Inoculating Against Globalization: Coronavirus and the Search for Alternatives

Written by Sam Gindin and first published at Socialist Project

Social developments constantly surprise. The latest anxieties over the economic contradictions of extreme globalization haven’t been triggered by a trade war, inter-imperial rivalry, a financial meltdown or riots in the streets. They’ve rather been sparked by an apparently non-economic and contingent event: the coronavirus outbreak. 

As precautionary measures send workers home in a place few of us have ever heard of and the ramifications shut workplaces in places most of us never knew were connected, a business panic has set in. Grown men (and women) stare in horror at stock market screens and the business press fretfully anticipates an imminent recession.

Yet a deeper fear lurks in business circles. Has globalization plateaued? Might the further spread of the virus “put globalization into reverse?” Some main-stream journalists have even suggested that a slowdown in hyper-globalization “may not be a bad thing, given the sometimes absurd and dangerous dimensions it took on.” Others are more cataclysmic, asking, as one headline does, whether the spread of the coronavirus could “Hasten the Great Coming Apart of Globalization.”

Preparing for ‘More of Them’

The least convincing response to the present nervousness is one that reduces the coronavirus to an unfortunate one-shot event. The EcoHealth Alliance, which tracks infectious disease events over time and globally, has found that such events “surged in the 1980s with the advent of the HIV virus and has remained elevated ever since.” This has led The Wall Street Journal to soberly warn that “[T]he public needs to prepare for more of them.” But what, especially in the context of globalization, can ‘preparation’ in fact mean?

The pressures that come with globalization have made a virtue out of restraining, if not reducing, health budgets (with the US standing out in handing out $1.5-trillion in tax cuts favoring the super-rich while still debating whether universal healthcare for all is ‘affordable’). At the same time, the profitability advantages of economies of scale and specialization, made all the more demanding by intensified international competition, have led to extended value chains – production structures, including that of medicine, that involve multiple inputs from multiple plants in multiple countries.

Add the near-universal business identification of any excess capacity with unnecessary waste (‘lean production’) thereby underplaying the significance of a degree of flexibility, and you have local medical systems left vulnerable to even minor interruptions and lacking the capacity to confront unexpected emergencies. To globalization as an economic curse is added the medical curse of undermining the domestic ability to prepare for, and respond to, potential pandemics.

These concerns are magnified when we turn attention to the most threatening and largest scale pandemic on the horizon: the environment. The ecological threat is not a distant unknown but a scientifically established presence in the here and now. The challenge it poses is not what to do after we’ve passed the ecological tipping point, nor only how to slow down the assault on the environment. It is, as Barbara-Harriss White has emphasized, the need to reconstitute what we have already damaged. This means transforming everything about how we live, work, travel, consume, and relate.

Near-consensus on the sacrifices demanded in such a focus on the environment would be difficult in the best of circumstances but near impossible if the existing degree of inequalities persist. The economic restructuring involved in ‘fixing’ the environment and the concerted actions across all sectors of society this would entail necessitates a capacity to plan. 

It is inconceivable that such a social transformation can be accomplished within an economic system based on fragmented private corporations maximizing their individual profits in the face of competition as well as compensating fragmented individuals for their lack of control over their lives with more individual consumption.

Truly addressing the environment would involve a sweeping turn to national planning, international coordination and popular support. The degree of democratization this implies re how we address our material needs would, in the most fundamental ways, challenge not only ‘hyper-globalization’ but the social relations and edifice that constitute capitalism.

Are We on the Verge of Deglobalization?

If what we mean by ‘deglobalization’ is its plateauing or even slight reversal, this may be welcome but – as with third way social democracy’s promise of ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ – we should not expect all that much from an allegedly ‘gentler globalization’. It is one thing to accept compromises in the long struggle for fundamental change but quite another to sell the promise, as Josh Biven sarcastically puts it in a book title, that with any kind of capitalist globalization Everybody Wins Except Most of Us.

Might globalization itself then collapse or rot from its abundance of contradictions? Maybe. But don’t count on it happening without a determining push from social actors. Political graveyards are full of premature predictions of the ‘inevitable’ and imminent end to this or that; better to avoid adding to that list. 

