We are publishing an article written by our sections in Spain and Italy, which shows that in all countries the bourgeoisie is displaying the same criminal negligence towards the pandemic and the same contempt for the lives of the exploited.
The capitalist state is presenting itself as our saviour. This is a scam of the worst kind. Faced with the spread of the pandemic, what have they done? The worst! In all countries they took measures at the last minute, forced to do so by the rising death toll; they have kept millions of workers at their workplaces, with no masks, or gel or gloves, and all crowded together. Why? To continue production at any cost. They want to win parts of the market by taking advantage of the difficulties of their competitors. “China is on the floor? Keep producing!” “Italy is down? Keep producing!” And so on. Even when the pandemic really began to bite, when the lock-downs started, the pressure to ensure the “health of the economy” didn’t go away. The declarations by Trump or Bolsanaro about the economy coming first are just a caricature of the murderous policy of the leaders of all the governments on the planet. And yet, in acting this way, each national bourgeoisie, by facilitating the spread of the virus, is putting its own economy in danger.
In response, we have seen a number of strikes in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, the USA, Brazil, Canada…Certainly these struggles are limited, how else could it be during the lock-down when it’s impossible to gather together in large numbers? But their appearance in different countries in these extremely difficult conditions shows that, in certain parts of the working class, there is resistance to the “sacrifices” being demanded, to the idea of serving as cannon fodder for the interests of capital. We cannot afford to bow down to the capitalist state which takes advantage of its role as "coordinator" in the fight against the pandemic to further strengthen its totalitarian control, to deepen our atomisation and develop an ideology of national unity and even of war.
More than ever, this pandemic shows us the alternative: either we allow ourselves to be dragged down into capitalist barbarism, or we contribute, with patience and a vision of the future, to the perspective of the world proletarian revolution.
Today, the streets pf Madrid offer us the spectacle of ambulances rushing at high speed, of chaos in the health services, of suffering comparable to the terrorist attacks of 2004 (193 dead and 1400 wounded). But this time this is a pandemic which has already killed 2,300 people and infected 35,000 in Spain, according to the official figures; an epidemic which is spreading faster than in Italy, which, a few days ago, had already beaten all records in terms of daily deaths. The death toll (over 7000 at the time of writing) already shows this pandemic to be the worst health disaster in the two countries since the Second World War. What’s happening in these two countries is only a preview of what will probably hit the populations of big cities like New York, Los Angeles, London. And it will be even worse when it hits Latin America, Africa and other regions where health systems are even more fragile or don’t exist at all.
But for weeks before this, the leaders of Spain and Italy – just as in France (as we show in our French publication[1]) and other capitalist powers – could easily have imagined the damage the epidemic would cause. However, like the other capitalist states (and not only those led by populists like Johnson in the UK and Trump in the US), they decided to put the needs of the capitalist economy before the health of the population. Now of course they are boasting histrionically that they are ready to do everything to protect the health of their citizens, and they have declared all out “war” on the virus.
But the responsibility for the deaths caused by the pandemic is entirely linked to the present social conditions, to a mode of production which, instead of dedicating the productive forces, natural resources and advances in knowledge to the benefit of life, is sacrificing human life and nature on the altar of profit.
The exploited class is the main victim of this pandemic
We are constantly being told that this pandemic affects everyone without distinction between rich and poor. They tell us all the famous people (like Prince Charles and Boris Johnson in the UK) who have been infected or even killed by Covid-19. But these news items are put around above all to hide the fact that it is the conditions of exploitation which explain the rise and propagation of the pandemic.
First, because of the overcrowding of the neighbourhoods in which the exploited have to live, a fertile soil for the spread of epidemics. This is easily verified given the higher incidence of the pandemic in regions of dense human population brought together by the needs of exploitation (Lombardy, Venice and Emilia Romagna in Italy, Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain) than in areas of lower population, such as Sicily or Andalusia. The worsening of housing conditions for proletarians further accentuates this vulnerability. In the case of Madrid, the hospitals which are most saturated and where services are collapsing are essentially those which serve the population of the industrial towns of the south. In dilapidated and overcrowded apartment blocks it’s also much more difficult to put up with the quarantine decreed by the authorities. In the luxury chalets of Somosierra or the villas of Nice where Berlusconi has taken refuge with his children, isolation is a lot easier to deal with. The exploiters’ talk about their “civic sense” is just cynicism.
Not to mention the impact on those living from precarious jobs or looking after children or elderly people, massed together in these kinds of dwellings. The situation of the elderly is particularly scandalous: having been exploited their whole life, many of them are forced to live alone or neglected in “care homes” run by the laws of capitalist profit. With one carer for 18 residents on average, care homes have become one of the main sources for the spread of the pandemic, as we have seen in Spain not only among the residents, but also those working there on temporary contracts and miserable wages, trying to take care of patients often without the basic measures of protection. The situation is identical in France, up till recently presented as a model of social protection run by the state. In Spain, the pits were reached when we saw hospitalised patients having to remain isolated in their wards next to the corpses of their fellow unfortunates, because the funeral services are overrun or lack the protective equipment to enable them to dispose of human remains. At the same time, numerous sick people, especially the old, who have been transferred to the saturated hospitals are relegated to the third and fourth rank by a “triage” organised according to the available resources and personnel, and by a cost-benefit analysis which is a real affront to human dignity, to the social instincts which enabled humanity to develop in the first place. This “treatment of the fittest” system has been openly put in place by the Italian, Spanish, French and other authorities.
To this we can add the intensified exploitation and exposure to the virus among the health workers, who make up to 8% of those infected: more than 5000 in Spain alone. Even these statistics are widely falsified, because a large number of these workers could not be tested. Nevertheless, they are frequently obliged to work without the necessary masks, gloves and overalls, which were previously seen as “superfluous” expenses by health budgets dictated by the needs of the capitalist economy. Beds in intensive care units, ventilators, research into coronavirus, into possible vaccines….al this has been sacrificed in the name of profitability. Today the media’s list of complaints, often expressed by politicians on the “left”, is used to deflect anger onto the “privatisation” of healthcare systems. But whoever owns the hospital, the pharmaceutical lab, or the care home, the truth is that that the health of the population is subjected to the rule of the profits extracted by an exploiting minority at the expense of society as a whole.
The defence of life against the laws of exploitation
The dictatorship of the laws of capital over human need is clearly revealed in the quarantine and lock-down measures in Italy, Spain and France, countries which have imposed draconian restrictions on shopping trips and visits to elderly people, while being totally lax when it comes to inciting people to get to the container docks and to keep up production in various factories (textiles, domestic appliances, automobiles). And to “protect” the conditions of exploitation, while hassling a few joggers or workers who share a car to reduce the cost of travelling to work, they still allow people to crowd together on a reduced tube and bus service to get to work and ensure that national production continues. Many workers have been scandalised by the criminal cynicism of the bourgeoisie and have expressed their anger through social networks, since in present conditions it is impossible to get together in the streets or in general assemblies. Thus, in response to the media campaign around the slogan “Stay at home”, there is a popular hashtag: “I can’t stay at home” launched by Uber and Deliveroo workers, home helps, workers in the huge underground economy etc.
Protests and strikes have also broken out against working conditions which risk the life and safety of the workers. As workers shouted out at demonstrations in Italy: “Your profits are worth more than our health!”
In Italy, this anger exploded on 10 March at the FIAT factory in Pomigliano where 5000 workers are present every day. Workers went on strike to protest against the unsafe conditions in which they are being forced to work. In other factories in the metallurgical sector, in Brescia for example, the workers put an ultimatum on the firms to adapt production to the workers’ need for protection, threatening strike action. Finally, the firms decided to close the factories. And on 23 March, when a decree issued by Prime Minister Conte gave a green light to continuing work in industries that are not really essential, spontaneous strikes broke out again, which obliged the CGIL union to make a show of calling for a “general strike”.
