are] undomestic.’ To this, the comrades from Domestic Territory add: ‘We make the world spin and we will change this world [because] to change housework and care would be to revolutionise everything at its roots.’ Domestic and care workers not only yell ‘enough is enough’; they move, organise, and shake things up.

Part 4: Generations of Shaking Up the Hornet’s Nest

Decades of neoliberalism seem to always burden the same bodies. The crisis of wage-based society did not alter the unequal distribution of work, nor did it recognise it as an integral element of all lives – despite how feminisms have long politicised this discussion.

We stand on the shoulders of comrades who have long been shaking the hornet’s nest to shed light on the fundamental role of domestic work, housework, and care work in sustaining and reproducing our societies. The struggles of those who came before us are reference points for those of us who seek to revive these discussions today, from the fight to recognise domestic work and the creation of the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) in the 1970s to Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers in India fighting for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), recognition, and remuneration and nurses in South Africa fighting for testing kits, PPE, and better healthcare management.^[14] These are the struggles that Thomas Sankara championed in Burkina Faso, where he created a day of solidarity in which men had to carry out domestic care work as a way to push an agenda beyond the walls of the personal and politicise the dynamics and work that go on within the home as well as the violence and inequality that sustain it. These are the struggles that are written into the constitutions of Venezuela and Ecuador, to name just two examples, which recognise housework as a part of economic activity.

The pandemic uncovered a reality that has long been brewing in which inequalities, injustices, and asymmetries are violently embedded in the order of society. The oppression of bodies and life that are exposed to unending workdays, whether paid or unpaid, within or outside of the home, became even worse. The lockdown, general isolation, and the restriction of movement has had catastrophic consequences for those who rely on piecing together work day to day; for those whose labour rights go unrecognised; and for those affected by a lack of housing or by housing or land insecurity. The premise of the lockdown as a global response to the health crisis further cemented the familial logic that has reinforced patterns of violence, oppression, and exploitation.

In difficult times, networks that sustain life are strengthened, resistance adapts to the changing reality, and solidarity is put into play. Conflicts become audible; community traumas become visible; and other forms of kinship are created around politics and land rather than bloodline. Faced with this isolating system, many women and LGBTQ+ people become involved in different spaces and give new meaning to sites of struggle: a park where they bring the person who they are caring for, a community kitchen, a street corner in the neighbourhood, a bus stop, the corner store, and the doorways of school become trenches for building collectively.

As a part of this process, what we call home is politicised; its borders become diffusive and mobile. The hegemonic image of a ‘happy home’ is revealed as a central space for the perpetuation of patriarchal violence. The unjust sexual division of labour within the home is replicated outside of it. In order to change this, we must revisit its foundations, strengthen emotional care networks, and retrace the command of the patriarchal family. Questioning what we call the home and the roles within it is part and parcel of challenging these processes and dynamics as well as widening the limits of the home. We must widen the limits of the home and recreate other kinds of responsibilities and relationships.

Throughout this dossier, we have identified certain common themes: the feminisation and the increase in care work to sustain that which is neglected by others – in homes, in neighbourhoods, and at the workplace – on the one hand and, on the other hand, daily resistance that gives new meaning to conditions and situations born from collective intelligence. Routines, silence, and cruelty are confronted with laughter, hugs, and even dance and song. In the interstices of the forms of resistance, other possible worlds are recreated and shaped. The feminist and collective diagnosis of the scope of this crisis offers tools to build the new life that we desire.

Mara Valdés, There are no women stronger than those who support each other, Buenos Aires Province, 2020.

Acknowledgments

This dossier was put together by the Mapeos Feministas collective alongside Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Argentina). Key contributors to this dossier are the grassroots feminist militants Ana Julia Bustonas (a philosopher, professor, and researcher); Camila Baron (an economist and collaborator of the Feminist Supplement to Página 12); Magdalena Roggi (a sociologist, professor, and popular educator); Josefina Roco (a doctor of International and Intercultural Studies); and Maisa Bascuas (a political scientist, professor, and researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

The guardians of the community with whom we reflected on collective care work and its challenges in preparation for this dossier include: Janet Mendieta (Argentine Workers’ Central Union / Central de Trabajadores Argentino), Lucero Ayala and Shirly Britchez (Popular Movement for Dignity / Movimiento Popular La Dignidad), María Benitez (Federation of Grassroots Organisations / Federación de Organizaciones de Base), Lourdes Durán (Feminist Assembly of Soldati / Asamblea Feminista de Soldati), Analía Jara (La Enramada, meaning ‘entwined branches’), Luz Bejerano (Transgender Movement of Argentina / Movimiento Transexual Argentino), and Silvia Campo (Encuentro de Organizaciones, meaning ‘a wide network of social organisations’).

Key to the discussion about the home as a site of struggle are: Rita Cabrera; Pamela Cutipa (a sex worker); Mariana Rojas (a member of the organisation Nuestra América, or ‘Our America’); Marta Dillon (a journalist and member of Ni Una Menos or ‘Not One [Woman] Less’); Estefi Barone; Sofia De Luca Bustos; Paula Aguilar of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET); Rocío Liébana (Mala Junta / ‘Bad Influence’); Ileana Fusco (Casa Anfibia / Amphibious House); and Rubi Fagioli (Colectiva Caracola / ‘Snail Collective’).

The discussion about the ‘robot girl’ was created in dialogue with domestic and care workers in Argentina, Bolivia, and Spain. Evelyn Cano and Mercedes (Workers’ Collective of Nordelta, Argentina); Delia Colque (Ni Una Migrante Menos, Bolivia / Not One Migrant [Woman] Less – Bolivia); Pilar Gil Pascual and Liz Quintana (Trabajadoras No Domesticadas, Euskal Herría / Undomesticated Workers – Basque Country ); and Rafaela Pimentel Lara (Domestic Territory – Madrid) were essential in reconstructing the wide ranging situations, experiences, and emotions of care and domestic workers in different parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Spain.

Bibliography

Carrasco, Cristina, ed. Con voz propia. La economía feminista como apuesta teórica y politica [With Our Own Voice. The Feminist Economy as a Theoretical and Political Bet]. Madrid: La Oveja Roja, 2014.

Carrasco, Cristina, Cristina Borderías, and Teresa Torns, eds. El trabajo de cuidados. Historia, teoría y políticas [Carework: History, Theory, and Politics]. Madrid: Catarata, 2011.

Colectivo IOÉ. Mujer, inmigración y trabajo [Women, Immigration, and Work]. Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales, 2001.

Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Brooklyn/Oakland: Common Notions/PM Press, 2012.

Federici, Silvia. Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism. Oakland: PM Press, 2021.

Federici, Silvia and Arlen Austen. Wages for Housework – The New York Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2017.

Fraser, Nancy. ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’. New Left Review no. 100 (July/August 2016).

Gago, Verónica. La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo [Feminist Power. Or the Desire to Change Everything]. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019.

Gonzalez Reyes, María, Emma Gascó, and Yayo Herrero. La vida en el Centro: Voces y relatos ecofeministas [Life in the Centre: Ecofeminist Voices and Reports]. Madrid: Libros en Acción, 2019.

International Labour Organisation. ‘Social protection for domestic workers: Key policy trends and statistics’. Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 2016. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_protect/—soc_sec/documents/publication/wcms_458933.pdf

James, Selma and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, 3^rd edition. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975.

Larguía, Isabel and John Doumolin. Towards a Science of Women’s Liberation: An Analysis from Cuba. London: Red Rag Collective, 1971.

Moscoso, Mafe. ‘Guayaquil, the “Colonial” Virus’. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, 5 April 2020. https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/42128/guayaquil-the-colonial-virus?cHash=07291282855243cfc38f57cca1a41c09

Navarro Trujillo, Mina and Raquel Gutiérrez. “Claves para pensar la interdependencia desde la Ecología y los Feminismos” [Keys for Thinking about Interdependence through Ecology and Feminism]. Bajo el Volcán, no. 28, March–August 2018.

Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (Buenos Aires). Condiciones de empleo, trabajo y salud de Trabajadoras Domésticas de Casas Particulares. Resultados de la ECETSS 2018 [Labour, Employment, and Health Conditions for Domestic Workers in Private Homes: Results from the ECETSS 2018]. April 2018. http://www.trabajo.gob.ar/downloads/estadisticas/ecetss/ecetss_casas-particulares.pdf

Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (Buenos Aires). Condiciones de empleo, trabajo y salud de Trabajadoras Domésticas de Casas Particulares. Resultados de la ECETSS 2020 [Labour, Employment, and Health Conditions for Domestic Workers in Private Homes: Results from the ECETSS 2020]. April 2020.

http://www.trabajo.gob.ar/downloads/estadisticas/ecetss/ecetss_casas-particulares.pdf

Parello Rubio, Sonia. Mujer, inmigrante y trabajadora: la triple discriminación [Woman, Immigrant, and Worker: Triple Discrimination]. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2003.

Pérez Orozco, Amaia. Subversion feminista de la economia [Feminist Subversion of the Economy]. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2014.

Quintana, Liz y Roco, Josefina. “Trabajo doméstico | Detrás de la chica robot” [Domestic Work: Behind the Robot Girl]. El salto, 31 December 2019. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/trabajo-domestico/columna-abolicion-cuarto-servicio

Roco, Josefina. Trabajadoras no Domesticadas. Diagnóstico Participativo y Plan de Acción Integral [Undomesticated Workers: Participative Diagnostic and Comprehensive Action Plan]. Bilbao: Mundubat Fundazioa, 2018.

Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. CoronaShock and Patriarchy. 5 November 2020. https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-4-coronashock-and-patriarchy/

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Health Is a Political Choice. 9 June 2020. https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-29-healthcare/

PowerPaola, Untitled, originally published in Página 12, Las Doce supplement, February 2020.

[1] Translator’s note: barrio popular is translated in this text as ‘working-class neighbourhood’. The term popular implies ‘popular’ or ‘of the people’, but because this literal translation does not carry the same fluidity, here we chose to use the term ‘working-class’, the closest commonly used substitute in this context. In other instances, we used the terms ‘grassroots’ (such as ‘grassroots feminist’ to mean feminista popular), ‘popular’, or ‘people’s’.

[2] Translator’s note: The term ‘popular economy’ refers to strategies of economic subsistence that poor workers who are excluded from the formal labour market develop to guarantee the reproduction of their lives, such as working as street vendors, collecting recycling and trash, urban farming, etc.

[3] Federici and Austen, Wages for Housework; James and Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community; Larguía and Doumolin, Towards a Science of Women’s Liberation; Federici, Revolution at Point Zero.

[4] Gago, La potencia feminista.

[5] Excerpt from a speech from Deolinda Carrizo of the MOCASE during the launch of the Secretariat of Women and Diversities of the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP), 8 March 2020. Translator’s note: Olla popular often refers to a single pot used to provide food for the people, sometimes in the corner of a park or plaza.

[6] Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’.

[7] Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (Buenos Aires), Condiciones de empleo, trabajo y salud de Trabajadoras Domésticas de Casas Particulares, April 2020.

[8] Roco, Trabajadoras no Domesticadas.

[9] Navarro Trujillo and Gutiérrez, “Claves para pensar la interdependencia desde la Ecología y los Feminismos”; Gonzalez Reyes, Gascó, and Herrero, La vida en el Centro.

[10] Carrasco, ed. Con voz propia.

[11] Carrasco, Borderias, and Torns, eds. El trabajo de cuidados.

[12] Moscoso, ‘Guayaquil, the “Colonial” Virus’; Parello Rubio, Mujer, inmigrante y trabajadora; Colectivo IOÉ, Mujer, inmigración y trabajo.

[13] Acuerpamiento is a term used to refer to the collective political act of bodies, or cuerpos, in order to provide the political energy to resist and defeat multiple oppressions.

[14] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock and Patriarchy; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Health Is a Political Choice.

Preface

Eli Gómez Alcorta

Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity (Argentina)

When mandatory preventative social isolation was announced in our country, only a few weeks had passed since 8 March, the date when women’s and the LGBTQIA+ movements once again put a political agenda and series of demands on the table. This agenda is linked to eliminating gender-based violence and inequality, which confront us in every aspect of life.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought visibility and clarity to many of the things that feminist and socialist movements have been saying for some time. First of all, that we live in a system that has reached atrocious and unprecedented levels of inequality, exclusion, hate, and discrimination as if it were ‘normal’ or ‘natural’. It is not an exaggeration to say that if we don’t put an end to this ‘normalcy’, we will drive straight towards the destruction of the planet and of humanity. Second, on a global level, COVID-19 has also made clear the importance of the state, once again shedding light on the vitality of state intervention — not just any kind of intervention, but the intervention of a state that cares for people and health and that preserves life. The pandemic has also put care work into the spotlight like never before, shedding light on tasks that have historically been feminised, socially and economically devalued, and which have become increasingly precarious.

Existing inequalities remain apparent. It is not the same to experience quarantine for those who live in houses and for those who live in shacks; for those who have work and those who do not; for those who have access to adequate infrastructure such as roads, internet, and transportation, and those who do not; those who have running water and those who do not; for women and for men; for cis women and for trans women… This inequality — which is normalised as if it were a natural phenomenon and not a political one — corresponds directly to the severity of the impact of today’s health crisis felt by different sectors of society.

For women and the LGBTQIA+ community, the inequality and oppression associated with this ‘normalcy’ are reflected by the exacerbation of gender-based violence, the increase in poverty, and the increase and overload of care work.

The enormous challenges that we face today are how to craft a strategy that takes the current emergency into account and that transcends it, and how to make sure that the impact of the pandemic doesn’t leave us even poorer, more subjected to violence, and more exploited. At the same time, we must work towards structural transformations that disarm relationships of power that reproduce violence and inequality.

The role that we have as militants of popular feminism is central in the tasks that lie ahead of us. In our country, thousands of us have met for over thirty-four years[1] to discuss a political agenda for the women’s and feminist movement, sharing with each other and organising ourselves in various parts of the country. We have a history of labour organisation, of fighting for our rights and fighting for our work to be recognised. We see ourselves reflected in the struggle for human rights in our country, in the madres and abuelas[2] who are part of the history of our movement.

In the last few years, the women’s movement has gained resounding strength. For five years, the Ni Una Menos (‘Not One Less’) movement has erupted in the streets of Argentina, putting on the agenda the urgent need of public policies to prevent gender-based violence and to provide aid to those who are subjected to such violence, demanding no nos maten más: stop killing us. With the Cambiemos (‘Let’s Change’) party in office[3] and the advance of neoliberalism, these debates of the movement lined up behind a new agenda. When there is an economic crisis, there is also a feminisation of poverty and of neoliberal policies, which hit women and the LGBTQIA+ community even harder, further exacerbating inequality. But the movement responded with organised resistance. The women’s movement led the first national women’s strike in 2016 and the massive ‘green wave’ during the debate on abortion in 2018, making it clear that the women’s and the LGBTQIA+ movement is among the most dynamic actors of our time.

Standing on the shoulders of the struggles that came before us and the sisters of our Patria Grande (‘Great Homeland’)[4] and of the world, we must work to emerge from this crisis better off than we are now, to put everything up for debate, and to assure ourselves that this debate comes from a popular, progressive, and feminist consensus.

Introduction

In our series on CoronaShock, we have discussed how a virus that struck the world with such gripping force has swiftly laid bare today’s social, political, and economic issues; COVID-19 has exposed the crumbling bourgeois social order while shedding light on the humanising resistance in socialist parts of the world.

In the midst of this global health, political, economic, and social crisis, it is often women who bear the brunt of the cataclysmic shifts in daily life, from the increasing care work of children, the elderly, and the sick to skyrocketing incidences of gender-based violence, as women and LGBTQIA+ people are quarantined with their abusers. As countries across the world experience different stages of the pandemic, it looks like 2020 will be shaped by an attempt to adapt to and survive in this new reality.

For months now, several countries around the world have been experimenting with different methods and stages of physical distancing and shelter-in-place orders. Some have begun to loosen lockdown restrictions and reopen the economy, while others are trying to flatten the rising curve of new infections. Uncertainty looms over how long it will take to recover from these incalculable social and economic losses as new challenges emerge for societies at large.

In this study, we seek to understand the current health crisis more comprehensively, which means that we must also understand it as a social and economic crisis. First, we will address the social and labour impacts of the crisis and look at the consequences for workers who are on the frontline of the pandemic: healthcare and essential workers, informal workers, and the most vulnerable members of society. Second, we will address care work as well as the impact of the lockdown and physical distancing measures on those workers. Third, we will address the increase in patriarchal violence during the quarantine, providing a historical analysis and connecting the latest increase in violence with recent political events, especially in the Global South. At the end of this study, we present a list of people’s demands that have been put forward by women’s and feminist organisations across the world to build a more just, humane, and equal society as we face this global crisis.

I. The Social and Labour Impact of CoronaShock

We are living through the worst crisis in the history of capitalism. This current crisis was sparked by a small, invisible virus that nevertheless led to the ‘largest inadvertent general strike in modern history’ as it forced the planet into lockdown, in the words of Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. At least half of the global labour force is out of work and/or staying at home, which has had far-reaching effects on the world’s economic growth rates. Labour produces value, and when workers are forced into lockdown, no economy escapes the repercussions. In a globalised world, when supply chains and industrial plants are forced to shut down either part or all of their operations, the economic impact becomes catastrophic for all countries — especially those in the Global South.

The implementation of the neoliberal model has made it even more complex to tackle the challenges that we face today. As this model promotes tax reductions, privatisation, and outsourcing, states become more and more debilitated, cut their budgets, and reduce social investments. Austerity policies, a minimal state, and the weakening of labour unions and social organisations have compromised the social and public resources that are necessary to tackle the pandemic, whether in the realm of healthcare, social services, or services dedicated to assist the most vulnerable segments of society. Under these conditions, healthcare and social service systems have collapsed, lessening access to essential humanitarian aid.

Kruttika Susarla / Artists For Progressive Politics (India), May Day, 2020

The Consequences of Neoliberal Expropriation

Health is not only about the individual; it is a complex, socially determined process. This aspect is often left out of the discussion on public health, which is centred instead on biomedical views that reduce health issues, prevention strategies, and treatment processes to the individual level. The neoliberal project gravely and severely threatens health as a fundamental universal and social right. Human rights, universality, equity, coverage, primary healthcare, and other concerns have been co-opted and transformed by neoliberal ideology.

Neoliberal ideology, which increased its hegemony in Latin America in the 1990s following the Washington Consensus, has successfully promoted the idea that the problems faced by Latin America were caused by the allegedly oversized public sector, and that structural fiscal adjustments and the privatisation of state-run services were necessary to solve those issues. After decades of neoliberal transformations and structural adjustment policies that were marked by the implementation of new technologies and the expropriation of common resources and goods, market fundamentalism ultimately prevailed. This led to partial, short-term interventions at the cost of efficient, sustainable, long-term public policies. In the midst of this political and economic climate, and based on the document ‘Investing in Health’ (1993), the World Bank intervened in the area of public health by forging an agenda and a model for reforms that lean toward the privatisation and commodification of healthcare.

The fight against health crises such as the one that we are facing today has been severely stunted by the destruction, dismantling, dispossession, and trade-off of public healthcare systems. The scenes of desperation seen across the world of dead bodies left in the streets after local systems collapse — as in the case of Guayaquil, Ecuador, or the mass graves dug in many Latin American countries — expose the depth of neoliberal dispossession in the region. The Americas have the largest number of reported COVID-19 cases of any region in the world, followed by other countries in the Global South such as India.

The World Health Organisation estimates that healthcare workers account for 10 per cent of COVID-19 infections across the world. It is clear that being on the frontlines results in a greater risk of becoming infected with COVID-19 and of being exposed to excessive stress, combined with other feelings of uncertainty. This reality predates the pandemic but has only become more dire, provoked by issues such as a shortage of personal protective equipment, long work hours, and the imminent risk of becoming unemployed or being forced to take informal jobs. In addition to this stress, women health workers continue to carry out care work in their private lives, often including housework and child and/or elder care.

What makes certain workers in the healthcare field — from cleaning staff to informal care workers — even more vulnerable is how invisible they are to the health sector and society at large, a reality rooted in historical and social factors intersecting class, gender, and race. This means that these workers hold less control over their working conditions and do not benefit from the same regulations and state protections, therefore facing greater health and security risks. As the precarity and fear of loss of income loom large, workers are less likely to organise and unionise, becoming more subjected to overexploitation, poor working conditions, and job insecurity.

The pandemic has clearly exposed the longstanding attack on healthcare and on the efforts to maintain free, public, quality service for the people, and has unveiled the gender gap among the most vulnerable health workers. We have no choice but to fight for a world where workers are acknowledged and gender discrimination is abolished — not just by cheering from our windows, but by winning tangible victories for the working class.

Women Healthcare Workers on the Frontlines

Women make up the majority of healthcare workers, especially in nursing. According to the United Nations (UN), some estimates say that women represent 67 per cent of the global healthcare workforce. Women also constitute the majority of workers in the cleaning industry and, notably, in social services (90 per cent). In the case of Brazil, 2 million of the 2.7 million people employed by the country’s public healthcare system (the Unified Health System, SUS), or 75.4 per cent, are women. In terms of racial demographics, 34 per cent of the SUS workforce is black; 8 per cent are black men, and 26 per cent are black women.

Despite the fact that women make up the majority of the workforce, the global healthcare industry is primarily led by men. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 69 per cent of global health organisations are headed by men; only 20 per cent have reached gender parity on their boards and 25 per cent have reached gender parity in senior management positions. The WHO also showed that, while women in this sector work longer hours, they are paid 11 per cent less than men.

In Argentina, the healthcare sector has historically been characterised by the feminisation of technical, operational, and cleaning work and the masculinisation of professional and leadership positions. Available data shows that 82 per cent of nursing undergraduates, nurse technicians, and nursing assistants are women. In recent decades, there has been a process of the ‘feminisation of the medical profession’, a shift from the historically male-dominated field. Today, women make up 70 per cent of healthcare professionals and the majority of medical students and graduates. However, only 40 per cent of leadership positions are held by women. In the private sector, the gender gap is even wider: only 13 per cent of management positions are held by women workers.

Despite the process of feminisation of these occupations, the share of women in leadership and management positions has not increased across healthcare institutions, whether in hospitals, local and national government health departments, professional associations, scientific organisations, or labour unions. This also has a profound impact on the wage gap, as women are paid 10 to 20 per cent less than men in the healthcare industry, according to a 2018 report by the United Nations Development Programme (Argentina).

Wages, Race, Gender, and the Invisible Side of Health Work

As in other fields, discrimination plays a major role in the management of healthcare workers — a reality that arises out of the patriarchal and neocolonial roots that shape the healthcare sector. The impact is evident in gaps in pay, educational level, and leadership positions between men and women and across racial lines. This reality underlines the need to implement active policies that would lead to gender and racial equality.

Around the world and in every industry, women are still paid 20 per cent less than men for doing the same work, and they are disproportionately employed in lower-paying jobs. Women are still regarded as less competent in the workplace, enjoy less prestige, are less likely to get promoted, and have less access to basic labour protections such as unionisation, safety, security, and decent wages. In Brazil, for example, there is a sevenfold gap between the lowest and highest-paying jobs in the public healthcare system. Overall, women are paid 75 per cent of what men make, and black women are paid as little as 60 per cent of what white men earn.

