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The growing wave of strikes and protests by Sri Lankan workers is rapidly moving towards a political confrontation with President Gotabhaya Rajapakses government and the entire capitalist class.

The global crisis triggered by COVID-19 has sharply impacted on the Sri Lankan economy, propelling workers and the poor into struggle against the intolerable social conditions and attacks on democratic rights imposed by the government and its big business partners.

More than a million workers have been involved in strikes and demonstrations since the beginning of this year, including hundreds of thousands of teachers, health workers and other public sector employees, as well as plantation workers. This social unrest has intensified across the country in recent weeks.

On the same day over 500 Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), port and petroleum corporation workers jointly demonstrated in central Colombo in protest against governments moves to privatise these enterprises.

Parallel to this industrial action, tens of thousands of poor rural peasants are maintaining protests that began in August to demand fertiliser and other agricultural subsidies.

The scale of this years industrial action and number of protests have not been seen since the betrayal of the public sector employees general strike by the trade unions in July 1980.

This years strikes and protests have united workers across Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim ethnic lines, highlighting a common class determination to defend living standards and social conditions.

These struggles, and their betrayal by the unions, starkly reveal, however, that militancy alone is not enough. Workers can only defend their rights by mobilising independently on a socialist program. The unions, which are tied to the capitalist system and the state, are opposed to any such struggle and are doing everything to prevent it.

The trade unions were compelled to call this years industrial action in response to popular anger over the pandemic health crisis, food shortages, the skyrocketing cost of essentials and government austerity measures. The unions soon betrayed the strikes, negotiating rotten deals with the government or big business.

On July 12, over 250,000 educators began the 100-day strike as part of their decades-long demand for higher wages. The government flatly rejected any salary increase.

The teachers and principals unions, including the Ceylon Teachers Union and the Ceylon Teacher Services Union, called various protests to deflect teachers anger. They then made a deal with the government, shutting down the strike and accepting just one third of the originally demanded salary rise, an increase that has not yet been implemented. The unions also agreed to the unsafe COVID-19 reopening of schools beginning on October 21.

This year, health workers have participated in at least 30 strikes and protests separately called by the unions, or under the Health Employees Trade Union Collective. In June, the union collective accepted a meagre allowance payment from the government and agreed to postpone a long-demanded wage increase.

The Sri Lanka Public Officers Trade Union Federation, which called the one-day national strike on December 8, initially wanted an 18,000-rupee monthly wage increase. But it told President Rajapakse that, considering the crisis of the government, it would reduce its pay demand to just 10,000 rupees. Finance Ministry Secretary S. R. Attygala flatly rejected the unions new claim, declaring that the treasury had no money.

Similarly, private sector unions have backed the wage and job cuts and high productivity demands of the big plantation corporations and the free trade zone companies.

All these unions have facilitated the Rajapakse governments relentless imposition of the economic crisis on working people. Slavishly appealing to the government and big business, the unions promote the illusion that workers can pressure the government and force them to increase wages, improve conditions and stop privatisation.

The government, however, confronts an unprecedented economic crisis and has no room to compromise. The growth rate last year fell to negative 3.6 percent, foreign reserves dropped this month to about $US1.6 billion, and the government on the verge of defaulting on foreign loans.

Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse recently warned of foreign currency shortages into next year, but reassured the public that the government would not allow famine in the country. In reality, mass starvation is around the corner in Sri Lanka with many already going hungry. These worsening conditions are part of the global crisis of capitalism with no national escape route for any country.

The Rajapakse regime is doing everything possible to ensure big business and investors boost profits, while assuring international financiers that it will maintain repayments on its huge foreign debts.

In October, the Rajapakse government began removing price controls, unleashing rampant inflation. The price index rose to 9.9 percent in November, measured on a year-on-year basis, the highest in 12 years. In contrast to these brutal social attacks, the government has given big business and foreign investors big tax cuts and other concessions. Listed companies reaped a combined profit of 292 billion rupees in the first nine months of this year, surpassing all historical records.

The entire policy of the government is that peoples lives are expendable. This is shown in its criminally negligent response to the pandemic that has led to nearly 15,000 deaths from COVID-19 and over 577,000 infections, even according to the highly undercounted official figures.