Global capitalism didn’t just happen but was made and its end will most likely only come out of an appreciation that its multitude of economic, social and political contradictions and horrors aren’t signs of some automatic end to globalization, but rather openings that can contribute to its conscious unmaking.

The discontent with globalization has been there for some time but it has recently come to the fore within both the right and left. It has however been the right which has had the greater general success in mobilizing the brewing popular frustrations. The right’s response has primarily been performative, distinguished by its nativist rather than class orientation – full of sound and fury with ugly attacks on immigration while, occasional rhetoric aside, having little concern to substantially confront the corporate power at the core of globalization.

Trump has, for example, raged against NAFTA and Mexico’s impact on the US auto industry, yet the new NAFTA (USMCA) had little or no impact on the behavior of the US auto majors and the return of American jobs. Within six weeks of signing the agreement GM could, with impunity, announce the closure of four major US plants (and one in Canada). 

Similarly, for all of Trump’s railings against China as the primary culprit in the decline of American manufacturing, his end game has been an often confused mix of geopolitical concerns (slowing down Chinese technological-military advance) and getting China to ease the conditions for the entry into China of US financial and high-tech companies (i.e. a deepening, rather than undermining, of the global economic order). 

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs in the US Midwest have quietly disappeared from attention. The bluster about reducing the ‘unfair’ burden that the US bears in overseeing global capitalism and the mobilizing of populist sympathies as leverage in this cause has generally aided sections of American business rather than the American working-class.

The contradiction for the right lies in the fact that to deliver to its working-class base, it would have to lead a crusade against the freedoms of corporate America to invest, trade, and reallocate profits as they please. But with even mid-size businesses now firmly integrated into the global economy, right-wing politicians are not about to alienate that base. 

They may deal with this by looking to keep their base intact through upping the attacks on immigration and thundering against ‘elites’, and/or rightwing politicians may take a more authoritarian turn. But we cannot ignore the possibility that the right’s contradictory rhetoric, (which affects the legitimacy of globalization), and populist erosions of state capacities (which affect the American administration and supervision of the global order) may, inadvertently, also end up damaging, if not undermining, the advance of globalization.

What then of the left vying for government? The dilemma for the left begins with the reality that the economic, political and media establishment is less tolerant of anti-globalization rhetoric from the left. 

But in any case, trying to govern while working to disentangle the economy from the dense web of cross border linkages now so powerfully in place is an intimidatingly daunting task. And since, as this process challenges capital and private investment, it can be assumed corporations will threaten to leave or refuse to invest because of the uncertainty, significant hardships will, for a time, necessarily fall on workers. 

And so, unless the understandings and necessary commitments have already been built among workers – unless workers see the coming difficulties as investments in their future in contra-distinction to the never-ending concessions they faced before – the constraints on how far any left government could go are severe.

Why Haven’t Workers Exploited the Vulnerability of Value Chains?

The role of the coronavirus in exposing the economic fragility of global production raises the perplexing of why, if the interruption of one link in the chain can have such a devastating overall impact, workers and unions haven’t used this leverage to counter the attacks they’ve suffered? (A recent example of the resistance value of interrupting the economy at its critical nodes, albeit at a different scale, has recently been witnessed in the protests of Indigenous protestors and their allies in shutting down railroads and occasionally highways in Canada.)

The explanation for the current relative passivity of workers is that though corporations had experimented with outsourcing and value changes earlier, they were hesitant to go all in until two conditions were met. First, that the outsourcing of work would not lead to a disruptive war with workers in the home workplace. 

Second that corporations were confident that the workers receiving the work would not use it as a lever to hold the corporations ‘ransom’. That is, a key precondition for generalizing value chains was a defeated working-class: one that was demoralized, had lowered its expectations, and was largely leaderless.

The importance of leadership lies in the limits of repeated rounds of militancy in any particular workplace that disrupt overall production. The corporate response would be to close such facilities and find other sources. 

But if the interruptions were strategically coordinated and spread across numerous plants rather than isolated to particular ones, corporations could not close all the plants without a) risking a political backlash that blocked it from domestic markets, inspiring hard limits on global corporations; and b) undertaking the substantial costs of moving elsewhere only to likely find other workers soon responding similarly.

The post-70s weakness of labour has commonly been understood as the result of globalization. But that has it backwards. The acceleration of globalization from that period on was only possible because, in spite of economic militancy, labour’s class and political weakness couldn’t block the acceleration of globalization. 