In Spain it started in the Mercedes factory in Vitoria: after a case of Covid-19, the workers decided to stop work immediately. The same thing happened in the Balay domestic appliance factory in Zaragoza (1000 workers) and the Renault factory in Vallodolid. It should be said that in a number of cases, it was the firm itself which decided on a lock-out (as at Airbus in Madrid, SEAT in Barcelona or Ford in Valencia in the same period, then at PSA in Zaragoza or Michelin in Vitoria), so that the funds of the state (in other words the surplus value extracted from the working class as a whole) would pay part of these workers’ wages; in fact, before the pandemic, there were already planned redundancies (in the Ford factories or Nissan in Barcelona).
But there were also open expressions of class militancy, wildcat strikes outside and against the unions, such as with the bus drivers in Liege (Belgium), which was one of the first countries to bring in a lock-down. It was the same with the Neuhauser bakery workers and the naval shipyard at Andrézieux near Lyon in France. There were also some militant demonstrations at the shipyards in Saint-Nazaire. One of the workers said in a TV interview: “I am forced to work in a confined space with 2 or 3 colleagues, in a booth 9 metres square and without any protection, then I have to go home to my wife and children who are self-isolating. And I ask myself anxiously if I am a danger to them. I can’t put up with this”.
As the epidemic spread, with its disastrous effects on workers, we saw further workers’ protests against this imposition of the logic of capitalist exploitation, even if only amongst a minority: we saw it at the FIAT-Chrysler factories in Tripton (in Indiana, USA), where there were protests against having to go to work when outside the factories it is forbidden to gather. There were further reactions at the Lear factory in Hammond Indiana, the FIAT factories in Windsor Ontario or the Warren truck factory outside Detroit. The Detroit bus drivers also stopped work until the firm provided a minimum of safety at work. It is very significant that, in these struggles in the USA, the workers had to impose their decision to stop working against the advice of the union (in the this case the UAW), which had been encouraging them to carry on working so as not to jeopardise the interests of the company.
In the port at Santos, Brazil, workers demonstrated against the authorities obliging them to go into work. Also in his country, there were growing concerns among the workers at Volkwagen, Toyota, GM etc against having to continue production as though the pandemic wasn’t there.
However limited these protests may be, they are an important element in the class response of the proletariat to the pandemic. Even on a purely defensive terrain, the exploited are refusing to be reduced to cannon fodder in the interests of their exploiters.
The response of the bourgeoisie: hypocrisy and state totalitarianism
The bourgeoisie itself is aware of the potential for the development of class consciousness and combativity contained in this accumulation of indignation at the sacrifices being demanded of the workers. Even the main protagonists of “austericide”[2] (like Merkel, Berlusconi, or in Spain Luis de Guindos) are full of promises of social assistance. But the weapons of the exploiting class are the traditional weapons of the whole history of the class struggle: deception and repression.
For example: the hypocrisy of the campaigns of applauding health workers, programmed and organised everywhere. Of course these workers deserve recognition and solidarity because it is essentially they whose efforts are devoted to keeping the health system going. They have been doing this for years in the face of lay-offs and the deterioration in material resources. What is repulsive however is the sight of the government authorities, the very ones who have created these conditions for the over-exploitation and powerlessness of these workers, cynically seeking to advertise their “solidarity” with the health workers and proclaiming that we are “all in it together”, singing the national anthem and propagating patriotic values as a response to the spread of the virus. The disgusting nationalism of these “mobilisations” promoted by the organs of the state are aimed at hiding the fact that there cannot be the slightest common interest between exploiters and the exploited, between capitalists and those affected by the degradation of the health infrastructure, between those whose only concern is to maintain production and the competitive edge of the national capital, and those who put respect for life and human needs first. The “country” or the “nation” are just a tall story as far as the workers are concerned, whether it’s put forward by populist factions like Salvini or Vox, or by the sirens of democracy like Podemos, Macron or Conte.
In the name of this fake “national solidarity”, citizens are called on to denounce people who flout the quarantine, creating a witch-hunt atmosphere towards people like mothers of autistic children or elderly couples doing the shopping, or even towards health workers on their way to the hospital. It’s particularly cynical to put all the blame on the minority flouting the lock-down rules for the spread of the virus or the deaths it is causing or the stress suffered by health workers.
There is nothing more anti-social (ie contrary to the human community) than the capitalist state, which is there to defend the interests of the minority class of exploiters, and which hides this precisely with the fig leaf of false solidarity. In a doubly hypocritical way, the bourgeoisie is trying to use the disaster caused by the negligence of the capitalist state to divide some workers against others. If the hospital workers refuse to work without protective material, they are denounced as being “against solidarity” and threatened with sanctions, as was recently the case with the sacking of the medical director of the hospital at Vigo in Galicia, for daring to denounce the “blah-blah” of the bourgeois politicians on the issue of protective measures. The local government of Valencia (composed of the same parties as the “progressive” coalition governing Spain at the national level) have threatened to censor images showing the disastrous state of hospital care in the region, citing the right to privacy of the patients crowded together in the emergency wards!
If the workers of local authorities’ funeral services refuse to work without protection with bodies killed by Covid-19, they are accused of preventing family and friends from taking part in the funerals of their loved ones. Like in the housing estates or the public transport where we are herded like cattle on our way to work, or at the workplaces where ergonomics is applied not to the physiological needs of the workers but to the need for productivity, those killed by the coronavirus are also piled together in buildings transformed into improvised mass morgues, like the Palacio de Hielo in Madrid.
All this brutality is presented to us as the highest expression of a united society. It’s no accident that, at the press conferences of the Spanish government, faced with repeated questions like “when will the tests arrive?” And the masks? And the ventilators?”, we always get the same imperturbable and evasive response from the health minister: “In a few days….”, while alongside him stand army generals, police chiefs, heads of the civil guard, bedecked in their medals. The aim here is to impregnate the minds of the population with a militarist atmosphere: “Obey without asking questions”. The bourgeoisie is also profiting from the events to habituate the population to all kinds of restrictions on their so-called “civil liberties”, all at the discretion of the government and some with highly dubious usefulness, but all of which favour social self-discipline and snitching, presented as the only barrier to disease and social chaos. Neither is it any accident that the western bourgeoisie is displaying a thinly-veiled admiration for the control which certain totalitarian regimes, like the one in capitalist China[3], are able to exert over their population. If the success of China’s lock-down in slowing the spread of the virus is today being saluted, it’s also to camouflage their admiration for the instruments of state control being used (facial recognition, following people’s movements and encounters, and using this information to categorise the population according to their level of ‘social threat’), and to be able, in the future, to present these means of totalitarian state control as a more effective way of “protecting the population” against epidemics and other products of capitalist chaos.
The only alternative is communism
We have shown how a crisis in society reveals the existence of two antagonistic classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Which one is actually using its best efforts to try to limit the impact of this pandemic? It’s essentially the work of the ambulance drivers, the public transport workers, the workers of the supermarkets and the food industry who are doing the real work, hindered at every turn by the negligence of the state. It has been shown once again that, on a world scale, the proletariat is the class which produces social wealth, and that the bourgeoisie is a parasitic class which profits from the tenacity, the creativity and the team efforts of the workers in order to enlarge its capital. Each of these antagonistic classes offers a completely different perspective to the global chaos into which capitalism has plunged humanity: the capitalist regime of exploitation is hurling humanity into more and more wars, epidemics, poverty and ecological disasters; the revolutionary perspective will liberate the human species from subjection to the laws of private appropriation by an exploiting minority.
