Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

IN early April, the United Nations General Assembly considered a draft declaration on the abolition of unilateral sanctions imposed by a number of states, primarily the United States, Britain and the European Union that bypassed the UN Security Council.

BY OWN CORRESPONDENT

The draft was co-authored by 28 states and its importance is determined by the need to unite the international community in the context of the coronavirus pandemic also known as Covid-19, which has infected more than a million people worldwide with over 54 000 becoming victims.

In this case, the unilateral sanctions imposed under various pretexts by western countries impose a threat to an assortment of supplies and equipment necessary to fight the deadly virus to countries that fall under their restrictive measures.

Countries such as Zimbabwe, Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, to mention but a few are under threat.

Despite the unequivocal importance and undeniable need for a declaration on the lifting of illegal, albeit unilateral sanctions, the draft was not adopted.

Opponents of the document, like many other humanitarian initiatives of the UN, have once again become the US, EU, Great Britain, Ukraine and Georgia.

Calls to abandon sanctions were also made in March at the G -20 summit held via video conference.

At that time, America once again kept itself aloof from participants who reaffirmed their commitment to solidarity between peoples and the search for common recipes to fight the new type of coronavirus.

The US did not hear the call to abandon sanctions and trade wars and give a green light to all countries that the access to food and medical supplies were necessary combating the epidemic.

According to the text of the draft declaration of the UN General Assembly considered this month , the document provided for the leading role of the World Health Organisation in combating the pandemic, the consent of states to cooperate with each other and with the WHO, including to develop ways to combat the spread and treatment of Covid-19.

It also called on countries to abandon trade wars and applying unilateral sanctions through the bypassing of the UN Security Council.

Apologists for countries that mantain sanctions policies were not ready to respond to the call of the UN Secretary General and were not able to sacrifice their politicised approaches and interests.

In such circumstances, it will be more difficult to give a global and joint response to the threat of a new pandemic.

And as a result of the short-sighted sanctions policy, the first violin, of which is Washington, a huge number of people can suffer, especially in developing countries.

The current situation shows that so far, not all countries have realised the seriousness of the situation.

The behavior of the US, EU, Britain, Ukraine and Georgia at the UN General Assembly shows that not everyone has realised the danger of the pandemic and continues to act as if nothing had happened.

In fact, a pandemic can be compared to a global war, and the whole world is waging a vicious fight against a common enemy-Covid-19.

Its time the world woke up to the fact that we need to forget about past grievances and work hand in glove, if not like tongue and saliva, to fight against the coronavirus.

But, as things stand, a number of countries are still preoccupied with some petty issues against the backdrop of the pandemic, making them appear insensitive and inhumane.

Countries that stubbornly support the preservation of sanctions are being too frivolous to approach the real threat of the extinction of mankind.

Should there be more victims for the US and its allies to finally wake up and smell the coffee?

After all has been said, there should be unity worldwide in fighting this global pandemic and break trade barriers to allow for the smooth and timely flow of supplies and equipment.

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Sanctions will not work in the age of Covid-19 - The Zimbabwe Standard

In the face of the COVID-19 tsunami, our lives are changing in ways that were inconceivable just a few short weeks ago. Not since the 20089 economic collapse has the world collectively shared an experience of this kind: a single, rapidly mutating global crisis, structuring the rhythm of our daily lives within a complex calculus of risk and competing probabilities.

In response, numerous social movements have put forward demands that take seriously the potentially disastrous consequences of the virus, while also tackling the incapacity of capitalist governments to adequately address the crisis itself. These demands include questions of worker safety, the necessity of neighborhood-level organizing, income and social security, the rights of those on zero-hour contracts or in precarious employment, and the need to protect renters and those living in poverty.

In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis has sharply underscored the irrational nature of health care systems structured around corporate profit the almost universal cutbacks to public hospital staffing and infrastructure (including critical care beds and ventilators), the lack of public health provision and the prohibitive cost of access to medical services in many countries, and the ways in which the property rights of pharmaceutical companies serve to restrict widespread access to potential therapeutic treatments and the development of vaccines.

However, the global dimensions of COVID-19 have figured less prominently in much of the left discussion. Mike Davis has rightly observed that the danger to the global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments, and left debates have been similarly circumscribed, with attention largely focused on the severe health care crises unfolding in Europe and the United States. Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world.

In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders.

As with all so-called humanitarian crises, it is essential to remember that the social conditions found across most of the countries of the South are the direct product of how these states are inserted into the hierarchies of the world market. Historically, this included a long encounter with Western colonialism, which has continued, into contemporary times, with the subordination of poorer countries to the interests of the worlds wealthiest states and largest transnational corporations. Since the mid-1980s, repeated bouts of structural adjustment often accompanied by Western military action, debilitating sanctions regimes, or support for authoritarian rulers have systematically destroyed the social and economic capacities of poorer states, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with major crises such as COVID-19.

Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral epidemiology and a lack of biological resistance to a novel pathogen. The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes.

One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public health systems across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 1520 percent of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the United States, and lies behind the strategy of flattening the curve in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity.

Yet, while we rightly point to the lack of ICU beds, ventilators, and trained medical staff across many Western states, we must recognize that the situation in most of the rest of the world is immeasurably worse. Malawi, for example, has about 25 ICU beds for a population of 17 million people. There are less than 2.8 critical care beds per 100,000 people on average across South Asia, with Bangladesh possessing around 1,100 such beds for a population of over 157 million (0.7 critical care beds per 100,000 people).

In comparison, the shocking pictures coming out of Italy are occurring in an advanced health care system with an average 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 (and the ability to bring more online). The situation is so serious that many poorer countries do not even have information on ICU availability, with one 2015 academic paper estimating that more than 50 percent of [low-income] countries lack any published data on ICU capacity. Without such information it is difficult to imagine how these countries could possibly plan to meet the inevitable demand for critical care arising from COVID-19.

Of course, the question of ICU and hospital capacity is one part of a much larger set of issues including a widespread lack of basic resources (e.g., clean water, food, and electricity), adequate access to primary medical care, and the presence of other comorbidities (such as high rates of HIV and tuberculosis). Taken as a whole, all of these factors will undoubtedly mean a vastly higher prevalence of critically ill patients (and hence overall fatalities) across poorer countries as a result of COVID-19.

Debates around how best to respond to COVID-19 in Europe and the United States have illustrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between effective public health measures and conditions of labor, precarity, and poverty. Calls for people to self-isolate when sick or the enforcement of longer periods of mandatory lockdowns are economically impossible for the many people who cannot easily shift their work online, or those in the service sector who work in zero-hour contracts or other kinds of temporary employment. Recognizing the fundamental consequences of these work patterns for public health, many European governments have announced sweeping promises around compensation for those made unemployed or forced to stay at home during this crisis.

It remains to be seen how effective these schemes will be, and to what degree they will actually meet the needs of the very large numbers of people who will lose their jobs as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, we must recognize that such schemes will simply not exist for most of the worlds population. In countries where the majority of the labor force is engaged in informal work or depends upon unpredictable daily wages much of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia there is no feasible way that people can choose to stay home or self-isolate.

This must be viewed alongside the fact that there will almost certainly be very large increases in the working poor as a direct result of the crisis. Indeed, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated for its worst-case scenario (24.7 million job losses globally) that the number of people in low- and low-middle-income countries earning less than $US 3.20/day at PPP will grow by nearly 20 million people.

Once again, these figures are important not solely because of day-to-day economic survival. Without the mitigation effects offered through quarantine and isolation, the actual progress of the disease in the rest of the world will certainly be much more devastating than the harrowing scenes witnessed to date in China, Europe, and the United States.