The Omicron variant, which is raging across the US, UK, Europe, Australia and other countries, is now in Sri Lanka. Colombo has completely ignored the highly infectious variant and continues with its murderous living with the virus policies.

The Rajapakse governments reaction to the rising militancy of workers and the rural poor is to utilise the unions to derail these struggles, while rapidly preparing for a brutal state crackdown.

This preparation includes the imposition of the draconian Essential Public Service Act, which covers about one million state workers and bans strikes and other industrial action with heavy fines and lengthy jail terms. None of the unions have opposed this draconian law.

Early this month, amid the deepening political and economic crisis, President Rajapakse suddenly prorogued parliament from December 12 to January 18. Sri Lankas big business Dailyft supported the decision, declaring that it would allow the president to take stock so as to better reflect the current and emerging economic scenario and articulate tangible measures [for] greater stability. The greater stability, demanded by the ruling elite is for ruthless suppression of working class.

Throughout his presidency, Rajapakse has stepped up the militarisation of his administration. Colombo insists that it has no money for salary increases, public health and education or fertiliser subsidies for farmers, while lavishly boosting defence expenditure.

At the same time, the unions and pseudo-left groups continue their efforts to tie workers to the opposition bourgeois parties, such as Samagi Jana Balawegaya and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, claiming that a broader front is needed to pressure the government.

These parties, which have a long record of suppressing the rights of workers and the poor, have no fundamental differences with the Rajapakse regime and would implement similar austerity measures if they were in power.

The working class faces enormous dangers and needs to take political matters into its own hands.

Firstly, workers urgently need to build action committees, independent of the unions and with their own democratically elected representatives, in order to take forward their struggles.

Second, workers need to break from every faction of bourgeoisie and their pseudo-left hangers on, and build a movement to take forward a political struggle against the Rajapakse regime and the capitalist profit system.

All foreign loans must be repudiated. The economy has to be reorganised from top to bottom to serve the needs of the majority, not the profit interests of a few. All large companies, plantations and banks should be nationalized and put under the democratic control of the working class.

To implement this program, workers must rally the rural poor and fight for a workers and peasants government, as part of the broader struggle for international socialism. Such a fight can only be carried out by uniting with the international working class. There is no national solution. The source of the attack on workers in every country is the crisis of global capitalism exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To organise this international struggle, action committees must join the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees launched by the International Committee of the Fourth International. This is the perspective of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP). We urge you to study our program and join us in this fight.

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To oppose government austerity, Sri Lankan workers need to build action committees and fight for socialist policies - WSWS

In our times, expressionism is often conflated with the movement that succeeded it in the United States abstract expressionism. Mid-century painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko blurred away all traces of realism in a highly expressive, and individualistic, mode of painting that aligned with US propaganda during the Cold War. Decades before drip painting and the Seagram murals hit the American art world, expressionist artists in Europe were concerned with a figurative style capable of responding to war and economic hardship at the turn of the twentieth century.

Among the most prominent of these artists was Kthe Kollwitz (18671945). Coming of age amid rapid industrialization in Germany, Kollwitz worked across painting, sculpture, and printmaking, helping to give expressionism its radical consciousness.

In lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, Kollwitz portrayed scenes of poverty and class warfare, devoid of color, using only line and shadow. As a propagandist and educator, she worked with socialist organizations to criticize inequality and oppression under the German Empire, Weimar Republic, and Third Reich. Her monochromatic designs, which appeared on posters and pamphlets, revived an aesthetic form of protest developed during the German Peasants War. That she herself produced an iconic print cycle on the sixteenth-century uprising speaks to her sustaining the old cause with the old tools.

Kollwitz was the first woman admitted to the Prussian Academy of Arts. However, her success was cut short when the Nazis banned her work. Dying just sixteen days before Victory in Europe Day, she never saw the ban lifted. Her experience losing children in both world wars led to a preoccupation with motherhood as the first line of defense. From peasant matrons sharpening scythes to mothers leading a weavers revolt, Kollwitzs women subjects transcend their traditional gender roles to rebel against the capitalist order that necessitated their poverty. Despite the many trials she experienced, Kollwitzs faith in socialism speaks to her sacrifices as a working artist who brought print to a higher plane of social commentary.