In addition to the disparity in pay between men and women, there is also a disparity in access to formal healthcare job opportunities. According to Women in Global Health, while female healthcare workers contribute to around US$3 trillion of the global GDP, almost half of that work goes unacknowledged or unpaid; much of this unpaid health work is carried out by women. In Argentina, while 77.1 per cent of healthcare workers have formal jobs and pay into pension schemes, the rate among male workers is higher, at 81.3 per cent. There is a 5.5 per cent gap between the number of men and women who are registered as medical professionals — such as doctors — and other medical workers such as nurses, social workers, and custodians, which in turn has implications for the wage discrepancies between men and women in the healthcare sector.

The role of women workers in popular economies[5] has also come into the limelight during the pandemic, especially in working-class areas. The health crisis has taken on a distinct shape in urban settlements and peripheries — where people do not have access to basic utility and public services, including water, electricity, and sanitation — creating a breeding ground for the virus to spread in precarious living conditions. It is the residents of these areas who most urgently need access to basic healthcare, information, and services during the pandemic.

In Argentina, women workers are on the frontline in working-class neighbourhoods, promoting community health and surveying and aiding older adults and individuals who live alone and who are at greater risk. In coordination with health centres, hospitals, and healthcare programmes, these women go from door to door testing residents and guiding individuals and families who have to self-quarantine. Not only are they managing the health crisis — they are also providing food supplies, essential goods, and overall care to their communities. But these community health workers — who often provide primary healthcare but are not registered in the healthcare system — are also generally unacknowledged and unpaid.

In South Africa, Community Health Workers (CHWs) — who have played a fundamental role on the frontline yet often have temporary contracts — staged a protest in July 2020, calling for full-time employment and greater recognition of their contributions in public health institutions. ‘How can we be relied on to screen and test communities for COVID-19, yet not be allowed to share our perspectives from the frontline at health forums?’ asked Noluthando Mhlongo, a CHW from KwaZulu-Natal.

Efforts to bring these realities and this essential work to the fore are now starting to shape the policy conversation, in particular in terms of advocating for professional training and to make sure they are paid. We must give credence to their demands to be paid and recognised for their work, and to be treated equally.

Informal Workers and Unemployment

Since the onset of the pandemic, most people have been faced with the stark reality of how to provide for themselves and their families as the economy shrinks further and further. This reality is particularly stark for informal and unemployed workers and for women. Before the pandemic, the informal economy was predominantly made up of women. Now, masses of women workers are losing their jobs and income in the midst of the pandemic.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), women are disproportionately employed in many of the industries most severely affected by the crisis. Nearly 510 million (40 per cent) of all women employed globally work in the four most affected industries: hotels, restaurants, retail, and manufacturing. Women are also predominantly employed in domestic work, healthcare, and social services, putting them at a greater risk of contracting COVID-19 and of losing their source of income if they become infected. They are also less likely to have access to social protections.

The ILO indicates that the crisis could cause an increase in relative poverty rates in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially among the number of informal workers. Informal employment is characterised by unstable jobs, low income, and no social protection to face health emergencies or situations such as unemployment and a lack of labour rights.

When the formal sector closes its doors to women, they are left with no other alternative but the informal sector (which women have historically been forced to occupy), in which they are subjected to precarious working conditions and low pay. Women are hit especially hard as city authorities clamp down on street vendors and other informal workers whose livelihoods depend on having access to public spaces. According to available data, it is estimated that around 30–40 per cent of the total trade within the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) is associated with informal cross-border traders. In South Africa, informal and transborder trading has come to a grinding halt across the country; thirty-five land border posts were shut down, as well as other posts with neighbouring countries, such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Scenes of women shutting down their fruit stands have become common in places such as the border town of Komatipoort in South Africa. These predominantly women workers are left with no income; all they are left with is the uncertainty of when they will be able to resume their work.

Even before the pandemic, more than 1.6 billion people — half of the global workforce — worked in the informal sector, constantly faced with the possibility of losing their livelihoods. As the United Nations estimates, informal workers around the world lost 60 per cent of their income in the first month of the pandemic. The ILO estimates that these figures are even worse in Latin America and the Caribbean, where informal workers’ income has been cut by 80 per cent in the same time frame. Fifty-nine percent of informal workers in the region are self-employed, while 31 per cent are employed by micro and small enterprises. In Brazil alone, more than 600,000 micro and small enterprises have been forced out of business since the pandemic began, and unemployment is expected to increase twofold or maybe even fourfold by the end of the year.

In India, according to the ILO Monitor, nearly 90 per cent of the workforce is based in the informal sector, making it the biggest workforce in the economy. The report also indicates that the roughly 400 million workers belonging to India’s informal sector will experience extreme poverty as the crisis intensifies. The precariousness of the informal sector disproportionately impacts women; 94 per cent of the women who are counted as being part of the workforce in India remain concentrated in the informal sector. Despite the huge number of workers hailing from India’s informal sector — which contributes significantly to the country’s GDP — their welfare has been tremendously neglected. Workers in India are facing additional challenges as labour laws are being weakened under the ruling government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including an attack on the eight-hour workday.

The ILO Monitor also highlights that ‘94 per cent of the world’s workers were living in countries with some sort of workplace closures’, many of whom have lost their jobs during the pandemic. Amidst this are mounting levels of anxiety and depression brought on by the pandemic and the increasingly precarious situation facing informal sector workers. On a global level, ‘More than half of young people surveyed had become vulnerable to anxiety or depression since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. One in six young people surveyed had stopped working, and 60 per cent of women and 53 per cent of men in this survey viewed their career prospects with uncertainty and fear. Young people who had discontinued working ran the highest risk of anxiety and depression’.

The emergence of a new kind of gig economy is further institutionalising precarity and informality. This new phenomenon, also referred to as the ‘uberisation’ of work, is the result of decades of changes in and the deterioration of working conditions and job security. This process maximised overexploitation by creating so-called ‘just-in-time’ labour, a system that requires workers to be constantly ready to report to work, but only calls them to work when there is demand. They are paid by the hour, or even the minute, for the time it takes to make a delivery or finish a temporary service, which externalises the cost of downtime to the workers rather than the company. This has had a disproportionate impact on young workers as well as poor women (mostly women of colour and/or migrants) and has become an unreliable source of employment for a tremendous number of people as an alternative to the shortage of jobs and lack of sources of income.

As these rates continue to increase, more and more people will be forced into poverty across the world, hitting women especially hard. They manage to scrape by with informal jobs, working in public spaces as street vendors, garbage collectors, recyclers, small-scale farmers, etc. Physical distancing and lockdown measures undermine the daily livelihoods of these women — who are often the heads of their household — as they cannot work from home, remotely, or online, and because many of them rely on busy streets, public marketplaces, and small businesses.

Paid Domestic Work in the Global South

The 67 million domestic workers across the world account for a key sector of the informal workforce. This sector of the workforce — 80 per cent of whom are women — accounts for the vast majority of the informal sector in much of the world. In addition to suffering from many of the same conditions as other informal workers — such as job insecurity and precarious conditions — domestic workers are often deprived of the scarce protections afforded to other precarious workers.

In India, most domestic workers are women and girls who have neither bargaining power nor any guarantee of employment. They do not have any of the social security benefits or legal protections that are guaranteed to other workers — even those in the informal sector — such as a minimum wage or allowances. High rates of illiteracy and a low level of formal education have made them even more vulnerable to horrendous working conditions, job insecurity, and low wages. The pandemic has exacerbated this vulnerability, as many have lost work or not been paid for their services. According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), the official count of domestic workers in India is 4.2 million. However, according to some studies, the actual number is likely to be between 50 to 90 million — over ten times the official count.

In Latin America, one-third of informal workers are domestic workers. In Brazil, women account for 97 per cent of domestic workers, earning 78.44 per cent of what men are paid for the same work — even though male domestic workers comprise only 1 per cent of all men who work outside the home. Among the approximately 7 million women domestic workers in the country, nearly 5 million have no job security (and are therefore subjected to informal employment) and are hired as day labourers. These informal domestic workers are paid even less, earning 60 per cent less than formally employed domestic workers.

In South Africa, the more than one million domestic workers, who are also disproportionately women, account for 8 per cent of the country’s workforce. Some domestic workers live in their employers’ homes, while others endure long commutes every day from the outskirts of large cities or neighbouring towns. While some have been granted paid leave and can stay at home with their families during the pandemic, most day labourers who carry out informal domestic work cannot survive if they practise physical distancing. They are faced with two options: following public safety protocols, staying home in the face of COVID-19, and facing possible starvation and eviction, or breaking the guidelines, increasing the risk of infection, and potentially securing a source of income.

As the economic crisis deepens, domestic workers are haunted by the uncertainty of whether or not they will still have a job after the quarantine. According to South African domestic workers’ unions, the sector is one of the most susceptible to cuts as middle-class families who employ them struggle to get by. Undocumented migrant women are especially vulnerable.

Though the governments of several countries announced economic relief plans, they were slow to introduce measures for the informal sector, postponed their implementation, and cut down the amount of aid that would be provided. Meanwhile, the rich have only been getting richer during the pandemic. A recent Oxfam report showed that, in Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, the wealth accrued by the richest groups between March (the beginning of the pandemic) and June of this year is equivalent to one-third of the funds provided for economic stimulus packages implemented in the region. The fortune of Latin America’s 73 billionaires surged by US$48.2 billion in this time period, while massive numbers of people in the region lost their jobs and sources of income. Between March and late July, eight new billionaires emerged in the region — one every two weeks. Meanwhile, 40 million people are expected to lose their jobs and 52 million will be forced into poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2020.

The neoliberal state is not at the service of humanity. The capitalist logic disregards domestic workers, informal workers, and the unemployed; it promises them the opportunity of success while delivering only increased exploitation, lower pay, and more precarious lives. It cannot support them through hunger and misery. This is a world where all the ‘nobodies’ die, as Eduardo Galeano so eloquently wrote:

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. (…)

Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.

The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

Rising Social Vulnerability: Poverty, Evictions, and Forced Migration

The cruelty of the capitalist system and capitalist states has driven humanity to its limit in the era of COVID-19. Though there was hope that the poverty rate among women would fall by 2.7 per cent between 2019 and 2021, as a result of the pandemic the rate is now projected to increase by 9.1 per cent. This means that, by 2021, 96 million people will fall into extreme poverty, 47 million of them women and girls. This will increase the total number of women and girls in extreme poverty to 435 million people.

This is the result of policies adopted by capitalist states in this period, driven by a concern for profits rather than a concern for humanity. This direction stands in sharp contrast to the policies implemented by parts of the world with socialist governments, from Kerala (India) to Venezuela to Vietnam, as shown in a recent study by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Among the heartless policies implemented during this period are the evictions of individuals, families, and entire communities in the midst of the pandemic. Women and children have lost their homes, and, as a result, their livelihood, as was the case with families brutally evicted from an MST encampment in Brazil in August of this year. The evictions that are underway in South Africa, as well as the forced migration in India after the lockdown was announced with little notice or state support, are two examples of the reality faced by the majority of the world’s people in capitalist states in the midst of the pandemic.

In India, the first phase of the lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020 with merely four hours’ notice, lasting for twenty-one days. The lockdown, which would be continually extended, completely lacked a proper roadmap for implementation; the questions of how people could abide by the lockdown, where to go if they were left stranded, and how to feed themselves and meet their basic needs for survival with a sudden loss of income were left dangling in the air. As a result, India witnessed the biggest on-foot migration since the Great Partition, when the subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947. While migration due to a lack of opportunities is not new, the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have brought this hardship to light. According to the Economic Survey (2017), roughly 139 million seasonal or circular migrants in India perform essential work that allows the rest of the economy to run, from factories to office buildings.

Despite this, migrants are often excluded from various government schemes. Many are from rural areas but have moved to cities to find work, and they rely on rented rooms for lodging and lack savings and regular pay. A number of reports surfaced after the lockdown that portrayed the sufferings of the migrant workers who were left stranded in big metropolitan cities with no lodging, no food, and no income or savings to get home. Tens of thousands were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres without any transport facilities or other means to return to their villages and hometowns during the initial period of the lockdown.

Identifying the government’s failure to respond to the situation of migrant labourers, the Supreme Court intervened and issued its first order on 26 May, followed by an interim order on 28 May and the full order on 5 June. The orders emphasised the lapses where the government failed to provide adequate means to the stranded migrant workers and failed to facilitate their means of transport during the lockdown. As reported by PRS Legislative Research, the Supreme Court ordered the central and the state governments to take responsibility for the migrant crisis through a series of measures. This included providing free food to stranded migrants, mandating that the state receiving migrants pay for their transportation as soon as possible and within fifteen days of issuing the order on 9 June, and ensuring that migrant workers not pay train or bus fare.

Despite these orders, India’s situation continues to be grim as millions of working-class people suffer and struggle every day for their survival. The report ‘Labouring Lives: Hunger, Precarity and Despair amid the Pandemic’ documents the response of a number of migrant workers and sheds light on the problems that they face. One stranded migrant recounted that:

Bhagwam bharose chal rha hai kyunki sarkar se koi umeed hai nahi; woh bas ghosana kr deti hai, mara jata hai gareeb (‘We are left to fend for ourselves because we don’t have any expectations from the government. They just make sudden announcements; it is the poor who pay the price)’.

A similar situation has occurred in South Africa during the pandemic as evictions are carried out throughout the country. In all of the major cities across the country, municipal governments have evicted people living in shacks in contravention both of the country’s laws, which prohibit evictions carried out without a court order, and of the rules governing the lockdown, which include a moratorium on evictions. In Durban, Abahlali baseMjondolo, a movement of shack dwellers that is the largest popular movement to have emerged in the country since the end of apartheid, has been subjected to daily evictions during which there has been considerable state violence; at times, live ammunition has been fired at residents. The movement has more than 75,000 members in good standing in Durban as of this year, the majority of whom are women, and in many cases mothers, fighting to protect their homes.

Ezrena Marwan (Malaysia), Pisang Topeng, 2020

Abahlali’s women’s organisation has issued two statements elaborating the gendered impact of evictions: ‘Why this Suffering?’ and ‘Sekwanele! Enough is enough!’. In the first statement, the women declare that:

We are afraid of the coronavirus, but there is no virus worse than not having a place to stay. There is no virus worse than armed men attacking and destroying your home. There is no virus worse than armed men shooting at your family, including children and old people. There is no virus worse than having to sleep outside, where there is always the fear of rape. There is no virus worse than our children waking up at night crying and shouting in fear.

Together, these statements note that evictions place women at a very high risk of sexual assault when they have to sleep out in the open after evictions. Evictions cause tremendous stress and anxiety for children, the impact of which is largely managed by women, and some women have lost male partners due to such state violence.

Ordinary forms of organisation such as meetings, street protests, and the like are impossible during the shutdown. It is incredibly difficult to access legal support or to prepare for court actions for a number of reasons: it is difficult to travel, police stations have refused to certify documents and to sign affidavits, and so on. For women who no longer have any income during the shutdown, online organisation is also impossible. It is vitally important that organisations staffed by middle-class gender activists remain acutely aware of just how difficult it is for women who have lost their income during this crisis to organise under the lockdown.

Holding the line of the fragile gains made by grassroots women’s rights activists in previous waves of struggle will require focus and fortitude. It will also require that an incisive gender lens be cast on every move by the government and the state in the coming months.

The Impact of CoronaShock on LGBTQIA+ People

As we have discussed, the impact of COVID-19 is far from equal in communities across the globe. The worst effects of the virus have been felt by marginalised communities along the lines of class, race, sexual orientation, gender, and — notably — gender identity. The pre-existing conditions caused by transphobia, heavily compounded by class and race, put transgender people in the crosshairs of COVID-19. In this section, we will briefly outline some of major challenges facing the LGBTQIA+ and especially the transgender community across the world in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first challenge in measuring the impact of COVID-19 on the transgender community is that data is largely unavailable. This is no accident: despite the objective impacts of discrimination, patriarchal violence, and marginalisation on the material lives of transgender people, they remain largely invisible. In the United States, California became one of the few states to collect data on the impact of the pandemic on the transgender community in July. In Brazil, federal data on the 12.9 million unemployed leaves out any mention of transgender people, as do government reports of the 53 per cent increase in homelessness in the city of São Paulo over the last four years (from 15.9 thousand people in 2015 compared to 42.3 thousand people in 2019). While it is impossible to fully quantify the impact of the pandemic on transgender people, support networks in the transgender community see this reality in their lives and on the streets, pointing to disproportionately high numbers of transgender people among the unemployed and unhoused.

This disparity starts early in life, as many LGBTQIA+ and especially transgender children are expelled from their homes by unsupportive families, resulting in a lower level of education and professional skills required by much of the formal sector — a factor further compounded by discrimination. Transgender people are often forced to stay in the closet or risk losing their jobs, leading to much higher levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide. One survey of 498 transgender people (452 transgender women and 46 transgender men) reported that, in Argentina, 40 per cent transgender men have attempted suicide at some point in their lives, and one-third of transgender women have attempted suicide, beginning on average at the age of 13 for transgender men and 16 for transgender women. Another survey in the United States among 27,715 transgender people found that 40 per cent of those surveyed had attempted suicide at some point in their lifetime — 8 times higher than the rate of the population as a whole. As many schools shut down and pivot to online learning, transgender children in unsupportive home environments remain trapped with their abusers.

In the era of COVID-19, that means that unhoused children and adults are at a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19 and have a lower level of access to care if they contract the virus. Some accounts point out that, unlike many migrants, who scrambled to travel home in great numbers with scarce funds in the midst of tremendous adversity, transgender children and adults often have no home or family to travel to. Many transgender people are migrants themselves, as we have seen with the crisis at the United States-Mexico border, where migrants who survive the treacherous journey are kept in squalid, overcrowded detention centres.

In South Africa, COVID-19 has brought such complex ongoing struggles for sexual and gender minority refugees to light. Victor Chikalogwe, the gender and LGBTQIA+ refugee project coordinator at People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP), notes that the severe and prolonged trauma that queer refugees experienced in their home countries is compounded once individuals attempt to settle in South Africa. In an article in New Frame, Chikalogwe notes that, ‘unlike many refugees who can rely on the support of their communities or compatriots, it’s not usually possible for sexual and gender minority refugees to do that. So without that support, it can be much harder for them’.

Unsurprisingly, given this reality, transgender people are disproportionately unhoused. According to one survey, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), 65 per cent of transgender people live in precarious, state-subsidised hotel rooms inhabited by people who cannot afford rent; 22.5 per cent rent their homes; and 6.6 per cent live in shelters or on the street — only 5.9 per cent own their own home. Discrimination plays a large role, as transgender people are often denied stable housing opportunities or faced with predatory landlordism and exorbitant fees. Florencia, a transgender woman, recounts that, ‘We don’t have proof of income, and we are faced with the stigma that transgender women will rent and then convert the place into a brothel, so they charge us double or triple what they charge others in rent’.

In Hyderabad (India), posters warned that talking to transgender people might expose them to contracting COVID-19. Based on nothing but transphobia and fear, such rumours have nevertheless had concrete consequences: as a result, The Hindu reports, ‘housing complexes ask[ed] transgenders to vacate their rented accommodation’.

Transgender people are also systematically excluded from the formal labour market and are most often left with the option of sex work or begging. For example, shortly after South Africa was placed under a national lockdown in March 2020, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) announced on 6 May that sex workers, many of whom are transgender, were ‘the most marginalised of all workers because their profession is not recognised as work in South Africa’. According to Larissa Heüer, Academic Associate at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, sex workers’ illegal status renders them especially vulnerable to abuse by police, healthcare providers, and clients. Heüer highlighted how sex workers’ lack of access to justice creates poor and dangerous working conditions and furthers their continued stigmatisation within South African society. The loss of income precipitated by the pandemic only aggravated already worsening conditions and crises such as the loss of shelter and the inability to access food, medication, and other basic necessities.

In Argentina, 90 per cent of transgender women work or have worked as sex workers, and only one in ten transgender women and men have some form of retirement benefit. In the words of one Panamanian sex worker, Monica, who supports her family and two sisters with her income, ‘many transgender people work as sex workers here in the city. Is it our first option? No. But it is regular work and it means I can take care of my family’. Like street vendors, the impact of physical distancing and quarantine has essentially evaporated the income of sex workers and beggars.

Compounding this is the fact that many transgender people do not have basic identification documentation and, as Divya Trivedi of Frontline writes on the situation of the transgender community in India, they ‘therefore remain outside the coverage of government social security schemes like rations and pensions, making it impossible to survive in these difficult times of lockdown’. This lack of documentation also excludes them from basic aid programmes, such as the scarce financial and food assistance provided by the government, as well as government social security schemes such as pensions.

In Brazil, much of the LGBTQIA+ and in particular transgender community does not have the necessary identification documentation to access the little aid provided by the government. Transgender people are among the 40 per cent of the black population in Brazil that is unable to access the internet, providing a huge barrier to sign up for the aid to begin with.

Excluded from the formal workforce, expelled from family support networks, and denied government aid, transgender people are much more likely to suffer from pre-existing medical conditions and less likely to receive medical care should they fall ill. In Brazil, the average life expectancy for transgender people is 35-years-old, compared to the average of 76.3-years-old for the general population, according to the National Association of Transgender People (Associação Nacional de Travestis e Transexuais).

According to the World Health Organisation, on a global level, transgender women are ‘around 49 times more likely to be living with HIV than other adults of reproductive age with an estimated worldwide HIV prevalence of 19%’. This disparity is even higher in some countries, where the HIV prevalence rate among transgender women is 80 times higher than the rate among the general adult population. Those who are HIV/AIDS positive may have a compromised immune system, putting them at a higher risk of dying from COVID-19, as one report notes.

In Brazil, 60 per cent of those killed by HIV/AIDS are black homosexual men. Following a common theme, the WHO notes that there is little data available on HIV rates among transgender men. Furthermore, many HIV-positive people do not disclose their status for fear of discrimination, putting formal estimates at risk of underreporting. The lack of access to stable jobs and health services contributes to such illnesses often going untreated or undertreated and being more likely to get pushed to the side as the treatment of COVID-19 cases takes priority.

Furthermore, historic barriers such as discrimination keep many transgender people from seeking medical care. One study in Argentina shows that, up until the recent passage of the Gender Identity Law (2012), seven out of ten transgender people relied on the public health system, and eight out of ten transgender people experienced discrimination based on their gender identity (though this number has decreased to three out of ten after the implementation of this law). Walking into a hospital to seek care often means being subjected to harassment, sneers, denial of care, and even physical and sexual abuse.

Exclusion from healthcare is further compounded by what some refer to as a ‘transgenocide’, officially sanctioned by the state and public policies. One recent example in the United States, where the Trump administration attempted to roll back non-discrimination protections for transgender people in healthcare in June, resulted in a record level of calls to transgender crisis lines, which had already skyrocketed by 40 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic. Though a judge halted Trump’s efforts in August, his administration has succeeded in rolling back other protections, and the constant threat of increased precariousness looms over the transgender community.