(Once globalization was on stream, it did indeed weaken workers further.) The point is that as important as militancy is, it is only a beginning. If the movement isn’t also politicized – expanded across the class and extended to challenge for state power – the militancy will be exhausted, and the movement ultimately crippled or destroyed.

There is no way out of this box without a transformation of unions themselves. The catch is that while workers have at some moments and in some places demonstrated the potentials of organized working people, it’s hard to imagine a widespread and sustained worker revolt without an institution – a socialist party of some kind – that sees creating and developing a coherent working-class out of its disparate pieces as its singular pre-occupation.

Reorienting to Inward Development

What interests us here is not how to turn the delegitimation of hyper-globalization into a vague ‘easing’ of globalization. Rather it is how, as socialists, we can better position ourselves for transforming society. This necessitates radically reorienting the political agenda away from global competition to “inward development.” We are not, it’s important to emphasize, suggesting a localist retreat from technology, modern life, and connections beyond our borders. 

Nor does this direction have anything to do with a (Steve) Bannon-esque populist nationalism that places ‘us’ before the rest of humanity. And though we emphasize a nationally focussed alternative, we insist that it retain an internationalist sensibility.

The argument for a turn inward begins with the reality that all organizing is ultimately local or domestic. Second, all politics must necessarily go through the state, especially if we want to seriously constrain the power of mobile capital. Third, the building of an alternative that maximizes the democratic administration of all aspects of our lives – which includes attention to the human scale of maximizing participation – is conditional on transforming the nation state as part of in turn transforming sub-levels of the state and local workplace and community institutions.

We conclude with two examples – representing the most international of issues, the environment and immigration – that speak to the mediation of a national focus with an internationalist sensibility. 

Even though ‘environmentalism in one country’ is a contradiction in terms, it is the case that it is primarily within each country that the work of changing attitudes, values and priorities can be carried out and the conversion of eco-structures and productive capacities to take on environmental repair and sustainability can be addressed. It is on that basis that meaningful international agreements can be signed, technologies and other supports be made freely available to poorer countries and genuine international cooperation achieved.

In the case of immigration, we would not want to exaggerate the claim that the shift to inward development within the developed countries will in itself solve the immigration crises (all of whom have a capacity to take in much higher levels of migrants than they do now). 

But that shift could nevertheless bring positive internationalist implications. To the extent that the immigrant crisis is reframed in terms of why people feel compelled to leave their countries, the shift to inward development among the developed countries might legitimate support for states in the poorer countries also moving toward a degree of inward development. 

And with the pressures of competitive globalization eased and workers in the developed countries feeling more secure, the argument that the advance of poorer countries comes only at our expense would carry less weight. It might consequently be easier to imagine transferring otherwise competitive technologies to poorer countries along with solidaristic corps of young educators and trainers.

Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition is forthcoming with Haymarket in 2020.

Lib Dems Weed Policy is Muddled but Essentially Right

The Lib Dems general election policy to legalise marijuana in the UK, is in many ways a sensible approach to dealing with the issue of possession and small scale cultivation of the drug. As the Lib Dems point out, prohibition has failed to reduce usage of cannabis and the fact that it is illegal means that it causes wider problems for society.

What is the point of criminalising people, who otherwise are perfectly law abiding citizens, just because they want to get high? Furthermore, the illegality of cannabis in the UK makes it an attractive money spinner for criminal gangs, and being on the black market, we are missing a stream of taxation which could be used to fund educational programmes about cannabis use and feed other spending areas such as health.

Many other countries around the world are moving towards legalisation. The US are implementing cannabis legalisation on a state basis, and by all accounts this has been a big success in reducing cannabis related crime and providing a handy income stream for state governments. More and more US states are moving to a legalised, licenced approach to weed.

So far, so good. But the Lib Dems also want to grade and limit the THC (which is said to be responsible for psychiatric problems in some people) content in cannabis, which I think is misguided. Grading is fine, people should know how strong any particular strain of weed is, but I can’t see the point of limiting the strength. This is what was reported about the policy on Buzzfeed:

‘The Liberal Democrats would appoint an independent regulator for the cannabis market and reduce the harm of the drug by requiring it to include lower levels of the active component THC and more of the harm-reducing CBD element.’