But the exploited can’t make an individual escape from this dictatorship. They can only escape by reacting collectively against the chaotic orientations of a state which is working for the mode of production which rules the whole planet. Individual sabotage or disobedience is the impossible dream of classes who have no future to offer humanity as a whole. The working class is not a class of powerless victims. It is a class which carries within itself the possibility of a new world free of exploitation, of division into classes and nations, of the subjection of human need to the laws of accumulation.
A philosopher (Buyng Chul Han), who is becoming very fashionable because of his description of the chaos provoked by capitalist social relations, recently declared that “we can’t leave the revolution to the virus”. That’s certainly true. Only the conscious action of a world-wide class, aimed at pulling out the roots of class society, can constitute a real revolutionary force.
Valerio 24.3.20
[1] https://fr.internationalism.org/content/10088/pandemie-covid-19-france-lincurie-criminelle-bourgeoisie [2]
[2] It’s a term that was made popular in describing the measures decreed by the European Union following the 2008 crisis, and which involved, among other things, a dismantling of health services.
[3] Obviously, for genuine communism, Russia, China, Cuba and their variants are just the extreme expression of the universal domination of totalitarian state capitalism in the period of capitalist decadence.
For several months, the region of Idlib in the north of Syria has been devastated by the forces of Bashar El Assad and the Russian army. Nearly three million civilians (a million of them children) are trapped in this last outpost of the rebellion[1]. As with Aleppo and eastern Ghouta, the Assad regime is trying to re-take this region through terror and a scorched earth policy. Russian planes are indiscriminately bombing apartment blocks, public buildings like schools and hospitals, markets and fields. More than a thousand people have died since the end of April 2018 according to the UN, and nearly a million are trying to escape the massacre, hungry, homeless, subjected to the glacial temperatures of winter. In this theatre of barbarism and chaos, the populations have only one way out: to flee for their lives. To head for the Turkish border or try to reach the Greek frontier, the nearest port to enter Europe.
Only the frontier between Syria and Turkey is now closed. Since 2015, the Turkish state has been carrying out a well-paid service to the European democracies by taking in the waves of refugees which the Europeans refused to deal with. The Turkish offensive in the north of Syria has changed the situation. The three million inhabitants of Idlib have now become hostages, prisoners of the region’s imperialist powers. As we have seen, Turkey and Russia are capable of anything, including the bloodletting of whole regions, terrorising the population and massacring them to satisfy their rapacious appetites. Today the region of Idlib has become a macabre board-game for imperialism, a region that moribund capitalism has sown with misery and death.
The refugees: commodities to be sold or disposed of
While Erdogan is refusing to take in the new exiles, he also wants to get rid of the three and a half million already inside Turkey. For him and his regime, these people are just objects to be used as commodities in their political ambitions. On the domestic level, the refugees are already the target of a disgusting campaign of denigration aimed at restoring the popularity of the AKP in Turkey. But it’s above all on the imperialist level that the refugees have their “value”, since they are being used to blackmail the powers of the EU. For months Erdogan has been threatening to open the country’s western borders in order to compel the European powers to support his military campaign in the north of Syria and to give him financial aid. On 28 February, he carried out his threats and tens of thousands of refugees have been trying, at considerable risk, to enter Europe via Greece, despite the categorical refusal of the Greek authorities, supported by the great democracies of the EU. At least 13,000 refugees are massing at the frontier, prey to cruel exactions from all sides. Others are trying to reach the islands of Chios or Lesbos by sea. Here too they face the same conditions: herded like animals, lacking water, heating, food and elementary hygiene. On Lesbos, the Moria camp, designed to hold 2,300 people, 20,000 are massed together behind barbed wire. The Repubblica newspaper gives us this abominable description: “The first to go under are the children. Here, there is nothing for them, not even beds, toilets or light. Here there is only the mud, the cold, and the waiting. An absurd, maddening purgatory. Day after day, as hope to reach Europe disappears over the horizon, there’s nothing for the weakest but to attempt suicide…but because they are afraid, they rarely go all the way. From time to time, an adult knocks on the doors of the clinic at the bottom of the hill, carrying in his arms a small child who has highly eloquent marks on his body. Everyone knows what has just been done. In a few months he will try again”. More than three quarters of a century after Auschwitz, it’s the same frightful reality for those populations that capitalism has judged undesirable.
Those who try to reach this Eldorado are being stopped with the greatest violence and brutality by the Greek authorities. We have seen unbearable, revolting images of Greek guards trying to sink an inflatable dinghy full of refugees and to scare them away with live rounds. In the Evros region, the police and the army are patrolling the zone and the 212 kilometres of the border are impassable. Those who try to get across are met with tear gas and even with real bullets, which according to the Turks has led to injuries and deaths. Those arrested are beaten, stripped, humiliated and sent back. Thinking that they are only metres away from paradise, they are faced with the cruel reality of Fortress Europe, for whom they are just refuse, stray animals which no state wants to help out. Each state blames the other but they all have the same aim: categorical refusal to welcome these populations who are victims of the barbarism engendered by the imperialist powers with the most incredible cynicism and hypocrisy[2].
The hypocrisy of the democracies faced with the waves of refugees
Soon after the Turkish regime announced that it was opening the gates in the direction of Europe, the reaction of the main EU states was clear: all the representatives of the European bourgeoisies cried out against the “unacceptable” policies of Erdogan (Angela Merkel). The head of the Austrian government Sebastian Kurz, elected specifically on the basis of his anti-immigration policies, feigned disquiet about “these human beings being used to put pressure on the EU”
The great democracies of Europe can come out with all kinds of compassionate phrases, they can put all the responsibility on their Russian and Turkish rivals, but the reality of Europe’s migrant policy reveals their ignominious hypocrisy. It is the “motherland of the rights of man” which has most clearly expressed the real intentions of the EU states: “The European Union will not give in to this blackmail,, the frontiers of Greece and the Schengen space are closed and we will make sure they remain closed, let’s be clear about this” said Jean-Yves le Drian, the French minister of Foreign Affairs. Thus, millions can perish of hunger and cold – the European states will do nothing for them, unless it is to make their situation even harder by strengthening the hermetic seal on the Greek border. Ursula von der Leyen, the EU president, guaranteed that “all necessary aid” would be supplied to the Greek state. Already the Frontex agency has sent police reinforcements and 700 million euros to this end. The intransigence of the European leaders reflects their desire to cut the grass under the feet of the populist governments and movements which will not hesitate to use this new exodus for their own benefit.
The European powers want to present themselves as the victims of the wicked manipulator Erdogan, or shed crocodile tears about the refugees, pleading that they are powerless to help, but they are all responsible for this, just as they are responsible for allowing hundreds of thousands of people to succumb to Russian bombs, Greek bullets, or Turkish cynicism.
Their nauseating tirades about the rights of man and their phoney indignation are just a smokescreen to hide their anti-migrant policies. Deportations, the dismantling of refugee camps, the erecting of walls and barbed wire fences, the militarisation of the frontiers and the increase in administrative measures aimed at restricting access – all these measures are first and foremost being set up and applied with the greatest rigour by the democratic states[3], where the dictatorship of capital functions in its most perverse and cynical way. The western democracies, whether run by the left or the right, are not only accomplices to the “bad guys” like Erdogan and Putin: they treat people in the same degrading way, but with a sprinkling of added hypocrisy.
