By Thomas Scripps 3 April 2020

Just one week after Julian Assanges request for bail in recognition of the threat posed to his life by COVID-19 was denied, the spread of the coronavirus through the prison system is escalating alarmingly.

The WikiLeaks founder, held in Belmarsh prison facing extradition to the US for exposing war crimes, has a chronic lung condition and has had his health destroyed by a decade of mistreatment by the British state, amounting to psychological torture.

Already on Monday, 55 inmates were reported infected across 21 different prisons in the UK, plus 18 prison staff and four escort staff. The number of prisoners testing positive was double the total just three days before. By Tuesday, the number had risen again to 65, across 23 prisons. According to the Mirror, around 6,000 prison and probation staff are currently in self-isolation12 percent of the workforce. Two prisoners have already been killed by the virus, the first on March 22 and the second on March 26.

The direction of travel is indicated by Rikers Jail in New York city. On March 31 there were 180 reported cases in the prison out of a population of 4,604, meaning an infection rate eight times higher than the already severely affected city itself.

In the UK, the barbaric response of the authorities has been to cohort prisoners who display coronavirus-type symptoms, like a fever or cough, with confirmed cases of COVID-19.

The Guardian reports that last week in Wandsworth prison in South West London, 12 coronavirus patients were kept with another 40 inmates with coughs and respiratory problems in the same isolation wing and in shared cells. This is in line with Ministry of Justice (MoJ) virus guidelines which read, If facing multiple cases of those displaying symptoms, cohorting, or the gathering of potentially infected cases into a designated area, may be necessary. There are apparently no plans for more tests at the prison and one wing has had no hot water supply for a week.

Unsanitary conditions are commonplace throughout the prisons system. A report from the National Audit Office earlier this year revealed a general state of chronic disrepair, including leaking rooms, broken heating systems and rat infestations. Last year, prison inspectors found that ten out of the thirty-five institutions they inspected did not meet minimum standards of cleanliness and infection-control compliance.

Belmarsh prison has a poor record on infection control. Noting that Assange has previously had significant dental problems, the Daily Maverick writes that a 2007 report by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons discovered that infection control was inadequate, citing a lack of infection control measures in the dental suite.

The Daily Maverick article also references inspections from 2009 and 2011 which concluded that infection control and decontamination standards were still not sufficiently good and that the dental surgery should be refurbished to meet infection control guidelines. In 2013, another report found that this recommendation was not achieved. Last year, the Independent Monitoring Boards reported that major safety and decency concerns remain, while the state of the showers and many of the toilets across the prison is appalling.

Given these appalling conditions, prisoners rights groups have called for the release of older, non-violent and vulnerable inmates.

Deborah Coles, director of the charity Inquest, sent an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying, People in prison are already dying. Many detention settings already have the virus within their walls, with thousands of frontline staff self-isolating the prison service is making plans to store the bodies of prisoners who will die in the coming months The government has a legal and moral obligation to protect the lives of detained persons from a foreseeable danger to their health.

Emily Bolton, legal director of advocacy group Appeal, stated, For the government to leave prisoners to die of Covid-19 behind bars when these deaths could be avoided is like leaving prisoners to drown in Orleans parish prison when the waters rose after Hurricane Katrina time is running out to avoid minor offences becoming capital crimes, and life sentences from becoming death sentences.

Faced with a catastrophe, the government is making a few very limited moves to release some prisoners.

Around 200 inmates in Northern Irelandroughly 7 percent of the totalwho are currently in the last three months of their sentence for non-violent offences will be released soon, under curfew and conditions which restrict their contacts with others. Scottish prisons are considering similar plans, with Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf saying, We are actively looking at options to do that. It could happen as early as next week. The situation is increasingly alarming.

In England and Wales, the Ministry of Justice has said pregnant women not considered a high risk to the public will be temporarily issued with an electronic tag within days.

Any additional releases are understood to have been ruled out. The Justice department insists that robust contingency plans have been put in place. No consideration whatsoever will be given to Assangeone of only two prisoners held on remand, as an innocent man, in Belmarsh maximum security prison.

In a video released on Wednesday, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said, A week ago, Magistrates Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the request to set Julian Assange free on bail because of the extraordinary circumstances of Covid-19. She did so by citing that there were no known cases of Covid-19 in Belmarsh prison and that she had full faith in the prison authorities.