Some countries, on the other hand, have implemented public policies to protect the LGBTQIA+ community during the pandemic, in particular to address the precarious situation faced by many transgender people. In Argentina, the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity, in coordination with organisations of civil society, has reinforced food assistance to LGBTQIA+ people by delivering food during the quarantine. Along the same lines, transgender people have been incorporated into social assistance programmes implemented by the national government during the pandemic. On 4 September, the federal government passed the Transgender Work Quota Law (Cupo Laboral Travesti Trans), which mandates that at least 1 per cent of the workforce of federal public administration must be made up of transgender people.

A recent law in Brazil shows the absolute callousness of the state towards the poor, working class, people of colour, the LGBTQIA+ community, and other marginalised groups by allowing cremation without a death certificate, giving a carte blanche for the state to burn and disappear unclaimed bodies. Even with the lack of data, we can imagine that transgender people who have been kicked out of their homes, disowned by their families, excluded from the job market, forced to work in precarious sectors — such as sex work — amidst the pandemic or to starve, are among these bodies. As Brazil becomes a global epicentre of COVID-19 infections and deaths, some have charged the state, under the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro, with genocide.

This section barely scratches the surface of the impacts of COVID-19 on the LGBTQIA+ community, much of which remains invisible and ignored. In the face of these issues, activists, grassroots community groups, and non-governmental organisations are calling on the government to decriminalise sex work, provide relief and food aid, provide emergency housing to unhoused transgender and queer people, and to support non-national and undocumented migrant communities in their efforts to access essential services for their survival. Whether their calls will be heeded remains to be seen.

 II. Care Work and CoronaShock

Care work is work. It is work that provides the material and psychological conditions to serve our basic needs and our human development as a society. It encompasses the continuous tasks carried out to maintain and care for the environment, the body, the being, and everything that is necessary to intertwine a complex network to support life and its reproduction. Among these tasks are caring for children, the elderly, and people with mental or physical illnesses/disabilities alongside household chores such as cooking, washing, and cleaning. While this work is essential for the reproduction of the labour force — a fundamental commodity for capital — it is usually underpaid or even unpaid, and almost always unacknowledged.

A recent Oxfam report (2020) shows that women are responsible for 75 per cent of the unpaid care work carried out across the world. That is more than 12.5 billion hours that women and girls around the planet spend doing this kind of work every year. According to the report, this is the equivalent of approximately US$10.8 trillion of unpaid care work per year that subsidises the global economy — three times the size of the global tech industry.

In rural communities and low-income countries, women dedicate up to 14 hours to unpaid care work every day — five times more than men. In South Africa, on average, women do three times more care work at home than men. In Brazil, 90 per cent of the care work is done in the household, 85 percent of which is carried out by women. In 2019, women dedicated on average 21.4 hours per week to care work, while men dedicated only 11 hours per week. Women who work outside the home dedicated on average 8.2 more hours per week to household chores than men who work outside the home.

The scale of care and housework has only increased during the pandemic. As quarantine and physical distancing measures are enforced, the necessity of care work has become increasingly visible as people are spending more time at home, caring not only for their house, but also for themselves, their families, loved ones, neighbours, and even their community. Following the recommended guidelines for cleaning in order to fight COVID-19 takes an extra effort: constantly cleaning and wiping down objects and surfaces and washing clothes upon coming home, caring for and becoming substitute teachers for children who are not going to school, caring for more people as they fall sick and stay at home (even when they are healthy), cooking most meals, tidying up as the house becomes more messy, and having restricted or no access to leisure and communal spaces such as churches, parks, bars, public squares, and businesses. All of this care work has increased exponentially, and the extra burden continues to fall on women.

A recent survey carried out by Gênero e Número and Sempreviva Organização Feminista

on the life and work of women in Brazil during the pandemic estimates that 50 per cent of Brazilian women have had to take on the responsibility of caring for someone since the outbreak; 72 per cent of these women say that this caregiving takes the form of intensive care and close monitoring, as is often the case with children, older adults, and people with severe disabilities or illnesses. Moreover, 40 per cent of women say that the pandemic, lockdown, and stay-at-home measures have put their own and their households’ livelihoods at risk; this is especially the case for black women, 55 per cent of whom reported that their and their households’ livelihoods are at risk. Meanwhile, 41 per cent of the women who have continued to work and get paid say that they are working longer hours without additional compensation during the quarantine.

Even women who are able to work from home face daunting challenges as their remote work and housework coalesce into a seemingly endless chain of overlapping tasks. The time to tidy up, clean, wash, and cook adds onto their other demands: mothers manage their children’s education at home, and the daughters of ill and/or elderly parents become their primary caregivers, taking on the roles that used to be shared with childcare centres, schools, and other institutions as the separation between home and work vanishes. Work that requires high focus, for example, does not go well with being constantly disturbed at home. After shelter-in-place measures were implemented in several parts of the world, editorial teams of scientific publications reported a sharp drop in paper submissions by women academics on a global level, while papers submitted by male academics increased by nearly 50 per cent.

Care work at home is not only continuous but it also requires other considerations. Caregivers have to consider the activities of the other people around them — not only those they care for, but also the noises, the distractions, and the demand for attention. The mental load of love and emotional care is also among the roles assigned to women in private life. Women continue to shoulder the same tasks and emotional labour they did before the pandemic — only now this work has become even more gruelling.

Home is not just a space of private relationships, but also of the production and reproduction of social behaviours, rules, and values, as well as of hierarchies and the sexual division of labour. When these rules mean that the care work done at home should be a woman’s job, this jeopardises their paid work, their economic autonomy, and their chances at professional improvement when compared to men.

Ezrena Marwan (Malaysia), Untitled, 2020

It is no coincidence that, globally, women make up the largest share of the informal sector, as they have to bear the additional responsibility of unpaid care and housework. According to an Oxfam report, around the world, approximately 42 per cent of women are unable to find a job because all of their time is dedicated to care and housework, while only 6 per cent of men face the same issue.

Additionally, the idea that women’s social role is historically related to care work has resulted in a kind of professional qualification in which working and lower-middle class women are channelled, as the Brazilian sociologist Heleieth Saffioti wrote in Women in Class Society, first published in 1967, ‘into second-rate, poorly paid jobs with no prospects for advancement’ that give them low prestige and little social acknowledgment (Saffioti, 1978, p. 64). Saffioti concludes that ‘Since a woman’s occupation is of secondary importance in her life, she has neither the motivation nor the time to concentrate effectively on improving her bargaining status on the labour market through union activities’ (Saffioti, 1978, p. 66).

In Brazil, the IBGE estimates that, between children and the elderly, there will be nearly 77 million dependents who will need care by 2050 (just over one-third of the country’s population). Society as a whole should be concerned about who will shoulder this responsibility, considering that the course of history could maintain women in that position. This same scenario is unfolding around the world.

Immediate solutions to the crisis are not difficult to find. As Oxfam points out, if the world’s richest 1 per cent paid an additional 0.5 per cent tax on their wealth for the next 10 years, that money could create 117 million jobs in education, health, and elder care. But — given the realities of class domination — there is no real chance of this happening in the foreseeable future. Instead, throughout the pandemic, capitalist states have granted astounding financial aid to big banks and corporations. Governments that have discussed incorporating a wealth tax, such as Argentina and Chile, have been met with strong resistance by the most powerful elite, which has so far prevented such a tax from being implemented.

From this we begin to understand what feminists like Alexandra Kollontai explained almost a century ago: ‘Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on woman’s shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother.’

‘Women’s Work’ as a Social Construct

Despite efforts to convince us otherwise, the fact that women take on these responsibilities is not ‘natural’. The situation of women in class society is the result of the imposition of two different sets of values of a natural and social order. The natural order is based on biological factors, whereby (in order to control their labour) society assigns care work to women based on their proximity to motherhood, which arises from their ability to experience pregnancy and breastfeeding. But, as Saffioti stated in Women in Class Society, ‘Indeed, since the survival of society is contingent on the birth and rearing of new generations, it should bear at least part of the cost of motherhood, or find satisfactory solutions to the occupational problems that maternity creates for women’ (Saffioti 1978, p. 59).

In the 1970s, a global feminist social movement emerged along these lines promoting the Wages for Housework campaign, which also advocated for the right to equal pay for equal work and parental leave. Created in Europe, it spread across the United States, Italy, England, and other countries in Europe and in the Global South, spearheaded by Selma James, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, and others. The campaign also condemned the sexual division of labour and the process of assigning more importance and a certain hierarchy to different tasks, which devalues reproductive care work. Despite the fact that it is key for the production and reproduction of human life, reproductive work has long been seen as unproductive and has been devalued and unrecognised; as a result, it has also been excluded from remuneration. In a society in which money is the medium of all interactions, women’s access to certain goods and services vastly decreases and their power is systematically undermined. As long as their place is in domestic work, which often remains unpaid, women will be economically subordinated to men.

Echoing Friedrich Engels’ analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Angela Davis expanded on this point, writing in Women, Race and Class that this hierarchisation of labour came alongside the development of capitalism and private property:

In advanced capitalist societies … the service-oriented domestic labour of housewives, who can seldom produce tangible evidence of their work, diminishes the social status of women in general. When all is said and done, the housewife, according to bourgeois ideology, is, quite simply, her husband’s lifelong servant.

The engrained and structural subordination of women, then, is part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production and the bottomless greed of the capitalist, who seeks to subsidise his profits and the cost of production with unpaid reproductive labour — labour that is predominantly carried out by women.

The sexual division of labour is a social construct within the general division of labour, in which certain tasks have historically been delegated differently between men and women. Under capitalism, this division is indisputably unequal, as certain roles are regarded as primarily masculine (in the political, religious, and military realms, for example) while others are set apart as feminine (roles related to reproduction, service work, and caring for the household and family unit). In order to maintain control over this unequal organisation of the workforce, the tasks performed by men are granted more value in terms of prestige and pay. Therefore, the sexual division of labour is based on two organising principles. First, the distinction between what constitutes ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’, and, second, the hierarchy that attributes more value to ‘men’s work’. That structure upholds gender inequality and the overexploitation and oppression of women through their work and role in society.

As a result of the sexual division embedded in the social logic of labour, house and care work are continuously undervalued and rendered invisible. This has not only proved useful to capitalism, as it allows this work to remain almost unquestionably unpaid, but it also feeds off of the psychological effects on women, who view themselves as having a social fate that is deeply determined by their biological sex, and by what society allows or demands them to do based on that.

CoronaShock opens an opportunity to spark a global debate about the essential nature of care work. Care work has long remained invisible to those who benefit from its status as unpaid labour and who are responsible for perpetuating this exploitative structure: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has always been unwilling to question the sexual division of labour and to foster a social, collective responsibility for reproductive work. The bourgeoisie reaps billions of dollars from unpaid reproductive work every year and absolves the state from taking the responsibility for care work; as a class, the bourgeoisie moves a political agenda to privatise services and cut social investments, placing the burden of those roles on households — and on women.

The women who most acutely feel the impact of this burden are women of colour, poor women, and immigrant women. They clean, wash, nurture, and care for everyone and everything, and are responsible for the roles that allow for the social reproduction of humanity. Underappreciating this work serves a purpose for capital. The war waged by the 1 per cent against the 99 per cent seems to have no limits — but its invisibility does.

The 99% versus the 1%

According to the ILO, most of the world’s workers — around 93 per cent — live in countries with some level of economic shutdown and job loss. Countries in the Global South are experiencing the worst cuts. It is the masses who have to leave their homes to work and seek — or desperately try to maintain — some source of income because they do not have savings to weather the quarantine during the pandemic without the intervention of the state. The failure of the state to provide basic income or emergency aid across much of the world — with important exceptions in regions such as Cuba, Venezuela, Kerala (India), and Vietnam — has exposed the neoliberal system’s concern for profit over humanity’s concern for life.

The richest sectors of society generally have not granted paid leave to their employees during the pandemic, even when the WHO recommended physical distancing practices and quarantine. Many workers, such as domestic workers and service employees, have had to continue to care for the homes, bodies, health, and well-being of the rich. While workers are forced to put themselves at risk, it is their employers who are able to stay safe at home per WHO recommendations.

A number of other factors put the poor and working class at an increased risk of falling ill and dying: among them, a lack of access to quality healthcare and a higher probability of pre-existing risk factors due to the structural attack on poor and working class communities — from asthma induced by coal plants and pollution kept away from wealthier areas by ‘Not In My Backyard’ movements to chronic issues caused by precarious working conditions. It is not a coincidence that the first person to die from COVID-19 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was a 63-year-old female domestic worker. Her employer had recently returned from a trip to Italy and neglected to tell her about the possibility of being infected. While the employer self-quarantined, she refused to allow the domestic worker to go home; the worker continued to work in the employer’s apartment in one of the country’s most expensive neighbourhoods. The employer had COVID-19 and infected this worker, who eventually died.

Leyla Tonak (USA), Lungs I, 2020

There have been reports of many other cases of domestic workers whose employers did not grant them leave, even when they had to face long commutes in public transportation and overcrowded buses and trains between home and work. There are also cases of people who knew they were infected and required their domestic workers to continue to work. While employers clearly perceived the need to keep a clean house and the need for domestic and care work, the value of those workers’ lives remained invisible to them. This provides a snapshot of social inequality: some remain steadfast that their lives are worth more than the lives of the predominantly women workers who provide services to them, a logic that is supported and encouraged by capitalist societies.

The COVID-19 crisis has created an opening to give new meaning to both the value of labour and the value of the lives of the women who care for the reproduction and maintenance of our society. We must recognise and remunerate this invisible labour, understanding that all people have the right to be cared for. This means advancing access to care that is outside family networks and outside the commodity form; this kind of care must cease to be the privilege of a few and instead become a human right.

Some countries and regions have pushed forward the creation of federal systems of care that attempt to respond to these concerns, as is the case in Uruguay and Argentina. In Argentina, the creation of the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity is a step forward in the discussion about the organisation of care work. Since the beginning of this year, the Ministry has been working on a Federal Care Map (Mapa Federal de Cuidados) in order to plan care-related public policies, which seek to reverse the gender inequality that is hidden in the current social organisation of care.

III. The Rise of Patriarchal Violence^[6] Under CoronaShock

Before the pandemic, we already faced a global reality in which, on average, 137 women were killed every day by someone in their family. UN Women estimates that one in five women between the ages of 15 and 49 around the world has experienced some type of physical or sexual assault by their partner. It is not a coincidence that, by the end of the twentieth century, fighting violence against women became the biggest demand for many women’s movements across the world. As impossible as it may seem, patriarchal violence has become significantly worse since the initiation of shelter-in-place measures. Over the last few years, we have also seen an increase in transfemicides across the world, propelled forward by a rise of hate speech and anti-human rights ideology.

While rates of gender-based violence are known to be high, especially in the Global South, it is challenging to find accurate statistics. However, we do know that, during times of emergencies and lockdowns, these rates go up, as has been the case during the current state of shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19. Unemployment, overcrowding, remote work, an overburden of reproductive work, increasing impoverishment, a crisis of one’s ability to maintain one’s economic livelihood, and drug and alcohol abuse are some of the elements that exacerbate gender-based violence — even more so during the pandemic. Women’s groups warn that lockdown conditions may be used by abusers to control the behaviour of their partners, blocking their access to security and support.

Feminist activists and political authorities who know this history anticipated the gendered impacts of physical distancing and quarantine measures enforced around the world, warning early on that these measures could hit women particularly hard. Gender-based violence flourishes on the social isolation of victims. A key aspect that impacts women who face domestic violence is that they often become deprived of all social and professional bonds, growing apart from family, friends, and colleagues, which in turn increases their dependence on their abusers. For this reason, supporting women who are experiencing gender-based violence must include the important task of rebuilding a support network that can help them emotionally so that they can regain economic, emotional, cognitive, and housing autonomy.

In Brazil — a country where one woman was assaulted every 15 seconds on average before the pandemic — femicide rates (the killing of women because of their gender) have surged in 2020 compared to previous years. The state of São Paulo, for example, reported a 46.2 per cent rise from March 2019 to March 2020, while femicide rates increased by 300 per cent in the state of Rio Grande do Norte and by 400 per cent in the state of Mato Grosso. Police responses to domestic abuse calls increased by 44 per cent in the state of São Paulo alone, and the number of abusers caught red-handed in the state increased by 51 per cent. These numbers only reflect the cases that are reported to the police — many other cases go unreported and are not included in these statistics. In Argentina, approximately one femicide was reported every day in the first month of shelter-in-place orders, 66 per cent of which took place in the victim’s home.

In South Africa, prior to the pandemic, femicide rates were five times the global average. However, the country does not produce statistics that appropriately reflect upon analyses or data of gender-based violence, supposedly because it is difficult to gather reliable data on the issue. From April 2018 to March 2019, the South African police reported 179,683 contact crimes against women (‘in which the victims themselves are the targets of violence’), such as murder, attempted murder, sexual offences, bodily harm, and ‘common assault’. Of these, 82,728 were cases of common assault and 54,142 were assault with the intent to cause grievous bodily harm. In that year, 2,771 women were murdered; there were 3,445 attempted murders (though the police do not provide data on motives for these murders); and there were 36,597 recorded cases of sexual offences against women. This is a broad crime category that includes rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, and contact sexual offences.

During the first week that South Africa went into lockdown, between 27 and 31 March 2020, the police recorded 2,300 calls about gender-based violence. In a webinar on 20 April 2020, Sonke Gender Justice, a South African-based NGO that supports women, reported that these figures do not reveal the full extent of violence against women and children, as most women who are abused cannot go out and file reports in the current situation.

In fact, we have seen a surge in cases of violence against women across the world since the beginning of the pandemic. This is why the Argentinian slogan el femicidio no se toma cuarentena (‘femicide does not respect the quarantine’) clearly points out how an already grave reality is becoming worse. As one solution to this reality, in France — which experienced a 32 per cent spike in cases of domestic violence in the first few days of the lockdown — the government started to put victims of domestic violence in hotel rooms and announced the establishment of counselling centres to support women who are experiencing domestic abuse.

Women’s movements have been creating new ways to fight these realities. In Argentina, on 30 March, the second week of quarantine, the local feminist movement organised a ruidazo federal (‘federal noise action’) against patriarchal violence after a double femicide took place. Faced with the restriction of movement, community and neighbourhood networks have taken on a significant role in creating support systems. As a result, governments have been forced to acknowledge and continue services and networks dedicated to protecting women, which are essential for caring for and maintaining human life. During the first phase of the quarantine, Latin American countries such as Brazil and Argentina pushed policies to tackle the effects of the lockdown on gender-based violence. The first measures were focused on developing and improving apps and hotlines to support victims of gender-based violence. During the first month and a half of the quarantine in Argentina, the demand for gender-based violence hotlines increased throughout various jurisdictions by 40 per cent on average as compared with the month prior to the declaration of quarantine. As the quarantine has been extended, public resources have been strengthened with new strategies of accompaniment, hotlines, and coordination between the jurisdictions of Nación, the Province of Buenos Aires, and the capital city, Buenos Aires. During the second phase of the quarantine, the feminist support to women in situations of violence was declared essential work in Argentina, allowing support groups to continue their work to help victims.

In Brazil, initiatives by social movements and organisations have gained traction, such as the Mapa do Acolhimento or ‘shelter map’, a service that helps women who need psychological or legal counselling to connect with volunteer psychologists and lawyers who provide online or in-person services. The World March of Women has held conversations and solidarity actions across the country, publishing a list of concrete demands for the state and society to tackle the pandemic and women’s issues (which contributed to the People’s Feminist Demands at the end of this paper).

However, it is worth noting that women’s and feminist organisations have been denouncing not only the increase in cases of patriarchal violence during quarantine, but also the increasing brutality of instances of abuse. As Rita Segato points out, this happens as neofascist conceptions about female subordination overshadow more enlightened ideas about women. These views have been spreading on a large scale under Brazil’s Bolsonaro, India’s Modi, and so many other countries with conservative right-wing administrations.

Inspired by a neofascist ideology, the rhetoric adopted by heads of government who vocally promote hatred and encourage misogynistic attitudes inevitably legitimises perpetrators of violence against women. Violence is then seen as an ordinary or normal act that authorities will not prevent or fight; quite the opposite — it is actually encouraged. This contributes significantly to increasing incidences of violence: fighting and eliminating people is the rule of barbarism, which is supported by hate speech, the failure to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions, and the failure to criminalise these attitudes.

Kruttika Susarla (India), Untitled, first published by Smashboard for the Sexual Violence vs. Capital Punishment series, 2020

The deepening of hate speech and sexist ideology is accompanied by an increase in homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, which has notable repercussions on the violation of the LGBTQIA+ population’s rights. During the pandemic, the transgender community has been subjected to discrimination, harassment, abuse, and persecution by the police and security forces. In many countries, policies pushed forward by political authorities have been characterised by the absence of a lack of inclusiveness towards the transgender community, reinforcing a sexist binary.

In many countries, restrictions on mobility were implemented based on biological sex, alternating days when men and women were able to leave their homes, a policy that excludes non-binary and transgender people. The implementation of these policies has often been left up to the discretion of security forces to decide if a transgender woman is allowed to go out with other women, or with men — according to the sex by birth — or stuck in the middle and forbidden from leaving at all. In the midst of this uncertainty, police and other security forces have often perpetrated violence against transgender and non-binary people, and store vendors have denied them service — either because of flagrant transphobia, or because of a fear of being fined or punished by authorities for not abiding by state orders.

In some cases, the pandemic has been used to increase harassment and attacks of LGBTQIA+ organisations and activists, at times forcing transgender people to hide or deny their identity. As a result of this reality, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a call in April for the states of the Americas to guarantee the rights, equality, and non-discrimination of LGBTQIA+ people in measures issued to contain the pandemic.

The social consequences of political attitudes cannot be disregarded or separated from the increasing rates of patriarchal violence during quarantine in several countries around the world. Amid this scenario, whether in Brazil, India, or elsewhere, life becomes impossible. It is not simply about a pandemic that exacerbates historical and social problems, but about a society that is deteriorating to the point of triggering its own inefficiency and decline. It is time to get rid of hierarchies and miseries inherited from the past and build possible — and necessary — utopias for the future.

IV. The People’s Feminist Demands

CoronaShock is exposing the structural crisis of capitalism, demonstrating the urgent need to overcome longstanding problems that have become even more dire in recent times, such as the social, economic, political, and ideological crises that predate the pandemic.

While the global bourgeoisie is unable to solve basic problems such as unemployment, hunger, patriarchal violence, and the underappreciation, precarity, and invisibility of social reproduction work, the movements of the working class offer their own solutions. Women in political organisations and social movements around the world have been organising to present their demands and proposals to overcome all of these crises in the midst of the global health crisis. With organised working-class women and women of colour spearheading this change, we know not just that another world is possible, but that a socialist, feminist, anti-racist world in which the wellbeing of humankind and of our planet is placed before the endless accumulation of profit is not only possible, but necessary. Below, we will introduce a list of urgent demands from feminist organisations from Brazil to India to South Africa who are fighting to create such a world.

