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Regional secretary with the National Education Union
The fusing of the pandemic, refugee and economic crises
Only working-class solidarity, compassion and organising for the common good will see us through them, writes KEVIN OVENDEN
Refugees wearing face masks on the edges of Lesbos's notorious Moria camp

HUMANITY faces a future of “socialism or barbarism,” wrote the Czech Marxist thinker Karl Kautsky in the period before the first world war.

That “war to end all wars” brought what was then the unimaginable suffering of the slaughter in the trenches. The great leaps in technology and engineering of advancing capitalism were turned to instruments of death.

It was followed by the global spread of a highly dangerous strain of influenza, incubated in the overcrowded, unsanitary military camps. It infected 27 per cent of the world’s population.

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