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 Western world lives in discontent. Progressive models have failed to maintain the levels of politicisation, mystique, capacity to question, transformative purpose, and possibilities of concrete changes for the masses. At the same time, neoliberal projects systematically fail to fulfil their own aspirations: to take advantage of new technologies, develop entrepreneurial capacities, and achieve noticeable improvements in the population’s living standards.

Models of success linked to upward mobility through work or associated with people becoming their own bosses fail to meet expectations and place the masses in a situation of constant frustration and discontent. This is undoubtedly the breeding ground for a broad spectrum of new right-wing operations. This reflects the situation described by Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism (2009), in which catastrophe slowly unfolds: the future only holds the same promise as the present, which is not encouraging.

The promises of the free world that were supposed to be realised after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that inextricably linked economic progress to individual liberties and democracy have failed miserably. In Latin America, the neoliberal scorched earth could not prevent the resurgence of people’s struggles and the blossoming of new grassroots leadership, which reached their peak in the first decade of the twenty-first century.^[1] This surge in popular governments and mass mobilisations managed to disturb the still waters in which neoliberal projects sought to submerge us. Renewed hopes, new myths, political identities, struggles, and tactics brought to the table a mobilising, mass, and popular sense of meaning for millions of people to fight and live for.

But the world is turning in a different direction. The break with neoliberal inertia allowed Latin America to rebuild links between peoples, include the excluded, and improve living conditions. However, this took place in the context of a trend towards the total precarisation of life, which could not be shaken from the roots of neoliberalism. This movement also came about in the context of the cultural triumph of neoliberalism, which radically changed the subjectivity of the majority of the population. This cultural hegemony has instilled deep roots that are based on individualism, consumerism, and a loss of the ability to imagine the future, which limits the horizon of what we believe to be possible. For the vast majority of humanity, this horizon is nothing more than the possibility of survival. As Fisher put it, ‘The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history’.^[2] This is the cultural and political context of the West, and it is based on this decay that a new neoliberal offensive was launched from 2012 onwards, with Washington at its core. US hard power pursued different forms of hybrid warfare including ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ coups, lawfare, fake news, and armies of trolls, bots, and right-wing supporters spreading hate speech. ^[3] In just a few years, Washington increased its levels of intervention, sophisticated its methods, and achieved its goal of destabilising the progressive balance of power in Latin America.

The traditional right-wing formulas, tied to the programme of neoliberal globalism or to the more historically conservative views of the oligarchic elites, were of course unable to fulfil their anti-populist promises. On the contrary, these formulas are also part of the problem. The emergence of both former President Donald Trump in the United States as well as the COVID-19 pandemic swept away the few remaining certainties that remained up to that point. The right wing today adopts new faces that intermingle with the old at the same time as it breaks ties with them. The alternative right, neo-reactionaries, far right, post-fascists, religious fundamentalists, and anarcho-capitalists moved from the margins of the political system to positions of relative importance in the Global North. One of the most prominent examples is Steve Bannon, a white supremacist who manipulated social media data and became one of the Trump administration’s star advisors for eight months. After his departure from the White House, mainly because of his proven manipulation of Facebook user data for electoral purposes, he devoted himself to developing links between the different parties or experiences of the new nationalist right in all its variations in Europe. Together with Belgian Mischaël Modrikamen, in 2018 Bannon launched what they called ‘The Movement’, a space for coordination and support for new right-wing projects in the region. They strengthened links with far-right parties in different countries and leaders of the stature of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; Matteo Salvini, who at the time was prime minister of Italy; Marine Le Pen in France; and figures linked to the Vox party in Spain and the Golden Dawn party in Greece, among others. Shortly afterwards, global events went into free fall. The pandemic that emerged in 2020 showed the profound decay of the capitalist West and the major crisis of its model of civilisation. This provided a wealth of possibilities for the initiatives of the extreme right, which assumed the role of condemning ‘the system’, voicing the need to break with inertia, and expressing the tedium and weariness caused by capitalist realism that does not offer alternatives that can be understood as ‘good sense’ in the hearts and minds the people, as Antonio Gramsci put it.

Latin America was not spared from this wave of new right-wing formations. From the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – the most important country in the region in economic and geopolitical terms – to the emergence of Nayib Bukele as president in El Salvador, different figures of the non-traditional right have gained political weight, visibility, and mass influence. At the same time, they have mixed up – or at least opened up – the spectrum of political discourse so that Latin America’s most conservative and traditional right wing can find echoes in the criticism of progressivism, the left wing, and national and popular projects.^[4]

In dossier no. 47 of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, New Clothes, Old Threads, we present an analysis of these right-wing movements in Latin America. This is comprised of both an old right and a new right: its new clothes are woven with the same old threads of the past: racism, classism, homophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, militarism, and repression.

Big Business Oscillates between the New and the Old Right

Since the 2008 financial crisis, global capitalism has accentuated and magnified its previous tendencies. The financialisation of the economy accelerated after states in the North (especially the US) carried out multi-billion-dollar bailouts of investment banks whose portfolios largely consisted of the subprime market. This renewed wave of financialisation accelerated the pace of growth of new economic bubbles and leveraged the new and triumphant hi-tech and online platform mega-corporations. The world of work continued to exclude more than 50% of the population in the capitalist countries of the South, increasing both the offshoring of production and the creation of new linkages in global value chains, in which the middle positions continue to be occupied by the countries of the Global North, with the exception of China.^[5]

These processes were undoubtedly exacerbated in 2020-2021 by the coronavirus pandemic, which acted as a catalyst for the economic tensions that had accumulated in previous years.^[6] Above all, the crisis clearly showed a significant gap between national and global dynamics of capital accumulation, among which the power of online platforms and investment banks prevails. In the face of the exponential growth in the use of online platforms and events, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla are the big business winners of the new post-2008 bubble, especially in 2020 and 2021. Major financial companies operated as an indispensable mechanism in directing the dollars in circulation towards these vehicles for capital accumulation.

To a large extent, the relationship between technological developments in Silicon Valley and the emergent right wing is well known: Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is a fervent advocate of alternative right ideology; cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are promoted by white supremacist Richard Spencer as the currency of the alt-right; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz donated some $127 billion to Donald Trump’s last election campaign, among other examples. Neo-reactionary sectors and philosophies based on uchronia, as advanced by ideologues such as Nick Land and Curtis Guy Yarvin (also known as Mencius Moldbug) and their followers, have reinforced the anti-statist and anti-globalist notions that fuel the new right-wing movements in the North. They have done this based on the latest developments in online platforms, social media, and cryptocurrencies.

The alternative right sees concrete ways of boosting private capital accumulation through the development of cognitive capitalism and the financial developments of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, in which national states have little or no capacity to intervene.^[7] Programmers linked to the new waves of Silicon Valley have associated the latest developments of high-tech companies with the potential to solve the ‘problems’ of democracy and state intervention. This is what Cédric Durand calls the ‘Silicon Valley consensus’, which – rather than impacting solely this group of companies (known as start-ups) – seeks to conduct a hegemonic operation to produce a new cognitive map. This map puts the blame for entrepreneurs’ lack of productivity on the traditional conservatives of the Republican Party and progressive Democrats, who are said to promote ‘egalitarian, consumerist and multicultural mediocrity’.^[8] This ideology was expressed in 1994 in A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, produced by the Progress and Freedom Foundation.^[9] This ideology failed to contest the brief period of neo-conservative hegemony at the state level, in which the Pentagon hawks set the pace. Big business adopted the same position that ‘Silicon Valley, or rather its enchanting representation, is the showcase of the new capitalism: a land of opportunity where, thanks to start-ups and venture capital society, ideas flourish freely, jobs abound, and high-tech developments benefit the masses’.^[10]

After the failure of neoconservatism and Barrack Obama’s globalist initiatives, this ideological operation – which had been developing since the 1990s – went on the offensive, boosting its political agenda during Donald Trump’s government. The world’s richest one percent have taken on the idea that value creation in contemporary capitalism is increasingly immaterial and found in innovation (be it in information technology, finance, or in obtaining patents to develop physical production). As Mariana Mazzucato shows us, from Apple to PayPal, and from Goldman Sachs to Pfizer, the position is clear: these companies are the ones who create value – not ‘inefficient’ sectors, among which the state and the working poor are always cited as examples.^[11] This is closely linked to the neo-reactionary movement, which is simultaneously ‘anti-modern and futurist, made up of disillusioned libertarians’.^[12]

The key questions here are: how many of these elements have been behind the projects of the Latin American right wing? Is this ‘Silicon Valley ideology’ setting the pace for the demands and proposals of the ruling classes in the countries south of the Rio Bravo?^[13] What link does this new emerging right have with local ruling classes? Though we will not be able to conclusively answer these questions here, we can at least propose some hypotheses.

Hypothesis one: Anti-populism is the main expression of big business in Latin America. Big business considers the diverse popular projects (which it disparagingly labels as populist) to be its greatest enemies. The reengagement of concentrated capital with the political right stemmed from the need to confront the governments emerging from the continental anti-neoliberal struggle since the first decade of the 2000s. As the two worked together more closely, they generated new processes ranging from soft coups to hard coups through a variety of reactionary electoral coalitions.

The region’s big business backed different right-wing coalitions and leaders based on core concepts such as the endless dichotomies associated with ‘populism’: republicanism versus institutional decline, the free market versus statism, and democracy versus autocracy, among others.

This coordination between business interests and right-wing political formations continues today. If we take Brazil as an example, it is clear that big business prefers to support Jair Bolsonaro, who could be defined as a neo-fascist. This support comes as his government faces the possibility of collapse and as a popular project could once again come to power, headed by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.^[14] As a rule, Brazil’s economic elite tends to position itself within a more classical and globalist neoliberalism, which is somewhat represented in the figure of Paulo Guedes, Bolsonaro’s economy minister. Compared to the 1990s, today Brazil is witnessing a conciliation of the classic neoliberal economic programme and Bolsonaro’s neo-fascism in the political sphere.^[15] Sectors ranging from agribusiness to banks now openly support the government.^[16] They are united by their fear of the return of a popular government: if the reactionary bloc in Brazil does not succeed in preventing the return of a popular government, it is ready to carry out all possible regressive structural reforms in order to destroy the already reduced capacities of the state. The Brazilian bourgeoisie refuses to consider another possible project. Rather, it is committed to maintaining the neoliberal vision in the economic sphere while sweeping Bolsonaro’s fascist excesses under the carpet.

Similarly, big business in Argentina adopted an anti-populist stance from the very moment of Néstor Kirchner’s inauguration as president in 2003, taking increasingly firm steps to shape a project that would succeed in replacing Peronism in the government.^[17] This was achieved through a political force headed by Mauricio Macri. While this force resembled the new right, it was closer to the conservative, republican, colonialist, and oligarchic right wing than a right wing which thrives on political incorrectness, extreme anti-statism, political mobilisation, and reactionary nationalism. In 2015, the Argentine Business Association (the most influential in the country), the major agribusiness players (represented by the Argentine Rural Society and other entities), and the main groups operating in the Argentine Industrial Union expressed their total support for Macri’s electoral campaign and policies, even though they did not actually benefit them substantially in terms of profitability. However, the need to sustain a neoliberal policy remained the core principle ‘in the face of the populist threat’.^[18]

Big business in Argentina is clearly opposed to the government of President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The vast majority contributes to the right and centre-right coalition of which former president Mauricio Macri is a member. The new right phenomenon, led by Javier Milei, does not have a substantial impact on the business world. For the moment, the capital of the traditional oligarchy has opted for conservative neoliberals over ultra-liberals and anarcho-capitalists.

These cases demonstrate that the ruling classes in our region are at a crossroads: either they continue to sustain a model of bourgeois democracy in crisis or they make the leap to an authoritarian form of government. In both cases, the only point of agreement is an anti-popular economic programme. The variable is how much political violence to allow while permitting economic violence to go unchecked.

Hypothesis two: The new right does not actually have an economic programme that can be appropriated by the main types of capital. Specifically, most of the economic policy measures of governments considered to be of the ‘new right’, such as those of Bukele in El Salvador and Bolsonaro in Brazil, arguably follow the process of radicalising the Washington Consensus. This path is taken instead of offering novel initiatives to address the exacerbation of the knowledge economy – ‘Industry 4.0’ – or the adoption of the premises of the Austrian School. The central macroeconomic measures of these projects, like those developed by Sebastián Piñera in Chile and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and those being implemented by Luis Lacalle Pou in Uruguay, are part of the programme of neoliberal globalism. Of course, the systematic exhaustion of this programme has been evident for decades, which is why the business community is beginning to sympathise with neo-reactionary approaches and the alternative right.

Perhaps the only deviation from this programme to produce new forms of a reactionary political economy that is appropriate today is El Salvador’s adoption of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency as legal tender. By promoting this law as a measure of great radicalism – which was approved by parliamentary majority – Latin America’s model neo-reactionary president introduced a very significant risk of instability. Freely converting dollars to Bitcoin can produce widespread speculative effects given the volatility of cryptocurrencies.^[19] El Salvador already has a stunted monetary policy due to its dollarised economy, but the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender directly pivots towards privatising the creation of money. Stripping the state of any capacity to intervene or regulate money is one of the great neo-reactionary dreams that seem to be coming true in the country.

With the exception of Nayib Bukele’s leap into the void of cryptocurrencies, the economic policy proposals of the region’s right wing are quite similar to classic neoliberal programmes. It is these economic proposals that big business advocates and upholds in order to oppose any programme of popular progress. In any case, it is clear that the different versions of the right are united by their fear and hatred of the working class.

Hypothesis three: The gap between the logic of capital accumulation and the political projects of the ruling classes is widening. Industry 4.0 dynamics of accumulation and extreme financialisation subordinate the ruling classes of the periphery to the dictates of global capital as never before. The response of big business in these countries, which seeks to survive the global competition that is increasingly tending towards techno-feudalism, is to resume the agenda of revived neoliberal reform. However, this agenda does not have the popular support that it had secured in the last decade of the twentieth century. The bourgeoisies of the Latin American periphery range from explicitly supporting traditional right-wing governments to increasingly sympathising with the still marginal sectors of the new right that promise new discourses, new reactionary utopias, and new forms of mobilisation to encourage a refoundation of capitalism.

A key point in this debate is to what extent today’s dynamics of global and national capital accumulation require domination through bourgeois democracy, and whether other models are being sought.

Expanding the Discursive Boundaries to the Right

The offensive waged in the last decade by the region’s ruling powers has largely been geared towards the dispute over meaning. How are new discursive boundaries being forged by the actions of the right wing? As noted, in our region, this offensive is at its core a reaction to the progressive governments and the expansion of rights over the last two decades. Here, demonisation emerges as the guiding objective, and the issue of ‘corruption’ becomes a central feature of discourse.

The offensive of the 1990s was developed in the name of a market-centred utopia, which envisaged the logic of profitability and efficiency as a way of organising and modernising our societies and overcoming the problems faced by the former welfare states; however, this new offensive cannot be sustained by the same optimism. Following the economic crisis, the wave of protests against the neoliberal model, and the emergence of governments that expanded social inclusion, the ruling powers relaunched their project in the twenty-first century with a discourse that moved in two directions. On one hand, the origins of the neoliberal doctrine were re-examined to create its personification – the entrepreneur – based on the abstract and triumphalist macro-narrative about the virtues of the market. On the other hand, the dichotomy between freedom/democracy and authoritarianism remains, with its anti-populist and/or anti-communist variants, depending on the country in question. Faced with the weakening of this market-based utopia, a former golden age is evoked – generally linked to an oligarchic and free market order – rather than the vision of an imminent future. Consequently, this offensive is largely deployed in the name of traditional institutions and values – from the family and the ‘natural’ role of men and women to the army and even religion – which give meaning to this new crusade.

That said, there are three aspects that characterise this conservative reaction across the continent to varying degrees in terms of communication strategies and the construction of discourses.

The first characteristic is the revival of conspiracy theories and a narrative centred on the image of the dangerous advance of the left, driven by a supranational structure. This includes constructing an external and powerful enemy reminiscent of the anti-communist discourse of the Cold War. This enemy can be epitomised in a government (as in the case of Cuba and Venezuela), in a leader (Lula da Silva, Nicolás Maduro and Evo Morales), or in a platform where common political positions are advanced.^[20] This construction of discourse holds more sway among sectors that include figures from the armed forces, but not exclusively. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these conspiracy theories appeared in other narratives. This threat was complemented by the nomination of strong political figures who personify salvation or protection in the face of danger.

Second, with the weakened possibility of mobilising citizens in pursuit of a market-centred utopia capable of offering a better future that could easily be envisioned, appealing to ‘sad passions’ became a strategic line of action.^[21] The defence of personal freedom and private property appear as the central elements of a common sense that is also encapsulated in hyper-individualistic perspectives. Communication strategies are used to encourage indignation, for which all tools are on the table: smear campaigns, fake news, and messaging targeted according to the audience. Examples of this abound. Once again, the cases of Brazil and Colombia are paradigmatic due to the intensity with which these actions were put into play, and because they served as a reference for other contexts.^[22]

Third, we are facing a conservative reaction that justifies and endorses neoliberal policy in the economic and social spheres while centring the issue of insecurity. This is why it promotes punitivism and repression. The defence of liberty to ensure individual and collective fulfilment goes hand in hand with control, stronger sentencing, and empowering security forces. This contradiction becomes palpable and includes a shift from focusing on crime against private property to criminalising social protest.

A brief look at several countries in the region will allow us to see how these discursive strategies and forms repeatedly appear across the board.

The Peruvian Cold War

Peru is experiencing a protracted political crisis that is most noticeable in the fragmentation of the party system and in the existence of equally fragmented leaderships.^[23] The right-wing camp has its ways of communicating, but it is also characterised by heterogeneity. There are sectors that can be defined more as classical liberals, others that are more populist, yet other sectors with nationalist roots, and there is also the far right. There are traditional parties and new parties, forces that emerged from Fujimorism, and less institutionalised groups that express themselves above all through social media and direct action.^[24]

One of the results of the June 2021 presidential run-off was the support that Keiko Fujimori of the Popular Force (Fuerza Popular) party secured from sectors identified with staunch opposition to the regime headed by her father in the 1990s. This shift was most illustrative in the case of writer Mario Vargas Llosa given his influence as a major public figure.^[25] In a column published a few days after the first round of elections, the Nobel laureate did not mince his words when he associated Pedro Castillo with the idea of a ‘communist dictatorship’ that would bring more poverty to the country.^[26]

It must be said that anti-communism is a central focus of the Peruvian right-wing discourse. This central discourse was strengthened by two factors: the revival of a conspiratorial narrative reminiscent of the Cold War at the continental level, and Castillo’s surprising electoral success. In the case of Peru, from the 1990s onwards, this anti-communism also became associated with ‘terrorism’; from there, it spilled over to the left wing and social protest in general. This was also a result of the repressive state policy under Fujimori, which had the Shining Path organisation as its primary target.^[27]

In the run-up to the second round of elections, Congressman of the Popular Renewal party (Renovación Popular) Vice Admiral Jorge Montoya, who represented another right-wing sector more closely linked to the military, claimed that Peru was faced with a choice between ‘living in democracy or living in communism’. He linked Castillo’s success to ‘a plan by the São Paulo Forum’ and concluded: ‘we need an alliance between the right-wing parties of the entire continent to stop the advance of communism’.^[28] Meanwhile, Keiko Fujimori referred to Castillo as the bearer of a class hatred that deepened the division between Peruvians while presenting herself as the ‘saviour’ and guarantor of ‘national unity’.^[29]

These discourses converged in the construction of an enemy whose legitimacy to represent significant sectors of the population is not recognised. In doing so, these discourses fanned the flames of groups with an even more radicalised discourse, which went so far as to physically attack Castillo’s supporters. Among these sectors, two groups stand out: Coordinadora Republicana and La Resistencia.^[30] Both have a strong presence on social media, a voice in the press, and devote their time to holding rallies to denounce journalists and civil servants. They preach anti-communism, have ties with religious fundamentalist sectors, and advocate ‘traditional family values’.

El Salvador’s Neo-Reactionary Experiment

As we have mentioned, one of the great novelties of the continental right wing is the figure of Nayib Bukele, who has been the president of El Salvador for two and a half years. His arrival to government and his profile can only be understood in the context of a profound crisis of legitimacy of the parties that alternated in power after the 1992 Peace Accords: the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).^[31] Bukele’s style – which is clearly reminiscent of Donald Trump – as well as his government’s political communication and his key measures, point to a way of constructing his image as a strong leader.

Bukele’s proposal has three clear symbolic pillars. The first is his differentiation from and systematic questioning of bipartisanship. He defines the country’s political leaders as ‘the same old faces’ and/or ‘the corrupt’.^[32] He even referred to the civil war and the Peace Accords as a ‘farce’.^[33] Secondly, Bukele presents himself as being capable of controlling insecurity and keeping organised crime – mainly embodied in las maras, the name given to gangs in the country – in check. To this end, his Territorial Control Plan is a legal tool to increase the resources allocated to state security forces and to militarise the daily life of the population.^[34] Thirdly, Bukele constructs an image of himself as a strongman, a young politician, a successful businessman, and a guarantor of change; this includes a politically incorrect and informal religious component that is in line with the precepts of the US alternative right.

Another characteristic feature that identifies him as a representative of the emerging right is the mixture between the use of social media and certain actions that constitute major shows of strength and that are on the margins of democratic institutionality. There are several illustrative examples in this regard.