Only a few hours later that same day those authorities had to admit that there were numerous cases of Covid-19 in the UK prisons. And those numbers have been going up day by day. Last week we knew that more than a hundred guards in Belmarsh were staying at home in self-isolation, and those numbers have now escalated. We have learned now that they doubled over the weekend

The media reports today that prisoners with flu-like symptoms are forced to share cells with other inmates. This is outrageous if not criminal. This cannot go on. No one knows how widespread the virus is at the prison. No one is testing

It doesnt take an expert to understand that the prison environment is the worst environment for illnesses such as Covid-19. The parliamentary group of the Council of Europe has said that theres only one journalist in a UK prison. That journalist is Julian Assange. He has to be released immediately. Do not forget that he is on remand. He is innocent according to the law. Release Julian Assange right now.

Doctors for Assange have released a statement saying, [District Judge] Baraitser did not address the increased risk to Mr Assange relative to the general UK prison population, let alone prisoners at HMP Belmarsh where Assange is incarcerated. Nor did she address the rapidly emerging medical and legal consensus that vulnerable and low-risk prisoners should be released, immediately

Baraitsers assurance that government measures were adequate to protect Mr Assange rang hollow on the very day the UK government announced that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid-19. If the UK government cannot protect its own royal family from the disease, how can it adequately protect its most vulnerable prisoners in prisons, which have been described as breeding grounds for coronavirus?

The British ruling class are using one monstrous crime to achieve another. Their inaction in response to the pandemic has created a time-bomb in UK prisons whose consequences they now intend Assange to suffer. They would be happy to see him die. More than ever, his life depends on the defence of WikiLeaks and democratic rights becoming a mass issue in the international working class. We encourage everyone to join the Global Defence Campaign and publicise its work and material widely.

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Julian Assange still held on remand as coronavirus spreads through UK prisons - World Socialist Web Site

World-renowned journalist and filmmaker John Pilger speaks to TJ Coles about the coronavirus crisis in the context of propaganda, imperialism, and human rights.

People are being told to self-isolate because of coronavirus, but Julian Assange has been isolated by successive British governments for years. Can you tell us whats going on with his case and how he was doing last time you saw him?

On March 25, a London court refused Julian Assange bail even though he was convicted of nothing and charged with nothing in Britain.

The Donald Trump administration wants to extradite him on a concocted indictment of espionage so ludicrous in law it should have been thrown out on the first day of the extradition hearing in February.

It wasnt thrown out because the magistrate, Vanessa Baraitser (she is described as a judge but is actually a magistrate) has made it clear she is acting on behalf of the British and US governments. Her bias has shocked those of us who have sat in courtrooms all over the world.

At the bail hearing, she added cruelty to her repertoire. Julian was not allowed to attend, not even by video link; instead he sat alone in a cell.

His barrister, Edward Fitzgerald QC, described how he was at risk of contracting coronavirus.He has a chronic lung condition and is in a prison with people who are likely to be carriers of the disease.

The UK Prison Governors Association has warned there will be deaths unless the vulnerable are released. The Prison Officers Association agrees; the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, the WHO, the Prison Advisory Service all have said the virus is set to spread like wildfire through Britains congested, unsanitary prisons.

Even Boris Johnsons Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, says: The virus could take over the prisons ... and put more lives at risk. At the time of writing, nine prisoners have died from COVID-19 in British prisons, including one at Belmarsh.

These are the numbers the authorities admit to; there are very likely more. Some vulnerable prisoners are to be released, but not Julian: not in the land of Magna Carta. How shaming.

When I last saw Julian in prison, he had lost between 10 and 15 kilos; his arm was a stick. He is as sharp as ever; his black humour is intact. His resilience astonishes me.

But how long can this resilience last? He is a political prisoner of the most ruthless forces, whose goal is to break him.

In your filmThe Dirty Waron the NHSyou expose the British National Health Services creeping privatisation and hollowing out, both by the Tories and New Labour. Whats the link between the coronavirus and the fragmentation of the NHS?

That the virus has been allowed to sweep through modern, developed societies is a crime against humanity. This applies especially to Britain.