Barbarism and chaos are all capitalism has to offer
After thirty Turkish soldiers were killed in an attack by the troops of Assad, giving rise to fears about an escalation of tensions, Moscow and Ankara signed a cease-fire on 5 March. This a farce which no one believes in given that the ambitions of both powers can only push them towards further clashes and confrontations. There is no sign of any stabilisation in the Middle East. The continuing retreat of the USA, and as a consequence, of France and Germany, brings with it a number of dangers in which the civilian population, as always, will be the first victims. It is undeniable that Assad has decided to reconquer all the territory he possessed prior to 2011. To this end, he has not hesitated to shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Putin, the only one who can modify the ambitions of the “butcher of Damascus”, does not seem to be completely opposed to this. But at the same time the master of the Kremlin has an interest in maintaining cordial relations with Erdogan in order to put pressure on NATO and maintain his precious naval base in Tartus in the west of Syria. For its part, Turkey now has a free hand to mop up the Kurds, denying them their autonomous territory in the north, which it fears will be a prop for the nationalist demands of the Turkish Kurds. Last October, after violent battles, Turkey managed to establish a “security zone”, breaking up the territorial integrity of Rojava. While up to now the American presence has provided protection for the Kurds, the departure of US troops from Syria will probably sign their death warrant.
This is all the more the case in that the European powers like France and Britain have lost a lot of ground and are no longer in a position to pursue their strategy of fighting both Daesh and the Assad regime through a game of alliances with the rebels and the Kurds. Thus, all the elements are coming together for new massacres which will create more millions of refugees.
What’s happening on the Turkey-Greece border is not an exception but one illustration among many of the horror that capitalism is making hundreds of millions go through. The lot of the African migrants on the Moroccan border, the living hell in Libya[4], or the situation facing Latin Americans between Mexico and the US are not so different. All of them are fleeing war, violence, criminality and ecological disaster. Today, more than seven million people are in the situation of exiles struggling to survive. They are trying to escape the barbarism of capital but are the pawns and victims of the national bourgeoisies who are instrumentalising the “refugee question” for their sinister imperialist interests.
Vincent, 8.3.20
[1]The rebels against the Assad regime are just a rival faction within the Syrian bourgeoisie. They are used by the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other imperialist powers as pawns in the defence of their imperialist interests
Introduction
The coronavirus epidemic is leaving thousands of dead around the world. Why? Because research into this kind of virus, which has been known about for a long time, was abandoned because it wasn’t seen as profitable! Because when the epidemic took off it was more important to the Chinese bourgeoisie to do everything to hide the gravity of the situation in order to protect its economy and its reputation; it didn’t hesitate to make up all kinds of lies and put pressure on the doctors who had sounded the alarm!
Because in all countries, the measures of isolation were taken too late, since the first concern of the state was “not to block the economy”, “not make business suffer”! Because everywhere, there weren’t enough masks, cleansing gel, equipment to test for the illness, hospital beds, ventilators…Is it necessary to recall that in France care workers and emergency workers have been striking for a year, denouncing the lack of human and material resources in the hospitals[1]? The politicians have the nerve to talk about protecting those most vulnerable to the virus, elderly people, at a time when the workers in residential care homes, the EHPAD, have also been out on strike over the past year, indignant about the mistreatment of the “residents” that results from a lack of workers to look after them. In France, which is the second biggest European economic power, it is impossible to find any masks. Even within the pneumological services, at the front line of the fight against the pandemic, the doctors have to limit themselves to three masks a day. In Italy, the same shameful situation prevails. Workers are forced to go to work, herded together on public transport, because they have to keep the economy going … as in the car factories for example, where they are again pressed together on the production line, without masks, soap or any other precautions.
Strikes have broken out in this country in the last few days. Here is a short extract from a testimony in Bologna, where workers raised the slogan “The workers are not lambs to the slaughter”. ”Strikes in the factories are multiplying. Forced to work without any health protection, workers are in revolt: ‘I am obliged to work in a work environment which puts my health in danger, the health of those close to me, my comrades at work, the people I meet…inside the warehouses and the factories none of the wise precepts we hear about all the time are worth anything. In many of these places, there is a total absence of the minimal conditions to avoid the spread of the virus:
The rallying cry for these strikes is “Your profits are worth more than our health!”. And this is indeed the reality under capitalism, this decadent system of exploitation. But these struggles show that hope does exist. The working class is the bearer of solidarity, dignity and unity. It is the bearer of a world which is no longer governed by the hunt for profit.
Faced with this pandemic, we not only have to develop solidarity, look after the most vulnerable, but also reflect on what capitalism is, why it’s rotting on its feet, and discuss such questions as much as possible in order to develop our collective understanding. The article that follows aims to contribute to this process.
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At the end of our first article on the Covid-19 pandemic, we underlined: "Whether this new Covid-19 virus becomes a new pandemic, as happened with SARS, or whether it persists as a new seasonal respiratory virus, this new disease is a new warning that capitalism has become a danger to humanity and to life on this planet. The enormous capacity of the development of the productive forces, including medical science, to protect us from disease is being undermined by the criminal pursuit of profit, by the excessive concentration of a large part of the human population in unbearable cities, with the risks of new epidemics that this entails."
Today, this pandemic has become a problem on a major scale worldwide and has provoked a veritable economic "tsunami" with disastrous consequences. We will not go into the analysis of its economic implications here; we will do so in a future article. Here we will show the way in which this epidemic reveals the disease of capitalism.
We have confirmation: Covid-19 is a manifestation of capitalist decomposition!
Today, the most pessimistic predictions are confirmed and the WHO (World Health Organisation) has recognised that this is a global pandemic that has already spread to 117 countries on all continents, that the number of people affected has exceeded 120,000, that the number of deaths in the first weeks of the pandemic was over 4,000, etc. What began as a "problem" inside China has now become a social crisis for the world's major capitalist powers (Japan, United States, Western Europe, etc.). In Italy alone, the number of deaths has already exceeded those caused worldwide by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03. And the draconian population control measures taken one month ago by the "tyrannical" Chinese authorities, such as the confinement of millions of people[2], and those of a veritable "social Darwinism" consisting of excluding all those who are not a "priority" from hospital services in the fight to contain the disease, are now commonplace in many large cities in all the affected countries on all continents.
The bourgeois "media" are constantly bombarding us with information, with recommendations and endless "explanations" of what they present to us as a kind of scourge, a new "natural" disaster. But there is nothing "natural" about this catastrophe; it is the result of the asphyxiating dictatorship of the senile and outmoded capitalist mode of production, in conflict with nature and a threat to the human species.
Revolutionaries are not equipped for producing epidemiological studies or in making prognoses on the evolution of diseases. Our role is to explain, on a materialist basis, the social conditions that make the occurrence of these catastrophic events possible and inevitable. We have therefore made it clear that it is in the nature of the capitalist system to put exploitation, profit and accumulation before human need and that it is not possible for any different kind of capitalism to exist. But we can also affirm that those same capitalist relations of production which, at one point in history, had made possible an enormous development of the productive forces (of science, of a certain mastery of nature to limit the suffering imposed on humanity ...) have today become an obstacle to their development. We have also explained how the prolongation for decades of this phase of capitalist decadence has led, in the absence of a revolutionary solution, to the entry into a new phase: that of social decomposition[3], where all these destructive tendencies are even more concentrated, producing a downward spiral of chaos, barbarism and the gradual collapse of the very social structures that guarantee a minimum of social cohesion, threatening the very survival of life on planet Earth.
Are these the delusions of a handful of old fashioned marxists? Certainly not. The scientists who speak most authoritatively about the development of the current Covid-19 pandemic affirm that the proliferation of this type of epidemic is caused, among other things, by the accelerated degradation of the environment, which leads to a greater contagion from animals (zoonoses) that live among the human populations in order to survive, and is, at the same time, further assisted by the concentration of millions of human beings in megalopolises that produce a truly dramatic rise in contagion. As we explained in our previous article on Covid-19[4], some doctors in China had indeed tried to warn of a new risk from a coronavirus epidemic, starting in December 2019, but they were directly censored and suppressed by the state, as this would threaten the image to which Chinese capital aspires as a major world power.