In early 2020, Bukele invoked Article 167 of the Constitution, which empowers the executive branch to convene parliament to meet on a single issue. In this case, the issue was a loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration to finance Phase III of the Territorial Control Plan. Faced with the refusal of the majority of ARENA and FMLN legislators to attend the session, Bukele sent troops into the Legislative Assembly and called on his supporters to gather outside the building. After an impassioned speech in which he sought to criminalise legislators, the president entered parliament and prayed in front of the empty seats.^[35] On his way out, he said that God had asked him for patience and announced that he was giving parliamentarians a week to assent to the loan, which ended up being approved with the only opposition from the FMLN.

On May Day of 2021, the new Legislative Assembly took office; in its first session, it approved the dismissal of the members of the Constitutional Chamber and the Attorney General of the Republic – bypassing the mechanisms provided for in the Constitution – and replaced them with officials close to the president.^[36] Bukele justified these actions on the grounds that they are part of a process of cleansing the political and judicial system through his leadership. This move received international condemnation and sparked tensions with the US government in particular, which even asked Bukele to reconsider the measure.^[37] In light of this reality, a new element appeared as part of the Salvadoran president’s discourse characterised by pragmatism and an appeal to the value of national sovereignty. Bukele left behind the discourse that painted the US as El Salvador’s chief ally and began to talk about the foreign interference that his country was suffering. It was in this context that the Salvadoran government highlighted the importance of the vaccine supply that the country received from China as well as the broader cooperation that has been established between the two countries.^[38]

The Old and the New in Uruguay

Uruguay is witnessing an unprecedented coalition government that brings together the entire political spectrum to the right of the Broad Front.^[39] The Multicolour Coalition is made up of the two traditional parties (the Colorado Party and National Party) and other forces with less experience in power.^[40] Among them is Open Cabildo (Cabildo Abierto), led by retired General Guido Manini Ríos.^[41] This new party took the political establishment by surprise in the 2019 elections, winning seats in the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate.

Both the main measures of the government headed by President Luis Lacalle Pou and his coalition’s discourse show elements of the most classical liberal ideology as well as other ideologies that update premises of neoliberalism. These include a range of punitive discourses and other ways of demonising the left wing, even justifying the role of the military dictatorships of the 1970s.

The hegemony of the National Party, led by President Lacalle, is indisputable. This gives the government a centre-right, clearly pro-business profile; it presents itself as being modern and well-prepared to govern. Lacalle’s style assigns a central role to social media and misses no opportunity to trivialise his own efforts leading the executive branch as a way of developing the image of a figure that is ‘close to the people’. This strategy once defined the construction of the public profile of former Argentinian President Mauricio Macri. In this context, the coalition’s most reactionary features are sidelined, but this does not make them any less relevant. The simple fact that Open Cabildo has obtained parliamentary representation and become a governing party legitimises these positions and places the larger forces of the coalition in the position of having to accommodate some of them, whether out of convenience or conviction.

The official discourse is constructed around criticism of the three previous Broad Front governments, whether explicitly stated or not. One of the core concepts of the official discourse is that of freedom and economic liberalisation as a vehicle of economic progress. This is complemented by the principle of fiscal efficiency, which is also one of the main bases for constructing this anti-Broad Front identity. Such elements can be identified in the criteria for managing the pandemic and are visible in Lacalle’s speech to the General Assembly (the two chambers of the legislative branch), given one year after his inauguration in March of this year.^[42] Here, Lacalle highlighted liberty ‘as a central element of a person’s life’ and as a ‘necessary beacon for all of a ruler’s actions’. In this framework, he highlighted the strategy of ‘appealing to responsible liberty’ as the main tool to confront the pandemic, a principle that was combined with the premise of ‘taking care of resources in order to take care of people’.^[43] Lacalle has also made a big deal of the fact that his government was able to meet the fiscal targets it set ‘without raising taxes, something it was said was impossible to achieve’.^[44]

The other focus of this discourse, which can also be seen in the government’s key measures, is security. In fact, during the first part of its term in office, the government coalition promoted the Urgent Consideration Law (LUC), which was approved and led to substantive security reforms.^[45] In his speech before the legislature, Lacalle himself highlighted the fact that the LUC developed the conditions to apply ‘legitimate self-defence, pickets were declared unlawful, the penalties for drug trafficking were increased, and the offence of resisting arrest was created’. All these measures add up to what he defined as ‘a major change of attitude regarding support for police work’.^[46]

In this sense, in its almost five hundred articles, the LUC summarises the imaginary defended by the right-wing coalition that governs Uruguay. This includes:

• understanding insecurity as the central problem and presenting punitive measures as the solution, namely by increased penalties and by providing greater legal support for the security forces
• deregulating economic activity and fiscal adjustment
• weakening the role of the public sector in producing goods and services
• concentrating previously decentralised powers in the executive branch
• weakening workers’ rights vis-à-vis employers
• criminalising protests

Argentina and Twenty-First Century Anti-Populism

In the case of Argentina, it is very clear that the offensive of the ruling powers both in discourse and in praxis is to a great extent a reaction to the expansion of rights spearheaded by the Kirchner governments and to the process of regional integration led by progressive and popular governments that were in power in the first fifteen years of this century. However, this progress comes alongside the worsening of structural economic problems and the limitations that the Kirchner experience itself demonstrated in reproducing its ‘post-neoliberal’ political project.^[47]

The last decade has been characterised by the growing imposition of an agenda rooted in two major cornerstones of the business sector’s agenda: the fight against authoritarianism, insecurity, and corruption and the drive to liberalise and deregulate the economy. The business elite, traditional factions of the political system, and new forces – together with the mainstream media – have converged in a cycle of growing confrontation. They have even managed to mobilise important sectors – chiefly the middle and upper classes in big cities and the most prosperous rural areas – around these issues. The deployment of this social bloc has created conditions that are conducive to advancing a new reactionary common sense.

In the more strictly political sphere, two elements are worth highlighting. In 2015, a coalition led by Mauricio Macri and his Republican Proposal party (Propuesta Republicana or PRO) came to power. Since its emergence – and later while governing the city of Buenos Aires – this party has been promoting an image of itself as the ‘modern right’, which has eschewed major ideological debates and has mainly drawn on political management vocabulary. From 2015 onwards, PRO and its main leaders brought into play an agenda and forms of discourse that are more typical of the classical right, combined with means of intervention that stretch the limits of political correctness. This process has only deepened during the pandemic and since the PRO was removed from the presidency in 2019.

The second element to highlight is the emergence of formations to the right of PRO that are characterised by political incorrectness as a distinctive style, much like the precepts of the alternative right in the United States and Europe. In this ‘right of the right-wing’ world, we find two extremes. On one side of this extreme are the followers of the liberal economists José Luis Espert and Javier Milei, who were elected as parliamentarians in the recent November midterm elections. On the other are those more closely linked to nationalist Catholicism and conservative evangelicalism, headed by figures who have a past in the PRO and who – for now – have only achieved minor prominence.

Although its influence is increasing, the radical right’s position in the local political scene may be more significant today for its capacity to impose a discussion of certain issues and for the impact it can have on the electoral performance of the majority right-wing alliance than for the amount of institutional representation it is able to achieve. As mentioned above, big business does not currently see a viable alternative in these groupings of the radical right.

These variations of the right find common cause in a number of strategies and devices while differing in others. They share an agenda that can be summarised in the catchwords ‘security’ and ‘anti-populism’. In the face of ‘insecurity’, they construct a punitive and increasingly xenophobic discourse, especially towards the sector of workers who are excluded from formal employment. This discourse seeks to legitimise and expand the security forces’ scope for action and constructs culprits in the same way that internal enemies were constructed in the past, and against whom the violence of the repressive state apparatus was directed. Depending on the circumstances, these culprits can be the poor, or immigrants, or indigenous peoples.

As has historically been the case, these right-wing formations strive to associate the term populism with other negative terms such as corruption and authoritarianism. The novelty here is the incorporation of the idea of privileges alongside these concepts. Populism is also presented as a synonym for clientelism and handouts, and a distinction is proposed between those who receive state assistance and ordinary people who ‘work and pay their taxes’. In this way, the right wing appropriates the discourse of condemning privileges – which has historically been part of the actions of the left – in order to crush the benefits of a section of working people. The ‘positive’ counterpart of this is the appeal to a common sense linked to individual effort and meritocratic criteria in order to simultaneously delegitimise the very idea of universal rights (to employment, housing, food, and so on) and collective organisation.

We must add an element to this common discourse, which is very significant in the Argentinian case, even though it operates in the background. This is the attack on the struggle of human rights organisations that stand against impunity for the crimes of the last military dictatorship. The variants of the domestic right, starting with PRO’s leading exponents, have tended to link these organisations to corruption. Although they have not gone so far as to propose explicit exonerations of state terrorism, as is the case in other countries, they have been silently complicit with the denial of these crimes.

The most radical formations distinguish themselves based on certain fundamental uses of discourse. On one level, there is a specific position that results from the combination of three elements: the figure of the new outsider to the political system; the idea that the real antagonism is that which exists between ordinary people and politicians; and – perhaps most importantly – the idea that an anti-system force is required. On another level, it is the discourse of the new right that has secured the most media coverage and electoral results and that explores the premises of economic ultra-liberalism in the greatest depth. The attack on all kinds of ways of regulating the economy, the idea of abolishing taxes, and the call to reduce the state to its minimum expression are the main pillars of a narrative that presents itself in the name of freedom, but which in fact vindicates authoritarian governments. In addition, this discursive construction is characterised by mixing the classic reference to a golden age – set, in Argentina’s case, in the oligarchic regime of the late nineteenth century – with the allusion to a ‘liberal utopia’, whose intention is to dispute the meaning of the future. This position is very close to the neo-reactionary concept most fully developed in Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment (2013), which is understood as a reactionary uchronia based on progress towards individualism and in which an anti-egalitarian logic reigns and monarchical and exclusionary forms of government return.

Brazil Caught between Neoliberalism and Neo-Fascism

At first glance, Brazil appears to be another laboratory of the new right. How can we understand the contradiction between a classic neoliberal economic programme and the excesses that President Jair Bolsonaro produces in the Brazilian political system? We can analyse this process as part of a discursive tension that does not appear to be clearly resolved. While the representatives of big business place themselves in the rhetorical camp of neoliberalism, value its institutions, and concretely advance globalist projects, the president intensifies his neo-fascist rhetoric. Let us consider three concrete examples of these discursive elements.

Firstly, as a parliamentarian and even more so as president, Bolsonaro puts forward an anti-Workers’ Party (PT) and anti-communist position, which discriminates against left-wing stances and resembles the case of Keiko Fujimori in Peru. These stances are associated with Lula da Silva and the left wing in general as well as with a continental project born in the São Paulo Forum and which has its most obvious expression in castrochavismo (Castro-Chavism).^[48]

Secondly, Bolsonaro’s discourse clearly reveals a growing attempt to bypass the rule of law. At the time of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the now president of Brazil dedicated his vote to oust Dilma in memory of the late Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who was in charge of a torture centre during the military dictatorship, and called Ustra a ‘national hero’.^[49] From then on, Bolsonaro’s celebratory mentions of Brazil’s military dictatorship have multiplied, which sheds light on his profoundly anti-democratic and politically incorrect side. He has managed to transform the unsayable into the sayable and move the discursive boundary one point further to the right.

Thirdly, Bolsonaro has tried by all means to connect with the big players of the alternative right in the United States. He expressed his support for Donald Trump on a number of occasions during the then-president’s years in office and participated in meetings of the regrouped formations of the global right. His alignment with the United States is in clear opposition to the more pragmatic sector of the government, which maintains the agenda of globalism as a possibility.

Though we cannot delve into all of these elements in the scope of this text, we can at least situate Bolsonaro’s interventions and discourse in an authoritarian, anti-popular, and repressive agenda. To a large extent, this approach follows the classic positions of the coup-mongering Latin American right wing. Bolsonaro also embodies a neo-fascist position; however, the Brazilian government as a whole cannot be characterised as neo-fascist because of the tensions that are developing within the Brazilian bourgeoisie and even within the military high command. If it were not for the reactionary unity sparked by the possibility of the advance of a popular project that could once again lead state power in Brazil, the economic powers would seek other alternatives that are more acceptable in democratic terms.

What’s New and What’s Old?

We have presented what we consider to be one of the central problems of the times we are living in: the right-wing offensive. Much of the current reality of the capitalist world – its profound economic, political, cultural, and civilisational crisis – once again poses the idea that there is no alternative. In the face of this anguish, the levels of discontent are becoming more acute, and popular and left-wing projects seem capable of obtaining partial victories and even putting limits on the advances of the reactionary offensive. However, these projects face serious difficulties in constructing a new narrative that could unleash a real wave of popular progress capable of bursting the seams that hold together the new right and the old right.

In Latin America, the adoption of the neo-reactionary and alternative right projects of the North appears to be a launching pad from which to modify the cognitive maps of the people and to shift political and discursive positions and public agendas to the right. However, the main right-wing forces in the region have exposed the old threads that stitch together their new clothes. This is above all because big business has no choice but to stick with its familiar programmes to avoid perishing in the face of the relentless advance of the global concentration and centralisation of capital led by the high-tech/finance conglomerates. Moreover, this is because the extreme uncertainty from which the peoples of the South most suffer evokes a defensive unity amongst the ruling classes, which above all want to prevent new processes of popular progress. This is the red thread that stitches together the views of the old and new right wing: anti-populism, anti-communism, and other ways of naming any project that puts equality, solidarity, and the rights of the masses above all else.

The challenges posed by the present historical moment are enormous, but the struggles of popular movements, political imagination, and the commitment to life are on our side.

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Chaves García, Nery, and Esteban De Gori. ‘Nayib Bukele: entre los militares y Dios’ [Nayib Bukele: Between the military and God]. CELAG, 12 February 2020. https://www.celag.org/nayib-bukele-entre-los-militares-y-dios.

Contente, Olyntho. ‘Bolsonaro governa para os bancos, ilhas de prosperidade em meio ao caos económico’ [Bolsonaro governs for the banks, islands of prosperity amidst economic chaos]. SEEBRIO, 8 February 2021. https://www.bancariosrio.org.br/index.php/noticias/item/5800-bolsonaro-governa-para-os-bancos-ilhas-de-prosperidade-em-meio-ao-caos-economico.

ContraPunto. ‘Presidente Bukele visita caserío El Mozote’ [President Bukele visits El Mozote village]. 19 December 2020. https://www.contrapunto.com.sv/video-presidente-bukele-visita-caserio-el-mozote.

Durand, Cédric. Tecnofeudalismo. Crítica de la economía digital [Techno-feudalism: A Critique of the Digital Economy]. Buenos Aires: La Cebra, 2021.

Dyson, Esther, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler. Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. The Progress & Freedom Foundation, 1994. http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html.

El Espectador. ‘La cuestionable estrategia de campaña del No’ [The questionable strategy of the No campaign]. 6 October 2016. https://www.elespectador.com/politica/la-cuestionable-estrategia-de-campana-del-no-article-658862.

Filgueiras, Luiz. ‘As classes dominantes e o governo Bolsonaro’ [The ruling classes and the Bolsonaro government]. Le Monde Diplomatique, no. 163, 1 February 2021. https://diplomatique.org.br/as-classes-dominantes-e-o-governo-bolsonaro.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hants: O Books, 2009.

Government of El Salvador. ‘El Salvador recibe trato preferencial de la República Popular China con otro envío de 500.000 vacunas anti-COVID-19’ [El Salvador receives preferential treatment from the People’s Republic of China with another shipment of 500,000 anti-COVID-19 vaccines]. 18 May 2021. https://www.presidencia.gob.sv/el-salvador-recibe-trato-preferencial-de-la-republica-popular-china-con-otro-envio-de-500000-vacunas-anti-covid-19.

International Labour Organisation. World Social Protection Report 2020-22: Social protection at the crossroads – in pursuit of a better future. Geneva: ILO, 2021. https://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/world-social-security-report/2020-22/lang–en/index.htm.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. New York: Public Affairs, 2018.

Moulier Boutang, Yann. Cognitive Capitalism. Malden: Polity Press, 2011.

Nick Land. The Dark Enlightenment. 2013. https://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land.

NODAL. ‘Castillo se reunió con Pepe Mujica y Keiko volvió a pedir “salvar a Perú del comunismo”’ [Castillo met with Pepe Mujica and Keiko once again called to ‘save Peru from communism’]. 4 June 2021. https://www.nodal.am/2021/06/cierres-de-campana-castillo-se-reunio-con-pepe-mujica-y-keiko-volvio-a-pedir-salvar-a-peru-del-comunismo.

NODAL. ‘Enviado especial de EE. UU. pide restituir a jueces y Bukele dice que la decisión es “irreversible”’ [US Special Envoy calls for reinstatement of judges and Bukele says decision is ‘irreversible’]. 13 May 2021. https://www.nodal.am/2021/05/el-salvador-enviado-especial-de-eeuu-pide-restituir-a-jueces-y-bukele-dice-que-la-decision-es-irreversible.

NODAL. ‘Discurso de Lacalle Pou a un año de asumir: anuncios, balance y “la necesidad de flexibilizar el Mercosur”’ [Lacalle Pou’s speech a year after taking office: Announcements, results and ‘the need to make Mercosur more flexible’]. 3 March 2021. https://www.nodal.am/2021/03/uruguay-discurso-de-lacalle-pou-a-un-ano-de-asumir-anuncios-balance-y-la-necesidad-de-flexibilizar-el-mercosur.

Perú21. ‘La Resistencia: la radiografía de un grupo violento’ [La Resistencia: Exposing a violent group]. 18 July 2021. https://peru21.pe/politica/la-resistencia-la-radiografia-de-un-grupo-violento-noticia.

Poder360. ‘Bolsonaro e Tereza Cristina recebem bancada do agronegócio no Planalto’ [Bolsonaro and Tereza Cristina welcome the agribusiness caucus to the Planalto Palace]. 6 October 2021. https://www.poder360.com.br/governo/bolsonaro-e-tereza-cristina-recebem-bancada-do-agronegocio-no-planalto.

Raim, Laura. ‘La derecha alternativa que agita Estados Unidos’ [The alternative right shaking up the United States]. Revista Nueva Sociedad, no. 267 (2017). https://nuso.org/articulo/la-derecha-alternativa-que-agita-estados-unidos.

Taglioni, Augusto. ‘El mercado evalúa acercarse a Bolsonaro ante la posibilidad de un triunfo de Lula’ [The market considers moving closer to Bolsonaro in view of the possibility of a victory for Lula]. LaPoliticaOnline, 24 September 2021. https://www.lapoliticaonline.com.ar/nota/136780-el-mercado-evalua-acercarse-a-bolsonaro-ante-la-posibilidad-de-un-triunfo-de-lula.

Télam. ‘Bolsonaro llamó “héroe nacional” a un coronel que dirigió un centro de represión’ [Bolsonaro called a colonel who led a repression centre a ‘national hero’]. 8 August 2019. https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/201908/382686-bolsonaro-heroe-dictadura-coronel-brilhante-ustra-militar-brasil.html.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Coronashock: A Virus and the World, dossier no. 28, May 2020. https://dev.thetricontinental.org/es/dossier-28-coronavirus.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. ‘Atravesando la nueva ola. Cambios, continuidades y disputas en la situación política continental’ [Confronting the new wave: Changes, continuities, and conflicts in the continental political situation]. OBSAL, no. 12 (March-May 2021). https://dev.thetricontinental.org/es/argentina/obsal12.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. ‘Asomándose al abismo’ [Leaning into the abyss]. La Tercera, 17 April 2021. https://www.latercera.com/opinion/noticia/columna-de-mario-vargas-llosa-asomandose-al-abismo/66J4RIVJD5EWTBZ6JRDEGAOBHQ.

Endnotes

[1] Translator’s note: Here the term popular is translated as ‘grassroots’, since this leaderships emerged from struggles linked to excluded sectors and saw the emergence of figures that were not attached to traditional political parties.

[2] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Hants: O Books, 2009), 4.

[3] Translator’s note: A soft coup, sometimes referred to as a silent coup, is a coup d’état without the use of overt physical violence based on a conspiracy or plot that has as its objective the taking of state power. The concept of a soft coup as a strategy is attributed to US political scientist Gene Sharp, a theorist and author of works on the dynamics of nonviolent conflict. In Latin America, examples abound of destabilisation attempts against popular governments. In some cases, these efforts are linked to lawfare, the misuse of legal systems and principles against an ‘enemy’, such as by damaging or delegitimising them. This was most clearly seen in the case of Brazil and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and later imprisonment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

[4] Translator’s note: In this text, Nuestra América, or ‘Our America’, is translated as Latin America. Nuestra América is a concept stemming from Jose Martí’s seminal 1891 work on Latin American nationalism, which argues for the rejection of European and United States cultural values in the forging of a Pan-Latin American identity and unity among nations.

[5] International Labour Organisation, World Social Protection Report 2020–22: Social protection at the crossroads – in pursuit of a better future (Geneva: ILO, 2021).

[6] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. CoronaShock: A Virus and the World. 5 May 2020. https://dev.thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus.

[7] ‘By cognitive capitalism we mean, then, a mode of accumulation in which the object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value, as well as the principal location of the process of valorisation’ (Moulier-Boutang, 2011: 57).

Translator’s note: Cognitive capitalism is a form of capitalism based on the accumulation of ‘immaterial capital’, which is often protected through Intellectual Property Rights (i.e. legal means such as patents), the dissemination of knowledge, and the driving role of the knowledge economy. Knowledge, science, and technology become leading productive forces.