Moreover, workers involved in informal and precarious labor often live in slums and overcrowded housing ideal conditions for the explosive spread of the virus. As an interviewee with the Washington Post recently noted in relation to Brazil: More than 1.4 million people nearly a quarter of Rios population live in one of the citys favelas. Many cant afford to miss a single day of work, let alone weeks. People will continue leaving their houses . . . the storms about to hit.

Similarly disastrous scenarios face the many millions of people currently displaced through war and conflict. The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest forced displacement since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally displaced people as a result of the ongoing wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in refugee camps or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary rights to health care typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of malnutrition and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself.

One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by extreme poverty, poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use).

Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere.

The imminent public health crisis facing poorer countries as a consequence of COVID-19 will be further deepened by an associated global economic downturn that is almost certain to exceed the scale of 2008. It is too early to predict the depth of this slump, but many leading financial institutions are expecting this to be the worst recession in living memory.

One of the reasons for this is the near-simultaneous shutdown of manufacturing, transport, and service sectors across the United States, Europe, and China an event without historical precedent since the Second World War. With one-fifth of the worlds population currently under some form of lockdown, supply chains and global trade have collapsed and stock market prices have plunged with most major exchanges losing between 30-40 percent of their value between February 17 and March 17.

Yet, as Eric Touissant has emphasized, the economic collapse we are now fast approaching was not caused by COVID-19 rather, the virus presented the spark or trigger of a deeper crisis that has been in the making for several years. Closely connected to this are the measures put in place by governments and central banks since 2008, most notably the policies of quantitative easing and repeated interest-rate cuts.

These policies aimed at propping up share prices through massively increasing the supply of ultra-cheap money to financial markets. They meant a very significant growth in all forms of debt corporate, government, and household. In the United States, for example, the nonfinancial corporate debt of large companies reached $10 trillion dollars in mid-2019 (around 48 percent of GDP), a significant rise from its previous peak in 2008 (when it stood at about 44 percent). Typically, this debt was not used for productive investment, but rather for financial activities (such as funding dividends, share buybacks, and mergers and acquisitions). We thus have the well-observed phenomena of booming stock markets on one hand, and stagnating investment and declining profit levels on the other.

Significant to the coming crisis, however, is the fact that the growth in corporate debt has been largely concentrated in below investment grade bonds (so-called junk bonds), or bonds that are rated BBB, just one grade above junk status. Indeed, according to BlackRock, the worlds largest asset manager, BBB debt made up a remarkable 50 percent of the global bond market in 2019, compared to only 17 percent in 2001. What this means is that the synchronized collapse of worldwide production, demand, and financial asset prices presents a massive problem for corporations needing to refinance their debt.

As economic activity grinds to a halt in key sectors, companies whose debt is due to be rolled over now face a credit market that has essentially shuttered no one is willing to lend in these conditions and many over-leveraged companies (especially those involved in sectors such as airlines, retail, energy, tourism, automobiles, and leisure) could be earning almost no revenue over the coming period. The prospect of a wave of high-profile corporate bankruptcies, defaults, and credit downgrades is therefore extremely likely. This is not just a US problem financial analysts have recently warned of a cash crunch and a wave of bankruptcies across the Asia Pacific region, where corporate debt levels have doubled to $32 trillion over the last decade.

All of this poses a very grave danger to the rest of the world, where a variety of transmission routes will metastasize the downturn across poorer countries and populations. As with 2008, these include a likely plunge in exports, a sharp pull back in foreign direct investment flows and tourism revenues, and a drop in worker remittances.

The latter factor is often forgotten in the discussion of the current crisis, but it is essential to remember that one of the key features of neoliberal globalization has been the integration of large parts of the worlds population into global capitalism through remittance flows from family members working overseas. In 1999, only eleven countries worldwide had remittances greater than 10 percent of GDP; by 2016, this figure had risen to thirty countries. In 2016, just over 30 percent of all 179 countries for which data was available recorded remittance levels greater than 5 per cent of GDP a proportion that has doubled since 2000.

Astonishingly, around one billion people one out of seven people globally are directly involved in remittance flows as either senders or recipients. The closing down of borders because of COVID-19 coupled with the halt to economic activities in key sectors where migrants tend to predominate means we could be facing a precipitous drop in worker remittances globally. This is an outcome that would have very severe ramifications for countries in the South.

Another key mechanism by which the rapidly evolving economic crisis may hit countries in the South is the large build-up of debt held by poorer countries in recent years. This includes both the least developed countries in the world as well as so-called emerging markets. In late 2019, the Institute for International Finance estimated that emerging market debt stood at $72 trillion, a figure that had doubled since 2010.

Much of this debt is denominated in US dollars, which exposes its holders to fluctuations in the value of the US currency. In recent weeks the US dollar has strengthened significantly as investors sought a safe-haven in response to the crisis; as a result, other national currencies have fallen, and the burden of interest and principal repayments on $US-denominated debt has been increasing.

Already in 2018, forty-six countries were spending more on public debt service than on their health care systems as a share of GDP. Today, we are entering an alarming situation where many poorer countries will face increasingly burdensome debt repayments while simultaneously attempting to manage an unprecedented public health crisis all in the context of a very deep global recession.

And let us not harbor any illusions that these intersecting crises might bring an end to structural adjustment or the emergence of some kind of global social democracy. As we have repeatedly seen over the last decade, capital frequently seizes moments of crisis as a moment of opportunity a chance to implement radical change that was previously blocked or appeared impossible.

Indeed, World Bank President David Malpass implied as much when he noted at the (virtual) G20 meeting of finance ministers a few days ago:

Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery ... For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.

It is essential to bring all these international dimensions to the center of the left debate around COVID-19, linking the fight against the virus to questions such as the abolition of Third World debt, an end to IMF/World Bank neoliberal structural adjustment packages, reparations for colonialism, a halt to the global arms trade, an end to sanctions regimes, and so forth.

All of these campaigns are, in effect, global public health issues they bear directly on the ability of poorer countries to mitigate the effects of the virus and the associated economic downturn. It is not enough to speak of solidarity and mutual self-help in our own neighborhoods, communities, and within our national borders without raising the much greater threat that this virus presents to the rest of the world.

Of course, high levels of poverty, precarious conditions of labor and housing, and a lack of adequate health infrastructure also threaten the ability of populations across Europe and the United States to mitigate this infection. But grassroots campaigns in the South are building coalitions that tackle these issues in interesting and internationalist ways. Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive political rhetoric of nativist and xenophobic movements a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with border controls, and a my country first national patriotism.

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This Is a Global Pandemic Let's Treat It That Way - Jacobin magazine

The global coronavirus pandemic has exposed a massive fissure in society, one between human life and economic value. Which do we value more? We certainly know where many politicians and titans of finance stand; hence the appeal from many of them to shorten the period of social distancing and send everyone back to work.

"Our country wasn't built to be shut down," said President Trump at a White House briefing, assuring the public that "America will, again, and soon, be open for business."

Senior chairman of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, a registered Democrat who recently announced that he would vote for Trump over Bernie Sanders, tweeted:

Extreme measures to flatten the virus "curve" is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.

Even more disconcertingly, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested on Fox News that it would be reasonable for the elderly to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the economy:

I'm not trying to think of it in any kind of morbid way, but I'm just saying that we've got a choice here, and we are going to be in a total collapse, recession, depression, collapse in our society. If this goes on another several months, there won't be any jobs to come back to for many people.

These kinds of callous remarks have been met with obvious outrage from workers who are being exposed to unprecedented risks on the job. But they've also provoked consternation from scientists and public health professionals, who are struggling to be heard over the clanging of the New York Stock Exchange bell. Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, told the New York Times: "You can't call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you're willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths."

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"Can't we try to put people's lives first for at least a month?" Caplan continued.

The vast majority of people are likely to agree with Caplan: putting people's lives first makes a lot of sense. Which raises the question: why is this even a matter of public debate? What kind of social system do we live in that forces us to ask whether we can put people's lives first, for a month?