Kthe Schmidt was born into a progressive religious family in conservative Prussia. Her maternal grandfather, Julius Rupp, founded the first Free Religious Congregation, and her father, Karl, was a Marxist member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Together, these men influenced her intellectual development. Father was nearest to me because he had been my guide to socialism, she wrote to a friend. But behind that concept stood Rupp, whose traffic was not with humanity, but with God. . . . To this day I do not know whether the power which has inspired my works is something related to religion, or is indeed religion itself.

Little Kthe, as her family called her, was the fifth of seven children, three of whom died young. Her mother Katharinas stoicism was formative for Kthes early notions of parenthood. The artist was prone to anxiety attacks and suffered from dysmetropsia, or Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which distorted her perception of size and self. These early experiences marked her introduction to art-making.

Originally trained in painting, Kthe was drawn to the work of the realist artist Max Liebermann who painted Germanys working class as well as the naturalist literary movement. It was after reading Max Klingers essay Painting and Drawing that she delved into printmaking, thanks to Klingers championing of the medium and its potential for poetic invention. Her earliest series, monochromatic line etchings adapted from mile Zolas 1885 novel Germinal, brought together these influences by depicting a miners revolt violently suppressed by the French police and military.

In 1891, Kthe married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor and SPD councilman who ran a clinic for Berlins working class. Through Karl, she met impoverished mothers and children, who would stay after their appointments to chat with her. Kollwitz soon became a mother herself, giving birth to sons Hans and Peter. Despite the labor of motherhood, Karl worked to ensure that Kthe could sustain an art career while they raised children.

Kollwitzs first artistic breakthrough came after experiencing Gerhart Hauptmanns naturalist play The Weavers, which dramatized an 1844 workers uprising against poor living conditions and low wages. Her print cycle A Weavers Revolt (189397) adapts the story across six sheets. The first three provide exposition: a family watches over a dying child in a cramped house filled with weaving looms, leading the father to conspire with fellow workers in a dimly lit barroom. The next two sheets exchange darkness for daylight, showing workers marching with pickaxes and mothers carrying children. In Storming the Gate, women lead an attack on a capitalists home. Kollwitz juxtaposes their dirty clothing with the lavish gate design, which is overtaken by workers hands.

Men carry away dead weavers in the final sheet, revealing subtle Christian themes of martyrdom and suffering. Biographer Martha Kearns notes that A Weavers Revolt transformed Kollwitz into an artist who celebrated revolution. After seeing the work at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, a Prussian awards jury proposed nominating her, but Kaiser Wilhelm II refused. This decision, along with a highly publicized closing of Edvard Munchs first major exhibition, led Kollwitz and several jury members including Liebermann to organize the Berlin Secession. From then through the German Revolution, Kollwitzs art became inextricably linked with anti-imperialism, leading to further breakthroughs that converged with personal tragedy.

The turn of the twentieth century brought Kollwitz to Paris and London, where she studied European art history. While abroad, she created the large-scale etching La Carmagnole, which depicts a scene of French revolutionary women dancing to a battle hymn from Charles Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities. That same year, she began her second major print cycle inspired by Wilhelm Zimmermanns illustrated history of the German Peasants War, which Friedrich Engels viewed as the first revolutionary worker uprising of the modern era.

The seven screens of Peasants War (19018) follow a similar narrative to the weavers. Two opening sheets show a plowman bending to the earth and a woman embedded in dirt after being raped. The next frame, Sharpening the Scythe, portrays a tense older woman with tired eyes running a whetstone across a long blade. Only two sheets show the actual war, with a sea of peasant warriors fighting night and day, led by a peasant named Black Anna. This is followed by the haunting Battlefield, in which an elderly woman makes contact with a young mans corpse; her veiny hand and his face appear illuminated at the point of contact. The series concludes with survivors tightly packed in an open-air prison.

Peasants War was a major success, and Kollwitzs work was quickly acquired by institutions like the British Museum and New York Public Library. She ensured wide accessibility to her work by producing in high volume and selling at low cost. This meant allowing her work to be reproduced, and, in 1908, she began contributing to Munich satire magazine Simplicissimus, which was committed to publishing visual and literary work critiquing economic inequality.

She also designed propaganda that addressed working-class issues. Her 1906 poster for the Exhibition of German Cottage Industries, showing an exhausted working woman, was so distasteful to Empress Augusta Victoria that she refused to visit. Another for the Greater Berlin Administration Union, which denounced the citys housing shortage, was banned by an association of landlords.

