Third Camp Marxism

It is nearly exactly a year since the first Global School Strike for Climate took place, and whilst the participation and coverage of the movement may appear to have peaked for now, the resolve and commitment of climate strikers across the globe remains strong.

Last year I was a climate striker during my last year of sixth form and I continue to be involved in the UKSCN branch in Newcastle, organising the climate strikes and trying to build links with the local labour movement.

More and more of us will be advised or forced to stay home for whole periods, and to stay home longer each week even when we are going to work.

We must remember that for many women and children, staying home comes with additional dangers of its own.

In the 2015 Ebola outbreak when Sierra Leone shut schools, girls removed from school took on care work and were also at heightened risk of sexual abuse and teen pregnancy. Activist reports and police statistics both report a spike in domestic violence in Wuhan as a result of strict curfews.

The mainstream media has already written off Bernie Sanders and crowned Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate to challenge Donald Trump (despite the primaries being far from over). But that hasn’t silenced the Vermont senator.

Sanders has long seen himself as more than just a conventional politician and acts as the voice for a movement. This last week, he laid out a socialist programme for the pandemic.

In this epidemic, Workers’ Liberty fights for the labour movement to make itself an essential service.

The labour movement, as yet, lacks the capacity to take over society and reshape it so as better to minimise and control epidemics. Neither we as Workers’ Liberty, nor the labour movement generally, has the depth of expertise to qualify us to second-guess the established bourgeois public health experts.

On 17 March, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn presented a list of demands to the Government:

• extend sick pay to all workers;
• increase sick pay;
• introduce rent and mortgage payment deferment options;
• ban coronavirus evictions;
• remove the requirement to present for Universal Credit and reduce the waiting time;
• support councils working with food banks.

Later in this year, assuming the UK has recovered enough from Covid-19, environmental activists will be active around 2020’s UN climate change conference, COP26, in Glasgow (9-20 November).

Probably very little radical or adequate policy will be decided at that conference, even though the world faces a pandemic and continuing climate crisis.

A “joint statement”, published in the name of the Department for Transport (DfT), eight individual unions organising in the transport sector, and the TUC, appeared online on Wednesday 19 March.

It reports the “first in a series of Ministerial calls” between the DfT and transport unions, and ends with an affirmation that “Transport Ministers have pledged to work tirelessly with the unions to support staff in the transport industry through not only the immediate challenges but also the issues that will affect the sector once the country has overcome this pandemic.”

A document from NHS England dated 4/3/20 says all workers on NHS premises should be fully paid to comply with public health advice.

Yet mostly it hasn't been made public or used by workers and unions. Managers are keeping it quiet or don't know about it.

Each day that passes that workers don't know about this provision puts the NHS workforce and NHS patients under greater risk of infection.

Spread the news: https://elftworkerssolidarity.org/!

With every major crisis capitalism has faced since the Second World War, we have seen Keynesianism rear its head. Either in the form of actual policy enacted or in the realm of ideas that come to the fore at these times. Our current situation with COVID-19 is no different. It is as the American monetarist economist Robert Lucas Jr. succinctly put it: “I guess everyone’s a Keynesian in a foxhole”, when capital sees itself in major crisis, Keynesianism reemerges in order to offer a solution. However, there is a widespread ignorance about what Keynesianism actually means.

The latest edition of Tubeworker, a socialist industrial bulletin for London Underground workers, by London Underground workers.

Click to download the PDF.