Erdoğan and his cabinet discussed the new counter-Covid-19 measures on Monday. Announcing the pandemic-related measures, President Erdoğan declared that millions of workers would continue to work at factories and workshops also on days and at times of curfew with no notable measures taken.

As the measures Erdoğan announced became known, it appeared that proposals emanating from scientific circles, not least the Turkish Medical Association, and trade unions’ demands that factories have each become a Covid-19 production centre and urgent measures must be taken had been ignored.

Having announced the new counter-Covid-19 measures, Erdoğan devoted the lion’s share of his speech to defending relations with Qatar and declaring the opposition to be a “national security issue.”

This statement revolved around money and the mentality that enables us to understand their failures in the fight against Covid-19 and their impending failure.

Erdoğan, who, in saying, “Money has no colour, religion or nationality; money is money!” sanctifies capitalism’s god, money, and places it at the pinnacle of the “pyramid of values,” by the same token says, “Never mind all our obsessions with ‘indigenousness and nationalness’ and the hullabaloo we have raised about the country’s major problems in the name of ‘survival’ … the basic issue is money. Regardless of where it comes from and how!”

WILL THE ADOPTED NEW MEASURES SERVE ANY PURPOSE?

The depleted state of the Treasury surely accounts for the placing of money above the “indigenous and national” values their propaganda deems to be all that is sacred. However, our topic today will be the fight against the spread of Covid-19.

Yes, in the fight against Covid-19, having even dispersed the Central Bank’s “reserve funds” and left the Central Bank with foreign-exchange reserves of up to minus 40 billion dollars to keep crony capital fed, the single-man administration:

1) wants the fight against Covid-19 to cost zero lira or even appears to have embarked on procuring fresh funds by campaigning for donations in the fight against the pandemic. Moreover, the single man administration has not missed a trick and has transferred the tens of millions of lira in the Unemployment Insurance Fund to the bosses in the name of “protecting employment.” The most recently adopted measures see the Unemployment Fund being left for the bosses to plunder, but not a penny has been allocated from the Treasury for example to support small businesspeople whose premises have recently been closed and the workers employed at these premises!

2) The single man administration, insistent on exploiting the fight against Covid-19 at the same time to crush the opposition (opposition system parties, progressive democratic parties and circles, labour and professional organizations, trade unions that have not been turned into the administration’s stooges, opposition local authorities), has made a true fight against Covid-19 impossible.

Indeed, on the ground, spokespersons of the Turkish Medical Association and health trade unions and workers trade unions state that the adopted measures will be insufficient to prevent the virus from spreading.

THE SINGLE-MAN ADMINISTRATION COULD NOT EVEN IMPLEMENT THE SIMPLEST OF MEASURES!

It is abundantly clear that, given the pandemic is an epidemic on a global scale, the fight against this epidemic also requires a global-scale mobilization.

However, the governments of developed countries have also been unable to mobilize in this endeavour and are at most giving financial support to alleviate the toll on the employed.

Indeed, despite claims that reduce the fight against the virus to whether financial aid is given to those suffering loss from the pandemic, we have seen and see that the most developed capitalist countries of the USA, France, the UK and even Germany, lauded for its successes in the capitalist press, have not managed to achieve the expected success in combatting the virus.

In our country, conversely, in tandem with the single-man administration billing the people for the pandemic along with the economic crisis, we have seen the struggle against the pandemic turned into the struggle to transfer fresh resources to capital and crush the opposition. And we have seen in practice when it came both to the inability to distribute masks and provide sufficient flu vaccines as well as online education and face-to-face education that the single-man administration was incapable of taking the simplest of measures to confront the pandemic!

Hence, second sight is not needed to say that we will witness a similar lack of success when it comes, for example, to importing and implementing the pandemic virus.

WHAT IF THERE WERE A MOBILIZATION AGAINST THE PANDEMIC?

If a counter-pandemic “mobilization” is to be spoken of, in combatting the pandemic, there is a need for all expenditure out of all financial and economic resources including and starting with the budget to be rearranged so that the destruction the pandemic wreaks will affect the people as little as possible and for all groupings of all social organizations down to the Turkish Medical Association, all health organizations, health trade unions, all other trade unions and labour and professional organizations, all local authorities, quarter heads, local associations, estate managers and apartment managers to be brought into action. Mobilizing (abandoning the attitude that prevents them from mobilizing) these organized forces, as hubs of solidarity over and above simply expressing opinions, to eliminate “physical distance” and, as it is stepped up, “social distance” as an important tool in combatting the pandemic is essential for a social mobilization.

But the single-man administration is allocating all its resources, the budget and other funds under its control, in support of the bosses, chiefly its own cronies.

Conversely, since the single-man administration now perceives all opposition forces to be a “national security issue” and adopts a strategy that places all kinds of popular organization and all trade union, professional or political groupings that do not do homage to the single-man order in the firing line, calls for mobilization against the pandemic cannot even turn into a whimper.

(Translated by Tim DRAYTON)