After the assassination of Spartacus League leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the Freikorps in 1919, Kollwitz attended Liebknechts funeral with thousands of supporters and became sympathetic to the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD). Her memorial to Liebknecht is one of the results of that experience. It shows his pale corpse lying flat in the style of a Christian lamentation, surrounded by black-clad mourners. His side profile appears to glow, emanating bright streaks into the coat of a sobbing man who seems not to notice.

In 1913, Kollwitz cofounded the Organization of Women Artists, coinciding with her foray into sculpture. One year later, and just three months into World War I, her son Peter was killed in action. This sent the artist, who spoke with so many ailing mothers, into a deep melancholy that informed the remainder of her career. While working in a cafeteria for the unemployed, she experienced a long period of creative stagnation that lasted until the revolution.

As poet Richard Dehmel urged further action in the war, Kollwitz published a dissenting letter in the German press that quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Seeds for sowing should not be ground. Following armistice, her woodcut series The War (19181923) provided a searing critique of the conflicts effects on family life. One sheet, simply titled The Mothers, shows a group of women holding each other as one. This piece, which looks almost sculptural, became the archetype for her many sculptures of mothers protecting children, and an enlarged version is prominently displayed at the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Victims of War and Tyranny in Berlin.

The peak of Kollwitzs career came in 1927 with recognition by the Weimar Republic. She visited the Soviet Union with Karl to commemorate ten years since the October Revolution and became the head of the Master Studio for Graphic Arts at the Prussian Academy, but her tenure was short-lived. When the National Socialists came to power, Kollwitz signed an appeal with Karl, Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein, and other intellectuals to align the SPD and KPD against the National Socialists, followed by a second attempt led primarily by Mann and Kollwitz in 1933.

Coverage in a Moscow newspaper led the Gestapo to question Kollwitz and threaten imprisonment, and eventually led to the removal of her work from German museums and her forced resignation from the academy. The Nazis stored her art in the basement of the Crown Princes Palace throughout World War II, claiming that mothers have no need to defend their children. The State does that.

Some critics have argued that Kollwitzs work was not political because she never portrayed the oppressor. Others have alleged that her style was out of touch during the birth of abstract expressionism. For Louis Marchesano, this notion is a result of the aesthetic purification that took place during the Cold War in North American and West German cultural institutions.

But Kollwitzs art, grounded in her radical commitments, and with its representations of working-class history, was deeply political. She aligned herself with many of the largest democratic and anti-war organizations. She was a member of the communist-led Womens International League for Peace and Freedom as well as the Workers International Relief. She designed posters for the International Labour Union, and her Never Again War illustration for the Central German Convention of Young Socialist Workers became an icon of the anti-war movement after her death.

Kollwitz embraced negative space, wielding shadow to define her scenes before expressionist filmmakers popularized this aesthetic. The darkness of daily life took its toll on her, but optimism persisted. This is evident in one of her last letters, to her daughter-in-law Ottilie, in 1944:

Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed. The devil only knows what the world, what Germany will look like then. That is why I am whole-heartedly for a radical end to this madness, and why my only hope is in a world socialism.

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The Radical Printmaking of Kthe Kollwitz - Jacobin magazine

Dear Editor:

I try hard to restrain myself from responding to Phil Grants letters, but his latest tirade regarding COVID [COVID science? Dec. 9] is over the top insensitive and uninformed. Just this past week, two long-term residents of Milbridge who he knows died of COVID and there have been more than 750,000 others in the country who have died of COVID.

Is Grant implying that unhealthy children who get COVID are expendable when he says that healthy children need not worry? Should we then separate out the overweight kids, the diabetic kids, any kids who dont seem healthy, and just vaccinate them? Does he imply that the cure is better than the prevention? Why bother with preventative measures like vaccines when there is so much science that promises a cure? And if one has had COVID, why bother with vaccines? All of the assumptions are against the science, and although I doubt that he listens to people like Dr Fauci (sadly, likely because Dr. Faucis a Biden man), Grant begins to sound a lot like his mentor Trump. What educated person would want that comparison?