This is in response to the sometimes hysterical reporting in the right wing media, I dare say, about a variety of cannabis known as ‘skunk.’ The THC levels in skunk is generally higher than more traditional varieties, but not always, and higher in CBD.’

As far as I can tell, skunk was developed in the Netherlands by cross breeding different types cannabis plants to obtain high THC levels. The practice is now widespread around the world.

In my experience the skunk on sale in the UK, is nowhere near as potent as that which can be bought in the Netherlands, although it is generally a bit stronger than more traditional cannabis varieties, but some of the traditional types can be equally as potent. In the Netherlands this much stronger skunk is legal just like other types of cannabis, but was not graded in strength the last time I was there.

Surely, this is a more sensible approach to what the Lib Dems are advocating for the UK? Whilst grading the potency of different types of cannabis for users is sensible, banning the higher strength varieties would immediately create an illegal market in them. Thus negating one of the benefits of legalisation, in the ending criminal involvement in supply. The market may well be smaller than what it is now, but it would still exist and may well be more daringly attractive, particularly to younger people.

The Green Party’s general policy is to have a similar model to the Netherlands in terms of licensed outlets, but I don’t think the grading of the strength of cannabis is stipulated, but maybe it should be.

With more evidence of the health benefits of cannabis emerging all of the time, like this research from Australia, which found THC improves the memory and learning in older mice and could help reduce dementia in humans, it makes no sense to prohibit it. Trails on humans will begin later this year.

Cannabis has a psychoactive affect but even the strongest varieties are nowhere near as strong as drugs like LSD, or certain types of mushrooms, but it is clear that small minority of people can have psychiatric problems with these type of drugs. But this is a health and education issue, not a criminal one, and cannabis is fairly easy to come by in the UK, even though it is illegal, so people will use it anyway. Better to have the situation regulated. 

The Lib Dems are on the right lines here, but they shouldn’t water down the idea to placate the Daily Mail. If it is right, then let’s do it properly. 

Will Cannabis use be Legalised in the UK?

I’m not known for heaping praise on the Liberal  Democrat Party, but hats off to them on this issue. As The Independent reports today, the Lib Dems set up an independent panel of experts to look into legalising cannabis in this country, comprising of, scientists, academics and police chiefs, which has recommended making the currently outlawed drug legal.

This follows in the wake of a shift in thinking around the world, with the realisation that the ‘war on drugs’ has been an abject failure in preventing the use of drugs, including cannabis, and costs a huge amount in public resources, and all for what? What is the point of criminalising people in possession of small amounts weed?

In the US, Colorado and Washington have legalised cannabis use, whilst Uruguay has followed suit. Jamaica has legalised the possession of up two ounces of the drug and Canada looks set to regulate cannabis use in the near future too.

The panel recommends the UK taking a similar approach to that of Uruguay, which is a less commercial model than in Colorado, where cannabis can be bought over the counter at licensed outlets, quite possibly chemist shops here and small scale cultivation for self use is allowed. Cannabis clubs could also be allowed to sell the drug to their members.

There would be a state regulator, similar to Ofcom or Ofwat, and perhaps it will be called Ofhead?

At present, in the UK, cannabis is an illegal class B drug, with a maximum penalty for possession of relatively small amounts, of five years in jail. Cultivation and supplying the drug has a maximum custodial sentence of 14 years. In practice, many police forces around the country will issue only police cautions to those caught in possession of small amounts.

One of the few benefits of the government’s slashing of public spending in London, has seen the police abandon the practice of descending on underground station forecourts with cannabis sniffer dogs, to catch people carrying a bit of weed. As I say, often this only results in a police caution, but it is harassment all the same. The police have rightly identified this activity as a waste of money and resources, for no real benefit to policing the city.

Allowing home cultivation and legal suppliers is actually likely to reduce crime generally, as the criminal gangs that make a lot of money supplying cannabis will become redundant, with all the savings for police resources that will entail. Prohibition just doesn’t work. On top of which, the panel believes legal sales could raise up to £1 billion in tax revenues.

So, the case is over whelming, and frankly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for five minutes. Will it happen in the UK? I have to say, I very much doubt it. The Daily Mail would be outraged, as they peddle a kind of Victorian morality where no one is allowed to enjoy themselves.  

