By Daniel Tarade (first published by the Municipal Socialist Alliance on Jan. 15, 2023)

On the first Monday of 2023, Jan. 9, the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB) held a special meeting to discuss and vote upon a proposed $48.3 million CAD increase to the Toronto Police Services (TPS) operating budget in 2023, which represents a 4.3% increase over the bloated 2022 operating budget. Like in most Canadian cities, TPS takes up the  biggest slice of the annual city budget at 22%. But by pushing a narrative that the city is increasingly beset by violent crime AND that the best solution is more police, Mayor John Tory and the City of Toronto keep throwing more at TPS instead of putting money towards our schools, public transit, daycare, and more. 

The Farce of “Civilian Oversight” at the TPSB

The TPSB ostensibly functions as a civilian oversight mechanism and “after consultation with the Chief of Police, [provides] overall objectives and priorities for the provision of police services.” This seven-person body comprises two city councilors, three members of the public appointed by the province of Ontario, one appointed by city council, and the mayor of Toronto or their designate. Mayor John Tory served on this board between December 2, 2014 and November 23, 2022. 

Despite the recent absence of Mayor John Tory from the TPSB, he still steers the ship. At a press conference on Jan. 3, 2022, John Tory announced the “investments we will be making.”[emphasis mine] Among these investments? A $48.3 million increase in the TPS operating budget. 

John Tory clearly embraces the “strong mayor” powers bestowed by Premier Doug Ford and Bill 3 (“Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act, 2022”). Not only does John Tory now possess powers to veto a city council majority or empower a city council minority, as denounced in a recent MSA press release, he also dictates the TPS budget despite no longer sitting on its “oversight” board. 

Public Consultation just a Formality at the Toronto Police Budget Hearing

The public is told that the TPSB provides public accountability over the TPS, but that cannot be further from the truth. The one opportunity for public feedback on this proposed budget hike (as opposed to anecdotal stories supposedly shared with the mayor and city councilors behind closed doors by residents demanding more police) came at a special TPSB meeting on Monday, Jan. 9 at 9:30 a.m.

By design, this special meeting excluded the masses of workers and oppressed people. 

In discussing the proposed 2023 budget at a special meeting, the TPSB skirted its own procedural by-laws, particularly section 8.6, which states that the “main public agenda for regular board meetings will be posted on the Board’s website no later than five (5) clear Business Days prior to the Board meeting.” With John Tory’s budget announcement coming on Jan. 3, the TPSB only provided three clear business days, but procedural by-laws designed to increase public participation do not apply to special meetings, which members of the TPSB can call at any time on 24-hour’s notice. 

Watch a deputant lead off this special meeting by criticizing this intentional move to block public intervention. [time-stamped video of TPSB special meeting]

The TPSB holds its meetings at the TPS headquarters (40 College Street), despite being tasked with oversight of the police and despite this location representing another barrier to participation by the most victimized people, including those attacked by the police themselves.

Attending TPSB meetings requires passing through security, possessions checked and body frisked. Speaking with other members of the public present on Jan. 9, profiling during these security checks is rampant. Not surprising given the TPS itself released a report this summer that concluded it operates in a systematically racist manner with racialized people being the victims of police violence more often than white people living in the city. 

The TPSB structurally disempowers the public in other ways too.

The special meeting of the TPSB took place at the same time that the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) Board held a special meeting to adopt their 2023 budget, which included money for twenty-five new Special Constables. Special Constables also patrol university campuses (University of Toronto recently rebranded its Special Constables as “campus safety”) and Toronto Community Housing (TCH). The TBSP grants these Special Constables are granted enhanced authority equivalent to TPS officers while not being counted as such. Remember this when the TPS argues the ratio of police to civilians is too low.

Workers and Oppressed Peoples Fight Back against the Capitalist Class 

The TBSP went through the motions and listened to dozens of deputations given by workers and oppressed people living in Toronto, who demanded that the police not receive a budget increase and that the money instead be put towards the root of violence — poverty and underfunded communities. 

Demond Cole, a prominent abolitionist activist, set the tone for the public deputations, by speaking the name of Taresh Bobby Ramroop, whose death in Oct. 2022 was caused by TPS. Rather than give the police more money, Desmond Cole argued that “[the TPS} are already doing too much…killing too many people” before concluding that the police should be defunded and abolished.  

Dr. Suzanne Shoush pointed out that the city’s budget is a zero-sum game — if you give the police $48 million in new funding, that money must be taken from somewhere else. This money could instead go towards our schools, public transportation, daycare, and housing, which keep our communities safer than police. 

Butterfly GoPaul, an organizer with Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP), criticized copaganda (cop propaganda) that says giving the police more money will make our communities safer as “police don’t serve and protect black communities” but instead “criminalize vulnerable groups while protecting the rich and carrying out racist, white-supremacist policies and practices.” 

And Sean Inh, member of the Municipal Socialist Alliance (MSA) and organizer with Students Mobilizing Against Systemic Hardship (SMASH) UofT, concluded public deputations by arguing that the increased violence in schools, which John Tory exploits as justification for more cops, instead stems from years of underfunding and cannot be remedied by increased police surveillance. 

Indeed, the only four deputants who spoke in favour of the proposed TPS budget increase represented downtown Business Improvement Areas (BIAs). Instead of protecting lives, these representatives of the capitalist class decried damage to their private property and an increase in graffiti tags and public urination. They demanded more police to maintain “business continuity” and profit accumulation in their private hands without giving a care to the continued defunding of crucial public services like public housing, public transportation, libraries, and schools. 

The question of police funding is a question of class. They exist to “serve and protect” the wealthy and powerful on the one hand and criminalize workers and the oppressed on the other hand. Workers and oppressed people must organize to abolish the police. 

The police exist to protect the dominant class in society and represent a barrier to equity and justice for the masses. The MSA demands an immediate 50% cut to the police budget. That money would be much better spent on funding our schools, public transportation, parks, cycling infrastructure, daycare services, rent-geared-to-income housing, and other socially-constructive projects. And rather than the city’s budget being undemocratically decided by a strong mayor elected under a first-past-the-post electoral system, the people should have a direct say in a participatory budgeting system. 

Notwithstanding the immediate demand to defund the police by 50%, the MSA remains committed to the ultimate goal of defunding, disarming, and disbanding the police in favour of community-led initiatives. We keep us safe! 

by Matthew Kennedy (Guest Submission)

The lack of a unified healthcare operating system is an urgent issue facing the healthcare sector. Dr. Tam's recent report, "A Vision to Transform Canada’s Public Health System" (The Chief …, 2021) discusses how, "the national data landscape is fragmented across jurisdictions, governmental organizations, and community-level data owners” (p. 58, para. 2). Moreover, in a statement of the report, Dr. Tam says, "Our pandemic response was hindered in part, by significant gaps in our public health surveillance and data systems" (Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), 2021). These gaps in our healthcare systems are dangerous. If I were to hazard a guess - based on my experience working as a public health case/outbreak investigator from November 2020 to present in a long-term care/retirement home team – I would say we are currently 80% inefficient. I would even argue that it could be declared a logistical emergency (a type of internal crisis, a ‘code brown’).

A simple example of inefficiency is how often I copy/paste data from one place to another. I must perform this action X number of times per day because of our disparate, disconnected systems. If this type of delay occurred in other sectors, like an automotive assembly line, it would cost thousands of dollars per minute. Consequently, when staff are busiest, their efficiency is at its worst because they spend more time processing data from one place to another. It is an inverse relationship: when it is most important to be focusing on real-time data/events, users of the healthcare operating system are processing mundane tasks. Rationally, the healthcare system ought to invest in a single system to recover the costs of an inefficient one – and that means investing in a system that eliminates these mundane tasks with computer algorithms (similar to investing in an automotive assembly line to quickly and cheaply produce more vehicles).

Multiple logons are another example of discontinuity of care that impacts efficiency. I have 10+ logons working in public health. As a result, instead of unifying our disparate systems, we are asking a skilled workforce in short supply to manually communicate between them. Per the CNA (2009), registered nurses have shortages of 60,000 full time jobs and Winsa (2021) reports "Hospitals across the province currently have a vacancy rate of 10 to 12 per cent for nurses, according to the Ontario Nurses’ Association". Keep in mind, that shortfall is with the contemporary healthcare operating system. I argue that if we had a more efficient system, we could operate with 20 percent fewer staff (freeing up labour for bedside care) and complete 80 percent more work. One of the reasons the automotive sector transitioned to assembly lines was that it required fewer skilled labourers; investing in a computer algorithm that functions as an assembly line ought to produce greater efficiency with fewer professionals. 

The contemporary healthcare operating system cannot manually cope with the massive spread of viral pathogens and therefore needs to be unified to be competitive. Massive spread is typically referred to as ‘surges’. These surges are insurmountable because the input is greater than the output. In my sector, it takes 3 or more employees to process data for 1 client. Moreover, the maintenance of that data (quality control) may require even more people. If the ratio were 1 employee to >1 client, the odds would be more favourable  – ideally tens, hundreds, or thousands of times more favourable. 

In order to be competitive, the healthcare system must overcome its complacency. When healthcare systems were first implemented, they worked in isolation – and at the time that may have been sufficient. Present day however, it is neglectful for provincial, federal, and local systems to not integrate their care. By definition, using separate systems for electronic health records is to not be integrated. The healthcare sector needs to respond to its apathy and it needs to begin with simple steps, like calling a code brown. The larger step is overcoming the complacency of fragmentation which has long been endemic to the healthcare sector.

  When the spread of SARS-CoV-2 reached a precipice, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO; 2022), Dr. Ghebreyesus, declared a pandemic and cited alarming levels of spread, severity, and inaction in a situation assessment. Now the healthcare system is on a precipice and needs to raise awareness of the impossibilities that lay ahead of it by calling a code brown. Such a message should communicate that homeostasis of the healthcare system is affected by the efficiency of computer algorithms, and that a timeline for correcting it is to be established by the person calling the code. 

*The above is the writer’s personal opinion and does not reflect that of any public health or healthcare institution.

 References

CNA. (2009). Tested Solutions for Eliminating Canada’s Registered Nurse Shortage. Retrieved from https://hl-prod-ca-oc-download.s3-ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/CNA/2f975e7e-4a40-45ca-863c-5ebf0a138d5e/UploadedImages/documents/RN_Highlights_e.pdf

Public Health Agency of Canada. (2021). Statement from the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada on the CPHO Annual Report 2021: A Vision to Transform Canada’s Public Health System. Retrieved from https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/news/2021/12/statement-from-the-chief-public-health-officer-of-canada-on-the-cpho-annual-report-2021-a-vision-to-transform-canadas-public-health-system.html

The Chief Public Health Officer of Canada’s Report on the State of Public Health in Canada. (2021). A Vision to TRANSFORM Canada’s Public Health System. Retrieved from https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/documents/corporate/publications/chief-public-health-officer-reports-state-public-health-canada/state-public-health-canada-2021/cpho-report-eng.pdf

WHO. (2022). WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 - 11 March 2020. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020

Winsa, P. (2021). An Ontario nursing shortage has been predicted for years. Now, it’s turned into a ‘mega crisis’. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/09/26/an-ontario-nursing-shortage-has-been-predicted-for-years-now-its-turned-into-a-mega-crisis.html

By Adam Sakiyama and Daniel Tarade (first published by Socialist Action on Jan. 26, 2023)

Well folks, he’s done it again. Ontario Premier Doug Ford retrieved the major tool in his toolbox: privatization. This time, Ford brandishes privatization to hammer on the nail that is the province’s healthcare system. As reported by the CBC last week, “Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones are planning to make an announcement next week on expanding the number and range of surgeries performed in independent health facilities outside of hospitals.” Independent health facilities are generally for-profit clinics operated by the private owners.

Ontario’s Conservative government first proposes to expand the number of cataract surgeries to be performed at independent facilities, followed by other “non-urgent, low-risk and minimally invasive” procedures. By 2024, private clinics will be allowed to even perform hip and knee replacement surgeries. The expansion of private healthcare represents a dangerous attack on socialized medicine and the tenet that everyone deserves access to quality healthcare independent of their ability to pay for it. 

While Ford argues that individuals will be able access private clinics without paying out of pocket (the government promises to pay these costs just as it pays for publicly-owned clinics), healthcare advocates make clear that this move further erodes public health care. 

One danger with a mixed public-private healthcare system is that for-profit clinics focus almost entirely on “lighter-care profitable patients.” Those who need complex care will have to rely on publicly-owned healthcare institutions, who cannot turn away “less-profitable” patients, and will suffer the most, under our under-resourced, over-burdened system. Remember, Ford’s government will be giving millions directly to for-profit clinics, which is money that otherwise would go to our public system. As more money is put into private clinics, the most vulnerable among us, who cannot access private clinics, will be left with an even more underfunded public system.

Another massive issue with for-profit clinics is that in addition to siphoning money away from our public system, they also siphon away staff. Investment into private clinics leads to greater under-staffing in our public institutions as both private and public sectors seek to hire the same workers. We see this at play with our mixed public-private mental healthcare system. A resident in Ontario can see a psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker for free if they are offered in government-funded hospitals, clinics or agencies, but with a lack of funds for public mental healthcare, most practitioners operate in the for-profit sphere, where they can pick and choose the most-stable, least-complex, and wealthiest clients while the rest of us are left waiting months for access to public services. The same reality awaits all of us if we continue to expand private healthcare. 

We must contend with the obvious contradiction in for-profit healthcare. A for-profit corporation prioritizes profit accumulation, above all. Whether providing healthcare or selling luxury watches, every for-profit corporation treats their business as a profit-generating machine. While the masses of workers and oppressed people generally agree that ill people should not be gouged by greedy corporations, the Ford Conservative government clearly condones gouging. A December 2021 report from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario found that “the Ministry [of Health] has no oversight mechanism to prevent patients from being charged inappropriately for publicly-funded surgeries.” The Auditor General found that for-profit clinics “misinformed [patients] of their right to receive standard cataract surgery free of charge through OHIP,” which led to manipulative up-selling and extra charges. For a private clinic, up-selling of medically unnecessary procedures and services represents another avenue to bolster the bottom line — profit in their pocket. Anything beyond profit is secondary, which constitutes a violation of the basic oath each doctor takes to “first, do no harm.” All procedures come with some risk and if a procedure is not necessary outside of its ability to generate profit for a corporation, then this up-selling is clearly at odds with basic principles of medical practice. 

In Ontario, we see many examples that prove profit matters more to for-profit healthcare providers than the health and even life of their patients. The Ontario Science Table released a report in January 2021 showing that for profit long-term care (LTC) homes had Covid-19 outbreaks with nearly twice as many residents infected and 78% more resident deaths compared with non-profit LTC homes. Both for-profit and publicly-owned non-profit LTC homes charge residents the same fee and receive the same financial support from the government. So why do for-profit homes see their residents die at a higher rate, especially during Covid-19? To maximize profits, they cut costs. For example, even though Ontario provides a fixed per diem of $103.88 per resident for nursing and personal care to both for-profit and publicly-owned non-profit LTC homes, for-profit corporations pay their healthcare workers less and hire disproportionately more casual and part-time staff to avoid paying benefits. This results in residents at for-profit LTC homes receiving fewer hours of daily care than those at non-profit LTC homes. As the Ontario Health Coalition notes, “for-profit facilities have fewer services and provide lower comfort and security, which increases residents’ stress levels.” Despite equal public funding for both for-profit and non-profit LTC homes, the former takes some of that cash and puts it into their pockets while the latter puts everything towards care for residents. 

Let us be clear: healthcare is a fundamental human right. Any move to restrict access to healthcare on the basis of individual wealth is exclusionary and a form of class warfare. Privatization of healthcare only serves to further widen the societal gap between the capitalist and lower classes. It disproportionately harms the most vulnerable among us.

The Ontario Government should not look to profitability as a motivator for funding public services. There are critical supports an individual needs to participate in a happy, healthy society. Healthcare is a primary one.

If Ford is truly interested in ameliorating the province’s healthcare crisis then the funds he’s willing to invest in private for-profit clinics should go towards supporting the public healthcare workers who were already struggling, rather than letting them drown. We need to properly invest in our public healthcare system. Not only will funding our public healthcare system cost less than subsidizing for-profit care, it will also result in better care and healthier communities. 

By Daniel Tarade (first published by Socialist Action on Nov. 21, 2022)

On Nov. 10, Eli Lilly, one of three pharmaceutical companies that collectively dominate the global insulin market, tweeted out, “we are excited to announce that insulin is free now.” With the adorned blue check, normally an indicator of a verified celebrity or corporate twitter account, the announcement went semi-viral. Eli Lilly’s stock price tumbled and many online laughed at how Twitter seemed to be imploding after a few short weeks with Elon Musk at the helm. But when one looks just slightly past the weeds of trolls and memes, contradictions inherent to capitalism smack you straight in the face.

Shortly after purchasing Twitter and stepping into the CEO role, Elon Musk announced that anybody could purchase a blue check for $8 a month as part of a new subscription service called Twitter Blue. While Musk hoped this decision would increase revenue, others saw an opportunity to troll.

Indeed, without the need to verify one’s identity, many began setting up fake-but-verified accounts with the goal of damaging corporate brands. In rapid order, a Nintendo clone tweeted out obscene photos of their characters and a verified Pope Francis began hocking $8 a month indulgences. Others tried to more closely impersonate corporations and aimed to tank stock prices with the announcement of news that while great for the many would spell disaster for shareholders.

Enter Eli Lilly.  

You see, while free insulin would be an absolute godsend for the millions of diabetics who depend on this life-sustaining medication, the shareholders that collectively own Eli Lilly would much prefer the billions in profit made by taking advantage of the disabled.  

In the immediate aftermath of the fake Eli Lilly tweet, stock in the real Eli Lilly fell by approx. 6% from $368.36 to $346.36 per share — this represents $15 billion being wiped from their market cap. Even after the fake Eli Lilly account went private and the real Eli Lilly account clarified that it will not be providing insulin for free, the stock did not fully rebound, remaining at $352.30 per share on Friday, Nov. 11. The two other pharmaceutical companies that produce insulin, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, saw the values of their shares tumble by 3.5%.

Did Twitter Blue tweet just cost Eli Lilly $LLY billions?

Yes. pic.twitter.com/w4RtJwgCVK

— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) November 11, 2022

Eli Lilly was not the only heavyweight targeted either. A fake-but-verified Lockheed Martin account tweeted out they “will begin halting all weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States until further investigation into their record of human rights abuses.” Just like Eli Lilly, shares in Lockheed Martin dropped 5.5% in the immediate aftermath of the tweet, an inversion of the predictable (and cynical) increase in weapons manufacturer stock prices following the announcement of military operations.

Twitter Blue erased a few billion in market cap for Lockheed Martin pic.twitter.com/RsMBfRyhO1

— litquidity (@litcapital) November 11, 2022

What insight does this give us into capitalism, especially the monopoly capitalism that defines this late-stage epoch?

It reveals, plain for all to see, that capitalism prioritizes wealth accumulation in the hands of a small number of shareholders, bankers, and CEOs. Those who own Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi did not contribute to the discovery of insulin but rather they own the factories that produce insulin. Those three companies control 100% of the U.S. insulin market and 90% of the global market. Together, they collude to drive up insulin prices so that they all make more profit.

The announcement that one of these three partners in monopoly would do the right thing and eliminate financial barriers to accessing this life-sustaining medication represented a horrible business decision. The 0.1% who dominate the global market do not make decisions to advance technology or improve the lives of workers and consumers — they only care about how much wealth they can extract from workers and consumers.

The entirety of the capitalist economy is a zero-sum game. What’s good for the capitalist class is bad for the working and oppressed classes. Every dollar in profit accumulated in an off-shore bank account represents a dollar stolen from workers; a dollar pilfered from the masses by privatizing and destroying our collective ecosystems.