Finally, Grants letter ends with the dreaded s word that being socialism. Republicans love to throw that out as being the most terrible threat of our time. No letter of Grants could be complete without scaring us about socialism creeping in like a thief in the night. I wonder if he receives Social Security, or if he ever has had to worry about paying medical bills.

Edgar Stanley

Southbridge, Mass. and Milbridge

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Insensitive and uninformed - The Ellsworth AmericanThe Ellsworth American - The Ellsworth American

Production is the essential condition for any functioning human society, and collective human labour the foundation of production. These basic facts are typically buried under an overgrowth of ideology but the Covid-19 pandemic has helped to strip this back, placing work at the centre of contemporary debates.

Conditions within the labour force that once passed unnoticed have suddenly emerged into the light. Addressing the shortage of hauliers in Britain, the Financial Times asked why any young person might wish to work in an industry based around 13 hour days of driving, punctuated by mandatory breaks in inadequate rest stop facilities. Time magazine reported a purported great resignation in the United States, as over four million workers quit their jobs in a single month in autumn 2021. Robert Reich, Bill Clintons former Labour Secretary, suggested that employees dont want to return to backbreaking or boring, low-wage, shit jobs. Workers are burnt out. Theyre fed up. Theyre fried. In the wake of so much hardship and illness and death during the past year, theyre not going to take it any more.

This analysis offers an account of some of the changes to work as the pandemic reaches its two-year mark. It comes with two important caveats. First, this account focuses on Britain and other similar economies. The important topic of work across the Global South is one that will be addressed in future issues. Suffice it to say here, even in countries where the direct health impact of Covid-19 has been more limited due to, for instance, relatively youthful populations, workers have not been spared more than their share of suffering. Economic dislocation in export industries and global supply chains, and declines in areas such as tourism, along with border closures and other restrictions imposed due to the pandemic, have helped drive the first global rise in extreme poverty since 1997.

The second caveat is that the potential impact of the new omicron variant of Covid-19 remained unclear at the time of writing. The failure of governments to control the spread of coronavirus has transformed populations into petri dishes for the creation of new viral strainsa situation exacerbated by the vaccine imperialism of the most powerful states. If new strains such as omicron turn out to be more transmissible, or to have greater capacity to evade existing vaccines, then the already weakening economic recovery could grind to a halt. As International Socialism went to press, Boris Johnsons increasingly crisis-stricken government had just announced new advice for workers to work from home where possible. However, it remained unclear how serious and prolonged a shift this would entail.

We should note, first of all, the peculiarity of the economic crisis accompanying the pandemic. As the first lockdown was imposed, Britain suffered its worst recession in over three centuries. We might envisage two likely outcomes of such a crisis: the failure of large numbers of firms and surging unemployment. The reality has been quite different. The pattern, deepening with each crisis of the 21st century and reaching new levels by 2020-1, has been intensifying action by states and their associated central banks to support firms, whether through direct interventions or measures such as ultra-low interest rates. This creates a situation in which unprofitable zombie firms survive well beyond their natural lifespan. As the pandemic erupted, firm failures fell, only returning to something close to pre-pandemic levels by autumn 2021 (figure 1).

Figure 1: Insolvencies in England and Wales before and during the pandemic

Source: Insolvency Service data.

Not only that, but the furlough scheme implemented by the British state meant a far more muted rise in official unemployment rates than in earlier crises (figure 2). As with similar schemes in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the British state found itself supporting the income of roughly a third of the workforce, with 11.7 million jobs furloughed at some point in the pandemic. Across high-income countries, employment fell by 18 million between 2019 and 2020, but hours worked fell by the equivalent of 39 million full-time jobs, reflecting the extent to which furlough schemes cushioned labour markets. A similar collapse in working hours took place in Britain, with this figure still well below levels expected from pre-crisis trends (figure 3).

Figure 2: Unemployment rate (16-65, seasonally adjusted) before and during the pandemic

Source: Office for National Statistics data.

Figure 3: Total weekly hours worked (millions) before and during the pandemic

Source: Office for National Statistics data.

In Britain, repeated extensions to the furlough scheme, paid for by expanding state debt, prevented mass unemployment. These measures, along with the vaccine rollout, helps explain Johnsons relative success in riding out the early phases of the pandemic. A cumulative 70 billion (about 2.5 percent of annual GDP) was handed over to 1.3 million employers as part of this scheme.