Indeed, all illegal drug policy needs to be rethought through, with it being treated as a health and education issue, not one for the criminal justice system.

This is what a Home Office spokesperson said on the matter, as reported at the UK Huffington Post:

"clear scientific and medical evidence that cannabis is a harmful drug which can damage people's mental and physical health, and harms individuals and communities". The government has no plans for any changes to the law.

As if alcohol is any different, in fact it is much more injurious to physical and mental health, not to mention the problems caused by drink related violent crime.

Our politicians have a blind spot on this, or probably more likely they know the facts but are too scared of upsetting some of the reactionary elements in the mainstream media, to allow sound logic to dictate drug policy.

Amnesty International: Protecting The ‘Human Rights’ Of Johns, Pimps And Human Traffickers

After a government raid last year on an illegal mining camp in La Pampa in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, a discarded bra lies on the ground outside an informal bar that allegedly employed sex workers. (Photo: Rodrigo Abd / AP)

Written by Chris Hedges and first published at Truthdig.com

The decision by Amnesty International’s decision-making forum, the International Council Meeting, to call for the decriminalization of prostitution is another in a long line of triumphs for heartless neoliberal economics and the grotesque commodification of human beings that defines predatory capitalism.

Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said: “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse. Our global movement paved the way for adopting a policy for the protection of the human rights of sex workers which will help shape Amnesty International’s future work on this important issue.”

In the sickness of modern culture, the ability to exploit with impunity is distorted into a human right even by a renowned and respected humanitarian organization. That is quite a card trick. We live in a global culture where the wretched of the earth are chattel and where sexual slavery—which is what most prostituted women and girls around the globe endure—is sanctified by market forces. These women and girls are among our most vulnerable. After being crushed by poverty, racism and sexism, they are unable to find other ways to make a sustainable income. They are treated little better than livestock transported to markets for consumption. That a so-called human rights organization parrots vile justifications is emblematic of the depth of our moral degeneration and the triumph of misogyny.

Women and girls who are prostituted should be treated not as criminals but as victims. The criminals are the johns and the pimps and traffickers who profit from the sale of human flesh. Decriminalizing prostitution, which allows these modern slave masters to openly ply their trade, means the exploitation will grow explosively. We must work to create a world where those who are dispossessed of their human rights are not forced into this dilemma. We must not accept a world where poverty destroys the lives of the weak and the vulnerable, including children. Those who profit from prostituting women and girls must be driven out of business.

“In sheer numbers, it is the poor brown women of the world who pay with bruises, humiliation and deaths for this ignorant and hideous decision that has brought Amnesty International so low,” Lee Lakeman, the Canadian feminist, told me by email. “When Amnesty International’s ‘progressive leftists’ blithely refer to ‘free choice to prostitute,’ do they choose to forget prostitution as imperialism? Third world brothel cities, the tourist brothels sprung up where once armies were stationed, man-camps of resource thieves that overrun indigenous communities, UN troops buying sex from women in refugee camps by offering them food? Abandoned migrant addicted kids and women in the ghettos of the world’s cities being bought for the price of a quick hit? Or are they [Amnesty and those who support its decision] imagining this free choice: the women, babes in arms migrating from war zones and environmental deserts who are bought with rides, food, water or with a chance to save a child? Surely they know how indigenous girls are groomed with drugs and alcohol and rides to the city from hopeless homelands. 

But they cannot have missed the inherent racism of prostitution that exoticizes every racial stereotype of woman on the back pages and internet sites of the world. And those of us, women of the global north, who have food and shelter? We fight now for the public life of full citizens. Are we obliged every time we leave our houses to face a barrage of men bloated with entitlement of class and race and sex, who sit scanning as we pass for our price tag? Consciousness is in part knowing who is standing with you. We know Amnesty International sold us out.”

Among those, including women, who have no concept of what being prostituted really means, it has become hip and edgy to talk about the legitimacy of “sex work.” Movies like “Pretty Woman” and the pro-prostitution lobby’s slick portrayals of the “sex industry” bear as much resemblance to the reality of prostitution as “Sands of Iwo Jima” does to war. If you want an honest window into what the prostitution industry is like, read “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution” by Rachel Moran, who at 15 was prostituted on the streets of Dublin. She endured this nightmare for seven years.