The ICC is also not the first to insist that one of the main driving forces behind the spread of this pandemic is the increased lack of coordination of the policies of various countries, which is one key features of capitalism, but which is reinforced to an ever greater extent by the advance of "every man for himself" and the inward-looking attitude which characterises states and capitalists in the phase of decomposition of this system and which tends to permeate all social relations.
We are not revealing anything new when we point out that the danger of this disease lies not so much in the virus itself, but in the fact that this pandemic is taking place against a background of enormous degradation, over decades and on a global scale, in health infrastructures. It is, in fact, the “administration" of these increasingly leaner and more defective structures that is dictating the policies of the various states, who have tended to delay the announcements of the appearance of new cases, even if it means prolonging the effects of this pandemic over time. And this irresponsible degradation of the resources accumulated by decades of human work - knowledge, technology, etc: does it not reflect an absolute lack of perspective, a total absence of concern for the future of the human species, which is characteristic of a form of social organisation - capitalism - that is in its phase of decomposition?
How is it possible that in the 21st century there is an epidemic that the world's most powerful states are unable to contain?
Of course, there have been other extremely deadly epidemics in the history of mankind. Nowadays, it is easy to find in the bourgeois "media" investigations and books on how smallpox and measles, cholera or the bubonic plague caused millions of deaths. What is missing in such claims is an explanation that the cause of these deaths is essentially the result of society's shortcomings, both in terms of the living conditions and the knowledge of nature. Capitalism poses, precisely, the historical possibility of overcoming this stage of material scarcity and, through the development of the productive forces, of laying the foundations for an abundance that could make possible a true unification and liberation of humanity in a communist society. If we consider the 19th century, namely the highest point of capitalist expansion, we can see how health, and therefore sickness, were no longer seen as fatalistic, how there was progress not only in research but also in communication between different researchers, how there was a real change towards a more "scientific" approach to medicine[5]. And all this has an application in the daily life of populations: from measures to improve public hygiene to vaccines, from the formation of medical specialisations to the creation of hospitals. The increase in world population (from one to two billion people) and especially in life expectancy (from 30-40 years at the beginning of the 19th century to 50-65 years in 1900) is essentially due to this advance in science and hygiene. None of this was done by the bourgeoisie in an altruistic spirit for the needs of the population. Capitalism was born "dripping with blood and mud", as Marx said. But in the midst of this horror, its aim was to obtain maximum profitability from the labour force, from the knowledge acquired by its wage slaves during the decades of learning new production techniques and to ensure the stability of the transport of supplies and goods, etc. This has made the exploiting class "interested" - at the least cost, to be true - in prolonging the working life of its employees, in ensuring the reproduction of the commodity that is labour power, in increasing relative surplus value by increasing the productivity of the exploited class.
This situation was reversed with the change of historical period between the ascendant period of capitalism and its decadence, which we revolutionaries have identified, along with the Communist International, since the First World War[6]. It is no coincidence that, around 1918, one of the deadliest epidemics in the history of humanity occurred: the so-called "Spanish flu" of 1918-19. In the magnitude of this pandemic, we see that it was not so much the virulence of the pathogen itself as the social conditions characteristic of imperialist war in capitalist decadence (global dimension of the conflict, impact of the war on the civilian population of the main nations, etc.) that explain the scale of the catastrophe: 50 million dead, almost twice as many as in the trenches.
The horror of war had a second, even more terrifying expression in 1939-45. The atrocities of the first imperialist carnage, such as the use of asphyxiating gases, were briefly set aside before the barbarities of the World War of 1939-45 were unleashed by all the participating powers: the German and Japanese military using human beings in experiments and the industrial mass murder of the Nazi concentration camps; the early use of biological weapons (the British military experimented with anthrax, for example); the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans.
And how should we understand the so-called period of "peace" that followed? It is true that the major capitalist powers created health care systems, based on the model of the British NHS created in 1948 - which is considered one of the founding landmarks of the so-called "welfare state" - to provide "universal" health care that aimed, among other things, to prevent epidemics such as the Spanish flu. Was this 'capitalist humanitarianism' and a victory for the workers? Certainly not. The purpose of these measures was to ensure the renewal, at the lowest cost, of a workforce (a precious commodity because the war had sent large sectors of the proletariat to the grave) and to ensure that the productive work of reconstruction was fulfilled. And this does not mean that the "remedies" employed do not themselves become sources of new disorders. We see this, for example, in the use of antibiotics prescribed to combat infections but which, in serving the needs of capitalist productivity, are abusively prescribed on a regular basis to shorten periods of sick leave. This has led to a major problem of bacterial resistance - the so-called "superbugs"- which eventually diminishes the medicinal arsenal for attacking infections. This has also manifested itself in the increase of diseases such as obesity and diabetes, caused by a worsening quality of the diet of the working class - that is, a devalorisation of the reproduction of the labour power of the exploited class - and of the poorest strata of society, to the point that capitalism's use of food technology is a factor in the spread of obesity. And we can also see how the drugs dispensed to make the pain that this system of exploitation inflicts on the working population more bearable, have led to phenomena such as the epidemic caused by the extensive use of opiate substances. Until the arrival of the coronavirus, this was the number one health problem in the United States, causing more deaths than all the victims of the Vietnam War.
The Covid-19 pandemic cannot be separated from the rest of the problems affecting the health of humanity. On the contrary, they show that the situation can only get worse if it remains subject to the dehumanised and commercialised machine that is the capitalist health system of the 21st century. The origin of diseases today is not so much humanity’s lack of knowledge or technology. Similarly, current knowledge in epidemiology should make it possible to contain a new epidemic. For example: within just two weeks of the discovery of the disease, research laboratories had already succeeded in sequencing the virus that caused Covid-19. The obstacle that the population has to overcome is that society is subject to a mode of production that benefits an exploiting social minority and has become a hindrance to the fight against disease. What we are seeing is that the race to develop a vaccine, instead of being a collective and coordinated effort, is actually a commercial war between laboratories. Genuine human needs are subordinated to the laws of the capitalist jungle. Fierce competition to get a product to market first and to be able to take advantage of that advantage is the only thing that matters to any capitalist.
Who is threatening the future of humanity, is it "irresponsible" individuals or the pressures of decomposition within the social system?