This kind of intervention meant that the bulk of the labour force in countries such as Britain was divided into four sectionswith workers sometimes moving between groups in the course of the pandemic. First, as noted above, there were those who were placed on temporary furlough. Second, there were those who left the workforce, discussed in more detail below. The third and fourth groups both consisted of people who continued working through the pandemic: respectively, those continuing to travel to their workplace and those for whom some or all their work shifted into their home. Each group was impacted by the pandemic, but not in the same manner.

Those most at risk of death were concentrated in occupations where contact with other workers or the public was expected. As figure 4 shows, workers in caring, leisure and other service occupations, along with those in occupations related to manufacturing, were far more likely to die from causes linked to Covid-19. Factors such as race and classwhich push people into such jobs as well as into overcrowded housing and which lead to poorer overall healthare central to explaining how excess mortality has been distributed across the population.

Figure 4: Deaths involving Covid-19 per 100,000 people between 9 March and 28 December 2020

Source: Office for National Statistics data.

There were lower levels of excess mortality in occupations with less contact with others, particularly where this work was done at home. The extent to which homeworking was used in the pandemic was unprecedented. Numbers travelling to work at least some of the time fell to their lowest ever level, about a third of the workforce, in April 2020. However, by late November 2021, around 71 percent were travelling to work. Most workers were, once more, expected to be present in the workplace.

For those whose work could be carried out remotely, the speed of the transfer of work into the home was striking. Prior to the pandemic just 4.7 percent of employees engaged in home-working: It had taken almost 40 years for home-working to grow by three percentage points, but its prevalence grew eight-fold virtually overnight as people were instructed to work at home if they can because of the pandemic. Around a third of the workforce across Europe and in the US worked from home in early 2020. In some cases, managers had little choice but to make this shift in spite of a negative impact on productivity; in other cases, productivity rose. Overall the changes seem to have averaged out, leading to a broad continuity in the amount of work squeezed out of workers during home-working. This does not take into account other advantages for employers, in particular the potential savings from making employees responsible for supplying office space, equipment and utilities (heating, lighting, internet access) required to do their jobs.

The impact on workers conditions has, unsurprisingly, also been mixed. About half of those who worked at home during the pandemic reported that they would prefer to work mostly or exclusively at home in future. However, this should not be taken as a broad endorsement by workers of the experience. For many, particularly those with caring responsibilities, who are disproportionately women, working from home allows familial and work commitments to be better juggled. Were better public provision made for childcare or if more flexible working patterns were available, this preference could change. Moreover, not all workers can afford the equipment required to work safely and efficiently at home or find the space to do so. Many workers also report feeling drained and isolated or working longer hours than before. The workplace is a site of exploitation, bullying and oppression, but it is also a concentration of collective labour, which makes it a key arena for socialisation and allows workers to express their power. By analogy, the drawing of women out of domestic activities and into waged labour has historically been regarded by Marxists not simply as exposing them to capitalist exploitation, but also as placing them in a world in which their capacity for collective action is enhanced. Although many workers appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home, a wholesale return of a section of the working class to a more isolated domestic sphere, without freeing them from exploitation, is hardly a panacea.

It is not simply the antipathy of workers towards working in their own homes that is likely to limit the use of remote working post-pandemic. Large amounts of employment continues to rely on access to equipment concentrated in workplaces (most obviously in manufacturing) or the provision of services that require the worker to be present alongside the recipient of those services (for instance, care work, cafes and transportation). Moreover, employers fear that managers may lose their ability to exert direct control over and to supervise remote workers. Even in areas such as finance and business services, an emerging norm at larger firms is for employees to be in the office at least two to four days a week. In cases where there is a shift towards home-working, workers and trade unions will have to formulate new demands to prevent workers subsidising their employers overheads or suffering extended working hours. However, as many areas revert to pre-pandemic patterns, workers will also have to raise demands for flexibility, though on their own terms rather than those of their employers.

Regardless of the eventual redistribution of work between the home and the traditional workplace, the deployment of digital technologies during the pandemic to facilitate the shift reminds us that the use of technology is far from neutral. Such technology does not simply permit changes to the location of work; it is also about measuring and enforcing its intensity and duration. This is a key issue in another form of work much in the spotlight during the pandemic, so-called platform work, mediated by online platforms. Deliveroo and Uber are the most high profile, but this type of work can also include running errands and doing housework along with a large and amorphous category of creative or technical digital tasks. As demand for such services has grown, so has the number of platform workers. One study suggests a modest growth of those obtaining more than half their income from platform work, from roughly 4.1 percent of the workforce in 2019 to around 4.4 percent in 2021.