In 2016, the Department of Health in London conducted a full-scale pandemic drill, known as Exercise Cygnus. The National Health Service was overwhelmed. There werent enough ventilators, emergency beds, ICU beds, protective kits and much else. In other words, it accurately predicted the crisis we face today.

The Chief Medical Officer at the time appealed to the Conservative government to heed the warning and begin to restore and prepare the NHS. This was ignored; the documents describing the conclusions of the drill were suppressed.

Why? By 2016, the Department of Health had been reduced to a revolving door of Thatcherite ideologues: privatisers, management consultants, asset strippers, many of them besotted with the American model of healthcare, where the current head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, had spent 10 years promoting the private health industry as a senior executive of United Health, a company that exemplifies an infamous system which effectively disbars some 87 million Americans from medical treatment.

In Britain, the Americanising of health care has been accelerating year upon year since a Tory bill, theHealth and Social Care Act, welcomed privateers such as Richard Branson and his Virgin Care.

In 2019, more of the NHS was sold to private companies than ever before. By last November, the number of public beds had been cut to 127,000, the lowest bed capacity since the NHS was founded in 1948 and the lowest in Europe.

Mental health beds were down to a mere 18,000 and most mental health services were now in private hands, mostly American.

This subversion of the worlds first public health service, established to give all people, regardless of income and class, freedom from fear, is surely a crime in what is now a state of fear.

Alas, my film foretold much of this. With the NHS and its clinicians prepared and ready with a national testing program not unlike Germanys, I believe Britain could have avoided the worst of the virus and the draconian measures that followed.

Your 2016 film,The Coming War on China, documents US encirclement and demonisation of China. Can you talk about the propaganda of the coronavirus as a Chinese virus?

Lets take one example. When the coronavirus emerged in China and Australian tourists of mainly Chinese descent flew home, they were quarantinedin a remote mining camp and an offshore detention centre.

When a cruise ship, the Ruby Princess, docked in Sydney with mostly white Australians and infested with the virus, the passengers were allowed to disembark without so much as a temperature check, let alone quarantine. As a result, 662 people linked to the ship have fallen ill and at least 11 have died.

The difference here is race and racist propaganda. A virulent anti-China campaign has consumed the Australian media in a country whose biggest trading partner is China and the universities depend largely on Chinese students.

At the same time, no country is as integrated with the US as Australia: its military and national security agencies and bases; its politics and media.

The current US propaganda war on China began in Australia when then-US president Barack Obama addressed federal parliament in 2011 and announced Americas pivot to Asia. This launched the biggest peacetime build-up of US naval forces in the Pacific since World War II, all of it aimed at China.

Today, more than 400 US bases surround China, from northern Australia, to the Marshall Islands, throughout south-east Asia, Japan and Korea. Such intimidation of China, a nuclear power, is seldom mentioned when China is attacked for building its defences on islands in the South China Sea.

As part of the pivot, a barrage of China-is-a-threat propaganda is dispensed by travelling Pentagon admirals and generals, who describe the Pacific Ocean as if it is theirs.

In a WikiLeaks disclosure, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state under Obama, demanded of a senior Chinese official that his government agree to re-name the Pacific the American Sea. She later claimed she was joking.

What are your thoughts on the US and British elites treating coronavirus as a war to be won, even though they cut back on public institutions that might have pre-empted the spread?

A pandemic described as a war to be won is in keeping with the language of permanent war.

The disabling or lock down of populations is routinely described as a wartime measure. This is meant to evoke The Blitz in 1940 when the Luftwaffe attacked England. Of course, to compare the current crisis with the carnage and struggle of World War II is profane.

The central issue is the ideological destruction of a health service that has been a beacon of a lost world of equity and fairness. How ironic and appropriate that the NHS is currently saving British Prime Minister Boris Johnsons life.

If there is a war, the weapons ought to be mass testing and tracing the pathways and pattern of the virus, treating people quickly and comprehensively, protecting front line health workers, social distancing and transparency but most of this is missing.

As for locking down the population and the forced isolation of those over 70, to quote one of the British government's favourite journalists, Robert Peston, there is a salutary lesson to be learned.

In 2012, a landmark study on the disease of isolation was published in Britain and the US. Researchers from University College, London, revealed that isolation was killing the elderly not loneliness, but isolation forced on people by circumstances beyond their control. More than pre-existing health conditions, isolation was the silent killer.