At our recent 23rd International Congress, we adopted a resolution on the international situation, in which we returned to and re-affirmed the validity of what we had written in our Theses on Decomposition:
“The May 1990 theses on decomposition highlight a whole series of characteristics in the evolution of society resulting from the entry of capitalism into this ultimate phase of its existence. The report adopted by the 22nd Congress noted the worsening of all these characteristics, such as:
- ‘the proliferation of famines in the ‘Third World’ countries…;
- the transformation of the ‘Third World’ into a vast slum, where hundreds of millions of human beings survive like rats in the sewers;
- the development of the same phenomenon in the heart of the major cities in the ‘advanced’ countries, … ;
- the recent proliferation of ‘accidental’ catastrophes (…) the increasingly devastating effects, on the human, social, and economic levels, of ’natural’ disasters …;
- the degradation of the environment, which is reaching staggering dimensions’ (Theses on decomposition, pt. 7)”
What we see today is that these manifestations have become the decisive factor in the evolution of capitalist society, and that it is only through them that we can interpret the emergence and development of major social events. If we look at what is happening with the Covid-19 pandemic, we can see the importance of the influence of two elements characteristic of this terminal phase of capitalism:
- First of all, China is not just the geographical setting for the origin of the most recent epidemics with the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 and Covid-19. Beyond this circumstantial element, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the development of Chinese capitalism at the stage of the decomposition of global capitalism and its influence on the current situation. In a few years, China has become the second world power with an enormous importance in world trade and economy, benefiting at first from the support of the US after its change of imperialist bloc (in 1972), and, after the disappearance of these blocs in 1989, as the main beneficiary of so-called globalisation. But precisely because of this, "China's power bears all the stigma of terminal capitalism: it is based on the over-exploitation of the proletariat's labour force, the unbridled development of the war economy of the national program of ‘military-civil fusion’ and is accompanied by the catastrophic destruction of the environment, while ‘national cohesion’ is based on the police control of the masses subjected to the political education of the One Party state (...).In fact, China is only a giant metastasis of the generalised militaristic cancer of the entire capitalist system: its military production has developed at a frenetic pace, its defence budget has increased sixfold in 20 years and it is ranked second in the world since 2010".[7]
This development of China, which is so often put forward as an illustration of the enduring strength of capitalism, is in fact a clear manifestation of its decrepitude. Its technological conquests or its expansion throughout the world thanks to spectacular initiatives like the new "Silk Road", should not make us lose sight of the enormous conditions of overexploitation (the exhausting workdays, the poverty wages, etc.) where hundreds of millions of workers endure extremely poor housing, food and general living conditions, which, moreover, are further deteriorating. For example, per capita health expenditure, already meagre, has fallen by 2.3%. Another edifying example is that food is produced with very low hygiene standards or by ignoring them, as in the consumption of the meat from wild animals purchased on the black market. In the last two years, the worst epidemic in the history of African swine flu has spread inside China, necessitating the slaughter of 30% of these animals and causing a 70% increase in the price of pork meat.
- The second element that shows the growing impact of capitalist decomposition is the erosion of the minimum level of coordination that existed between the different national capitals. It is true that, as marxism has showed, the maximum unity to which capitalism can aspire - even reluctantly - is the national state, and therefore a super-imperialism is not possible. This does not mean that, when the world was divided into imperialist blocs, a whole series of structures were not created, from UNESCO to the WHO, which tried to implement a minimum of common interests between the different national capitals. But this tendency towards a minimum of coordination is deteriorating as the phase of capitalist decomposition progresses. As we have also analysed in the already quoted resolution on the international situation of our 23rd Congress: "The deepening of the crisis (as well as the demands of imperialist rivalry) is putting the multilateral institutions and mechanisms to a severe test”. (Point 20).
This can be seen, for example, in the role played by the WHO. The international coordination in the face of the SARS epidemic in 2002-03, as well as the speed of certain discoveries[8] in laboratories around the world, explains the low incidence today of a virus from a family very similar to that of the current Covid-19. However, this role has been jeopardised by the WHO's disproportionate response to the 2009 influenza A epidemic, in which the institution's alarmism was used to generate massive sales of the antiviral "Tamiflu" manufactured by a laboratory in which former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had a direct interest. Since then, the WHO has been almost relegated to the role of an NGO making pontificating "recommendations", but it is incapable of imposing its directives on the various national capitals. They are not even able to unify the statistical criteria for counting infected persons, which opens the door for each national capital to try to conceal, for as long as possible, the impact of the epidemic in their respective countries. This has happened not only in China, which tried to hide the first signs of the epidemic, but also in the United States, which is trying to sweep under the carpet the number of people affected so as not to reveal the weaknesses of a health system based on private insurance to which 30% of American citizens have practically no access. The heterogeneity of the criteria for the application of diagnostic tests, or the differences between the protocols for action in the different phases, undoubtedly have negative repercussions for containing the spread of a global pandemic. Worse still, each national capital is adopting protectionist measures in terms of the provision of protective and hygienic equipment or artificial ventilation devices, as Merkel's Germany is doing.
These are measures which put the defence of national interests above what might be more urgent needs in other countries.
How to overcome the threat to health produced by capitalist social relations?
The media propaganda is constantly bombarding us with appeals for individual citizens to show responsibility in order to prevent the collapse of the health systems which, in numerous countries, are showing signs of exhaustion (physical exhaustion of the workers in the sector, lack of material and technical resources, etc). The first thing to denounce here is that we are dealing here with the chronicle of a catastrophe foretold. And not because of the irresponsibility of citizens but because of decades in the reduction of health spending, of jobs for health workers and budgets to maintain hospitals and medical research[9] Thus in Spain for example, one of these countries closest to this “collapse” we are being called on to avoid, successive cuts have led to the disappearance of 8000 hospital beds[10], with beds in intensive care below the European average and with materials in a poor state of repair (67% of ventilators are over 10 years old). The situation is very similar in Italy and France. In Britain, presented as the model of universal healthcare, we have seen a continual deterioration in quality over the last 50 years, with more than 100,000 vacancies for healthcare personnel. And all that well before Brexit!
And it’s these same health workers who have seen their living and working conditions get worse and worse, facing growing pressure to provide care to more patients and deal with more illnesses, with staff numbers being reduced more and more, who now face the added pressure of a collapse of health services as a result of the pandemic. And those who applaud the courage and self-sacrifice of these public employees are the same people who have been driving them to exhaustion by getting rid of official breaks, transferring them from one job to another and making them work – in the face of a pandemic whose future evolution is not known – without adequate protective equipment (masks, clothing, etc) or adequate training. The fact of making health personnel work in these conditions makes them all the more vulnerable to the impact of the disease itself. As we have seen in Italy where at least 10% of health workers have caught the virus.
And to force the workers to obey these orders, they resort to the repressive arsenal of the “state of emergency”, threatening them with all kinds of sanctions against those who refuse to obey. These policies of the authorities have in a number of cases made the existing chaos even worse.
Faced with this situation, which imposes on the health personnel the fait accompli of the disastrous state of the care system, the workers in this sector are forced to apply methods which are close to those of eugenics, since they have no choice but to devote the meagre resources available to them to those patients who have the best chance of surviving, as we have seen with the directives issued by the Italian association of anaesthetists and emergency staff, which characterises the situation as a “state of war”[11]. And this is indeed a war on human need waged by the logic of capital, where the workers in this sector are afflicted with growing anxiety because they have to apply these inhuman laws. The anguish expressed by many of these workers is the result of the fact that they can’t even rebel against such criteria, or refuse to work in shameful conditions, or even reject making sacrifices in their living conditions, because if they did this by going on strike this would have a serious impact on their own class brothers and sisters, on the rest of the exploited. They can’t even meet together with other comrades, physically express their solidarity with other workers because that would contravene the rules of “social isolation” imposed to prevent the spread of the epidemic.
Our comrades in the health sector can’t come out in open struggle in the present situation but the rest of the working class can’t leave them on their own. All workers are victims of this system and all workers will sooner or later pay the costs of this epidemic. Whether it’s as a result of cuts in non-priority health services (suspension of surgical operations, medical consultations etc) or through the suppression of thousands of temporary contracts, or the reduction of wages to the level of sick pay etc. And to accept all this would give the green light to new and even more brutal anti-working class attacks that are being prepared. We must therefore continue to sharpen the weapons of class solidarity with rage in our hearts, as we saw recently with the strikes in France against pension “reforms”.
The explosion of the insurmountable contradictions of capitalism at the heart of the health system are unequivocal symptoms of the terminal phase of capitalism’s senility. Just as the virus has the strongest impact on aging bodies, provoking the most serious illnesses, so the healthcare system has been profoundly weakened by years of austerity and “management” based not on the needs of the population but on the demands of capitalism in crisis and decline. The same goes for the capitalist economy, which has been kept going artificially by manipulating the law of value and plunging head first into a sea of debt. This has made it so fragile that the epidemic could well trigger a new and brutal global recession.