1. Ensure that the measures being demanded by movements in the face of CoronaShock are made available to all people, with special attention to those who are the most systematically excluded from such aid: women, informal workers, migrants, people of colour, lower castes, and LGBTQIA+ people. These general demands, which have been outlined in earlier texts at more length, include:
2. 1. Cancel the payment of utility bills such as electricity, water, internet bills, and rent as long as the pandemic lasts; guarantee that debt will not accrue for non-payment.
   2. Distribute personal hygiene supplies (including masks and hand sanitiser) on a massive level.
   3. Freeze prices for essential cleaning supplies, hygiene products and healthy food products, such as grains, vegetables, and meat, according to each country’s cultural specificities.
   4. Ensure the right to paid leave to all working people; guarantee no loss of income or rights.
   5. Provide economic assistance — of at least a minimum wage — for informal workers and self-employed workers.
   6.  Place private healthcare facilities and structures to fight COVID-19 under public control; expand the capacity of the healthcare system to serve the people.
   7. Take emergency action to solve the water supply crisis in each region and guarantee public access.

2. Ensure full transparency of information and data about the evolution of the pandemic and about every country’s government measures (broken down by sex, age, income, sexual orientation, gender identity, and place/territory, whenever possible).
3. Include women from working-class women’s movements in leadership positions for decision-making processes regarding responses to and recovery from the crises that we face today.
4. Demand that governments launch campaigns to encourage men and women to share household chores equally so that women do not have to shoulder the brunt of the burden of housework.
5. Increase long-term public investment for the public good in areas such as social protection, pensions, universal public healthcare, free public childcare, and other actions that affect women directly.
6. Aid and financial stimulus packages implemented by governments must include social protection measures that address women’s special circumstances and acknowledge the care economy.
7. Provide a guaranteed minimum income for women and households that carry out the many different types of essential care work (including domestic/housework), especially for those who have dependents.
8. Provide food baskets for families with children where childcare centres/schools are closed.
9. Demand essential health interventions to protect the health of all people, with special attention towards marginalised, poor, and transgender people, migrants, people of colour, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Such services include mental health services, HIV/AIDS medications, cancer treatment, etc.
10. Ensure that marginalised communities — including those without access to official documentation, in particular the poor and working-class transgender people and migrants — receive aid services; ensure the expedient delivery of emergency relief such as a Universal Basic Income, food distribution, and other services demanded in this list.
11. Demand that the government protect LGBTQIA+ and all marginalised people from discrimination in the midst of policies aimed at fighting COVID-19, such as policies that only allow for men or women to leave their home on certain days.
12. Decriminalise sex work, provide relief and food aid, provide emergency housing to unhoused transgender and queer people, and support non-national and undocumented migrant communities in their efforts to access essential services for their survival.
13. Guarantee readily available hotlines and other publicly accessible communication channels and services for all victims of patriarchal violence as essential services.
14. Demand that governments take on the responsibility for advertising these hotline numbers and publicly accessible communication channels through automated services, text messages, banners on buses, billboards, and displays in public spaces, newspaper ads, etc., so that those in need know about the service.
15. Demand that governments offer counselling facilities for women, marginalised people, the poor, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, people of colour, the elderly, and people with disabilities in vulnerable situations and/or victims of violence.
16. Demand that governments offer safe, comfortable alternative shelter during the pandemic, such as hotel rooms and vacant buildings, to women struggling with domestic violence and provide necessary protection and security in these locations; ensure the continuation of these services in the long-term to meet the pre-existing need for such services.
17. Build networks of solidarity and collective support that respect physical distancing practices to fight against individualism and violence; create women’s rights groups and local information campaigns about emergency plans for women and children suffering from domestic violence; and create teams to care for children in neighbourhoods with greater social vulnerability.
18. Mobilise healthcare workers to help the community, support women workers in popular economies, and make sure that they are given proper pay and protective equipment.

Kruttika Susarla (India) / AIDWA, International Women’s Day, 2020

[1] Translator’s note: The Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (‘National Women’s Gathering’) has met annually since 1986.

[2] Translator’s note: In 1977, madres (mothers) and abuelas (grandmothers) of those disappeared by the civic-military dictatorship began protesting in the Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires). From 1976-1983, the dictatorship disappeared 30,000 people, many of whom had been targeted for political activity, or simply for being poor. The madres and abuelas continue their protests today, demanding — among other things — to know the whereabouts of their disappeared love ones, many of whom remain missing.

[3] Translator’s note: The Cambiemos Party — led by former President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) — pushed forward a number of neoliberal reforms such as funding cuts to the Ministry of Health and Work and attacks on workers’ rights; deepened the economic crisis in the country; and took on unprecedented loans from the International Monetary Fund.

[4] Translator’s note: Patria Grande refers both to the idea of a ‘Great Homeland’ and to a political front, Frente Patria Grande, a broad coalition of grassroots organisations and people’s movements in Argentina.

[5] The term ‘popular economy’ refers to strategies of economic subsistence that poor workers who are excluded from the formal labour market develop to guarantee the reproduction of their lives, such as working as street vendors, collecting recycling and trash, urban farming, etc.

^[6] It is important to distinguish patriarchal violence from other terms such as domestic violence, which too often inadvertently ignores power and male dominance inherent in such violence, as well as the fact that violence against women is not only exerted in the household. In Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks writes that ‘[f]or too long the term domestic violence has been used as a “soft” term which suggests it emerges in an intimate context that is private and somehow less threatening, less brutal, than the violence that takes place outside the home’. Rather, patriarchal violence is a more expanded definition that is linked to the inherent inequality of the capitalist system, and which manifests in many forms, including domestic and physical gender-based violence, but also symbolic and cultural violence. Patriarchal violence ‘continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination’, bell hooks writes.

The Grito dos Excluídos (‘Cry of the Excluded’) mobilisation brings together post office workers on strike and educators who are occupying the streets in downtown Campinas (Brazil), 7 September 2020.
Guilherme Gandolfi/Fotos Públicas

Introduction

Across the world, youth have become important political actors, especially since the 1960s. Along with workers, women, and people of colour, youth have been main protagonists in the fight for national, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist liberation in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They have also spearheaded uprisings against the establishment and their state institutions (such as the uprisings against prison systems and mental asylums — particularly youth detention centres). As they organised, they created movements and led struggles in the following decades for the right to education, health, and housing, as well as for the right to one’s own body, the right to love, and to be able to be whoever one wishes to be.

In Brazil, the 1970s and 1980s were an impactful time period. In addition to the end of the military dictatorship in 1985 and the enactment of a new Constitution in 1988, in this time period leftist social organisations consolidated their foundation and structure and flourished, as was the case with the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), Workers’ Party (PT), Base Ecclesial Communities (BECs), and Unified Workers’ Central (CUT). This period of social effervescence followed industrialisation policies implemented in previous decades that sharpened social and economic contradictions. A new working class emerged and became the protagonist of social struggles, bringing demands for better working conditions together with the struggle against food shortages and price rises. These movements brought together new social actors in the struggle for rights: neighbourhood associations, organisations of women ‘homemakers’, and healthcare movements all demanded rights side by side with factory workers.

As this qualitative shift in people’s organising and struggles took place, these organisations’ joint efforts also underwent a long process of systematisation. This provided the foundation for local experiences to shift to a nationwide scale and incorporate more theoretical vigour to people’s movements at the time. Left-wing people’s organisations realised how necessary it was to reflect on the political landscape and to systematise collective reflections. They used this accumulated knowledge as a basis for their work in the following decades, aiming to adapt grassroots work to the challenges of each time period.

To continue this legacy of study and systematisation with people’s organisations, one of our research goals at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) is to understand the Brazilian youth who live in urban peripheries, how they live, what they aspire to, how they behave, and — more recently — to better understand their reality in the midst of CoronaShock¹. To reflect on these issues, we have divided this dossier into three parts. The first section introduces an overview on what youth means, and has meant historically, as a category; the second section paints a picture of the youth who live in the periphery based on field research that we conducted in 2019; and the third section discusses the challenges that youth face in the midst of CoronaShock.

Faced with government neglect in favelas, collectives in Morro da Providência come together to install sinks with water and soap on the walls of the hillsides. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2020.
Douglas Dobby / Mídia Ninja

Part 1 | What Do We Mean By ‘Youth’?

The year 1985 was proclaimed ‘Youth Year’ by the United Nations (UN). The political use of this category emerged in the context of the external debt crisis in Latin America, when youth as a political category began to be debated. But what does ‘youth’ mean and why is there a debate about it? A first step to answering this question is to review youth as a category, understanding both that it is historically constructed — and varied across different political landscapes — and that youth are an actor in historical and social processes.

Linear Development

The first treatise on youth was published by Stanley Hall in 1904, inspired by Darwinism and the theory of evolution. Evolutionism assumed a universal notion of history and progress and believed that all human societies were meant to have the same fate: the consolidation of ‘civilised’ society. According to this way of classifying the world, European societies had already reached the level of civilisation, and therefore represented the universal standard of civility. Meanwhile, indigenous communities in Latin America and Africa were seen as undeveloped, primitive, and savage.

The first treatise on youth followed this evolutionist logic that was applied to human societies and considered human development to be a linear, universal process in which youth was seen as a transitional and formative stage that takes place between the ages of 14 and 26.

Delinquency and Irresponsibility

During World War I, other researchers linked the youth phase of human development to emotional instability, rebelliousness, aloofness, melancholy, aggressiveness, and other ideas that are still echoed today in the popular imagination. A dominant view pervaded in which youth became seen as a fragile and morally and emotionally incomplete group that posed a threat to the moral order; associated with the idea of deviation, they were seen as a danger to society and even to themselves. Since they are seen as a danger both to society and to themselves, youth — according to this line of thought — must be tamed. This notion leads to ideas of tutelage and care toward youth as an allegedly vulnerable group.

Particularly in times of crisis, authoritarian solutions have emerged as an option. In the 1920s — as the world witnessed the rise of fascism and Nazism — Hitler Youth, Falange (Spanish youth who supported Franco’s dictatorship), and the Italian Balilla (Mussolini supporters) were vital forces operating within authoritarian governments.

Heroic and Defiant Youth

In 1968 and throughout the 1970s, the uprisings that spread across the globe were connected to national liberation and independence struggles, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Youth participation in these events was striking. In South Africa, youth were important actors in the radical struggle against the apartheid regime. Steve Biko, one of the most prominent leaders of anti-apartheid activism, was a co-founder of the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black Consciousness Movement, which gained traction with the slogan ‘Black Is Beautiful’. In 1976, twenty-three young students were killed in a massacre during the Soweto Uprising, including thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson, for protesting against the apartheid police and the use of Afrikaans — the language of the colonisers — as the language of instruction in schools located in black areas.

In Guinea-Bissau, the national liberation struggle led by Amílcar Cabral left a strong mark on literacy and popular education projects among youth and adults; the ripple impact of this struggle spread beyond the country’s borders to Brazil, where Cabral would influence the thought of Paulo Freire. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Senegal, youth also played a key role in revolutionary and national liberation processes in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Mexico City, the leftist youth who opposed the military regime were brutally repressed after a growing wave of protests against the military occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). During the Tlatelolco Massacre, as it became known, hundreds were killed before the Olympics opening ceremony in 1968.

In the Soweto Massacre (South Africa) in 1976, twenty-three students were killed for protesting against apartheid policies and the adoption of Afrikaans as the language spoken schools in Black regions.

In Cuba, inspiration came from Julio Antonio Mella, who — even though he was murdered in 1929 at the age of twenty-six — left a great legacy and became an example for political struggle and organising, helping to organise the Cuban student movement and the resistance during his years of exile in Mexico.

It is worth highlighting the influence of youth who were socialised during World War II and who started to challenge their cultural heritage, both in terms of relations of production and customs. Baby boomers, who were born in the 1940s and 1950s, are seen as defiant and liberating; they are the generation that called for peace, free love, and communal living as a counterpoint to urban life ruled by capital and war. The conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War are a clear expression of the youth of that era; such events strengthened the view of youth as important political actors and agents of social change.

In France, the 1968 uprisings strongly criticised the state, relations of production, bureaucracy, and the power that people were subjected to in schools, factories, psychiatric institutions, and so on. While university and high school youth started the uprisings, they were followed by the greatest general strike to ever be staged in France, which included significant participation of working-class youth. The May 1968 uprisings pushed a critical agenda against the hegemonic ways of creating bonds and relationships of love and stood for individual freedom, which ultimately helped strengthen the feminist movement and would later be echoed in LGBTQIA+ movements and struggles for rights.

Youth, the Consumer Market, and Precarious Work

In the capitalist world, growing post-war markets and consumption caused the luxury youth market to thrive through the 1970s and 1980s. In this time period, youth can be understood as a cultural construct of advanced capitalism and its expression through mass media and the cultural industry.

After the 1980s, the life cycle that was enabled by industry entered into crisis, and what was once thought to be a linear path for a person’s formative years — from youth to entering into the labour force in adulthood to later culminating in the restfulness of one’s elder years — shifted to a spiralling trajectory in which what had been seen as the transitory and unstable phase of youth became a permanent stage. This process took place under neoliberalism in the digital and information era — the era of precarious work.

In the 1990s, researchers began to look into the connection between youth and the inequalities of class, gender, and race. These studies challenged the idea that the category of youth is defined exclusively by age and proposed that social criteria be taken into account. In line with this way of thinking, in our research at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) we met a young emcee in his forties who, after a life of battling addiction and serving time in prison, told us that he feels young now that he is able to express himself artistically, organise politically, and dare both to dream and to live out his dream. Young working-class people from the peripheries are often deprived of their youth as they have to lead an ‘adult life’ from an early age, entering the job market and many times forming a family at a younger age. Meanwhile, young people from privileged classes are allowed to put their adulthood on hold, extending their years of youth for a longer period.

Youth and the Struggle for Rights: Education and Culture

Youth challenge the separation between politics and culture. National liberation struggles, as well as the movements of 1968, tie art and politics closely together. In Brazil, cultural movements from the periphery such as thriving rap and hip-hop scenes have emerged and burgeoned since the 1990s. One notable example of this is the Racionais MCs, a group who sings about life in the peripheries of São Paulo and was key to the political education of an entire generation in Brazil. Baile Black and Brazilian ‘funk’ dances, especially in Rio de Janeiro, also became important spaces to meet and socialise.

In the 2000s, poetry reading sessions known as saraus and slam poetry sessions have solidified as self-organised cultural spaces at bars, overpasses, bridges, and public plazas, drawing in young people and encouraging gatherings and social encounters through art. Poems read at these events commonly address topics such as feminism, the fight against racism, and LGBT-phobia. Since the 2000s, there has also been a rise of university preparation courses for low-income students spurred by policies that aim to widen access to higher education; these spaces too have become popular meeting points for youth.

The biggest slam poetry championship in Latin America brings together poets who express their struggles, daily dramas, and themes such as love, homophobia, machismo, and violence. São Paulo, Brazil, 2018. 
Sergio Silva

Anti-Imperialist Youth and the Right to Health

In the 2000s, youth — alongside workers and immigrants — played a role as key actors during protests and encampments against imperialism and large European trade blocs in what became known as the anti-globalisation movement in Europe and the United States. A decade later, students from Chile to Brazil have occupied high schools to combat government policies that seek to reorganise schools. In Brazil, large street demonstrations have been staged by the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre) against hikes in public transit fares.

In the 2010s, we saw the rise of far-right heads of state: notably, Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. A considerable amount of their support comes from youth. In the case of Brazil, some youth are involved in spreading fake news and engaging in the hate speech that characterises Bolsonarism. All of these countries have recorded catastrophic infection and fatality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic as a consequence of their administration’s choice to further neoliberal policies and promote death.

In 2020, CoronaShock is impacting above all the life, work, and livelihoods of those who live on the periphery of the world system, bringing attention to the importance of solidarity and the right to health and healthy food. Youth are at the forefront of both of these trends in Brazil. First, as delivery app workers — mainly black and young people from the peripheries who often resort to informal jobs in order to put food on the table — who make it possible for others to practise social distancing. They have drawn attention for staging demonstrations for better working conditions through a form of protest known as breques dos apps (‘breaking the apps’), which have been taking place in Brazil since July. Secondly, youth have played an important role in promoting solidarity campaigns; this includes handing out food and personal hygiene products to residents of urban peripheries and self-organising in different communities, as is the case with the creation of People’s Health Agents (Agentes Populares de Saúde).

Part 2 | Brazil: Youth, Periphery, and Participation

Recently, the Right has placed young people on the frontlines of conservative movements around the world; Brazil is no different. Today, 15 to 29-year-olds make up 25 per cent of the population in Brazil — the largest population of youth in the country’s history. It is no wonder that political and social organisations devote special attention to this demographic.

This generation is faced with different dilemmas. While their parents’ generation grew up in a period of industrial development, today’s youth in Brazil live under the hegemony of neoliberalism. While today’s youth have more access to education than their parents’ generation, their job prospects are more unstable. The predictable world of their parents has been replaced by a reality informed by the short-term; ideas of career building, job stability, and retirement plans are replaced by a sense of flexibility and immediacy based on an entrepreneurial ideology.

In this context, it became necessary for the popular Left to consider new channels to once again become closer to youth. What are the organisations, collectives, and instruments that have been winning the hearts and minds of youth in Brazil’s urban peripheries? This was the guiding question in the research conducted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) in collaboration with the Popular Youth Uprising (Levante Popular da Juventude) and the Workers’ Movement for Rights (Movimento de Trabalhadoras e Trabalhadores por Direitos or MTD). In the next section, we will discuss the results of the research that we conducted in 2019 with youth in the peripheries of Brazilian cities including São Paulo (in the Southeast), Porto Alegre (in the South), and Fortaleza (in the North East²). As we will discuss, our research shows how neoliberalism has penetrated the lives of youth, and how this poses new challenges for people’s organisations.

Neoliberal Ideology and Entrepreneurship

Gigs, freelance work, instability, and unpredictability mark the lives of youth in Brazil today. Their reality is different from the generation born from the 1950s through the 1970s, which — despite facing great social inequality — could take one of two possible, linear paths: the path of college education, mainly available to upper and upper middle class youth, or the path of taking on a job that did not require years of study and training, which was especially prevalent in the lives of youth who lived in the periphery. Each path had its own set of options to help build and consolidate an adult life, including buying a house, forming a family, having a job for life until retirement, etc.

Today, however, youth tend to feel lost amidst organisations forged in previous decades. Major left-wing organisations created in the 1980s are facing challenges to incorporating youth in their organisations. That doesn’t mean that youth are not engaged in politics, that they are not taking part in collectives, or that they are not forging their own social networks. Our challenge is to understand where and how young people are taking part in politics, becoming collective actors, and sharing their experiences, distress, dreams, and solutions.

When we talked to young people about their future and the challenges of everyday life, a common theme that emerged was individualism and the ‘business-individual’ logic. In addition to looking for formal jobs and/or ‘gigs’ (short-term, temporary, or inconsistent work), they also resort to ‘entrepreneurship’ — the dream of being one’s own boss. This idea is presented as having a certain element of rebelliousness compared to other jobs that are available to them and promotes a liberal view of the labour market, in which it is only through hard work that one may find ‘success’.

This ideology of entrepreneurism comes alongside a lack of public policies. As neoliberal policies empty out the state, public policies and public facilities become distant realities for young people who no longer find in them solutions to their questions.

Labour, Education, and Violence

Work and income are two of the main challenges that youth face, along with raising a family, which — of course — requires youth to have the means to support them. Brazil is characterised by a precarious labour market with high turnover rates. This is especially true for youth in Brazil, since it is more common for people to enter the labour market at an earlier age compared with most other South American countries. In this context, education as a ‘compulsory’ step to find quality work no longer holds the same weight for youth; stories abound of friends, relatives, or neighbours who graduated from college and are unable to find jobs options compatible with their degree.

Our research also reinforces what statistics already show regarding the striking presence of violence in the lives of youth in the periphery, which often takes the form of police brutality, drug-related crime, and domestic violence. In a context in which crime is presented as an alternative for youth in the periphery, many young people have relatives or friends who have been or are currently in prison.

Culture, Collectivity, and Ways to Organise Youth

In this context, culture becomes a way to mobilise youth, whether by creating or enjoying it. From those who want to form a band, become emcees, dance, or perform in plays to those who want to go out to Brazilian ‘funk’ dance parties, concerts, or rap battles, young people are mobilising around culture. This is the case in large part because these spaces are able to channel a feeling of belonging to a group and offer a space of creation and socialising.

This may be the key to organising youth. Despite the growing influence of individualism, young people are seeking out collective spaces. As our research shows, many religious organisations and cultural groups have adopted this strategy to mobilise young people. Overall, the organisations in the peripheries that we analysed are building spaces of sociability that contribute to the development of youth as individuals; they do not challenge the individualistic mentality, but rather forge a sense of collectivity based on the idea of enhancing the individual. In other words, these cultural collectives aim to support young people’s individual development as they try to improve their personal selves in order to face the world. The youth see these collectives as a way to improve their lives, whether by creating a group of friends and/or by finding work, income, and education/professional training opportunities.

Youth mark points of reference in their neighborhood during collective mapping research. State of São Paulo, Brazil, 16 October 2019.
Stella Parterniani / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Part 3 | Brazilian Peripheries and the Pandemic: Inequality, Resistance, and Solidarity 

Inequalities of Territory, Race, and Class

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities. Its victims are concentrated in the peripheries, whether in Brazil or in the global periphery, in the peripheries of Brazil’s northern and north-eastern states, or in predominantly black neighbourhoods and regions that are more at risk, in part because they have less access to public and state services. Despite significant under-reporting, especially because of the low level of testing, data disclosed by Brazil’s state health departments show that the virus is not an equal-opportunity killer. And even though COVID-19 landed by plane, brought to the country by white bodies who live in elite neighbourhoods, the predominantly white areas with better infrastructure have lower death rates than black neighbourhoods in the peripheries.

Another historically rooted factor that has shaped the uneven distribution of COVID-19 cases and fatalities in Brazil is unequal access to land. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the 2018 Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNADC) shows that approximately 13 per cent of Brazilians — roughly 27 million people — live in households with at least one inadequate structure (such as not having a bathroom for exclusive use or having walls built with non-durable materials), in over occupied-households, or are subjected to high rent prices. According to these surveys, 35.7 per cent of the Brazilian population — more than 74 million people — live in homes where there is no sewage treatment system. Housing inadequacies and poor sanitation disproportionally impact black people as compared to white people as well as informal workers and those with a low level of formal education.

Inequality in Brazil continues to affect the most fundamental right — the right to life. According to the Violence Atlas (2019) produced by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), 75.5 per cent of homicide victims in the country in 2019 were black. The survey also showed that the fatality rate for black Brazilians has gone up by 33 per cent in the past decade (2007-2017), while the fatality rate for white Brazilians has risen by merely 3.3 per cent in the same period. These are just a few examples of structural racism in Brazilian society.