That forces us to question what our society's underlying values really are. This is very relevant to the sudden shift in how we think about work. Suddenly, we're all questioning what kind of work is actually "essential" and what isn't that is, what kind of work we value as a society. Healthcare workers, those who give us access to necessities like food, toilet paper, and soap, all perform radically essential functions for our continued existence even if those who do this work are usually granted lower status than those who design smartphone games and engineer luxury vehicles.

Nevertheless, there is a vast gulf between such "human values," and what constitutes economic value in a capitalist society. To understand how we came to live in a capitalist society that is poised to sacrifice millions for the sake of profits, it is always a good idea to look to capitalism's unparalleled critic, Karl Marx. "Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish," he famously wrote in an 1868 letter.

But Marx wasn't just making the basic point that we need labor in order for a country to function. Neoliberal ideology has made this seem like a radical claim today, but it was actually taken for granted by the dominant economic thinkers of the period.

Marx was trying to argue something much more specific about how labor happens, as he started to lay out in the next sentence: "And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society's aggregate labour."

In other words, different needs are met through different types and different durations of labor, which are all portions of the labor everyone has to do in society as a whole. Our society needs a certain amount of toilet paper, so a corresponding amount of labor time has to be devoted to manufacturing it. We need another specific amount of canned beans, which calls for another amount of labor time, so everyone's combined labor time has to be divided up accordingly. From the vantage point of meeting a society's overall needs, each individual labor process is best understood as a portion of this aggregate labor.

Finally, with an extremely dense sentence bear with me, we'll try to make sense of it Marx came to his central and original point: "the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products."

What does this all mean? Marx had presented the whole argument systematically in the first volume of "Capital," which he published the year before this letter. As we've just established, the reproduction of human life the meeting of people's subsistence needs requires people to perform labor. That labor has to be organized and allocated socially somehow; otherwise, people won't be able to coordinate to do all the different kinds of tasks that are required to meet the diverse needs of the whole society. The overall labor that everyone in society performs has to be distributed in proportions that correspond to the society's needs.

But in capitalist societies and here you have the weird and complicated reality Marx was trying to explain this doesn't happen as the result of a consciously determined plan (which might seem like an awfully good idea at the moment). It also doesn't happen on the basis of tradition, as it may have in pre-capitalist societies; e.g., my father was a blacksmith, so I too become a blacksmith. In capitalist societies, the allocation of labor is determined through the exchange of the products of labor on the market.

While the ideologues of capitalism would like us to see this as a natural condition, Marx showed that it's definitely not. It's specific to capitalist societies, because under capitalism people don't have direct access to the things they need to perform this labor: land, machinery, materials. These "means of production," as Marx called them, are owned by a small minority as private property. For Marx, the part of society that we might today call the "one percent" isn't defined in terms of its relative wealth or status, but in terms of its ownership of property..

In short, those of us who don't own the means of production which corresponds, more or less, to the "99 percent" are dependent on working for wages to get what we need to survive.

This is why Marx rejected the socialist slogan, which at first glance it might seem like he would agree with, that "labor is the source of all wealth and culture." Nature, he pointed out, is also a source of wealth, and to produce anything through labor, we need to have access to it in some way. But in capitalist societies, only some people are the "owners" of nature! The rest of us, Marx wrote in "Critique of the Gotha Program," "can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

Now, the pandemic is making a lot of people question this arrangement. How, exactly does society decide who does what job, and who makes what? Why are there so few ventilators, oxygen machines, masks and coronavirus testing kits being produced quickly in the United States?

The answer is that labor isn't allocated based on what is useful, but by competition on the market for profit. A huge number of ventilators and coronavirus testing kits would be very useful indeed right now, but the free market is having tremendous trouble allocating our labor to produce that kind of thing efficiently. Quite simply, labor isn't allocated based on human need; it is based on the market exchange of its products. And the goal of this exchange is the capitalist accumulation of economic value.

The fact that so much of the labor people normally do from day to day can now be deemed "non-essential" gives us a kind of illustration of how capitalists accumulate economic value. Only a small portion of the total labor done by society, as we're seeing now, is actually required for human survival. But we can't access the products of that labor without money. In other words, we're dependent on the market for survival. Employers need to pay us enough money so that we can access those products on the market and show up to work the next day. But they don't need to pay us any more than that. (That is, unless we demand that they do.) So when the capitalist economy is functioning normally, all of this extra, "surplus" labor we do gets churned through the process of commodity exchange and comes back to the capitalist as profit. This is Marx's theory of exploitation.

As many feminists have pointed out since Marx, this also applies to the kinds of work that might seem to be outside the capitalist job market. Housework and care work have traditionally been assigned to women, and treated as a gift from nature. But this has obscured the fact that these kinds of work also produce a commodity: the ability to work, or "labor-power," which is exactly what we sell to our bosses every time we clock in.

As schools and other public services close due to the pandemic, this "reproductive" labor is expanding rapidly: people will have to spend more and more of their time looking after children and the elderly, cleaning and disinfecting every surface, and stockpiling groceries. If this doesn't happen, there won't be a labor force after the crisis. But capitalists don't expect to have to pay for this extra labor. Sometimes they're willing to let the state pay, in the form of welfare and public services; but they're also eager to find opportunities to privatize these services and make us pay for them ourselves. Fast food, for example, allows people racing between two or three low-paying jobs to substitute a portion of their wages for the time, which they have precious little of, that it would take to cook for their families. As Angela Davis argued, what this actually demonstrates is that we have the technological capacity to make the private burden of housework obsolete, if tasks like meal preparation, cleaning, and child care could be socialized and subsidized. Instead, they fall upon a super-exploited domestic workforce consisting largely of women of color.

You don't have to get through the three volumes of "Capital" to see that this situation is incredibly bizarre. It means that the performance of work which is required for our survival is only done so that those at the top, capitalists, can accumulate economic value.

This is a tricky definition, because "value" doesn't mean actual wealth as in more stuff, which could be useful in various ways. It's the pursuit of more wealth in the form of money which reaches absurd heights in the world of financiers, whose volatile fortunes end up determining our destinies.

The fact that this scenario is bizarre doesn't change the fact that it is real. In capitalist society, people need to be buying and selling commodities for the allocation of labor to take place. In this irrational order, it doesn't really matter whether you're doing anything useful for the world. If you're producing things that others buy, and generate profit for your employer in the process, you're performing labor that's necessary to create economic value. The "non-essential" labor is actually quite essential for the overall system.

In this context, the profit motive actually does determine whether we live or die. Because of market competition, the accumulation of capital requires constant growth and expansion. Capitalists are all in competition with each other, and any capitalist who fails to aggressively raise profits and increase productivity will be pushed out of the market by other capitalists. From the perspective of human values, the statement "life should take priority over profit" is sensible. From the perspective of economic value, life can only be sustained insofar as it facilitates the relentless drive for profits.

But this isn't just a lie that capitalists tell. It's actually the cruel and twisted reality of the system we live in: our needs are met only insofar as there's a favorable climate for the pursuit of profit.

This is what is so peculiar about this pandemic, how it is exposing the irrationality of this system. Even before the current pandemic, capitalism was constantly suffering crises because competitive accumulation leads to situations in which some industries produce more commodities than they can sell; or capitalists sink investments in machinery that quickly becomes obsolete; or people don't have enough money to buy the commodities they need; or financial growth leads to bubbles that inevitably pop; or the underlying infrastructural requirements for production like roads are not profitable to build. Or, in this case, a virus puts the very existence of human life into question.

This is why governments have to step in, to regulate industry and finance, provide effective demand through spending, build infrastructure, and so on. But they operate in a contradictory situation, because if their activity threatens capitalist profitability, the whole system that actually determines the way people meet their needs could collapse, and they could lose the tax revenue that allows them to fund their programs.