But the proletariat is not merely the victim of this catastrophe for humanity that is capitalism. It is also the class which has the potential, the historic capacity, to eradicate the system once and for all, through its struggle, through developing its consciousness and its class solidarity. Only the communist revolution can and must replace human relations based on division and competition by relations based on solidarity, by organising production, labour, the resources of humanity and of nature on the basis of human need and not the laws of profit which serve an exploiting minority.
Valerio, 13.3.20
[1] Macron made a speech on television full of detestable boasting about the “excellence of the French health system”, supposedly free and accessible to all, while saluting the devotion of the health personnel. The response was immediate: numerous photos on social media of carers, nurses and doctors brandishing a placard addressed to the president: “You can count on us. The inverse remains to be proved!”
[2] Clearly, it was necessary to prevent people from travelling and to encourage them to stay at home, to prevent the spread of infection. But the way in which these measures were imposed (virtually no state support for the care of children or the elderly, where it was needed, heavy monitoring of the population - and all this while the work in the factories, for example, was not affected) bears the mark of the modus operandi of capitalist state totalitarianism. In our next articles, we will also come back to the impact of these actions on the daily life of the exploited in the world.
[3] See our Theses on Decomposition (International Review No. 107, 4th Quarter 2001) https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition [7]
and the Resolution on the International Situation of the 23rd ICC Congress on our website: https://en.internationalism.org/content/16704/resolution-international-situation-2019-imperialist-conflicts-life-bourgeoisie [8]
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16810/more-evidence-capitalism-has-become-danger-humanity [9]
[5] By searching for the objective causes of the infections and not religious or fantastic causes (the "4 humours" theory of ancient medicine, for example), by trying to get a materialist view of human anatomy and physiology, etc., it became possible to identify the causes of these infections.
[6] See in the most recent issues of our International Review (Nos. 162 and 163) our articles on the centenary of the Communist International.
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16704/resolution-international-situation-2019-imperialist-conflicts-life-bourgeoisie [8].
[8] For example, the role of civets as an intermediate transmitter of the disease to humans led to a lightning elimination of these animals in China, which very quickly stopped the spread of the disease.
[9] In France for example, research into the coronavirus family which followed the 2002-3 epidemic was suddenly interrupted in 2005 as a result of budget cuts
[10] This tendency is a dynamic which can be seen in all countries and under governments of all political colours, as we can see from this graphique d’Euroestat [10]
[11] See (in Italian) "Recomendaciones UCI en Italia".
On July 20 1969, two men took the first steps on the moon. These exploits concretised one of the most audacious dreams of humanity, an unparalleled plan already imagined by Lucien of Samosata in the IInd century, later by the poet Cyrano de Bergerac and more recently, Jules Verne. But with capitalism, everything useful, every conquest, every advance, has its downside. The Apollo II Mission brought in its wake a frenzy of competition and a bellicose mentality which at the level of states is called imperialism. The militarisation of space is an old obsession of the great powers. In effect, the space-race was a crucial stake in the Cold War between the USA and Russia. It was necessary for them to get to the moon first and, if possible, them alone.[1]
First of all these space programmes were useful propaganda: the first Sputnik, the first man in space was triumphantly broadcast around the world by the USSR. Even today there remains a real cult devoted to Yuri Gagarin since his voyage around the Earth[2]. The flight of the three Apollo II astronauts was presented as the success of advanced American technology.
But behind the propaganda, these space programmes had a quite concrete military dimension. The fact is that everyone sent into space had come from the military (the first civilian to set foot on the moon was Harrison Schmitt in 1972... the last Apollo mission), the rocket science used by both the Americans and the Russians was initially developed for inter-continental missiles. NASA appealed to Wernher von Braun, who was lifted out of Germany after the war in a secret operation that included hundreds of other scientists who worked for the Nazis[3]. Following his work for the Third Reich and its success with his V2[4] rocket, the US employed him to design the US Saturn V rocket used to go to the moon. The Soviet launchers were also adapted copies of the German V2's. The R-7, which put Sputnik I in orbit, was nothing other than an inter-continental missile. As for the Europeans, Britain and France also profited from German technology by launching V2 rockets and then, in France, there was a development from this basis of its own launcher ending up in the "Ariane" programme. The Russian and American states first of all built missiles to carry nuclear charges before being interested in the space exploration made possible by the technology.
Moreover, the first satellites sent into space had a strictly military aim: the 144 satellites of the US Corona programme, begun in 1959, had the sole aim of spying on the enemy. In 1962, the United States made its first high-altitude nuclear test at 400 km ("Starfish Prime") while the Russians developed their "kamikaze satellites" in order to eliminate American spy satellites. The USSR even succeeded in putting into orbit two secret space stations armed with automatic cannons (Salyut 3 in 1974 and Salyut 5 in 1976).
During President Reagan's tenure, the US army prompted the "Strategic Defence Initiative" popularised under the name "Star Wars". The aim of this military programme was to be able to intercept ballistic missiles whose trajectory (like the V2) left Earth's atmosphere. Some real weapons were developed during this period, the anti-satellite ASM-135 or the "Patriot" anti-missile system, notably deployed during the Gulf War. The USSR tried to keep up but quickly gave up given the enormous resources thrown at it by the Americans: twelve billion dollars over five years, enabling them to get up to 30,000 scientists working on their projects. The technological advances made from this allowed the US to completely dominate their imperialist rivals in the domain of space. The effort here made by the USSR led to its ruin, ending up in its economic and political collapse in 1990.
Today, numerous signs point to a greater and greater interest by the main imperialist powers in space as a field of battle, possibly in the confrontation where one opposes the other. One could see this as just a technological and scientific issue, but the runners in this race, when they talk openly, see things much more "strategically": "faced with the quarrels taking place in European and French space agencies, Thomas Husak (...) considers that 'given the strategic stakes we cannot allow ourselves to be divided'. A word to the wise... Much more than the USA and China, beyond questions of sovereignty, there is participation in a real commercial war in developing space capacities (launchers, applications...). The European Union is well aware of this, betting heavily on space with a constantly increasing budget: five billion euros in 2007, then thirteen billion in 2018 and finally sixteen billion in 2027"[5].
Today, as well as the Russians, Americans and Europeans, there are other actors arriving on the scene of space competition: India and China have shown their ambitions in this domain... by demonstrating their ability to destroy orbiting satellites. In launching satellites capable of approaching other satellites, Russia has worried certain other states sufficiently enough push France into providing itself with an autonomous space command whose avowed aim is to protect French satellites: "We can see with this intrusion that we are vulnerable, said Stephane Mazouffre. And that's even truer when Europe hasn't developed a system to destroy satellites from the ground up. In March 2019, India became the fourth country to destroy, by missile, one of its satellites in low orbit"[6].
General Friedling, leader of the French inter-army command on space, made clear in an interview that it wasn't illegal to install armaments in space "if their aim were non-aggressive"[7]. When we know that the most developed states depend on the US GPS satellite system for 6 or 7% of their GDP, we can understand the interest that they have in protecting their satellites and their space communications!
Evidently, when the bourgeoisie develops an overtly aggressive strategy, above all in the domain of space which doesn't appear strategic at first sight, it also develops a whole range of propaganda in order to obscure its real intentions. In France, such has been the role, conscious or not, of astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who became a leading expression of the state's propaganda claiming to show the most "peaceful" side of the space activity of the major nations. Outside of the fact that the equipping of the International Space Station (ISS) has always been international, links between schools, direct scientific experiences and numerous photos of Earth taken by Pesquet have given a very "peaceful" and "neutral" image of present space activity[8]. President Macron’s involvment in the official welcome that the astronaut received when he returned to Earth illustrates all the French state's effort of communication behind this episode. The exploration of the moon and Mars poses many scientific elements but also more clearly prosaic elements too; notably who can lay claim to the resources that could eventually be extracted from the lunar or Martian soils.