Although there is little evidence that platform work will displace other forms of employment, we should be aware of the parallels between the use of technology to monitor and enforce work rates in platform work and in non-platform work, particularly in the home. An estimated 9.4 percent of non-platform workers used a specifically designed platform in 2021 to receive notification of the availability of work, with 18.7 percent using a platform to log when work was done.

As noted, there is widespread discussion of a great resignation, focused on the US. Unfortunately, the reality is very far from Reichs hyperbolic claim that workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.

In moments of economic distress, the number voluntarily leaving their jobs tends to fall, as workers seek to hold on to the work they have, while the number involuntarily leaving grows as firms close down or sack workers. These trends were reflected in the US as the pandemic began. Overall job separations rose between 2019 and 2020, driven by employers sacking workers, but the number of voluntary quits fell by 14 percent. The big spike in people voluntarily leaving came in autumn 2021, when the quit rate reached 3 percent in September, the highest figure since collection of this data began in 2000. There were rises in sectors such as manufacturing and education and health services. The most dramatic rise, though, was in leisure and hospitality, in which 6.4 percent of the workforce quit their job. However, we should not overstate the shift. Many of those quitting were people who held back from doing so earlier in the pandemic but felt able to switch jobs as recovery developed. In other words there was a backlog of people who might ordinarily have quit. The total number quitting between March 2020, when the pandemic began to hit, and September 2021, at the height of the great resignation, was 63,873,000. This is slightly lower than the number who quit between March 2018 and September 2019, which stood at 65,856,000.

There has been a small decline in the US labour participation rate, but the most significant reason for this is not younger people dropping out but older people retiring: As of August 2021, there were slightly over 2.4 million excess retirements due to Covid-19more than half of the 4.2 million people who left the labour force from the beginning of the pandemic to the second quarter of 2021. Some of this involved people bringing forward their retirement in fear of contracting Covid-19, but it also reflects the asset prices boom during the recession, due to factors such as quantitative easing, which makes retirement more attractive for some.

Similar patterns hold in Britain. There was a spike in people resigning from their job in autumn 2021, but many simply moved to another similar job. Some 57 percent of those moving jobs remained in the same industry, an increase compared to immediately before the pandemic. The most common reasons for leaving the labour force altogether were long-term illness or retirement.

By autumn 2021, there were record levels of job vacancies, concentrated in areas such as accommodation and food services, manufacturing and construction. However, this sat alongside an overall drop in demand for labour compared to the immediate pre-pandemic period (figure 5). In other words, what is happening here is part of a process of economic rebound from the disruption of the pandemic. Accommodation and food services, in particular, is a highly casualised sector that was largely shut down for long periods in Britain. Even though many of the workers in this sector were furloughed, this does not mean that they returned to the same job when furlough ended. Hence the surge in vacancies now.

Figure 5: Total jobs (1,000s), selected industries, seasonally adjusted

Source: Workforce jobs by industry data, Office for National Statistics

If recovery continues, the whip of economic necessity will likely force workers who have dropped out of the workplace, particularly younger ones, to return. The fact that this adjustment can be prolonged and disruptive demonstrates a point that Marxists have frequently made: labour markets are complex and often recalcitrant institutions. The neoclassical fantasy in which supply and demand neatly adjust to smooth out the requirements of capital is just thata fantasy. However, a long-term shift in the position of labour is unlikely without a higher degree of struggle by workers. Market mechanisms cannot substitute for this.

The ability of some groups of employees to leverage higher wages in the immediate future is unlikely to counteract the other issue facing workers during the recovery from the recessionthe surging cost of living (figure 6).

Figure 6: Consumer price index before and during the pandemic

Source: Monthly Wages and Salaries Survey data from the Office for National Statistics.

Mainstream debate on inflation has polarised between team transitory, who think the inflation is a short-term response to the pandemic, and team permanent, who think that inflation is now more deeply embedded and here for the long term. The debate can run and run, because, as London School of Economics professor Charles Goodhart points out: We have no general theory of inflation. Two established mainstream theoriesthe monetarist theory that inflation is a result of too much money chasing too few goods and the Phillips Curve theory that predicts a trade off between inflation and employmentare both discredited.