This is the contradiction we're seeing around the novel coronavirus. Social distancing is an absolute requirement for human survival. The labor we do to keep society working is impossible to perform if we're sick, not to mention dead. But at the same time, if the economic crisis continues to become more severe and accumulation grinds to a halt, so will the allocation of social labor. People will indeed lose their jobs. There will be a long-term depression.

The only way to resolve this contradiction within our current situation is for governments to mercilessly take measures that threaten the private property of capitalists and the "free market." The more they take control of the private property of necessary industries through nationalization, provide public services and cash payments, and displace market relations by social planning, the more likely it is that we will be able to mitigate the effects of the pandemic while still allowing people to meet their survival needs. In the absence of such changes, human values are powerless against economic value.

In other countries, these measures are being implemented with some success. But unfortunately, capitalist states especially ours are often reluctant to take these measures. Even where these changes are being made on a broader scale think of the nationalization of hospitals in Spain and Ireland and Denmark's measures against mass layoffs governments are thinking about restoring conditions for accumulation in the future, and imposing austerity to compensate for their temporary concessions. (Indeed, US states are already making cuts.)

In some cases, there are factions of the ruling class which are willing to threaten the short-term interests of capitalists in order to restore equilibrium: Bill Gates, for example, who advocates for an "extreme shutdown." Other factions of the ruling class, like those in power in Texas and DC, are willing to sacrifice our lives to preserve capitalist social relations. It is entirely possible that the faction of the ruling class which is willing to gamble on mass deaths in order to get the economy running again will succeed in sending people back to work.

The only way we know to ensure that the outcome is one which protects the vast majority of the population which works for a living is to engage in class struggle. This isn't the same as defending human values, which are meaningless in a society governed by economic value. Despite our recognition of what kind of work is really necessary for human life, capitalism is indifferent to this realization; neither capitalists nor the capitalist state will be moved by it. We have to actually disrupt the efforts of the ruling class to control our lives and put us at risk. Appealing to the values of politicians and capitalists won't get us anywhere.

Social distancing appeared, at first, to be a kind of passive, potential "general strike": a situation in which many people across industries stopped working and brought the economy to a halt. Since capitalism depends on the exploitation of labor for accumulation, this kind of mass refusal to work poses a fundamental threat to the system.

General strikes, as an active tactic of class struggle, have happened before throughout U.S. history. W.E.B. Du Bois famously described, during the Civil War, a "general strike" of enslaved peoplewho, in one of the most significant events of self-emancipation in modern history, left the plantations and refused to work, forcing the escalation of the war towards the abolition of slavery.

In Seattle where the US coronavirus outbreak began and where Amazon is now poised to reap record profits from the pandemic, owing to the continued labor of its workers in dangerous conditions a general strike shut down the city in 1919. This was the year after the Spanish flu epidemic, which had already led to a major shutdown of the city. Starting in the shipbuilding industry and spreading across trades, people all over Seattle refused to work, demanding higher wages. But they also engaged in careful planning to ensure that everyone's survival needs would be met through mutual aid hospitals would remain open, milk would be delivered, and garbage would be collected. They were not only demanding better working conditions, but were taking back control of their lives from capital.

The Seattle general strike provoked a strong anti-communist reaction, stirring up fears that had been raised by the Russian Revolution two years earlier, and the city government was prepared to use police and military repression to bring it to an end. Ultimately, the strikers found themselves in a stalemate. They had to either escalate their struggle to challenge the dominant political power, or retreat. Union bureaucracies began to withdraw their support. Slowly, people returned to work and the general strike came to an end.

Recently, we appeared to be on the verge of being forced into a general strike by the pandemic, but it quickly became clear that such a measure is a serious threat to the capitalist system. The ruling class now wants to put a stop to the general strike. To preserve social distancing means extending and prolonging the general strike, as Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods workers are announcing this week. Workers at General Electric are reviving the practice of combining the strike with the principle of mutual aid. These workers normally produce jet engines, but management, citing the effect of the pandemic on the aviation industry, recently announced mass layoffs. In response workers at the GE plant in Lynn, Massachusetts walked off the job and, standing six feet apart, demanded that the plant be repurposed for the production of ventilators. In the context of the irrationality and harmfulness of capitalist production, it's the workers who are stepping up to impose rational and life-saving measures.

However, as the 1919 Seattle general strike illustrates, there are strategic problems that any strike will encounter. Disruptions like strikes happen throughout the history of capitalism, and often spur the system to develop and adapt in new ways. Struggles over the length of the working day, for example, forced capitalists to develop technologies that made labor more productive, and generated a leap in development.

It's impossible to say what kind of "leap" may take place today. It may be quite ugly, and will likely involve the transfer of the greatest costs of the crisis onto the most vulnerable of our population. So far, this is exactly the plan. As Naomi Klein recently said, "Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis [are] their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world."

For the refusal of work to actually change the underlying structure of society, there has to be a passage to the political level of organization. There has to be some kind of independent organization which challenges the existing structures of political power and channels the refusal of work into the demand for an entirely different system.

This kind of organization used to be the political party, but it isn't clear what it will look like now. We don't have the mass political parties that existed before the crisis situations of the 20th century revolutions, and the political parties that are part of our existing governments are totally bureaucratic and top-down, and resistant to change. The challenges by figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders have been systematically shut down by elites.

So we need to figure out how to build new organizations that can facilitate and advance the necessary class struggle. Indeed, in this pandemic moment, millions are suddenly realizing how irrational our economic system is. It's inevitable in this moment that we will all be thinking about what an ethical system of values would look like, and how that would determine our response to the pandemic in a more rational world. But for that kind of thinking to be anything more than speculation, we have to first recognize that this can never be realized within the capitalist system, and we have to start to think politically about what it would take to change the system.

The rest is here:

A general strike could happen in the US. But what comes after could change everything - Salon

Approximately 200 Harvard Law School students have signed a letter asking administrators to publicly advocate on their behalf for being granted law licenses without taking the bar exam.

The reason for the emergency diploma privilege request, according to The Crimson,is the ongoing coronavirus situation.

Letter co-author Donna Saadati-Soto said it would be unfair to ask students to take the bar exam since the pandemic limits the ability of some students to prepare.

The students are asking Law School officials to take four specific actions:

[A] public statement supporting the emergency diploma privilege across the United States; sharing the students letter with other law schools; sending a statement supporting the privilege to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; and hosting a virtual town hall for students to discuss their needs with the administration.

Last week, Massachusetts announced its bar exam would be postponed from late July to an undetermined date in the fall. Saadati-Soto and her peers claim this puts their future employment and financial security at risk.

In addition, Ms. Saadati-Soto was certain to not omit the intersectionality factor:

[She] said students who can secure employment before the postponed exam might have to decide whether to work full-time or study for the exam full-time a decision she thinks would eliminate traditionally marginalized students from the legal profession.

Folks that dont have the financial security to be able to just quit their job and study for the bar at any moment they might choose to forego the state bar, she said. That means low-income students, immigrant students, folks of color are the ones that are going to be more likely to have to forgo taking or studying a later exam because theyre going to be needing to work to provide for themselves and their family.

She also said that the legal profession currently faces a mental health crisis, and having to take the bar exam could exacerbate the issue by adding unnecessary financial and academic stress in the midst of a global pandemic.

The letter also asserts more attorneys will be needed post-COVID-19 to advocate for struggling small businesses, recently unemployed individuals, and families facing eviction. Not allowing emergency diploma privilege will deprive Americans of crucial legal assistance in the months ahead.

Harvard Law spokesperson Jeff Neal said the Law School appreciates the letter and would work with the state to explore ways to address it.

Read the article.