While private ownership of the means of production means that a handful of wealthy elite further enrich themselves by exploiting the needs of the masses, collective ownership represents a path towards an equitable society — where the needs of the many come before the riches of the few.

Recall that in 1921, a team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, and John Macleod successfully purified insulin and sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1 to ensure all people with diabetes would be able to afford the life-saving treatment. The University of Toronto’s Connaught Labs itself produced and distributed the drug at this cost in Canada for until the Brian Mulroney Progressive-Conservative government privatized the Connaught Labs in 1986.

The capitalist mode of production measures success by one measure — profit earned. Yet in medicine, in housing, in transportation, the most equitable, sustainable, and life-affirming choices we can make do not make a handful of people wealthy beyond wildest imagination but address real human needs — access to nutritious food, accessible shelter, leisure time, and vibrant communities. This represents the central contradiction in capitalism.

Free transit is great for the masses but not the capitalists who make billions by selling us inefficient and polluting cars.

Free and accessible housing is great for the masses but awful for the tycoons of industry who own most shelters and make billions by selling at inflated prices.  

Free insulin is great for the masses but a terrible blow for the leeches who sell this essential medicine at 1000-fold markup.

The capitalist class understands clearly their class interests. It’s time for the working class to organize just as strongly around our own class interests.

Content warning: Discussion of anxiety, depression, and suicide.

By Daniel Tarade

On college and university campuses across the country, students face a mounting mental health crisis. This is no secret, not to the administration and certainly not to students. In fact, I first heard of the troubling statistics collected by the 2016 National College Health Assessment survey when referenced by University of Toronto President Meric Gertler in a campus-wide email distributed following the third student death by suicide on-campus during the 2018-2019 school year.

In finally addressing the crisis, Meric Gertler highlighted that;

•  46 per cent of Ontario post-secondary students reported feeling so depressed in the previous year that it was difficult to function

• 65 per cent reported experiencing overwhelming anxiety in the previous year

• 2.2 per cent reported a suicide attempt within the previous year

With numbers this alarming, and only getting worse, you would think that our school president would enact serious changes. Nope. The administration struck a new committee and pledged to lobby the provincial government for more resources. Despite an endowment fund of over $2 billion, U of T committed no financial resources to ensuring timely access to mental health care, and ignored even the most basic demands, like the installation of barriers at the site of two suicides on campus. When a third student died of suicide at the same site less than six months later, the hands of University of Toronto administration became stained with blood.

In light of bureaucratic shiftiness and deflection and neglect, the citation of such grave statistics on the mental health crisis by top administrators appeared an attempt at normalizing the crisis. That students everywhere struggle. That mental illness emanates entirely from one’s own neurochemistry and genes. That the structure and hierarchy entrenched on campuses has nothing to do with the increasing rates of mental anguish and suicide.

Fucking bullshit.  

So let’s explore the systems and structures that brought about the mental health crisis. Only by viewing the flux of material conditions over time do we appreciate the battle lines. Only when armed with a historical view can students walk the path to equitable and democratic schools.

In the early 1990s, Canada and other western countries entered a recession. With mounting debt, the capitalist class shouted ‘balance the budget.’ And who paid down the debt? Not the capitalist class. No, the burden fell squarely on the shoulders of the working class, who suffered a massive austerity agenda under a federal Liberal majority government and a provincial Conservative majority government. In this environment, right-wing demagogue and Premier of Ontario Mike Harris slashed funding for postsecondary schools.

As per The Walrus, “Ontario postsecondary funding … fell by 21 percent during the ’90s while enrolment increased by 8 percent.” At the the same time, tuition fees spiked. In particular, the tories deregulated tuition fees for graduate and professional programs, which inflated by over 500% in some instances. Despite increasing tuition costs, there was no compensatory increase in Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) loans and new restrictions actually led to a decrease in the number of students receiving financial support.

If the Mike Harris strategy sounds familiar, you are not alone. For many, Premier Doug Ford signalled an unwelcome déjà vu. The Ford government cut both the number of OSAP grants and the six-month interest-free grace period for OSAP loans. Free tuition for poor students? Scrapped. And tightening the thumb screws, Ford outlawed mandatory student fees for essential services with his Student Choice Initiative (SCI). Much like “Right to Work” legislation, which undermines union solidarity, the SCI erodes the capacity for student organizing. In a victory for the student movement, however, the Canadian Federation of Students launched a successful legal challenge that overturned this anti-student law.

And don’t assume that the provincial Liberal party is a friend of students. The education budget never recovered after the Mike Harris government, despite the Liberals being in power between 2003 and 2018. Neither capitalist party values students or education intrinsically but only as commodities.

When public institutions are chronically-underfunded, administrators begin running schools and healthcare like a business. After all, the goal of education cuts is a manufactured crisis in the public postsecondary system that paves the road for privatization and further capitalist exploitation. And this is not some outrageous conspiratorial hollering. In 1995, Minister of Education and Training John Snobelen was recorded saying, “Yeah, we need to invent a crisis… Creating a useful crisis is what part of this will be about."

Under Harris, the Tories passed the Post-secondary Education Choice and Excellence Act, which achieved the first steps in this privatization agenda by allowing private colleges and universities to confer degrees. As we see with for-profit nursing homes, which suffered 78% more Covid-19 deaths than their non-profit counterparts, students and staff will suffer even more under the outright privatization of schools, all while shareholders leech profits.

And we continue to see the corporatization of our public schools before our eyes. Tuition fees and enrolment increases while funding for services stagnates or gets cut. Universities pay millions to those managing their investment portfolios and refuse to divest from fossil fuel companies. As Ford’s term continues, more and more college and university funding gets tied to the ‘performance’ and ‘outcome’ of students. As a result, Laurentian University already declared bankruptcy due to Ford’s austerity agenda.

With less and less government support, many universities and colleges attempt to account for budgetary shortfalls by targeting international students, whose tuition is not regulated. Between 2009 and 2017, the number of international students doubled in Canada. And tuition fees during this period increased twice as quickly for international students when compared to domestic students. In a BBC interview, U of T President Meric Gertler admitted that he increased tuition fees to boost U of T’s image and garner more interest from international students. Mel Broitman, a private recruiter who worked for the University of Windsor and other Canadian postsecondary institutions, says “international students are not being treated fairly but are being exploited for their money at the expense of their education.” The immigrant advocacy group Migrante Alberta uncovered that agents lied to eighty students enrolled at private college in Edmonton about their prospects of obtaining a work permit after graduating. No surprise that international students are speaking out and rejecting their “cash cow” status.

Unsurprisingly, the neo-liberal austerity agenda hurts students. It creates stress and provokes anxiety and depression. A third of students enrolled at universities and colleges in the Greater Hamilton and Toronto areas commute more than hour each way. In 2015, half of all students graduated from college or university with student debt, with only a third of indebted students paying off their loans within three years. Student debt now contributes to one in six bankruptcies in Ontario. Roughly four percent of postsecondary students living in Canada experience some kind of homelessness. More live in de facto slums or with abusive partners just to find some sort of shelter. And not all students suffer equally. Disabled students, queer students, racialized students, and international students face unique institutional barriers and violence that leaves them more vulnerable to deteriorating mental health.

These numbers and these experiences matter when attempting to understand the why of the mental health crisis. The administration instead chooses to play dumb whenever they peddle “student resiliency” or yoga as a solution. And administrators reveal their ghoulishness when they attempt to hide the harm they wrought. They embrace draconian strategies like the University Mandated Leave of Absence Policy (UMLAP). They lean on the campus police to respond to those in crisis, whose preferred strategy appears to be handcuffing students.

Legitimate and well-reasoned demands by students get ignored. Teachers and staff instead are abandoned on the front lines, entirely ill-equipped to deal with rampant mental illness, sexual assault, and poverty. Competition is baked into the institutional pedagogy, which remains focused on branding and image rather than helping students in their academic journey.

Where do students go from here?

Unlike many workers, students belong to unions. Unfortunately, student unions degenerate because of craven opportunism. And well-meaning activists elected to student unions get stalled out by the school bureaucracy while others lack the historical and material framework needed to identify where the battle must be fought. Major reforms will not be won in private boardroom meetings. They will only be won when students identify themselves as being in opposition to the administration and the puppeteering provincial government and take to the streets. Escalating and united actions, up to and including tuition strikes and mass walkouts are needed to raise consciousness among students and win demands. Students need to link up with the broader union and activist movements because our struggles are combined.

Building a revolutionary student movement presents a difficult but worthwhile challenge. With seasoned student activists graduating or dropping out every year, institutional memory represents a serious hurdle. And like the broader working class, consciousness of society’s class nature remains low. A revolutionary student organization needs to first connect student-specific struggles to broader struggles and emphasize the ultimate truth that capitalism needs to be dismantled and replaced by a democratic worker’s society before human emancipation can be achieved.

Students cannot only be for free tuition. They must also fight for the end of Israeli apartheid.

Students cannot only be for accessible counselling. They must also fight for Indigenous self-determination.

Students cannot only be for mandatory equity training for staff. They must also fight fascism, both on- and off-campus.

To this end, Socialist Action and independents recently founded Students Mobilizing Against Systemic Hardship (SMASH). Currently, only a handful of comrades belong to SMASH, primarily situated at the University of Toronto, but we aim to build this movement as a United Front. We invite any groups and individuals who study or work on campus that agree with the following demands to join SMASH and help build the revolution!

SMASH demands the following:

1. Free tuition for all students

2. Subsidized public transportation for all students

3. A living wage for all graduate students and all other students whose labour the university relies upon to function

4. A living wage for all University of Toronto Staff

5. Cops off campus

6. 24-hour counselling during midterms and exam season

7. Repeal the university-mandated leave of absence program

8. Mandatory sexual violence education and preventation presentation during orientation week; increase awareness about and access to resources about sexual violence

9. Establish culturally appropriate and representative counselling and mental health services on the U of T campus for addressing the mental, emotional, and psychological needs of racialized students

10. Establish mandatory equity training for all faculty, students, governors, and all other administrative bodies.

11.  Immediate divestment from any fossil fuel companies; Immediate divestment from any infrastructure projects that violate UNDRIP, like the Site C Dam and the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline

12. Boycott, divestment, and sanction of all corporations profiting from Israeli apartheid

13. Nothing About Us Without Us; That every committee or working group struck by the University to address student issues be comprised of at least 50%+1 student representatives

This list of demands is not exhaustive. No group of five or ten students can craft a perfect platform. But by connecting our collective struggles, we aim to grow and fight like hell!

Want to read more about the mental health crisis?

The Intersection of the Mental Health Crisis with Covid-19: "Injury on the tracks"

A Morbid Toronto Ritual - "Injury at Track Level"

Intervening in Suicide at a Societal Level; Lessons from Sri Lanka

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As per The Varsity:

Warning signs of suicide include:

• Talking about wanting to die

• Looking for a way to kill oneself

• Talking about feeling hopeless or having no purpose

• Talking about feeling trapped or being in unbearable pain

• Talking about being a burden to others

• Increasing use of alcohol or drugs

• Acting anxious, agitated, or recklessly

• Sleeping too little or too much

• Withdrawing or feeling isolated

• Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge

• Displaying extreme mood swings

The more of these signs a person shows, the greater the risk. If you suspect someone you know may be contemplating suicide, you should talk to them, according to the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.

By Daniel Tarade

Like all capitalist-owned corporations, the priority of pharmaceutical companies starts and stops with shareholder profits. Rip the mask off of Pfizer, Scooby Doo-style, and you find the same motivation that exists just under the surface of Exxon-mobil, Monsanto, Amazon, and Halliburton. The capitalists that own Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca do not provide a service. No, they hold essential services hostage while they shake down the working class. If the COVID-19 pandemic has a silver-lining, it is that workers may realize the need for democratic control over essential industries. This includes big pharma. Socialist Action and other revolutionary groups call for the immediate nationalization and democratization of the pharmaceutical industry. Put our collective scientific knowledge to work for humanity, not for shareholder greed!

Some may argue that the successful design and testing of multiple vaccine formulations in under one year by scientists employed by private biotech companies proves the virtue of capitalist control. According to the old saying, without competition and a profit motive, no technological advance can be made. Of course this is bunk. From insulin to penicillin to the polio vaccine, remarkable advances only require human need and control over the means of production. The fact that many vaccines and antibiotics emerged from non-profit academic institutions reveals an innate desire of people to improve life, absent the profit motive.

Instead, the privatization of pharmaceutical companies and the subordination of academia — and its intellectual contributions — to the profit motive stifles medical and technological advancement. Pharmaceutical companies in Canada spend roughly an equal amount on marketing their drugs (sales representatives, taking out ads in journals, etc) as they do on research and development.[i] Among Canadian pharmaceutical companies, the percentage of sales reinvested into research dwindled from 11.7% in 1995 to only 4.0% in 2018 (see table 14). Of the sixty-one drugs patented in Canada in 2018, only one qualified as a breakthrough while the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board deemed fifty-six new drugs to be of little to no improvement (see figure 1). While roughly half of all drugs fail during late-stage clinical development, almost a quarter fail due to “commercial” reasons.[ii] Adding injury to insult, companies publish the clinical trial results for fewer than 10% of these commercially non-viable drugs.[ii] At the commanding heights of pharmaceutical research and production, the commercial interests of a few wealthy capitalists matters beyond all else.

Under capitalism, pharmaceutical companies develop strategies around maximizing profit — not based on helping patients. One strategy involves manipulating intellectual property. Because owning a patent means being able to set whatever price you want, pharma companies put most of their resources on tweaking existing drugs so they extend their patents. We call this evergreening.[iii] A delightful term for an evil process. Another strategy to maintain control involves buying up startups for the sole purpose of preventing future competition. Researchers from the London Business School estimate that between five and seven percent of startup acquisitions meet the definition of a “killer acquisition.”[iv]

If pharma prioritizes evergreening and marketing and killing innovation, then we must ask an important followup question: what does pharma neglect? If you want an easy way to answer that question, just begin naming the most essential medicines discovered over the past century.

Since the 1950s, the number of pharmaceutical companies producing vaccines plummeted, leading to less innovation and a shortage of essential vaccines.[v] And don’t forget the rampant vaccine denialism. Hard to fault someone from espousing a healthy scepticism of the vulturous pharmaceutical industry.

Then there are the neglected tropical diseases and rare diseases. Diseases restricted to the so-called global south, like Chagas disease, comprise the former, and the latter designates diseases affecting fewer than one in two-thousand or so people. In both cases, the market does not appeal to investors, so human needs remain unfulfilled.

And despite the growing threat of mass antimicrobial resistance, only four of the top fifty pharmaceutical companies, by sales, operate an active antimicrobial drug discovery pipeline. Why? It is not profitable. Short courses of antibiotics for acute infections, or the development of vaccines for unpredictable pandemics, or new drugs for diseases that kill poor people are not as profitable as lifetime treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease. This is not a conspiracy; these companies are very open about it.

So what strategy do neo-liberal governments employ to combat these serious threats to human health? Financial incentivisation. Basically a lib way to describe throwing money at companies in hopes that they invest it in something useful. Examples include “Making Markets for Vaccines: A Practical Plan,” a report by the Global Health Policy Research Network and the Center for Global Development , which proposed the “AdvancedMarkets commitment”, where “donors would make a legally binding commitment to pay for a new vaccine if and when one is developed.” In their view, this strategy works because;

"Some people want to see medicines available at the lowest possible price, so that everyone who needs them can afford to use them. Some want industry to make a sufficient return on medicines to enable and encourage them to go on developing important new products. Many people have some sympathy with both points of view. The AdvancedMarkets commitment would resolve this trade-off both by ensuring that poor people get access to a vaccine they need, and by providing a return to the developer to encourage further innovation."

Neo-liberalism! Things happen as a side effect of making money!

Despite some well-intentioned people, pharma exerts its might when confronted with any attempt to put people first. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), founded in 2017, raised a billion in capital to incentivize private research into vaccines to fight potential epidemics “where market incentives fail.” [vi] Any serious stipulations burdened on awardees disappeared following a round of consultation with potential pharmaceutical partners. No longer would CEPI set the price of a potential vaccine so that poor countries could afford them. No longer would pharma companies be required to disclose all data pertaining to funded projects. Instead, the rich simply get richer off the public’s dime by selling vaccines back to us at a 100% markup.

And this is also happening during the current pandemic of COVID-19. In April, Oxford announced that it would donate the rights of its potential COVID-19 vaccine to any manufacturer. The promise stood until the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation conversed with them. Instead, Oxford licensed the vaccine to AstraZeneca in an exclusive deal with no price control. Same deal with the Moderna vaccine. First, the American government funded the project almost entirely to the tune of one billion dollars. Second, scientists working at the National Institutes of Health played a big part in designing the vaccine. And last, the same American government signed a contract to purchase 100 million doses for another billion-and-a-half. Public innovation and private profit on both sides of the pond.

And the failures of for-profit medicine don’t stop there. Once publicly-funded COVID-19 vaccines hit the market, wealthy nations outbid poor nations, as they are wont to do. Despite hoarding the world’s vaccine supply, Canada, USA, and Europe opposed any relaxation of international agreements that protect the patents on essential medicines. It’s not enough to sell vaccines for profit to rich countries, pharma won’t even share our their formulation with poor countries so they can make their own vaccine. With how things are going, researchers at Duke predict that those living in impoverished countries will not be vaccinated until 2024. Meanwhile, nearly half of Israeli citizens have been vaccinated so far. The key to success? A combination of outbidding other nations and denying vaccines to essential healthcare workers besieged in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not only are pharmaceutical companies bleeding us dry (profit margins above 50%!), they simultaneously bully the Canadian people for more subsidies and less taxation. And less regulation to boot. By owning the means of production, their leverage cannot be underestimated. Much like the ultimatum given by Novartis when India’s Supreme Court put a stop to their evergreening, Pfizer makes thinly-veiled threats about outsourcing jobs if Ottawa doesn’t liberalize their economy further.

Make no mistake in equating the existence of COVID-19 vaccines, that emerged from the private sector, with the usefulness or justification of for-profit medicine. Because working-class scientists designed and tested the successful vaccines, and we don’t even know their names. The capitalists who raked in all the profit merely let them have access to means of production. Not because a vaccine would help humanity, but because the market was big enough.

If the bottomline is profit, capitalist interests will only coincidentally align with working-class interests.

But with scientists in control, accountable to the public, society could focus efforts on improving lives. Only with a truly democratic research and manufacturing program would we research new antibiotics and new vaccines, and also ensure that everyone has access to clean water, healthy food, adequate time to sleep, safe working conditions, affordable housing, and free education. The best solutions are often the cheapest and least profitable – and thus invisible to neo-liberal eyes.

Reformism fails humanity. History shows that any gains won by the working class will be erased during subsequent waves of austerity. You can win single-payer health care only for the United Conservative Party of Alberta to reintroduce private health care after two recessions in a decade. The capitalists will retreat if pressured, but return persistently.

Now is the time for the working class to seize the means of pharmaceutical production. Only our interests reside with the masses. We are the masses. We sacrifice for our broader community. We organize to make food for our neighbours. We put in long hours to treat our sick and dying. We sing with our neighbours and bang pots and pans. They cut ‘hero pay’ from grocery store workers during a pandemic. They let our elders die preventable COVID-19 deaths. They ticket us for being homeless and kick us out of our parks.

Socialist Action demands the following;

That the government immediately expropriate all domestic pharmaceutical companies.

That Canada no longer honour drug patents, and instead produce generic medications at cost for all who need them.

That research and development of new drugs be brought under democratic control of doctors, pharmacists, scientists, patients and their advocates.

That federal investment into drug discovery and manufacturing be increased.