As this data shows, people and territories that already faced structurally unequal conditions — which, in Brazil, cannot be dissociated from race and class — are the most severely affected by the pandemic. This reality is further exemplified by the Health Intelligence and Operations Centre of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro’s (PUC-Rio) findings that black people without formal education are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people with higher education. Among Brazil’s urban peripheries, those in the northern region have the highest fatality rates, and more than 20 per cent of the region’s population lives in areas where they have to spend up to four hours to travel to the nearest city where they can find appropriate healthcare for serious cases of COVID-19.

Though São Paulo, the country’s largest and most populous city, has been the epicentre of the pandemic, the city’s fatality rate was just slightly above the national average. However, the disproportionate distribution of fatality rates across the city exposes pre-existing inequalities: the most affected neighbourhoods are in the peripheries, where there is a much larger population that identifies as black or multiracial than the city-wide average. These are also areas where the number of hospital beds is much lower than the recommendation of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and where the wait time to see a doctor is the highest in the city.

We know that COVID-19 spreads quickly in crowded places and through travel — both conditions that are present in the peripheries. Many residents of the periphery are domestic workers who have had to continue commuting to their employers’ houses on public transit; black nurse technicians who have to continue commuting to and from work, often without Personal Protective Equipment (PPE); delivery app workers who drive or ride across the city for very little money; and so on. These so-called essential workers in the periphery — who account for a large part of the employed workers in these areas — make it possible for wealthier parts of the city and country to quarantine.

Recent surveys show that delivery app workers who ride their motorcycle or rental bikes are usually young black men from the periphery. As researcher Maria Augusta Tavares points out, in times of crisis, these so-called entrepreneurs are ‘trapped outside’ and are among the most precarious workers; as a result, they are at a higher risk of getting infected and spreading the virus.

A protest of high school students against the ‘school lunch mafia’ was repressed by the Military Police; one student was arrested. São Paulo City (Brazil), 2016.
Mídia Ninja

We must not forget that the lives of black youth from the periphery were already under threat long before the pandemic: black movements, scholars, and activists have tirelessly denounced the genocide against black youth from the periphery perpetrated by the Brazilian state. The state promotes even more death through evictions that continue to happen even during the pandemic, despite the recommendations of the United Nations. While ‘stay at home’ becomes a ubiquitous watchword, the Brazilian state neglects and even attacks housing rights, destroying homes and neglecting households and families in the periphery.

State policies of racial segregation, racism, and necropolitics are not new in our country. We must insist on studying social relations in Brazil with a precise understanding of racial dynamics. This includes an assessment of one of the main indicators of Brazilian inequality: access to land, whether to grow food on or just to live; whether in rural or urban areas. Structural racism is also manifested in the way that different bodies unevenly occupy our cities to live, work, and travel. Once again, the pandemic and its fatalities expose these inequalities. Some bodies are not able to stay at home; others are not safe either inside or outside of their homes. The lives of black youth in the periphery are constantly threatened: if they leave their homes, they are threatened by the virus; if they stay at home, they are threatened by the state.

Income and Work Among the Poor

Universities and research collectives have taken on a significant role in the production of knowledge on pandemic-related inequality. A survey conducted by the Solidarity Research Network Bulletin (Boletim da Rede Pesquisa Solidária) with more than 70 community leaders in 6 metropolitan areas around the country between 5 and 11 May 2020 showed that hunger is the number one problem facing the residents of peripheries as a result of the pandemic. The same survey points to unemployment, lower wages, and lack of income as the second most pressing problems facing the residents of peripheries as a result of the pandemic. Community leaders underscored the impact of the pandemic on informal and self-employed workers who lost their source of income with no compensation or expected date to resume their work. This is what has happened to daily-wage domestic workers, caretakers, and maintenance and construction workers, for example.

Because we are living through the worsening of an already-existing crisis, social indicators from previous years were already quite low. After Brazil’s former president Michel Temer implemented labour reform in 2017, for the first time in the country’s history, informal workers outnumbered formal workers. In 2020, employment figures reached even more catastrophic levels. According to a survey published by the Centre for Labour Economics and Trade Unionism (CESIT), 4.9 million additional jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2020, reaching a total of 70.9 million people out of work. For the first time in the country’s history, more than 50 per cent of Brazil’s economically active population (that is, all people who are of working age) are unemployed (Teixeira and Borsari, 2020). That means that nearly 71 million Brazilians of working age, or around one third of the country’s population, are not working (formally or informally), or are not looking for work.

While the overall employment rate plunges as the government fails to produce policies to improve the lives of the Brazilian people, one sector of informal workers has been growing during CoronaShock, drawing attention from the media and the general population: delivery app workers. These workers are beginning to solidify as a sector of the workforce and are staging strikes to demand decent working conditions. According to a survey by Professor Marco Aurélio Santana (2020) with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in 2019 there were approximately 5.5 million delivery app workers in the country, accounting for roughly one fourth of Brazil’s self-employed workers. In March 2020, job applications to work with the delivery app iFood nearly doubled, with 175,000 people applying that month alone.

According to a report by the Network of Studies and Monitoring of the Labour Reform, delivery app workers are working longer hours and making less money during the pandemic. The survey interviewed 252 workers from 26 states, 52 per cent of whom are working 7 days a week, and 25.4 of whom percent are working 6 days a week. Among respondents, 89.7 per cent said that their income reduced or remained the same during the pandemic while only 10.3 per cent said their income increased in the period. Nearly half (48.7 percent) received up to R$520 a week before the pandemic, but after the quarantine began, that number went up to 72.8 per cent (Abílio et al., 2020).

Second breque dos Apps (‘breaking the apps’) protest: delivery app workers go on strike.  São Paulo, Brazil, 25 July 2020. 
Roberto Parizotti/Fotos Públicas

This bring us to the question: what is happening to youth during the pandemic? According to the PNADC, unemployment among 18 to 24-year-olds has increased in the first quarter of 2020, hitting a 34.1 per cent record high in the northeast of Brazil. In the same period, the national average was 27.1 per cent, an increase from 23.8 percent in the first quarter of 2019. Most unemployed youth are women (14.5 per cent, while men make up 10.4 per cent), self-identify as black or multiracial (15.2 per cent and 14 per cent, respectively, while 9.8 per cent self-identify as white), and did not graduate from high school (20.4 per cent, compared to 6.3 per cent who hold a higher education degree).

These patterns are reflected among youth across Latin America. In May, the regional director of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for Latin America and the Caribbean, Vinícius Pinheiro, looked at the situation faced by 15 to 24-year-old workers in the report ‘Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020: Technology and the future of jobs’. The report points out that 9.4 million young people are unemployed in Latin America and the Caribbean, in addition to 23 million youth who are not studying, working, or in training (also known as ‘NEET’, or youth ‘not in employment, education or training’). Furthermore, informal employment is the only option for 30 million youth (one fifth of the youth population in the region).

The crisis has also aggravated inequality between men and women. Young women face the most critical situation: 28.9 per cent are NEETs, compared to 14.6 per cent of young men. PNADC data show that seven million women left the job market in the second half of May — two million more than the number men who left the job market in this period. Women also constitute the majority of people on the frontlines of the fight against COVID-19. According to the Brazilian Federal Board of Nursing (Conselho Federal de Enfermagem), teams of nursing staff are predominantly made up of women, who account for 84.6 per cent of all nurses, nursing assistants, and nurse technicians in Brazil. Women are also even more overburdened with domestic work during the quarantine. IBGE data from 2019 shows that, before the pandemic, women dedicated on average 18.5 hours per week to house and care work, while men spent 10.3 hours a week on the same tasks. This gap has undoubtedly widened during the pandemic.

Domestic and gender-based violence is also on the rise during quarantine, especially in the peripheries of big cities. When women and children — as well as the LGBTQIA+ community — are forced to live with their abusers, staying at home makes them more vulnerable and puts their lives at risk.

Youth and Solidarity in the Peripheries during CoronaShock

As the state and governments have failed to provide preventative action against COVID-19 and care for its victims in accordance with the needs of each locality and region, a word began to echo among the Brazilian people: solidarity. CoronaShock has caused many youth groups, artists, collectives, social organisations, neighbourhood associations, friends, families, and even individuals to start solidarity campaigns and actions and strengthen those that already existed. These efforts propel youth as political actors and as protagonists in creating new ways to overcome the challenges posed by the virus and the Brazilian state — especially when it comes to maintaining income, accessing food, and promoting health and well-being.

Solidarity has been vital in the collection and distribution of food, hand sanitiser, and personal hygiene products. However, there two kinds of solidarity actions that have emerged: ‘Solidarity, Inc.’ (solidariedade S.A.) and popular solidarity. The former is centred on the donations of big companies and corporations, which Kelli Mafort from the national board of the Landless Workers’ Movement coined ‘Solidarity Inc.’ (2020).

‘Solidarity Inc.’ works like charity — it is vertical, based on a relationship between those who have and choose to give and those in need who can only receive. People who receive donations are seen as nothing but recipients of donators’ benevolence, a way of understanding and establishing a relationship with others that is similar to what Paulo Freire called ‘the banking model of education’. We also know that, when it comes to big corporations, donations can benefit the companies and their profit margins in the near future.

In stark contrast, popular solidarity is promoted by the periphery and for the periphery. It is based on an organic relationship, similar to what Paulo Freire called popular education, in which solidarity itself is seen as a relationship in which everyone involved participates and has something to share and receive, building and growing a people’s organisation based on a common project.

Several urban and rural organisations are part of popular solidarity campaigns. They collect and hand out supplies, incorporate youth, and promote the relationship between agroecological food — a fruit borne by agrarian reform — and the empty pans in households in the periphery. This process promotes encounters between people from the city and people from the countryside; it also strengthens a network to fight against the government and struggle both for popular agrarian reform and for urban reform. Inspired by these practices and led by young people who reject the indifference that capitalism attempts to impose upon us, we at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research call upon youth to continue to dare to dream of and build a future beyond the misery of the present and what is deemed to be possible and to resist the discourse spread by the virus and the vermin who insist on steering humanity and the planet towards destruction.

Solidarity action with families in vulnerable situations in the peripheries of Curitiba and Araucária organised by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and Sindipetro-PR/SC, the oil workers’ union of Santa Catarina. Paraná, Brazil, 1 August 2020. 
Giorgia Prates/Brasil de Fato

References

Abílio, Ludmila Costhek; Almeida, Paulo Freitas; Amorim, Henrique; Cardoso, Ana Claudia Moreira; Fonseca, Vanessa Patriota da; Kalil, Renan Bernardi; Machado, Sidnei. ‘Condições de trabalho de entregadores via plataforma digital durante a Covid-19’ [‘Labour Conditions of Delivery Workers via Digital Platforms During COVID-19’], Revista Jurídica Trabalho e Desenvolvimento Humano [Legal Magazine Labour and Human Development], Campinas, Special Issue — Dossier COVID-19, pp. 1-21, 2020.

Almeida, Alfredo Wagner Berno de. ‘Nova cartografia social: territorialidades específicas e politização da consciência das fronteiras’ [‘New Social Cartography: Specific Territorialities and Politicisation of Consciousness of the Borders’]. Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais: Nova Cartografia Social [Traditional Communities and Peoples: New Social Cartography]. Manaus: PNCSA/UEA, 2013. pp. 157-73.

Badiou, Alain. A Hipótese comunista [The Communist Hypothesis]. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2012.

Brazil. National Youth Department. Estatuto da Juventude. Lei n. 12.852, de 5 de agosto de 2013 [The Youth Act. Law No. 12,852, from 5 August 2013]. Brasília: National Youth Department, 2013.

Feixa, Carles. Interview. ‘A juventude como categoria social está morrendo de êxito’ [‘Youth as a Social Category Is Dying of Success’]. Instituto Humanitas Unisinos [Humanitas Unisinos Institute], 2015 (www.ihu.unisinos.br/169-noticias/noticias-2015/540624-a-juventude-como-categoria-social-esta-morrendo-de-exito).

Ferreira, Letícia. ‘Diante de fotos de geladeiras vazias, liderança feminina distribui marmitas em Paraisópolis’ [‘In Face of Photos of Empty Fridges, Feminist Leaders Distribute Meals in Paraisópolis’]. AzMina, 29 April 2020 (azmina.com.br/reportagens/diante-de-fotos-de-geladeiras-vazias-lideranca-feminina-distribui-marmitas-em-paraisopolis/), Date of Access: 24 August 2020.

Instituto Pólis. Juventude brasileira e democracia: participação, esferas e políticas públicas [Brazilian Youth and Democracy: Participation, Public Policies and Spheres]. Final report. Ibase/Pólis, 2005.

Lopes, Artur Sérgio. ‘Juventude, território e ativismos nas periferias da metrópole: notas sobre uma pesquisa’ [‘Youth, Territory and Activism in the Peripheries of the Metropolis: Notes on a Survey’]. Espaço e Economia [Space and Economy], 11, 2017.

Mafort, Kelli. Interview with Lu Sudré. ‘Para combater a “pandemia da fome”, MST já doou mais de 600 toneladas de alimentos’ [‘To combat “hunger pandemic” MST has donated more than 600 tons of food’], Brasil de Fato, 11 May 2020 (www.brasildefato.com.br/2020/05/11/para-combater-a-pandemia-da-fome-mst-ja-doou-mais-de-600-toneladas-de-alimentos), Date of Access: 24 August 2020.

Novaes, Regina. ‘As juventudes e a luta por direitos’ [‘Youth and the Struggle for Rights’]. Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, São Paulo, November 2012, pp. 10-11.

Pereira, Alexandre Barbosa. ‘Muitas palavras: a discussão recente sobre juventude nas Ciências Sociais’ [‘Many Words: The Recent Debate About Youth in Social Sciences’]. Ponto Urbe, n. 1, São Paulo, 2007.

Santana, Marco Aurélio. ‘“Quem apostou no fracasso da greve dos entregadores, perdeu”, afirma sociólogo’ [‘“Whoever Bet the Strike Held by Delivery App Workers Would Fail, Lost”, Says Sociologist’. Brasil de Fato, 2 July 2020 (www.brasildefato.com.br/2020/07/02/quem-apostou-no-fracasso-da-greve-dos-entregadores-perdeu-afirma-sociologo), Date of Access: 24 August 2020.

Rede de Pesquisa Solidária [Solidarity Research Network]. Bulletins (redepesquisasolidaria.org/), Date of Access: 24 August 2020.

Tavares, Maria Augusta. ‘Empreendedores: presos do lado de fora’ [‘Entrepreneurs: Trapped Outside’]. Termômetro da Política, 2 June 2020 (www.termometrodapolitica.com.br/2020/06/02/empreendedores-presos-do-lado-de-fora/), Date of Access: 24 August 2020.

Teixeira, M., Borsari, P. ‘Mercado de trabalho no contexto da pandemia: a situação do Brasil até abril de 2020’ [‘Labour Market in the Contexto of the Pandemic: Brazil’s Situation by April 2020’]. Centro de Estudo Sindicais e de Economia do Trabalho [Centre for Labour Economics and Trade Unionism]. (www.cesit.net.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Marilane-e-Pietro-Mercado-de-trabalho-1o-quadrimestre-2020-vf2.pdf), Date of Access: 24 August 2020.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Apresentação da cartilha sobre juventude e participação nas periferias brasileiras [Study on the Participation of Youth in the Peripheries of Brazil], 5 June 2020 (www.thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/brasil/apresentacao-da-cartilha-sobre-juventude-e-participacao-nas-periferias-brasileiras/).

During the sixth Marmita Solidária (‘Solidarity Prepared Meals’) in Rio de Janeiro, 300 meals were prepared with food produced by family farms in settlements organised by the MST. In addition to solidarity, the meals carry political messages with them, such as the Fora Bolsonaro (‘Out, Bolsonaro’) campaign. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 24 August 2020.   
MST/RJ

¹ : CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient.

² :To learn more about the methodology of our research, please refer to Study on the Participation of Youth in the Peripheries of Brazil [‘Estudo sobre participação de juventude nas periferias brasileiras’], in Portuguese.

Herb and spice vendor working (despite the pandemic). Santa Cruz Street, La Paz, Bolivia, 2020.
Carlos Fiengo

The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in December 2019 in Wuhan (China). In early March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the rapidly expanding illness a pandemic. With more than ten million people infected across the world as of late June, the effects of the pandemic on the world system reach far beyond the realm of public health; indeed, a reconfiguration of social life is underway. The crisis spread by neoliberal capitalism is intensifying, as is the increasing necessity for an urgent transformation of the system along an alternative path (for more on this, read our dossier no. 28, CoronaShock: A Virus and the World, and our CoronaShock studies). In Latin America, the first cases of the disease were detected at the end of February. Four months later, at the end of June, the number of people infected in Latin America has reached for more than twenty-three per cent of the global total and twenty-two per cent of daily deaths as the rapid spread of the virus has turned the region (particularly South America) into the new global epicentre of the pandemic.

The pandemic has furthered – sometimes dramatically – a series of economic and social processes that were already underway before the virus emerged. Capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy and increasingly authoritarian neoliberal reforms have put these policies and the US-led imperialist offensive into question (for more on this, read our report no. 6, From 8M to the Coronavirus Crisis). The expansion of the virus has also shined a light on the dismantling and privatisation of public healthcare – the result of decades of neoliberalism – as well as on the increasing precariousness of labour and the living conditions and quality of life of the people. The pandemic has put on display the resounding failure of neoliberal policies to effectively combat the health and social crises. Finally, the current situation puts into question the effects, actions, and challenges that these processes pose for people’s movements and the alternatives that they are creating.

Protest in Caracas, Venezuela after US President Donald Trump called for the imprisonment of President Nicolás Maduro, 28 March 2020
United Socialist Party of Venezuela / Fotos Públicas

This Crisis is Not Natural

Numbers of those infected and killed by the virus began to sharply increase in May 2020. These numbers, threatening to serve as the straw that causes the collapse of health systems throughout the region, clearly show the disproportionately impact of the crisis on the poor and the working class. This is especially true in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Bolivia, where the number of those infected has (drastically, in some cases) surpassed 2,000 cases per million residents. At the end of May, Brazil tragically became one of the first places in the world to reach such a high level of infections; by the end of June, it became the country with the second-highest number of deaths and infections, after the United States. Meanwhile, migration from the Dominican Republic to Haiti has accelerated the rapid spread of infections and is edging towards a humanitarian tragedy.

This is not about a natural curse; the pandemic was not biologically predetermined. Its emergence – as is the case with all of the pandemics that we have experienced throughout the twenty-first century – is linked to the processes of the industrial production of food and the destruction of native forests and jungles, which is characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. In addition, the transformation of the pandemic into a health and humanitarian crisis is linked to public policies and the approach of governments as well as other social, institutional, and historic resources that the people count on.

In the case of Latin America, COVID-19 emerged at a time when people were already questioning the wave of neoliberal policies that has been developing in the region since 2015, from structural adjustment to privatisation and other regressive reforms. Following the defeat of a wave of progressive governments in much of the region throughout the 2000s, in the last few years public health budgets were cut across most of these countries. These policies have resulted in the growth of poverty, precarisation, and inequality, as well as the dismantling of public health systems. In Argentina, for example, the Ministry of Health was combined with the Ministry of Social Health and downgraded to a secretariat in 2018. This shift was part of the process of structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund through its agreement with former president Mauricio Macri. Such waves of neoliberal policies have confronted Latin America since the 1970s, never failing to trigger deleterious social consequences.

The current crisis, therefore, is not an isolated or anomalous event. Rather, it rests on top of decades of disastrous neoliberal policies and shines a light on neoliberalism’s failure and inability to combat the underlying health crisis that it caused through its very own framework. It was the conditions of neoliberalism that triggered the crisis; not an inevitable series of external events. It is not a coincidence that the countries that are suffering the most from the impact of the virus are the countries whose governments are most closely aligned with the neoliberal project – the same countries that have ignored the recommendations of the WHO. The most dramatic case of this has been in Brazil, where the government, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, has underestimated the pandemic and created a permanent campaign in favour of maintaining unrestricted economic activity.

On the other hand, the state of public health is in less dire straits where progressive governments have respected the recommendations of the WHO. Argentina, for example, is undergoing an extended quarantine and bolstering its public health system, including developing tests through its national public science system. Cuba, which has a public health system that is well-known for its quality, has adopted policies of selective physical distancing and testing and is implementing a model of community medicine. Venezuela has among the lowest rates of infection and deaths per number of residents – despite the extreme commercial, financial, and media blockade and the permanent threat of the hybrid war led by the United States. In the midst of the pandemic, this hybrid war threatens to compound the impacts of the health crisis with economic difficulties that could be used to justify external intervention.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has accelerated a deep global economic recession. The current crisis has compounded the slow economic growth that the region has experienced over the last seven years and which increased even further under the harsh neoliberal offensive. Regional and international organisations anticipate the worst economic contraction at a regional level since 1930. In April, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) anticipated a 5.4 per cent decrease in the GDP in 2020; by June, an estimate from the International Monetary Fund predicted that it would fall by 9.4 per cent. The economic crash particularly impacts countries, regions, and sectors that rely on the export of oil, gas, and minerals (where the fall in international prices of natural resources has been felt the most acutely); tourism and remittances from migrants; the flow of global finance (the Brazilian economy has been among the most deeply impacted by capital outflows); and participation in global commerce and global production chains. In addition to the recession and capital outflows, the people have been adversely affected by the devaluation of their currencies, and, in some countries, by bloated external debt.

This ominous economic reality has disastrous consequences for the majority of the population. International organisations warn of a substantial increase in unemployment; according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in 2020, unemployment will increase by at least 3.4 per percent – on top of the 8.1 per cent unemployment rate recorded in 2019 – placing the unemployment rate at 11.5 per cent in the region. This means that roughly 37.7 million people or more will be unemployed. Poverty levels are also expected to increase by an average of 4.4 per cent according to ECLAC, impacting 34.7 per cent of the population. This increase in poverty will mean a step backwards towards the reality that prevailed in the early part of the twenty-first century before the wave of progressive governments. Along the same lines, the United Nation’s World Food Programme has warned that roughly 14 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean may suffer from hunger and food insecurity this year. This current economic landscape, managed within a neoliberal policy framework, informs whether or not – and how many – resources are allocated to confront the pandemic. More often than not, protecting ‘the economy’ comes before protecting the people.

Throughout 2019, the almost non-existent economic growth at the regional level, combined with neoliberal reforms, has opened Latin America to conflicts and to the collapse of the credibility of its governments. While the public health emergency reinforced presidential authority in many cases, as time progressed, the gravity of the current crisis and the profound impact of decades of neoliberal policies have made neoliberalism’s growing crisis of legitimacy crystal clear.

Shoppers at the market pay to be disinfected. Rodríguez Market, La Paz, Bolivia, 2020.
Carlos Fiengo

Neoliberalism’s Use of the Pandemic, Part I: Authoritarian Reinforcement 

The IMF has referred to the global economic crisis unleashed by the pandemic as the ‘Great Lockdown’, drawing an analogy to the Great Depression that began in 1929. This reference not only highlights the similarities between the magnitude of both situations and their impact, but also attributes the crisis to the restrictive public health measures, particularly the implementation of physical distancing policies commonly referred to as ‘quarantine’. There is nothing new in the history of capitalism – from its very beginning to today – about economic powers opposing quarantine. The expansion of plagues has long been closely linked with commercial circuits, its transportation networks, and processes of capitalist globalisation.