In my own reporting in Britain in the age of austerity, I have seen underfunded voluntary services trying to cope with this killer disease for example, in the northern city of Durham, devastated by Conservative policies, one volunteer attempted to care for 21,000 people and to save many of them.

This is occasionally a local media story, usually when a privatised care home is caught mistreating its elderly occupants, a common abuse. Once a humane extension of the NHS, Britains social care of the vulnerable was privatised by both Tory and Labour governments.

Many of the care homes are cash cows for ruthless individuals and their precarious companies. The people of Britain deserve better, at the very least their freedom from fear.

[TJColes is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute in the UK and the author of several books, includingVoices for Peace(with Noam Chomsky and John Pilger) andPrivatized Planet.]

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Freedom from fear: John Pilger on coronavirus, Assange, propaganda and human rights - Green Left Weekly

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.

The Slovenian Marxist Slavoj iek is one of the most prominent (and prolific) writers in the world of contemporary philosophy, author of groundbreaking studies like Less Than Nothing and The Sublime Object of Ideology. He is also, I regret to inform you, at it again.

In Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World, a short book to be published in April, iek casts his gaze on the coronavirus pandemic. The book has been produced at a breathless pace for the publishing world, in part because it recapitulates material from his weekly columns in RT, the government-funded publication formerly known as Russia Today. (iek will receive no royalties from this book, donating them instead to Doctors Without Borders.)

There are some passages of beauty, as when he remarks that, "It is only now, when I have to avoid many of those who are close to me, that I fully experience their presence, their importance to me." But those thoughts jostle with undigested chunks of film dialogue, complaints about political correctness, footnotes that mostly point to articles in the Guardian or to Wikipedia, and suggestions that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whom Swedish authorities were investigating on the basis of rape and sexual assault allegations until last year, is "Christ on the cross." In other words, about what you'd expect if you've read one of his 47 other single-authored books written in English: a hire-wire juxtaposition of far-left political theory and pop culture, held together by the force of his rumpled charm.

Although the pieces collected here are scattered, iek does have, more or less, a central argument: Because of the coronavirus, the worlds capitalist systems will necessarily need to be replaced. He writes, "measures that appear to most of us today as Communist will have to be considered on a global level: coordination of production and distribution will have to take place outside the coordinates of the market."

iek takes pains to make his proposals seem reasonable to a less-than-communist reader, painting his approach as an outgrowth of various responses that have been floated to the pandemic and the economic collapse it has triggered: an expanded role for international groups like the World Health Organization, a universal basic income, and governments organizing health care across national borders producing and distributing masks, requisitioning hotel rooms for the sick all outside of the free market. No more cruise ships, Disneyland, or cars. Sounds great.

That all seems like pretty straight-ahead and sound advice, really, even if ieks vernacular laden with slogans from French student protesters and psychoanalysis doesnt seem to have been updated since the late 60s. And iek is at his best when he reminds us to "resist the temptation to treat the ongoing epidemic as something that has a deeper meaning." We're not being punished for our sins or being sent a message from the natural world to respect the limits of the environment. The virus that has no way of knowing us just lucked into a pattern of replication that turns out to be really, really bad for humans. "The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemic is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that it just happened."

Sadly, iek fails to follow his own advice.

In many places, iek is asking the right questions Why are so many people OK with exploiting blue-collar workers while the privileged sit at home taking conference calls? How did the distrust between the state and people make the outbreak worse in China? Are governments using the pandemic as an excuse to declare a state of emergency that might never be lifted? And iek does provide a novel metaphor for the revolution he thinks will bring down capitalism, comparing the pandemic to the finishing move that Uma Thurman's character uses at the end of Kill Bill: Volume 2: "the coronavirus epidemic is a kind of 'Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique' on the global capitalist system."

But then he arrives at Wuhan. Or, at least, his dream version of the Chinese city in which the pandemic originated, where iek finds "an unexpected emancipatory prospect," in an exoticized version of the city in China where the virus is thought to have begun. There, he finds what he thinks is a silver lining in all of the deaths and chaos.

"The abandoned streets in a megalopolis the usually bustling urban centers looking like ghost towns, stores with open doors and no customers, just a lone walker or a single car here and there, provide a glimpse of what a non-consumerist world might look like," iek writes of the version of Wuhan that he sees in his mind, a city in which he is able to roam without the pressure to constantly work, consume, and engage. (This passage may have been written before other cities around the world entered lockdown.)