Decriminalize all drugs. Ensure access to safe-injection sites. Access to free abortion and contraception.

Provide universal and accessible medical care, dental care, mental health care, vision care, and pharmaceuticals for all living in Canada. Affordable housing, clean water, and food for all. Guarantee Indigenous people access to clean water, food, decent housing, and specialized centres for treating the after-effects of colonial violence.

[i] Lexchin, J. (2018). Pharmaceutical company spending on research and development and promotion in Canada, 2013-2016: a cohort analysis. Journal of pharmaceutical policy and practice, 11(1), 1-6.

[ii] Hwang, T. J., Carpenter, D., Lauffenburger, J. C., Wang, B., Franklin, J. M., & Kesselheim, A. S. (2016). Failure of investigational drugs in late-stage clinical development and publication of trial results. JAMA internal medicine, 176(12), 1826-1833.

[iii] Collier, R. (2013). Drug patents: the evergreening problem.

[iv] Cunningham, C., Ederer, F., & Ma, S. (2018). Killer acquisitions.

[v] Offit, P. A. (2005). Why are pharmaceutical companies gradually abandoning vaccines?. Health Affairs, 24(3), 622-630.

[vi] Huneycutt, B., Lurie, N., Rotenberg, S., Wilder, R., & Hatchett, R. (2020). Finding equipoise: CEPI revises its equitable access policy. Vaccine, 38(9), 2144-2148.

By Daniel Tarade

As the worst pandemic of the past century continues into another calendar year, I reflect on the lessons I learned. I previously highlighted how the profit motive not only fostered the conditions for new pandemic strains to jump into humans but also for cruise ships to sail and planes to take off and stores to remain open while hospitals overflow with the sick and dying. I realized that the austerity endemic in capitalist society gutted our publicly-funded health care system and outsourced manufacturing capacity, leaving us ill-prepared to respond to any healthcare emergency, let alone a pandemic. In our capitalist societies, corporations commodify even the basic necessities, like shelter, which resulted in the tragedy of mass evictions during a pandemic. The priorities of profit-driven society can be easily gleaned by any person viewing the news, where our politicians urge working-class people to not see their friends and family while refusing to acknowledge that the biggest threat we face in our day-to-day lives is going to work. But for all the sacrifice and isolation and illness and death burdened on the shoulders of the working class, we now begin mass immunization. From the very beginning, whether affronted by the conflicting #flattenthecurve or #herdimmunity messaging, vaccination remained coveted as the beginning of the end of the pandemic. So we made it. The endgame. Although hard-working scientists achieved the impossible by successfully designing and testing multiple vaccine formulations in under a year, class relations in our society continue to threaten mass immiseration and death. The prioritization of profit means a deadly second wave, botched vaccine distribution, and new variants of Sars-CoV-2 that threaten to undermine the all-eggs-in-one-basket vaccination approach.

The first tragedy is that while longterm care workers and residents, nurses and doctors begin getting vaccinated, the Canadian working class suffers a second wave even deadlier than the first. The deadliest day of the pandemic in Ontario occurred not in March, April, or May of 2020 but January 7, 2021, when officials announce eighty-nine more deaths along with 3519 new cases. As of Jan 13, 1674 are hospitalized with Covid-19, which is nearly 600 more than the peak of the 1st wave. Covid-19 patients now occupy a quarter of ICU beds in the province. Seventy-three Tendercare residents, a private longterm care facility in Scarborough, died since December. Morgues in Windsor and London, Ontario are full-up. So to is Windsor Regional Hospital, where up to twenty patients will be transferred to Chatham and Sarnia in the weeks ahead. By February, Covid-19 might just overtake all other diseases as top killer in Ontario.

If the conservative Ford government was simply unprepared in March, what is their excuse now?

Despite bringing cases down to only a handful during the summer, the Ontario provincial government ignored public health officials and epidemiologists by allowing schools, malls, gyms, bars, and restaurants to re-open. As cases began increasing, slowly at first, they remained content to react rather than act proactively. The foresight of public health officials appears spot on in hindsight. In Manitoba, provincial data shows that workplaces and retail stores drove community transmission during the beginning of the second wave.

Even now, despite more cases, more hospitalized, more ventilated, more dead than at any prior point, Ontario remains committed to the ‘lockdown-light’ approach. It took until Jan 14 for a second state of emergency to be put in place, but the “stay-at-home order” remains weak. Case in point, non-essential research labs, like those where I work, closed for four months in Spring 2020. Despite the current dire situation, I continue to hop on the subway and go to work. Hell, small businesses and big-box stores still sell non-essential goods, while regulations definitely favour the larger corporations. Our government officials and corporate leaders are not doing enough. The priority is business-as-usual and continued profit accumulation.

Despite scientists designing and testing vaccines in record time, the neoliberal governments of the world remain paralyzed. As Dr. Andrew Boozary tweeted, “we developed a vaccine for COVID19 before governments could ensure paid sick leave in a pandemic.” We see in real time the failure to meaningfully intervene in this crisis and prevent needless death. Instead, governmental officials are reduced to simply pleading with people to cutoff contact with friends and family while expected to still work and consume. Why? Because the most effective approach to dealing with a pandemic, shutting down all non-essential production and consumption, is off-limits. And even though our public health officials now possess the coveted vaccine tool, class relations threaten its effective use. As UK PM Boris Johnson stated so eloquently, it’s “a race against time” to vaccinate people.

We see the privileged capitalists and petty bourgeoisie shuttled to the front the vaccine line. At the Stanford Medical Center, medical residents protested being passed over in the vaccine line by executives and senior doctors, who do not work directly with patients. In Ontario, University Health Network employees, including those who do not see patients, were eligible for vaccination despite many frontline workers not being afforded the same opportunity. Members of Congress in the United States received the vaccine despite some intentionally misleading the public and claiming the pandemic was a hoax. In Canada, Conservative Party leader O’Toole and Premier Ford demagogue against the vaccination of vulnerable prisoners, who are actually human beings deserving of compassion, despite claims to the contrary.

Unfortunately, Canada cannot currently immunize all of its vulnerable people. It is necessary to explore why Canada lacks vaccine-production capacity. Mirroring an issue faced during the beginning of the pandemic, where we suffered a paucity of manufacturing capacity to produce sufficient masks and other PPE, we working-class people rely on our government to outbid other capitalist nations for essential supplies. Even if a Canadian company developed its own vaccine, it would be impossible to scale up. Even if a Canadian company developed a vaccine, we would still need to purchase vaccines from them at an inflated price. Despite scientists employed by Quebec-based Medicago working hard to produce a vaccine, the vast majority of the revenue would instead line the pockets of parasitic shareholders. Because that is exactly what happened in the US. American taxpayers funded the Moderna vaccine, which was co-developed by the National Institutes of Health, while top executives cashed in over $100 million in stocks. Analysts predict that Pfizer and Moderna shareholders will make billions in profit just from vaccine sales. The same systems enriching a handful of people also keeps frontline workers from receiving a vaccine.

There is an alternative. The University of Toronto used to operate the Connaught labs and manufactured vaccines and insulin for the public good. In the case of insulin, scientists sold the patent to U of T for $1 so that the life-saving medicine would be affordable for all diabetics. Further, the Connaught labs contributed greatly to the creation of a polio vaccine. But Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives sold the Connaught labs to Sanofi in the 1980s. Infectious disease expert Dr. Earl Brown recently blamed the privatization on “a poor business model…of not making so much profit.” This is just silly and highlights the reactionary nature of academia. Would we complain that our hospitals do not make enough profit (maybe I shouldn’t give Ford any ideas)? The Connaught labs existed to manufacture and distribute essential medicines, not to make a few shareholders wealthy. But privatization yielded a windfall for the government that in turn cut taxes for the capitalist class.

Today, despite the federal government providing one billion in medical research funding every year, our universities have no choice but to license any innovation to private pharmaceutical companies, who profit immensely and act as gatekeepers of what ought to be collective human knowledge.

But for all the working-class exploitation within Canada, imperial and colonial relationships abroad also need careful analysis. Within days of Pfizer announcing the successful results of its vaccine clinical trial, the wealthiest nations in the world outbid poor countries such that 85% of the most destitute people in the world have no access. But Ottawa is not content to simply outbid poorer nations. Led by South Africa and India, one-hundred low- and middle-income countries challenged an international agreement that protects the patents on essential medicines. If the World Trade Organization permits countries to manufacture their own generic Covid-19 vaccine, billions more people could be vaccinated. But Canada along with USA, Norway, and EU countries oppose such a measure while collectively hoarding the vast majority of available vaccine for themselves. Not only is this egregious action fundamentally colonial in nature, it is incredibly short-sited from an epidemiological perspective. Viruses do not respect national borders. 70% of Canadians can be vaccinated but a pandemic will rage globally if billions of people from the poorest countries remain vulnerable.

Another example of wanton colonialism, Israel refuses to provide vaccines for Palestinian healthcare workers despite pleas from the WHO. Their reasoning? They lack enough vaccines for their own citizens.

Under capitalism, our governments allow a pandemic to rage in order to allow continued exploitation of the working class. They accept that many will die in the short-term and simply hope that a vaccine will allow for a meaningful public health intervention before hospitals completely collapse; or the working class radicalizes too much and organizes.

Will the fingers-crossed approach work?

In the last several months, scientists identified several variants of Sars-Cov-2 that threaten to unravel the capitalist plan. If new variants can evade the immunity conferred by existing vaccines, we will be no closer to the resolution of this pandemic than we were at the beginning of 2020. Ironically, new strains emerge more rapidly under conditions of uncontrolled spread. Business-as-usual, under the auspices of building herd immunity, threatens to prolong the pandemic, a contradiction in keeping with the rule that short-term profits trump long-term losses. The capitalist class gambled on a vaccine and resultantly stacked the deck in the virus’ favour.

Let’s count off the three four variants. There is the mink variant, the UK variant, the South African variant, and the Japanese variant. They all contain mutations in the spike protein, found on the exterior of the virus. The spike protein plays a crucial role during both cellular infection and immune recognition. Thus, mutations in the spike protein may modulate infectivity and the efficacy of vaccines. While the mink variant appears to be contained, although at the cost of culling all seventeen-million mink in Denmark, the UK and South African variants not only remain in circulation but also spread more readily. The new variant whirling around the UK doubles every ten days rather than the more usual forty days. They now face their deadliest moments as hospital occupancy swells clear past that of the last wave. Yet the South African variant is most worrying. Not only is it more easily transmitted, but one of the mutations in the spike protein reasonably stands to impact the effectiveness of the vaccines currently available. Despite arriving at an end-game situation, the following months will reveal how close we truly are to a resolution.

It does not have to be like this. Some countries succeeded in stopping the spread of the virus. Life in the epicentre of Wuhan now resembles pre-Covid days. There is no secret to containment. All non-essential production must shut down while simultaneously providing for the needs of workers: provide full pay or otherwise cancel rent and utility payments while also providing food, shelter, and medicine. Essential workers need to be outfitted with proper PPE and deserve hazard pay. Socialist Action joins the call demanding ten paid sick days in Ontario. Manufacturing needs to be converted to making what is essential. We need mass testing, contact tracing, and vaccine research and production under workers control. Healthcare workers and vulnerable populations the world over ought be vaccinated first. No jumping the vaccine queue. This response is not possible under capitalism, which exists for the generation of profit and shareholder greed. Only a centrally-planned economy under democratic worker’s control can respond to the needs of humans. It is a distinct contradiction of capitalism that workers must sacrifice personal relations and freedoms while profit accumulation continues unabated. We cannot visit friends and family, the government places us under curfew, we risk our lives at work while corporate elites make record profits and vacation in the Caribbean. No longer! Those who make society run ought to run society! Workers of the world unite.

By Daniel Tarade

Based on remarks given during the Socialist Action Canada webcast entitled “Will the Pandemic Ever End?”

Just like a fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat, a pandemic requires a virus, susceptible people, and contact between the two. And just like how we cannot separate wildfires in California, Australia, or the Amazon from human-made climate change, the organization of our society impacts on all conditions required for the outbreak of new and deadly viruses. Pandemics are not simply a natural process. We need to address how the profit motive brings about zoonotic viruses. The answer to this question, and others like it, cuts to the heart of the contradictions innate within capitalism.

The narrative built around infectious agents is that they are natural. And that is obviously the case. But it is not simply a case of our scientists, our medicine, and our vaccines against their viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Because even though viruses are natural, they come from somewhere. All viruses that infect humans descend from a virus that didn’t. This is true because viruses predate multicellular organisms. And 70% of contagions jump directly from animals to humans (i.e. zoonotic).[i] When we look at the phylogeography of viruses, we reveal the ways our capitalist society constructs and destroys our environments, often in a way that creates the most perfect incubators for pandemic viruses and superbugs. So questions of political economy are as essential as any biological questions scientists may ask.

There are classical examples like workers being forced into slums during industrialization, which spread tuberculosis like wildfire among the malnourished. Remember that until the early 1900s, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in industrialized nations.[ii] Then there are examples like the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, where the virus hitched a ride with American troops deployed to fight in an imperial war. As deaths from influenza surpassed those from fighting, censored media outlets could not report on the pandemic for fear that it would hurt the war effort. Spanish news did report on the outbreak as they were neutral in the conflict, hence the Spanish Influenza moniker. Meanwhile, pleas from scientists and doctors stateside couldn’t stop cities like Philadelphia from holding war-bonds parades, which resulted in thousands of deaths.

In addition to imperial and corporate pressures that force people into contact, for-profit interests also create the breeding grounds from which new and deadly viruses emerge.

One recent example is the pandemic of H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Evolutionary biologist and marxist Rob Wallace argues that this strain ought to be called the NAFTA flu as it most likely originated on pig farm owned by the Smithfield corporation near the epicentre in Vera Cruz, Mexico.[iii] Traveling back in time, we find that the American-owned Smithfield began consolidating farms in Mexico in 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect. Like all free-trade agreements, NAFTA allows capital to cross borders with impunity while people fleeing violence and austerity cannot. Case in point, Smithfield set up shop in Mexico because environmental regulations were lax or non-existent compared to those they were routinely breaking in America.

Although we can geographically link the 2009 pandemic to Smithfield, a for-profit corporation, it is the genetics of this virus that indicts the whole capitalist system. 

The 2009 pandemic strain resulted from the mixing and matching of five different influenza strains, including those endemic to north American avian, north American swine, Eurasian swine, and human. When an animal is infected by two different strains of influenza, genetic components can be swapped around. Most of the time, the new hybrid virus is junk, an evolutionary dead end. But every once in a while, a highly virulent, highly pathogenic strain can emerge.  

And there is evidence that process is accelerating. Until 1998, the H1N1 strain that circulated in North American swine was stable. Since that year, new virulent forms appear almost annually on pig firms across North America. Is there a structural reason for this? Or is it simply nature?

Rob Wallace argues that vertically-integrated stockbreeding, originating in 70’s America and since adopted as an industry standard, is an existential threat. This system cramps thousands of monoculture swine and avian into lots and pens, sometimes together, and ships them all around the world. Corporations predominantly take advantage of countries in the ‘global south,’ where labour is cheaper, regulations lax, and the terms of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans weaken animal and health infrastructure, as has happened in Mexico since the 80s. 

Although the 2009 pandemic turned out to be less deadly than health officials feared in that it only killed hundreds of thousands of people, the subservience of agricultural practices to corporate greed threatens us repeatedly.[iv]  

There is H5N1 avian flu, which first jumped to humans in Hong Kong in 1997.[v] Of 861 confirmed cases in humans between 2003 and 2020, 455 people died.

There is the Nipah virus, first identified in 1998, which can spread to humans via bat or pig.[vi] Although there have been fewer than 1000 confirmed cases in humans, the case mortality rate is approximately 60%.[vii] Fun fact, the movie Contagion was based on this virus gaining the ability to spread between humans easily.

And there is the coronavirus that causes Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or MERS. First reported in 2012, it spreads to humans primarily from camels.[viii] Of 2500 confirmed cases in humans to date, the case mortality rate hovers around 35%. 

The process of viruses jumping from animal hosts to humans is accelerating and while an infinitesimally small number of capitalists profit from this process, the costs are externalized to the working class. For every pandemic, our governments provide billions in de facto subsidies by paying for vaccines, medicines, and reimbursements for the culling of livestock. These subsidies result in new waves of austerity and public sector cuts. But even more so, it is our lives upended, our bodies in the ground.

So finally onto COVID-19.

Based on genetic analysis, SARS-CoV-2 most most likely originated from bat, as its genetic material is nearly identical to a coronavirus isolated from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.[ix] From bat, it may have taken many routes to human, but one hypothesis focuses on wet markets in Wuhan, where live exotic animals are cramped in cages. Health officials and scientists scrutinized such wet markets afters the SARS outbreak of 2003, when civets, raccoon dogs, and workers in wet markers were found to carry SARS-CoV.[x] In the wake of SARS, China banned the trade of wildlife, but this proved temporary.

Even if we concede that our for-profit agribusiness foster the ideal conditions for pandemic strains of viruses to emerge, some might imagine the solution is a greater investment in surveillance, technology, medicine, and vaccines. After all, Pfizer just announced that its vaccine is 90% effective. Never mind the unusual situation of announcing preliminary results of a clinical trial still in progress and the Pfizer CEO selling over $5 million in stock the day news broke. Even if the final clinical trial results shows the vaccine is safe and successful at preventing infection, agribusiness in threatening us with a twist ending. (EDIT: The Pfizer clinical trial finished with a final efficacy of 95% and no safety concerns. Moderna obtained similar results with their version of an RNA-based vaccine).

Denmark is the largest mink fur producer in the world. 20% of mink farms have had COVID-19 outbreaks — in the mink. Hundreds of people have contracted COVID-19 from mink, but most worrying are the twelve comprising cluster 5. Here, scientists observed a mutation in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 not seen in viruses isolated from humans. This is the main target of vaccines as the spike protein is found on the outside of the virus, and preliminary results suggest that antibodies from COVID-19 survivors are less effective at neutralizing this strain of SARS-CoV-2. The only evidence we need to ascertain the graveness of this risk is the Danish government’s order to cull all mink in the country — all 17 million. Only time will tell if this action came in time.

It is clear that we are rapidly approaching a situation where the system cannot keep up anymore. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released a report earlier this year highlighting that five new diseases emerge in people every year! They estimate that 1.7 million viruses remain undiscovered in avian and mammalian hosts and that one-third to one-half carry the potential to infect humans.

Not unlike the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, a bleak prognosis hangs in the air. But these bureaucratic institutions cannot provide a vision for system change when they are imbedded in the system. The solutions that emerge from neoliberal governments will only address some of the symptoms of a system in crisis and disproportionately benefit wealthy populations while the rest of us suffer the consequences, whatever they may be.

This is not just a problem that requires a simple bandaid. The connection between agribusiness and pandemics betrays an inherent contradiction in capitalism, much like the connection between big oil and climate change. Vertically-integrated, globalized industrial farms are the inevitable conclusion of competition among for-profit corporations. Integration, scaling up, and outsourcing to the global south are measures corporations need to take to combat the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism inevitably leads to the destruction of the environment and exploitation of people and animals because it requires perpetual growth.

We can fight for reforms but we must not settle for reforms. Simply pleading with the capitalists to play nice will not work. They might retreat if pressured, but they come back with a vengeance and a whole new cycle of austerity, deregulation, exploitation, and fascism. We must lop off the head of capital once and for all. Only a working class movement led by a vanguard party can plan a rational economy based on human need rather than corporate greed. We must unite because an infection in one is a risk to all!

[i] Jones, K. E., Patel, N. G., Levy, M. A., Storeygard, A., Balk, D., Gittleman, J. L., & Daszak, P. (2008). Global trends in emerging infectious diseases. Nature, 451(7181), 990-993.