In contrast, the strategies of isolation and physical distancing recommended by the WHO, as well as by the general dynamic of the crisis that the pandemic has provoked, have granted a new role to the state in the areas of health, social, and economic policies. Serious questions are being asked about the new role of the state under conditions of deep inequalities produced by neoliberal policies. However, the new role of the state does not necessarily imply a contradiction with the neoliberal order; during the financial crisis of 2008, for example, the state intervened to bail out banks and corporations.

The logic of quarantine and state intervention justified by the crisis has been used – especially by neoliberal governments in the region – to reinforce a politics that is increasingly repressive and authoritarian. This shift was already underway in many of the countries under siege by the neoliberal offensive – especially in the face of the increasing scrutiny that this model and its advocates have faced from the public, which has intensified over the last year.

This has also occurred in most countries throughout Central America. There, the sparse presence of social and health policies stands in contrast to the imposition of curfews and a state of emergency, the reinforcement of militarisation, and increasing punishment of those who disobey isolation measures, which in many cases has led to new violations of human rights, especially in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Along the same lines, the assassination of leaders of social movements and former guerrilleros in Colombia has increased since the emergence of the pandemic. In Peru, the Police Protection Act (bill N° 31012), approved in 2019, has been put into effect, granting impunity to security forces for repressive actions and brutality. In Chile, the pandemic has pushed back the referendum to reform the country’s constitution, giving a breath of air – at least for now – to a government that has been under scrutiny by sustained protests. Now the government is raising the possibility of going back on the call for the referendum, instead strengthening the security apparatus with the purchase of new equipment, putting the military back on the streets, instituting a curfew, and continuing to use repression to disperse the protests that are resurging in this new context.

Surely, the most dramatic example of this deepening of authoritarian logic is the situation in Bolivia, where a coup in November 2019 removed the government of the legitimate president, Evo Morales, refused to recognise the electoral results, and imposed a self-proclaimed ‘transitional’ government led by Jeanine Áñez, a conservative senator from the Department of the Beni. The de facto government led by Áñez – marked initially by massacres in Sacaba and Senkata and by the return of neoliberal policies – has postponed the elections that had been set for 3 May in the context of the pandemic; it has used the logic of the quarantine to persecute its critics, attack the primarily indigenous majority, and deepen its policies of dispossession and corruption.

Among other measures, in May Áñez enacted Supreme Decree 4231, which makes it criminally punishable to publish written, printed, or artistic information that generates ‘uncertainty among the population’. This is a serious violation of the freedom of expression and the right to information. In addition, the government has responded with repression to protests that are demanding food, healthcare services, work, and the execution of the postponed elections.

Yet another example of the continuous threats to the last glimmers of democracy took place in May, when a group of military personnel led by Carlos Orellana, the Commander in Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, barged into the Plurinational Legislative Assembly with an ultimatum demanding the ratification – with no changes – of the Armed Forces’ proposal for promotions. The proposal had been sent by self-proclaimed president Áñez in February. This is a new level of authoritarianism for a government that is increasingly dabbling in corruption scandals. Now the government has attempted to postpone the elections once again, now proposed to take place in September – perhaps because Luis Arce, the candidate of the Movement for Socialism (Evo Morales’s party) – is leading in the pre-election polls. 

There is an increase in the power of the military in much of the region. In Bolivia, the military has gained power since the coup. In Brazil, the military has a substantial presence in Bolsonaro’s government. In countries throughout the region, the military forces have been empowered to control security mechanisms and public spaces and have used the pretext of quarantine to exercise control over the population. The application of authoritarianism and neoliberal policies have become increasingly militaristic, using a range of tactics such as lawfare (or judicial warfare) and the restriction of democratic life. In other words, a neofascist beltway is emerging in the region.

Social distancing and order during the delivery of food baskets, El Salvador, 29 April 2020.
Casa Presidencial / Fotos Públicas

Neoliberalism’s Use of the Pandemic, Part II: Policies of Structural Adjustment  

In mid-April, a group of right-wing politicians from Spain and Latin America – alongside the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who has turned into a spokesperson for neoliberalism in recent years – released a declaration titled ‘The Pandemic Should Not Be a Pretext for Authoritarianism’. In this declaration, they react to the emergence of state interventionism, socialism, and populism by accusing ‘many governments’ of taking ‘measures that indefinitely restrict basic freedoms and rights’. For them, following the tradition of Hayek and Friedman, liberty is considered only in an individualistic sense, linked to the protection of economic freedom. They characterise any policy that restricts the free market as being authoritarian, even if this policy is instituted by democratic institutions and governments, and/or by the masses. This same philosophy has been used to support and justify the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990). Along the same lines, Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs, Ernesto Araújo, criticised the policies of the WHO and denounced what he calls the ‘communavirus’.

Alongside these discourses and policies, many of the region’s neoliberal governments have taken advantage of the pandemic to advance neoliberal socioeconomic reforms – many of which were already part of the programme underway before the emergence of the virus – or to promote aid packages that benefit the economic powers. For example, in Paraguay, the government of Mario Abdo announced a ‘structural reform of the state’ whose objective is to shrink the state apparatus, reduce public spending, privatise public sector enterprises, and decrease salaries and pensions. In Colombia, the government of Iván Duque approved Decree 444, which takes away economic resources from local governments in the country in order to subsidise banks and companies. Duque also managed to approve the Law of Economic Emergency, which gives the government superpowers to advance neoliberal labour reform and pension reform. However, he has not yet been able to implement either. Along the same lines, the dictatorship in Bolivia continues to dismantle the gains won by the government of Evo Morales and has deregulated the economy, incurred a new cycle of external debt, and approved transgenic agricultural reform.

Yet another tragic example of a neoliberal structural adjustment policy that has been implemented in the era of the pandemic is the case of Ecuador under President Lenín Moreno. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Moreno’s administration has continued the policies of structural adjustment that were imposed as part of its agreement with the IMF (approved in early 2019) despite the massive discontent and protests that it has faced. Between March and April 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Moreno’s administration made significant debt payments in order to receive new IMF loans. To be able to access these new loans, Moreno’s administration is required to adhere to even harsher neoliberal policies. Finally, in May 2020, Moreno’s government obtained parliamentary approval for two bills: the Organic Law for Humanitarian Support to Combat the Crisis Derived from COVID-19 and the Organic Law for the Ordering of Public Finances. These bills advance the state’s structural adjustment policies, close or privatise public businesses and offices, facilitate the payment of lower salaries, and worsen the precarious conditions under which the working class lives and works. The structural adjustment package imposed by the IMF, and that Moreno’s administration agreed to, also includes substantial cuts to university budgets, which provoked student protests; the budget cuts to universities have been temporarily suspended by the supreme court as a result. This austerity package has been criticized by large sections of the population and by the political opposition, creating a situation that could trigger a new crisis.

The Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST) main acts of solidarity are geared towards the distribution of food through various formats: food baskets, farmers’ markets, and lunch boxes. Paraná, Brazil, April 2020.
MST

Instability and Political Crisis in Brazil 

Brazil has become the regional epicentre of COVID-19 and one of the centres of the pandemic on a global level. The failure of the federal government to adopt sufficient measures to combat the pandemic has created a catastrophic situation that is edging towards a humanitarian tragedy. This inaction by the federal government is accompanied by President Jair Bolsonaro’s approach of underestimating, or even denying the problem, and placing concern for the economy before concern for the people. The gross underreporting of cases, mainly due to the scarcity of tests being carried out, does not allow us to have a true grasp of the health crisis underway. The Imperial College of London estimates that the total number of active cases of COVID-19 as of the end of June is at least three times higher than the official count (1.23 million active cases), bringing the estimate of active cases in the country to at least 3.7 million.

This health crisis is the greatest expression – and one of the causes – of the political and social instability that faces Bolsonaro’s government. This government has increased its political isolation, amplifying a tendency that was already in place. Bolsonaro has picked fights with legislative and judicial powers and has intensified conflicts with governors and mayors, breaking with his past allies and pressuring them to open up the economy (as is the case with the governors of the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, for example). On top of this, Minister of Health Luiz Henrique Mandetta resigned – as did his replacement – due to differences over the health policy pushed forward by Bolsonaro. Minister of Justice Sérgio Moro resigned and denounced the president while attempting to manipulate the federal police to guarantee impunity for his relatives from a variety of investigations that are underway. All of this has further isolated Bolsonaro’s government. As a judge, Moro was a main force in pushing forward the court case known as Lava Jato, which led to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s imprisonment and his exclusion from the 2018 elections. Moro’s resignation in particular both exemplified and accelerated the declining support for Bolsonaro’s government by an important section of the population – particularly the middle class – that had supported him from the beginning.

While Bolsonaro still has the support of a resistant core that rallies for him in the streets, carrying out caravans, actions, and encampments, the president has sought higher approval among low-income sectors. This effort has been based on two main discourses: the defence of the use of Chloroquine to treat COVID-19 and a supposed concern about employment. In the first case – contrary to scientific evidence – Bolsonaro seeks to instil the idea that there is a quick solution to the disease. In the second case, he uses a discourse that economic activities should return to ‘normal’, which could garner support from those who are in desperate situations and have seen their incomes diminish or disappear. In addition, Bolsonaro has tried to take credit for the economic aid created and approved by the National Congress (despite having initially opposed it and then attempted to decrease the amount of the aid package).

Bolsonaro has increasingly attempted to gain more support from the armed forces, whose members have increasingly been appointed to government positions. The most extreme example of this is their complete control over the Ministry of Health following the resignation of two former ministers of health in the middle of the pandemic. The position of interim head of the ministry and 40 other strategic positions are occupied by military personnel who lack training in the arena of health. More than 2,800 members of the armed forces have been appointed to administrative state roles under Bolsonaro’s administration.

Faced with efforts to remove Bolsonaro from the presidency, his administration has established alliances with legislators from parties that do not have any ideological commitment and who instead sell their votes to whoever is willing to pay more. This is what is called centrão. Leading the charge in these negotiations are military leaders who are generally critical of this kind of alliance but who are now seeking it out in exchange for positions in the civil government (some have been appointed to high-level positions in Bolsonaro’s cabinet).  

It is important to note that the weakening of the government does not necessarily mean that Bolsonaro will be ousted, though it does allow society to see the correlation of political forces more clearly. A political dispute is currently being played out within the establishment between neofascists – symbolized by the current president – and the traditional right wing, which is represented by other institutions (such as the parliament and legal system) and some state governors. In this context, Bolsonaro’s challenge is to avoid impeachment and to organise a parliamentary alliance that guarantees him support from the heads of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

The effort to defeat Bolsonaro has taken on an unprecedented central role and has created awareness among wide-ranging sectors of society: the Left, institutions (such as the parliament, legal system, and especially the federal supreme court), intellectuals, public figures, civil society organisations, and political parties – even those that represent the right wing. However, such advances bring up debates and challenges within the Left, such as the difficulty of creating a tactical alliance in defence of Bolsonaro’s impeachment among the most diverse sectors of society. This is indicative of the difficulty of bringing forward a left front that is capable of building a people’s project in Brazil and engaging in a dialogue with society about an adequate and uniting exit from the crisis.

Political organisations and people’s movements in Brazil have raised two important initiatives along these lines. The first is the construction of a Popular Emergency Plan in defence of life, health, income, and employment. This platform, in addition to denouncing the neoliberal and neofascist project that is underway, is based on the understanding that it is impossible to dissociate the social mobilisation that is confronting the pandemic from a qualitative and programmatic government plan. However, the current government – which is guided by private business interests and acts against scientific evidence – limits the possibility of state action in the fight against the crisis and makes it extremely difficult to overcome the challenges that the country is faced with.

The second initiative of political organisations and people’s movements in Brazil is the construction of a Politics of Solidarity in Brazil’s major peripheries, which helps coordinate a platform of people’s movements that encompasses their diverse initiatives. Based on solidarity, the battle of ideas, and grassroots work, this process aims to strengthen the organisation of the masses through a coordinated, popular project and to strengthen the people’s struggle as a whole. Solidarity in this context goes hand in hand with the struggle for rights: the right to quarantine with physical distancing, guaranteed income, and access to water, food, and health.

A fierce struggle is necessary to win these rights and to gain access to public resources – and it is people’s organisations that channel this resistance and seek to embody hope for the people. Fighting for people’s rights in the context of the pandemic requires putting in the work to support building this process at all levels – from the local level to the national level – in a coordinated way. Either the working class will organise, fight for its life, and prepare for a political struggle, or it will witness the bourgeoisie pillage the country and bury the corpses of thousands of predominantly working-class and poor people.

Chess in the time of COVID. Venezuela 2020.
Dikó / CacriPhotos

Images of Imperialist Intervention 

This alarming public health crisis has not stopped the US from continuing its aggressive imperialist policies in the region. For many years, Cuba and Venezuela have been the main targets of the US-led hybrid war, with the goal of strengthening US domination over what it considers to be its ‘backyard’ (for more on the hybrid war, read our dossier no. 17, Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America). Today, we are in a key a moment of intense global dispute between the US and other powers, such as China and Russia (Boron 2020).

In Cuba, the policy of Washington’s war hawks – sharpened by US President Donald Trump – has been to tighten the sanctions, accompanied by a succession of hostile actions in the diplomatic, political, and economic arenas. Among these actions, it is worth highlighting the US Department of State’s re-inclusion of Cuba in the list of countries that is ‘not cooperating fully with U.S. counterterrorism efforts in 2019’, making 2020 ‘the first year that Cuba has been certified as not fully cooperating since 2015’. This selected group of public enemies, accused of ‘not fully cooperating with U.S. counterterrorism efforts’, is made up of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and now Cuba since May 2020.

In a mix of clumsiness and desperation in the midst of the crisis, the United States government opted to attack Cuba’s cooperation with countries around the world to collaborate on public health measures and combat the crisis. The US State Department openly deployed a pressure campaign against the rest of the world so that other countries would not ask for help from Cuba. Despite the fact that the core of the US narrative was amplified by private mainstream media, their attempt failed: the role of the solidarity brigades became well-known, and images of white coats and Cuban flags arriving at airports in countries in crisis spread throughout the world.

Even before the pandemic, members of Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade were sent to twenty-four countries, including Haiti. The first country in the Americas to expel European colonialism in 1804, in recent years Haiti’s dependence on imperialist powers has increased, forced by coups d’état, foreign military occupation, and humanitarian intervention by non-profit organisations in the Global North. As a result, Haiti – one of the most violent experiments of the neoliberal war – has become the counterpoint of Cuba, robbed of its sovereignty, existing in a state of general poverty, and faced with a lack of public services and growing repression. In Haiti, as in other countries, Cuba’s response of solidarity stands out in contrast with the aggressive policies of the United States, which prefers instead to deploy troops and further cement its warlike character.

In the case of Venezuela, the confrontation by the United States has continued to escalate. With each new confrontation, the United States’ plot of siege is increasingly exposed. The foiled mercenary incursion in May, ‘Operation Gideon’, is another watershed moment in a long sequence of attacks that are ignored or justified by international mainstream media. The operation is representative of the character of the Venezuelan opposition: completely surrendered to imperialism. One aspect that stands out is that the operation was established through a contract that formally linked Washington’s puppet Juan Guaidó to Jordan Goudreau, the head of the mercenary corporation Silvercorp and a former member of the US Armed Forces who recently worked in a security operation for a campaign event for US President Donald Trump. The operation is illustrative of the outsourcing (real or simulated) of military interventions, which the US has promoted since the Gulf War (for more on this, read our CoronaShock study no. 2: ‘CoronaShock and the Hybrid War Against Venezuela’).

The Colombian state, currently in the hands of Iván Duque (former president Álvaro Úribe’s disciple and staunch uribista), has a special role in the siege against the Venezuelan government. In public settings, Colombia is one of the main forces in the Lima Group, the diplomatic forum that brings together right-wing governments across the continent, supposedly to promote the well-being of the Venezuelan people. At a more clandestine level, Colombia allows for the establishment of paramilitary training camps stationed to attack Venezuela.

While this is happening, Colombia is struggling with a spiral of political violence that has placed the leaders of social movements in its crosshairs. The police-military machinery unceasingly produces scandals, including spying on public figures – some in its own government.

The United States has nine military bases in Colombia, as well as others in the Caribbean, some of which belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). One aspect of the intervention driven by Southern Command is true army propaganda. For example, much-touted naval bases were put in place – supposedly to intercept boats carrying illegal drugs – after the US attorney general accused Nicolás Maduro and other chavista leaders of narco-trafficking and put a bounty on their heads.

The fleet that Southern Command deployed in the Caribbean appeared in the news when the United States let it be known that it could be used to stop the Iranian oil tankers that were on their way to Venezuela. Despite this, the oil tankers arrived in Venezuela, breaking the US embargo. The image of Iranian tankers in the Caribbean, escorted by the National Bolivarian Armed Forces’ Sukhoi planes, is symbolic of the shattering of US power. It shed light on the absurdity of the threats of Trump’s administration, which has accumulated quite a number of failures in recent months. However, the military threat remains and should not be downplayed.

It is noteworthy that the US government is promoting conflict at a time when the country’s death count continues to skyrocket (having reached over 120,000 as of late June, the highest in the world). This reality has unleashed such chaos that even the US’ well-oiled propaganda machine has not succeeded in hiding the effects of the pandemic, nor the blunders of the Trump administration. This stands in sharp contrast to the political action of other states, such as China and its rapid and comprehensive response to the pandemic, and Cuba. Just ninety miles south of the US, this small rebellious island has been able to combat the pandemic despite the US embargo while simultaneously aiding other people across the world with its medical solidarity brigades. Meanwhile, the US’ unilateralism has reached a record level, also demonstrated by its fight with the WHO. It seems that the pandemic is accelerating the global hegemonic transition (Merino 2020).

On top of this, the streets in the US are on fire once more, a result of deeply embedded structural racism and police violence. The people’s response to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others is another indication of the level of tension that surges through the United States; these uprisings chip away at the image of an all-powerful empire that the country once brandished.

Community kitchens combat hunger in poor areas. Villa Celina, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2020.
Nazareno Roviello / Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP)

People’s Movements and the Challenges Ahead

In October 2019, a new wave of struggles spread throughout much of Latin America in response to the neoliberal offensive. Within just a few months, the challenges and confines presented by the pandemic would force the actions and demands of people’s movements in the region to take on a different shape, each in their own way. But this change in the conditions of struggle has not meant their disappearance. New forms of organising have arisen through social media, with Twitter storms and virtual meetings; cacerolazos (the banging of pots and pans in protest, often from balconies and windows in the era of COVID-19); street demonstrations adhering to social distancing with protestors wearing masks; and, more recently, the return of strikes and the blockading of streets and highways. This new face of people’s protests has become more and more present in the context of the worsening health, social, and political conditions facing the poor and the working class.

The effects of the pandemic and its use to further the capitalist agenda have manifested through a significant increase in layoffs; reductions in salaries; the increasing precariousness of work, especially in the private and informal sectors; and a notable advance in the digitalisation of work (such as the increasingly precarious ‘uberisation’) that capitalists had already begun to promote before the emergence of the virus. Faced with this daunting reality, workers in the region have responded with various actions, including delivery workers’ and other essential workers’ strikes on both a regional and global level. It is worth paying particular attention to the conflict and demands of health workers throughout the region (for more on this read our dossier no. 29, Health Is a Political Choice).

The situation is even worse in sectors with precarious or occasional work that is insufficient for sustaining life. The absence of social policies has had a disastrous impact, aggravating and triggering plagues of hunger and illness (to read more about this on a global level, read our twentieth newsletter (2020), Hunger Gnaws at the Edges of the World). In this context, people’s movements have carried out heroic work, often in very difficult situations, organising canteens for the people; providing food and basic goods that are necessary for public health; contributing to collective organisation; and demanding effective solutions from governments. Among these efforts, it is worth mentioning the distribution of food by organisations in poor neighbourhoods in Chapare (Bolivia) that have been persecuted by the dictatorship. In Brazil, more than more than 1,200 tonnes of food were delivered to shantytowns in cities throughout the country by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and other people’s movements. In Argentina, organisations linked to the popular economy have led such efforts, demanding food and measures that guarantee assistance to poor neighbourhoods that are suffering from the rapidly spreading virus.

In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Ecuador, women hang white flags along the highway and families hang white flags from their homes to symbolise widespread hunger and the demand for food. In Panama, the poor are protesting by blockading the streets and organising cacerolazos. In Santiago, Chile, residents of poor neighbourhoods who have protested and constructed barricades are being repressed by the same government that only offers them scraps. In El Alto, La Paz, and elsewhere in Bolivia, workers and neighbours protest, denouncing the lack of work and food. Similar events have unfolded in Bogotá (Colombia) and other large urban centres in the region. The rejection of the neoliberal agenda in Ecuador; cacerolazos and exploding fireworks in the streets of Bolivia demanding elections; and panelaços (cacerolazos) in Brazil alongside the chants Fora Bolsonaro! (‘Get out, Bolsonaro!’) seem to indicate the reinvigoration of people’s struggles under the new conditions raised by the pandemic.

The spread of the virus in poor neighbourhoods threatens to provoke a social and health catastrophe. This reality is not limited to urban areas and has been denounced by movements across the region, from the Amazonian departments in Colombia (among the poorest regions in the country) to Haiti. Organisations of indigenous peoples have also denounced the dire situation looming over their homelands; as of late May, there are at least 20,000 cases of infection in the Amazon basin according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

The pandemic has also exposed and aggravated the traumas of injustice and the double exploitation, oppression, and violence against women and against people across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Poor women in particular have been impacted by the loss of income, the responsibility of domestic caretaking, and the increase in violence, as seen by the growing numbers of femicides. In Chile, the Coordinadora Feminista 8M has played an important role, taking a lead in organising collective feminist caretaking for families and populations in these areas; shedding light on and demanding urgent attention towards the need for the eradication of intrafamilial violence and the protection of women, children, and adolescents; and demanding the right not to leave home to work during the pandemic and the right to guaranteed income and other emergency health measures.

Feminist women’s movements and other movements with a feminist analysis have voiced loudly and clearly that caring for human life is worth more than profits. The International People’s Assembly has called upon the people of the world to put the preservation of life before the interests of capital and for an emancipatory exit to the contradiction between health and the economy that continually emerges within the capitalist framework. The ALBA movements’ platform in Latin America has called for the condemnation of neoliberal governments, for the lifting of sanctions, and for the rejection of imperialist aggressions. The group also called to give life to a political programme and project from below. Not only has the global reach of the virus-turned-pandemic aggravated the social suffering caused by neoliberalism; it has also made very clear the effects of capitalist globalisation and raised a debate about the global disorder. The resistance of the people brings up the necessity of building alternatives, which must strengthen and renew internationalism.

The MST organises the donation of fifty tons of food in the interior of Paraná, Brazil, April 2020.
Wellington Lenon / MST

The Past and the Present 

The expansion of the pandemic in Latin America has revealed the precariousness of the system of public health and the eroded conditions of life for the poor, the result of decades of neoliberal policies – as shown by the failure of these policies to respond to the spread of the disease. In the face of the crisis that is unfolding, the hegemonic narrative often raises the urgency to return to the ‘normalcy’ of the past. However, as we have shown, the past has in essence normalised the economic, social, migration, environmental, and climate crisis that characterises the development of neoliberalism. The future cannot simply be reduced to going back to the past. The building of an effective exit to the crisis must be centred on a profound transformation of its true causes.

