Portside

Tricontinental: The movements, unions, and parties that make up the International Assembly of Peoples propose that a programme of structural change be formulated and implemented to allow us to win this struggle and reshape the world. 

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Members of La Via Campesina: As Corona Virus spreads across countries and continents, several members of La Via Campesina, farmers organizations from Europe, Latin America, Asia, North America, Central America and Africa, have issued statements highlighting the precarious situation of peasants and migrant workers around the world.

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Ammar Ali Jan, The News International: The working class forms the surplus humanity of our supposedly ‘neutral’ discourse on preventative care. Factories in Pakistan, hazardous and unhygienic in the best of times, have still not been shut down.

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Pascuale Serrano, OpenDemocracy: The Cuban government, accustomed to natural disasters, noted that its 2014 legislation determines that when natural, technological and health disasters prevent employees from performing their jobs, workers shall receive their entire salaries for one month and 60% for the rest of the time their work is suspended. The Cuban government also approved extraordinary health spending for consumables, protection and intensive therapy teams.

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Beatrice Busi, Alessandro Delfanti and Erika Biddl, Medium: Italy is currently shaken by a wave of wildcat strikes in factories, warehouses, supermarkets, and ports. Workers in industries that have not been shut down, such as manufacturing or logistics, are protesting the impossibility to maintain social distancing in the workplace or the reckless disinterest shown by their employers.

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William Shoki, Africa is a Country: The coronavirus is globalist in character, knowing no distinctions based on color or nationality, but reinforcing class inequalities across and within these characteristics all the same.

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Radhika Desai, Canadian Dimension: The present pandemic is certain to be different not because it is more lethal than previous ones (it is not), nor because it is causing havoc in financial markets (as most crises of neoliberal era have), but because it is exposing the weaknesses, distortions and imbalances of the productive apparatus that neoliberalism has shaped over four decades.

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Ingar Solty, Socialist Project: The size and dynamism of workers’ struggles is likely to increase with the intensification of the coronavirus and economic crises. At the same time, the fact that they need to occur out of a situation of desperation shows how unlikely ‘flattening the curve’ is going to be and how likely working-class families are going to suffer from the coronavirus crisis and are going to carry most of the burden.

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Prabhat Patnaik, NewsClick: The overall lesson from the current pandemic is to reverse the direction in which neoliberalism has forced us, to introduce a comprehensive public healthcare system and a universal public distribution system

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Franco 'Bifo' Berard, Verso: The point is not how lethal the virus is. The effect of the virus is not linked to the number of people it kills. The effect of the virus lies in the relational paralysis it is spreading.

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Nilantha Ilangamuwa, CounterPunch: Bottom line is that we are running out of everything, but we still pay less serious attention to the true crises. Panic-2020 is more dangerous and vicious than the COVID-19.

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Sabine Nuss, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung: We now sit collectively like the canary before the snake of the corona virus, hoping that the chalice of severe illness passes us by and that the state will be strong enough to save “the economy” so that it can continue after the horror subsides. The appeal to solidarity will have served its purpose. After corona is before corona. Is that what we want?