The pandemic has given him a chance to withdraw from the hustle of everyday life, and for that iek is...grateful?

"Perhaps, one can hope that one of the unintended consequences of the coronavirus quarantines in cities around the world will be that some people at least will use their time released from hectic activity and think about the (non)sense of their predicament."

There seems to be a part of iek that recognizes that even if he dresses it up in language borrowed from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, there is something unspeakably crude about taking such a Pollyannaish position. He quickly backs off, adding, "When a masked citizen of Wuhan walks around searching for medicine or food, there are definitely no anti-consumerist thoughts on his or her mind, just panic, anger and fear."

But it's too late. iek has declared a wildly lopsided ledger to be balanced: On one side, thousands dead in Wuhan (not counting the rest of the world); on the other, a respite from speaking tours and daily errands for iek. (But not, of course, so much of a break that he can't still churn out a book.) Who's to say the universe has not maintained its balance in some mysterious way? "My plea is just that even horrible events can have unpredictable positive consequences."

My suggestion: Take a meditation class there are plenty free online. Read a book. Have a cup of coffee. Take a (socially distanced) walk. What a monstrous suggestion that in Wuhan's more than 2,500 deaths (a likely under-counted figure that could be as high as 42,000 deaths, according to an estimate made last month by Radio Free Asia) he can find solace, because the machinery of everyday banality has temporarily ground to a halt.

Otherwise, iek is left with quite a dream. But as one of Quentin Tarantino's other characters, Mr. White, says in Reservoir Dogs, "You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize."

Go here to read the rest:
The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It's Terrible - BuzzFeed News

By Oscar Grenfell 9 April 2020

At an online lecture organised by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality last Tuesday, leading WSWS writer Nick Beams exposed the bankrupt politics of Socialist Alternative and the pseudo-left, documenting their role in seeking to subordinate the working class to the capitalist political establishment amid growing social opposition.

The event was the third in a series of online lectures delivered by Beams under the title Capitalisms war on society: Why you need to fight for socialism. The speaker stressed that the differentiation from the pseudo-left was not separate from the struggle for socialism, but was at the cutting edge of defining the independent interests and tasks of the working class.

The lecture was well-received by an audience of over 190 people. Participants included workers, students and young people from most Australian states and territories, along with international attendees from Sri Lanka, New Zealand, the Philippines and a number of other countries.

A video of the lecture by Beams

Beams began by explaining that the coronavirus pandemic had triggered the greatest crisis of the capitalist system seen in our lifetimes, opening up a period of political radicalisation and socialist revolution.

The decisive question, the speaker said, was arming the emerging movement of the international working class with the lessons of history and the socialist and internationalist program of the Trotskyist movement developed in a struggle against all forms of national-opportunism.

Beams explained that the key issue is this: the working class cannot overthrow the bourgeoisie if it remains politically and ideologically subordinated to it. This required a political offensive against all those tendencies that sought to prevent the working class from striking out on an independent path, including the pseudo-left.

This had been demonstrated by the experience of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The fight waged by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks and other tendencies that supported the liberal Russian bourgeoisie played the decisive role in politically preparing the conquest of power by the working class.

The coming to office in Greece of Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, in 2015 was a confirmation of the same truth in the negative. Syriza won elections by appealing to mass hostility to the austerity measures that had led to the collapse in support for PASOK, the countrys social democratic party.

Syriza immediately formed a coalition government with the Independent Greeks, an extreme right-wing nationalist formation. Within six weeks, it was imposing sweeping cuts to social services.

Socialist Alternative and the pseudo-left internationally had hailed Syriza as a model to be emulated. In May, 2015, Beams stated, Socialist Alternative had declared that Syriza cannot be transformed into an austerity party, even as it was clear that the organisation was committed to carrying out the demands of European finance capital.

Syrizas betrayal, and Socialist Alternatives support for it, were a product of the class character of both organisations, Beams explained.

This was also evident in Socialist Alternatives support for US regime-change operations, including the CIA-instigated civil war in Syria. Leading Socialist Alternative member Corey Oakley had infamously declared in 2012 that it was necessary to end knee-jerk anti-imperialism, i.e., to dispense with opposition to the predatory wars waged by the major powers.