[ii] van Helden, P. D. (2003). The economic divide and tuberculosis: Tuberculosis is not just a medical problem, but also a problem of social inequality and poverty. EMBO reports, 4(S1), S24-S28.

[iii] Wallace, R. (2016). Big farms make big flu: dispatches on influenza, agribusiness, and the nature of science. NYU Press. Highly, highly recommend this collection of essays!

[iv] Dawood, F.S., Iuliano, A.D., Reed, C., Meltzer, M.I., Shay, D.K., Cheng, P.Y., Bandaranayake, D., Breiman, R.F., Brooks, W.A., Buchy, P. & Feikin, D.R. (2012). Estimated global mortality associated with the first 12 months of 2009 pandemic influenza A H1N1 virus circulation: a modelling study. The Lancet infectious diseases, 12(9), 687-695.

[v] Chan, P. K. (2002). Outbreak of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus infection in Hong Kong in 1997. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 34(Supplement_2), S58-S64.

[vi] Chua, K.B., Bellini, W.J., Rota, P.A., Harcourt, B.H., Tamin, A., Lam, S.K., Ksiazek, T.G., Rollin, P.E., Zaki, S.R., Shieh, W.J. and Goldsmith, C.S. (2000). Nipah virus: a recently emergent deadly paramyxovirus. Science, 288(5470), 1432-1435.

[vii] Kenmoe, S., Demanou, M., Bigna, J.J., Kengne, C.N., Modiyinji, A.F., Simo, F.B.N., Eyangoh, S., Sadeuh-Mba, S.A. and Njouom, R. (2019). Case fatality rate and risk factors for Nipah virus encephalitis: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Virology, 117, 19-26.

[viii] Zaki, A. M., Van Boheemen, S., Bestebroer, T. M., Osterhaus, A. D., & Fouchier, R. A. (2012). Isolation of a novel coronavirus from a man with pneumonia in Saudi Arabia. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(19), 1814-1820.

[ix] Zhang, Y. Z., & Holmes, E. C. (2020). A genomic perspective on the origin and emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Cell.

[x] Webster, R. G. (2004). Wet markets—a continuing source of severe acute respiratory syndrome and influenza?. The Lancet, 363(9404), 234-236.

By Daniel Tarade

Nestled in the middle of Bob Dylan’s acclaimed album Blood on the tracks is one of my favourite songs. “You’re Gonna Make me Lonesome When You Go” is an unusually up-tempo Bob Dylan song that stuffs seven stanzas into a whirlwind of song. At 2 min and 54 seconds, the song features no interceding harmonica solos, no chorus, and almost no dead air. This is intentional. The out-of-breath song perfectly encapsulates the feeling of a magical summer fling. Dylan employs a few other strategies to invoke the feeling of an affair rather than relationship. Details of Dylan’s lover are vague while the landscape is described in greater detail; Dylan’s language is passive and features more than a fair bit of second guessing and confusion. All of this creates the impression of Dylan being blindsided by a passionate love and needing to make a tough decision about what to do when the sun sets.

I've seen love go by my door
It's never been this close before
Never been so easy or so slow
I've been shooting in the dark too long
When somethin's not right it's wrong
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

The song chronicles all stages of a wonderful and brief romance. The opening lines conjure up an image of Dylan adrift at sea under a starless night sky as he falls victim to underwhelming and toxic relationships. Mired in such a situation, Dylan sees “love go by my door” and shoots “in the dark.” Further, the use of passive language betrays the absence of hope and agency; “I’ve seen love…I’ve been shooting.” Reflecting this despair, Dylan can only rely on the simplest of logical statements; “when somethin’s not right it’s wrong.” A prologue lacking more insight foreshadows Dylan being left scratching his head as the rogue wave, about to ravage his ship, leaves him far behind

One important line that juxtaposes the overall mood of the song is Bob Dylan’s description of this magnificent love as “this close…so easy…so slow.” In particular, the description of this love as “so slow” contrasts the overall tempo of the song. Because this is a relative “slow,” not unlike the Einstein anecdote. While Dylan feels comfortable and satisfied and joyful, the rest of the world and its obligations and harshness misses no step and rushes to wait for Dylan at the finish line.

Dragon clouds so high above
I've only known careless love
It always has hit me from below
But this time around it's more correct
Right on target, so direct
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

By the second stanza, Bob Dylan begins painting an impression of this new relationship — “dragon clouds” now occupy the background of his life. But again, Dylan denies himself agency in this new relationship. He continues to describe this new love as “right on target, so direct,” which applies more to a shark attack than a courtship. This contrasts previous “careless love[s]”that “hit [him] from below.” In both cases, it didn’t depend on how Dylan positioned himself but rather the angle at which he was struck.

To this point, Dylan has yet to describe the person with whom he has fallen in love, except to say that they’re “gonna make [him] lonesome when [they] go.” This evokes that universal feeling of anticipating the end before something even truly begins. Perhaps the dragon clouds are more ominous than they initially let on.

Purple clover, Queen Anne lace
Crimson hair across your face
You could make me cry if you don't know
Can't remember what I was thinkin' of
You might be spoilin' me too much, love
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

By the third verse, Bob Dylan begins describing the person who captured his heart, yet the description remains vague. In fact, Dylan spends as much time painting the canvas with broad brush strokes, one with both “purple clover and Queen Anne lace.” It is telling that the only description of his romantic interest, “crimson hair across [their] face,” obscures other, more intimate descriptions. You know, like their face. This ambiguity is also mysterious, hinting at a more salacious relationship. So Dylan’s own emotions and confusions remains the subject of the song instead. For example, we learn that “[they] might be spoilin’ [him] too much” but not the ways in which he is spoiled.  

Further, Dylan reasserts the confusing whirlwind of it all, where he “can’t remember what [he] was thinkin’ of,” which plays on the earlier lack of autonomy. So much so, that Dylan would break down “if [they] don’t know.” Dylan loves so much and needs for that to be validated.

Flowers on the hillside, bloomin' crazy
Crickets talkin' back and forth in rhyme
Blue river runnin' slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever
And never realize the time

The song slows down just a tad in the middle verse. Here, Dylan finishes painting the scene of the summer romance’s zenith; “crickets talkin’,” “blue river runnin’,” and “flowers…bloomin’,” the latter calling back to the description of purple clover and Queen Anne lace. In this garden of Eden, Dylan could “stay with [them] forever and never realize the time.” With another explicit reference to time, the blessing/curse dichotomy of temporal reality becomes even more apparent. Dylan could stay with them forever, but this relationship and this song hurry along and finish much too quickly. In fact, this verse speedily transitions into the following by forgoing the “you’re gonna make me lonesome when you go” refrain. With not a single moment to savour the scene, Dylan is left catching his breath.

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud
But there's no way I can compare
All them scenes to this affair
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

As we enter the final stages of this romance, Dylan again dwells on past relationships. Dylan uses passive language to enumerate how “situations have ended sad” and “relationships have all been bad.” To drive the point home, he further analogizes past relationships as having been “like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud.” Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, French poets and gay lovers, fought and drank incessantly, which culminated in Verlaine shooting Rimbaud.

The previous stanza ended with a desire to stay in in a moment forever while the next immediately begins with a line describing how “situations have ended sad.” This foreshadows the ending of this relationship but also Dylan’s denial. Dylan says he cannot “compare” all those dismal “scenes” to this “affair.” But by describing the current relationship this way, Dylan impresses upon the listener the idea of a torrid love affair rather than a stable or healthy long-term relationship. It just feels better than those that came before, at least in the moment. As we are reminded over and over again, Dylan already anticipates feeling “lonely” as this affair winds down, a crumpled-up napkin in a seedy hotel.

You're gonna make me wonder what I'm doin'
Stayin' far behind without you
You're gonna make me wonder what I'm sayin'
You're gonna make me give myself a good talkin' to

Twilight falls. For reasons unknown to us, the relationship ends with the parting of two souls. All we know is that Dylan is “stayin’ far behind with [them]” and his lover is “go[ing].” Such a premature termination leaves Dylan in a state of duress, where he “wonder[s] what [he’s] doin’” and “wonder[s] what [he’s] sayin’.” And while Dylan begins second guessing staying behind (“give myself a good talkin’ to”), the verse again ends abruptly and transitions immediately into the epilogue. When mired in a torrid love affair, perhaps Dylan learned that there is no time for second guessing.

I'll look for you in old Honolul-a
San Francisco, Ashtabula
You're gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

As the relationship ends, as Bob Dylan and their partner part, a promise is made. Even before they leave, Dylan declares he’ll “look for [them] in old Honolul-a, San Francisco, Ashtabula.” This builds on the previous confusion about “staying far behind.” Because physical distance did not precipitate the end of this relationship. Clearly, Dylan is willing to travel the world looking for his love. Rather, a more fundamental cleavage occurred. Dylan’s lover perhaps didn’t want to be tied down and desired freedom from a clingy partner. Or the “affair” in question is literal. Or both. But Dylan remains in denial because he never felt so whole before. At least, this interpretation fits the fast tempo of the song. Something akin to a Roman Holiday coming to an end, but instead of a mutual parting, one half of the once couple is left crushed.

As Dylan stops singing, a harmonica plays out the last half minute. It’s over.

The specific locations named are the smoking guns that validate this entire interpretation; Ellen Bernstein, then twenty-four years old, worked at Columbia records and lived in all three of Honolulu, San Francisco, and Ashtabula. During the writing and recording of Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s twelve-year marriage to Sara Dylan disintegrated. Jochen Markhorst describes the affair between Bob Dylan and Ellen Bernstein and its influence on this song here.

How exactly would the mood change if the song slowed down? The popular Miley Cyrus cover instead lasts a little over 4 minutes. Just this extra 33% makes a love affair instead feel like a lifelong relationship coming to an end for very different reasons. Because when the song slows down, the lines “I’ll see you in the clouds above, the tall grass, the one’s I love” sound like a death-bed goodbye. The confused “wonder what I’m doing, staying far behind without you” instead sounds like a bereaved widow jumping into the grave, gripping at the casket. But the slow, contemplative tempo does not jive with the lack of description of the red-headed lover. Normally, a eulogy focuses more on those who died rather than the previous, shitty relationships. 

The fact that the Miley Cyrus cover almost works with the lyrical content highlights the subtlety of the Dylan song. He paints an impression of a summer romance without explicating a time frame or a season. Instead, a synergy of fast tempo and bittersweet poetry creates vivid scenes in one’s mind.

By Daniel Tarade

Republished by the Monthly Review on Sep 14, 2020, by Socialist Action Canada on Sep 25, 20.

No person is an island. It takes a village. Circle of Life. We are stardust. Seven generations. These truisms reference connections between people and what we owe each other. Appealing to chaos theory, an action, no matter how small, dominoes around the world. You accidentally wave at someone who looks like your friend Nevraj in Toronto, and a union goes on strike in Australia. In the same way, ecosystems interdigitate. Food webs explode beyond neat textbook boundaries, nutrients cycle between the atmosphere and the ocean, and capitalist extractive activities threaten everything. Everything. By appealing to these interconnections, we illuminate neon contradictions and build an eco-socialist theoretical base.

Let’s talk about a concrete example. Watching the new Netflix show Connected taught me that Saharan storms whip up tonnes of dust, which travels across the Atlantic Ocean. Some of this dust settles in the Amazon rainforest. And this is not just a factoid. Satellite-based studies suggest that 22,000 tonnes of phosphorus, originally from the Sahara, precipitates from the sky above the Amazon every year.[i] Scientists estimate that this amount matches how much phosphorus leeches from the soil due to annual rainfall and flooding. Desert and rainforest — it is hard to think of two ecosystems that clash more. But the dust of the former feeds the latter. Shits connected.

Studying cycles in nature perhaps fosters a desire for justice, for no person to go hungry or thirsty or homeless in a world of plenty. Studying how the capitalist machine disrupts these cycles, however, is deeply radicalizing. In the 19th century, the german academic Justus von Liebig described how nutrients cycle from plants to animals to the social and back to soil via waste. More crucially, Liebeg prescribed a system where foodstuffs are exported as a “robbery system” because nutrients are not returned to same soil. This idea influenced Marx, whose metabolic rift theory stated that “a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system” and its dependence on perpetual growth. Capitalists exploit not only the labour of the working class but also steal nutrients from the soil.

Liebeg focused his analysis on the second agricultural revolution in the British Empire (c. 1840s). Mass agricultural programs and the import of foodstuffs into the cities away from the countryside depleted the soil of its nutrients. To remedy the robbery of rural soil, the empire imported guano from Peru by the tonne and bones from catacombs in Sicily (among other sources of nutrients). This too was robbery. One striking testimony is that British military conscripts stood taller than their continental counterparts. Imperialism operates in such insidious ways.

To increase access to nutrients and resources around the world, imperial powers employed the ‘tools’ of genocide and slavery. Slaves and bonded Chinese labourers dug guano. Indigenous land stolen and indigenous people murdered. In Ireland, an exploitive class relationship prevented the tillers of the soil from replacing the nutrients lost by the export of crops. This set the stage for the widespread Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.[ii] In turn, the famine provided the opportunity for landowners to evict peasants and labourers and consolidate land, furthering metabolic strain and opportunities for exploitation.

Broadly, the great famines of the 20th century — Bengal famine of 1943, Ethiopian famines of the 1970s, Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the Sahelian famine of 1973 — cannot be explained by performing Malthusian arithmetic. As Marxist Mike Davis describes, “the great hungers have always been redistributive class struggles.” It is not the case that there were simply too many people and too few resources, but that exploitive class and imperial relations leave people bereft in the face of plenty. As over a million people died in Bengal under British colonial rule, the Indian colony exported over 70,000 tonnes of rice to England.[iii] So despite more rainfall than preceding years, Bengali people starved while Britain hoarded resources.

There are so many other examples. Nestlé and other massive corporations pump water from colonized nations and indigenous land, which disrupts local ecosystems and threatens future access to clean water, all without (reasonable) compensation. The US supported a military coup in Bolivia in the fall of 2019, which would open the country to multinationals hoping to exploit local lithium supplies. While the indigenous in Bolivia would be left to deal with the toxic byproducts of lithium processing, multinationals make obscene profits. Similarly, the US and Canada supported a failed military coup in Venezuela, a country with large oil deposits. In Canada, our government sends the RCMP to assault Indigenous land defenders on unceded land to ensure the construction of a pipeline. Owners of capital and their lackey governments direct the flow of resources in one direction and for the sole purpose of exploitation.

The language of metabolic rift mirrors Marxist descriptions of class relations. This is how activists defend against the rhetoric of protestors and rioters “destroying their own communities” when they burn down big-box stores. That Walmart on fire did not belong to the community. It was not owned by the community or democratically operated by the community. It was a capital-extracting factory. That Walmart destroyed small businesses. It sucks the life out of the community, providing only meagre wages in return. Resources flow from the working class to the capitalist class, from the rural to the urban, from the colonized to the colonizer.

By impoverishing communities, the capitalists ensure their domination over workers. Wage slavery is only possible by denying access to the materials needed for social reproduction — food, water, shelter. As Marx said, “if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price.” In such a way, capitalism and (particularly) colonialism achieve the dual function of robbing resources and creating the material conditions that allow for the super-exploitation of workers.

The capitalist demand for perpetual growth, in the agricultural sector and elsewhere, robs the future too. Marx wrote about how record crops in one year could so exhaust the soil that famine necessarily follows. Similarly, the need for more and more profit yields more and more extraction, which poisons the air and water. Greenhouse gas emissions and plastic waste impact us now but also threatens the future with irreparable metabolic rift. But the key takeaway is that not everybody suffers equally. The people who are destitute now will not be able to rehouse themselves after coastal flooding, rising temperatures, superstorms, and wildfires. Meanwhile, the billionaires of the world are prepping with underground bunkers and escape choppers.

What is the solution to all this? It is not the free market, which got us into this mess. The only way to live in harmony within the greater natural world is to get rid of the profit motive and build a democratic and centralized economy. Create what we need and do so sustainably. This does not mean eschewing technology but deciding as a community how to implement technologies. It means democratically deciding what we value. Because when those who work and live in a community decide collectively on their industrial activities, a balance is struck with natural processes.

Note: Inspiration for this post came from a talk given by ecosocialist Ian Angus, which is summarized here.

[i] Yu, H., Chin, M., Yuan, T., Bian, H., Remer, L. A., Prospero, J. M., ... & Zhang, Z. (2015). The fertilizing role of African dust in the Amazon rainforest: A first multiyear assessment based on data from Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 42(6), 1984-1991.

[ii] Slater, E. (2019). Marx on the Colonization of the Irish Soil. Irish Metabolic Rifts, https://www. irishmetabolicrifts. com/marx-on-the-colonization-of-irish-soil.

[iii] Choudhury, S. (2019). Bengal Famine of 1943: Misfortune or Imperial Schema. Available at SSRN 3452678.

By Daniel Tarade

Note: Stories of suicide can be difficult to read. If you're dealing with mental-health concerns, help is available. If you're in crisis or in need of assistance, call 416-408-HELP, go to your nearest hospital or call 911.

Edit: The Toronto Star covered this topic on Aug 5.

The crisis of Covid-19 intersects with many other systemic issues. The Albertan government argued that now is the ideal time to build pipelines — because people can’t protest. Black neighbourhoods in Toronto have been hit the hardest just as black Americans die at three times the rate of white Americans. Migrant workers in Windsor-Essex die while working and living in crowded, dangerous conditions. As schools and workplaces close, unpaid work in the home disproportionately burdens girls and women. All of these systemic inequalities manifest in an unequal mental health burden. Just the increase in unemployment due to Covid-19 is predicted to result in between 400 and 2000 excess suicides in 2021.[i] This, of course, affects the poorest among us. But I am concerned that a burgeoning mental health crisis is being ignored, or worse, weaponized by those who want us to go back to work for their profit. Because, right now, there is evidence of increased suicide in Toronto subway system, and no one is talking about it.

In October of 2018, I wrote about suicide in the Toronto subway system (Toronto Transit Commission; TTC). My young blog seldom appeared in search engine queries. All of a sudden, at seemingly random intervals, website visits would spike. Looking through the visitor logs, it became clear that Torontonians looking up “injury at track level TTC” drove this trend. Stranded commuters confused by ambiguous TTC announcements turned to google for an answer about why they were late for work; they found my article.

Digging through the data, the landscape of a mental health crisis, its peaks and valleys backlit in flickering yellow light, emerged in sharp relief and then suddenly slunk back into the shadows.

Between March 20, 2019 and Mar 19, 2020, I find evidence for 28 injuries at track level. For most of these (Mar 20, Apr 18, May 30, Jun 2, Jun 13, Jun 27, Aug 1, Aug 6, Aug 23, Sep 3, Sep 26, Oct 12, Nov 24, Dec 27, 2019; Jan 8, Jan 16, Jan 25, Jan 30, Feb 1, Feb 16, Mar 5, Mar 15, and Mar 19, 2020, there is a correspondence between web traffic and TTC notices. In this window, all spikes of five of more clicks correspond to an “injury on the tracks.” The only exception was Sep 10, 2019, when the TTC launched a new anti-suicide initiative. Searching through @TTCnotices specifically for this phrase revealed five additional incidences (Jun 28, Jul 29, Oct 13, Oct 19, 2019; Jan 27, 2020), all of which occurred late at night or early in the morning, that did not generate web traffic.

But, since the government of Ontario declared a state of emergency on March 17, subway suicides became more common but less visible. There have been thirteen incidents between April 1 and July 10 (Apr 4, Apr 13, Apr 14 (x2), Apr 28, May 9, May 16, May 20, May 23, Jun 4, Jun 16, Jul 2, and Jul 9). None of these drew much attention except when subway suspension caused a crowded situation when we all ought to have been physically distancing. This isn’t surprising as subway ridership declined over 80% during the pandemic. But despite decreased ridership, these thirteen incidents are more than double the same period in 2019. Is Covid-19 also exacerbating a mental health crisis?