MORE: Harvard Law hosts discussion on abolition of police forces

MORE: Its official: Harvard Law School will change its racist seal

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Harvard Law students want licenses without having to take bar exam - The College Fix

The European Commission is calling on member states to work together on the world stage to put an end to capital punishment and torture.

The details are included in the executives communication on the EU Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy for 2020-2024, for which the Commission is seeking the backing of EU governments.

The Commission would like to work towards the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, and in countries where the death penalty still exists, insist on the respect of minimum standards and work towards a moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolition.

In terms of global instances of torture, the EU should strive to eradicate torture globally through prevention, prohibition, accountability and redress for victims, the document states.

Chinas capital punishment record

Currently, more than 60% of the global population reside in countries where capital punishment is legal, including China, the US, and India.

Despite access to official figures being tightly guarded by the Chinese authorities, Beijing is believed to administer more executions than any other nation on earth, according to Amnesty International.

During the EU-China summit last year, the bloc raised concerns with their Chinese counterparts about the detainment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, and an EU delegation reiterated these concerns during the 42nd United Nations Human Rights Council last September.

However, should member states decide to adopt the Commissions approach on its Human Rights Action Plan, any political pressure imposed directly on China is unlikely to come anytime soon, after the EU-China summit, due to take place at the end of March in Beijing, was postponed. The meeting would have been the first coming together of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and European Commission and European Council presidents, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, since they took up their new posts.

A second EU-China summit is still slated to take place in Leipzig in September, under the Presidency of the German Council, with Chinas President Xi Jinping meeting all 27 EU leaders.

Human Rights Action Plan

Elsewhere in the EUs action plan, the role of technology and its proximity to human rights abuses was highlighted, with the Commission stating that certain applications can support abusive, unlawful restrictions on movement and speech.

Social media platforms are used to channel targeted disinformation and hate speech that often violate privacy and undermine democracy and human rights, the communication continued.

In this context, recently the European Court of Auditors launched a probe into the blocs attempts to stifle fake news that can cause public harm.

The investigation will focus on the robustness of the 2018 Action plan on disinformation, in addition to whether the EUs code of practice against disinformation has brought tangible improvements to the state of fake news across the bloc.

The code is a self-regulatory voluntary framework signed by platforms including Facebook, Google and Twitter, which obliges them to take measures to control the surge of disinformation online.

Having been put in place ahead of the 2019 European elections, the code received criticism from certain EU Commissioners, with the former Security Commissioner Julian King describingthe initial compliance reports produced by the platforms as patchy, opaque and self-selecting.

In the digital arena, the human rights action plan also brings into question the use of certain Artificial Intelligence applications, saying that they can carry a risk of increased monitoring, control and repression.

In some countries, mass surveillance of citizens is a reality. Data and algorithms can be used to discriminate, knowingly or unknowingly, against individuals and groups, reinforcing societal prejudices.

However, concerns have also been raised about the EUs funding of questionable AI applications on the bloc, as part of the EUs long-term research and development funding mechanism, Horizon 2020.

These include projects such as the iBorderCTRL technology which detects lying through the reading of micro-expressions, and the SEWA initiative a technology will the capacity to read nuances in human facial, vocal and verbal behaviour.

(Edited by Benjamin Fox)

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Commission charts end to execution and torture in human rights plans - EURACTIV

There has been quite a bit of talk in the past couple of days about when we might get back to normal. The president is hoping that might happen as soon as Easter while others are saying it could be 3-4 months. But some people arent interested in going back to normal. On the contrary, they see the crisis as an inflection point that presents and opportunity for some significant changes to the country.

On the left there are a lot of people who see the crisis as an opportunity to push forward some of the socialist agenda theyve had all along. In some cases, they dont mean European-style social democracy, they want to see an end to capitalism. Heres an example published by NBC yesterday. The author of this is named Paris Marx:

Once COVID-19 abates and people can start leaving their homes, many industries may indeed have collapsed or will be surviving on government support the airline industry being the first. If China and Italy are any indication,carbon emissions and air pollution will have declined. We can choose whether we ramp things back up in a way that continues to threaten our futures and our health by fueling the climate crisis, or we can make the necessary investments and change the regulatory framework to move away from fossil fuels while ensuring that our workers have a future.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., proposed their Green New Deal in February 2019, the most likely implementation of which wouldcost $16.3 trillionover 10 years, it was written off as a green dream by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., andridiculed by Republicanswho charged it was too expensive and un-American. Yet its policies would provide a job guarantee for being laid off, support for retraining for many workers, and a mass investment program to not only boost the economy, but move it away from fossil fuels.

Is the author suggesting we should not have an aviation industry? I seem to remember that was a big issue when AOC initially released the Green New Deal and a summary that suggested a focus on high speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary. Even Sen. Mazie Hirono mocked the idea of replacing air travel with trains saying, That would be pretty hard for Hawaii.

AOCs accidentally leaked agenda, which she backtracked away from at the time, sounds moderate compared to what this author is suggesting. At least AOC wanted to phase out air travel by replacing it with something else. Paris Marx is suggesting that if the industry collapses we just let it burn, even if theres no alternative.

As for the cost of the Green New Deal, that has been a matter of some debate. Initial estimates ranged between $52 and $94 trillion over 10 years. Sanders would later release his own GND plan (under the same name) and claim it would cost $16.3 trillion. However, its important to note that his GND plan was just one of several plans. If you include the cost of his Medicare for All plan, youre right back around $50 trillion over ten years. Thats far beyond even the cost of the current stimulus bill duplicated every year for the next ten years.

Sanders plan also didnt envision a global pandemic which would potentially create a worldwide recession (or worse). Its one thing to promise a government job to out of work people when the economy is running along wish sub-4 percent unemployment. Its quite another to make the math work when unemployment hits 15 percent or higher. The cost of the latter program would be far higher and the ability to cover those costs after taking into account all of the revenue the government will lose because people are out of work will be far less.

Anyway, this isnt even the most extreme proposal being floated during the crisis. Yesterday a site called Open Society published a piece suggesting now is a good time to think about doing away with capitalism and the nuclear family:

Nuclear households, it seems, are where we are all intuitively expected to retreat in order to prevent widespread ill-health. Staying home is what is somehow self-evidently supposed to keep us well. But there are several problems with this, as anyone inclined to think about it critically (even for a moment) might figure out problems one might summarize as the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticisation of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property

In short, the pandemic is no time to forget about family abolition. In the words of feminist theorist and mother Madeline Lane-McKinley; Households are capitalisms pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more. Far from a time to acquiesce to family values ideology, then, the pandemic is an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower survivors of and refugees from the nuclear household.

And thirdly, even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to ones person no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly,sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are individuals. It minimizes costs for capital while maximizing human beings life-making labor (across billions of tiny boxes, each kitted out absurdly with its own kitchen, micro-crche and laundry). It blackmails us into mistaking the only sources of love and care wehavefor the extent ofwhat is possible.

That last link is to an article at a site called Pinko. Heres a sample:

In place of the coercive system of atomized family units, the abolition of the family would generalize what we now call care. Care of mutual love and support; care of the labor of raising children and caring for the ill; care of erotic connection and pleasure; care of aiding each other in fulfilling the vast possibilities of our humanity, expressed in countless ways, including forms of self-expression we now call gender. Care in our capitalist society is a commodified, subjugating, and alienated act, but in it we can see the kernel of a non-alienating interdependence.

Communists like to promise the revolution that sounds like it will be an orgy/art exploration, but the reality is always something closer to Venezuela, i.e. a man-made disaster where millions of nuclear families flee their homes to protect their children.

Even the fringiest of communist ideologues now see a path to what they want in things Sanders and AOC have already introduced in Congress. Were not quite there for the family abolishment people. The full language to propose that as a serious idea hasnt been imported into the mainstream yet, but you can bet they are working on it. AOC has already suggested it makes sense that people no longer want to have children. Little by little theyll make this part of the conversation. The coronavirus is just another crisis the far left doesnt want to go to waste.