Suggested Reading 

Boron, Atilio. ‘Notas sobre el imperialismo y la estrategia de seguridad de los Estados Unidos’ [‘Notes on the current affairs of imperialism and on US new national security strategy’]. Las venas del Sur siguen abiertas. Debates sobre el imperialismo de nuestro tiempo [The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates around the imperialism of our time’], edited by López, Emiliano, LeftWord, 2020.

Katz, Claudio. ‘Confluencia del virus en América Latina’ [‘The Confluence of the Virus in Latin America’]. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 14 May 2020.  https://www.thetricontinental.org/es/ba-research/katz-confluencia/

Merino, Gabriel. ‘La reconfiguración imperial de Estados Unidos y las fisuras internas frente al ascenso de China’ [‘The Imperial Reconfiguration of the United States Against the Rise of China’]. Las venas del Sur siguen abiertas. Debates sobre el imperialismo de nuestro tiempo. [The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates around the imperialism of our time’], edited by López, Emiliano, LeftWord, 2020.

This dossier was produced by the Observatory on Latin America and the Caribbean (OBSAL) and the Buenos Aires and São Paulo offices of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research with the collaboration of researchers and activists in the region. Among others, we would like to thank Ana Maldonado of the Frente Francisco de Miranda de Venezuela.

Mangoes, plantains, and avocados. Caracas, Venezuela, 2020.
Dikó / CacriPhotos

Pavel Égüez, Cuarantena / ‘Quarantine’, 2020.

Leaning against a friend’s living room wall is a reproduction of a painting of the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro. My eyes keep drifting towards it during yet another video conference call. Scratched into the black paint in the bottom right corner are the words:

A Fidel en sus 70 años
con la admiracion de 
siempre. 
Guayasamín

To Fidel on your 70th year
with the same admiration as always.
Guayasamín

Oswaldo Guayasamín, Fidel Castro, 1996.

This would be the fourth and final portrait that the indigenous Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919-1999) would paint of Fidel during their decades-long friendship. Rather than Fidel’s signature beard and brows, the painting draws attention to his two cupped hands, reaching towards the sky. It is a broad and slightly fragile offering, as if to say, yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón. I come to offer my heart.

These hands are strikingly similar to the ones that hold up the sun and moon in the central mural of the Ecuadorian National Assembly building. Mural de la Patria (‘Mural of the homeland’), inaugurated in 1988, highlights the country’s long struggle towards national liberation, in which indigenous people, women, peasants, and proletariat leaders led the fight against the evils of colonialism, the military dictatorship, and imperialist intervention. If you look closely, on a panel on the left, ‘CIA’ is printed in clear block letters on a helmet of a Nazi soldier. Above it, patria (‘homeland’) is written. To its left are three women, including indigenous leader Dolores Cacuango and revolutionary Manuela Sáenz, who gained the name ‘the liberator of the liberator’ after saving Simon Bolívar’s life. Painted on fibreglass panels with a mixture of acrylic paint and marble dust, ‘it is a painting made to last a thousand years’, Guayasamín said.

Oswaldo Guayasamín, Mural de la Patria / ‘Mural of the homeland’, National Assembly of Ecuador, 1988.

Working alongside Guayasamín on the mural was Pavel Égüez, then a teenage art school student. Égüez knocked on the door of the great Latin American muralist; soon after, they would begin collaborating together on projects. Last year, on the centenary of Guayasamín’s birth, Égüez wrote ‘I knew him, I worked with him on various occasions. He left us a great legacy: his passion for painting, a life dedicated to art, and his commitment to just causes for humanity’. This commitment to the ‘just causes of humanity’ is what Égüez himself has championed in the three decades since Mural de la Patria was completed.

Égüez is a Latin American painter, muralist, and humanist whose work carries the cries and aspirations of the people of the Americas. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research sat down with Égüez in his second month in quarantine to talk about the situation in Ecuador and his new series of paintings, Cuarantena (‘Quarantine’). He calls on artists to reflect and participate in the struggles of the people, and he talks about what it means to not only stay alive, but to stay human.

Luncheon on the Grass

Pavel Égüez, Cuarantena / ‘Quarantine’, 2020.

Égüez began talking about the dual health and economic crises in Ecuador, a small country which has become one of the hardest hit by COVID-19 in Latin America. As of early June, there have been over 44,000 confirmed cases and 3,700 deaths (adding onto the thousands of ‘probable deaths’ that have not received forensic analysis). In mid-May, the first case was confirmed in one of Ecuador’s remote Amazonian indigenous communities of the Waorani people, adding to the 20,000 indigenous people infected across the Amazon region, which spans eight countries. Nearly 60% of Ecuador’s cases are centred in the major port city of Guayaquil, once brandished by its local government as a ‘model city’. But Égüez knows deeply that the ills revealed by the global pandemic are not a cause but a symptom of what he calls a ‘civilisational crisis’, a ‘tragedy in the political order of globalisation and capitalism’.

‘This crisis also shows that the thirty-year model of a right-wing government in Guayaquil is a total failure – it has created a highly unequal society’. The densely populated city is one of the most unequal in a country that has a poverty rate of 25%. Many of its residents are precariously employed or unemployed and many live hand-to-mouth, meaning that stay-at-home orders cannot be adhered to. The government is mired in corruption scandals, leading to skyrocketing prices of food, medical supplies, and other essential goods (masks are US $12 and body bags US $148). ‘Maybe the government will take advantage of the situation and implement a series of neoliberal policies’, he says, referring to the Organic Law on Humanitarian Support and Organic Law on Regulation of Public Finances pushed through by President Lenín Moreno’s government. Ostensibly passed in response to the pandemic, these laws have pushed austerity measures, further scaling back social security and labour rights in the midst of the crisis.

In the face of this calamity, Égüez is watching. He is witnessing. When we spoke in early May in Égüez’s sixth week of quarantine, he had created forty oil paintings, part of the Cuarantena series. They are haunting portraits on cardboard in black, white, and greys – a stark contrast to the vivid palettes of his more well-known work. ‘All of them are in the shadows to portray the feeling that even if we are protected in our houses, we cannot stop watching the people’s suffering. They have nothing to eat, and the conditions in which they live do not allow for quarantine. You must look through the eyes that [Cuban revolutionary José] Martí had towards the world, towards those who need the most, towards the poor’. In a consoling tone, he adds, ‘With this series, somehow I suffer a little less’.

Pavel Égüez, Almuerzo sobre la hierba / ‘Luncheon on the Grass’, 2020.

Cuarantena finds its balance with another more private series of Érgüez’s artwork in full colour – his interpretations of Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863). The original French pre-Impressionist painting features two fully clothed men picnicking with a naked woman, modelled by fellow painter, Victorine Meurent. Luncheon on the Grass shocked viewers of the time for its bold content and style, was rejected by the Salon exhibition, and has been since subject to countless feminist interpretations. Why was she naked and what did her frank stare mean? Like many women and working-class artists, Meurent has barely made it into the footnotes of art history. Through this now canonical painting, however, she continues to exist. In her glowing bareness and her defiant stare, she is being watched, but she is staring back at us. For Égüez it is a metaphor, and a cry for hope. ‘When you are in lockdown, the only thing that is left is to think about is that luncheon on the grass’.

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe / ‘Luncheon on the Grass’, 1863.

Artists Conquer Our Gaze Through Creation

Pavel Égüez, Grito de la Memoria / ‘Scream of the excluded’, Quito, 2014.

‘This is a time for more intimate work. It is a time for thinking about this historical moment’, Égüez comments on his paintings made in quarantine. They stand in contrast to his work as a muralist, which is normally housed on the streets and is architectural in scale. One of his major murals is the 340-metre-wide Grito de la Memoria (‘Scream of the Excluded’) (2014) in Quito, a ceramic-tiled homage to the importance of the public sphere. His murals privilege public spaces over commercial or private ones. He defends access to public art in the same breath that he defends the public sector, which he believes is vital in combating this global health crisis.

Grito de la Memoria carries with it the great Latin American muralist tradition – Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, Guayasamín, Portinari – that began with the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Birthed from the struggle for land and liberty, Mexican muralism inspired a movement for the decolonisation of art and culture. Under Latin America’s colonial history, Égüez says, ‘not only were social and political subjects excluded – even the landscape was excluded from art. Everything was kidnapped. If we don’t decolonise culture, we won’t have another way of seeing. We have to conquer our own gaze, and artists conquer our own gaze through creation’.

People in the Struggle Show the Artists the Way

Pavel Égüez, La Patria Naciendo de la Ternura / ‘The Nation Being Born of Tenderness’, Caracas, Venzuela, 2006.

In the pursuit of a new way of seeing – a people’s aesthetic – Égüez highlights the protagonism of social movements: ‘You cannot speak about “the popular” without raising the flags of the people, the key ideas being the struggle for land and for identity, and the recovery of history and of indigenous cultures that were erased’. In Égüez’s murals, this is exactly what you find – the excluded become the protagonists and those who labour become the owners of their capacities. In Égüez’s words, ‘people in the struggle show the artists the way; the artists follow their path when the people open the borders’.

‘Cuba opened up a new path for us, so did the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)’, Égüez says of the Brazilian social movement that connected us. Under the banner for the struggle for land, agrarian reform, and social transformation, ‘the MST emerged as one of the first movements that has been concerned about key issues such as food sovereignty, defending the land, and fighting against big capital, agribusiness, and the uneven distribution of land’, he explained.

Égüez has a lesson for artists around the world: join social movements. After all, he adds, ‘social movements build a thesis for the future’, and the ideas and demands that emerge from movements are what can ‘potentialise art’. Égüez puts this theory into practice, as demonstrated by the art that he makes available online: Migrantes (‘Migrants’), Dictadura nunca mais (‘Dictatorship Never Again’), Ele não (‘Not Him’), Ayotizinapa, Xenophobia, Free Assange, 8 de Marzo (‘March 8’), Venezuela. These are just some of the people’s struggles that make up his body of work of more than 10,000 pieces that has been created in the service of social movements.

To Not Only Stay Alive, but to Stay Human

In Pavel Égüez’s Cuarentena series, he includes a quote from George Orwell’s dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949: ‘The object was not to stay alive, but to stay human’. Égüez elaborates on this quote: ‘What capitalism has shown us in this crisis is its inhuman way of facing the crisis … To be human is to live together, to take care of each other, for the state to take care of the people and our culture – what neoliberalism has failed to do. We need a different model, one where we can be human’. We need a people’s culture that might be able to usher us through this historic global moment and open a new path for life.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been building a network of movement-aligned artists jointly with the international political platform of the International People’s Assembly. We launched the first call for submissions for the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions. This series of four online exhibitions over the coming months will serve as cultural instruments to enliven and deepen the political process of the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle, a political platform that has emerged from hundreds of people’s movements, political organisations, and networks from across the globe. The next call for submissions is on the theme: neoliberalism.

We invite you to contribute art to this process.

We hope you can join us.

We hope to meet again, in the struggle, where we can once again have luncheons on the grass, as human beings.

Opening of ‘I Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition: Capitalism’

Tings Chak leads the Art Department of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Pavel Égüez is a well-known Latin American artist, painter, illustrator, and muralist. He was the Cultural Counselor of Ecuador of the Ecuadorian Embassy in Brazil and in Venezuela. His broad artistic trajectory can be summed up by dozens of murals and exhibitions in countries throughout Latin America and Europe.

8 May 2020: As part of South Africa’s community screening and testing programme, a Khayelitsha Eastern community team tests farm workers in Faure, where a number of positive cases were discovered. A health worker signals what the minimum social distance should be.
Barry Christianson / New Frame

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.

Little of this vision has come to pass for the majority of the world’s people. What workers’ movements and anti-colonial movements have been able to gain in the past hundred years has been chipped away at by a regime of austerity that cuts public funds for the right to health and well-being, that sells the right to provide these services for profit to the private sector, and that therefore cheapens human rights into commodities that remain outside the reach of those without sufficient income.

During the global pandemic, there has been much talk about ‘essential’ workers and about reforms such as shorter work hours, better working conditions, and higher wages. But – as in previous crises – all of this is likely to be forgotten once the crisis is seen to have ended. The bourgeois governments are not capable of making these reforms permanent, or of permanently rewarding the healthcare workers in a ‘normal’ situation. Ruling classes around the world punish any government that attempts this small dose of humanity because – they argue – such welfare payments create a ‘moral hazard’, and any permanent workers’ rights create a bad example to other workers.

In our dossier no. 29, we argue against the return to normal – specifically in the healthcare systems of the bourgeois order. In Part 1, we go over what the pandemic has shown us about the healthcare system; then, in Part 2, we attend to the voices of leaders of healthcare workers; in the final part of this dossier, we lay out an agenda for a new healthcare compact based on the demands of healthcare workers.

9 May 2020: From left to right, Luyanda Mto, Dr. Celeste Jonker, and Buhle Nkomonda at the pop-up testing centre outside of the Khayelitsha District Hospital. The centre was set up to help swab more than 270 employees of three shopping centres who had close contact with other workers there who tested positive.
Barry Christianson / New Frame

Part 1: What Capitalism Has Done to Our Health System

In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth created by the United Nations’ Secretary-General looked carefully at the global healthcare sector and concluded that ‘Business as usual is untenable’. This was a very strong judgment. The 2014-15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa was fresh on the minds of the members of the Commission; looking at that outbreak, the Commission’s final report noted, ‘We have seen how inaction and chronic underinvestment can compromise human health, and also lead to serious economic and social setbacks. Investing in health workers is one part of the broader objective of strengthening health systems and social protection and essentially constitutes the first line of defence against international health crises’. By 2030, the Commissioners wrote, the world would need at least an additional 40 million healthcare and social service workers; they projected that there would be a shortfall of at least 18 million health workers – most of them in the poorer nations. This was years before the coronavirus swept across the globe.

In February 2018, a group of thirty microbiologists, zoologists, and public health experts met at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. They created a priority list of dangerous viruses, particularly those that had no vaccines; the final list contained SARS, MERS, and one named Disease X. Peter Daszak, chair of the Forum on Microbial Threats at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, who was at that meeting, recently said that COVID-19 is similar to how the scientists understood Disease X. Speaking of anticipating COVID-19, Daszak told The New York Times, ‘The problem isn’t that prevention was impossible. It was very possible. But we didn’t do it. Governments thought it was too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies operate for profit’.

A year later, in September 2019, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – co-chaired by Gro Brundtland (former Director General of the WHO) and Elhadj As Sy (head of the Red Cross and Red Crescent) – warned that ‘the world is not prepared for a fast-moving, virulent respiratory pathogen pandemic’. The report went further:

The 1918 global influenza pandemic sickened one third of the world population and killed as many as 50 million people – 2.8% of the total population. If a similar contagion occurred today with a population four times larger and travel times anywhere in the world less than 36 hours, 50 – 80 million people could perish. In addition to tragic levels of mortality, such a pandemic could cause panic, destabilize national security and seriously impact the global economy and trade.

Their warning was not heeded.

On 15 February 2020, the WHO’s Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gave an impassioned speech at the Munich Security Conference. ‘The world’, he said, ‘has operated on a cycle of panic and neglect. We throw money at an outbreak, and when it’s over, we forget about it and do nothing to prevent the next one. The world spends billions of dollars preparing for a terrorist attack, but relatively little preparing for the attack of a virus, which could be far more deadly and far more damaging economically, politically, socially’.

In September 2019, world leaders gathered at the UN to take a pledge for universal healthcare by 2030. Gro Brundtland, who had been the head of the WHO, said that healthcare could not be left to the free market, since such a model would allow only the wealthy to access healthcare, with healthcare costs driving the poor deeper into poverty. There is an urgent need for public finance. Cutting health budgets, she said, is a ‘huge mistake’. The current head of the WHO – Dr. Tedros – emphasised that ‘health is a political choice’.

Over the past forty years, as the regime of austerity has driven governments to cut social and health spending, healthcare systems have been eroded. The impact can be summarized as follows:

• Cuts in public spending for healthcare, notably for public health.
• An increase in private sector involvement in healthcare delivery.
• An increase in unregulated fee-for-service medical care.
• An increase in the reliance on private insurance to pay for medical services.
• A reduction of healthcare workers, cuts in their wages and pensions, and erosion of unionisation.
• A rise in the price of medical care and of pharmaceutical drugs.

A review of 161 International Monetary Fund (IMF) country reports in 2018-2019 shows that the governments of the poorer nations are under pressure to make substantial budget cuts; one of the areas where the cuts are significant is in the public health sector.

Dr. Bernard Lown, a cardiologist who invented defibrillation, taught at the Harvard School of Public Health, and is a Senior Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (USA), puts his view on the privatisation of healthcare plainly:

Healthcare does not lend itself to the efficiencies of industrialization. Common sense indicates that patients cannot be standardized, and most of their parts are not interchangeable. Healthcare is a customized service resisting commodification and is incompatible with the efficiencies of [the] industrialized assembly line or other mass production technologies. Such basics are ignored by the high priests of market medicine. Market medicine is additionally flawed because it diverts economic resources from the community, from medical education and from research. The profits generated are not reinvested locally but are distributed to remote investors and senior management as large dividends, hefty bonuses and egregious salaries. The market has been presented as the solution, but now we know it to be the problem.

13 May 2020: Health professionals from the government programme Consultório na Rua (‘Street Clinic’) attend to unhoused patients early in the morning in São Paulo, Brazil.
PMSP/ Fotos Públicas.

Part 2: What the Healthcare Workers Say

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research spoke to four leaders in healthcare workers’ movements, one from each of the countries where we are based. Each of these leaders speaks at a different scale of struggle, giving us a window into the levels of the challenges that healthcare workers face.

Argentina

Understanding the situation in Argentina without considering the World Bank’s intervention in South America would be inadequate. In 1993, the World Bank focused its World Development Report on the issue of public health. While the Bank called for an increase in government spending in healthcare, it focused its attention on what it called ‘Promot[ing] diversity and competition’. By ‘diversity’ and ‘competition’, the Bank meant that the healthcare field must be diversified by increasing the for-profit sector, which would provide competition against the public sector. Rather than call for universal health coverage, the Bank encouraged the creation of private insurance schemes, the emergence of for-profit delivery of medical services, and the end to protections for domestic pharmaceutical companies.

Viviana Garcia, a leader in the healthcare workers’ union in Argentina (The Trade Union Federation of Health Professionals of the Argentine Republic or FESPROSA), told us that the impact of the World Bank policy hit most of the countries of South America very hard. She offers the examples of Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, which saw the increase of private-public partnerships in healthcare delivery, the entry of profit-driven insurance schemes, and the overall commodification of healthcare. In these countries, the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the disaster caused by the destruction of public health systems. Ecuador’s health system has utterly collapsed, with the bodies of many of those killed by COVID-19 piling up in the streets.

In Argentina, the National Constitution of 1994 established that health is an essential public right. In 1946, the country developed a healthcare system inspired by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Since then, there have been several significant attempts to reform the system, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. The health system is a mixed one, with a State sector (available to everyone), a sector for union members (Obras Sociales), and a private sector (predominantly used by the wealthy). Despite its fragmentation, the mixed system covers almost the entire population.

Pressure from the World Bank report of 1993 pushed the government to erode the public character of the state institutions in healthcare, notably with the creation of self-managed hospitals that had to rely on private financing and the privatisation of services, as well as on the creation of a precarious workforce. The new plan led to the decentralisation of healthcare to the provinces, cities, and towns, but without any proper funding mechanism; this meant that these levels of healthcare provision had to rely upon private funds, which led to inequality in the system.

14 May 2020: FESPROSA president Fernanda Boriotti (right) at the actions organised with the Association of State Workers (Asociación Trabajadores del Estado) in Argentina. Their demands include better working conditions and wages, a sufficient supply of quality personal protection equipment, and adequate subsidies for family allowances and an emergency fund.
Sofía Alberti

The highly privatised and unequal Chilean and Colombian models could not be applied in Argentina thanks to the decisive action of organised workers. It was because of the unions and the emergence of progressive governments from 2003 to 2015 that important advances were made to defend the people’s right to healthcare and the rights of medical workers. For example, a universal child allowance was provided, health plans were developed for reproductive and sexual health, a national vaccination plan was established, job security was guaranteed for the country’s 26,000 health workers, and a path was opened for the improvement of their working conditions. Even as these were important reforms, they were insufficient to respond to the collective needs of a segmented and unequal society produced by the neoliberal policies of the 1990s.

The government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) swung the political pendulum to the right, pushing healthcare to an unsustainable limit. The 2016 budget for the Ministry of Health vastly underfunded the work of healthcare provision during a lethal dengue epidemic, and the Macri government cut the budget even further in 2017 and 2018. During Macri’s tenure, according to the Ministry of Finance, the government cut the healthcare budget by 22%. In 1990, the healthcare budget was around 10% of the GDP, which would fall to 9.6% in 2015, when Macri took over; by the time Macri left office, the WHO calculates, the health budget had fallen to 8% of GDP.

The Macri government cut the budgets for programmes to reduce and treat sexually-transmitted diseases (which then saw a dramatic increase in congenital syphilis and HIV-AIDS), vector-borne diseases (dengue, chikungunya, and zika), and vaccine-preventable diseases (which saw doses discontinued through a national scheme); the government also cut programmes to treat cancer. Macri went to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan, whose interest payments alone could have funded 3,200 modern hospitals. The work on four hospitals in the Buenos Aires suburbs had to be put on hold. During the Macri years, the medical system in Argentina saw an increase in informal work, the destruction of hospital services, the lack of funds for equipment, cuts in salaries, and layoffs of 1,600 workers from the country’s iconic El Hospital Nacional Posadas.

The current progressive government led by President Alberto Fernández took office in December 2019, just before the pandemic swept into South America. One of the first acts of the new government was to restore the Ministry of Health to its full stature, although it will take time for the government and the unions to recover the devastation left behind by Macri.

India

If not for the 900,000 Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers, India’s response to the coronavirus would be much less robust. These ASHA workers received no personal protective equipment (PPE) and work for a modest remuneration – which, up until recently, was as low as Rs. 1,000 to 1,500 per month (roughly US $13 to 20) paid only once a year or once every two years. They go from house to house across the country to check on people, deliver medicines, check for symptoms of illnesses, and carry out basic medical care. These workers have become the most important people in India’s struggle against COVID-19. For their trouble, they have been beaten by the police and faced threats from their communities – including some of their husbands. Since government officials tell them to make their own PPE rather than make any effort to secure proper protection for them, they have had to improvise their own protection.

Studies of epidemic outbreaks show that community health workers, such as the ASHA workers, are integral to tracing the pattern of the infection and are essential for transmitting information about how to break the chain of infection. Each ASHA worker has to cover thirty households in her area in a week, constantly keeping in touch with the people to monitor the spread of the disease. Yet, in India, these workers are not even treated as workers but as ‘volunteers’ and they are routinely disrespected. On 18 April, the ASHA workers conducted a symbolic protest; they wore a black ribbon or a black scarf (chunni) to indicate their dissatisfaction with the lack of support from the government.