I trawled through all @TTCnotices tweets using the queries “personal injury at track level” and “injury on the tracks.” The Twitter account abruptly switched from using the former to the latter on June 18, 2019 amidst a spate of four injuries in three days. I wonder if their social media people grew frustrated with the Twitter threads clarifying that “personal injury at track level” euphemized suicide. Overall, I found 16 ‘personal injuries at track level’ in 2013, 29 in 2014, 19 in 2015, and 24 in 2016, which matches up well with the 17, 30,16, and 21 suicides reported by the Globe and Mail for those respective years. 30, 30, and 25 incidences were uncovered in 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. These numbers fall short of the 45 (2017) and 46 (2018) suicide-incidents reported in a CBC article; apparently, 2017 was “the only year for which the TTC was able to provide [an] up-to-date figure.” This is linked to a decision the TTC made in 2016 to pursue honesty because “not talking about [subway suicides] hasn’t worked.” As a result, the numbers reported for 2017 and 2018 seem to include “[t]ransit workers who have also intervened with dozens more people who seemed to be in distress.” But these don’t show up on Twitter.

When I took a 60-day rolling average of “injuries at track level,” the quarantine period clearly stood out compared with Spring months in previous years. The 9 incidents between April 4 and May 23 or April 13 and June 4 matches the highest 60-day total, confined entirely to one calendar year, in the last seven years (there was a sixty-day period with 10 incidents spanning Dec ‘17 to Feb ‘18). Despite the clear impact of Covid-19 on mental health, there is media silence on this uncomfortable topic.

The TTC claims to care deeply about the proliferation of suicide on subway tracks, but nothing they do seems to help. TTC's chief safety officer, John O’Grady, says in 2019 that “we’ve done many things, which have some effect. But still the numbers are high and going up. So we’re not doing enough.” While the TTC continues to mull over the financial costs associated with barriers, which would immediately prevent future suicides in the subway system, they instead ask “customers to look at their fellow citizens and just talk to them...that’s the next thing we can try until we get an engineered solution.” What fucking horseshit!

Articles on subway suicides are a perverse Toronto tradition. Every six months, like clockwork, another newspaper takes a crack at the eye-catching topic and some TTC official expresses their concern. There have been over 1000 suicide attempts since the subway was first built in the 50s. It’s not a novel concept. Subways all over Europe and Asia feature barriers. Clearly, this isn’t a real priority for the TTC or the city. Just admit it. How else do you explain the TTC’s request that commuters play therapist while they travel to their minimum wage job on a jam-packed subway that is 30-minutes delayed rather than invest in barriers or social workers. Instead, the TTC invests heavily in fare inspectors to issue $425 fines for not paying a $3 fare while phasing out the subway guard position, which actually helps prevents suicide and other tragedies. Instead, they force employees with PTSD back to work. This punitive and aggressive approach contrasts with the lovey-dovey image the TTC tries to portray. After all, fare inspectors, much like Canadian police, who themselves murdered five BIPOC during wellness checks in the last three months, are not equipped to handle mental health crises. Rather, they happily pepper spray mentally-ill folks and racially profile commuters. In capitalism, these are the only ‘solutions’ that exist.

Just like the installation of subway barriers, students at the University of Toronto pushed for barriers in certain buildings known to be suicide hotspots — within one eighteen-month period, three Toronto students died of suicide in the same building. But these are immediate demands. If installed, these barriers buy us time to intervene in a broken system. The same goes for expanding the public mental health care system in Ontario, which in its current form is woefully inadequate. We must ask, however, whether the mental health crisis can be effectively confronted in a capitalist society. As a socialist, I argue that it cannot.

Capitalists seek to maximize profit. The hoarding of wealth by the 1% drives the austerity confronting our societies. Money flows into the military and police to bomb brown people and protect private property while marginalized people fall through budgetary cracks. Private practices respond to the mental health crisis, but this is not affordable for many people. Because wealth can’t be extracted from the homeless and broke people living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, or addiction, those most vulnerable become invisible.

Instead, the bare minimum is invested towards hiding homelessness from the rest of the population. The Toronto police literally uses bulldozers to raze encampments of homeless people. The same perverse situation exists on campus. The administration, although a non-profit entity much like the TTC, runs the school like a business. Mental health services are pitiful despite a 2016 National College Health Assessment survey finding that 65% of Canadian students reported feeling overwhelming levels of anxiety and 44% reported difficulty functioning due to depression within the last twelve months. Most troubling, one in fifty students reported a suicide attempt in the previous year. With limited resources, the University of Toronto focuses on those students whose mental health struggles impact their studies. I myself was turned away by health resources on campus for this reason. As I wrote to U of T President Meric Gertler, “I took that to mean that if you can succeed despite anxiety, despite depression, the University of Toronto does not care. Only when graduates stop being successful in the community, when the U of T image is tarnished, will those who run this institution care.” It is clear that both the TTC and U of T care more about their revenue stream than the wellbeing of people. This is the reality when public institutions compete for funding amidst cutbacks.

The Covid-19 pandemic is just the most recent stress test that our society fails to pass. Capitalist greed drives corporations to rush people back to work in order to keep up profits even if it means workers must risk their lives. The wealth inequality endemic in capitalism means that even temporary layoffs threaten to leave thousands homeless. Austerity, ramped up since the 2009 financial crisis, left the healthcare system unable to deal with an influx of critically-ill patients. Privatized long term care facilities, which prioritize profit and not resident wellbeing, failed to even slow down Covid-19. While unemployed people must make do with only $2000 a month in Canada, massive corporations receive billions in bailouts. Combined with the need to quarantine, many fear a mental health crisis of pandemic proportions echoing for years to come. Capitalist forces seize upon this emergency to justify re-opening. But this is an obvious contradiction in the capitalist system — to control the pandemic, we need to shut down non-essential production, but this leaves many workers in dire straits. It is time to for workers to construct a society based on human need rather than capitalist greed! We must fight for a centralized economy under direct, democratic workers control. Workers make society run. We should run society!

[i] McIntyre, R. S., & Lee, Y. (2020). Projected increases in suicide in Canada as a consequence of COVID-19. Psychiatry research, 113104.

By Daniel Tarade

Scabs. Those workers who cross picket lines. In doing so, scabs undermine the collective bargaining process. By refusing to work, the bosses lose money, and workers tip the scales and wield some power. But, if the bosses can bus in non-unionized workers to keep the machines running, the effectiveness of a strike, the only leverage available to the working class, becomes neutralized. It is no coincidence that such an ugly word is reserved for so-called ‘class traitors.’ Scab made the jump from a description of the sores caused by diseases like syphilis to a description of moral character. But, the use of scabs is just one of the strategies employed by the capitalist class. The strategy works by picking at class solidarity and taking advantage of working class desperation. It is imperative that we shine a light on these dirty tactics. By doing so, we build a disciplined and conscious working class movement.

As a fourth-year undergraduate at the University of Windsor, I was offered a Teaching Assistant position. As someone eager to go into academia, teaching experience would be a boon to my grad school applications. But, a few days before orientation, our manager called me into their office. They asked whether anyone approached me about getting hired. No, I replied, not sure where this was going. They informed me that a graduate student, upset that they weren’t offered the position, blamed it on me because undergraduate students normally didn’t apply. It took me years to realize, but I was a scab.

Well, not exactly. At the University of Windsor, two types of teaching assistants belong to the same union. Teaching assistant (TA) positions are typically held by undergrads, and graduate assistant (GA) positions are held by... graduate students (i.e. Masters and PhD candidates). Despite performing the same job, undergrad TAs are paid between $19-21 an hour while GAs are paid double at $37-41. In the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where I schooled, graduate student stipends included a guaranteed GA position. That is to say, the pay received as a GA makes up a significant portion of their financial support. PhD students are guaranteed seven full-terms as a GA and Masters students three, but each can apply for up to one extra term. That was the position occupied by the anonymous, would-be GA who blamed me for taking their position. Did I receive this position because I was meritorious, or because I was more affordable?

There is some language in the collective bargaining agreement that tries to prevent the administration from simply hiring only TAs in a bid to save money; “…the ratio of TA hours to GA hours within that course for that semester shall not exceed 2.0 (TA) to 1 (GA).” But, this is only a meagre protection. Instead, I want to focus on the University of Windsor’s long-term strategy for dealing with unions: divide-and-conquer.

The GAs and TAs at the University of Windsor found themselves in a ‘two-tiered’ bargaining situation. In fact, GAs and TAs are themselves further divided; a first- or second-year undergrad makes less than a third- or fourth-year undergrad; a PhD candidate makes more than a Masters candidate. Again, the responsibilities and work are the same (the only exception is that GAs are hired for more hours). As written by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, “once successful in establishing a second tier, the employer will try to shift work to workers who cost less, away from workers who enjoy full pay and benefits.” As “there is nothing fair about people doing the same job for different wages,” union solidarity erodes and infighting explodes.

This is not the only example of two-tiered bargaining at the University of Windsor. The Windsor University Faculty Association (WUFA) represents professors, instructors, lecturers, ancillary academic staff, and librarians. Librarians are divided up into four separate tiers; ancillary staff too. But, the more insidious two-tiered bargaining on display is the stratification of sessional lecturers and instructors and assistant, associate, and full professors. Much like TAs and GAs, there is a lot of overlap in the roles of lecturers, instructors, and professors that make the difference in salary, benefits, and job security unconscionable — all teach and design courses while some professors also conduct research. Lecturers belong to the lowest tier in the WUFA collective agreement, assistant professors the second-lowest, associate professors the third, and full-professors sit at the top. This gradient may appear reasonable except that most assistant professors progress to associate professor status within their first five years. There is no similar route for lecturers. Rather, lecturers and instructors are contract employees. Shepherded away from the professors, they stand alone.

It is difficult to figure out how much the average lecturer makes. The salary range for the lowest bargaining tier is $57,269 - $97,357, but this also includes the lowest tier of ancillary staff and librarians. But, associate vice-president academic Jeff Berryman said in 2018 that associate professors make “somewhere in excess of $54,000,” which probably puts them at the bottom of the salary range. For full professors, the average salary is around $140,000. Worse treated are instructors. While lecturers teach a guaranteed six courses during an eight-month contract, instructors are instead paid a flat fee of $8600 a course. Much like TAs, the University of Windsor takes advantage. Instructors and lecturers taught a full two-thirds of UWindsor courses in 2018. Instructors alone taught 979 courses out of a total of 2500. As neo-liberal austerity ramps up, squeezed workers take what they can get, and the gains of past working class struggle are erased.

This desperation provided the administration with lots of leverage when negotiating a new contract in 2014. The administration decided to meet many demands put forth by the instructors and lecturers while ignoring the demands of professors. The gains enjoyed by contract employees would be more than offset by concessions made by the better-paid professors. In forcing workers into conflict with each other, the university hoped to make off like a bandit. It seems like it may of worked — ratification of the new contract passed with only 66% of the vote after months of fighting. Clearly, many workers wanted to keep up the struggle, but with poor labour leadership, union fell apart.

So, what should I have done as a fourth-year TA? I could have refused the position, but my graduate school applications would have suffered. But, by accepting the position, I deprived a graduate student of their much-needed income. It appears that there is no easy decision. Because, once two-tiered bargaining becomes entrenched, someone is going to suffer — either by losing their job to someone in a lower tier or instead being relegated to a lower tier. To prevent this, unions must fight for the rights of the rank and file. All teaching assistants should be paid the same wage for the same work. Graduate students should be guaranteed a GA position for the full duration of their studies, or their stipend should be uncoupled from a GA position in the first place. By forwarding these demands, the class struggle grows and and the material conditions of workers improves. But, broader divide-and-conquer strategies need to be recognized and overcome.

Although two-tiered bargaining and the use of scabs denote specific strategies, the principle of divide-and-conquer lines the bedrock of capitalist domination. American colonizers made small concessions to white slaves specifically to undermine solidarity with black slaves. Irish immigrants in mid-19th century America, “themselves poor and despised,…ignored the plight of blacks.”[i] Because immigrants were desperate for work, the bosses brought them in as scabs — in 1874, striking miners in Pittsburgh murdered three Italian strike breakers. In 1891, convicts were brought in as de facto slaves to replace Tennessee miners who refused to sign a contract that limited their right to strike. As farmers organized alliances in the late 1800s, blacks and white remained segregated; “When the Colored Alliance declared a strike in the cotton fields in 1891 for a dollar a day wages for cotton pickers, Leonidas Polk, head of the White Alliance, denounced it as hurting the Alliance farmer who would have to pay that wage.” The dire economic situation in which most workers find themselves often forces us to fight among ourselves just to make ends meet in the short-term. But, for any long-term victory, we must organize and fight together.

What about contemporary examples of divide-and-conquer? A wage gap still persists between men and women because feminized jobs pay less than men-dominated positions even when similar levels of experience or education are required. The bosses push for an expansion of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, where non-Citizens work for $5 an hour and no overtime pay. In my hometown of Windsor, Ontario, the automobile capital of Canada, workers in feeder plants, like my father once-upon-a-time, made a third of the hourly wage that a unionized worker in the Big Three (Chrysler, GM, Ford) would make. Uber undercuts taxi drivers while also providing no benefits or security for its own drivers. When Foodora couriers won the right to unionize, a big victory for gig-economy workers, the company instead shuttered its operations in Canada. In Ontario, only certain ‘essential’ employees qualified for a pandemic premium — midwives and grocery store clerks did not make the cut. Some workers are more essential than others.

In these manufactured dichotomies — men vs. women, black vs. white, citizen vs. non-citizen, contract workers vs. employees — pressure from the have-nots is perceived as a challenge to the fledgeling gains of the have-slightly-more-but-much-not-much-at-alls. How else can you explain the pushback to an increase in minimum wage from those who make just slightly more than minimum wage? The fight against ‘illegal’ immigration because ‘they’ are stealing ‘our’ jobs? The reactionary “All Lives Matter” response to “Black Lives Matter?”

All workers suffer under capitalism — its wars, its austerity, and its alienation. But, the suffering is not equal. All revolutionary socialists will fall short if they neglect ideas of intersectionality. We must categorically denounce the capitalist myth that for one to prosper another must suffer. In our unions, we must abolish two-tiered bargaining. In our nations, we must demand that no one is illegal. In our international struggle, we must stand by the right of oppressed nations to defend themselves against imperialism. In our colonialist backyard here in Canada, we must fight for indigenous self-determination. Only with the dissolution of capitalism and its replacement with a true worker democracy will we be able to overcome economic divisions along lines of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and ethnicity. Only with a workers’ democracy will true human liberation become possible.

[i] Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. These quotes and other historical examples discussed here can be found in chapters “The Other Civil War” and “Robber Barons and Rebels.”

By Daniel Tarade

If you should go skating
On the thin ice of modern life
Dragging behind you the silent reproach
Of a million tear-stained eyes
Don't be surprised when a crack in the ice
Appears under your feet
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind
With your fear flowing out behind you
As you claw the thin ice

Thin Ice- Pink Floyd

Practitioners of the scientific method march towards capital T-ruth. That is the ideal, according to science advocates. Through empirical observation, scientists arrive at the bedrock of the universe; they uncover the laws, unflinching and forever to be, that are used to deduce and predict any natural phenomena. Yet, debate on the presence of Truth continues. Certain philosophers of science espouse that Truth exists but can never be known. Only approximated. Others argue that Truth is a myth and does not exist. This article will not provide an exhaustive overview of these positions. Instead, I want to clamber down a rabbit hole hidden behind a simple scientific claim and imagine what Truth might look like in an all-knowing world. I previously critiqued one of my own manuscripts to highlight the gaps that exist between scientific claims and scientific observations. If Truth is to exist, that gap will have to shrink to nothingness. As I have recently published another article, I am up to the challenge of Truth and science. What limits on Truth exist, and what can humans can uncover?

As a quick recap, my research focuses on oxygen-sensing proteins found in animals. There are three proteins central to the story; the closely related HIF1α and HIF2α proteins and their negative regulator VHL. Hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) is a master regulator of the cellular milieu under low-oxygen conditions. In fact, adaptation to low oxygen conditions is contingent on the HIF family of proteins. It is important to understand that HIF comes in several flavours (AKA paralogs): HIF1α and HIF2α. Under conditions of sufficient oxygen, a group of enzymes stick molecular oxygen onto the HIFα proteins. The HIFα protein, now labeled with oxygen, are recognized by the VHL protein, which targets HIFα for degradation. Thus, under homeostatic conditions, HIFα proteins are inactive. When oxygen is limiting, enzymes no longer modify HIFα, which itself becomes invisible to the VHL machinery. As oxygen decreases, HIFα protein accumulates and enacts functional changes. Imagine this transition as the promotion of HIF to commander-in-chief. HIF is a transcription factor that activates dozens of other genes. The question that we tackled was simple; does VHL differentially regulate HIF1α and HIF2α?

To begin exploring this question, we utilized a simplified biochemical system. Rather than work with a model organism, we instead worked with model proteins. See, the interface sufficient for binding between VHL and HIFα is known. So, we performed interaction studies using a twenty amino acid HIFα peptide and full-length VHL protein. We studied how tightly VHL bound to the HIFα paralogs and observed that VHL binds approximately two times more tightly to HIF1α than HIF2α. By studying mutant peptides of HIF1α and HIF2α, we found that a single amino acid dictated this differential binding (remember that proteins are polymers of amino acids). At one particular 3-dimensional co-ordinate, HIF1α possesses a methionine and HIF2α possesses a threonine. Our reasoning as to why there was a differential binding took into account the corresponding VHL amino acid (in vertebrates, a phenylalanine) that was positioned next to either methionine or threonine. Previous computational chemistry experiments had posited that the methionine-phenylalanine interaction is stronger than the threonine-phenylalanine interaction. These observations helped us formulate a model that we then applied to the whole of animal evolution. If methionine is associated with increased VHL binding and other residues are associated with weaker binding, might we learn something about the role of HIF throughout evolutionary time? We looked at the sequence of HIFα and VHL in dozens of invertebrate and vertebrate species. We found that protostome species, particularly the arthropods (think insects), featured substitutions of both the HIFα methionine and the VHL phenylalanine. Conversely, in deuterostome species, which includes sea urchins and certain worms, we find a high prevalence of HIFα methionine and VHL phenylalanine. Importantly, in vertebrate species, HIF1α always has a methionine and HIF2α in all but one instance has a threonine. Our conclusion based on these observations is complicated and esoteric, even for our field, but we are not interested in animal oxygen-sensing, are we? No, we are here to look for Truth.

Let’s tackle the low-hanging fruit first. By performing real-time binding experiments, we reported that VHL dissociated 1.704379562 times more quickly from HIF2α than from HIF1α. Is this Truth? The first line of the evidence that says no is that we repeated the experiment three times and obtained different results each time; variability in scientific measurements is inherent to our instruments and abilities. Based on statistical modelling, the ‘Truth’ could be anywhere from 1.6573439 and 1.7511501 with 95% confidence. A common position on Truth is that it exists but is not accessible to us. Taking this argument further, as instrumentation becomes more precise so too will the measurements. The models will suggest finer and finer ranges of acceptable Truths. But, this all gets more complicated. We performed a similar binding experiment using a different type of instrument. With this machine, we observed values that were an order of magnitude larger than those we observed first. We attributed this to a higher temperature made necessary by the instrument’s setup (25 °C v. 4 °C). This is not surprising; increased kinetic energy speeds up the rate of association and dissociation events. Under these conditions, HIF2α dissociated 2.812324 times faster than HIF1α. Thus, in a quest for a never obtainable Truth, a scientist would have to perform these association experiments under all temperatures. The same goes for all other variables, such as salt concentration and pH. Under all these conditions, the rate at which HIF proteins bind to VHL will change. As there are an infinite number of temperatures and concentrations, it is impossible to complete all the necessary measurements. The best possible truth would require interpolation and resembles a phase diagram more than any single number. There are other practical considerations. We work with bits and pieces of these proteins because working with the full-length sequence is difficult in some cases. Our binding experiments involve immobilization of the HIFα peptide on a substrate and measuring changes in the local environment upon binding of VHL. However, HIFα would never be immobilized in a cellular environment. In theory, these could all be rectified as technologies advance. Still, we would be left with boring truth made subjective by randomness and experimental error. But, what if we spoke in the abstract? Forget quantitative Truth. Does qualitative Truth exist?