[8] Cédric Durand, Tecnofeudalismo. Crítica de la economía digital (Buenos Aires: La Cebra, 2021); Laura Raim, ‘La derecha alternativa que agita Estados Unidos’, Revista Nueva Sociedad, no. 267 (2017): 59, https://nuso.org/articulo/la-derecha-alternativa-que-agita-estados-unidos.

[9] Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, ‘Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age’, Future Insight (1994). http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html.

[10] Durand, Tecnofeudalismo, 49.

[11] Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (New York: Public Affairs, 2018).

[12] Raim, ‘La derecha alternativa’, 55.

[13] Translator’s note: The Rio is the fifth longest river of North America, forming the border between Mexico and the US state of Texas.

[14] Augusto Taglioni, ‘El mercado evalúa acercarse a Bolsonaro ante la posibilidad de un triunfo de Lula’, LaPoliticaOnline, 24 September 2021, https://www.lapoliticaonline.com.ar/nota/136780-el-mercado-evalua-acercarse-a-bolsonaro-ante-la-posibilidad-de-un-triunfo-de-lula/.

[15] Luiz Filgueiras, ‘As classes dominantes e o governo Bolsonaro’, Le Monde Diplomatique, no. 163, 1 February 2021, https://diplomatique.org.br/as-classes-dominantes-e-o-governo-bolsonaro.

[16] On agribusiness see: ‘Bolsonaro e Tereza Cristina recebem bancada do agronegócio no Planalto’, Poder360, 6 October 2021, https://www.poder360.com.br/governo/bolsonaro-e-tereza-cristina-recebem-bancada-do-agronegocio-no-planalto/; on banks see: Olyntho Contente, ‘Bolsonaro governa para os bancos, ilhas de prosperidade em meio ao caos económico’, SEEBRIO, 8 February 2021, https://www.bancariosrio.org.br/index.php/noticias/item/5800-bolsonaro-governa-para-os-bancos-ilhas-de-prosperidade-em-meio-ao-caos-economico.

[17] Translator’s note: Peronism (Peronismo) is an Argentinian political movement based on the ideas and legacy of former President Juan Perón. Peronism has played an important part in Argentina’s political history since the mid-1940s, with the majority of presidents since then emerging from this camp. Peronists espouse Juan Perón’s policies of social justice and economic nationalism, to varying extents.

[18] Francisco Cantamutto and Emiliano López, ‘Voces que gritan fuerte: posiciones del bloque de poder durante el gobierno de Cambiemos’, Mediações: Revista de Ciências Sociais 24, no. 1 (2019): 74, http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.2019v24n1p74.

[19] BBC Mundo, ‘Bitcoin: El Salvador se convierte este martes en el primer país del mundo en adoptar la criptomoneda como divisa de curso legal’, 7 September 2021, https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-5844156.

[20] Translator’s note: The Foro de São Paulo (São Paulo Forum), is a conference of leftist political parties and other organisations from Latin America and the Caribbean. It was launched by the Workers’ Party of Brazil (PT) in 1990 in the city of São Paulo with the objective of debating the new international context after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequences of the implementation of neoliberal policies by right-leaning governments in the region at the time.

The Grupo de Puebla (Puebla Group) is a political and academic forum made up of representatives of the Ibero-American political left, founded in 2019 in the Mexican city of Puebla. According to its founders, the main objective is to articulate ideas, productive models, development programs, and state policies of a progressive nature. It is composed of presidents, former presidents, political and social leaders within the socialist movement, and academics from twelve Latin American countries as well as Spain.

[21] According to Baruch Spinoza, sad passions refer to exploiting in individuals everything that separates them from well-being and favours hatred. Antonio Gramsci contrasted this with political passions, which aim towards a collective and transformative will.

[22] El Espectador, ‘La cuestionable estrategia de campaña del No’, 6 October 2016, https://www.elespectador.com/politica/la-cuestionable-estrategia-de-campana-del-no-article-658862.

[23] Laura Capote, ‘Y Perú despertó. Crisis institucional, movilización antineoliberal y propuesta constituyente’, OBSAL, no. 2 (December 2020), https://dev.thetricontinental.org/es/argentina/obsalcuaderno2.

[24] Translator’s note: Fujimorism (Fujimorismo) denotes the policies and the political ideology of former dictator of Peru Alberto Fujimori as well as the personality cult built around him, his policies, and his family. This ideology is defined by its support for neoliberal economics, fierce opposition to communism, and socially and culturally conservative stances such as an opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and school curriculums that include gender equality or sex education. Alberto’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, remains a central figure in Peruvian politics, having run for president three times (most recently losing to Pedro Castillo). Like her father, she has been caught up in several corruption scandals and now stands accused of taking illicit money from Brazil’s construction giant Odebrecht. Keiko’s Popular Force party is the second largest force in Congress.

[25] Translator’s note: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer, journalist, essayist, college professor, and former politician. He is one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation and the literary movement known as the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

[26] Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Asomándose al abismo’, La Tercera, 17 April 2021, https://www.latercera.com/opinion/noticia/columna-de-mario-vargas-llosa-asomandose-al-abismo/66J4RIVJD5EWTBZ6JRDEGAOBHQ.

Translator’s note: José Pedro Castillo Terrones is a Peruvian schoolteacher, union leader, and politician who has been serving as the 130^th president of Peru since 28 July 2021 following the 2021 general election. He attained prominence as a leading figure in a schoolteachers’ strike in 2017 and ran in the election as the candidate of the left-wing Peru Libre (‘Free Peru’) party.

[27] Capote, ‘Y Perú despertó’.

Translator’s note: Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) is a Peruvian revolutionary organisation founded in 1970 that endorsed Maoism and employed guerrilla tactics. It began its campaign in remote areas of the Andes and spread to various urban centres, including Lima and Callao.

[28] Jovel Álvarez Solís, ‘Jorge Montoya, congresista de Renovación Popular: “Perú decide si quiere vivir en democracia o en comunismo”’, La Gaceta, 6 June 2021, https://gaceta.es/gaceta-tv/jorge-montoya-congresista-de-renovacion-popular-peru-decide-si-vivir-en-democracia-o-en-comunismo-20210606-0950.

Translator’s note: Popular Renewal (Renovación Popular) is a conservative political party founded in 2020 as the successor of the former National Solidarity Party founded and led by former Lima Mayor Luis Castañeda Lossio.

[29] ‘Castillo se reunió con Pepe Mujica y Keiko volvió a pedir “salvar a Perú del comunismo”’, NODAL, 4 June 2021, https://www.nodal.am/2021/06/cierres-de-campana-castillo-se-reunio-con-pepe-mujica-y-keiko-volvio-a-pedir-salvar-a-peru-del-comunismo.

[30] On Coordinadora Republicana see: Carlos Bedoya, ‘La cabeza política del complot contra Vizcarra’, La Mula.Pe, 14 September 2021, https://carlosbedoya.lamula.pe/2020/09/14/la-cabeza-politica-del-complot-contra-vizcarra/carlosbedoya/; on La Resistencia see: ‘La Resistencia: la radiografía de un grupo violento’, Perú21, 18 July 2021, https://peru21.pe/politica/la-resistencia-la-radiografia-de-un-grupo-violento-noticia.

Translator’s note: Coordinadora Republicana, founded in 2019, is a far-right organisation that includes figures linked to Fujimorism. It brings together some of the most extreme sectors of the anti-communist right wing. Its central banner is that the greatest risk facing Peru is communism.

La Resistencia is a Peruvian far-right collective linked to the Popular Force and Popular Renewal parties. The collective was founded in 2018 and is led by Jota Maelo, pseudonym of Juan José Muñico Gonzáles, who defines himself as a Fujimorist, patriot, and anti-communist. Its motto is ‘God, Homeland, and Family’.

[31] Translator’s note: The Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista or ARENA) is a conservative political party in El Salvador, founded on 30 September 1981 by retired Salvadoran Army Major Roberto D’Aubuisson. It defines itself as a political institution constituted to defend the democratic, republican, and representative system of government as well as the social market economy system and nationalism.

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional or FMLN) was formed as an umbrella group on 10 October 1980 from five leftist guerrilla organisations. After the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in 1992, all armed FMLN units were demobilised and their organisation became a legal left-wing political party in El Salvador.

[32] Nery Chaves García and Esteban De Gori, ‘Nayib Bukele: las ansias por la centralidad del poder’, CELAG, 19 March 2020, https://www.celag.org/nayib-bukele-las-ansias-por-la-centralidad-del-poder.

[33] ‘Presidente Bukele visita caserío El Mozote’, ContraPunto, 19 December 2020, https://www.contrapunto.com.sv/video-presidente-bukele-visita-caserio-el-mozote.

[34] Translator’s note: On 20 June 2019, President Nayib Bukele, together with security authorities, announced the implementation of the Territorial Control Plan (Plan de Control Territorial), a multi-phase national security strategy that focuses on regaining control of territory from organised crime and modernising the police; it includes the incursion of police and army personnel into gang-controlled areas.

[35] Nery Chaves García & Esteban De Gori, ‘Nayib Bukele: entre los militares y Dios’, CELAG, 12 February 2020, https://www.celag.org/nayib-bukele-entre-los-militares-y-dios.

[36] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Atravesando la nueva ola. Cambios, continuidades y disputas en la situación política continental’, OBSAL, no. 12 (March–May 2021) https://dev.thetricontinental.org/es/argentina/obsal12.

[37] ‘Enviado especial de EE. UU. pide restituir a jueces y Bukele dice que la decisión es “irreversible”’, NODAL, 13 May 2021, https://www.nodal.am/2021/05/el-salvador-enviado-especial-de-eeuu-pide-restituir-a-jueces-y-bukele-dice-que-la-decision-es-irreversible.

[38] Government of El Salvador, ‘El Salvador recibe trato preferencial de la República Popular China con otro envío de 500.000 vacunas anti-COVID-19’, 18 May 2021, https://www.presidencia.gob.sv/el-salvador-recibe-trato-preferencial-de-la-republica-popular-china-con-otro-envio-de-500000-vacunas-anti-covid-19.

[39] Translator’s note: The Broad Front (Frente Amplio) is a centre-left to left political coalition that governed Uruguay from 2005 to 2020 under presidents José Mujica and Tabare Vazquez.

[40] Translator’s note: The Multicolour Coalition (Coalición Multicolor) is a centre-right political coalition formed ahead of the general elections in 2019 and led by current Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou. It is composed of National Party (PN), Colorado Party (PN), Open Cabildo (CA), Independent Party (PI), and the Party of the People.

[41] Translator’s note: Cabildo Abierto (Spanish for ‘open cabildo’ or ‘town council/hall’) is an Uruguayan political party founded in 2019. It is led by Guido Manini Ríos, a former commander-in-chief of the Army and the descendant of a traditional Colorado Party family.

[42] ‘Discurso de Lacalle Pou a un año de asumir: anuncios, balance y “la necesidad de flexibilizar el Mercosur”’, NODAL, 3 March 2021, https://www.nodal.am/2021/03/uruguay-discurso-de-lacalle-pou-a-un-ano-de-asumir-anuncios-balance-y-la-necesidad-de-flexibilizar-el-mercosur.

[43] Pablo Álvarez, ‘Uruguay: un año de Lacalle y su coalición de derechas’, CELAG, 1 March 2021, https://www.celag.org/uruguay-un-ano-de-lacalle-y-su-coalicion-de-derechas.

[44] ‘Discurso de Lacalle Pou a un año de asumir: anuncios, balance y “la necesidad de flexibilizar el Mercosur”’, NODAL, 3 March 2021, https://www.nodal.am/2021/03/uruguay-discurso-de-lacalle-pou-a-un-ano-de-asumir-anuncios-balance-y-la-necesidad-de-flexibilizar-el-mercosur.

[45] Translator’s note: The Ley de Urgente Consideración (LUC), or Law of Urgent Consideration, saw strong opposition from the Broad Front and the population. The LUC is made up of 476 articles proposing neoliberal reforms that would impact various aspects of the public sector such as health, education, housing, employment, economy, and security. This legislation promotes budget cuts in the public sector, supports the privatisation of public companies, increases the powers of law enforcement forces, and restricts workers’ right to strike, among other issues.

[46] NODAL, ‘Discurso de Lacalle Pou’.

[47] Translator’s note: Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner served as presidents of Argentina from 2003-2007 and 2007-2015, respectively. Cristina now serves as vice president to Alberto Fernández.

[48] Translator’s note: Castrochavismo (Castro-Chavism) is combination of Castroism (castroismo) – the theory and practice associated with Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution – and Chavism or Chavezism (chavismo) – based on the ideas, programmes, and government style associated with former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

[49] Télam, ‘Bolsonaro llamó “héroe nacional” a un coronel que dirigió un centro de represión’. 8 August 2019.

Adapted graphic from People’s Medical Publishing House, China, 1977.

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.

This is the third in a multiple-part series of studies on CoronaShock. It is based on research by Ana Maldonado (Frente Francisco de Miranda, Venezuela), Manolo de los Santos (researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), Subin Dennis (researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), and Vijay Prashad (director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism’. What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilisation? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilisation. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilisation and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.

Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy, 1915.

Ở nhà là yêu nước! (‘To stay at home is to love your country!’), Vietnam, 2020.
Hiep Le Duc

In late December 2019, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in central China’s Hubei Province detected cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause. In the first few days of January 2020, Chinese authorities were regularly informing the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as other major countries and regions with close ties to China’s mainland, such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan about the outbreak. On 5 January, the WHO released its first briefing on a ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ in Wuhan. Little was known about the virus, neither how to properly understand it nor whether transmission could occur between humans. The genome sequence for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was published by the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) on 12 January. Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese pulmonologist who is advising the Chinese government on this pandemic, confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus on 20 January.

As soon as it was clear that this virus could be transmitted between humans, the Chinese authorities acted. Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was shut down, the scientific establishment in China – and its collaborators around the world – went to work to understand the virus and the disease (COVID-19), and medical personnel in China rushed to be trained and to help break the chain of the infection. Inside Wuhan, the neighbourhood committees, which include members of a range of other associations, Communist Party cadres, and volunteers of all kinds, hastened to assist with temperature checks, food and medicine distribution, and assistance in hospitals. After ten weeks in lockdown, Wuhan opened once more on 8 April. On 15 May, the authorities started to test all the residents of Wuhan once again in order to protect public health and to resume social and economic activities (China shared the results of this test to aid with studies on the feasibility of the herd immunity theory).

On 30 January, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the outbreak constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). From its Geneva headquarters, the WHO sent up a flare which effectively read: a highly contagious virus has been detected that requires stringent measures of tests, physical distance, and aggressive sanitation.

At this point, in the aftermath of 20 January, a gulf opened between the capitalist states and the socialist states. Our analysis shows four main areas of differentiation between the socialist and capitalist approach to the virus. The socialist approach is based on:

1. Science-based government action
2. Public sector production of essential materials
3. Public action mobilised to facilitate social life
4. Internationalism

In the capitalist states (such as the United States, Brazil, and India), the governments have instead operated in a hallucinatory manner, pretending that the virus is either not real or not contagious and hoping that some extraneous factor would protect their citizens from its dangers. For-profit sector firms have failed to provide the necessary equipment, while public action has been hard to galvanise in atomised societies that lack the habit of organisation and struggle. Finally, to cover up their incompetence, the ruling political class in these states has resorted to stigmatisation and jingoism, using – in this case – the lethal combination of racism and anti-communism to blame China.

In this report, we look at three countries (Cuba, Venezuela, and Vietnam) as well as one state (Kerala, India) to investigate how these socialist parts of the world have been able to handle the virus more effectively.

Cuba

On 17 January, Cuban media reported the detection of a mysterious pneumonia in China that, at that point, had killed two people and infected forty-one. When more information came in about the novel coronavirus, the government began to disseminate the WHO’s reports. The Cuban media provided comprehensive coverage of the decisions made in China to implement lockdowns and other measures to break the chain of the infection. On 28 February, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, President of Cuba, spoke by phone with Xi Jinping, President of China. During the call, Díaz-Canel expressed the firm support and solidarity of the Cuban people, their government, and the Communist Party with China’s struggle against the virus. Cuba offered to help in any way it could to assist the Chinese people. BioCubaFarma, a public sector firm, increased its production of Interferon Alpha 2B and, as of 24 February, had provided more than 150,000 double dose vials of the drug to China.

On 28 January, Dr. José Ángel Portal Miranda, head of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), convened a national-level meeting on the novel coronavirus. Medical vigilance was to be the priority, which is why the government created a National Working Group (NWG) to lead the struggle. MINSAP began to train all public health personnel – over 95,000 doctors and 84,000 nurses – to diagnose and treat cases of COVID-19. A public campaign began to call for vigilance of symptoms and heightened hygiene. Media platforms shared this information, but so did mass organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), and the Federation of University Students (FEU). Dr. Francisco Durán García, the national director of epidemiology of MINSAP, made the first official statement that day. He calmly explained that the administration had designed a plan ‘similar to the plan we developed when the Ebola epidemic hit several countries’. Dr. Carmelo Trujillo Machado, national head of the MINSAP International Health Control Program, said that officials would be vigilant at ports of entry for travellers with any known symptoms of COVID-19.

The National Working Group authorised the immediate purchase of protective gear, medical equipment, and reactive agents. The production of thirty critical medical products became a priority. Agencies in Cuba began a renewed emphasis on the research and development of candidate vaccines and anti-viral treatments to be shared with China. By April, the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) started the first clinical trials on a vaccine that could boost the immune system. Dr. Gerardo E. Guillén Nieto, the director of Biomedical Research at the China-Cuba Centre for Biotechnological Innovation (CCBJIC) in Hunan, China said that his team was examining whether the innate immune system could be activated and, if activated, would produce a specific immunity against the virus. There are no specific vaccines for this disease, but Cuba, he says, ‘has products that already exist’.

On 10 March, four tourists who had arrived from Lombardy (Italy) showed symptoms of COVID-19. When they tested positive for COVID-19, they were shifted to the Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), which has a long history of combatting epidemics. The IPK, along with regional hospitals in Santa Clara and Santiago de Cuba, was designated as the primary site for testing patients suspected of having COVID-19. Each of these hospitals has the capacity to test 1,000 patients per day. The government decided to place all travellers arriving in Cuba under fourteen days of medical observation.

On 17 March, 28,000 students from Cuba’s thirteen medical universities joined a campaign to visit every home in the country. The students went to check each person for symptoms, and if they found someone with symptoms, they referred them to their community’s family doctor. This doctor would then make a decision about whether or not to test the person. Within a week, the medical students had visited six million Cubans – half of the island’s population. With this approach, close to 40,000 people were tested for COVID-19 by 26 April. In the province of Villa Clara, the students visited 250,000 people, leading to the detection of 2,687 cases with respiratory symptoms, including five potential COVID-19 cases most likely to test positive. Thousands more foreign medical students on scholarships provided by Cuba joined this campaign. Ishaira Nieto Rosas, a third year student from Puerto Rico, said that for foreign students these visits were voluntary, but ‘in these moments you realise that our work is very important and that the population is aware of that. It does not matter how many doors we have to knock on, or how many times we have to shout good morning. We do this because the country needs us, and we do it with great pride’.

On 20 March, President Díaz-Canel, along with seven members of Cuba’s Council of Ministers, went on television to report on the steps taken thus far and to outline further measures. ‘We have a responsibility to protect human lives and the entire social fabric’, he said, ‘with serenity, realism, and objectivity. There can be neither panic nor overconfidence’. A science-based attitude defined Cuba’s response. By that date, 21 people had tested positive for COVID-19 and another 716 people were under observation in hospitals. The government put forward several measures:

1. Cuban nationals who returned home from abroad would be placed under a fourteen-day quarantine.
2. Sixty thousand tourists would leave the country; the entry of travellers would be heavily regulated, which would impact tourism, one of Cuba’s key sources of revenue.
3. Physical distancing was mandated.
4. People vulnerable to the virus and those who were not working in key industries were mandated to self-quarantine at home.
5. The Ministry of Internal Commerce suspended all public activities. Food stores and farmers’ markets would be kept open under the strictest health regulations. Restaurants could remain open but only at 50% capacity.
6. Minister of Labour and Social Security Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera said that ‘No one will be left helpless’, and measures were implemented to ensure this. Tax payments for self-employed private sector workers were suspended. For the first month of the quarantine, furloughed workers received 100% of their salaries; after that, workers were promised 60% of their salaries. Workers in the private sector were told that they would receive the equivalent of the national minimum wage.
7. To stave off the possibility of hunger, the Cuban authorities expanded the existing rationing system in order to guarantee each family equitable access to food and basic sanitation supplies during the pandemic. Ration cards were used for distribution through 12,767 neighbourhood stores; these cards offer a basic food basket that includes cooking oil, sugar, rice, and beans, and was expanded to include eggs, potatoes, vegetables, an extra pound of chicken per person, and extra soap, toothpaste, and bleach. Despite its limitations, the ration cards and neighbourhood stores have served 3,809,000 families and limited price gouging.

By 6 April, the number of confirmed patients rose to 396, with 1,752 hospitalised. The government announced additional measures based on the national plan. These included suspending all non-essential economic activities, sit-down service in restaurants (only pick-ups and deliveries allowed), urban public transportation, and postponing payment for water, electricity, and gas.

The backbone of Cuba’s response to COVID-19, as in other socialist countries, has been public action. The Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), founded in 1960 under the threat of a possible US invasion, have an estimated 8 million members (out of a population of 11.34 million). The committees are organised on a block-by-block basis; they mobilise the people to help the most vulnerable in each community, to participate in health campaigns, and to provide food and shelter during the hurricane season. In the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, CDR members like Juana Guerra, a university professor and a member of the Federation of Cuban Women, made 16,000 masks. Members of the Federation of University Students volunteer in different cities, helping to clean and cook in isolation centres, delivering supplies to families under quarantine, and working in designated support centres preparing food for medical personnel and vulnerable families. Inspired by the battles of the past, many students proudly say that COVID-19 has become their Bay of Pigs (#EsteEsMiGiron).