Moran says, based on her experience, that there are three types of men who use prostitutes: those who treat women as if they do not have human emotions; those who are conscious of a woman’s humanity but choose to ignore it; and those who derive sexual pleasure from crushing the humanity of the women they buy.

Our culture, manipulated by sophisticated forms of propaganda, mesmerized by commercially created images that glorify violence and sexual exploitation and consumption, cannot untangle fantasy from reality. Many, maybe most, men have been indoctrinated by pornography. Pornography has taught them that their personal gratification at the expense and degradation of another is a human right. This indoctrination has twisted feminism, which once fought for oppressed women and girls, into an accessory to misogyny. Why would genuine feminists organize or consider taking part in “SlutWalks”? Why is the election of a female president or the appointment of a female CEO an advance when at the same time—often with the collaboration of elite women—social and governmental programs that provide assistance to poor and working women are abolished? The current generation of neoliberal “feminists” cite the empowerment of a tiny, predominantly white female elite as proof of feminist advance. Women and girls who are poor, racialized or part of the working class, like all of the vulnerable in our age of predatory capitalism, are ignored and discarded, along with most of their advocates. This is not an advance for women. It is a profound setback.

“Capitalism and prostitution are the new method of imperialism and colonization,” said Alice Lee, a member of the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, whom I reached in Vancouver. “It is no coincidence that pornography and prostitution use racial stereotypes to sell and exploit women. 

Prostitution is a tool that subjugates women, especially women of color, reinforcing sexism and the global racial hierarchy. The normalization of sexualized racism entrenches the idea that women of color and poor women are dispensable/disposable in all nations. The global north no longer has to occupy our lands. They can occupy our bodies and define our worth. This othering enables them to see us as less than human.”

The world has been turned upside down. Every sentence uttered by the pro-prostitution lobby—that prostitution is about choice, that prostitution is about empowerment, that legalizing prostitution protects women—is a lie. But we are a culture awash in lies, and amid this flood it is hard for many to separate illusion from reality.

Being prostituted is perpetual rape. Being prostituted means your orifices are penetrated a dozen or more times a night by strangers who often insult, maul and beat you. This happens in cars, in alleys, in “massage parlors,” in brothels, in motel rooms. And those who make the real money are not the exploited and the abused but the pimps, traffickers and brothel and massage parlor owners. Being prostituted means vaginal and anal tears, bruises, broken bones, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, and severe psychological damage. And it can mean death. It almost always means early death. Those who must endure this abuse are almost always women of color, many shipped by traffickers from poor countries to relatively affluent countries for the sole purpose of being sexually exploited.

“Rape, wife battering and pornography serve to put women in their place,” Lee said. “That is the function of male violence against women. When women hear and see other women being raped, battered or prostituted, we know this could easily happen to us. Sometimes in the pro-prostitution argument you will hear that prostitution will prevent men from raping ordinary women. But by accepting prostitution we are accepting a class of women being expendable, as if that will prevent men from raping and beating us. Only when all women achieve liberty and autonomy can we be free.”

I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from my years as a war correspondent. I instantly recognized fellow sufferers of PTSD in prostituted women and girls when I interviewed them in refugee and displacement camps in Latin America, Africa and the Balkans. Prostituted women in and near war zones are as commonplace as corpses. Once a culture descends into the sickness of violence, once a culture allows human beings to become racialized objects of exploitation, there is an explosion of rape and prostitution, along with pornography. War, like neoliberal economics, sees only commodities, not sentient beings with the ability to feel pain and joy. And making war on people, as well as the planet, lies at the heart of neoliberal economics.

Prostituting women and girls is a lucrative business. Germany, which legalized prostitution in 2002, is now being called “Europe’s biggest brothel.” It has industrialized sexual exploitation with a terrifying corporate efficiency. Over a million men a day engage in these transactions, sexually exploiting women and girls who come mostly from poor countries in Africa and Eastern Europe. 

These women and girls have been shipped to Germany to satiate the physical desires of the affluent and enrich the pimps and traffickers who control them. The women and girls do not do this because it is a choice. They do this because they are desperate and poor. The German magazine Spiegel published an investigative piece that lays out this abuse in detail, “How Legalized Prostitution Has Failed.”