What do I mean by quantitative and qualitative Truth? Quantitative Truth is expressed as an absolute value. For example, the speed of light is 299 792 458 meters per second. Qualitative Truth is stated as a principle. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. As I explore scientific quantification, it seems clear that quantitative Truth cannot exist. One possible exception are the scientific truths expressed with discrete values. There are eight planets in our solar system. I will get back to this point later, but the example I choose intentionally highlights a role for subjectivity in scientific Truth. Let’s instead discuss these qualitative Truths. Even if I cannot nail down with absolute certainty how much more tightly HIF1α binds to VHL than HIF2α, would it be unTruthful to say that HIF1α does indeed bind more tightly? Just as before, many technical limitations arise. It is impossible to directly observe HIF1α in the cellular environment. Only by affixing fluorescent molecules can we visualize a protein with a microscope. At such a point, you are no longer studying native HIF1α. Just like our biochemical experiments stripped HIF1α of its native context, it is impossible to observe native HIF1α without manipulation. Humans observe a world that they too exist within. It follows that it is impossible to know qualitative Truth. Advances in technology might minimize the manipulation of a system required for observation, but it is inconceivable that observation without manipulation could ever exist.

There is one additional flaw in the conception of scientific Truth. It is evident that any communicable Truth requires operationalization. Let’s revisit a candidate qualitative Truth; HIF1α binds more tightly than HIF2α to VHL. That statement requires caveats a plenty. One, how do you define HIF1α and HIF2α? Which species does one study? What if HIF1α does not bind more tightly to VHL than HIF2α in lamprey but does in humans? We would have separate Truths for different organisms. If we restrict our line of inquiry to humans, which sequence do we study? Every gene exists in flux within a population. There exist humans with subtle changes in HIF1α and HIF2α. Other humans have serious, disease-causing mutations in HIF2α or VHL. Thus, we will have individuals Truths for wild-type HIF1α and HIF2α sequences (a wild-type sequence is the most common sequence found within a population) and for other rarer sequences. What about modifications of HIF1α and HIF2α? We already encountered a common modification that regulates interaction with VHL: hydroxylation (the sticking of oxygen to a protein). So, we must specify hydroxylated but otherwise unmodified HIF1α and HIF2α. How does one define tightness of binding? In general, scientists use affinity constants. An affinity constant is the concentration of one protein needed for half of another protein to be bound. It is a stochastic measure designed to represent a collection of transient events; proteins interactions are not static but breath in and out. Even if one protein binds tighter on average than another protein, any given ‘weaker’ protein might interact longer than any given ‘stronger’ protein. We just keep digging. The more soil that what toss up to the surface, the questions become more pedantic. At a certain point it becomes unescapable: any construction of scientific Truth, even qualitative in nature, is bootstrapped by human definitions. Just like the scientific Truth of planets orbiting the sun relies on the subjective definition of a planet, humans define HIF1α and HIF2α. They define humans and non-humans. They define binding strength. Humans are forced to operationalize the world that they are studying. It becomes impossible for humans to know Truth except in relationship to our own definitions. Any Truth that exists in relation to subjective definitions becomes truth.

Humans define Truth, and we can also kill it. I have defined Truth as an immutable law, something indelible and existing independently of humanity. First describing quantitative observations, such as the binding rate of two proteins, it becomes clear that humans cannot know with certainty any measured value. Even as machines become more precise, there will always be random variations in instrumental measurements. But, a discussion of qualitative Truths, those fancy principles like gravity and evolution, are in need of dissection. It is obvious that any absolute Truth requires an infinitely narrow definition. Operational parameters are necessary to define a context for the Truth. Yet, this is also makes it impossible for humans to know Truth.

By Daniel Tarade

A version of this article first appeared as an Op-ed in Spring Magazine and republished by Socialist Action.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, socialists insist that “Capitalism is the Virus!” Such a phrase is not a casual flip of the script or a ‘what-about-ism’. Popular discourse surrounding virology (and epidemiology) simply accounts for capitalist rhetoric. Neo-liberals apply concepts of natural selection and “survival of the fittest” to viruses, to humans, to businesses, to ideas, and to our capitalist economy. By picking at these threads, the slogan — capitalism is the virus — becomes more analytical. Simultaneously, we critique capitalism by highlighting how the material conditions it fosters prompt pandemics and how the solution is socialism.

Throughout history, viruses and bacteria — tuberculosis, pneumonia, small pox, polio, measles, influenza, cholera, etc. — killed more humans than anything else. It is only recently, in the last 50 to 100 years, that chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease killed more people than infectious diseases in the global North, and life expectancy has soared from around 50 years to 80 years of age. This dramatic shift is commonly attributed to scientific and technological advances, like the discovery of antibiotics, which entered clinical practice in 1942, and widespread vaccination programs that became common around the same time. By extension, these advances are credited to capitalism, the “free market of ideas,” and competition between corporations for profit. Although a tempting hypothesis, this relationship is not borne out in the data.

The decline of infectious disease in the global North

Mortality due to tuberculosis already declined a full 90% from its peak in the mid-1800s before effective antibiotics entered clinical usage. Measles killed fewer and fewer people despite no change in incidence level before an effective vaccine in the 1960s caused the number of cases to plummet. So, what was the cause of the decrease in infectious disease mortality in the years leading up to effective treatment and vaccines? Thomas McKeown, epidemiologist and historian of medicine, put forth a thesis in the 1960s that argues that increases in population in the 1800s resulted from increases in nutrition due to improving economic conditions. This idea has since gained significant traction.

What brought about improved nutrition? The industrial revolution, associated with more efficient agriculture and increased wealth generation, was necessary. Importantly, it was not sufficient. The first wave of the industrial revolution in mid-1700s no doubt increased wealth for the ruling class in the Global North—fuelled by slavery and colonization of the Global South. But, for the working class of the Global North, the industrial revolution produced the crowded impoverished cities that spread tuberculosis. It took at least 50 years before the working class gained any significant increase in wages and living conditions. Why did wages increase? It is not a law of capitalism that real wages for the working class increase over time. Quite the opposite. As rates of profit fall due to competition, workers get squeezed one way or another (by outsourcing, automation, stagnating wages, layoffs, slashed benefits). Instead, workers organized unions, fought for better wages, safer working conditions, and more democratic control. Mass organization, general strikes, and militancy redistributed some of the massive wealth accumulated in the early capitalist system. The resultant improvement in proletarian living conditions fostered resilience to pestilence and increased life expectancy in the Global North, while colonization continued to fuel so-called “tropical diseases” in the Global South world.

Today, the connection between poverty and mortality — the social determinants of health — is taught in medical school. But, the relentless austerity endemic in the capitalist system, necessary to combat declines in the rate of profit and to keep the capitalist machine humming along, promotes and maintains the poverty and malnutrition that makes people susceptible to both infectious and chronic diseases.

Profit vs lives

This is not the only way capitalism is a virus. The profit-motive led companies to bury internal studies linking a diet high in sugar with diabetes, smoking cigarettes with lung cancer, and industrial carcinogens with multiple forms of cancer. Instead, corporate-funded think tanks and industry groups obfuscated and lobbied against regulation. The pandemics of lung cancer, mesothelioma, other environmentally-linked cancers, and diabetes, so-called “diseases of old age”, would have been largely mitigated if profit did not factor into the equation. Similarly, the most pressing emergency in the world of microbiology, antibacterial resistance, springs from the bowels of capitalism.

Although a redistribution of wealth decreased mortality from bacterial infections well before antibiotics were discovered, the new medications did save lives. However, pharmaceutical companies quickly obtained patents and aggressively marketed antibiotics. This essential medicine could be found in tooth paste, gum, and lipstick. Pharmaceutical companies lobbied doctors to prescribe their new antibiotic. Worse, antibiotics became entrenched in industrial agricultural practices, where they are commonly added to feed to promote animal growth. Unnecessary usage of antibiotics, driven by profit, selected for resistant microbes, and now antibacterial resistance kills an estimated 700,000 people a year. If we do nothing to address this crisis, it is predicted that resistant microbes will kill 10 million people annually, some 400,000 in Canada, by 2050.

While humanity suffers, is Big Pharma re-doubling efforts to save us? Not a chance.  Despite the pressing danger of antimicrobial resistance, company after company is shuttering their antimicrobial drug pipeline. Only four of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies, by sales, operate an active antimicrobial drug discovery pipeline. Why? It is not profitable. Short courses of antibiotics for acute infections, or the development of vaccines for unpredictable pandemics, are not as profitable as lifetime treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease. This is not a conspiracy; these companies are very open about it.

Isn’t this the opposite of ‘natural selection’ in the so-called capitalist free market? Now that demand for antibiotics is increasing, shouldn’t corporations compete for solutions? I came across a discussion on the internet near the beginning of the COVID outbreak — a discussion on viruses and natural selection. One person commented to another that a virus capable of wiping out humanity would never evolve because it is self-defeating. Once all humans are dead, the virus too goes extinct. Instead, because of natural selection, via the survival of the fittest, only viruses that effectively propagate will come about. This idea that evolution has foresight and plans accordingly is widespread.

Similarly, proponents of capitalism misappropriate the concept of natural selection. In the free-market of ideas, there is a survival of the fittest. The best innovations make millions. The hardest, most intelligent workers get hired. Over the years, society improves through relentless competition. That, however, is a monstrous myth.

Evolution is not forward thinking.  Neither is capitalism. Evidence that evolution is not prescient is the fact that species go extinct all the time. A virus that can predict that it will cause the extinction of its host is no different than the dinosaurs evolving in anticipation of the asteroid.  Why has a killer virus not evolved yet? It simply isn’t probable given all the characteristics that such a virus would need. But, just like the evolution of viruses and bacteria, the “natural selection” seen in capitalism is reactive. It comes down to what is propagating, or profiting, most rapidly at a particular moment.

A rule of capitalism is that short-term profits are better than long-term losses. There is no purifying selection in capitalism that roots out companies that place human survival in peril.  Just the opposite. More profit is to be had from slashing workers’ benefits, selling antibiotics for animal feed, funding disinformation groups, and selling addictive and harmful products. In the pharmaceutical industry, the bigger a company gets, the less it spends on R&D — and the more it spends on lobbying. That is how they increase profit. Not by developing new drugs that help people, but by increasing market share and getting doctors to prescribe their costlier medication instead of other alternatives. The profit motive also rules the carbon sector, which is why catastrophic climate change is driving humanity to the brink of extinction. This is why life expectancy in the US is actually now decreasing. The gains of past working class struggles are being erased.

Socialism

What is the solution? Socialism. Just like mass mobilization led to real material gains for the working class in the 1800s, which directly led to improved nutrition and less death due to pestilence, it’s time to rise up around the world, reclaim our industries and put them to work for us, not for the capitalists who leech off social production. We can learn from the shortcomings of past movements. History teaches that simply relying on legislation or on the reform of capitalism results only in temporary wins, which are restricted by borders and maintain the colonial and capitalist state responsible for global poverty and its pandemics. In capitalist society, the ruling class controls the means of production, but what they lack is a superiority in numbers.

That’s why it is vital to mobilize masses with the vision of workers’ control and workers’ democracy in mind —for workers of the world to unite. When the moment comes, and with many capitalist catastrophes on the horizon it may be soon, we seek to elevate the working class to the role of rulers of society.  It is absurd to expect capitalists to play politely — to put the interests of the vast majority first. Have no illusions in phony class alliance with them. Capitalism is the virus. We must inoculate ourselves against corporate propaganda and wipe the system of exploitation and oppression off the face of the earth.

By Daniel Tarade

Academic science is hierarchical. Atop stacks of senior scientists, research associates, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, technicians, assistants, and undergraduate students sits the principal investigator. The PI. They alone receive the awards. Their solitary name adorns funding applications. More practically, it is the PI that receives a living wage and job security. Yet, the PI is also the individual who does the least. Students and technicians and postdoctoral fellows make the majority of empirical observations while labouring for minimum wage (or less). Everybody gives lip service to science being a team effort, but almost every means by which people can be compensated for their contributions disproportionately benefits the most senior member. A careful look to the history of scientific organizations betrays that scientists loathe manual labour and fetishize mental masturbation. The latter is the domain of the PI, and for it they are greatly rewarded.

I can remember when being a research assistant in my third year of undergrad at the University of Windsor and a few of us undergrads were stacking pipette tips, a menial task if there ever was one. One wondered out loud how awesome it would be if our lab had a robot for stacking tips. I retorted that the lab already did; we are the robots. A lot of work is needed to run a research lab. Yet, scientists distinguish between chores that are merely laborious and those tasks that require ‘intelligence.’ Shockingly, even certain experiments belong to the former category. A insidious phrase summarizes the divide between and ‘intellectual’ and ‘non-intellectual’ scientific work: just a pair of hands. You see this phrase used in a number of contexts (example 1, 2, 3). It is always a derogatory dismissal of someone’s contributions. If you are a pair of hands, it means you are replaceable. You are expendable. But the scientific enterprise sputters to a stop without technicians, trainees, and postdocs. As a whole, they play a vital role. The arbitrary distinction between ‘intellectual’ and ‘non-intellectual’ labour validates a system where a small number of scientific elite benefit while the rest suffer. How did this come about?

Many researchers trace science back to the ancient Greeks. Adherents of the ‘Greek Miracle,’ like historian of science Alistair Cameron Crombie, believe that “science [ultimately] derives from the legacy of Greek philosophy.”[i] What did Greek philosophy entail? In A People’s History of Science, Clifford D. Conner summarizes the incredibly influential arguments of Plato and the effect he had on scientific thought.[ii] Rather than praising Plato, Conner instead charges him with playing a “significant role in a two-thousand-year retardation of scientific thought—arguably the greatest damage any scientific elite has ever inflicted on science in all of human history.”[ii] What is the crux of Conner’s argument? Plato advocated for elitism and hierarchy in science. He explicitly excluded people who work with their hands from scientific practice and advocated in the Republic that “it is not the man who make a thing, but the man who uses it, who has a true scientific knowledge about it.” In general, Plato placed pure thought on a pedestal and relegated those who practiced empirical science to a lower caste. With the founding of his Academy, these scientific ideals persisted and spread. As we move on to discuss more modern scientific enterprises, the influence of Platonic platitudes is evident.

Evidence for the privileged status afforded to a priori reasoning is abundant in medieval European history. The Roman doctor Galen (129-210 AD) greatly influenced medical practice for centuries. Galen popularized the Hippocratic theory that all human disease stemmed from an imbalance of the four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Cancer was the lone physical illness that Galen believed arose from an excess of black bile. As Siddhartha Mukherjee outlines in the Emperor of All Maladies: Biography of Cancer, the notion that tumours were merely a local outcropping of a systemic increase in black bile led doctors to rule out surgery as a potential therapy.[iii] Although Galen learned much about anatomy and physiology from dissecting animals, once he began working as the personal physician to Marcus Aurelius, his work stagnated;

Indicative of the beginning of the cleavage between surgery and medicine was the fact that Galen no longer practiced surgery to any great extent after coming to Rome. In the slaveholding society, manual labour was considered beneath the dignity of a gentleman, and surgery was regarded as a form of manual labour.[iv]

So it shouldn’t be surprising that no one empirically tested the idea of black bile; in fact, the standard of medieval scholasticism entailed memorizing and regurgitating the texts of Galen. That is until Vesalius disproved many of Galen’s ideas with his 1543 treatise De humani corporis fabrica (yup, it did take over 1300 years). Vesalius tried and tried but could not find any evidence of black bile in the human cadavers he dissected. Plato also contributed to the corpus of unscientific reasoning. Plato’s Timaeus summarized his thoughts on the cosmos based on “quasimathematical reasoning that was mistaken by credulous scholars [in the 12th century] for valid astronomy.”[ii] The spectre of armchair elitism paralyzed genuine scientific progress by brushing labour and observation aside.

Jumping forward to the scientific revolution (mid 16th century to the end of the 18th century), the ideal of empiricism took hold among the scientific elites. Francis Bacon and company, often regarded as the heroes of the scientific revolution, took inspiration from the mechanics, miners, blacksmiths, potters, technicians, etc who never abandoned empirical ideals. Yet, the elite did not collaborate with artisans. Rather, they used (or stole) artisanal knowledge as “raw material” for their own theories.[ii] Even though scientific methodology was reformed, the same hierarchies remained; those who instigated and supervised research on top and those who worked with their hands and made observations at the bottom. Revisiting one of the most celebrated achievements of the scientific revolution demonstrates this point clearly.

One of the most celebrated achievements of the revolution is Kepler’s formation of the planetary laws of motion. The raw data for this work is attributed to Tyco Brahe. You would be forgiven for believing that Tyco Brahe was a genius who meticulously made astronomical observations all by his lonesome. That is the myth. Reality is far more nuanced. As a nobleman and feudal lord, Brahe used his immense wealth to found “the most advanced astronomical research institute in the pretelescope era.”[ii] At no point did Brahe operate the observatory alone but did participate directly alongside skilled assistants. Yet, as time went on, Brahe became more and more occupied with his other duties. While Brahe funded, supervised, and wrote about the research, a legion of artisans, technicians, and labourers carried out the actual day-to-day work. Despite this, Brahe never named those people who worked for him. It took the work of historians of science like John Robert Christianson to identify those who so vitally contributed to this import astronomical project. For example, Christopher Schissler constructed a one-and-a-half meter globe, Hans Crol served as chief technician, and Christian Sorenson Longomontanus led the team of anonymous surveyors who in 1592 completed a catalogue of 777 stars. Brahe also forced the two hundred inhabitants of Hven island, where he based his observatory, to labour without pay. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss Brahe’s contributions but to question a history that gives all glory to the person with the idea and none to the people who laboured to actualize an idea or test a hypothesis. It also reveals that elitist science continued uninterrupted since the age of plato; the manner in which Brahe ran his institute (minus the use of literal slave labour) is so reminiscent of modern academia it hurts.

Reformation of science took hold in America by the late 1800s. John M. Barry chronicles this transition; beginning with Johns Hopkins, American scientific institutions, much like European institutions in the centuries past, committed themselves to secular and empirical science.[v] Barry dubbed this new generation of scientists, who rejected Galen and other theoreticians, “warriors” — Jonas Salk is one prominent example. In 1947, Salk started his own lab at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. A small team of researchers worked tireless at creating the first polio vaccine. They based their efforts on Salk’s idea that a dead virus can elicit an immune response just as readily as an attenuated virus. In the spring of 1955, the results of a massive field study testing the efficacy of their vaccine were announced at the University of Michigan. Spoiler alert, it worked. During Salk’s speech, he never gave credit to the members of his lab despite many being in attendance. Julius Yougner, a key contributor to the polio vaccine, never relented in demanding acknowledgement. In an interview following the announcement, Yougner said that “while Salk raised research funds, fought with his scientific opponents, and dealt with the public and the press, he stayed in the lab and conducted the experiments.” Salk had a hypothesis but did not test it alone. Instead, it took the tireless effort of an entire research lab.

Another more recent controversy centres on the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. I admit that Nobel Prizes are low-hanging fruit; any scientific award that recognizes just three people (at most) will fail to recognize many important contributions. It just so happens that those neglected are usually those who did the actual experiments. Jules A. Hoffman received a one-quarter share for “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity." But after the announcement, former trainee Bruno Lemaitre claimed that his supervisor did not contribute to the research at all. Lemaitre alleges that only once the importance of the work became apparent did Hoffman begin talking about a ‘team effort.’ It is telling that Lemaitre’s group supervisor Jean-Marc Reichhart defended the contribution of Hoffman by calling him “a very good ambassador for the field of innate immunity." If empiricism is the basis of science, why is the ‘ambassador’ put on a pedestal? Might as well give Bill Nye a Nobel Prize.

The purpose of this post isn’t to whine about awards and credit. These instead serve as a litmus test for how academic contributions are evaluated. But what is the result of scientific labour being undervalued? The average associate professor (all disciplines) in the United States makes $80,000 USD a year while a PhD student earns anywhere between $15,000 and $30,000 USD a year. And it hasn’t always been the case, but at some point PhD-trained scientists were expected to complete a postdoctoral fellowship before applying for a professorship. As wryly noted by many, this exploitive system keeps labour costs low as the average post doc salary is roughly $45,000 USD. And even though postdocs at certain institutions, like the University of Toronto, are entitled to overtime pay, they are warned by human resources that no one ever asks for it. Wink wink. Postdocs work long hours and even contribute intellectually. It is also ironic that a survey of American graduate students (in the biological sciences) found that postdocs positively contributed to skills development and PIs didn’t. But no one should be surprised. After all, postdocs actively engage in the empirical practice of science that positions them to teach others and generate hypotheses in addition to actively collecting scientific data. It is true that PIs possess a proven track record, but once they become the boss, they cease to contribute at the same level. There are exceptions. Some PIs never retire from lab work or are bona fide geniuses. But in most cases, it is the trainees that contribute most of the labour and much of the intellectual insight.

There are real consequences to this! In larger cities with high costs of living, many post docs and graduate students find themselves living in poverty. As I recently calculated for the University of Toronto, the stipend received by a Masters student in the Faculty of Medicine is half that of a living wage. Some may argue that completing a PhD and postdoc is simply a rite of passage, and that the cushiness of a PI gig makes up for it. This argument falls apart when you realize that in the US, there are seven postdocs for every tenure-track PI position. The vast majority of scientists never financially benefit for their contribution to academia. This results in another argument. Ever since Plato, scientists have argued that our pursuits ought to be dispassionate and uncoupled from any possible financial reward. It is laughable that these historical arguments emerged from the independently-wealthy scientific elite! Perhaps scientific research ought to be uncoupled from hunger and desperation instead. Enough with the moralizing, pay all scientific labourers a living wage!

So why hasn’t anything changed? The scientists with the power to change the system are those who most benefit from its current configuration. PIs constitute a conservative, reactionary force that largely reinforces the system. Many trainees also buy into the structures of academia; instead of valuing their labour, they view themselves as temporarily embarrassed PIs. Only once we all recognize our collective value will we be able to change the system so that all contributions to science are recognized as important and remunerated appropriately.

[i] Crombie, A. C. (1953). Augustine to Galileo : The History of Science A.D. 400-1650. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[ii] Conner, C. D. (2009). A people's history of science: Miners, midwives, and low mechanicks. Hachette UK.

[iii] Mukherjee, S. (2010). The emperor of all maladies: a biography of cancer. Simon and Schuster.

[iv] Ackerknecht, E. H., & Haushofer, L. (2016). A short history of medicine. JHU Press. Quoted in [ii].

[v] Barry, J. M. (2005). The great influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history. Penguin.

*Socialist Action first published this article on Dec 16, 2019*

By Daniel Tarade

On December 15, the Toronto chapter of the nonviolent civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion held its first general assembly and adopted a new demand — Justice for All — that places indigenous people and other marginalized groups at the center of its climate activism.  XR Toronto elaborates that it “demands self-determination for Indigenous communities both in Canada and around the world. The response to the climate crisis must center the rights and needs of indigenous peoples, people of colour, the economically disadvantaged, people with disabilities, migrants, and people of all genders and sexualities. Solutions must be actively de-colonial and firmly safeguard the dignity of all.”

XR began in London, UK with a public declaration of rebellion on October 31, 2018. The radical group debuted with three core demands: Tell the Truth, Act Now, and Beyond Politics. Chapters around the world voice these demands, but their exposition differs to account for unique historical, cultural, environmental, and material contexts. In September 2019, members of XR Toronto founded a de-colonial solidarity group that works with indigenous activists and other Extinction Rebellion chapters to address the colonial nature of Canada. As we all know, the Canadian Government repeatedly undermines the self-determination of First Nations people by building pipelines, clear cutting forests, and dumping toxic chemicals or instead allowing corporations to do the same with impunity. Can a people’s movement address climate change without addressing Grassy Narrows? XR Toronto says no.

Although the first three XR Toronto demands date back to the genesis of the group in the UK, members adopted the fourth demand by popular vote at the first general assembly held in Toronto. Over seventy-five self-identified members of XR crowded into a classroom at the University of Toronto. Although several rounds of voting were necessary due to procedural confusion, a testament to XR’s non-hierarchical structure and ability to engage with first-time activists, members adopted the fourth demand with 83.3 per cent opting for it. Chants of “This is what democracy looks like” greeted the result. In keeping with its third demand, XR continues to eschew electoral politics and instead aims to host general assemblies to directly address the climate crisis. As the movement continues to grow, their vision for environmental, economic, and societal reform is one led by the people.

In adopting their new demand, XR Toronto shuts the door on Elon Musk and the technocrats who promise a free-market solution to what is just the most recent on a long list of environmental catastrophes.  XR Toronto also continues to show capacity for growth. In the past, activists (rightfully) criticized certain elements of XR including their cozy relationship with the police, shutting down public transit in impoverished neighbourhoods, and failing to address eco-fascism and environmental racism. The first demand to be adopted by general assembly highlights the need for any popular movement to continually self-reflect and evolve.

Socialists note that members of XR Toronto continue to see colonial capitalism as the root of the current ecological and environmental crisis. In responding to the crisis, XR Toronto renewed calls for true ally-ship. In future months it will be important to keep an eye on the active discussion within the group concerning its apolitical philosophy. Can a broad radical movement be apolitical about a fundamentally political problem? This is a question that XR still needs to answer. But it is heading in the right direction. As XR says, our efforts are fuelled by love and rage.

By Daniel Tarade

*The Meaning of Life Type Stuff is now indexed on Feedspot under the Top 200 Philosophy Blogs*

The central dogma is something that all biology students learn in high school. The concept is defined as the unidirectional flow of information from DNA to RNA to protein. DNA is the hereditary blueprint for cellular and organismal functioning that encodes functional protein units, which fill structural, hormonal, enzymatic, and signalling roles. The DNA sequence, a polymer comprised of four different flavours of deoxyribonucleotides, is first transcribed into a complementary RNA molecule, a closely related stretch of ribonucleotides. During the subsequent translation, RNA is ‘read’ three nucleotides at a time. These combinations of three nucleotides, or codons, each specify a particular amino acid, which is the basic building block of the protein polymer. This process is fundamental to all life known to humanity.

In today’s age, immediately after learning about the central dogma, students are taught a compendium of supposed exceptions. RNA-based retroviruses can reverse transcribe RNA back in to DNA. Some RNA is functional and never translated into protein. The identification of gene splicing added a wrinkle. So too did the discovery of prions, those proteins that replicate and spread without any nucleic acid intermediate. But none of these processes violate the central dogma as formulated by Francis Crick in 1958[i];

Th[e central dogma] states that once 'information' has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible. Information means here the precise determination of sequence, either of bases in the nucleic acid or of amino acid residues in the protein…As far as I know [this dogma] has not been explicitly stated before.

Even prions do not violate the central dogma. Prions are misfolded proteins that induce other proteins to misfold. But the induction of misfolding is the not transmission of protein sequence information. Rather, the information in these proteins is separately transcribed from RNA.

For some time, scientists searched for cases of reverse translation. To a few, it served as a promising hypothesis to explain genetic changes that did not lean on random mutation as a mechanism.[ii] Moss now grows over this hypothesis, long since abandoned. A testament to the once-promising idea takes the form of an April Fool’s prank on a science blog. Others laid the theoretical foundation for an equilibrium between amino acid and nucleic acid chains, which may have been important during earliest stages of life on Earth.[iii] Despite a theoretical possibility, no experimental evidence for reverse translation exists. Or perhaps it is just hiding in plain site.

During one of our departmental coffee breaks, Professor Paul Hamel strolls in and asks the students present to explain the central dogma. For reasons discussed above, we all proffered up incorrect answers. He brought our attention to Crick’s original definition and asked us if there are any exceptions. After some time, we reasoned that the central dogma remains intact to this day. Paul asked us to think about outside the box. What about the reverse translation that we do as scientists? Any university student in biology can deduce a complimentary DNA sequence from any given protein sequence. Of course. Reverse translation does exist. A simple google search will reveal multiple webservers that can take an amino acid sequence and spit out a complementary nucleotide sequence. There are a few tricks involved. There is a degeneracy when a nucleic acid sequence is translated into protein. There are sixty-four permutations of the four nucleic acids when arranged into triplet codons but only twenty amino acids. As a result, multiple codons often encode the same amino acid. For example, GAG (guanine-adenosine-guanine) and GAA both encode glutamic acid. When reverse translation occurs in silico, the most frequent codon is chosen. So here is the question — does this reverse translation violate the central dogma?

The impulse of most people is no. As quoted on at least one tutorial page, “reverse translation is not a biological process.” Although obsessed over by scientists, no one has discovered a cellular mechanism by which an amino acid sequence serves as a template to produce a corresponding nucleic acid sequence. The transfer of information from protein to DNA, however, is possible with human intervention. And humans are biological. Any denial of reverse translation requires treating human activity as technological and not natural. Hence, we need to address the divide between society and nature.

Binary thinking on nature and society bubbled to the surface during the Enlightenment. Scholars interested in studying physics, chemistry, and biology argued that these ‘natural’ phenomena are separate and external to humans and their societies and are best studied in an objective and dispassionate manner. Thus, scientists and researchers construct ‘nature’ and define with a razor’s edge the phenomena they wish to interrogate. Just because this distinction simplifies the research process does not mean it is apolitical. It is ideological.

The classic example used to illustrate the arbitrary divide between nature and technology is the beaver dam. A beaver dam is a sophisticated construction that provides shelter and modifies the local hydrology. If beavers did not exist, would we claim that dams do not exist in the natural world despite our own constructions? Many other examples highlight the absurd distinction between technology and nature. What is the difference between a chimp using a rock to smash a nut and a human using a nutcracker? Or a spider using a web to snatch flies and a human using a net to catch fish? I contend that the difference is one of degree but not of kind. More and more, scholarship aims to entrench the human experience the natural world.[iv] The rapid emergence of extinction rebellion, a group demanding the halting of biodiversity loss and continued greenhouse gas emissions, exemplifies popular support for dismantling the society/nature divide. The era of human exceptionalism is coming to an end, whether you like it or not.

Humans are biological. Everything humans do is biological. As athletic competitions are illustrative of human biology so to is human engineering and scientific inquiry. We pioneered reverse translation and broke the central dogma. If you still cannot wrap your head around that, imagine yourself an alien visitor to the planet Earth. Would you differentiate humans from other fauna? No. You would identify humans as apex predators or keystone species, but your study of humans might be reminiscent of how humans study chimps or other ‘higher’ organisms. As an alien Jane Goodall, you might even astonish members of your scientific institution with evidence of biological reverse translation.

[i] Crick, Francis HC. (1958). On protein synthesis. Symp Soc Exp Biol. 12,138-63.

[ii] Cook, N. D. (1977). The case for reverse translation. Journal of theoretical biology, 64(1), 113-135.

[iii] Nashimoto, M. (2001). The RNA/protein symmetry hypothesis: experimental support for reverse translation of primitive proteins. Journal of theoretical biology, 209(2), 181-187.

[iv] Goldman, M., & A. Schurman, R. (2000). Closing the “great divide”: New social theory on society and nature. Annual review of sociology, 26(1), 563-584.

By Daniel Tarade

Bob Dylan represents how easy it is to shift from anti-establishment thinking to chanting the pro-individualistic, anti-anti-establishment mantra. Early in his songwriting career, Dylan wrote anti-war, anti-racism songs of protest but Dylan later came to promote freedom of individual thought above all else and denounced the leftist movements of the 1960s. I appreciate Dylan’s beautiful conviction in speaking out for self-determination, but his dismissal of left ideologies as groupthink reeks of centrism. It is privileged and naive. Who better represents the mass movements of the 60s? Phil Ochs. Never relenting, Ochs wrote anti-imperial, anti-war, anti-racism, anti-draft, anti-segregation, and anti-poverty songs. He wrote one of the first songs to call out the Vietnam war. In 1966, Ochs released the song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” on a concert album. Recorded at Carnegie Hall, the performance typified the Ochs concert experience. He talked to the audience, peppering one-liners here and there. A phrase that did not make the final album cut — William Zanzinger killed poor Bobby Dylan — highlights the transition from Dylan to Ochs. In his earlier, political days, Dylan wrote a great song about the murder of Hattie Carrol by the wealthy white heir to a tobacco farm. Somewhere between 1963, when Dylan recorded that song, and 1966, the political Dylan died a lonesome death. The leftist movement leaned on other poets, like Ochs. For listeners, then and now, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” might be a bit confusing. Liberals are the progressives, right? So why did the radical Ochs release a satirical song making fun of liberals? A thorough analysis of the song helps to explain the difference between liberalism and leftism while also highlighting several tactics the ruling capitalist class uses to divide and conquer our society.

In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.

The song begins with a conversational introduction. Phil Ochs describes the liberal as ‘shady’ who at times will support the progressive agenda but are regressive much of the time. Especially when it ‘affects them personally,’ the liberal reacts to and defends against movements from below that threaten the status quo. The rest of the song spotlights Ochs as a liberal describing their position on many contemporary issues. To the radicals/leftists in the audience, the contradictions are obvious.

I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
And I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I'd lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
Get it?

Phil Ochs’ rendition of a liberal cries at the deaths of both Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy. Evers was a civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1963. Half a year later, JFK himself was killed. American liberals mourned both deaths. They represented reform that liberals found reasonable, like de-segregation. But not everybody grieved the death of Kennedy. Sure, some racists and conservatives giddied at the news, but radicals like Malcolm X also expressed that the assassination was no tragedy. In a famous quote, Malcolm X stated that the assassination of JFK was a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” The unpopular opinion contributed to Malcolm X being expelled from the Nation of Islam a year before his own assassination. Now, Malcolm X spoke more radically to the plight of African-Americans than most other leaders of the civil rights movement (“Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”). Many liberals thought he went too far in demanding black liberation. The modern counterpart? The liberal supports Obama but not the Black Lives Matter movement.

I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R (D.A.R., that's the Dykes of the American Revolution)
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Ochs continues. The liberal is proud of playing a part by attending civil rights rallies and insulting the Daughters of the American Revolution. The DAR is a patriotic group that did not allow African Americans to join until the 1970s. Of course, the liberal finds it funny to call these women dykes. If you despise Trump and like to call him Putin’s cock holster, you might be a liberal. Homophobia is never ok.

The liberal also sees hope in the Harry Belafontes, Sidney Poitiers, and Sammy Davis Jrs becoming famous. For the liberal, equal participation in capitalist exploitation is the goal. For leftists, representation is important but not the end in itself. If you believe a vote for Hillary Clinton in progressive because she is a women, you are definitely a liberal. What liberals do not support is an actual revolution. They just want capitalism to be polite.

I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad that the Commies were thrown out
Of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
And I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
As long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Hubert Humphrey was vice-president under Lyndon B. Johnson (65-69) and won the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1969. As a senator, he was the lead author of the Civil Rights act and introduced the first initiative to create the peace corps. But, he also sponsored the McCarran Internal Security Act, which forced members of communist groups to register their name and address with the attorney general. As a presidential nominee, he pledged to send more troops into Vietnam and increase the defence budget. Committed to ending the Vietnam War, Eugene McCarthy challenged Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. Although he secured more votes than Humphrey during the primaries, the delegates of caucus states overwhelmingly supported Humphrey. A riot broke out in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was held, as the majority anti-war crowd denounced the nomination as fixed. Phil Ochs was present during these riots, which were later described as leading to his political disillusionment. This would not be the first time that the DNC boosted an establishment candidate to undermine a progressive voice.

Much like the DNC stacks the deck in favour of its preferred liberal candidates, union leadership conspires to keep out radicals and not upset the bosses. The A.F.L. C.I.O (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) is the largest federation of unions in the US. In 1949-1950, leftist-led unions were expelled. This marked the end of a strong socialist influence in the labour movement, and the widespread support of cold war politics by the organizers of the working class.

The last few lines of the stanza are biting. Ochs calls out the liberal for giving mere lip service to equality. Just like the white liberal, supportive of racialized minorities in theory, might not want “Puerto Ricans and Negros…mov[ing] in next door,” the modern reincarnation instead participates in gentrification. That is not the only liberal hypocrisy on display today. What about a trans woman using the women’s washroom? As Hillary Clinton exemplified recently, many liberal feminists are unsupportive of trans rights.

Ah, the people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
Now, I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crane?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Phil Ochs often criticized the institutionalized racism of Mississippi, a view shared by his caricature of a liberal. But, the liberal’s disgust at the institutionalized racism in the American South lacks analysis. Failing to see the capitalist ploy of divide and conquer for what it is, they instead imagine that ‘country bumpkins’ are ignorant and uneducated. Perhaps if they watched the liberal radio and TV personality Les Crane, they would be enlightened. In today’s era, the liberal might instead recommend John Oliver.

The liberal also resents being personally asked to participate in desegregation. After the supreme court declared that the racial segregation of schools of public school is unconstitutional, students were re-assigned to schools in order to minimize segregation. In some instances, kids were bussed (free of charge) to schools outside of their district. This lead to white flight and increased enrolment of white children in private schools, which undermined desegregation. Today, the liberal might instead criticize affirmative action and scholarships for racialized minorities. And what about reparations for indigenous Canadians? In 2016, a survey found that two-thirds of Canadians agree that indigenous people “have a sense of entitlement about receiving support from government and taxpayers.” In Canada, the liberal stands in the way of true reconciliation.

Yes, I read New Republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Ochs continues to attack the liberals for their choice in media. The New Republic took a stance against the Vietnam War and the McCarthyism but critiqued the New Left. Also left-of-center (but not leftist) was The Nation. Max Lerner and Harry Golden are both famous liberal writers. Lerner was against discrimination of African-Americans but supported internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. By consuming the opinion of prominent minorities, the liberal feels that they are able to speak to the issues facing minorities in general.

Even if the liberal might hold some critical views of the government during peace time, the liberal will toe the patriotic line when the country wages another imperialist war of conquest. Just consider how George W. Bush’s approval rating skyrocketed after the 9/11 attacks. More recently, many democrats were outraged when Trump decided to withdraw American Troops from Syria. The liberal party supports American imperialism most of the time. Socialists don’t.

I vote for the democratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
And I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Six stanzas in and Och’s satirical attack crescendos to a slaughter. He critiques blind support for the democratic party and the U.N — both institutions exist to maintain the status quo. Och’s even call outs the liberal’s for attending Pete Seeger concerts but stopping short of becoming involved in community organizing. For the liberal, their political ideology alleviates guilt and provides comfort because it condemns overt atrocities but does not demand any fundamental change in society. As reformists, the liberal is content to donate money or share a post on Facebook.