Internationalism is at the core of the revolutionary Cuban ethos. In 2005, Cuba founded the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to provide emergency health assistance around the world; since then, it has sent twenty-five contingents abroad, aiding 3.5 million people in twenty-three countries. This brigade is now at the centre of the fight against COVID-19, responding to requests to send Cuban health workers to countries around the world. On 15 March, the first contingent of 130 epidemiologists and other medical specialists left for Venezuela. Since then, thirty-three more contingents made up of 3,337 health workers have gone to work in twenty-seven countries in Europe, Africa, and Latin America (the contingents range from two doctors in Grenada to 217 health workers in South Africa). Many of these countries have come under increased pressure from the US government to deny Cuba’s help. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has led the charge, accusing the island of profiting from the pandemic. Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla responded to the US smear campaign, saying, ‘What right does the Secretary of State have to put pressure on sovereign governments to deprive their nation[s] of medical care?’

As the world entered into CoronaShock, the British cruise ship MS Braemar was left stranded in the Caribbean carrying 682 passengers, including five with COVID-19, desperately looking for a port in which to dock. While other countries refused to allow the ship to dock, Cuba – at significant risk – opened its doors and organised the disembarkment and return home of its passengers, stating that ‘These times call for solidarity, understanding health as a human right and strengthening international cooperation in order to address our common challenges; i.e., values that are inherent to the humanist practice of the Cuban Revolution and people’.

Cuba’s revolutionary system has given it the strength and ability to survive in the face of blockades and pandemics, integrating workers, peasants, scientists, mass organisations, and civil defence systems with a party and a government that puts human life at the centre of its attention.

We sent a doctor to Cuba; the doctor transformed into millions, 2020.
#CubaSavesLives

Vietnam

On 16 January, before it was clear that the new virus could be transmitted between humans, Vietnam’s Ministry of Health informed the other government agencies and the public about the dangerous virus and urged immediate action. Five days later, on 21 January, the Ministry of Health gave detailed instructions to hospitals and clinics about how to tackle the virus. On 24 January, Deputy Health Minister Đỗ Xuân Tuyên said that inspections would take place at all border posts; this was an important decision, since Vietnam shares a 1,400-kilometre border with China, and this border is only a ten-hour bus ride from Wuhan. On 30 January, the Vietnamese government – led by Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc – established a national steering committee on epidemic prevention. Two days later, on 1 February, Prime Minister Nguyễn declared what was effectively a national emergency.

The Communist Party of Vietnam very early on offered a motto: ‘fighting the epidemic is like fighting against the enemy’. But this fight was to be conducted with a scientific attitude. Testing began at the border points, and epidemic control teams began to test the population and carry out contact tracing if an infected person was identified. The National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology was able to create a test very quickly, which was used extensively in the country; over 100 laboratories across the country performed real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, which allowed for much faster COVID-19 results at the rate of 27,000 samples per day. On 10 March, the government released the NCOVI mobile application to facilitate contact tracing. Rather than lock down the entire population, the epidemic teams studied the population and isolated and treated those with symptoms, those who tested positive for COVID-19, and anyone who they came into contact with; any region with particularly high numbers was quarantined.

Based on the scientific knowledge available, the Vietnamese authorities followed a four-tier approach to isolation:

1. Tier one: anyone with a confirmed diagnosis is isolated in a health facility (in these cases, self-quarantine is not permitted).
2. Tier two: anyone with close contact with the confirmed cases must be tested and go into a government-run quarantine centre.
3. Tier three: anyone who has been in close contact with the people in tier two must self-isolate at home.
4. Tier four: if there is a particularly bad outbreak in a village or a hospital, the entire village and hospital must go into lockdown.

This multi-tier isolation system helped the authorities break the chain of infection. But the government remained vigilant. On 30 March, soon after the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi – which had been essential in the fight to break the chain – experienced a flare of cases, the government announced a national pandemic.

The Ministry of Health posted a music video to explain the concept of physical distancing and hand washing; this video went viral on Tik Tok, where young people created a dance to go with it. The message was broadcast within days. Telecommunications firms – including private companies – sent three billion messages about COVID-19 to those with mobile phones. Masks were mandated in public and alcohol-based hand sanitisers were distributed and made available for sale everywhere. Schools and religious sites were all immediately closed.

The government directed public sector units to produce necessary equipment, including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and ventilators, as well as hand sanitizer and medicines. There was enough industrial capacity that could be directed to produce these goods without any concerns about price gouging, since these are public sector enterprises. On 8 April, the government of Vietnam sent 450,000 units of PPE to the United States in an act of solidarity. This is the same country which was bombed beyond belief by the United States government, which used such harsh chemical weapons that the people remain scarred by. Vietnam’s agriculture will not recover for generations.

The private sector followed suit, and so did philanthropists who set up ‘Rice ATMs’ to distribute food to those who had lost their incomes. The government set up food kitchens to feed any one in need.

Vietnam, with a population of 100 million, has had no fatalities from COVID-19 as of early July.

Cảm ơn Việt Nam! (‘Thank you, Vietnam!’), Vietnam, 2020.
Hiep Le Duc

Venezuela

On 26 February, Brazilian authorities reported the first case of coronavirus; this case was also the first to be reported in Latin America. Two days later, on 28 February, the Venezuelan government created the Presidential Commission for the Prevention and Control of Coronavirus (weeks before the first case was reported in the country on 13 March). Strikingly, during the same time frame, the United States government decided to deepen its hybrid war against Venezuela – despite the highly contagious nature of the coronavirus, and despite the warnings of the WHO.

Before the pandemic, Venezuela had already been under severe US sanctions, putting pressure on Venezuela’s economy as a whole and sabotaging Venezuela’s public health system. In 2018, the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation reported 85% shortages of essential medicines. Another study from 2018 showed that 300,000 people are at risk of dying because they lack access to key medicines for HIV, kidney disease, cancer, and diabetes as a result of the sanctions. Venezuela turned to its international allies – China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia – to provide necessary equipment and support. Squeezed by the hostile US-driven sanctions regime and by a blockade by US warships, the Venezuelan government and its allies demonstrated nerves of steel in their decision to break the US embargo.

On 13 March, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez confirmed the first positive cases of COVID-19: a forty-one-year-old woman returning from travels in the European Union and the United States and a fifty-two-year-old man returning from Spain. The previous day, the government had suspended flights – effective 15 March – from Europe, Colombia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic and began checking for symptoms at airports and seaports. Because of the cases of the travellers returning from Spain, mandatory quarantines were ordered for all passengers who arrived on Iberia flight 6673 on 5 and 8 March.

The government took the WHO advisories seriously and banned all public gatherings, suspended all schools, ordered the use of face masks on public transportation, and, on 15 March called for a total quarantine in certain states of the country (La Guaira, Miranda, Zulia, Apure, Táchira and Cojedes, as well as in the city of Caracas). Within two days, the government confirmed sixteen new cases, and so it extended the quarantine to the entire nation for one month. The use of face masks in public was declared compulsory.

It was imperative, again based on the advice of the WHO, to collect relevant medical and epidemiological information about the population. On 16 March, the government announced that the Sistema Patria (‘System of the Homeland’) – the national card system established by President Nicolás Maduro in 2016 to facilitate access to social programs and electronic payments– would be used as an instrument in the fight against the disease. In 2017, Maduro’s administration established this web-based platform as a way to reach the most vulnerable parts of the population in the fight against sanctions-induced problems. Through a voluntary registration process, over eighteen million of Venezuela’s roughly twenty-eight million residents enrolled in the system, making it the most comprehensive way both to collect information and to deliver goods and services to the people. Over the years, the Sistema Patria has become the basis for organising the food supply, allocating monetary assistance, and experimenting with digital currency. In the case of the struggle against COVID-19, the system has been used to deliver cash assistance to the people as well as to do a proper inventory of the people’s medical needs.

On 26 March, the US Department of Justice accused the Venezuelan leadership of drug trafficking and put a bounty on President Nicolás Maduro, Minister of Industry and National Production for Venezuela Tareck El Aissami, Minister of Defence Vladimir Padrino López, and President of the National Constituent Assembly Diosdado Cabello Rondón, among others. On that same day, the government announced a COVID-19 survey and screening plan using Sistema Patria as its basis. The plan, focused on house-to-house visits of those who are the most vulnerable to the disease, is an effective mechanism in the prevention and early detection of new cases. At the same time, it creates employment for healthcare workers in the midst of an economic crisis. The plan was developed by Venezuelan and Cuban medical teams who worked closely in their outreach with the various organisations of the people such as communal councils, the Local Committees for Supply and Production, health committees, and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Venezuela has carried out 929,599 tests to diagnose cases of COVID-19, equivalent to 30,987 tests per million inhabitants.

On 24 March, President Maduro reiterated the importance of taking preventative measures against the virus and tightened the lockdown in the Capital Region. This announcement came in light of seven new detected cases of COVID-19, bringing the country’s total at that time to ninety-one cases. This government response required at least the bolstering of three kinds of institutions: 1) Forty-six hospitals dedicated to COVID-19 patients; 2) comprehensive diagnostic centres, which were established in 2005 as local health clinics as a project of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments; 3) private health centres. Based on the latest science, the government circulated epidemiological and clinical protocols. Medications such as the Cuban anti-viral drug Interferon Alpha 2B and hydroxychloroquine were introduced to assist in the treatment of infected patients, even in private medical centres. Twelve thousand medical and nursing students were mobilised to assist in the treatment of the patients.

Venezuelans – familiar with the harsh conditions imposed on them by the sanctions – had already built relief institutions and political resilience. One such important institution is the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP), which were created in 2016 as a method to deliver food to at least seven million households who were otherwise in danger of hunger. The point of the system is not only to meet the basic nutritional needs of the people, but also to strengthen local community organisations, since these are the bodies that are in touch with the people and that deliver food. Each CLAP box has similar supplies (flour, grains, rice, milk, oil, and canned meat); while the market price of the goods in the box is roughly $11, the cost to the public is less than a penny.

The CLAP programme has been under targeted attack by the United States government, which has sought to sanction overseas suppliers of food products that enter the CLAP relief boxes. This has not deterred the Venezuelan government, which – despite manifold problems – remains committed to the relief of the people. In 2016, Aristóbulo Istúriz, vice president of Venezuela, said that the programme is a ‘political instrument to defend the revolution’; this attitude remains intact. On 19 March, the government created a supplementary plan for CLAP, using the programme as a way to enhance relief at a time of the lockdown.

On 24 March, the government further extended the CLAP programme, and – despite the economic uncertainty posed by the sanctions – its distribution is guaranteed until at least August 2020. There has been a long-term plan to move from the import of food – including what goes in the CLAP boxes – to becoming more self-sufficient in food production. The government announced further investment to strengthen the Centralised Public Procurement Plan, which manages state purchases of social goods, and it encouraged the creation of ways to bring food from the countryside into cities. Since schools are closed, the School Feeding Plan, which feeds a large percentage of Venezuela’s children, has now been transformed into part of an emergency plan; drawing on a bedrock of public action, food that is cooked in community kitchens is being distributed to the students’ homes. The People to People Socialist Plan of Production, Distribution and Consumption enhances this School Feeding Plan with fruits and vegetables from productive communes and a participatory and pedagogical methodology of work. The city of Caracas has established a home delivery programme, ‘I Buy from Home’, with regulated prices of subsidised food and hired workers whose daily income had vanished as delivery persons.

A range of policies was announced on 23 March to secure the already fragile economy. Using the Sistema Patria, the government provided cash assistance to the vulnerable and to small and medium businesses directly in order for them to continue paying their workers. The government suspended lease and rent payments and prohibited evictions. It called upon real estate associations to find a way to manage the long-term crisis of insolvency. All principal and interest payments on loans were suspended for six months, and fines and interest on fines were also abolished. The government ordered banks to reclassify the measurement of credit in this period in order to protect people’s credit histories. Since communications are central – especially during the quarantine – the government prohibited the suspension of cable television services and telephone services (including the Internet) for six months. To enable the import of key goods to sustain the country, the government offered tax exemptions and invested in strategic sectors such as food production and distribution, pharmaceutical production and distribution, and the production of hygiene and sanitary equipment and goods.

In addition to such measures by the state, a key part of the Venezuelan response has been the centrality of public action. The theory of the Bolivarian Revolution is to decentralise institutional power into people power, to build institutions of the people that self-manage localities and that collectivise production. Crucial to carrying out this process are the communes, their communal councils, and the CLAP committees, as well as people’s movements. Women play a central role in the leadership of these entities as part of the Social Missions; it is women who cook every single day, who work preparing infusions and making masks, and who provide assistance to families who do not have the means to school their children at home.

The response to the pandemic is met not only by the state, but by these decentralised bodies, which are highly motivated and political. As the hybrid war against Venezuela deepens, the people’s participation not only provides vital support to counteract the impact crisis, but also strengthens their own determination to defend their Bolivarian Revolution against the attack on the currency, hyperinflation, and the armed aggression against the country intensifies popular resistance. The reaction to the pandemic – both by the state and through organised public action – has weaved relief efforts to meet people’s immediate material needs together with the political fortitude and resilience required to resist the US-led hybrid war.

Over the first six weeks of the lockdown, roughly 49,628 people returned to Venezuela, mainly from Colombia and Brazil. After being tested at the borders, they went into mandatory quarantine in government-run centres. Despite these thorough measures, many of the COVID-19 cases are imported – 77.8% of the thirty-four cases of COVID-19 identified between 9 and 27 May alone were brought in from outside of the country.

Knowing these risks, the government sent planes to Santiago (Chile), Lima (Peru), and Quito (Ecuador) to bring Venezuelans home at no cost, regardless of their political affiliations, and despite the additional obstacles to managing the crisis and accessing adequate medical supplies that are posed by US sanctions. Venezuela has faced hostility from the governments of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil, but this has not impacted how the government of Venezuela helped Venezuelans who migrated to those countries. Furthermore, when the Colombian Ministry of Health said that its only machine to diagnose COVID-19 had broken, President Maduro offered to send two machines, which had come from China, to Colombia – despite the fact that Colombia houses anti-Venezuelan military forces on the border and has consistently acted as a ‘doormat’ for US intervention in the country. The Venezuelan government tried to coordinate this offer through the Pan-American Health Organisation, but the offer was rejected by Colombia.

Venezuela and Cuba have been brought closer together by the US attack on both countries and by their joint commitment to socialism. The response to COVID-19 was therefore very closely coordinated by the two states. The Cuban government sent 10,000 doses of Interferon Alpha 2B; its creator – Dr. Luis Herrera – visited Venezuela on 16 March and praised the Venezuelan decision to impose quarantine as an effective way to break the chain of infection. The day before, a team of 130 Cuban doctors arrived to support the efforts to combat coronavirus in the country. This team joined the Cuban Medical Mission that has been in Venezuela since 2003 (its members rotate every two years). On 23 March, a medical team arrived from the People’s Republic of China to offer assistance, and China – along with Russia – sent medical equipment, medicines, diagnostic tests, reagents, protective lenses, biosafety suits, and air purifiers for health centres, and an air bridge was established between Venezuela and China to facilitate imports of essential goods.

In May, Iran sent five oil tankers with fuel to Venezuela with the intention of providing relief to the Venezuelan people, thereby breaking the US blockade of Venezuela’s ports. These tankers entered Venezuela with a broad message of peaceful solidarity between peoples.

A los médicos cubanos (‘To the Cuban Doctors’), Venezuela, 2020.
Miguel Guerra/Utopix

Kerala

On 18 January, KK Shailaja, Kerala’s health minister in the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government of this Indian state of 35 million, convened a meeting to discuss what was going on in Wuhan, China. Wuhan had not yet gone into lockdown, but Shailaja was aware that there were students from Kerala in Wuhan, and that when they returned, there would be a possibility of the coronavirus being imported into the state. On 22 January, the health department sent an alert to all hospitals and district authorities about the need to prepare for the virus. On 24 January, Kerala set up a state-level control room; by 28 January, control rooms had been set up in all of the districts. Isolation facilities were also set up in all of the districts, and eighteen committees were established and preventive measures were set in motion.

The first case of coronavirus in Kerala, a medical student who had been in Wuhan, was detected on 30 January; soon, two more tested positive, and by 3 February more than 2,200 people who returned to Kerala from coronavirus-hit regions had been placed under quarantine. The vigilance exercised by the state proved effective: all three patients fully recovered within a few days, and there were no cases of secondary spread. The number of people under quarantine soon decreased.

But late in February, as the coronavirus spread to more countries, the influx of people into Kerala from coronavirus-hit regions intensified. Several people – initially those coming from Italy, and later those coming from the Persian Gulf region – tested positive for COVID-19. Others who came into contact with them also contracted the disease. This was the second wave of COVID-19 infections in the state. Throughout the subsequent weeks, Kerala continued to screen passengers who came into the state not just by air, but also by road at twenty-four border checkpoints, and by train – an arduous task given the sheer number of passengers.

Kerala carried out extensive contact tracing, using route maps that contain the details of the places visited by infected persons. The people who were present at those locations during the time when the infected persons visited were asked to contact the health department. The route maps have been widely circulated through social media and through GoK Direct, the Government of Kerala’s mobile phone app. Elected representatives from Local Self Government Institutions and community health workers helped carry out contact tracing. The formula was clear: ‘trace, quarantine, test, isolate, treat’, as Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan – who is also a Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – would later state.

Those who come from abroad or from other states are placed under quarantine, either at designated quarantine centres or at home. Those who have come into primary and secondary contact with infected persons are under home quarantine. Health department officials visit or call regularly to check whether isolation protocols are being followed at home. Those who do not have enough facilities at home for effective quarantining are lodged in government-run quarantine centres, and anyone who develops symptoms associated with COVID-19 is hospitalised. Testing and treatment are free and available to everyone in the state.

When COVID-19 started being reported in the state, Health Minister KK Shailaja held daily press conferences to inform the public about the latest updates, the measures being taken to combat the virus, and the measures that must be taken by the public. From 10 March onwards, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan started to give daily press conferences, as the efforts to contain the pandemic now involved the work of several departments. More COVID-19 test centres and COVID-19 care centres have been set up in all districts, and 276 doctors and 321 junior health inspectors have been newly appointed.

The government has taken steps to manufacture masks and sanitiser in light of the increased demand, rather than leaving the problem to be played out in the free market. The public sector has taken the lead in producing more medicines, hand sanitiser, and gloves. Kudumbashree, a massive government-backed collective of neighbourhood groups of 4.5 million women (roughly one-fourth of the population of women in the state), started making masks. Activists of the left-wing Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) and the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (‘The Kerala Forum for Science Literature’ or KSSP, Kerala’s biggest people’s science movement) pitched in by making hand sanitiser.

The government launched the Break The Chain campaign to encourage people to adopt the practices necessary to prevent COVID-19 infection. Government employees’ organisations set up hand sanitiser kiosks in front of government offices. DYFI set up hand washing facilities in 25,000 locations across the state, and call centres for people who needed help. Preparedness, utmost vigilance, strict adherence to protocol, and transparency have been crucial in Kerala’s battle against COVID-19.

By late March, when the rest of India awoke to the reality of the pandemic, Kerala had already moved towards an in-depth plan to alleviate the economic hardship of the people. By 12 March, it had announced the closure of educational institutions and soon began to deliver food at home for children who would have otherwise been in childcare centres. Rather than impose a blanket lockdown with no thought as to how families might eat, stay in their homes, or comply with the policies being rolled out – as done by the India’s central government – Kerala’s state government gradually put restrictions into place, taking care to provide the people with the conditions to follow them. On 19 March, the Chief Minister announced a relief package of Rs. 200 billion. The package included advance payment of social welfare pensions, free food grains to everyone for a month, additional funding of Rs. 5 billion for public healthcare, and relaxation of utility bill and tax payment deadlines.

The state implemented a lockdown from 24 March onwards. India’s central government implemented a country-wide lockdown from the next day onwards. In the subsequent weeks, Kerala’s state government distributed food grains for free to all families in the state. Cooked food is being provided to the elderly who live alone, the disabled, those who cannot cook for themselves due to illness, and the extremely poor. Ward-level committees of Local Self Government Institutions (LSGIs) – panchayats in villages, municipalities in towns, and municipal corporations in larger cities – are doing this work with the help of volunteers. Community kitchens have been set up by the LSGIs, and volunteers deliver cooked food from these kitchens to the homes of those in need. Members of the left-wing unions of LSGI employees, such as the Kerala Municipal and Corporation Staff Union (KMCSU), constitute a majority of those who are volunteering their services at the community kitchens. The government has also distributed grocery kits containing seventeen essential items to all families for free.

Anticipating the possibility of supply chains being disrupted due to the lockdown, the state government took steps to ensure that paddy, the staple crop of the region, is harvested without interruption. Measures were also taken to ensure the procurement of rice, vegetables, and several other crops.

Right at the outset, the Government of Kerala recognised that the accommodation facilities for migrant workers from other Indian states were often inadequate to ensure physical distancing. Therefore, state-run relief camps were set up for the workers and medical check-ups were arranged. Food, masks, soap, and hand sanitiser were made available to the workers. As of 20 April, 19,902 camps had been opened for migrant workers in Kerala, with 353,000 workers staying in the camps – the highest number of such camps in the country.