Amnesty International has, in essence, legitimized the weapon of male objectification and violence in the war against women. This weapon exists apart from the evils of global capitalism. The fight to end male violence against women has to be integral to those of us who also fight global capitalism. We need the liberation of women and girls, including those who are poor and of color. Women cannot join the fight for a better world until male violence and male entitlement are eradicated. Freedom from exploitation, especially for women and girls, will define the success or failure of our struggle. To be an anti-capitalist, to be a member of the authentic left who stands with all of the oppressed, is to embrace radical feminism—not the mock feminism of neoliberalism but the true feminism of Andrea Dworkin. It is to recognize that no assault against capitalism is possible, or morally permissible, unless it is accompanied by an assault against male violence and the exploitation of women and girls.

“Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore,” Dworkin wrote. “Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man’s pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

London Green Left Statement on Jenny Jones comments about Zac Goldsmith

There has been a debate arising from the Evening Standard’s report of Jenny Jones’ remarks about some Greens supporting Zac Goldsmith as second preference in the forthcoming London Mayoral election. At present it is not clear if Zac Goldsmith will stand, or indeed who the Green candidate might be or who else might stand from other parties or as independents.

London Green Left believes that all members of the Green Party should campaign to seek the victory of the GP candidate.  Left Greens, whether in Green Left or not, ought to attend the London Federation of Green Parties  meeting which will be held at Development House (7.30 - 9.00pm) on Monday 18th May 2015 to express a view on the mayoral campaign, possible candidates and their selection and the campaign for the London Assembly which will also be running next year. All London Green party members can attend London Federation meetings.

Tory – Lib Dem Coalition 2010 – 2015: A Record of Nastiness and Incompetence

The odious Tory/Lib Dem Coalition government has ended (for now at least), we look back on what this has meant for Britain.

The banks have been re-financed with tax payers money, and the good times in banking, if not for the rest us, are well and truly back. Hefty bonuses are once again the norm for those with their snouts in the trough, even at government owned banks, you wouldn't know that these people crashed our economy. Royal Mail sold off at a huge discount to city investors. All in it together? Risible really.

Welfare benefit sanctions up massively since 2010, cuts to benefits, including the bedroom tax, housing benefits, working tax credits, crisis loans, Independent Living Fund for the disabled and overall benefits allowed to fall as inflation rose. Food banks up by about 500% and suicides up massively for benefit claimants. Hundreds of millions of pounds wasted on IT in the botched attempt to introduce the Universal Credit benefit system.

Workfare schemes introduced which amount to little more than slave labour, benefiting big business with participants learning such valuable skills as stacking supermarket shelves. Temporary, part-time, zero hours and mainly lowly paid jobs 'created'. Public sector workers made redundant in their hundreds of thousands whilst those left have had below inflation wage increases (if any at all) and hikes in their pension contributions. All are considerably poorer than before the Coalition started mismanaging the economy.

On the other hand well paid advisory jobs in government for The Sun hacking crooks like Andy Coulson.

An unsuccessful attempt to privatise our forests and woods and the cruel and utterly ineffective badger cull that despite all the scientific evidence (and there is loads of it) saying it was at best pointless and at worse would increase the spread of bovine TB, duly proved the scientists entirely correct. Defra Secretary of State at the time Owen Paterson, claimed it would have worked out OK, if only the badgers hadn't moved the goal posts!

Vans dispatched by the Home Office to drive around areas where immigrants live to tell people to 'GO HOME' in a panicky response to UKIP gaining popularity.

University tuition fees increased to £9,000 per year for students, already burdened with debt, and despite the Lib Dems promising to abolish them altogether. Once the votes of students were bagged by the Lib Dems their policy was deemed to be too expensive.

Local government cut by around 40% leading to the closure of libraries, day centres, leisure centres, youth clubs and many other services. All under the cover of 'localism'. More freedom for local authorities to spend much less cash. At the same time a huge increase in school privatisations as many were turned into academies, run by crack pot religious individuals and wealthy business men, all funded by the tax payer.

No expense spared though when it came to bombing Libya, which has been a complete disaster as militant Islamists have taken over huge areas of the country, with plans to make it a base for attacking Europe. Thousands killed.