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old Union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

The final stanza. A hallmark of the liberal is that they justify their current, regressive views with an appeal to life experience and maturity. The liberal may have even been a radical at one point, wearing pins and singing union hymns. Here, Ochs makes a pointed counterposition between union hymns (more radical) and Pete Seeger songs (less radical). With age, the liberal cares less about class struggle and more about succeeding in polite society. Sure, you might think you want to overthrow the government now, but just wait until you have to pay taxes. You will come around.

There are a few things missing from the song that leaves me wanting. For a song about liberal politics, the omission of the word ‘capitalism’ is glaring. The Liberals in Canada and the Democrats in the US are parties of big business. In the interest of maximizing profit for the few, both governments approve pipeline expansions and give handouts to big business. Neither taxes corporations and the wealthy at a just level. However, what Ochs does address is the reactionary impulse of the liberal to any perceived threat to the status quo. The first defence of capitalism against a worker revolt is the neoliberal line. Everything from a militant union to a black liberation movement is brake checked by liberal forces. The liberal argues that revolution is going a bit too far, and in doing so ensures that our current exploitation continues unchallenged. Phil Ochs understood this.

By Daniel Tarade

The pharmaceutical industry is said to be a necessary evil. Yes, essential medicines are expensive. But, we are told that is the cost of developing new drugs. Research takes many years, and clinical trials are costly. Ten thousand dollars may seem like an obscene cost for a course of drug, but otherwise the company would not make any money. That is how exorbitant prices are justified. That is how patents are justified. Without these practices, a pharmaceutical company would not make a profit, and they would not develop medicines. Even though many people (or countries) may not be able to afford these futuristic medications right now, the prices will fall in time. When they do, we will all benefit. That is the narrative. While it is true that there is massive private investment into the drug development pipeline, the mythos omits the labour and investment of the public sector. Every drug is developed on the back of fundamental scientific discoveries that are not factored into the equation. In reality, the university scientist sets the stage for big pharma to come in at the last possible moment and steal the profits.

Let’s start by unpacking the current narrative of drug development. A pharmaceutical company can now expect to spend $5 billion for every drug that is approved for use. This estimate is the main justification for the often unaffordable price tag attached to new, life-saving medications. Without profit, how can one expect a private company to invest in the drugs that help everyone? But why does a drug take billions of dollars to develop? The major reason cited by pharma is that most of the drugs they begin developing are neither efficacious, safe, or profitable. Thus, the average cost of drug development includes the ghosts of failed projects. Because private capital is willing to take on this risk, they deserve to make a profit. After all, if private industries were not around, we would never benefit from new medicines. That is the argument I hear over and over again. I hear it from libertarians, and I hear it from scientists. I once had a long conversation with Durhane Wong-Rieger, President of the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders, following her presentation on how the current drug discovery system fails those who suffer from a rare disease. Because demand is lower, the price is often unaffordable by individuals and unjustifiable in the Canadian universal healthcare system. When I brought up the potential solution of nationalizing pharmaceutical R&D, she cut me off and said it wasn’t possible. That scientists lack the motive to discover new cures if they aren’t to become wealthy in the process. Over the years, the parasitic relationship of pharma has become normalized. We are workers without consciousness of our class.

When we look only at the piles of money invested by pharma, we lose sight of what the public scientist provides to the system. By public scientist, I mean the graduate student, the postdoctoral fellow, the research associate, the laboratory technician, and the professor working at a university or college. These scientists are most often publicly funded and their work enters the public domain. It is in this sector that the most important scientific discoveries of the past hundred years were made. It was not a private company that discovered the nucleus, the mitochondria, or the cell. Pharma did not discover the double helix, or vitamin C, or protein kinases. They did not invent protein crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy. The fundamental discoveries and inventions that form the basis of current biological knowledge and practice were the fruits of the average, government-funded scientist. Scientists operating without a profit motive but driven to explore and improve the world. In many cases, scientists discovered essential medicines in the absence of private investment. Pencillin, insulin, and the polio vaccine sit on the trophy shelf of non-profit science. We have done the hard part. In light of this, why do we let for-profit companies control our drugs.

I want to bring up the case of imatinib to highlight how pharma acts as a parasite, extracting profit at the very last stage of drug development. Imatinib is a veritable cure for chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML), as disease that kills over 50% of diagnosed individuals treated with conventional chemotherapy.[i] The disease was first described by doctors Rudolf Virchow and John Hughes Bennett in 1845. In 1960, doctors Peter Nowell and David Hungerford made another big discovery. They noted that CML cells taken from patients display a specific chromosomal abnormality. This defect was named the Philadelphia chromosome after the city in which they worked. By 1973, Dr Janet Rowley identified that the Philadelphia chromosome came from the erroneous swapping of bits of chromosome 22 and chromosome 9. A whole cadre of scientists began to unravel the molecular mystery at play. The accepted idea is that the ABL oncogene encoded on chromosome 9 breaks apart and fuses to another gene on chromosome 22 called BCR. This fusion event produces a chimeric protein, termed BCR-ABL, that is more active than ABL and capable of initiating tumourigenesis. Thirty years of work established the BCR-ABL oncogene as the cause of CML and clarified that the protein functioned as a tyrosine kinase (an enzyme that catalyzes phosphorylation of tyrosine residues on proteins; associated with cell growth and division in the case of BCR-ABL). This work was not dispensable but absolutely necessary for any future innovation by a pharma company.

While the investigation into CML and BCR-ABL was ongoing, scientists at Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) became interested in developing protein kinase inhibitors for cancer treatment.[ii] After all, most of the discovered oncogenes at the time were kinases. They based their designs on kinase inhibitors first discovered by university scientists. One problem Ciba-Geigy had to overcome was to figure out how to screen their chemicals for activity, and these pharma scientists had no successful method to purify protein kinases for experiments. Rather than develop their own techniques, they adopted the methods of Tom Roberts, a scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Further, it was John Kuriyan’s lab, based in Berkeley, that performed the protein crystallography that confirmed how imatinib worked to inhibit BCR-ABL. The biggest contribution came from Brian Druker, scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, who became interested in finding an inhibitor of BCR-ABL after pioneering the use of antibodies to study tyrosine kinase activity.[iii] He described his one goal as finding “a drug company that had a BCR-ABL kinase inhibitor.” Nick Lydon, a scientist at Ciba-Geigy, sent over compounds they had developed. It was Brian Druker who was able to confirm the selective activity of imatinib against CML cells. In clinical studies, funded by Ciba-Geigy, imatinib proved to be even more effective than either could imagine; patients taking imatinib have a 90% cure rate. This story highlights both the power of the scientific method to improve lives but also why scientists need to rethink our relationship with pharma.

Imatinib made its clinical debut in 2001. When introduced to market, a year-long course of drug cost $21,000 USD. Since then, the cost has not decreased. Instead, the price increased 10-20% a year and peaked at $146,000 a year. Even the introduction of a generic form in 2016 did not provide an immediate respite. Due to the Hatch-Waxman act, the company that first filed to bring generic imatinib to market had 180 days of market exclusivity and sold a course for $140,000. As these patents expired, the cost of imatinib did fall to $9000 and $8000 for branded and generic imatinib, respectively. But, these medical costs are destructive, in particular because a patient with CML needs take imatinib for life to prevent recurrence. As wryly noted in an article about how Novartis manipulated the market to maintain high drug costs, the author describes imatinib as “a miraculous drug that results in a normal functional lifespan in most patients with CML who can afford and comply with the treatment and who are monitored optimally [emphasis mine].” Even in a country with universal healthcare like Canada, the cost of generic imatinib costs the government $10,000 a year. But, the Supreme Court in India did deny Novartis a patent extension in 2013 for a slight modification of imatinib. The decision allowed the continued production of generic imatinib, which still costs less than $1000 a year. In response, Novartis threatened that future innovation in India will be discouraged. The same argument resurfaces. Pharma companies threaten to pull the carpet out from under our feet; allow us to profiteer or else suffer pestilence.

Why do we accept that pharma is the central player in drug development? They did not discover cancer, or CML, or the Philadelphia chromosome, or oncogenes, or kinases, or chemotherapy, or kinase inhibitors, or BCR-ABL, or protein crystallography, or kinase purification methods, or kinase detection methods. Ciba-Geigy developed a panel of potential kinase inhibitors and held it hostage. Brian Druker describes how even before he validated the use imatinib as a potential therapeutic for CML, “it was already patented against any tumor in a warm-blooded mammal.”[iii] After winning the prestigious Lasker award, Brian Druker pleaded that scientists aught to give in to pharma. That if we try to negotiate for royalties or control, it will delay and impede clinical development of drugs. That we need to “never forget…the 1.5 million individuals diagnosed and the 500,000 who die of cancer each year and are in desperate need of better therapies.” Druker recognizes that publicly-funded scientists are necessary for the fight against cancer. That is why he called on the government to fund a massive cancer genome sequencing project that would cost $1 billion. Druker also recognizes that pharma is the gatekeeper. There is no mechanism in our society for clinical drug development independent of pharma. They have latched their tentacles to the distal end of the drug pipeline.

Other models of drug development are shaking up the industry for their ability to develop drugs at a tenth the cost of traditional pharma. A non-profit organization, called Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), brings new drugs to the clinic at cost of $110-170 million. This is a fraction of the cost that it take for-profit pharma to do the same job. How do they make this work? One, they develop drugs against diseases endemic to the poor global south. There they face little competition, and these fatal diseases with few treatment options are low hanging fruit. You do not need to design a clinical trial with tens of thousands of patients because clinical improvements are more clear when you start with a poor baseline. Otherwise, they use the same strategies of big pharma. They contract companies to conduct high-throughput screens of drug libraries. They collaborate with university and government scientists. Yet, at the end of the day, they are non-profit and develop drugs that are necessary even if if the target demographic cannot afford expensive medications. After Gilead Sciences brought a hepatitis C drug to market, many other for-profit companies abandoned their own projects even though there were concerns that the drug may not be effective against all strains. The lack of further innovation also allowed Gilead to charge $74,000 USD for a course of drug. Thus, DNDi is taking up the charge in developing affordable hepatitis drugs by working on those projects abandoned by for-profit companies. The same phenomena is happening with antibiotic development to fight against new drug resistant bacteria. Most pharma companies have abandoned their antibiotic research programs because they are not profitable enough. Yet, almost a million people are already dying each year due to drug-resistant bacteria. The World Health Organization is now tasking DNDi with developing new drugs that will be affordable. The model works. For now, pharma is willing to collaborate with DNDi because they are not trying to develop the cholesterol, heart, diabetes, and cancer medications that are so so profitable. But, once the non-profit model of drug development is expanded, big pharma will fight to maintain control. Despite the battle on the horizon, we cannot relent in our mission to seize control of drug development. Because the current process is not working.

Scientists are capable of developing drugs ourselves. In fact, scientists, whether working at a university or pharma company, create most drugs. All scientists working in private industry received their training in university labs. Much like drug development, pharma plays little role in training scientists, but instead they sponge up human resources at the last stage when they would indeed be capable of working in the non-profit sector. Pharma companies only exist because our governments have allowed private interests to leech off of public scientific progress. We can do it ourselves and we can do it better.

[i] Druker, B. J. (2008). Translation of the Philadelphia chromosome into therapy for CML. Blood, 112(13), 4808-4817.

[ii] Lydon, N. (2009). Attacking cancer at its foundation. Nature medicine, 15(10), 1153.

[iii] Druker, B. J. (2009). Perspectives on the development of imatinib and the future of cancer research. Nature medicine, 15(10), 1149.

By Daniel Tarade

Even for individuals that acknowledge capitalism’s misdeeds, some are willing to bite the bullet. Why? Because even if capitalism results in gross inequality, it also has prompted the technological innovations that have trickled down and helped everyone. In this way, capitalism is the utilitarian choice. I want to tackle this assertion head on. To do so, I want to talk about one metric that is brought up in political and scientific circles: lifespan. One of the biggest developments in the past hundred or so years is that human lifespan has become longer. A lot longer. Despite lifespan being affected by many variables, scientists and science advocates often point to advances in medication and vaccination. I call this the myth of heroic science, that all modern advances are the outcome of science. Intrinsic to this veneration is that scientific process requires a profit motive. Lies. A look at historical trends reveals that major killers, like tuberculosis, began killing fewer and fewer people before major scientific innovations. Rather, socialist and labour movements brought about improved conditions for the common labourer. Social progress, not profit-driven science, is responsible for a new era of human longevity.

Crude mortality rates for all causes, noninfectious causes, and infectious cases. Data from the United States. Armstrong, Conn, and Pinner. 1999.

The dotted lines indicate the start of the respective Russian and Spanish influenza pandemics. Zürcher et al. 2016.

Reported measles cases and deaths per 100,000 population, United States, 1912-1974. Barkin. 1975.

At the turn of the 20th century, the average lifespan in western nations was around 50 years. At the same time, the three leading causes of death in the US were related to infectious diseases (tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections). What has happened since the late 1800s is remarkable; deaths due to infectious diseases have become rare (see panel on the right, slide 1). With fewer people dying in childhood, the average person now lives longer than ever before. The classic explanation is that scientific advances, namely vaccines and antibiotics, saved humankind from the indignity of microbial death. But a causal connection is not borne out in the data. Deaths due to infectious disease began decreasing long before vaccines or antibiotics for those illnesses became available. This is clear with tuberculosis (see slide 2). In a number of western countries and cities, tuberculosis deaths decreased for decades before streptomycin, one of the first antibiotics, entered clinical practice in 1946. By that point, mortality from tuberculosis had already decreased 90% from its peak in the mid-1800s. The same trend exists for most vanquished foes. Measles mortality fell many years before the introduction of a vaccine decreased measles incidence (slide 3). I do not bring up these data to argue that vaccines are unnecessary (although some do make such bad faith arguments). Vaccines remain a great human innovation that prevents suffering. Rather, it is misguided to attribute all improvements in public health to scientific research alone. To better understand the role of science and capitalism in our society, we need to grapple with what underlies the precipitous decrease in death due to microbial disease.

It is undeniable that health outcomes have improved in the absence of medical and scientific intervention. An uncontroversial corollary is that the health of a society is affected by a combination of medicine, work conditions, nutrition, sanitation, and environment. And academics try to tease apart the impact of these different aspects of society on human health. Once the project is undertaken, it is hard to ignore the positive benefits of socialist forces on lifespan. One prominent example is Cuba. Before the Cuban revolution in 1958, life expectancy on the island was only 60 years and lower than a number of other Latin American countries.[i] In the following years, life expectancy surged to over 75 years. As of 2015, Cuba boasts the third highest life expectancy in Latin America and lags USA by only 0.2 years. This is despite being an impoverished island nation that faces intense American pressure (Cuba is one of the biggest outliers when comparing GDP per capita and life expectancy). In Cuba, a more equitable distribution of scarce resources decreased infant malnutrition and mortality and increased access to flush toilets and running water.[i] Another example are the nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway that achieved some of the greatest health indicators in the world after several decades of socialist democracy and high union involvement.[i]

We started by speaking about infectious disease and the 1800/early-1900s in Western Europe and North America. What was happening then and there?

In general, a decrease in infectious disease deaths could arise from the development of effective treatments/preventatives, a change in the microbe and/or host immunity, or a change in the standard of living. When looking at the decline in tuberculosis mortality in England and Wales, the most logical explanation is an increase in nutrition and other socioeconomic improvements in the mid 1800s.[ii] What else was happening in England at this time? The industrial revolution was just coming to an end. Some argue that capitalism, emblemized by the industrial revolution, was the impetus behind an increase in standard of living. But what else was happening in England? Socialism. The Chartist Movement was the first mass worker’s movement in English history. By the mid-1800s, they achieved a reduction in the work day to ten hours. Direct action, including general strikes, was common. Now, it is true that industrialization lead to increased wealth. But the funny thing about capitalism is that wealth concentrates in the hands of the few. Did a factory owner ever increase wages in industrial England, or America, or Canada? Of course. Increases in wage and improvements in work conditions, however, resulted from organized strike action. Capitalism unfettered does not improve conditions for the labouring class. Rather, the organization of labour, often under the banner of socialism, brings about reforms that improve socioeconomic conditions and improve resilience to pestilence.

Even if the importance of poverty in health is accepted, I can imagine that people might hesitate to give up the medical advances we have come to enjoy. After all, technology can also prevent and cure illnesses and even compensate for unhealthy lifestyles and environmental conditions brought about by capitalist exploitation. It is important to recognize that this either/or thinking is artificial. We do not need to choose between socialism or technology. Hear me out. Karl Marx took a historical approach to political economy. He described the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a natural progression. In the same way, Marx recognized that the capitalist ideology would result in increased inequality until the working class revolted. In the process, workers would not abandon the factories but rather operate them as a collective. In this way, the wealth generated by an industrial society can be shared. So far, this has only happened on a small scale with the labour movement winning concessions from the capitalist class; as illustrated, even these reforms have had a profound impact on the quality of life for the proles.

Now imagine what would happen if the entirety of the biotech industry was brought under social control? Scientists, doctors, and other ancillary workers would collectively make decisions about the research they pursue and the conditions under which they labour, all while sharing the wealth generated. The redistribution of wealth will improve the health of the workers. The direct democratic control will also enable scientists to better improve societal health by pursuing the projects that are most needed rather than those that are profitable (like new antibiotics). In this way, we enjoy the full bounty of this planet and the creativity of all people. For those who are still sceptical that scientific progress will continue unabated in the absence of a profit motive, remember that the most important medications in history have been developed by publicly-funded scientists. Medications like penicillin and insulin were first created in university labs. Only after the initial discovery and development were these drugs patented and sold for profit. Capitalism is more parasitic than mutualistic. With this in mind, there is no reason why we cannot socialize the pharmaceutical and medical industries.

My supervisor once told me an anecdote about interviewing potential candidates for the MD/PhD program at the University of Toronto. They were asked what they thought was the greatest medical advance in the past century. Many answered that CRISPR, the emergent gene editing technology, stood above the rest. The response elicited shock from my supervisor, who instead felt that vaccines and antibiotics were the obvious answer. Whether one thinks old-school microbial management or futuristic gene therapy is more important, both betray the ideological supposition that science alone can promote the health of our citizenry. When combined with the truism that capitalism is necessary for technological advance, we begin to feel that we have no choice but to accept an exploitive and unequal system. However, two pieces of evidence liberate us from this conclusion. One, dramatic decreases in infectious disease mortality precede relevant scientific discoveries and instead are the result of concessions won by the labour movement. Two, medical knowledge has been accumulated for millenia before the dawn of capitalism, and many major discoveries are made by government-funded scientists. We need to remind ourselves that socialism does not mean abandoning medical research but liberating scientists and doctors from a profit motive. By redistributing wealth, socialism allows for improved quality of life AND democratic control of scientific institutions. Truly a win-win.

Post-Script on Anti-Vaxxers

I believe that the anti-vaccine movement is dangerous. But I also see the anti-anti-vax rhetoric as reactionary. By arguing that an unvaccinated children is guaranteed (or even likely) to die, we become alienated from the role that societal structure plays in human heath. Instead, science becomes an almost godlike monolith that one must worship. Science is capable of promoting great change but only if it is under our control. Otherwise, it is susceptible to exploitation for profit.

[i] Navarro, V. (1993). Has socialism failed? An analysis of health indicators under capitalism and socialism. Science & Society, 6-30.

[ii] McKeown, T., & Record, R. G. (1962). Reasons for the decline of mortality in England and Wales during the nineteenth century. Population studies, 16(2), 94-122.