Kerala has many welfare fund boards for workers of various sectors, which provide social security benefits by pooling contributions by workers and their employers into welfare funds. All workers in sectors with welfare fund boards are being provided financial assistance through the boards. Workers who are not part of any welfare fund board are being given Rs. 1,000 each.

The scale of voluntary work that is underway is massive. Apart from voluntary work by government employees, trade union members, youth activists, and student activists, work by the Social Volunteer Force of youth set up by the government has also been a crucial part of the relief efforts. As of 23 June, 346,306 youth had registered as volunteers who are working to identify those who need assistance, deliver food and essential items, provide emergency assistance at homes, help with the operation of call centres and control rooms, deliver materials to relief camps, communicate alerts, and provide assistance at hospitals.

Kerala’s efforts to contain the second wave of COVID-19 infections were successful – by 8 May, the number of active COVID-19 cases in the state had come down to just sixteen. But a third wave of infections began soon after. This was because, as part of the easing of the lockdown in India, the severe restrictions on inter-state travel and on the arrival of international flights which were in place began to be relaxed from the first week of May onwards. Hundreds of thousands of Keralites living abroad and in other Indian states, faced with rising COVID-19 infections and deaths, unsafe conditions, a lack of medical attention, and even job losses in many cases, scrambled to get back to their home state. The state government adopted the stand that it is committed to bring back all Keralites who wanted to return to the state. More than 315,000 people returned to Kerala from other states and abroad between 4 May and 23 June. Since most of those who return come from regions with very high numbers of COVID-19 cases, this led to an increase in the number of infections in Kerala.

As of 23 June, the number of active COVID-19 cases in Kerala stood at 1,620, and the number of deaths at 22. Out of all the cases reported in the state from 4 May to 23 June, 90.7%f were reported among those who came from abroad or other states. A total of 150,196 people were under observation at this point – 147,990 at home or at quarantine centres, and 2,206 at hospitals. Restrictions are being relaxed in a calibrated manner, but there is no room for complacency. Awareness campaigns are continuing, norms about physical distancing are in place, large gatherings are not allowed, and the use of face masks in public is compulsory. The state government continues to hold regular press conferences and provide daily updates for the public.

The efforts of the LDF government are rooted in a comprehensive approach to ensure the welfare of all citizens. This is an approach which recognises the importance of the public healthcare system, as well as other social and economic determinants of health and well-being. It recognises that hunger and homelessness would be serious impediments to health. The LDF government’s policy measures amid COVID-19 aim to address all of these issues in order to provide relief to the people.

The objective is to reach every single person in need. As of 9 June, 116,328 volunteers had been deployed to identify those who need assistance so that no one falls through the cracks. The government’s strategy has been to mobilise its entire state machinery, including the public sector and LSGIs, along with the collective energies of the state’s powerful mass and class organisations, collectives, and cooperatives, and the zeal of Kerala’s citizens for voluntary action. This is a strategy of total mobilisation that integrates the work of the state machinery with the work of the general public, with those mobilised by mass and class organisations playing a key role.

All of this has been made possible as a result of public action in the state. Right from the time when the first communist ministry was elected in 1957, Kerala has invested in public education and public healthcare. Communist-led governments have taken the lead in implementing land reforms that broke feudal landlordism, greatly improved the living standards of the peasantry and agricultural workers, and increased the bargaining power of the workers. The working-class movement has played a crucial role in Kerala’s wages being the highest in the country, and has served as the most important factor behind the state having the most wide-ranging social security measures for workers, through the welfare fund boards.

The Left has long championed democratic decentralisation. The biggest effort in that direction was the People’s Plan Campaign, initiated by the LDF government in 1996. The LSGIs were greatly strengthened by the People’s Plan Campaign, which led to much higher devolution of funds and powers to the local bodies. This has significantly expanded the capacity of the LSGIs to intervene effectively in times of need, and now they are spearheading the relief efforts in the state. Kudumbashree was also initiated by the LDF government in 1998 and strengthened in the subsequent tenures of the LDF.

Public healthcare in Kerala has received its biggest boost over the tenure of the present LDF government, which came to power in 2016. This is in large part due to the Aardram Mission, an ambitious programme launched in 2017 to upgrade the state’s public healthcare facilities. Kerala has long had the best system of primary healthcare in the country, centred on Primary Health Centres (PHCs). The present LDF government has carried forward and significantly expanded upon this legacy. Now according to official rankings, the top twelve PHCs in India are in Kerala. As part of the Aardram Mission, all PHCs are being upgraded to Family Health Centres (FHCs) with extended timings (FHCs have outpatient services from morning to evening, compared to morning to noon in PHCs) and more doctors. Facilities in all government hospitals have improved greatly. This is what has enabled the healthcare system to stand up to the challenge posed by COVID-19. At the same time, efforts by the central government led by the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to push privatisation in the healthcare sector have been resisted by the LDF government of Kerala. In February of this year, the central government proposed that the district hospitals in Indian states should be privatised, and Kerala flatly refused.

The Very Best of Human Possibilities

CoronaShock reveals a deep divide between capitalist and socialist countries. This divide can be best understood, as we have shown, along four axes:

Socialism

1. Science
2. Public sector
3. Public action
4. Internationalism

Capitalism

1. Hallucination
2. For-profit sector
3. Atomisation and paralysis of the population
4. Jingoism and racism

There are, of course, exceptions to these reactions among the capitalist states. Several states in East Asia – such as Japan and South Korea – as well as Australia and New Zealand had been prepared by the SARS outbreak of 2003, and they did not destroy their public health infrastructure in the decades that followed; based on the experience of SARS, they did not scoff at the WHO reports.

By and large, however, it is the socialist states that have confronted the virus with resolve and intelligence; this is even though they face the brunt of US imperialism and an increasingly aggressive hybrid war (especially in the case of Cuba and Venezuela). These societies and their states have acted with determination and tenacity to break the chain of the pandemic and to avoid creating individual and social trauma and an economic desert for their peoples. Capitalism is unable to confront a disaster that it has in many ways created; socialism, on the other hand, brings out the very best of human possibilities.

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

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.

This is the second in a multiple-part series of studies on CoronaShock. It is based on a number of articles researched and written by Ana Maldonado (Frente Francisco de Miranda, Venezuela), Paola Estrada (Secretariat of the International Peoples Assembly and member of the Brazilian chapter of ALBA Movements), Zoe PC (Peoples Dispatch), and Vijay Prashad (director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

We carry on resisting. San Juan, Caracas. 2010.
Comando Creativo

But even the president of the United States
sometimes must have to stand naked.

[Bob Dylan, It’s Alright, Ma, 1965.]

The Folly of Hybrid War

Swiftly moves the Coronavirus and COVID-19, dashing across continents, skipping over oceans, terrifying populations in every country. The numbers of those infected continue to rise, as do the numbers of those who have died. Hands are being washed, tests are being done, physical distance is being observed. It is unclear how devastating this pandemic will be or how long it will last.

On 23 March, twelve days after the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic, the UN Secretary General António Guterres said, ‘The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. That is why today I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives’. Secretary General Guterres talked about silencing the guns, stopping the artillery, and ending the airstrikes. He did not refer to a specific conflict, leaving his plea to hang heavily in the air. After six weeks of deliberation and delay caused by Washington, in the first week of May, the United States government blocked a vote in the UN Security Council on a resolution that called for a global ceasefire.

The United States blocked this resolution, but even this resolution did not turn its attention to the kind of war that the US is prosecuting against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela – among others. Instead, it has imposed a hybrid war. The US military complex has advanced its hybrid war programme, which includes a range of techniques to undermine governments and political projects. These techniques include the mobilisation of US power over international institutions (such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the SWIFT wire service) in order to prevent governments from managing basic economic activity; the use of US diplomatic power to isolate governments; the use of sanctions methods to prevent private companies from doing business with certain governments; the use of information warfare to render governments and political forces to be criminals or terrorists; and so on. This powerful complex of instruments is able – in the plain light of day – to destabilise governments and to justify regime change (for more on this, see the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 17, Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America).

During a pandemic, one would expect that all countries would collaborate in every way to mitigate the spread of the virus and its impact on human society. One would expect that a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude would provide the opportunity to end all inhumane economic sanctions and political blockades against certain countries. On 24 March, the day after UN Secretary General Guterres’s plea, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet agreed that ‘at this crucial time, both for global public health reasons, and to support the rights and lives of millions of people in these countries, sectoral sanctions should be eased or suspended. In a context of [a] global pandemic, impeding medical efforts in one country heightens the risk for all of us’.

A few days later, Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, said that she was gratified to hear both Guterres and Bachelet call for an end to the sanctions regime. The problem, she indicated, lies with Washington: ‘The US, under the current administration, is very keen to continue the sanctions. Fortunately, some other countries are not. For instance, the European Union and many of the European countries are responding positively and easing sanctions during this time of the coronavirus. They are not completely lifting sanctions but interrupting them, and there are some communications going on, but not in the US, unfortunately’.

On 6 May, three other UN Special Rapporteurs – Olivier De Schutter (on extreme poverty and human rights), Léo Heller (on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation), and Koumbou Boly Barry (on the right to education) – said that ‘in light of the coronavirus pandemic, the United States should immediately lift blanket sanctions, which are having a severe impact on the human rights of the Venezuelan people’. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has brushed aside all concern and continued with its agenda of hybrid war towards regime change.

Habits of Regime Change

As COVID-19 moved toward South America, the US government increased pressure on the Venezuelan government. In February 2020 at the Munich Security Conference, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US seeks to ‘oust Maduro’. The following month, on March 12, the US tightened sanctions against Venezuela, and then the US Treasury Department put pressure on the International Monetary Fund not to allow Venezuela access to emergency funds to tackle the global pandemic. None of this worked. Despite the lack of support from the IMF, the Venezuelan government mobilised the people to break the chain of infection, with international assistance from China, Cuba, and Russia, as well as the World Health Organisation.

At this point, the US government shifted its focus. It suggested that President Nicolás Maduro and his senior leadership are involved in narco-trafficking. No evidence was offered for this hallucinatory claim, although there is substantial evidence of the culpability of senior Colombian politicians in the drug trade. US President Donald Trump authorised a naval detachment to sit off the coast of Venezuela, threaten its government, and intimidate its population. On April 30, to increase pressure on Venezuela, the Trump administration activated parts of the Selected Reserve of the Armed Forces to assist the US armed forces in a mission named ‘Enhanced Department of Defense Counternarcotic Operation in the Western Hemisphere’. All signs point to mischief by the US and its Colombian allies against the Venezuelan people.

The United States government has been entirely candid about its goal to overthrow the Venezuelan government, currently led by President Maduro, and to reverse the Bolivarian Revolution. In August 2017, Trump spoke openly about the ‘military option’ at the same time as the United States, Canada, Colombia, and a list of other countries governed by the far-right and subordinated to Washington formed the Lima Group. The Lima Group tried to maintain a liberal patina around their objective, stating in their declaration that they wished to ‘facilitat[e] … the restoration of the rule of law and constitutional and democratic order in Venezuela’. Trump ripped aside the fig leaf of this kind of liberal language and interpreted the phrase ‘restoration of democratic order’ quite rightly as a call for a military coup or an armed intervention to overthrow the government.

In January 2019, the United States government deepened its hybrid war with a clever diplomatic manoeuvre. It declared that Juan Guaidó, an insignificant politician, was the president of Venezuela and turned over substantial Venezuelan assets outside the country to him. An attempted uprising led by Guaidó and the far-right in Venezuela to oust Maduro and claim power failed to materialise, and Guaidó found himself with more friends in Washington, DC and amongst Colombia’s oligarchy than at home in Venezuela. However, this failed attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government did not deter the United States. In fact, the failure deepened US intervention in the region.

In May 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to make the case that the ‘US must be willing to intervene in Venezuela the way we did in Grenada’. In 1983, the US marines landed in Grenada to overthrow the legitimate government and to uproot the New Jewel Movement. Should certain measures not be taken, Senator Graham wrote that the United States ‘should move military assets to the region’. The United States attempted to create a phalanx of allies in the Brazilian and Colombian militaries to prepare for an invasion of Venezuela. Fortunately, at the Lima Group meeting in February 2019, Brazil’s vice president Hamilton Mourão told the press that Brazil would not allow the US to use its territory for a military intervention into Venezuela. The plans of a full-scale invasion had to be put on hold.

‘This is our great homeland’ / Tenemos Patria Grande. La Candelaria, Caracas. 2013.
Passersby in front of a mural that references the vision of a free and united Latin America, following the vision of José Martí and the Bolivarian Revolution.
Comando Creativo

Collective Punishment

On 10 March, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza told us that the ‘illegal and unilateral coercive measures that the United States has imposed on Venezuela are a form of collective punishment’. The use of the phrase ‘collective punishment’ is significant; under the 1949 Geneva Convention, any policy that inflicts damage on an entire population is a war crime. The US policy, Arreaza told us, has ‘resulted in difficulties for the timely acquisition of medicines’.

On paper, the unilateral US sanctions say that medical supplies are exempt. But this is an illusion. On 26 March, eleven US Senators sent a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to say: ‘We understand that the administration has stated that humanitarian and medical needs are exempt from U.S. sanctions, but our sanctions regime is so broad that medical suppliers and relief organizations simply steer clear of doing business in Iran and Venezuela in fear of accidentally getting caught up in the U.S. sanctions web’. Neither Venezuela nor Iran can easily buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport them into their countries, nor can they use them in their largely public sector health systems. The embargo against these countries – even more so in this time of COVID-19 – is not only a war crime by the standards of the Geneva Convention (1949); it is also a crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations International Law Commission (1947).

In 2017, Trump enacted tight restrictions on Venezuela’s ability to access financial markets. Two years later, the US government blacklisted Venezuela’s Central Bank and put a general embargo on Venezuelan state institutions. If any firm trades with Venezuela’s public sector, it could face secondary sanctions. The US Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) in 2017, which tightened sanctions against Iran, Russia, and North Korea. The next year, Trump imposed a raft of new sanctions against Iran, which suffocated the country’s economy. Once more, access to the world banking system and threats to companies that traded with Iran made it almost impossible for Iran to do business with the world. In particular, the US government made it clear that any business with the public sector of Iran and Venezuela was forbidden. The health infrastructure that provides for the mass of the populations in both Iran and Venezuela is run by the state, which means it faces disproportionate difficulty in accessing equipment and supplies, including testing kits and medicines.

Venezuela and Iran have relied on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to obtain medicines and tests. Nonetheless, the WHO faces its own challenges with sanctions, particularly when it comes to transportation. These harsh sanctions forced transportation companies to reconsider servicing both Iran and Venezuela. Some airlines stopped flying there, and many shipping companies decided not to anger Washington. When the WHO tried to get testing kits for COVID-19 from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into Iran, it faced difficulty ‘due to flight restrictions’, as the WHO’s Christoph Hamelmann put it. The UAE sent the equipment via a military transport plane.

Likewise, Arreaza told us, Venezuela has ‘received solidarity from governments of countries such as China and Cuba’. In late February, a team from the Red Cross Society of China arrived in Tehran to exchange information with the Iranian Red Crescent and with WHO officials. China has also donated testing kits and supplies. The sanctions, Chinese officials told us, should be of no consequence during a humanitarian crisis such as this; they are not going to honour them.

Meanwhile, the Iranians developed an app to help their population during the COVID-19 outbreak. Google decided to remove it from its app store, a consequence of the US sanctions.

What kind of moral fibre holds together an international system where a handful of countries can act in a way that goes against all the highest aspirations of humanity? When the United States continues its embargoes against thirty-nine countries – but with greater intensity against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela – when there is a global pandemic afoot, what does this say about the nature of power and authority in our world? Sensitive people should be offended by such behaviour, its mean-spiritedness evident in the unnatural deaths that it provokes.

When then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 about the half million Iraqi children who died because of US sanctions, she said that those deaths were ‘a price worth paying’. They were certainly not a price that the Iraqis wanted to pay, nor now the Iranians or the Venezuelans, or indeed most of humankind.

The IMF Takes Orders from the US Treasury

On 16 March 2020, the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva wrote a blog post on the Fund’s website; it represents the kind of generosity necessary in the midst of a global pandemic. ‘The IMF stands ready to mobilize its $1 trillion lending capacity to help our membership’, she wrote. Countries with ‘urgent balance-of-payments needs’ could be helped by the IMF’s ‘flexible and rapid-disbursing emergency response toolkit’. Through these mechanisms, and against its own history of structural adjustment conditions, the IMF said that it could provide $50 billion to developing countries and $10 billion to low-income countries at a zero-interest rate – without the usual strings attached.

The day before Georgieva made this public statement, Venezuela’s foreign ministry sent a letter to the IMF asking for funds to finance the government’s ‘detection and response systems’ for its efforts against the coronavirus. In the letter, President Nicolás Maduro wrote that his government is ‘executing different highly comprehensive, strict and exhaustive control measures … to protect the Venezuelan people’. These measures require funding, which is why the government is ‘turning to your honorable [organisation] to request your evaluation about the possibility of granting Venezuela a financing facility of USD 5,000 million [5 billion] from the emergency fund of the Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI), resources that will contribute significantly to strengthen our detection and response systems’.

Georgieva’s policy to provide special assistance to countries should have been enough for the IMF to provide the assistance that the Venezuelan government had requested. But, very quickly, the Fund declined the request from Venezuela.

It is important to underline the fact that the IMF made this denial at a time when the coronavirus had begun to spread in Venezuela. On 15 March, the day that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government sent the letter to the IMF, Maduro also met with senior government officials in Caracas. The state-owned Venezuelan pharmaceutical body (CIFAR) and the Venezuelan medical equipment companies said that they would be able to increase the production of machines and medicines to stem the crisis; but, they said, they would need key raw materials that have to be imported. The Venezuelan government went to the IMF in order to be able to pay for these imports. The denial of the loan directly impacted the Venezuelan health apparatus and impeded Venezuela from properly tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

‘This is the most dire situation we have ever faced’, said President Maduro as he put new measures in place. The Venezuelan government imposed an indefinite national quarantine and has implemented processes to distribute food and key supplies, building on the local self-government (communes) that developed with the Bolivarian Revolution. All of the institutions of the state are now involved in doing their part to help ‘flatten the curve’ and ‘break the chain’ of contagion. But, because of the IMF loan denial, the country has had a harder time producing testing kits, respirators, and key medicines for those infected with the virus.

Venezuela is a founding member of the IMF. It has, despite being an oil-rich state, come to the IMF several times for various forms of assistance. The cycle of IMF interventions in Venezuela in the 1980s and early 1990s led to an uprising in 1989 that delegitimised the Venezuelan elite; it was on the back of the popular protests against the IMF that Hugo Chávez built the coalition that propelled him to office in 1998 and that started the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999. By 2007, Venezuela paid off its outstanding debts to both the IMF and the World Bank; the country cut its ties to these institutions, hoping to build a Bank of the South – rooted in Latin America – as an alternative. But before this Bank could be set up, a round of crises struck Latin America, forced by a fall in commodity prices from 2014-15.

Venezuela’s economy relies upon foreign oil exports to generate the revenue necessary to import goods. With the fall in oil prices between 2014 and 2018 came a directed attack on Venezuela by the United States, who imposed a new round of unilateral sanctions. These sanctions prevented oil companies and transportation firms from doing business with Venezuela; international banks seized Venezuela’s holdings in their vaults (including $1.2 billion in gold in the Bank of England) and stopped doing business with Venezuela. This sanctions regime, tightened further by Donald Trump’s administration, deeply hurt Venezuela’s ability to sell its oil and buy products, including supplies for its state health sector.

In January 2019, after the US supported Guaidó’s attempt to usurp power, US banks hastily seized the Venezuelan state assets that they held and turned them over to the self-proclaimed president. Then, in a startling move, the IMF said that the Venezuelan government would no longer be allowed to use its $400 million in special drawing rights (SDRs), the currency of the IMF. It said that it had taken this action because of the political uncertainty in Venezuela. In other words, because of the attempted coup – which failed – the IMF said that it would not ‘take sides’ in Venezuela; by not ‘taking sides’, the IMF refused to allow the government of Venezuela to access its own funds. Strikingly, Guaidó’s adviser Ricardo Hausmann, a former IMF development committee chair and Guaidó’s representative at the Inter-American Development Bank, said at that time that he expected that when the regime change occurs, the money will be available to the new government. This is the IMF directly interfering in Venezuelan politics.

Neither at that time nor now has the IMF denied that the government of Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate government in Venezuela. The IMF continues to acknowledge on its website that the representative of Venezuela in the IMF is Simón Alejandro Zerpa Delgado, the minister of finance in Maduro’s government. One of the reasons why this is so is that Guaidó could not prove that he had the support of most of the member states of the IMF. Since Guaidó could not prove his standing, the IMF – again, extraordinarily – has instead denied the Maduro government its legitimate right to its own funds and to borrow against facilities provided by the Fund to its members.

History is watching us. Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2011.
Comando Creativo

Normally, the IMF takes time when it gets a request for funds. The request must be studied by the analysts, who look at the situation in the country and see whether the request is legitimate. In this case, the IMF responded immediately. It said no.

A spokesperson for the Fund, Raphael Anspach, would not answer specific questions about this denial; in 2019, he had been similarly cautious about saying anything about the denial of access to the $400 million in SDRs. This time, Anspach sent us a formal statement that the IMF had released to the media. The statement said that, while the IMF sympathises with the predicament of the Venezuelan people, ‘it is not in a position to consider this request’. Why is this so? Because, the IMF says, its ‘engagement with member countries is predicated on official government recognition by the international community’. ‘There is’, the statement says, ‘no clarity on recognition at this time’.