Hand in hand with its pro-imperialist standpoint, Socialist Alternative had refused to defend Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher who is currently imprisoned in Britain and faces extradition to the US, where he would be jailed for life for exposing American war crimes.

In 2012, Socialist Alternative had lent succor to the attempts to frame Assange on bogus allegations of sexual misconduct. The organisation declared that he should go to Sweden, where the allegations were concocted, to answer the charges. It is now clear that the warnings of WikiLeaks and the WSWS that the attempt to extradite Assange to Sweden was a pretext to carry out his forced rendition to the US were entirely accurate. For years afterwards, the organisation had not mentioned the WikiLeaks founder.

Only last year, following his illegal expulsion from the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrest by British police, did Socialist Alternative publish a handful of articles condemning the attempt to railroad Assange to a US prison. However, the organisation did not repudiate its previous attack on him and boycotted all events held in his defence.

Beams explained that these positions were inextricably tied to Socialist Alternatives attempts to subordinate the working class to Labor, a party of big business, and the unions, which have suppressed every major social and industrial struggle of the past four decades.

Pointing to the relevance of these issues in the present coronavirus crisis, Beams noted that Socialist Alternative had enthusiastically welcomed the installation of Sally McManus as secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 2017. A year later, Socialist Alternative wrote that McManus ascension had been greeted as a breath of fresh air by many unionists, declaring that she had struck a defiant tone in contrast to her grey predecessors.

McManus is currently collaborating with the Liberal-National Coalition government on a daily basis, as it responds to the pandemic by providing billions of dollars to the major corporations that are laying off thousands of workers.

Beams explained: It is necessary to deal not only with the McManuses of the world but even more importantly with tendencies within the pseudo-left that work to prop them up.

He concluded by declaring: The immune system of the working class is developed above all through the theoretical political struggle conducted by the revolutionary party, basing itself on the great strategic lessons of struggle for socialism going back more than a century.

There is only one party which conducts such a struggle, the SEP and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). I urge that you apply to join it tonight.

The lecture prompted a series of questions. One attendee asked the SEP to elaborate on its role in the events surrounding the coming to power of Syriza in Greece.

Beams explained that the WSWS and the ICFI had been alone in warning that Syriza would inevitably betray the working class, as a result of its history as an unprincipled amalgamation of various Stalinist and reformist tendencies, and its pro-capitalist program.

Others noted that Socialist Alternative occasionally criticises union officials. Did this, some asked, invalidate Beams analysis. In reply, he said that the pseudo-left organisations would sometimes condemn the actions of particular union bureaucrats. But they insisted that workers had to remain trapped within these thoroughly corporatised organisations.

All of them rejected the position of the ICFI, which was that the globalisation of production had rendered the nationalist and reformist program of the unions completely bankrupt. The unions had been transformed into open instruments of big business, necessitating the creation of genuine organisations of struggle, including independent rank and file committees.

Some participants asked why it was that Socialist Alternative played the role that it did. Beams said that like other pseudo-left organisations, they were descended from groups that had broken from the Fourth International amid the post-World War Two boom of global capitalism, rejecting its insistence on the revolutionary role of the working class.

The pseudo-left, Beams stated, spoke for affluent sections of the upper middle-class in academia, the public sector and the union officialdom, whose wealth had increased as a result of soaring share values. They had a material stake in defending the status quo by preventing the working class from turning to a genuine socialist perspective, and sought to advance their own interests through various forms of identity politics based on gender, race and sexual orientation.

Throughout the meeting, a small group of individuals, clearly opposed to Beams exposure of Socialist Alternative, sought to disrupt the event, playing music while he was speaking and shouting incoherently. The unsuccessful attempt to block the discussion underscored the pseudo-lefts concern over the growing support won by the SEP, and its inability to respond with substantive political arguments.

Next Tuesdays lecture will be on the role of identity politics. The fifth meeting will feature an interview and discussion with SEP (US) Presidential candidate Joseph Kishore. The details will be posted on the WSWS and on social media over the coming days.

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At IYSSE (Australia) online lecture, Nick Beams exposes Socialist Alternative and the pseudo-left - World Socialist Web Site