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SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, now declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, has begun to wreak havoc in large parts of the world, with other parts waiting in anticipation. We are in a real struggle, which needs total mobilisation; a struggle that needs to put life before profit.
The coronavirus attack has so far been much less deadly than the Spanish flu of a century ago. That had affected 500 million people worldwide, about 27 per cent of the world’s population of the time, and had a death rate of about 10 per cent among those affected.
These days we hear a lot about the symptoms of Covid-19 (dry cough, high fever, etc.). Conversely, there is much less discussion of the virus as a symptom. To intervene on the symptoms of the virus it is necessary not only to have specific scientific knowledge, but also to put in place a serious reflection […]
A man worth over $100 billion, who makes, on average, $230,000 per minute calling on the public to help his own impoverished employees was not met well by many.
In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise. It was codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, as part of the general antipathy towards the NHS in general by the Conservative party. But the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had […]
When trying to interpret, understand and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works.
Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25 co-founder and MeRA25 MP, on the economic and political impact of the coronavirus.
Bumping elbows at the United Nations.
COVID-19 has challenged humanity: on what principles do you organise your society? The pandemic could have been defeated by cooperation, planning, transparency, and social solidarity. But instead, it was born into a society based on competition, secrecy, lies, and greed.
SARS-Co-2 or COVID-19 moves swiftly across the planet, leaving no region untouched. It is a powerful virus, with a long enough incubation period to hide the symptoms and therefore to gather more and more people in its deadly arms.
In April 2012, at the White House on her first visit to the United States since her election in 2010, Brazilian president Brazil Dilma Rousseff scolded advanced capitalist economies for unleashing a ‘tsunami de liquidez’, a ‘liquidity tsunami’, onto the developing world.
The political answer is not acceleration but refusal. And this is indeed what is has begun to manifest, in a variety of social rebellions. This includes the strikes of gig economy labor, the protests of Silicon Valley tech workers, anti-surveillance movements, urban protests against the smart city, defections from social media sites, algorithmic-bias busting, and […]
What are the underlying structural reasons for the coronavirus outbreak? According to Monthly Review Press author Rob Wallace, you have to look at global agriculture if you really want to understand the nature of global outbreaks.
In the likely event that you need some news to give you a bit of faith in humanity today, you should know that supporters of whistleblower Chelsea Manning have raised over a quarter million dollars to pay the cruel, draconian fine that was heaped upon her for her principled stand against testifying at corrupt secret […]
Decades of neoliberal austerity will make it harder to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, we must rebuild our social safety net and forge a New Deal for public health.
Jessica Whyte’s new book, The Morals of the Market, demonstrates the kind of scholarship we all aspire to: insightful, thought-provoking, and, above all, accessible and engaging. In it, she traces the “historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism”.
It will be hard to decide the most Trumpian moment in his dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, but my nomination is Trump’s meeting with executives from several pharmaceutical companies, where he discussed developing a vaccine. According to Trump, he asked them to “speed it up,” and they said that they would.
These are miserable times. The statistics of deprivation and death are gruesome. Far too many people struggle with hunger; roughly nine million of them dying each year from complications due to malnutrition (a child dies somewhere in the world around every ten seconds because of this).
The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure or—better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to the proliferation of capitalist food production and distribution.
CLASS struggle occurs in the realm of concepts too. The World Bank for instance systematically counters Left concepts by employing a novel tactic: it uses the very same concepts as are used by the Left, but gives them a wholly different meaning; as a result they either come to mean something entirely different from what […]
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