Since the 2000's we've seen more or less fantastical projects put together, from "tourism in space" to the pure and simple exploitation of the mineral resources of asteroids or even the moon and Mars. On the off-chance, various countries have provided themselves with legislation regarding the ownership of celestial objects[9]. The aim is to establish a juridical support to eventual mining prospecting in space. A certain number of firms and billionaires like Richard Branson have proclaimed their interest in these opportunities and in the creation of space tourism, but a certain number of elements show that in reality this is only a mirage. The Virgin Galactic company, founded in 2004, is still incapable of achieving what it was created for, sending "tourists" into terrestrial orbit. If the creation of an "orbital aeroplane" capable of following a trajectory coming out of Earth's gravitational attraction is a possibility, sending tourists to the moon is another story completely: even the future rockets of NASA cannot carry more than four passengers! However, cosmologically speaking, the moon is not far away! But, technically, nothing is ready.
If "space tourism" appears a chimera, what about the exploitation of mineral resources from space? In order to exploit fanciful natural resources in space it would be first of all necessary to send numbers of workers into space with particularly sophisticated and thus costly heavy equipment. Profits from such an operation thus appear totally illusory, much more so when the necessary technology remains to be invented. None of this can solve the problems of capitalism in any case; what it lacks is not raw materials but buyers!
Finally, a recent independent report published in February 2019, concluded that in the present conditions there is no precise aim, nor the technical capacity, nor the finance to send anyone to Mars between now and ... 2033! "We note that, even without budget restraints, an orbital mission to Mars 2033 cannot be realistically planned in the framework of the present plans and theory of NASA"[10]. When we know that the above report puts a figure of at least 217 billion dollars in costing a space programme to Mars, we can see the breadth of the effort demanded of the American economy at a time when global economic perspectives are darkening by the day. As to the reason effectively pushing the US space agency to plan a Martian expedition, the report concludes... there are none!
It's funny to note that the problems of costs do not spare the "peaceful" space industry: NASA's budget represented 4.5% of US GDP in 1966, but now only represents 0.5% of it. Last September, India launched a moon lander module whose main characteristic was its low cost (six times cheaper than an identical programme developed by China). But the set-backs of this moon landing were preceded by various incidents affecting the launch, showing that trying to do too much with so little is not really a strategy that pays off in space... Far from doping the economy, these projects not only cost a fortune without any returns but they are already prey to the "low cost" approach which is gangrening the whole capitalist economy.
From all this we can only conclude one thing: the scientific and "peaceful" perspectives that states are developing for the conquest of the Solar System are nothing but propaganda; propaganda which is against the real, hidden objective of providing themselves with an array of military satellites in the framework of an imperialist confrontation!
In fact space is an essentially military and strategic stake: spying, telecommunications, GPS tracking and military communications all converge to make space the present field of strategic operations of the major imperialisms. "Space is already militarised, warns Stephane Mazouffre, research director of the Icare laboratory of CNRS, at Orleans-La Source. All countries have spy satellites, communication satellites dedicated to the military which also utilises GPS systems... A satellite itself is a weapon. Why? Because if its orbit can be altered, it's enough for it to approach another satellite in order to perturb its orbit and make it inoperable. The simple fact of being able to move a satellite closer to another can be considered as a possible attack"[11]. All the deployments of armies, from the movement of troops to strategic bombardments, depend on the GPS system or its European competitor, Galileo. All securitised communications go through satellites that consequently have to be protected from the risk of being totally disarmed faced with an enemy. In this optic one can understand why the great powers provide themselves with a specifically military space operation with its own budget. The collapse of the imperialist blocs and the development of "everyone for themselves" have largely meant that new actors are constantly looking out to get involved in this vital domain for their own imperialist interests. These intentions are clear in the case of France which has some experience in this matter: [12] "The law on the French military programme (LPM) 2019-2025, foresees a budget of 3.6 million euros for space defence. It must in particular allow for the renewal of French observational satellites (CSO) and communications (Syracuse), and launch into orbit three electromagnet listening satellites (Ceres) and modernise the Graves space surveillance radar.[13]
As we see, and despite soothing declarations of intentions, space has been a field of rivalries between the major imperialist sharks for a long time; and today more than ever it’s a key element in the affirmation of their military power. Even beyond the economic aims that bourgeois propaganda and some private operators have broadcast (space tourism, extraction of minerals from asteroids, planetary exploration, regular return trips to the moon) which themselves constitute a component of imperialism, it is also the object of an intense battle for the protection of the advanced technology of the major powers towards eventual new competitors. But above all that, the real stakes of the militarisation of space can only be the preparation for future conflicts.
"Capitalism brings war as the clouds bring the storm" Jaures said. He could never have imagined that capital, far from stopping at the level of the ground and the sky, would a century later bring war and militarism much higher than the clouds, so that the necessity to destroy this system in order to halt this universal militarism becomes ever more urgent.
H.D.
[1] On our website: https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/10/apollo-11-lunar-landing [12] "... the adventure that wasn't".
[2] The cult devoted to Gagarin by the military-space complex is mocked in the comic-book of Marion Montaigne published in 2017: Dans la combi de Thomas Pesquet (In the space-suit of Thomas Pesquet), humorously devoted to the personality of the last French astronaut.
[3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip [13]. The Americans had the pick and the "allies" had to make do with the rest.
[4] The V2 was a missile developed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The advantage gained by Germany with the V2 was that this missile left the atmosphere during the course of its trajectory, which made its interception impossible.
[5] "Space, a vital and strategic stake for the competitiveness of the European Union". In French, La Tribune (June 27, 2018).
[6] "The militarisation of space: a satellite is itself a weapon". France 3, Centre-Val de Loire (July 26, 2019).
[7] "France could send arms into space". Le Point, (March 18, 2019).
[8] This point was developed very explicitly in the comic-book, In the space-suit of Thomas Pesquet, which re-traced his whole space journey.
[9] The USA in 2015, Luxemburg in 2017!
[10] Quoted from: "Independent report concludes a human to Mars mission 2033, is not feasible", Space-news (April 18, 2019).
[11] "Militarism in space: a satellite in itself is a weapon", France 3 Centre-Val de Loire (July 26, 2019).
[12] This has been the case since the policy of De Gaulle of "self-determination" regarding "the nuclear deterrent", parallel to but also on the margins of NATO. The creation of the National Centre for Space Studies ((CNES) in 1961 is an illustration of it, even if this was then integrated into a European framework in the 1970's, France remained the most active member of the European Space Agency.
[13] "France goes onto the offensive in space", Le Figaro (July 14, 2019).
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/death_spain_virus-jpeg.jpg
[2] https://fr.internationalism.org/content/10088/pandemie-covid-19-france-lincurie-criminelle-bourgeoisie
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/syrian_refugees.jpg
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201510/13468/syria-russian-intervention-escalates-chaos
[5] https://fr.internationalism.org/content/9934/droit-dasile-arme-dresser-des-murs-contre-immigres
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16774/war-terror-and-modern-slavery-libya
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16704/resolution-international-situation-2019-imperialist-conflicts-life-bourgeoisie
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16810/more-evidence-capitalism-has-become-danger-humanity
[10] https://www.newtral.es/las-uci-de-europa-ante-los-casos-graves-con-coronavirus/20200312/
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/space_race_cartoon.jpg
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/10/apollo-11-lunar-landing
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip