57 Communist and Workers' parties demand "Immediate measures to protect the health and rights of the peoples"

Update: As of April 3 a total of 80 parties have now signed the statement. 

In a joint statement released today 57 Communist and Workers' parties released a set of joint demands that need to be realized to protect workers and people internationally during the capitalist coronavirus crisis. These include calls for strengthening public health systems, ending criminal imperialist sanctions and redirecting public funds from military interventions and exercises to fighting the crisis.

In the preamble the statement notes:

The pre-existing slowdown in world economy is now being...reinforced by the spread of the coronavirus and increasing the risk of a new crisis in the coming period. In spite of the propaganda about "unity", governments in the service of the big capital  focus their financial measures on the support of monopoly groups and will once again seek to throw the burden of the crisis on the workers and the other popular strata. The workers and the peoples cannot and must not pay again!

The statement also salutes "the countries that develop solidarity actions with the most affected countries, such as the sending of protective materials and health professionals from countries such as China, Cuba and Russia, actions that are in stark contrast to the absence of the European Union."

The demands it outlines are:

• Immediate strengthening of public health systems by state funding, recruitment of full-time medical and nursing staff with full labor rights. Meeting all the needs of Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and the infrastructure needed for the full functioning of public healthcare and research services.

• Immediate provision of all necessary means of protection (masks, gloves, antiseptics, etc.) by the state to the people free of charge and fight against profiteering. Provision of all protection measures to all healthcare personnel  giving this battle at the hospitals with sacrifices and at their own cost.

• Protection of the income and rights of the working-popular strata. To put a brake on the unaccountability of capital that under the guise of the CoVID-19 epidemic proceeds to massive redundancies and tries to (further) trample over wage rights, working time, leave from work, and other labor rights. Immediate action to protect workers in the workplace.

• No to any curtailment of the democratic rights of the peoples under the pretext of the coronavirus.

• End all sanctions and measures of economic exclusion, which in this situation are even more unjust and criminal and make the life of the peoples in the countries they turn against to even more difficult. To take all necessary measures to protect the health and life of (all) peoples.

• We say no to imperialist interventions and military exercises, such as those of NATO, and demand that public resources be redirected to support the needs of the peoples, such as the financing of public health and social security systems.

The statement was initiated by the Communist Party of Greece was signed by parties including the Communist Parties of Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Ireland, India, Malta, Poland, Portugal and 47 others.

To read the full statement and see the full list of endorsers go to: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/Dozens-of-Communist-and-Workers-Parties-demand-immediate-measures-to-protect-the-health-and-rights-of-the-peoples/

Flag of the Communist Party of Brazil at a Rally, 2018 -- Daily LIFT #158

Flag of the Communist Party of Brazil at a Rally, 2018 -- Daily LIFT #158

Today is the party's 98th anniversary.

"We are going to fight comrades, friends! Enough of Bolsonaro! We will win, despite him and the pandemic and we will win with Brazil and with Brazilians!" -- Excerpt from a speech today by Luciana Santos, National President of the party, to honour the occasion. 

The centre did not hold

An Italian supermarket worker

When the epic horror story that is the capitalist coronavirus crisis is finally over the truth will be that the centre did not hold. Things had already fallen apart, but somehow many needed a catastrophe to truly show it.

For over a generation politicians of all stripes -- including  "social democrats" like Tony Blair and Roy Romanow and Democrats and liberals like Jean Chrétien, and Bill Clinton -- have devastated civil society, the social safety net, social solidarity and the institutions that were meant to protect working people.


After the trauma of the Great Depression and the Second World War, and with the alternative of a developing and seemingly energetic Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc, the capitalists were pushed into a post-war "compromise". Workers in the advanced west would get unions, middle-class wages, cars and homes, opportunity for their kids, and some semblance of job and social security in the hope that they would eschew a more radical alternative or communism.

The social democratic parties like Labour in the UK and the NDP in Canada bought into this fully. They became an essential electoral outlet that told working people that they had some version of "representation" in parliaments and legislatures while, when in power, actually selling them out in virtually every case. "Power" became an exercise in quisling attempts to prove that they would be good little capitalist managers and they, too, would stand firm in defense of the "western" system.