But there is clarity. The IMF listed the Venezuelan minister of finance on its website at least until mid-March. The United Nations continues to recognise the Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolás Maduro. That should be the official standard for the IMF to make its determination. But it is not. It is taking dictation from the US government. In April 2019, US Vice President Mike Pence went to the UN Security Council, where he said that the UN should accept Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela; he turned to the Venezuelan ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada Acosta, and said, ‘You shouldn’t be here’. This is a moment of great symbolism, the United States acting as if the UN is its home and that it can invite and uninvite whomsoever it wants. The IMF denial of the $5 billion request from Venezuela follows Pence’s sentiment. It is a violation of the spirit of international cooperation that is at the heart of the UN Charter.

There are signs of weakness in the US position. On 18 December 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted – without a vote – a resolution that accepted the credentials of the diplomats appointed by Maduro’s government. The fact that there was no vote taken reveals that the United States does not want to reveal in plain sight the minority support in the world for its position of isolating the government of Venezuela. The US would rather forego a vote in the interest of fabricating and upholding a smoke and mirrors narrative allegedly held by the ‘international community’ than allow the actual international community to vote openly and show that it accepts the Maduro government as the legitimate government of Venezuela.

The Hallucinatory Accusations of Narco-Trafficking

At a press conference on 26 March, it was almost comical how little evidence the US Department of Justice provided when it indicted Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and several of the leaders of his government of narco-trafficking. The US offered $15 million for the arrest of Maduro and $10 million for the others. Maduro, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said dramatically, ‘very deliberately deployed cocaine as a weapon’. Evidence for this? Not presented at all. An indictment is not a verdict of guilt, merely a note – in this case – prepared by the US government against an adversary; there is nothing in the indictment that proves the case that any of the individuals mentioned in it have anything to do with narcotics smuggling. It was apparent from the press conference at the US Department of Justice that this was political theatre, an attempt to further delegitimise Maduro’s government.

It is surreal that the United States – during the COVID-19 global pandemic – chooses to put its efforts into this ridiculous, evidence-free indictment against Maduro and other members of the government. Already, there is pressure on the United States to lift the sanctions not only against Venezuela but also against Iran (even The New York Times came out on 25 March to call for an end to sanctions on Iran). The World Health Organization has made it clear that this is just not the time to hamper the ability of countries to get precious supplies in to tackle the pandemic. Out of desperation, the US tried to change the conversation – no longer about COVID-19 and sanctions, but about narco-terrorism.

When asked about these indictments during the COVID-19 pandemic, US Attorney General William Barr tried to say that the fault lay not in Washington but in Caracas. He said, absent any evidence, that Venezuela is blocking aid from coming into the country. Nothing could be further from the truth, since Venezuela has welcomed medical supplies and medical personnel from China, Cuba, and Russia, as well as from the WHO. In fact, the WHO has pressed the US to allow it freer rein to bring goods into the country – a request that the US has not allowed. Barr can so easily say the very opposite of truth because none of the media outlets at the press conference would challenge him based on matters that are clearly in the public record.

In 1989, the US used the accusation of narco-trafficking – specifically cocaine trafficking – to taint the reputation of its former asset, then-president of Panama Manuel Noriega. Based on this accusation and an indictment in Florida, the US eventually invaded the country, seized Noriega, planted Washington’s puppet in Panama City, and threw Noriega into a Florida prison. The shadow of how the US dealt with Noriega hangs over Caracas.

The bounty on the heads of Maduro and his leadership suggests that the US government has essentially put a mafia-type hit out on these Venezuelans. This is a very dangerous move by the United States. It essentially gives gangsters a green light to attempt assassination inside Venezuela. The refusal to allow Maduro to travel outside of Venezuela is a violation of a series of international conventions that promote diplomacy over belligerence. But, given the lawless way that the US has formulated its regime change strategy against Venezuela – and throughout history – it is unlikely that anyone is going to criticise this move.

A few hours before the announcement in Washington, word began to spread that the United States was going to place Venezuela’s government on the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ list – the very highest condemnation of a government. But they had to pause. And the pause itself came for absurd reasons. If the US government accused Maduro’s government of being a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, then it would be tacitly acknowledging that the Maduro government is indeed the government of Venezuela. Since January 2019, one of the attempts at destabilisation had been to deny that Maduro’s government is the legitimate government of Venezuela, indeed, to deny that it is any kind of government. It would be impossible to say that the Maduro government is a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ without acknowledging that it is the government of Venezuela. So, the United States had to stay its hand, caught out by its own logic.

The statement released by the US Department of Justice reads like a thriller, and the lack of evidence lends it to comparison with fiction. It lists names and accusations, makes constant references to ‘narco-terrorism’, and claims that the Venezuelan government wants to ‘flood’ the United States with cocaine. It would take a superhuman effort of blindness to believe this baseless ranting and raving. But the problem is that the people of Venezuela must take this seriously, since it is a deepening of the United States government’s belligerence. The people of Venezuela are aware of the dangers of a Panama-type situation. It’s hard to blame them. This is the track record of the United States government.

The comparison to a Panama-type situation cannot be written off as paranoia. On April’s Fools Day, Trump gave a press conference in which he announced a new ‘counter-narcotics effort’ by US Southern Command. ‘We’re deploying additional Navy destroyers, combat ships, aircrafts and helicopters; Coast Guard cutters; and Air Force surveillance aircraft, doubling our capabilities in the region’, he said. The point of this mission – which will be joined by other countries – is to ‘increase surveillance, disruption, and seizures of drug shipments’. ‘We must not let the drug cartels exploit the pandemic to threaten American lives’, he added.

Coming less than a week after the US indictment, it became clear that the point is not actually to disrupt the cocaine trade, but to put pressure on Venezuela. No evidence was provided during the Department of Justice press conference when the United States charged Maduro with narco-trafficking, and no evidence was presented at Trump’s press conference when he announced that a naval carrier group would enter the Caribbean. There was no evidence presented at either high-profile event, because no evidence is either available or necessary. It is not available because even the US government’s own agencies say that Venezuela is neither the originator of narcotics nor the trafficker of narcotics; it is not necessary because the United States has consistently used its position to invent increasingly hallucinatory stories about the Venezuelan government in order to delegitimise and overthrow it.

In December 2019, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) released its ‘National Drug Threat Assessment’. This study offers the most detailed look at the movement of drugs into the United States. At several points in the study, the DEA says that Colombia is the ‘primary source for cocaine seized in the United States’. According to the DEA’s Cocaine Signature Program, in 2018 ‘approximately 90 percent of cocaine samples tested were of Colombian origin, six percent were of Peruvian origin, and four percent were of unknown origin’. As far as the US government’s own drug agency is concerned, there is no cocaine or any other narcotic that comes from Venezuela.

Both at the US Department of Justice press conference and at Trump’s press conference, maps were shown that indicated cocaine traffic from Venezuela to the United States. This is simply not true, based on the information from the US DEA: ‘The majority of the cocaine and heroin produced and exported by Colombian TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] to the United States is transported through Central America and Mexico’, write the DEA officials in their 2019 report. However, there are suggestions in the report that Colombian narco-traffickers sometimes ‘store large quantities of cocaine in remote areas of Venezuela and Ecuador until maritime or aerial transportation can be secured’.

It is important to recognize that the cocaine and heroin are hidden in ‘remote areas’ of Colombia’s neighbours, with Colombia being the focus of the entire drug trade. At no point in the entire 146-page DEA document, and in documents from previous years, do the US drug officials make any statement that implicates the Venezuelan government in either the production, storage, or transportation of the cocaine and heroin. The only time Venezuela enters the picture is when Colombian narco-traffickers hide their cocaine and heroin in ‘remote areas’ of Venezuela before they traffic them into Central America and Mexico and then onwards to the United States.

There is significant evidence, however – as presented by the Colombian journalist Gonzalo Guillén in La Nueva Prensa on 3 March 2020 – that Colombia’s president Iván Duque and his patron, the former president Álvaro Uribe, had close ties with the narco-trafficker José Guillermo Hernández Aponte, alias Ñeñé. The previous day, Duque was in the Oval Office as Trump chided him for not doing enough to eradicate cocaine production in Colombia. ‘Well, you’re going to have to spray’, Trump told Duque. ‘If you don’t spray, you’re not going to get rid of them. So, you have to spray, with regard to the drugs in Colombia’.

Trump was talking about glyphosate-based fumigation, which the government of Colombia halted in 2015 because the WHO said that such sprays caused cancer. Despite this, Duque said that he will restart spraying. There was no mention of the accusations that Duque himself is linked to the narco-traffickers; since he is pliant towards Washington, his own alleged crimes do not amount to much. Duque’s patron Uribe, the former Colombian president and current Senate member, is currently implicated in more than 270 legal cases in Colombia with charges including illegal wiretapping, organised crime, selective assassinations, and forced disappearances. Uribe and members of his family have proven links with the paramilitary group Bloque Metro (‘Metro Block’) of Antioquia, which was responsible for thousands of assassinations of Colombian civilians and was deeply involved in the narco-trafficking.

Strangely, in that press conference, both Trump and Duque talked about Venezuela, but neither of them mentioned drugs or narco-trafficking. It was all about regime change.

On 31 March, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Venezuela must have a transitional government; this itself is bizarre because Pompeo is neither Venezuelan nor a United Nations official, and yet he felt emboldened to speak for the Venezuelan people. His plan, ‘Democratic Transition Framework for Venezuela’, called upon President Maduro to resign and for Washington’s favoured replacement Juan Guaidó to continue his imaginary claim to power. Members of the four main parties, including Maduro’s Socialist Party, would form a council and be led by an ‘interim president’. If this plan is accepted, Washington would lift its unilateral coercive sanctions that it had imposed from 2014.

The previous weekend, Guaidó announced on Twitter that Venezuela needed an ‘emergency government’ that had the participation of all parties and would govern until new elections could be held. After Pompeo’s announcement, Guaidó took credit for it and thanked Pompeo publicly. Other far-right politicians, such as Leopoldo López, Carlos Vecchio, and Julio Borges, saluted Pompeo’s plan and thanked the United States for backing Guaidó’s ‘emergency government’. When she heard that gunboats are coming towards the Venezuelan coast, Maria Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela Party tweeted, ‘That’s the way to build a credible threat’. It is credible because the gunboats have done this before.

‘This is our homeland’ / Tenemos patria. Macuro, Sucre. 2014.
Comando Creativo

The Organization of American States (OAS), which behaved as the long-arm of the US State Department during the coup against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia last November, joined in the chorus begun by Pompeo and Guaidó. In a statement, the OAS declared that it ‘considers that the plan presented constitutes a valid proposal for a path to end the usurping dictatorship and restore democracy in the country’.

The Venezuelan government led by President Maduro rejected the plan. But it was not alone. Maduro’s main opponent in the 2018 presidential election, Henri Falcón of the Avanzada Progresista (‘Progressive Advance’) party, also rejected the Pompeo-Guaidó plan and the deployment of US warships off the Venezuelan coast. The removal of Maduro, he wrote, ‘is a process and not an imposition; it requires agreements between adversaries for it to be successful. The solution in Venezuela is between Venezuelans’. ‘The pandemic’, he wrote, ‘is wreaking havoc in the world. Venezuela is one of the most vulnerable. It would be humanitarian and very great if ships came with aid and medicine, and it would be very inhumane if they came loaded with weapons and threats’.

Most of the opposition in Venezuela, like Falcón, did not approve of Guaidó’s submission to Trump and Pompeo. Claudio Fermín of the Partido Soluciones para Venezuela (‘Solutions for Venezuela Party’) attacked the ‘irresponsible and fanciful thesis’ of Guaidó and his supporters, which is reliant upon the ‘fantasy cloud of instructions sent to them by their bosses Elliot Abrams, Pompeo, and Trump’. Henrique Capriles Radonski, who twice ran unsuccessfully to be president, said that Maduro has ‘internal control’ while Guaidó’s people have ‘international alliances’.

So much of this is déjà vu. On 7 October 1963, US President John F. Kennedy gathered his advisors in the White House to discuss how to overthrow the democratically elected government of João Goulart in Brazil. Kennedy asked frankly, ‘Do you see a situation coming where we might be – find it desirable to intervene militarily ourselves?’ His ambassador in Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, said that he had worked on a plan with US Southern Command – then based in Panama – and with his contacts in the Brazilian military. A US invasion, Gordon told Kennedy, would require a ‘massive military operation’, which ‘all depends on what the Brazilian military do’. Any coup without major military support would lead to ‘the beginnings of what would amount to a civil war’.

Rather than risk a civil war, Gordon said the military had to act, and the United States had to provide them with diplomatic and military support. By March 1964, Gordon said that the ‘most significant development is the crystallizing of a military resistance group under the leadership of General Humberto Castelo Branco’. Washington gave the green light. Operation Brother Sam was put in motion, which included egging on the Generals and sending a massive naval task force to sit off the coast of southern Brazil. An aircraft carrier, two guided missile destroyers, and other support vessels left Aruba and made their very public journey to Brazil. General Castelo Branco moved against Goulart; that coup created a military dictatorship – backed by Washington – that lasted 21 years and killed, detained, and tortured tens of thousands of people.

The US carrier group that sits off the coast of Venezuela seems to be mimicking Operation Brother Sam of 1964. Rather than focus attention on the pressing problem of controlling the coronavirus in the United States – or even amongst its military forces – Trump has begun manoeuvres that could very well lead to a serious and dangerous clash in the Caribbean Sea.

The Colombian People Reject the Hybrid War Against Venezuela

On 21 November 2019, the Colombian people took to the streets in massive numbers to reject the policies of the government led by President Iván Duque. In particular, the people voiced two main demands. First, they wanted Duque’s right-wing government to advance the 2016 Peace Accords between the government and the left-wing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). These Accords, negotiated in good faith, would have ended a war that has lasted for six decades (70 percent of Colombian society has been born during this war). Second, the people wanted to end the harsh austerity policies driven by Duque’s government, which includes cuts to public universities, the pension system, and broad social spending. The main trade union federation, the Central Trade Union of Workers in Colombia (CUT), called for that protest, which then broadened into a mass uprising against Duque and the system of Colombian politics.

The general secretary of the CUT and spokesperson of the People’s Congress (Congreso de los Pueblos), Edgar Mojica, was on the barricades daily helping shape the mass upsurge that suggested that Colombian society no longer wanted to be held hostage to the whims of its sclerotic oligarchy and to the United States government. This was the mood. It was clear in the slogans and graffiti that emerged in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, and then outwards to its smaller cities and towns. The two demands – to implement the Peace Accords and to end austerity – are related. The Colombian oligarchy fears that if it contributes to building a comprehensive and genuine peace, the arrival of the FARC onto the political stage will strengthen the left, and a stronger left will have the power to annul not only the austerity agenda but also the pro-US orientation of the ruling classes of Colombia (for more on this, see the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 23, Peace, Neoliberalism, and Political Shifts in Colombia).

The other left organization – the National Liberation Army (ELN) – has in good faith tried to negotiate with Duque’s government, but has seen the door slammed in its face repeatedly, as Pablo Beltrán, an ELN leader, told Argentine journalist and educator Claudia Korol last year. Duque has intensified the military campaign against the ELN. If the Peace Accords with the FARC and the talks with ELN deepen, it would undermine the power of the oligarchy and of Washington. As Olimpo Cárdenas of the People’s Congress said two years ago, ‘There is a sector of the Colombian oligarchy that benefits from the war’.

There are days when it seems as if President Duque cannot make decisions without consulting the US government and his mentor, Álvaro Uribe. The advice he gets is to burrow deeper into an alliance with the United States, even at the cost of public opinion in Colombia. It would be fitting to call Duque’s policy toward the United States a ‘doormat policy’ – a policy where he offers Colombia as the doormat for the United States to wipe its feet before it marches into neighbouring Venezuela. When we spoke to Mojica recently, he said, ‘The Colombian government is a submissive government. It is inclined toward the decisions of the North American government’.

This is not a new development. At the start of the 20th century, Colombia’s foreign policy was defined by the principle of Respicium Polum (‘Look toward the North’). More recently, in the 1990s, US foreign policy shifted its gaze from Central America to Colombia; Plan Colombia, developed in 1999, drove a militarised agenda of the US and the Colombian oligarchy in the ‘War on Drugs’, which was in essence a bid to defeat any revolutionary insurgency and consolidate control over the Andean-Amazon territory. What is indeed new, Mojica says, is that Duque has done everything to facilitate both the blockade against Venezuela and the potential military intervention into Venezuela.

When the governments of Canada and the United States urged their partners in Latin America to create a platform against Venezuela, which became the Lima Group in 2017, Colombia was an eager participant. In February 2019, Duque welcomed the Lima Group to Bogotá during a high-stakes gamble by the United States to overthrow the Venezuelan government of President Maduro. At that time, Mojica and other social movement leaders criticised the way their country was being used by the Colombian oligarchy and the United States for narrow purposes, against the interest of the Colombian people. Mojica told us, ‘We have been denouncing this for the past year, beginning when President Duque lent himself to legitimise Guaidó and to legitimise the positions that the Lima Group has had with respect to Venezuela’. Heightened military tension with Venezuela suits the Duque government’s agenda. It means that it can put off any talk of full implementation of the Peace Accords and cast aside any criticism of its austerity policies. Since 2016, hundreds of social movement leaders have been assassinated across Colombia; this violence is obscured by the attention being paid by the media to the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

With the US government absurdly saying that Venezuela is the source of narco-trafficking – even though all evidence pointing to narco-trafficking is rooted in Colombia – the pressure on Colombia to deal with its drug problem is now lifted. Indeed, the intimate links between the oligarchy and the narco-traffickers are now hidden by the hallucinatory claim that Maduro is himself involved in this trade.

Mojica told us that the entire narco-policy is a ‘distraction’ because it fails to grasp the real problem. ‘We reject the policies of crop dusting and the blackmailing of the Colombian government’ by the US, he said, which uses its international power to force policy changes on the country.  Mojica explained that, because the production of coca leaves by small farmers is the ‘first step of production’, and because the farmers have no other source of revenue to support their families, the farmers serve as ‘the weakest link in the chain’ and an easy target for cocaine eradication programs.

These small farmers, whose farms and bodies will be saturated by toxic chemicals, are not the main culprits behind the drug trade, nor is their wellbeing the main concern of Duque’s government; but they do provide a convenient scapegoat to mask the actions of those who really pull the strings. The responsibility for the colossal drug trade about which the Trump administration and his cronies are allegedly so concerned instead lies mainly with the large Colombian narco-cartels, who traffic the drugs through Mexico and Central America to North America; the drug mafia in North America itself; and the immense demand – largely in the US and Europe – by consumers for South American cocaine.

But none of the main culprits face the brunt of the drug eradication policy, reserved instead for the ‘weakest link’ – coca growers. ‘The coca growers and their families’, Mojica said, ‘are not presented with any alternative in terms of financial support for the eradication of their crops’. Despite this, they have unfairly become the frontline of the war. The 2016 Havana Peace Accords did provide a mechanism to assist farmers in transitioning from the cultivation of illicit crops. However, as with much else in the peace process, the protocol has not been respected; peasant communities have repeatedly denounced incidents of forced eradication by the army. The assassination of the leaders of these communities is often carried out by paramilitary groups, cartels, and a section of the armed forces known as the Fuerza Pública (‘Public Force’).

Morale and lights. Chapellín, Caracas. 2014.
Comando Creativo

The US and the Duque administrations, Mojica says, are using the question of drugs to move an agenda for regime change in Venezuela. Matters are so grave that the Colombian government has allowed US troops to enter its territory – both on the Caribbean coast and on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, such as in the area of Catatumbo. ‘We think that from there they are preparing a land invasion’, says Mojica. These are tense times, with the imminent possibility of military manoeuvres turning into a war.

The Colombian Senate has been vocal in its opposition to the use of Colombian territory to destabilise Venezuela. In April 2020, a group of Colombian congressmen wrote a public letter to Duque saying that their country must not participate in regime change in Venezuela. If Duque wants to pursue any such agenda, he must seek permission from Congress. Mojica told us that the Colombian social movements ‘completely reject’ Trump’s agenda. ‘We are not its backyard’, he said of the United States, and therefore not its doormat either. ‘We do not condone its anti-drug policies; we do not condone its policies of looting our natural resources and our environment’.

The Bay of Piglets

In the early morning hours of Sunday, 3 May, speedboats left the Colombian coastlines and headed toward Venezuela – though they had no authorization to cross the maritime border – and landed on the Venezuelan coastline at La Guaira. This was clearly a hostile action, since the boats carried heavy weaponry, including assault rifles and ammunition. The people on the boats possessed satellite phones as well as uniforms and helmets with the flag of the United States of America. The incursion was intercepted by Venezuelan military (FANB), who fought them off; eight of the belligerents were killed, while two were intercepted, and several temporarily escaped. One of those who was arrested says that he is an agent of the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Early Monday May 4, Venezuelan security forces, aided by the fishermen and fisherwomen of the Bolivarian Militias in the coastal town of Chuao, arrested eight additional mercenaries on a speed boat who were attempting to enter the country. Two others were captured by Venezuelan Security Forces the same day in the town of Puerto Maya. During the arrests, more weaponry and military intelligence equipment was seized by Venezuelan security forces.

Néstor Reverol, the minister of internal affairs of Venezuela, told Venezuelan television stations hours after the thwarted incursion that the government received information about the attack from sources in Colombia and from its own regular patrols of the Venezuelan coastline. ‘We cannot take any of their threats lightly’, said senior Venezuelan politician Diosdado Cabello. ‘What happened today’, he said, ‘is an example of the desperation’ of the United States and its allies.

Such plots surround Venezuela, the plotters a cast of characters from the seediest quarters of the military and the drug world, as well as of US intelligence and Colombian paramilitaries. The plot for a small invasion in 2019 that unravelled is now documented by Joshua Goodman of the Associated Press. That plot was led by Jordan Goudreau, who served in the US Army as a medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and then became a private security contractor; he worked with Cliver Alcalá, a former Venezuelan military officer, who brought together a few hundred Venezuelan military deserters to conduct the raid. Alcalá is now in prison in the United States for his involvement in the drug trade. Goudreau and Alcalá were backed by Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller and Roen Kraft of Kraft Foods. The entire operation sniffs of a madcap CIA adventure, akin to the 1961 CIA failed invasion of Cuba at the Playa Girón.

One of the ugliest aspects of the 2020 military incursion was that – in the name of combatting narco-trafficking – the entire operation seems to have been financed by drug dealers. José Alberto Socorro Hernández (alias Pepero), who was captured during the invasion, admitted that the La Guajira cartel of Colombia offered them $2 million for their actions. Pepero confessed that the operation was financed by Elkin Javier López Torres (alias La Silla, ‘The Chair’, or Doble Rueda, ‘Double Wheel’), a relative of Alcalá’s wife, Marta González.

It is likely that this most recent invasion in May 2020 emerged out of the military deserter camp set up by Alcalá in Colombia. One of the men involved in the raid was Captain Robert Levid Colina, also known as Pantera (‘Panther’). Colina had been involved in the attempted coup on behalf of Juan Guaidó on 30 April 2019 and is a close associate of Alcalá’s. Antonio Sequea, former Venezuelan National Guard member, who had last been seen on April 30, 2019 during the failed coup d’état led by Leopoldo López and Juan Guaidó, was among those arrested. Sequea is believed to have led the operation. The arrest of two US military officials from Texas, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, who are members of the US mercenary company Silvercorp was also noteworthy. The US government has denied all participation in the operation, and has largely ignored it, but, according to one of the detained mercenaries, the pair has a relationship with Trump’s head of security.

Silvercorp is the company of Jordan Goudreau, to whom Guaidó promised to pay $212.9 million to ‘capture, detain, or “remove” President Nicolás Maduro and install him in his place’, as reported by journalist Alan MacLeod. In February 2019, Goudreau and his company provided security to the Venezuelan right-wing during the provocative Humanitarian Aid concert. Videos and photos have also emerged on social media showing a contract signed between Goudreau and right-wing opposition leader Guaidó. The former US special operative expressed frustration because Guaidó did not hold up his end of the bargain, however, and Silvercorp has yet to receive payment for their work.

The operation, which has been under investigation by Venezuelan authorities for the past couple of months, is believed to be organised, planned, and financed by the Venezuelan opposition and its diverse allies with the objective of assassinating constitutional president Nicolás Maduro and other high-level leaders of the Venezuelan government. It is likely that the US government’s bounty on Maduro and on other leaders played a role in this attempted invasion.

However, as Hernán Vargas, a member of the Movimiento de Pobladoras y Pobladores (‘the Settlers’ Movement’) and the Secretary of ALBA Movements explained, it is likely that the mission of this group ‘was not to take over the country, it was not to take over the government. It was simply to carry out a series of activities that would be coordinated with other forces, which all depended on a chain of events that did not occur… They really expected maybe a response from the Armed Forces, a street mobilisation, or that another armed group that was going to join, and that didn’t happen’.

The mercenaries playing freedom fighters, however, ‘did not expect the response of the people’, Vargas said, and they vastly underestimated the skill of the Venezuelan intelligence. He explained that they likely had it in their heads that they could be ‘received with applause and with cheers. They thought people were going to support this or an Armed Force was going to support this… but there are no people in Venezuela willing to do that. The majority of Venezuelans want it to be resolved in peace. There are no sectors that are willing to take that gamble or not enough for what they need at this moment’.

The threat, however, remains. Vargas calls for a close study of the Silvercorp contract with Juan Guaidó and Juan José Rendón – a right-wing political consultant and former advisor to Guaidó –where he states that there is, ‘a whole series of clauses that allow or agree to actions of human rights violations, the execution of civilians, or the use of heavy weapons, which introduce another dimension. In other words, this is an equally dangerous situation because these groups can easily carry out terrorist actions, and they also set strategic civilian and military objectives in Venezuela’.

Vladimir Padrino López, the minister of defence of Venezuela, said that the government and the people had defeated this attack and would remain vigilant against other such plots. One of the characteristic features of the Bolivarian process has been the mobilisation of the population to defend itself – from the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002 to today. ‘We declare ourselves in rebellion’, Padrino said, adding that Venezuela is now under a state of ‘permanent vigilance’. Despite the global pandemic, the old playbook of the CIA and the US government as a whole – currently led by the Trump administration – with their dirty coups and hybrid wars, remains operational. Much like the Cubans who thwarted the attempted US-backed invasion at the Playa Girón, or Bay of Pigs (1961), the Venezuelan people defeated this Bay of Piglets plot in La Guaira (2020).

The Weakness of US Power

Five Iranian tankers – each laden with gasoline – moved swiftly with their flags flying and their radar open to detection from Bandar Abbas (Iran) into the Caribbean Sea. One of them, serendipitously named ‘Fortune’, broke through the feverish US naval blockade to enter El Palito, Venezuela on 24 May. That the US was unable to force a confrontation with the Iranian vessels signals the weakness of the US position. A new sea bridge opens between two countries under immense US pressure; this demonstrates the limitations – but not the end – of US power and of the hybrid war.

Chávez lives. Puente Llaguno, Caracas. 2015.
Comando Creativo

About the pictures

The Comando Creativo (‘Creative Command’) is a collective that brings together workers from the fields of visual communication, social scientist specialists and researchers, and people who – from many other professions – see themselves as the producers of meaning, stories, and symbols. Since 2007, the Comando Creativo has been dedicated to the production of popular, counter-hegemonic communications. Currently, the collective is sharing its work on the platform utopix.cc.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 1. The Austerity Virus

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wave of Financialization

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Acceleration of the Decline of the United States 

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

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

Digitalization Against Labour

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

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

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

The Crisis of the Neoliberal State

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

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

Part 2. In Light of the Global Pandemic, Focus Attention on the Needs of the People

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

States with a socialist orientation (from national governments as in China to state governments as in Kerala) have mobilised whatever resources they have available – regardless of economic losses – to contain the pandemic. The WHO called China’s efforts ‘perhaps the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort in history’. Meanwhile, the bourgeois order has utterly failed to use their considerable resources and has failed to prepare a rational plan for these resources; the death rates from Italy to the United States of America have been catastrophic, a political crime against humanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3. Universal Basic Income

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

《请战书·红手印》Volunteer medical workers – all hands on deck.
Li Zhong

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.

This is the first in a multiple part series of studies on CoronaShock. It is made up of three articles on how China identified the novel coronavirus and then how the Chinese government and Chinese society fought against its wider diffusion. The report is researched and written by Vijay Prashad (Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), Du Xiaojun (a translator and linguist from Shanghai), and Weiyan Zhu (an attorney from Beijing). These articles first appeared through the Globetrotter service of the Independent Media Institute. The paintings in this booklet have been done by Li Zhong, an artist from Shanghai. At the end of the booklet is an interview with Li Zhong conducted by Tings Chak (Lead Designer at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

Growing Xenophobia Against China in the Midst of CoronaShock

On 25 March, the foreign ministers of the G7 states failed to release a statement. The United States – the president of the G7 at this time – had the responsibility of drafting the statement, which was seen to be unacceptable by several other members. In the draft, the United States used the phrase ‘Wuhan Virus’ and asserted that the global pandemic was the responsibility of the Chinese government. Earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump had used the phrase ‘Chinese Virus’ (which he said he would stop using) and a member of his staff was reportedly heard using the slur ‘Kung Flu’. On Fox News, anchor Jesse Watters explained in his unfiltered racist way ‘why [the virus] started in China. Because they have these markets where they eat raw bats and snakes’. Violent attacks against Asians in the United States have spiked as a consequence of the stigma driven by the Trump administration.

Quite correctly, the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for ‘solidarity, not stigma’ in a speech given on 14 February, long before the virus hit Europe or North America. Ghebreyesus knew that there would be a temptation to blame China for the virus, in fact, to use the virus as a weapon to attack China in the most repulsive way. His slogan – ‘solidarity, not stigma’ – was intended to sharply demarcate an internationalist and humanist response to the global pandemic from a narrow bigoted and unscientific response to the virus.

Origins

SARS-CoV-2, which is the official name for the virus, developed in the way that many viruses develop: through the transmission between animals and humans. There is as yet no firm consensus about this particular virus. New pathogens arise in various animal reservoirs and these cross over to the human population, which gives rise to new diseases and can cause epidemics. For example, in the recent period, we have seen a range of viruses such as H1N1, H5Nx, H5N2, and H5N6.

Even though H5N2 was known to have originated in the United States, it was not known as the ‘American virus’, and no one sought to stigmatize the United States for it. The scientific name was used to describe these viruses, which are not the responsibility of this or that nation; the arrival of these viruses raises the fundamental question of human encroachment into forests and the balance between human civilisation (agriculture and cities) and the wilds.

The naming of a virus is a controversial matter. In 1832, cholera advanced from British India toward Europe. It was called ‘Asiatic Cholera’. The French felt that since they were democratic, they would not succumb to a disease of authoritarianism; but France was ravaged by cholera, which was as much about the bacteria as it is about the state of hygiene inside Europe and North America. (When cholera struck the United States in 1848, the Public Bathing Movement was born.)

The ‘Spanish Flu’ was only named after Spain because it came during World War I when journalism in most belligerent countries was censored. The media in Spain, not being in the war, widely reported the flu, and so that pandemic took the name of the country. In fact, evidence showed that the Spanish Flu began in the United States in a military base in Kansas where the chickens transmitted the virus to soldiers. It would then travel to British India, where 60 percent of the casualties of that pandemic took place. It was never named the ‘American Flu’ and no Indian government has ever sought to recover costs from the United States because of the animal-to-human transmission that happened there.

China and the Coronavirus

In an important article published in the medical journal The Lancet, Professor Chaolin Huang wrote, ‘The symptom onset date of the first patient [with COVID-19, the disease from the virus] identified was December 1, 2019’. Initially, there was widespread confusion about the nature of the virus, and whether it could be transmitted from human to human. It was assumed that the virus was one of the known viruses and that it was mainly transmitted from animals to humans.

Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of Hubei Province Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, was one of the first doctors to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak. On 26 December, Dr. Zhang saw an elderly couple who had a high fever and a cough – symptoms that characterize the flu. Further examination ruled out influenza A and B, mycoplasma, chlamydia, adenovirus, and SARS. A CT scan of their son showed that something had partially filled the interior of his lungs. That same day, another patient – a seller from a seafood market – presented the same symptoms. Dr. Zhang reported the four patients to China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of the Jianghan District of Wuhan. Over the next two days, Dr. Zhang and her colleagues saw three more patients with the same symptoms who had visited the seafood market. On 29 December, the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention sent experts to investigate the seven patients at the hospital. On 6 February, Hubei Province recognised the valuable work done by Dr. Zhang and her team in the fight to identify and reveal the virus. There was no attempt to suppress her work.

《快递小哥》Deliveryman.
Li Zhong

The provincial authorities knew about the new virus by 29 December. The next day, they informed China’s Centre for Disease Control, and the following day, on 31 December, China informed the World Health Organization (WHO), a month after the first mysterious infection was first reported in Wuhan. The virus was identified by 3 January; a week later, China shared the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus with the whole world. They uploaded it on public databases and shared it with the WHO.

It is because China released the genomic sequence so quickly that scientific work immediately took place across the planet. Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the leading centre for medicine in Germany, used this genome sequence data to create the first test kit outside of China for the virus, which the WHO adopted and made available to all countries. The protocol was published in Berlin on 17 January. The search for a possible vaccine also immediately began and there are now at least 71 candidates, four in very early testing stages.

Two other doctors – Dr. Li Wenliang (an ophthalmologist from Wuhan Central Hospital) and Dr. Ai Fen (chief of the department of emergency treatment at Wuhan Central Hospital) – raised issues outside the channels for reporting such information. In the early days, when everything seemed fuzzy, Dr. Li and seven others were reprimanded by the authorities on 3 January. Dr. Li died of the coronavirus on 7 February. Major medical and government institutions – the National Health Commission, the Health Commission of Hubei Province, the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, and the Wuhan government – expressed their public condolences to his family. On 19 March, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau admitted that it had inappropriately reprimanded Dr. Li, and it chastised its officers. Dr. Ai Fen was criticised by the hospital on 2 January, but in February she received an apology and was later felicitated by Wuhan Broadcasting and Television Station.

China’s National Health Commission assembled a team of experts from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences; they conducted a series of experiments on the virus samples. On 8 January, they confirmed that the novel coronavirus was indeed the source of the outbreak. The first death from the virus was reported on 11 January. On 14 January, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said that they did not have evidence of human-to-human transmission, but they could not say with certainty that human-to-human transmission was not possible.

A week later, on 20 January, Dr. Zhong Nanshan said that the novel coronavirus could be spread from human to human (Dr. Zhong, a member of the Communist Party of China, is a famous respiratory expert and a leading person in the fight against SARS in China). Some medical workers were infected by the virus. That day, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier of the State Council Li Keqiang instructed all levels of government to pay attention to the spread of the virus; the National Health Commission and other official bodies were told to begin emergency response measures. Wuhan went into full lockdown on 23 January, three days after human-to-human transmission of this virus was established. The next day, Hubei province activated its Level-1 alert. On 25 January, Premier Li assembled a coordinating group. He visited Wuhan two days later.

Some local Hubei government officials understated certain aspects of the virus in early January and they were quickly removed. As we have shown, that did not impact the breakneck speed of scientific investigation, nor did it slow down the decisive measures taken by all levels of the Chinese government and within Chinese society.

It is unclear if China could have done anything differently as it faced an unknown virus. A WHO team that visited China from 16 to 24 February praised the government and the Chinese people in its report for doing their utmost to stem the spread of the virus; thousands of doctors and medical personnel arrived in Wuhan, two new hospitals were built for those infected by the virus, and various civic bodies went into action to assist families under lockdown. What the Chinese authorities did to stem the rise of the infections – as a major study shows – was to put those infected in hospitals, intensively trace those who had been in contact with them, quarantine those who had been in contact with them, and closely monitor the population. Lockdowns were not enough. This targeted policy was able to identify those who had been in the chain of infection and thereby break the chain.

The World and China

The Indian state of Kerala’s Health Minister K. K. Shailaja followed the rise of the cases in Wuhan and began emergency measures in this state of 35 million people in India. She did not wait. Nor did the Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc and his government, which immediately took measures to break the chain of infection. What China was doing taught Shailaja and Phúc and their teams how to respond. As a result, they were able to contain the virus in this part of India and in Vietnam.

The United States was informed about the severity of the problem early on. On New Year’s Day, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control (CDC) officials called Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, while he was on vacation. ‘What he heard rattled him’, wrote The New York Times. Dr. George F. Gao, the head of the Chinese CDC, spoke to Redfield days later, and Dr. Gao ‘burst into tears’ during the conversation. This warning was not taken seriously. A month later, on 30 January, U.S. President Donald Trump took a very cavalier position: ‘We think it’s going to have a good ending for us’, he said of the coronavirus. ‘That I can assure you’. He did not declare a national emergency till 13 March, by which time the virus had already begun to spread in the United States.

Other heads of state around the world were just as cavalier. They were like the French politicians of 1832 who felt that France would not be affected by ‘Asiatic cholera’. There was no such thing as Asiatic cholera in 1832 – only cholera that would harm people with poor hygienic systems. In the same way, there is no such thing as a Chinese virus; there is only the SARS-CoV-2. The Chinese people showed us the way to confront this virus, but only after some trial and error on their part. It is time to learn that lesson now. As the WHO says, ‘test, test, test’, and then carefully calibrate lockdowns, isolations, and quarantine. Chinese doctors who developed expertise in fighting the virus are now in Iran, Italy, and elsewhere, bringing the spirit of internationalism and collaboration with them.

On 4 March, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led the WHO team to China, was interviewed by The New York Times. When asked about the Chinese response to the virus, he said, ‘They’re mobilised, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them. They really saw themselves on the frontlines of protecting the rest of China. And of the world’.

《披战袍斩病魔》
Medical workers putting on their gowns to fight the ‘evil’ virus.
Li Zhong

How China Learned About SARS-CoV-2 in the Weeks Before the Global Pandemic

The WHO declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, said at the press conference on that day that this was ‘the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus’. He said, ‘In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled’. From 11 March onward, it became clear that this virus was deadly and that it had the capacity to tear through human society with ease. But this was not always so clear.

On 17 March, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute (USA) and his team showed that the new coronavirus strain, SARS-CoV-2, had a mutation in its genes known as a polybasic cleavage site that was unseen in any coronaviruses found in bats or pangolins, and that there is a likelihood that the virus came to humans many years ago, and indeed not necessarily in Wuhan. Dr. Chen Jinping of the Guangdong Institute of Applied Biological Resources, along with colleagues, had earlier published a paper on 20 February noting that their data did not support the claim that the new coronavirus in humans evolved directly from a pangolin coronavirus strain. Zhong Nanshan, a noted epidemiologist, said that ‘although the COVID-19 first appeared in China, that does not necessarily mean it originated here’.

The Western media has consistently made scientifically unfounded claims about the source of the virus, even when Western scientists were urging caution. They were certainly not listening to the doctors in Wuhan or to public health experts in China.

When doctors in Wuhan first saw patients in their hospitals in December, they believed that the patients had pneumonia, although CT scans showed severe lung damage and the patients were not responding to the typical medical treatment. Doctors were alarmed by the situation, but there was no cause to imagine that this was going to escalate into a regional epidemic and then a global pandemic.

The doctors and hospitals in Wuhan eventually came to grips with the evidence before them, and as soon as it became clear that this was an unfamiliar virus and that it spreads rapidly, they contacted China’s national Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and then the WHO.

You would not know this if you only read Western newspapers, notably The New York Times, which suggested in a widely circulated report that the Chinese government had suppressed information about the epidemic and that the Chinese warning system did not work.

Our investigation finds neither of these arguments to be true. There is no evidence that the Chinese government systematically suppressed information; there is only evidence that a few doctors were reprimanded by their hospitals or by the local police station for divulging information to the public and not using the established protocols. There is also no evidence that the Chinese direct reporting system was faulty; instead, there is only evidence that the system, like any system, could not easily adjust to unknown or unclassified outbreaks.

The Chinese medical system, like other systems, has a rigorous procedure to report such things as health care emergencies. Medical personnel report to their hospital administration, which then reports to the various levels of CDC and the Health Commissions; they can also use the internet-based direct reporting system. It did not take long for the medical personnel to report the problem, and even less time for a high-level investigation team to arrive in Wuhan. This is what our investigation found.

Did the Chinese Government Suppress Information?

Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of Respiratory and Critical Medicine at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, saw an elderly couple on 26 December. Their ailment bothered her. She arranged CT scans of the lungs of the couple’s son who otherwise appeared healthy; the result, however, ‘showed ground glass opacity’. Uncertain about the causes, Dr. Zhang reported the situation to Dr. Xia Wenguang, the vice president of the hospital, as well as other departments of the hospital; the hospital promptly told Jianghan District Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This took place within 24 hours.

More patients arrived at the Hubei Provincial Hospital on 28 and 29 December. The doctors still did not know more than that these patients presented symptoms of pneumonia, and that they had significant lung damage. It became clear to them that the immediate location for the spread of the virus was the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. On 29 December, as the cases increased, the hospital’s vice president Dr. Xia Wenguang reported directly to the disease control department of the provincial and municipal Health Commissions. That day, the disease control department of the municipal and provincial Health Commissions instructed the Wuhan CDC, Jinyintan Hospital, and the Jianghan District CDC to visit the Hubei Provincial Hospital for an epidemiological investigation. On 31 December, an expert group of the National Health Commission arrived in Wuhan from Beijing. In other words, officials from Beijing arrived in Wuhan within five days of the first sign of a problem.

《疫情下的卫士》Warriors fighting against the epidemic.
Li Zhong

The day before the expert group arrived from Beijing, one doctor – Dr. Ai Fen – expressed her frustration at the mysterious virus with some medical school classmates. Dr. Ai Fen saw a test report of unidentified pneumonia. She circled the words ‘SARS coronavirus’ in red, photographed it, and passed it on to a medical school classmate. The report spread among doctors in Wuhan, including Dr. Li Wenliang (a Communist Party member) and seven other doctors who were later reprimanded by the police. On 2 January, the head of Wuhan Central Hospital Supervision Department warned Dr. Ai Fen not to release information outside the channels of the hospital.

The reprimands received by these doctors are offered as evidence of high-level suppression of information about the virus. This is not logical. The reprimands took place in early January. By 31 December, a high-level team arrived from Beijing, and on that day, the WHO had been informed; China’s CDC and the WHO had been informed before these two doctors were reprimanded.

On 7 February, the National Supervision Commission decided to send an investigation team to Wuhan to investigate the situation. On 19 March, the team published the results of their investigation and held a press conference to share their findings. As a result of the investigation, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued a circular to withdraw the letter of reprimand issued to Dr. Li Wenliang. On 2 April, Dr. Li Wenliang, and 13 others who died in the fight against the virus, were honoured by the government as martyrs (this is the highest honour given by the Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China to its citizens).