Go here to see the original:

For the far left, the coronavirus crisis is the perfect time to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family - Hot Air

ARIES (March 21-April 19)Your oracle comes from Aries poet Octavio Paz: The path the ancestors cleared is overgrown, unused. The other path, smooth and broad, is crowded with travelers. It goes nowhere. Theres a third path: mine. Before me, no one. Behind me, no one. Alone, I find my way. APRIL FOOL! Although the passage by Octavio Paz is mostly accurate for your destiny during the rest of 2020, its off-kilter in one way: Its too ponderously serious and melodramatic. You should find a way to carry out its advice with meditative grace and effervescent calm.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)A century ago, fiery writer Maxim Gorky and hard-ass Taurus politician Vladimir Lenin were listening to a Beethoven sonata together. I cant listen to music too often, Lenin told his companion. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things. This is crucial advice for you to heed in the coming weeks, Taurus. You need to be as smart and tough as possible, so dont you dare listen to music. APRIL FOOL! Lenin was half-mistaken, and I half-lied. The fact is, music makes you smarter and nicer, and those will be key assets for you to cultivate in the coming weeks. So yes, do listen to a lot of music.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)By the time he was 55 years old, Gemini author Thomas Hardy had written 18 novels and many poems. His stuff was good enough to win him two separate nominations for a Nobel Prize in Literature. But during the last 32+ years of his life, he never wrote another novel. According to one theory, it was because he was discouraged by the negative reviews he got for his last novel. I suspect you may be at a similar juncture in your life, Gemini. Maybe its time to give up on a beloved activity that hasnt garnered the level of success youd hoped for. APRIL FOOL! The truth is, it is most definitely NOT time to lose hope and faith. Dont be like Hardy. Rededicate yourself to your passionate quests.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)Cancerian theologian John Wesley (17031791) was a Christian who embodied the liberal values that Christ actually taught. He advocated for the abolition of slavery, prison reform, the ordination of women priests, and a vegetarian diet. He gave away a lot of his money and administered many charities. To accomplish his lifes work, he traveled 250,000 miles on horseback and preached 40,000 sermons. Lets make him your role model for the coming weeks. Be inspired by his life as you vividly express your care and compassion. APRIL FOOL! I lied a little bit. Although most of what I just recommended is a good idea, the part about traveling long distances, either on horseback or by other means, is not.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)The neurotic but talented French novelist Marcel Proust observed, Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces. With that in mind, and in accordance with current astrological omens, I urge you to cultivate your own neurotic qualities in their extreme forms of expression during the coming weeks. Youre due for some major creative breakthroughs. APRIL FOOL! I was kidding. The fact is, you can generate creative breakthroughs in the coming weeks by being poised and composednot extra neurotic.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)Virgo author Leon Edel wrote a five-volume biography of renowned author Henry James. In the course of his research, he read 15,000 letters that were written by James. He came to have a profound familiarity with the great man. In accordance with current astrological omens, I recommend that you choose a worthy character about whom you will become equally knowledgeable. APRIL FOOL! I half-lied. Its true that now is an excellent time to deepen your understanding of people you care about. But dont get as obsessed as Edel!

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)About 2,000 years ago, a Roman woman named Sulpicia wrote six short love poemsa total of 40 linesthat are still being analyzed and discussed by literary scholars today. I bring her to your attention because I think that in the next four weeks you, too, could generate a small burst of beauty that will still be appreciated 2,000 years from now. APRIL FOOL! I lied about the small part. The burst of beauty you create in the immediate future could actually be quite large, as well as enduring.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)French poet Louis Aragon (18971982) was an influential novelist and a pioneer of surrealistic poetry. Much of his writing had a lyrical quality, and many of his poems were set to music. He also had a belligerent streak. Before the publication of one of his books, he announced that he would thrash any writer who dared to review it in print. Success! There were no critical reviews at all. I recommend his approach to you in the coming weeks. Make it impossible for anyone to criticize you. APRIL FOOL! I lied. I would never suggest that you use violence to accomplish your aims. And besides that, the coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to solicit feedback of all varieties, even the critical kind.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)I hesitate to be so blunt, but its my duty to report the facts. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you should have as many orgasms as possible in the next 15 days. You need to tap into the transformative psychological power thats available through monumental eruptions of pleasure and releases of tension. (P.S. Spiritual orgasms will be just as effective as physical orgasms.) APRIL FOOL! What I just said is true, but I left out an important component of your assignment: Be loving and responsible as you pursue your joyous climaxes, never manipulative or exploitative or insensitive.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes was renowned for his skill at delivering powerful, charismatic speeches. While he was still learning his craft, he resorted to extreme measures to improve. For example, there was a time when he shaved just half of his head. It made him ashamed to go out in public, forcing him to spend all his time indoors practicing his speeches. Would you consider a similar strategy right now? APRIL FOOL! I was just messing with you. Its true that the coming weeks will be a good time to minimize your socializing and devote yourself to hard work in behalf of a beloved dream. But shaving half your head isnt the best way to accomplish that.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to tell as many lies as possible if doing so helps you get what you want. I hereby authorize you to engage in massive deceptions, misrepresentations, and manipulative messages as you seek to impose your will on every flow of events. APRIL FOOL! I lied. In fact, everything I just said was the exact opposite of your actual horoscope, which is as follows: You have a sacred duty to tell more of the truth than you have ever been able to tell before. As you dig deeper to discover more and more of whats essential for you to understand and express, dedicate your efforts to the goal of gliding along with the most beautiful and interesting flow you can find.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20)Fifteen minutes before the Big Bang occurred, where was the matter that now constitutes your body and my body? And if, as seems to be true, the Big Bang was the beginning of time, what time was it fifteen minutes earlier? Questions like these are crucial for you to ponder in the next two weeks. APRIL FOOL! I lied. The questions I articulated should in fact be very low priority for you. In the immediate future, youll be wise to be as concrete and specific and pragmatic as you can possibly be. Focus on up-close personal questions that you can actually solve, not abstract, unsolvable riddles.

Read more from the original source:

Week of March 25 | Free Will Astrology - Style Weekly

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Your oracle comes from Aries poet Octavio Paz: "The path the ancestors cleared is overgrown, unused. The other path, smooth and broad, is crowded with travelers. It goes nowhere. There's a third path: mine. Before me, no one. Behind me, no one. Alone, I find my way." APRIL FOOL! Although the passage by Octavio Paz is mostly accurate for your destiny during the rest of 2020, it's off-kilter in one way: It's too ponderously serious and melodramatic. You should find a way to carry out its advice with meditative grace and effervescent calm.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A century ago, fiery writer Maxim Gorky and hard-ass Taurus politician Vladimir Lenin were listening to a Beethoven sonata together. "I can't listen to music too often," Lenin told his companion. "It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things." This is crucial advice for you to heed in the coming weeks, Taurus. You need to be as smart and tough as possible, so don't you dare listen to music. APRIL FOOL! Lenin was half-mistaken, and I half-lied. The fact is, music makes you smarter and nicer, and those will be key assets for you to cultivate in the coming weeks. So yes, do listen to a lot of music.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): By the time he was 55 years old, Gemini author Thomas Hardy had written 18 novels and many poems. His stuff was good enough to win him two separate nominations for a Nobel Prize in Literature. But during the last 32+ years of his life, he never wrote another novel. According to one theory, it was because he was discouraged by the negative reviews he got for his last novel. I suspect you may be at a similar juncture in your life, Gemini. Maybe it's time to give up on a beloved activity that hasn't garnered the level of success you'd hoped for. APRIL FOOL! The truth is, it is most definitely NOT time to lose hope and faith. Don't be like Hardy. Rededicate yourself to your passionate quests.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian theologian John Wesley (17031791) was a Christian who embodied the liberal values that Christ actually taught. He advocated for the abolition of slavery, prison reform, the ordination of women priests, and a vegetarian diet. He gave away a lot of his money and administered many charities. To accomplish his life's work, he traveled 250,000 miles on horseback and preached 40,000 sermons. Let's make him your role model for the coming weeks. Be inspired by his life as you vividly express your care and compassion. APRIL FOOL! I lied a little bit. Although most of what I just recommended is a good idea, the part about traveling long distances, either on horseback or by other means, is not.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The neurotic but talented French novelist Marcel Proust observed, "Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces." With that in mind, and in accordance with current astrological omens, I urge you to cultivate your own neurotic qualities in their extreme forms of expression during the coming weeks. You're due for some major creative breakthroughs. APRIL FOOL! I was kidding. The fact is, you can generate creative breakthroughs in the coming weeks by being poised and composednot extra neurotic.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo author Leon Edel wrote a five-volume biography of renowned author Henry James. In the course of his research, he read 15,000 letters that were written by James. He came to have a profound familiarity with the great man. In accordance with current astrological omens, I recommend that you choose a worthy character about whom you will become equally knowledgeable. APRIL FOOL! I half-lied. It's true that now is an excellent time to deepen your understanding of people you care about. But don't get as obsessed as Edel!