When the neo-liberal era dawned and the "death" of communism seemed to be the end of history no one bought into the new paradigm more than social democrats who were certain that they could build a new capitalism that would include everyone as "stakeholders" and that would truly allow equality of opportunity.

Of course, it was all a lie.

Over the last three decades inequality has risen to near feudal levels in virtually every respect. Not only is inequality staggering in terms of wages and lifestyles, but any semblance of democracy that once existed has been shown to be a sham from the rigged primaries and elections in the United States to the near Shakespearean tragedy that was the utter capitulation of Syriza in Greece.

The "left" gleefully participated in destroying the "welfare state" from Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" to the saxophone prison state of Bill Clinton, to the neo-con "Liberal" budget in Canada of 1995 to the squandered opportunities of NDP governments from Nova Scotia to Ontario to British Columbia now.

Among the many travesties were the devastation of public health institutions and the decimation of laws protecting working people and, for example, renters.

When the 2008 crisis came the companies and banks were bailed out, but working people were allowed to drown. Barack Obama gave Wall St. criminals a pass and the penalty for corporate malfeasance was massive corporate welfare.

While there have been flashes of backlash against this in Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn the truth is that they have not led to much. They have failed, nobly perhaps, to change the disastrous course we are on. Sanders lingers in the Democratic primary at the moment, but it does not matter at all in terms of how this unfolding nightmare will play out other than in rearguard attempts to build enough public pressure to prevent the absolute worst. A worthwhile effort to be sure, but not one coming from a place of power.

With the coronavirus we are seeing the reality of the corporate state laid bare.

The corporations and their hired staff political class have built an economy and society that is entirely based around corporate power and the fantasy that "economic growth" meant something for everyone.

After having sold the public on tax cuts, contracted out public services and endless cutbacks, the corporations and the wealthy have being doing extraordinarily well while supposedly "advanced" countries like the United States and Canada lack sufficient hospital beds or infrastructure to cope with what is now on the horizon.

When we look, as working people, in vain for allies we see governments like the NDP in British  Columbia refusing at first to stop evictions by greedy landlords in the truly terrible housing market of Vancouver while also allowing mass concentrations of workers to continue to build colonial and environmentally destructive pipelines despite the obvious and terrible health risk this poses.

It is grotesque. It is appalling. It is enraging. It is predictable.

Some fightback has and will begin. We can only work to make sure it is not too late to prevent the mass destitution of millions of North American workers all while this terrible illness spreads exponentially.

But even if we do salvage some semblance of justice and fairness for working people during this terrible time we must remember that what the coronavirus has shown us is that the society we live in is built on fictions and injustice.

And that when the time came and the cases of illness and death spiraled out of control, the right spoke of opening the economy back up anyway even if that killed hundreds of thousands while the left fiddled with half-measures and its own impotence.

In the immediate future we are very likely to see the already greatly emboldened western far right encouraged and gaining momentum in this context of immense disempowerment and displacement.

To counter this will require a mass movement and a new anti-capitalist vision. We know that this will not be forthcoming from the parties of the institutionalized "left". The rotten edifices of parties like the Democrats and the NDP are corrupted by parliamentarianism and a fundamental faith in the system. Large elements of the Labour Party worked to destroy Corbyn, for example, because when push comes to shove they would rather have the Conservatives in power than an actual socialist. We need to move far beyond the notion that fairness is just a little bit of tinkering away or that by electing this or that candidate in an old-line party we can achieve transformative change.

This is by no means an easy task and I am not suggesting that a blueprint exists for how to do it, but when "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;", such is the moment for the left to rise again out of the ashes of the old order.

It had best lest it is the rough beast of fascism that slouches instead towards Bethlehem to be born.

Fidel Castro on the Great Wall of China, 1995 -- Daily LIFT #157

Fidel Castro on the Great Wall of China, 1995 -- Daily LIFT #157

"If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people" - Archbishop Óscar Romero assassinated 24 March, 1980

"If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people" - Archbishop Óscar Romero assassinated 24 March, 1980 

“I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.”

Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who spoke out against poverty, social injustice and the death squads, was murdered while giving mass on the order of right wing death squad leaders. At his funeral hundreds of mourners were killed by the Salvadoran army. Despite these crimes, and countless others, the government of El Salvador and the right wing death squads continued to be supported by the United States throughout the 1980s.

No one was ever convicted of his killing.

First Days of October, Georgy Savitsky (1887 – 1949) Daily LIFT #156

First Days of October, Georgy Savitsky (1887 – 1949) Daily LIFT #156

Savitsky was a founder of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia and a prominent early Socialist Realist Soviet painter. This painting portrayed a Bolshevik street guard in the earliest days of the revolution. It was completed in 1930. 

Report: Nearly half of Canadian working renters a month or less away from not being able to pay bills -- Urgent relief for workers needed

In an analysis and press release today the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) has found that close to "half of working renters in Canada don't have enough savings to pay their bills for more than a month if they lose their jobs".

According to the CCPA release:

"As more Canadians lose their incomes to COVID-19 every day, hundreds of thousands of families could soon be forced to choose between buying groceries and paying the rent," said Ricardo Tranjan, political economist and senior researcher with the CCPA Ontario office. "It's good that the Government of Canada has announced plans to support lower-income Canadians, but many families can't wait for support by April or May – they need it now. A lot of out-of-work tenants will be in dire straits before the end of the month."
Statistics Canada data from 2016 show that 3.4 million Canadian households are renters whose main source of income is employment or self-employment income. Of this group, 46 per cent, or 1.6 million households, only have enough money saved to pay their bills for a month or less, the CCPA analysis shows. Twenty-four per cent of the total, or 830,000 households, don't have enough income to get through a single week without pay.
"When we say people are living paycheque to paycheque, it's not just an expression, it's reality," Tranjan said. "As the crisis worsens, the need to support low-income renters becomes even more urgent. Both the federal and provincial governments must work to keep renters safe and solvent."

The report itself includes graphics that show very starkly the situation we are facing.

The analysis reinforces the urgency of demands for Employment Insurance reform and wage premiums from unions like Unifor. 

In a press release today Jerry Dias, Unifor National President said "We are facing a crisis of catastrophic proportions that requires fast action from government. Despite promising first steps, federal progress on worker supports has stalled and I'm afraid our opportunity for quick action may have passed".

The release further noted that:

Unifor is calling on Parliament to pass emergency measures on Tuesday to expedite the delivery of paycheques to displaced working families, through whatever means necessary, including via existing employer payroll systems or direct payments to households.
"Canada's workers were feeling the squeeze before they were forced out of a job by this pandemic. Without a dramatic change of tack, in a few more days laid-off workers will be left with empty cupboards and bare dinner tables," said Dias.

Unifor wants retailers remaining open to -- in addition to enhanced safety measures -- give their workers essential wage premiums like the extra $2 an hour that have been instituted by major chains like Rexall, Loblaw and Metro. This would both help workers to save towards a possible future shutdown of their workplace as well as with supporting their families where other household members may already be out of work. 

The time for action is now. 

"Last week, more than 500,000 individual E.I. claims were filed and there is no reason to expect that number to slow down," said Lana Payne, Unifor Secretary-Treasurer. "Millions more will have their work interrupted by this pandemic. The E.I. system, once overwhelmed, is now completely under water."

Dias added further that "Members of Parliament need to be prepared to make an immediate decision about how they plan to fund income replacement for Canada's workers tomorrow. If the E.I. system cannot handle these claims in a timely way, an immediate and temporary alternative is needed to ensure hardworking Canadian families do not fall into financial ruin.".

Tranjan in his CCPA report concludes:

The findings in this report show the magnitude of the need. Tenants don’t
have enough financial cushion to pay next month’s rent. And once they are
back to work, they won’t be able to pay arrears, given how little they were
able to save in normal times.
The federal government and its provincial counterparts need a plan, or
several plans.