There is no evidence that local officials were afraid to report the epidemic to Beijing. There is no evidence that it took ‘whistleblowers’, as The New York Times put it, to shine a light on the issue. Dr. Zhang was not a whistleblower; she followed the established protocol, which led to information being passed on to the WHO within days.

China’s Early Warning System

In mid-November 2002, a SARS outbreak spread throughout Foshan (Guangdong Province, China). Doctors could not easily understand what was going on. Eventually, in mid-February, China’s Ministry of Health wrote an email to the WHO Beijing office ‘describing “a strange contagious disease” that has “already left more than 100 people dead”’ in one week. Also mentioned in the message was ‘a “panic” attitude, currently, where people are emptying pharmaceutical stocks of any medicine they think may protect them’. It took eight months to contain this SARS outbreak.

In its aftermath, the Chinese government set up a direct reporting system to catch any health emergencies before they spiral out of control. The system works very well for clearly defined infectious diseases. Dr. Hu Shanlian, a professor of health economics at Fudan University, describes two such incidents. As part of the polio eradication expert group, his team found two cases of polio in Qinghai. The local government reported the cases to the central government, and it began emergency immunisation and gave children a sugar cube vaccine to effectively control the disease and its spread. As well, he reports about the two cases of the plague in Beijing that came from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. ‘Diseases like these’, he wrote, ‘can be quickly absorbed from the direct reporting system’.

Well-known ailments such as polio and plagues can easily be entered into an early warning system. But if the doctors are confounded by the virus, the system cannot easily work. Dr. Ai Fen, who forwarded some clinical records to her colleagues, said that the direct reporting system is very effective if the ailment is commonplace, such as hepatitis and tuberculosis. ‘But this time it was unknown’, she said. Dr. Zhang Wenhong of Shanghai said that the direct reporting system ‘is more powerful than those in most countries in the world for known pathogens [such as MERS and H1N1] or pathogens that do not spread quickly and have limited human transmission [such as H7N9]’. If confronted with a new virus, the medical personnel and the direct reporting system are bewildered.

The most effective way to proceed when there is no clarity about the infection is to inform the disease control department in the hospital. This is exactly what Dr. Zhang Jixian did, and her superior, the head of the hospital, contacted the local CDC, who contacted China’s national CDC and the National Health Commission of China. Within five days of Dr. Zhang’s alarm, the WHO was informed about a mysterious virus in Wuhan.

Since 21 January, the WHO has released a daily situation report. The first report highlights the events from 31 December to 20 January. The first bullet point of that report says that on 31 December, the WHO China Country Office was informed that there were ‘cases of pneumonia unknown aetiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China’. The Chinese authorities isolated a new type of coronavirus on 7 January, and then on 12 January they shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for use in developing diagnostic kits. Precise information about the virus’s form of transmission would not come until later.

The direct reporting system was updated on 24 January with the information about the novel coronavirus. It has now learned from experience.

Facts and Ideology

Florida Senator Marco Rubio accused the WHO of ‘servility to the Chinese Communist Party’. He wrote that the United States will open ‘investigations into the WHO’s unacceptably slow decision-making on whether to declare a global pandemic and into how China has compromised the integrity of the WHO’. Characteristically, Rubio offered no facts. US President Donald Trump mirrored Rubio’s accusation, and then said that his administration would cut the annual $400 million that the US contributes to the WHO. Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made unfounded allegations that the virus came from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology.

Was the WHO slow in declaring a global pandemic? In 2009, the first known case of H1N1 was detected in California on 15 April; the WHO declared a global pandemic on 11 June, two months later. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the first known cases were detected in January 2020; the WHO declared a global pandemic on 11 March – one and a half months later. In the interim, the WHO sent in investigation teams to Wuhan (20-21 January) and to Beijing, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Wuhan (16-24 February); their investigation, before the declaration, was thorough. The timeframe for the WHO declaration is similar to, and even faster, in 2020 than it was in 2009.

Whether it is The New York Times or Marco Rubio, there is an urgency to conclude that China’s government and Chinese society are to blame for the global pandemic, and that their failures not only compromised the WHO but caused the pandemic. Facts become irrelevant. What we have shown in this report is that there was neither wilful suppression of the facts nor was there a fear from local officials to report to Beijing; nor indeed was the system broken. The coronavirus epidemic is mysterious and complex, and the Chinese doctors and authorities hastily learned what was going on and then made rational decisions based on the facts available.

《水星家纺在行动》Mercury textile company in full production.
Li Zhong

How China Broke the Chain of Infection

On 31 March, a group of scientists from around the world – from Oxford University to Beijing Normal University – published an important paper in Science magazine. This paper – ‘An Investigation of Transmission Control Measures During the First 50 Days of the COVID-19 Epidemic in China’ – proposes that if the Chinese government had not initiated the lockdown of Wuhan and the national emergency response, then there would have been 744,000 additional confirmed COVID-19 cases outside of Wuhan. ‘Control measures taken in China’, the authors argue, ‘potentially hold lesso[n]s for other countries around the world’.

In the World Health Organization’s February report after a visit to China, the team members wrote, ‘In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history’.

In part 3, we detail the measures taken by the different levels of the Chinese government and by social organizations to stem the spread of the virus and the disease at a time when scientists had just begun to accumulate knowledge about them and were working in the absence of a vaccine and a specific drug treatment for COVID-19.

The Emergence of a Plan

In the early days of January 2020, the National Health Commission (NHC) and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to establish protocols to deal with the diagnosis, treatment, and laboratory testing of what was then considered a ‘viral pneumonia of unknown cause’. A treatment manual was produced by the NHC and health departments in Hubei Province and sent to all medical institutions in Wuhan City on 4 January; city-wide training was conducted that same day. By 7 January, China’s CDC isolated the first novel coronavirus strain, and three days later, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and others developed testing kits.

By the second week of January, more was known about the nature of the virus, and so a plan began to take shape to contain it. On 13 January, the NHC instructed Wuhan City authorities to begin temperature checks at ports and stations and to reduce public gatherings. The next day, the NHC held a national teleconference that alerted all of China to the infectious novel coronavirus strain and announced the need to prepare for a public health emergency. On 17 January, the NHC sent seven inspection teams to China’s provinces to train public health officials about the virus, and on 19 January the NHC distributed nucleic acid reagents for test kits to China’s many health departments. Zhong Nanshan – former president of the Chinese Medical Association – led a high-level team to Wuhan City to carry out inspections on 18 and 19 January.

Over the next few days, the NHC began to understand how the virus was transmitted and how this transmission could be halted. Between 15 January and 3 March, the NHC published seven editions of its guidelines. A look at them shows a precise development of its knowledge about the virus and its plans for mitigation; these included new methods for treatment, including the use of ribavirin and a combination of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and modern medicine. The National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine would eventually report that 90 percent of patients received a traditional medicine, which was found to be effective in 90 percent of them.

By 22 January, it had become clear that transport in and out of Wuhan had to be restricted. That day, the State Council Information Office urged people not to go to Wuhan, and the next day the city was essentially shut down. The grim reality of the virus had by now become clear to everyone.

The Government Acts

On 25 January, the Communist Party of China (CPC) formed a Central Committee Leading Group for COVID-19 Prevention and Control with two leaders – Li Keqiang and Wang Huning – in charge. China’s President Xi Jinping tasked the group to use the best scientific thinking as they formulated their policies to contain the virus, and to use every resource to put people’s health before economic considerations. By 27 January, Vice Premier of the State Council Sun Chunlan led a Central Guiding Team to Wuhan City to shape the new aggressive response to control the virus. Over time, the government and the Communist Party developed an agenda to tackle the virus, which can be summarized in four points:

1. Prevent the diffusion of the virus by maintaining not only a lockdown on the province, but by minimizing traffic within the province.This was complicated by the Chinese New Year break (originally from 24 January to 30 January), which had already begun; families would visit one another and visit markets (this is the largest short-term human migration, when almost all of China’s 1.4 billion people gather in each other’s homes). All of this had to be prevented. As part of the effort to stop the spread of the virus, the break was extended to 2 February. Local authorities had already begun to use the most advanced epidemiological thinking to track and study the source of the infections and trace the route of transmission. This was essential to shut down the spread of the virus.
2. Deploy resources for medical workers, including protective equipment, as well as hospital beds, equipment, test kits, and medicines for the patients.This included the building of temporary treatment centres – including two full hospitals(Huoshenshan Hospital and Leishenshan Hospital). Increased screening required more test kits, which had to be developed and manufactured.
3. Ensure that during the lockdown of the province, food and fuel were made available to the residents.
4. Ensure the release of information to the public that is based on scientific fact and not rumours.To this end, the team investigated any and all irresponsible actions taken by the local authorities, from the reports of the first cases to the end of January.

These four points defined the approach taken by the Chinese government and the local authorities through February and March. A joint prevention and control mechanism was established under the leadership of the NHC, with wide-ranging authority to coordinate the fight to break the chain of infection. Wuhan City and Hubei Province remained under virtual lockdown for 76 days until early April.

On 23 February, President Xi Jinping spoke at a teleconference for 170,000 officials and Communist Party cadres and military officials from every part of China; ‘this is a crisis and also a major test’, said President Xi. All of China’s emphasis would be on fighting the epidemic and putting people first, and at the same time China would ensure that its long-term economic agenda would not be damaged.

《义务送药者》A volunteer delivers medicines.
Li Zhong

Neighbourhood Committees

A key – and underreported – part of the response to the virus was in the public action that defines Chinese society. In the 1950s, urban civil organizations – or juweihui – developed as a way for residents in neighbourhoods to organise their mutual safety and mutual aid. In Wuhan, as the lockdown developed, it was members of the neighbourhood committees who went door to door to check temperatures, to deliver food (particularly to the elderly), and to deliver medical supplies. In other parts of China, the neighbourhood committees set up temperature checkpoints at the entrances to the neighbourhoods to monitor people who went in and out; this was basic public health in a decentralised fashion. As of 9 March , 53 people working in these committees lost their lives; 49 of them were members of the Communist Party.

The Communist Party’s 90 million members and the 4.6 million grassroots party organizations helped shape the public action across the country at the frontlines of China’s 650,000 urban and rural communities. Medical workers who were party members travelled to Wuhan to be part of the frontline medical response. Other party members worked in their neighbourhood committees or developed new platforms to respond to the virus.

Decentralization defined the creative responses. In Tianxinqiao Village (Tiaoma Town, Yuhua District, Changsha, Hunan Province), the village announcer Yang Zhiqiang used 26 loudspeakers to urge villagers not to pay New Year visits to each other and not to eat dinner together. In Nanning (Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region), the police used drones to play the sound of trumpets as a reminder not to violate the lockdown order.

In Chengdu (Sichuan Province), 440,000 citizens formed teams to do a range of public actions to stem the transmission of the virus: they publicised the health regulations, they checked temperatures, they delivered food and medicines, and they found ways to entertain the otherwise traumatised public. The Communist Party cadre led the way here, drawing together businesses, social groups, and volunteers into a local self-management structure. In Beijing, residents developed an app that sends registered users warnings about the virus and creates a database that can be used to help track the movement of the virus in the city.

Medical Intervention

Li Lanjuan was one of the early medical doctors to enter Wuhan; she recalled that when she got there, medical tests ‘were difficult to get’ and the situation with supplies was ‘pretty bad’. Within a few days, she said, more than 40,000 medical workers arrived in the city, and patients with mild symptoms were treated in temporary treatment centres, while those who had been seriously impacted were taken to the hospitals. Protective equipment, tests, ventilators, and other supplies were rushed in. ‘The mortality rate was greatly reduced’, said Dr. Li Lanjuan. ‘In just two months, the epidemic situation in Wuhan was basically under control’.

From across China came 1,800 epidemiological teams – with five people in each team – to carry out surveys of the population. Wang Bo, a leader of one of the teams from Jilin Province, said that his team conducted ‘demanding and dangerous’ door-to-door epidemiological surveys. Yao Laishun, a member of one of the Jilin teams, said that within weeks their team had carried out epidemiological surveys of 374 people and traced and monitored 1,383 close contacts; this was essential work in locating who was infected and treated as well as who needed to be isolated if they had not yet presented symptoms or if they tested negative. Up to 9 February, the health authorities had inspected 4.2 million households (10.59 million people) in Wuhan; that means that they inspected 99 percent of the population, a gargantuan exercise.

The speed of the production of medical equipment, particularly protective equipment for the medical workers, was breath-taking. As of 28 January, China made fewer than 10,000 sets of personal protective equipment (PPE) a day; by 24 February, its production capacity exceeded 200,000 per day. As of 1 February, the government produced 773,000 test kits a day; by 25 February, it was producing 1.7 million kits per day; by 31 March, 4.26 million test kits were produced per day. Direction from the authorities moved industrial plants to churn out protective gear, ambulances, ventilators, electrocardiograph monitors, respiratory humidification therapy machines, blood gas analysers, air disinfectant machines, and haemodialysis machines. The government focused attention on making sure that there was no shortage of any medical equipment.

《抗疫日记·憩》Diary on the fight against the virus: taking a short break.
Li Zhong

Chen Wei, one of China’s leading virologists who had worked on the 2003 SARS epidemic and had gone to Sierra Leone in 2015 to develop the world’s first Ebola vaccine, rushed to Wuhan with her team. They set up a portable testing laboratory by 30 January; by 16 March, her team produced the first novel coronavirus vaccine that went into clinical trials, with Chen being one of the first to be vaccinated as part of the trial.

Relief

To shut down a province with 60 million inhabitants for more than two months and to largely shut down a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants is not easy. The social and economic impact was always going to be very great. But, the Chinese government – in its early directives – said that the economic hit to the country was not going to define the response; the well-being of the people had to be dominant in the formulation of any policy.

On 22 January, before the Leading Group was formed, the government issued a circular that said that medical treatment for COVID-19 patients was guaranteed and that it would be free of cost. A medical insurance reimbursement policy was then formulated, which said that expenses from medicines and medical services needed for treating the COVID-19 would be completely covered by the insurance fund; no patient would have to pay any money.

During the lockdown, the government created a mechanism to ensure the steady supply of food and fuel at normal prices. State-owned enterprises such as China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, China Grain Reserves Group, and China National Salt Industry Group increased their supply of rice, flour, oil, meat, and salt. The All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives helped enterprises connect directly with farmers’ cooperatives; other organizations like the China Agriculture Industry Chamber of Commerce pledged to maintain supply and price stability. The Ministry of Public Security met on 3 February to crack down on price gouging and hoarding; up to 8 April, the prosecutorial organizations in China investigated 3,158 cases of epidemic-related criminal offenses. The state offered financial support for small and medium-sized enterprises; in return, businesses revamped their practices to ensure a safe working environment (Guangzhou Lingnan Cable Company, for instance, staggered lunch breaks, tested the temperature of workers, disinfected the working area periodically, ensured that ventilators worked, and provided staff with protective equipment such as masks, goggles, hand lotion, and alcohol-based sanitizers).

Lockdown

A study in The Lancet by four epidemiologists from Hong Kong shows that the lockdown of Wuhan in late January prevented the spread of the infection outside of the Hubei Province; the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Wenzhou, they write, saw a collapse in the number of infections within two weeks of the partial lockdown. However, the scholars write, as a consequence of the infectiousness of COVID-19 and the absence of herd immunity, the virus might have a second wave. This is something that worries the Chinese government, which continues to be vigilant about this novel coronavirus (a cluster of cases in Harbin, near the China-Russia border, reinforces the need for vigilance).

Nonetheless, the lights of celebration flashed across Wuhan as the lockdown was lifted. Medical personnel and volunteers breathed a sigh of relief. China had been able to use its considerable resources – its socialist culture and institutions – to swiftly break the chain.

Painting an Epidemic: An Interview with Li Zhong

9 April 2020, Shanghai

We sat down with Li Zhong (李钟) at a small open-air tea house run by a friend of a friend; Zhong is a painter of the Shanghai Academy of Painting and Calligraphy and president of the Fengxian District Artist Association. A man in his forties, Zhong wore a navy blue blazer and jeans, and, of course, a face mask. Even three months after the COVID-19 epidemic began, in Shanghai – a city relatively sheltered from the virus that has resumed daily life – 100% of people still wear masks while outside of their homes. The masks may prevent us from recognising each other in the streets, but still we can smile behind them.

And there is reason to smile – the 76-day lockdown of the hardest-stricken Chinese city of Wuhan had been lifted just over 24 hours before we met. ‘This is a very exciting moment for the Chinese people’, reflects Zhong. ‘This means that China has defeated the virus and people all over China trust science. But we cannot stop being vigilant or all our previous efforts will be for nothing’. He is referring to the worries over the recent rise of imported cases of the virus and the fears of a second wave of the virus in China.

We came to know of Zhong through a series of paintings he made in solidarity with the workers fighting COVID-19 in Wuhan. The scenes portray sensitive, everyday moments in a traditional Chinese ink painting style – shades of black ink with colour accents, most prominently the blues and reds of medical outfits. A traffic officer slurping down his cup of instant noodle, still in uniform. A security guard catching a brief nap during the intensive work nights and days. Workers taking temperatures, sewing personal protective equipment, clearing garbage, and delivering supplies. Workers who, behind masks, become anonymous and, in a series, become whole. Zhong began posting these images on his WeChat ‘moments’ (similar to ‘stories’ on other social media platforms), which were circulated and eventually reached some news outlets. Little has been told, however, about the origins of the paintings and who was behind them, so Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research went to speak with Li Zhong in Shanghai.

‘Well, this was a special year’, Zhong told us. After briefly introducing himself, Zhong dives into the sequence of events of the COVID-19 epidemic, which moved him to paint: ‘I was recording the process of how the Chinese people fought the virus; it’s a kind of record of the Chinese people’s bravery’. He is an artist who deeply believes in science. He categorised his work meticulously: Raging Epidemic, Frontline Warrior, Grassroots Perseverance, Logistical Support, Suspension of Classes, and Anti-Epidemic Sketches. But he is reluctant to speak about himself as a protagonist in this story. Instead, he talks about socialist values. He commends the government’s decisive actions; over the past two months, millions of people have been mobilised across the country to do frontline work, with most of the 1.4 billion population in some form of lockdown.

‘The reason why I created the paintings was to show the benefits of a socialist country, and this is different from capitalism in the West. As an example, Chinese people are a people for whom solidarity is key; we are a hardworking people. During New Year’s Eve, Chinese families gather together. However, many people sacrificed this precious time with their families to help fight the virus. Many medical staff went to Wuhan. I was very touched by these actions. They are so noble, but they are just ordinary people like us. They are not only the medical staff, but also grassroots staff and officials, community staff, many people who gave up their traditional festival. And this is difficult for other countries to do’.

《致敬天使·不一样的年夜饭)》Tribute to an angel – a different New Year’s Eve dinner.
Li Zhong

Tribute to an angel – a different New Year’s Eve dinner (致敬天使·不一样的年夜饭) features two medical staff hastily eating a meal while squatting, still in medical gear. A ‘different’ meal is also portrayed in a different style. He deploys a traditional Chinese style of painting in service of the contemporary moment, to ‘develop the new from the old’, as Mao Zedong himself might have called it. Ink wash painting emerged during the Tang Dynasty and is common throughout East Asia. Its characteristic black ink, diluted to various concentrations and shades, is painted onto a highly absorbent and delicate rice paper. Once a stroke is painted, it cannot be modified or undone. Its ability to capture a moment is not measured by its realism but by its essence – it is a snapshot that already begins to fade once the brush meets the paper, as if changing with the speed of the virus itself.

In the tradition of socialist painting, Zhong turns our gaze to the workers – the subjects who have consistently been excluded from bourgeois painting and who are now absent in the Western media’s portrayals of China’s response to the pandemic. ‘Across the world, people may say bad things about China, but this experience has changed their view totally. They surprisingly never considered the solidarity of Chinese people […] but right now across the globe, everyone is asking China for help and we are the only ones helping. China has helped 120 countries, both with supplies and staff’.

《停课不停学》Stop class, but don’t stop learning.
Li Zhong

In celebrating those who labour, Zhong himself also went to work. During his self-quarantine of one and half months, he created 129 paintings – creating more than two new paintings a day. His social commitment is clear, both as an artist and as a member of the Communist Party of China. Zhong studied and referenced images from the online and televised reporting in China, ‘which showed a lot of the workers’ perspective’. The paintings have also gone back to the workers themselves, such as the twenty medical staff from his community who went to Wuhan. The paintings gave them courage and encouragement; ‘They told me that my paintings reflect the truth of the outbreak. In the future when they see my paintings, we will not forget’, Zhong explained.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research we are engaged in a battle of ideas, which we understand is also a battle over the visual. Zhong made art that contests in this battle. He made art ‘to show the soldiers who are fighting against the virus, and these soldiers don’t just include medical staff. This includes the people staying at home, they are also fighters’. He invited us to see a different representation.

One of his paintings features a child at a drawing board, colouring in block letters. It reads Stop class, but don’t stop learning (抗击疫情停课不停学). ‘Because of the virus children cannot go to school’, Zhong explains. ‘The experts say that the virus can be transmitted from person to person. So, the schools had to be closed. Students must remain in quarantine, so the students are drawing comics in support of the medical workers’. It is a drawing within a drawing, a record of a record being made.

As for artists, what can we do? ‘They can reflect the situation positively. They should be true. Don’t blame other countries or spread misinformation, because the biggest challenge is to defeat the virus, which requires our unity’. As soldiers in this international battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, whether working on the frontlines or behind the scenes, quarantined at home or out of a home, caregiving or being cared for, at your computers or at your easels, Zhong reminds us to be scientists, to learn, and to be true.

Li Zhong, painting an epidemic.
Tings Chak