From the International Communist Party
World capitalism,
is only concerned with its own survival, it exploits and abandons the working class
to the contagion. Capitalism can and must be overthrown - everywhere.
Capitalism is
responsible for the losses caused by this epidemic. In all continents the
chaotic cramming of rural people, in search of a wage to live on, in the
frightening and insane urban agglomerations of capitalism, and the convulsive
migration of people makes any preventive care impossible.
For years,
medical science has predicted the worldwide spread of a new virus and its dire
effects. However, epidemics can neither be avoided nor contained within
present-day society. Capital, always in search of immediate profit, has no
interest in predicting and preventing.
It has not set
aside adequate stocks of medical devices and has not trained an adequate number
of medical personnel. Indeed, it has drastically reduced them everywhere,
forcing them into intolerable overwork; it has closed many hospitals and turned
others into “companies”. Its imperative is always to save on the maintenance
and care of the working class.
The expected
contagion has finally arrived, upsetting a humanity completely unprepared to
face it and shattering the latest misplaced certainties about capitalism’s
ability to protect health and life on the planet.
In the face of
the universal scourge, which can only be attacked with a coordinated world-wide
plan of science and solidarity, each state does its own thing. Worse, the
crisis intensifies the competition between national centers of capital and
their hateful and inhuman selfishness. It exacerbates the trade war in the fear
that competitors from other countries will take advantage of the situation to
deprive them of market share. In this war between national bourgeoisies,
workers have nothing to gain and everything to suffer.
Industrialists
have postponed the closure of factories to the point where further delay was
impossible: from China to Italy and France, to the United Kingdom and to the
United States, which has seriously extended the contagion. Even when measures
to close commercial and recreational activities were no longer postponed, the
managers of the majority of industries found ways to circumvent the rules to
continue production, apart from companies where it was convenient to close, finding
easy loopholes in the ambiguous rules of governing blocs.
So, they forced
workers to go to the factory, even in industries that have nothing to do with
the health emergency, such as steel production, and to flock onto public
transport, grossly dividing society along class boundaries: proletarians today
are no longer even masters of their own lives. As in war, they must sacrifice
themselves to the god of bourgeois profit.
While factories
are kept open, strikes and worker assemblies are prohibited. The unions, which
have sold out to the regime in the name of “national solidarity”, endorse the
bourgeois dogma that reducing production “is not an option”. Be content with a
little more soap and masks: a few dollars.
And it is true.
In order to continue generating and appropriating profits, capitalists must
infinitely grow the scale of production. For this reason, each company, without
any agreement with the others in the sector, indeed at war with them, pushes
the rhythm and scale of work to the maximum, in the vain hope of being able to
find a buyer for the crazy growth of goods of all kinds, a deranged and
anarchic system.
Capitalism does
not produce based on what is needed; it produces based on the expected profit.
The majority of goods produced therefore have no social utility and
increasingly penalize the workers who manufacture them, the consumers who are
driven to use them, and the environment, which is unnecessarily cluttered and
intoxicated.
This
irreparable and obvious absurdity must necessarily block all the apparatus for
the reproduction of capital and commerce with increasing frequency. It is now a
single and closely interconnected global machine, a monstrosity in which up to
95% of activity is useless or harmful.
In fact, in the
course of the past year, well before the outbreak of the epidemic, the general,
historical, centuries-old, inescapable crisis of the capitalist mode of
production had arrived punctually and was already affecting all spheres of life
and society.
So, it was not
the plague that caused the crisis. Sanitary isolation, which is blocking the
consumption of all the goods that are not really necessary for life, around the
world and simultaneously, amplifies the pre-existing overproduction of goods,
and is almost bringing the infernal cycles of capital accumulation to a
standstill.
The panic
spread among the bourgeoisie, who ran to sell on the stock exchange, while
entrepreneurs were horrified at the decline of their profits. Desperate
capitalists in all countries appeal to the State for orders, credits and
commercial protection, as well as to help them defend against the workers’
struggle.
But states are
nothing more than associations between capitalists and, in the end, they only
derive sustenance from capitalist production. They are not above the economic
laws of capitalism: they can only transfer wealth from one part of the ruling
classes to the other. Or anticipate something that must come back sooner or
later.
The failure of
this political, economic, social system is so evident that even many bourgeois,
in the scientific, political and religious fields, are calling for its profound
reform: a different relationship with nature, a different way of producing and
a different choice of what to produce: “hospitals, not weapons”, they say. All
empty talk. As soon as the emergency is over, and maybe even before, everything
will go back to business as usual. This system is as absurd as it is incapable
of reform.
The ruling
classes will not peacefully surrender their power or give up their petty
privileges, the immense profits and the repressive paraphernalia of their
states. The present upheaval of the rhythms of life must not only teach us the
failure of capitalism, but that the working class can do without capitalism,
this entire social and economic system. It is the bourgeoisie that needs the
working class and not vice versa.
The
international anti-worker solidarity of the bosses, who attack workers’ very
existence, must be opposed with the international solidarity of the working
class fighting for its emancipation and for the salvation of all humanity.
The working
class will have to mobilize in all countries to defend itself from the
disastrous effects of this crisis, to impose its longstanding demands through
struggle:
- wages in full
for the unemployed
- generalized
reduction of working hours for the same wages
-
regularization of the status of immigrant workers
- free health
care for all workers
The working
class, well organized in its true class unions and well directed by its party,
the custodian of its long-established internationalist program, must succeed with
its revolution in breaking through the thick shell of prejudices and forces of
repression that still imprisons the new, communist society, which will be
classless and stateless, and which is ready, robust and complete to free itself
and spread to all the countries of the world.
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