Even within Marxist political economy, more work is required to develop a compelling theory of inflation. This is not the place to attempt to provide such a theory. However, broadly speaking, inflation depends on the interrelation between value creation through the expenditure of labour power, the creation of money (primarily through the credit system), and the relationship between capital accumulation and profit rates. Vast amounts of money have been created through quantitative easing since the 2008 recession, and this certainly drove asset price inflation in the financial sector, but we did not witness a surge in the cost of living like the present one. However, if money is injected into the expansion of production but the value of the goods produced and sold is insufficient to mop up all this new money, it is possible for inflation to arise, either through firms raising prices to prop up faltering profitability or as banks continually refinance to allow them to continue their activities through monetary creation. As Anwar Shaikh points out, this is more likely to lead to inflation when the rate of profit is declining but the rate of accumulation has not fallen accordingly, thus sustaining overall demand levels.

However, the pattern in countries such as the US and Britain since the 1990s has tended to be for the rate of accumulation to decline in line with profit rates. Of course, if states embark on a massive programme of investment financed by money created by central banks, there is always the potential for inflation, but so far there is little evidence that this occurring on a sufficient scale. The rise in inflation we are seeing today is more likely a result of the restoration of previous levels of demand in conditions of dislocation and disruption to supply chains and labour markets generated by the pandemic. This has been exacerbated by a lack of investment in oil and gas production, combined with geopolitical tensions, which has pushed up energy prices as demand has rebounded.

If this is correct, inflation is likely to return to lower levels. Indeed, the greater danger may be an overreaction by central banks, in which a rise in interest rates chokes off the delicate recovery altogether.

However, saying that inflation will probably ebb is hardly reassuring to workers. Short term, in this context, can mean months of pain. Workers have to eat and heat their homes now, not in some hypothetical future. Moreover, the rise in the cost of living comes after a decade of stagnating real wages (figure 7). It is absolutely right for workers to demand a pay rise. There have been some important strikes in recent monthsnotably those by university staffand a smattering of victories, particular by workers in transport and logistics, either through threatening or taking industrial action. The recently elected leader of the Unite union, Sharon Graham, is quite right to point out that anything below a 6 percent pay rise is a pay cut. However, much more could be done by the trade union leaders to translate growing discontent among workers into action. In the absence of this, or any lead from the still rightward moving Labour Party leadership of Keir Starmer, socialists will have to do what they can to channel the anger of workers into sustained and collective struggle.

Figure 7: Real Average Weekly Earnings (2015 s)

Source: Office for National Statistics data.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Readers Guide to Marxs Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

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Athow, Jonathan, 2021, Far from Average: How Covid-19 has Impacted the Average Weekly Earnings Data, Office for National Statistics blog (15 July), https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/07/15/far-from-average-how-covid-19-has-impacted-the-average-weekly-earnings-data

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Branded as Samajwadi Attar, and bottled in red and green glass, the perfume has been made from 22 natural scents. The box comes with a picture of Akhilesh Yadav, with the Samajwadi Partys election symbol on it. (Photo: India Today)

Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav has launched a perfume to attract voters to the party in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. Branded as Samajwadi Attar, and bottled in red and green glass, the perfume has been made from 22 natural scents.

The scent will have its magic in 2022 [polls], Akhilesh Yadav said on Tuesday. Uttar Pradesh is due for assembly polls in February-March next year.

The box of the perfume comes with a picture of Akhilesh Yadav, with the Samajwadi Partys election symbol on it. The Samajwadi Party leader from Kannauj and Uttar Pradesh MLC Pushpraj Jain inaugurated the Samajwadi Attar.

Jain said that when people will use the perfume, they would smell "socialism" in it. "Samajwadi perfume will end hate in 2022," Jain said.

This is not the first time the party has launched a perfume. In 2016, Akhilesh Yadav had reportedly launched a range of perfumes named 'Samajwadi Sugandh' to mark four years of his party government in the state.

The perfume was made of four fragrances, with each bottle capturing the fragrance of four different citiesAgra, Lucknow, Varanasi and Kannauj.

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