House building, other than for foreign millionaires who 'buy to leave' property in London, down. At the same time homelessness hugely on the rise, especially in London. Families on housing benefit evicted from their homes and sent to all parts of the country (well all parts that are cheap).

All this with wages falling, the NHS opened up to privatisation, Legal Aid cut, Corporation Tax reduced for big business to one of the lowest levels in the G8, inequality rising along with carbon emissions.

What a record. Are they ashamed? Hell no, they say they want to finish the job off. More likely finish the rest of us off. Kick them out.

  

Hyperbole about the dangers of ‘skunk’ won’t help those at risk – but a change in the law might

Can I write an entire blog post about one sentence? I’d certainly like to. The sentence in question is ‘The potent form of the drug, known as ‘skunk’, is so powerful that users are three times more likely to suffer a psychotic episode than those who have never tried it.’ It’s from a piece in the Mail on Sunday which claims in its headline that ‘scientists show [not "research suggests", you notice] cannabis TRIPLES psychosis risk: Groundbreaking research blames ‘skunk’ for 1 in 4 of all new serious mental disorders.’

The MoS is infuriatingly pleased with itself for having got hold of this research ahead of publication – they’re pitching it as an ‘exclusive leak’, which sounds to me like a pretty grand way of describing breaking a PR embargo. It’s infuriating for two reasons. First, it’s hardly as though it’s the Watergate files or something – the research was going to be published anyway, so all the MoS has done is put it out a few days ahead of schedule. Second, the fact that they’ve done so means that those of us who are interested in critiquing the paper they’ve based their story on can’t, because it’s not been published.

Except that it has, because the lovely people at the Lancet, presumably sighing heavily as they did so, have made the paper available, for free, for everyone, immediately.  And inevitably, the MoS’s big exciting news turns out to be – well, not nothing. But much less exciting than they claim.

The research is into 500 or so people who accessed mental health services in south London between 2005 and 2011. The reason I’ve focused on that one sentence above is that it clearly and unambiguously implies causation. Skunk is so powerful that users’ risk is tripled, apparently. Not, users of the powerful drug skunk are at three times the risk, but skunk is so powerful etc etc. And scientists have shown that. (Side note: ‘shown’ is what philosophers call a ‘factive verb’. It implies that the thing being shown is true.)

But the paper in fact ‘shows’, nor even claims, no such thing. Its own, far more cautious, conclusion is ‘Use of cannabis with a high concentration of THC might have a more detrimental effect on mental health than use of a weaker form.’ The suggestion that 24 per cent of first-time psychoses – the one in four of all new serious mental disorders from the MoS’s headline – can be attributed to skunk is caveated with the pretty important phrase ‘if a causal role for cannabis is assumed’. They drop variations on the ‘if we assume causality’ theme into the paper at least four times. There are obvious other possible reasons for a link – forms of self-medication, which the paper addresses but thinks unlikely, or some third factor. Perhaps people at risk of psychosis are simply more likely to enjoy skunk, or to want to try different drugs.

The researchers, it should be admitted, seem to think a causal link is likely. It may – may - even be true. But this research certainly hasn’t shown anything. (And the ‘groundbreaking’ research doesn’t ‘blame’ skunk, while I’m on the topic.) Five hundred people isn’t a huge study, but nor is it so tiny that we can discount it. This is definitely interesting, but it’s irresponsible to suggest it’s more than that. In fact it’s worse than irresponsible. It’s either terrifyingly stupid of the MoS – the writer failed to notice all the caveats and caution in the Lancet paper – or it’s hugely cynical, not caring whether it was true or not, but only wanting to scare its readers.

The thing is, as I’ve written before, it doesn’t greatly matter, on one level, precisely what the risks of skunk are. No one claims it’s safe, and (actually) it wouldn’t hugely surprise me to learn that it does increase the risk of psychosis. The point is: while drugs such as skunk are on the black market, and unregulated, and while users are pushed into a criminal subculture, the harms they cause are increased. If the MoS was actually interested in reducing the damage skunk causes society, it’d be campaigning for a change in the law. Instead it’s nicking papers from an academic’s desk and claiming to be Woodward and Bernstein.

Written by Tom Chivers and first published (surprisingly) at The Spectator