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): About 2,000 years ago, a Roman woman named Sulpicia wrote six short love poemsa total of 40 linesthat are still being analyzed and discussed by literary scholars today. I bring her to your attention because I think that in the next four weeks you, too, could generate a small burst of beauty that will still be appreciated 2,000 years from now. APRIL FOOL! I lied about the "small" part. The burst of beauty you create in the immediate future could actually be quite large, as well as enduring.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): French poet Louis Aragon (18971982) was an influential novelist and a pioneer of surrealistic poetry. Much of his writing had a lyrical quality, and many of his poems were set to music. He also had a belligerent streak. Before the publication of one of his books, he announced that he would thrash any writer who dared to review it in print. Success! There were no critical reviews at all. I recommend his approach to you in the coming weeks. Make it impossible for anyone to criticize you. APRIL FOOL! I lied. I would never suggest that you use violence to accomplish your aims. And besides that, the coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to solicit feedback of all varieties, even the critical kind.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I hesitate to be so blunt, but it's my duty to report the facts. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you should have as many orgasms as possible in the next 15 days. You need to tap into the transformative psychological power that's available through monumental eruptions of pleasure and releases of tension. (P.S. Spiritual orgasms will be just as effective as physical orgasms.) APRIL FOOL! What I just said is true, but I left out an important component of your assignment: Be loving and responsible as you pursue your joyous climaxes, never manipulative or exploitative or insensitive.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes was renowned for his skill at delivering powerful, charismatic speeches. While he was still learning his craft, he resorted to extreme measures to improve. For example, there was a time when he shaved just half of his head. It made him ashamed to go out in public, forcing him to spend all his time indoors practicing his speeches. Would you consider a similar strategy right now? APRIL FOOL! I was just messing with you. It's true that the coming weeks will be a good time to minimize your socializing and devote yourself to hard work in behalf of a beloved dream. But shaving half your head isn't the best way to accomplish that.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to tell as many lies as possible if doing so helps you get what you want. I hereby authorize you to engage in massive deceptions, misrepresentations, and manipulative messages as you seek to impose your will on every flow of events. APRIL FOOL! I lied. In fact, everything I just said was the exact opposite of your actual horoscope, which is as follows: You have a sacred duty to tell more of the truth than you have ever been able to tell before. As you dig deeper to discover more and more of what's essential for you to understand and express, dedicate your efforts to the goal of gliding along with the most beautiful and interesting flow you can find.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Fifteen minutes before the Big Bang occurred, where was the matter that now constitutes your body and my body? And if, as seems to be true, the Big Bang was the beginning of time, what time was it fifteen minutes earlier? Questions like these are crucial for you to ponder in the next two weeks. APRIL FOOL! I lied. The questions I articulated should in fact be very low priority for you. In the immediate future, you'll be wise to be as concrete and specific and pragmatic as you can possibly be. Focus on up-close personal questions that you can actually solve, not abstract, unsolvable riddles.

Homework: Tell jokes to humorists. Be extra kind to kind people. Sing songs to the birds. Change the way you change. FreeWillAstrology.com

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Free Will AstrologyWeek Of March 26 | Advice & Fun | Bend - The Source Weekly

Recent columns in the Turkish press praise jihad and martyrdom and yearn for a caliphate. Burhan Bozgeyik wrote on March 20, 2020: "Jihad is a valid ruling until the Day of Judgement. Jihad will not be abandoned... If the Muslims are unified, [the unbelievers] will all be like dogs at our door." Mustafa Kasadar wrote on February 10: "This ummah has gotten its dignity and honor from jihad and martyrdom." Muzaffer Dereli wrote on March 6: "If we get scared when war and jihad are mentioned, this shows the weakness of our faith."

Mustafa elik wrote on March 11: Democracy, which was imposed as an ideology after the abolition of the caliphate, is a dress of the Greek philosophers that was put on the Muslims... Governing without that which Allah has sent down is a cruelty composed of darkness... If Islam's state governs the world on its own, Allah will lift off of us the despicableness that is thought to be irremovable!" The government-issued sermon for February 28 said: "Our troops obey the call of our prophet to 'make jihad with your hands, your words, and your property.'"

From left to right: Burhan Bozgeyik, Mustafa Kasadar, Muzaffer Dereli, and Mustafa elik.

Following are translated excerpts from the columns and sermon.

"Jihad Is A Valid Ruling Until The Day Of Judgement Jihad Will Not Be Abandoned... If The Muslims Are Unified, [The Unbelievers] Will All Be Like Dogs At Our Door "

In a March 20, 2020 column, Burhan Bozgeyik wrote: "There cannot be Islam without a state. There must be a state, an administrator of all Muslims. This is the truth. Allah's rulings will be dominant in all areas (the sayings and actions of Muhammad are included in these rulings). All Muslims will be brothers, will be united. A Muslim will never draw a weapon on another Muslim. Jihad is a valid ruling until the Day of Judgement. Jihad will not be abandoned. If jihad is abandoned, despicableness will come on its own. The unbelievers will be expelled from every handsbreadth of Muslim land... Let's say it outright: To hell with all of the cruel unbelievers who, in the language of the Quran, are all filth. If the Muslims are unified, they will all be like dogs at our door."[1]

"Our Troops Obey The Call Of Our Prophet To 'Make Jihad With Your Hands, Your Words, And Your Property'"

The February 28 Friday sermon issued by Turkey's Ministry of Religious Affairs read in part: "Our troops are always beside the oppressed against the tyrant. They are at the front for the good of the world, and they take cover in the name of humanity. They are on expedition to run to help those whose rights are taken from them. Our troops stand tall on their feet on the side of truth and against falsehood, having faith in the [Quran 17:81] verse 'And say: "Truth has come and falsehood has collapsed. Verily, falsehood is condemned to collapse.' Our troops run from victory to victory being bound from their hearts to the [Quran 3:139] verse: 'Do not become loose, do not be saddened. If you have faith, you will be superior.' Our troops obey the call of our prophet to 'make jihad with your hands, your words, and your property' and say 'stop' to the brazen raid of the enemy."[2] Turkey's Ministry of Religious Affairs, which prepares the sermons that are given each week at the country's 84,000 mosques, issued this sermon amid fighting in Idlib between the Turkish military and Turkish-backed jihadi factions on one side and the Syrian military on the other.