Surekha Rani, the General Secretary of the ASHA Workers’ Union (affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, CITU) in the Indian state of Haryana (26 million), spoke to us about the struggles of these workers. The ASHA worker scheme was created by the National Rural Health Mission in 2005; the ASHA Workers’ Union in Haryana was formed in 2009. There are currently 20,000 ASHA workers in Haryana, 15,000 of them in the union and at least 18,000 of them active in the workers’ movement against the government. The union first emerged during the ASHA workers’ fight to be recognised as workers – rather than as volunteers – and to receive a minimum wage, social security, and other benefits. The ASHA workers perform at least forty different tasks – such as pre-natal care and immunisation for children – on behalf of the health department.

13 May 2020: ASHA workers Lathika and Usha inspect homes and surrounding premises for possible mosquito breeding sites, give instructions to residents, and track those with potential COVID-19 symptoms. Lathika is a Thiruvananthapuram District Committee member of the Kerala State ASHA Workers’ Federation (KSAWF), affiliated with the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).
Subin Dennis / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

In 2013, the union began an agitation to ensure that ASHA workers be paid regularly. Fourteen thousand ASHA workers took to the streets, in response to which Chief Minister of Haryana Bhupinder Singh Hooda said that one of the CITU comrades should be burnt to death. When he said that he could not agree to the union demands because he himself was going hungry, the union collected wheat flour from each of the ASHA members’ houses. ‘We made a parcel of this flour and sent it to the Chief Minister’, Surekha Rani said. ‘This embarrassed the Chief Minister, who called us to his house, apologised, and agreed to raise the incentives and the salary’. It was a start, but again, ‘it was insufficient’, Surekha Rani told us.

In 2015-16, the government said that the ASHA workers must perform their work in a digital format, but – as Surekha Rani explained – ‘the government did not provide any gadgets, nor did they provide any training for how to use the software to update information’.

In 2017, an all-India agitation began, which the union in Haryana joined, holding an indefinite strike. On five occasions during this period, the union negotiated with the state government. On 2 February, the state government agreed to pay the workers a monthly salary of Rs. 4000 – double the income they had been receiving – plus incentives from the central government; they also agreed to give the women workers insurance so that, upon their death, their families would receive Rs. 300,000. To facilitate their own digital information policy, the government agreed to provide an android phone to each worker. But, ‘true to its nature’, Surekha Rani said, ‘the government went back on its promises’. The workers demonstrated from March to June 2018, and since the government did not implement their promises, the workers began an indefinite strike from 7 June. The strike went on for eight days. When the union threatened to court mass arrest, the government said that it would implement the agreement, and it provided an assurance in writing. The strike ended on 15 June.

Once more, the government went back on the agreement. When the union found out that the Chief Minister of Haryana at the time, Manohar Lal Khattar, would be at a meeting in Karnal (Haryana), union members set up a tent and held an indefinite protest there. Khattar met with the union and said that their demands had been accepted, and that the finance department would soon issue a notification. ‘We told the Chief Minister that till the notification comes we will demonstrate at the district headquarters’, Surekha Rani said. This is what they have done. Men in the government would disparage them, making sexist comments about their determination to get their salaries. But the ASHA workers are not deterred. ‘We protest every two months’, Surekha Rani told us, ‘demanding the release of our salaries. We are known as a fighting [ladaku] force’.

The struggle of ASHA workers has inspired other workers in Haryana. Anganwadi (childcare) workers began their own strikes – so did the municipal workers, and so did the public transportation workers. Chief Minister Khattar accused the striking workers of being communists and thugs [badmash]. ‘We coined a slogan to counter him’, Surekha Rani said. ‘If fighting for our rights, asking for employment, asking for food, if these demands are the work of thugs, then this Red Flag of ours is famous for being carried by thugs and we will continue to be thugs’. The Chief Minister was forced to apologise.

Today, in the face of the rapidly spreading pandemic, ‘The ASHA workers are sad and demoralised’, Surekha Rani told us. ‘They are of the view that we are the ones on the ground who are working to break the chain of infection, and yet the officials are not listening to our problems’.

9 May 2020: Inside the testing facility at the Khayelitsha District Hospital, South Africa.
Barry Christianson / New Frame

South Africa

On 22 April, South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa announced a stimulus package of R500 billion. Stunningly, the package did not directly provide funds for healthcare providers who are at the forefront in the struggle to contain COVID-19. Lerato Madumo, the President of the Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union (YNITU), an affiliate of the South African Trade Union Federation (SAFTU), told us that this speech spurred her union to start a campaign calling for COVID nurses to stay home. The YNITU had planned a May Day strike but called it off the day before and held a press conference instead. They wrote to the president asking for urgent attention for the health providers; if their reasonable demands for compensation and safe working conditions are not addressed, this ‘will leave us with no choice but to put down our tools and stay at home’.

Sufficient testing kits and PPE are not available. Testing of providers is essential, and yet it is not happening anywhere near the scale that it is needed. ‘If one nurse contracts the virus’, Madumo says, ‘the whole shift of nurses end up being COVID-19 positive’. The medical practitioners’ union, the South African Medical Association, said that what PPE is provided is of such a poor quality that when a doctor walks, the PPE tears. In Johannesburg’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, the nurses had to come to work with raincoats that they purchased and which they had to disinfect; all this in lieu of proper PPE. The money for this improvised PPE comes from the nurses, who are paid abysmal salaries. What PPE is being provided by the government does not seem to have reached the nurses.

The president responded to the union’s demands with the statement that to strike would be a ‘criminal offence’ under the Disaster Management Act (2002). Madumo told us that the Occupation Health and Safety Act (1993) makes it clear that ‘if you believe the environment you work in is unsafe, you have the right to withdraw your labour. So, it is not even a question of whether it will be a criminal act or not; it is an issue of us saying that our government is committing a crime against humanity. Nurses are human beings. You cannot ask a soldier to fight in a war and not give them protection in the form of bulletproof vests; it is just not correct’. ‘If the frontliners continue to be sick’, Madumo said, ‘it means by the end of this COVID-19, we will have a healthcare system that does not even have healthcare providers’.

‘Even before we got into COVID-19’, Madumo told us, ‘our health system was already ailing. At the top of the list was the shortage of nurses. We went into this pandemic with a skeleton nursing staff’. In South Africa, 84% of the population is served by the public sector, and yet the private sector – which only serves 16% of the people – hires 60% of the health professionals; there is a structural understaffing of the public sector health system. The union carried out a survey which shows that there are unemployed qualified nurses. Because the government refuses to hire them, the nurses on staff are working harder than is healthy for them. ‘Nurses – besides contracting coronavirus – are getting emotionally and psychologically crushed; there is no other word to use’, said Madumo.

The level of attrition among nurses and other medical staff is extremely high, and it is often linked to widespread overwork, emotional distress, dissatisfaction, and burnout. Managers of hospitals have gained authority at the expense of clinicians and nurses; they run the hospitals like a business proposition. The hospitals have begun to rely upon nursing agencies, which traffic in the casualised employment of nurses. Madumo suggests that these agencies are dangerous because they send nurses from one hospital to another, and if these nurses contract COVID-19 – and are not tested – then they can carry the disease across hospitals. ‘It becomes very difficult for infection control’, Madumo says.

Nurses have been demanding that, rather than all hospitals having COVID-19 wards, some hospitals should be designated to treat COVID-19 patients. ‘Let’s get one hospital to be the one that admits all suspected and infected cases; then the staff should come on a rotational system, a roster that will allow them to be accommodated in the nurses’ residence or doctors’ quarters of that facility’, Madumo proposes. Here the nurses and doctors should be given proper equipment and be regularly tested. Nurses and doctors have first-hand knowledge of tackling a disease, but the political class does not take their proposals seriously.

The YNITU is currently campaigning for proper personal protective equipment for all health workers, and for nurses who come into contact with a COVID-19 positive person to be tested and isolated for 14 days. Though the government is currently testing nurses who have been in contact with a case of COVID-19, it expects nurses to keep working until they receive their results – likely putting others at risk of infection.

Finally, Madumo told us that her union, YNITU, argues that this pandemic shows why healthcare should be nationalised. Each district, each province is doing what it wants, she says. ‘Nationalisation will ensure that every facility will get to be under the eagle eye of our national department of health’, Madumo said. ‘We feel that we cannot allow the private sector to do as they please as they have been doing for years. Their focus is profit-making: they insist that their nurses use one mask for five days’, she told us, even when the mask is only viable for far less time. While the masks are supposed to be disposed of after treating each patient, the nurses are also being asked to recycle them, putting themselves and their patients at an increased risk of contracting the virus.

Brazil

Brazil has among the strongest universal healthcare systems in the world, the result of social struggles led by the people. After more than twenty years under a dictatorship, the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 established the foundation for the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde or

SUS), the country’s free and comprehensive universal healthcare system. The SUS includes programmes for health surveillance, immunisation, HIV-AIDS control, care through the Family Health Programme, and a variety of other crucial medical interventions. However, the governments of the right and the neo-fascists have compromised Brazil’s laws and its universal health system. Constitutional Amendment 95 (2016) – the year of the ‘soft coup’ that unseated Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party) and installed right-wing Michel Temer – forced an austerity policy that freezes public spending for twenty years. This mechanism deepened the underfunding of the healthcare system, causing the system to become even more vulnerable in the face of the global pandemic.

Hugo Bethsaida Leme, a family and community physician who works in the public Basic Health Unit in Londrina (Paraná) and is a member of the National Network of Popular Doctors (Rede Nacional de Médicas e Médicos Populares), spoke to us about the impact of COVID-19 in Brazil. He told us that the SUS had been ‘historically strangled due to underfunding (approximately 4% of the GDP), a process that deepened after the coup of 2016’. The system was starved of resources. Underfunding of the system, in addition to the departure of Cuban doctors caused by Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, means that ‘many communities are without access to the More Doctors for Brazil Program (PMMB), which generates an overload in urgent care and emergency units with cases that could have been attended in the Basic Health Units (UBS)’.

The SUS was designed with great care and, if properly funded and managed, would be better able to deal with the global pandemic. However, the system simply has insufficient resources, and even if these are available, they are distributed unequally; most intensive care units and intensive care physicians are located in Brazil’s south and south-east.

Not only is the SUS underfunded, but the support given to the for-profit sector has undermine public health. Half of the ICU beds are in the private sector, which serves only a quarter of the population. This for-profit sector, Dr. Leme says, ‘sucks resources from the SUS and has increasingly been prioritised to the detriment of public health’. The private or for-profit sector, Dr. Leme told us, ‘has always been parasitical towards the SUS; it is only committed to its shareholders while the majority of the population continues to depend solely on the public system’. To confront such inequities and the increasing role of the for-profit sector, the Beds for All Campaign (Campanha Leitos para Todos) was started as a reaction to COVID-19; this campaign seeks to bring all hospital beds (both public and private) into one pool for this emergency, so as not to exhaust the public sector hospitals, and to divert patients to the private sector medical centres.

Nothing has made it more difficult for medical professionals than the callous anti-scientific attitude of the neo-fascists led by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro. ‘The neo-fascist federal government has done a disservice by ignoring the gravity of the situation and calling on workers to die, and/or killing people with risk factors [who are forced] to go back to work in order to benefit the economic interests of the few’, said Dr. Leme.

There are not enough tests, which has obviously meant that the confirmed cases of COVID-19 are low, and which in turn has ‘generated confusion among our people regarding the disease and adhesion to the measures to break the chain’. Low levels of testing mean that the medical workers are ‘often working in the dark, without having a real dimension of the situation, including whether they are contaminated or not’, said Dr. Leme. There is just not enough PPE, not enough medical equipment, and not enough science-based action from the government.

Dr. Leme insists that the medical question must not be reduced to the disease itself. Health, he says, must be seen in a broad, social sense. Due to the large number of unemployed and informal workers, he says, and due to the absence of labour rights and social policies, there has been an increase in hunger; hunger weakens the body and threatens illness. As a consequence of entrenched patriarchy, there have also been increased rates of violence against women during the lockdown. Those with chronic diseases – such as hypertension and diabetes – cannot see doctors during the quarantine and are therefore in danger of their health deteriorating.

For Dr. Leme, as with Dr. Teodros, health is a political issue. ‘It is urgent’, he said, ‘to fight for a sovereign, democratic, and popular government that rebuilds the SUS with adequate funds so that it can offer the necessary and adequate services to the people’ – despite the messages propagated by mainstream media, ‘which demoraliz[e] the public health system and praises the private sector’. Such a government needs to improve the social conditions of its people, and to champion workers’ rights. Only then can society ‘develop in a dignified, humane, and healthy way so that if a new situation such as this arises, we can be more prepared and always put the life, rights, and welfare of our people as a priority’. The SUS, Dr. Leme, says, ‘must be a permanent part of the struggle for our people’.

7 de maio de 2020: Equipe de médicos e enfermeiros comemoram alta de pacientes recuperados da COVID-19 no Abelardo Santos, o maior hospital público do Pará.
Marcelo Seabra/Ag.Pará/Fotos Públicas.

Part 3: What Healthcare Workers Want

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research studied the demands of healthcare worker unions across the world and, based on these demands, we have constructed a list. Most of the unions have very broad demands that go far beyond those of their own profession. These include broader social and economic transformation, which provides a new foundation for social life and which minimises the health hazards produced by capitalist social relations. For instance, the abolishment of the condition of homelessness (and not of homeless people, as attempted by neoliberal governments) would both help people to practice physical distancing and improve the health conditions of those who are forced – because of a lack of money – to live on the streets.

1. Immediately focus the capacity of all healthcare services – both public and private – towards the treatment of serious cases of COVID-19.
2. Provide special assistance to regions and communities that are severely impacted by the pandemic.
3. Enforce policies such as isolation to stem the spread of the virus; institute necessary subsidies and policies to allow workers to obey the quarantine without going hungry – including informal workers – such as minimum income programs, social rent, unemployment insurance (even for non-contributors), and enable emergency access to idle properties to provide housing for those who need it.
4. Protect workers by providing high quality PPE and masks, as well as other necessary equipment. Frontline workers must be adequately trained to confront the disease.
5. Guarantee proper health worker identification cards for frontline health workers so that they can carry out essential health work without facing fines, violence, or other punishment issued by the State under isolation, curfew, and quarantine orders.
6. Substantially increase COVID-19 testing for health workers.
7. Increase equipment for hospitals and other medical centres, including ventilators and Intensive Care Unit beds.
8. Acknowledge that workers have the right to withdraw their labour if they decide that to work entails an imminent risk to their health or life (this is based on the International Labour Organisation Conventions 155 and 187).
9. Immediately disburse funds to set up training schools for health workers, including doctors, nurses, and public health workers.
10. Increase the salaries of health workers and pay them on a frequent and regular basis.
11. Guarantee the most generous health and life insurance schemes for health workers, who are the most likely to fall ill or die from the disease. All people should be guaranteed free and universal healthcare.
12. Guarantee the inclusion of health workers’ unions on committees that formulate policies for the health sector in general and for the COVID-19 crisis in particular, and that they have a voice in helping to determine such policies.
13. Immediately channel significant funds towards an expansion of public health programmes, including for primary healthcare, and lift austerity policies.
14. Shift the entire health sector – from hospitals to rural clinics, from medical equipment manufacturers to pharmaceutical makers – into the public sector.
15. Immediately turn over adequate funds for research related to this virus and to similar viruses.
16. Ensure that the measures achieved in the period of the epidemic are maintained after its resolution.

12 May 2020: Nurses from a Sebokeng clinic gather to commemorate International Nurses Day in South Africa.
Ihsaan Haffejee / New Frame

What is the difference between a virus and bacteria?

Virus and bacteria are two major kinds of microbes infecting humans. Bacteria are one of the oldest living organisms and have all of the necessary components to live and reproduce. Only a small number of bacteria cause human disease; many of them are good bacteria. Some are even necessary for our survival.

Viruses are not defined as fully living organisms, as they cannot reproduce by themselves. They are a small bit of genetic material contained in a protein envelope. They are also generally much smaller than bacteria.

Viruses are genetic parasites that need other living cells to reproduce themselves. When they invade the cells of their host, they hijack the cell’s biochemical machinery to make a very large number of copies of themselves. These copies are then released from the cell, sometimes killing it in the process, then infecting other cells and repeating the cycle.

Bacteria are easier to kill, as they have their own distinct chemical processes that drugs can attack, and they reproduce more slowly than viruses. We have a whole host of medicines, from the older sulfa drugs to other antibiotics, that successfully control bacterial infections in our bodies.

What is the novel coronavirus?

SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a family of viruses called coronaviruses that usually infect mammals and birds. There are seven coronaviruses that infect humans, four of which have crossed over earlier. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, is one of the coronaviruses; it has spiked projections on its surface, which resemble a crown or corona when studied under a microscope.

The chances of viruses crossing over from other species to human beings increase if these species are in close contact with us. Therefore both, factory farming and live markets of animals and birds provide opportunities for such transfers, which are called zoonotic transfers.

Bats often serve as a major reservoir of these viruses. The crossover from bats to humans can happen directly, or it can happen through other animals acting as intermediate hosts. Cats, monkeys, pangolins, and dogs can also harbour such viruses, and therefore can act as intermediaries between bats and us. Several viruses – such as Ebola, rabies, encephalitis, SARS (now renamed as SARS-CoV-1), Chikungunya, Zika, and Nipah – have jumped from bats to humans in this way.

Apart from bat viruses, some of the other viruses that have caused epidemics in humans come from birds and pigs. The most well-known virus group that is shared by pigs, birds, and us, is made up of the different strains of flu viruses. It was a swine flu or bird flu that was responsible for the 1918 Spanish flu, which probably started in Kansas. It also caused the 2009-2010 pandemic that started in North America, infecting approximately 1.6 million people and killing an estimated 284,000. The deadly H5N1 influenza, which is currently seen to be a major threat, is a combination of swine and avian flu. It spreads through birds and then to the human population through domesticated ducks, poultry, or poultry farms.

As viruses do not have the full mechanisms of a living cell, they use those of host cells. Viruses have either DNA or RNA. DNA carries our genetic code, while RNA uses this genetic code to produce the proteins that our body needs. RNA viruses include hepatitis C, Ebola, SARS (both variants), influenza, polio, measles, and HIV, which causes AIDS. The novel coronavirus – or SARS-CoV-2 – is an RNA virus.

Why has this novel coronavirus caused so many deaths?

SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV-1 both had much higher mortality rates than SARS-CoV-2. In SARS, the infection to fatality rate (people dead out of the total infected) was 11 per cent, while in MERS, it was approximately 35 per cent. In comparison, SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 deaths are in the region of 1 per cent – much less than SARS or MERS. However, this is significantly higher than the flu, which has an infection to fatality rate of less than .1 per cent.

SARS-CoV-2 is dangerous, as it is easily passed from one person to another. It is this ability to transmit easily from one infected person to another that leads to a very large number of infections, and therefore to a very high level of total deaths. SARS-CoV-2 affects people over 65 much more seriously. The higher the age group, the more likely they have other risk factors such as heart disease, diabetics, cancer, asthma, or other chronic diseases. It is this – among other risk groups, such as those that are immune compromised or have existing respiratory conditions – that is seeing a much higher death rate in the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been compounded in countries with a large presence of nursing homes, where elderly patients with weak immune systems and many chronic diseases live close together, fuelling the spread of the infection. But this does not mean that COVID-19 is dangerous only for the elderly.

SAR-CoV-2 has more effectively adapted itself to its human hosts than SARS-CoV-1 and MERS have. When the current version of the COVID-19 virus mutated, either in us or in a yet unknown intermediate host, it became particularly effective in binding itself to human cells. The spike protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 binds to the ACE-2 receptors that lie on the surface of a large number of our cells, from the lungs to our liver, kidneys, and intestinal tract.

The initial infection is most likely to occur through airborne particles carried in droplets released by those infected. Therefore, the initial infection takes place in the nose, throat, or upper respiratory tract. If the body can fight the infection there and defeat it, it may exhibit itself only as a mild throat irritation, dry cough, or mild fever. Quite often, people who are infected do not even show symptoms; they are asymptomatic. But both those who have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic can infect others.

In most people, COVID-19 is not a serious disease. But in a small proportion of cases, the infection travels to the lungs – the lower respiratory tract – triggering pneumonia. The lungs in such patients show a ground glass effect visible in CT scans. For older people, it can also be accompanied by secondary bacterial infections.

In some cases, COVID-19 becomes particularly dangerous when it causes the immune system to overreact and go berserk. This heightened immune response not only attacks the infected cells, but also the healthy cells, creating what is called a cytokine storm and damaging the lungs even further. It is the cytokine storm triggered by the flu of 1918-20 that caused its high mortality. Further, as the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can bind to other organs in the body by attaching itself to the ACE-2 surface receptor, it also attacks other vital organs and can contribute to multiple organ failures.

What is the possibility for the creation of a vaccine or medicines to stem the pandemic?

Vaccination.

Vaccination became the major route to control infectious diseases caused by viruses. While we did use vaccines against bacterial diseases like the plague, and still use them against other diseases such as typhoid, with the discovery of broad-spectrum antibiotic drugs like sulfa drugs, other antibiotic drugs like penicillin, bacterial infections have become easier to control.

Viral infections are fought largely by the body’s disease fighting mechanisms. Our antibodies and T cells fight any external invasion, whether by a bacteria or virus. Vaccines trick the body into creating antibodies in our system to fight against infections of specific viruses. The body’s immune system remembers the invaders introduced by the vaccine and knows how to fight the actual infection when it presents itself. For viral diseases, real herd immunity comes from vaccination, which protects a significant part of the population and thereby breaks the transmission chain.

Research institutions and companies are taking different approaches to vaccines. One set of approaches is to use existing technologies – that is, live, inactive, or parts of the viruses to trigger the creation of antibodies. These vaccines are well-known. The other approach is to use the advances in genetic engineering to create new types of vaccines. Both sets of vaccines are entering clinical trials. Most candidate vaccines fail during the clinical trial phase of vaccine development; they may not develop antibodies, the effect may be too small, or they may even trigger negative responses such as an even more serious infections than would have taken place without the vaccine. Vaccine development can take a minimum of 12 to 18 months.

Vaccines are often developed with full patent protection to make profits for private pharmaceutical companies, even though large amounts of public money are invested for their development. Philanthropic capital – which has floated bodies such as GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance) – claims that it supports public good, but has refused to accept that vaccines should be available without any patent protection. China, on the other hand, has said that it will break the chains of patent protection and offer a vaccine as a public good.

Once a drug works, or a vaccine is developed, duplicating it is within the powers of any scientifically developed country. The ‘protection’ against such developments is in international treaties and geopolitics (such as in the World Trade Organisation’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights or TRIPS)

Medicines.

Existing drugs are being repurposed to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Human trials will teach us if these repurposed medicines are effective. Several drug trials are in progress, such as a set of drugs being tested through the  ‘Solidarity Trials’, the World Health Organisation.