"This Ummah Has Gotten Its Dignity And Honor From Jihad And Martyrdom"

In a February 10 column, Mustafa Kasadar wrote: "This ummah has gotten its dignity and honor from jihad and martyrdom. This ummah, in the period when it burned and ignited as a whole with the longing for jihad martyrdom, it was the lord of the world. It gave shape and order to the whole world. But whenever it became a nation that was disgusted by death, that forgot the desire for martyrdom, and preferred the worldly life to the hereafter, that is when it fell from the summit and became the plaything of the non-Muslim nations...

"On this occasion we are commemorating with mercy all our martyrs and congratulating all of the civil society organizations, above all the Anadolu Genlik Dernei (Anatolian Youth Assocatian, AGD) who are celebrating February as 'Martyrdom Month' and bringing jihad and martyrdom to the youth agenda once again. We commemorate with mercy and gratitude the jihad leaders 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam, Hassan Al-Banna, Abdullah Azzam, Ahmad Yassin, and Necmeddin Erbakan, who are the jihad teachers of our age. The path that will save the ummah from this despicableness today is clear. This path has been tried dozens of times before and every time, with this method, the ummah got up from the place to which it had fallen and reached the summit once again. That path is singular, and it is the construction of an ummah that desires jihad and martyrdom."[3]

"If We Get Scared When War And Jihad Are Mentioned, This Shows The Weakness Of Our Faith"

In a March 6 column, Muzaffer Dereli wrote: "Only hypocrites flee from war when it is necessary. To say: 'Do your worship, leave off jihad' is such a big sign of discord... After permission for war (jihad) came following the hijrah [i.e., migration], the hypocrites feared war with the enemy and they made the entreaty: 'If only this command came a little later.' Today, if we get scared when war and jihad are mentioned, this shows the weakness of our faith. Jihad is making war with [one's] life and property for Allah in the path of Allah. It is working and making effort with [one's] life, property, words, publications, and by other means to spread Allah's supreme name to the universe... When it is necessary, jihad is farz [obligatory] for believers, and the one who is prepared on this path is called a mujahid." Dereli ends his article with two poems about martyrdom and jihad.[4]

Mustafa elik wrote in a March 11 column: "The Rashidun Caliphate[5] is for Muslims a yardstick in government. In the absence of a caliphate, they repeatedly condemn the caliphate. In theology departments they are having doctoral work done to cancel the hadiths of the prophet concerning the caliphate. They are trying to make Muslims the enemy of the order that the prophet recommended. This is a danger as intense as the Day of Judgment. Those who fall into this danger will definitely fall into destruction. They do not know: The caliphate is innate nature,[6] can innate nature be forgotten? Man was created as a caliph. The caliphate entered the picture when man was created. The caliphate is part of the agenda wherever there are people. Because without the caliphate, man's innate nature cannot be satisfied. Those who dirty their minds with ideologies do not know this reality..."

"Democracy... Is A Dress Of The Greek Philosophers That Was Put On The Muslims... Governing Without That Which Allah Has Sent Down Is A Cruelty Composed Of Darkness"

"With the abolition of the caliphate, our world became darker. Never mind the people, [even] the leaves on the trees grew yellow. The poor, the destitute, the orphans, the parentless sought a master to protect and embrace them. In the absence of the caliphate, never mind enemies, brother strafed brother. Those fighting back without a caliphate and without a caliph, benefited the unbelievers more than the Muslims. The enemies of the caliphate took from us the possibility of being governed with our religion. They stole the sun from our eyes and the spring from our noses. In the absence of a caliphate, we experienced winters in the spring of our lives. It was as if we began our lives from the end...

"The abolition of the caliphate is an epic of sorrow. Democracy, which was imposed as an ideology after the abolition of the caliphate, is a dress of the Greek philosophers that was put on the Muslims. The abolition of the caliphate was a wedding of pleasure and joy for those who swallow the fire of ideologies... The ideology that, with the abolition of the caliphate, was put in front of and in place of Islam, is governance without that which Allah has sent down. Governing without that which Allah has sent down is a cruelty composed of darkness... They divided the single ummah into a thousand and one pieces. They made Muslims forget the caliphate, which is the recommendation of the prophet. If Islam's state governs the world on its own, Allah will lift off of us the despicableness that is thought to be irremovable!"[7]

[1] Milligazete.com.tr/makale/4078828/burhan-bozgeyik/mahzun-kabe-bize-ne-soyluyor, March 20, 2020.

[2] Karar.com/diyanetin-cuma-hutbesi-cihad--28-subat-2020-1546697, February 28, 2020.

[3] Milligazete.com.tr/makale/3641018/mustafa-kasadar/sehitlik-ve-sehadet-ayi-subat, February 10, 2020.

[4] Dirilispostasi.com/makale/cihat-mucahit-ve-sehadet, March 6, 2020.

[5] The Rashidun Caliphate governed much of the Middle East from 632 to 661. It was the first caliphate established after the death of Muhammad.

[6] The original word is ftrat, the Turkish word for the Islamic concept of fitra.

[7] Yeniakit.com.tr/yazarlar/mustafa-celik/hilafet-unutulmaz-ideolojilerin-atesi-yutulmaz-31580.html, March 11, 2020.

Read more from the original source:

Turkish Columnists Praise Jihad, Martyrdom, And Caliphate: 'Jihad Is A Valid Ruling Until The Day Of Judgement... If The Muslims Are Unified, [The...

The nomination offormer Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi,to Rajya Sabha after three months of his retirement has sparked controversyand concern in the public domain. Though the onslaught of Corona pandemic has deflected the public attention from this important political development and other matters of national significance, it is importanttojoin the debate: whether the nomination of Justice Ranjan Gogoi compromises the independence of Indian judiciary and has further led tothe concentration of powers in the hands of Executive- which poses a threat to Indian democracy - as hasmostly been argued by the critics of the Modi government.

Besides the issue of constitutional propriety, the nomination ofJustice Gogoi has largely been seen as a case of quid pro quo/political favouritism in exchange of his series of Judgments including Ayodhya issue, Rafale case, the delay in the matter of hearing over the abolition of Article 370, Electoral Bonds etc, which appears to favour the government of the day.

But it seems that none of these allegations has substance. It is the matter of fact that it is the same opposition which had hailed the Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Chelameswar and others as hero of democracy for raising their voice against the then Chief Justice Dipak Misra. ( In January 2018, Justices Gogoi, Lokur, J Chelameswar, and Kurian Joseph, the most senior judgesin the Supreme Court, called a press conference to question the conduct of Justice Dipak Misra on the allocation of important cases)

It is another matter that with judgement related to decriminalisation of IPC 377 and Protection of Individual Privacy and other progressive judgments, much of the liberal-leftist critique of Justice Dipak Misra vanished in thin air.

Second, it is a myth that government organs work with complete independence, rather they work in harmony and cooperative framework with a larger goal of governing the country.

Third, whenever a strong personality has dominated Executive in India, the issue of compromising the independence of the judiciary has been raised in the public domain, though without much merit. Indian democracy has matured and moved forward amidst such allegations in the past.

Fourth, Indian politics is riddled with a large list of appointments of Judges including Chief Justice of the High Court and Supreme Courtto various Commissions and nominations in Rajya Sabha. In fact, the Constitution of India provides 12 nominations of people with exceptional abilities and recognitions in the various fields into Rajya Sabha with a view tobenefit the nation from their talents. I believe that Justice Ranjan Gogoi deserves such recognition and an honourable place inRajya Sabha as an independent member. It is misnomer to think that the nomination of a judge in the Parliament amounts to compromising the independence of Judiciary; rather law-making exercise is benefited from experiences of such legal luminaries. In fact, all sitting judges of Supreme Court in the United Kingdom find an automatic place in theHouse of Lords after their retirement without ever generating a controversy that such an exercise or political traditioncripples the independence of UK judicial system.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)

Excerpt from:

Nothing political about Justice Ranjan Gogoi's nomination to Rajya Sabha - WION