"Each of us must participate in this massive effort to preserve global security," said the director of the WHO in a press release dated March 16. On March 27, French President Macron declared: "We will not overcome this crisis without strong European solidarity, on the health and budgetary levels". And German Chancellor Merkel demanded, in the face of the health crisis: "more Europe, a stronger Europe and a Europe that works well"! Politicians urge people to show solidarity, good citizenship and unity to fight "the invisible enemy". While the need for masks and medical equipment is immense due to a scandalous shortage, all politicians and the media have denounced thefts in hospitals, pharmacies and even from carers' cars. The bourgeoisie winds up the media and widely publicises the selfish behavior of these “infamous and despicable” thugs, at a time when the whole world is in a so-called “war” against the pandemic of Covid-19.

In reality, while on the one hand the bourgeoisie displays its indignation and contempt for theft, on the other it coldly applies the same methods of brigands on the international scene: hijackings and “requisitions” of orders from other countries, outbidding and purchases of medical equipment directly from airport tarmacs. This is how the bourgeoisie expresses its “solidarity” “to preserve world security”!

So, at the start of the epidemic in Europe, China diplomatically and interestingly, sent some masks and respirators to Italy, but these were immediately diverted by the Czech Republic. With staggering hypocrisy, the latter completely denied any theft and pleaded an unfortunate “mistake”!

At the beginning of March, it was France which "requisitioned" Swedish masks on its territory from under the noses of Spain and Italy, countries very hard hit by the epidemic. It was only after the intervention of the Swedish government that the French state agreed, under pressure, to keep "only" half of the stolen stock. A month later, with the affair gaining momentum (it was, of course, a “misunderstanding”), Macron pleaded for "more coherence" and, despite himself, sent all of the masks on to their destinations.

The United States is also accused of having diverted medical equipment destined for Germany, Canada and France. Trump, unlike his foreign counterparts with more civilized appearances, nevertheless displayed his colours clearly and brutally: "we need these masks; we don't want other people to get them"!

In Africa, an epidemiologist recently warned about the very worrying situation on the continent: hospitals cannot obtain tests. Priority is given to the big guys, the big sponsors: the United States or Europe. The “great democracies” are holding on to testing equipment for their own interests! No wonder then that Africa seems little affected by COVID-19! The list of cynical acts of piracy by bourgeois states grows ever longer![1]

Even at the national level, the bourgeoisie falls into the war of each against all by default. In fact, like the states that scramble on the tarmac in order to steal medical equipment, federal states, regions and even cities are tearing themselves apart in order to protect "their" inhabitants.

Similarly, in Spain, where the weight of regionalism weighs heavily, a controversy erupted when the government decided to requisition and centralise the stocks of masks. But the incompetence of the Spanish authorities has led each regional government to look for its own supplies in competition with the others. The central state has been accused of fueling tensions and even of "invasion" by Torra, the president of the Generalitat in Catalonia. Everything is a pretext to assert petty “regional” interests where one is master of one's home! In Mexico too, the governor of Jalisco is pressuring the federal government to stop keeping back tests for the benefit of the Mexico region.

The bourgeoisie drapes itself with beautiful moralising speeches and calls for international solidarity, urges its "troops" to close ranks around the protective state. What lies! The "solidarity" which the bourgeoisie calls for is only an expression of each for itself, a reinforcement of chaos and capitalist barbarism on a planetary scale!

Faced with the crisis, letting the national state rip-off masks intended for "foreigners" only aggravates the problem. Capitalism, cynical and deadly, has no perspective to offer to humanity other than what is illustrated today by this lamentable spectacle of plunder: misery and destruction! The only social force capable of putting an end to the war of each against all is the working class, a class that has no homeland to defend, whose interests are the needs of all humanity and not that of the “nation” (or its “regionalist” version)! It is the working class, through health and careworkers, who today are saving lives at the risk of their own. Although the current pandemic context prevents any massive mobilization and limits expressions of solidarity in the struggle, it is the working class which, in many sectors and in several countries, is trying to resist the consequences of the negligence of the bourgeoisie and the anarchy of capitalism. Our class is the bearer of a society without borders and without competition, where hospital workers will no longer be forced to make an abominable "assessment" between the “productive” and “unproductive” patients (retired or disabled), where the value of lives will no longer be determined by budgets!

 Olive, April 7 2020

We have received an article on the legislative elections in Korea from the comrades of the Korea-based group Internationalist Communist Perspective. The comrades underline in this article “However, nothing can be achieved for the working class through elections. This is because the electoral system itself maintains all the political systems and governing bodies of bourgeois society and strengthens the passivity of the workers...

(…) The working class should not have the illusion that the liberation of the workers can be obtained through parliamentary means and winning majorities in elections. Taking power by the working class and its full political participation can only be achieved through the destruction of capitalism and its state institutions.”

The article of the comrades was written before the elections in Korea, which took place on 15 April 2020 and ended in a landslide victory for the current president Moon Jae-in, to a large extent because of the country’s relatively effective response to the Covid-19 outbreak. According to the comrades this text was the only voice raised against participating in the elections.

With the highest turn-out over the past decades – 66% - the ruling class achieved what it wanted: strengthening the credibility of bourgeois democracy and its parliamentary system. While the measures put in place under president Moon Jae-in were praised as most efficient in combating the health risks of the corona virus, the ruling class will now use the elections to bolster its democratic legitimation – because the Democratic Party and the Citizens’ Together Party won more than 60% of the seats, and they will now claim that the biggest majority of any government coalition in power is entitled to defend the interests of Korean national capital and demand more sacrifices. Because while the dangers to the health of people may have been protected better than in other countries, as the comrades of IPC write, the working class will now be presented with a heavy bill for the economic consequences. And their warning in the article that “regardless of the outcome after the elections, the capitalists and the government will start attacking the working class” was a very realistic assessment. We agree with the comrades’ strong denunciation of bourgeois elections. Some formulations in the article such as the rise of fascism in Korea are not clear from our point of view and would need further clarification and this should be subject of a debate.

ICC, April 27, 2020

ICP Statement

Another bourgeois election is due (on 15th April 2020) in the face of the capitalist crisis, the Covid19 pandemic, and the resulting catastrophe for the world proletariat. Again the Korean working class is being told to exercise its ‘democratic right’ to elect representatives that they cannot control. There is no alternative unless the working class has power in its own hands.

What is the reality for the working class that has repeatedly gone to the polls? Governments change, politicians change, and individuals from a working class background have been elected to the National Assembly to ‘represent’ the workers, but the living conditions of the workers have not improved. Rather, they have got worse and workers live in an increasingly dangerous society where no one is guaranteed a stable life. Even the Moon Jae-in government which claimed to be the successor of the candle light movement and took “respect for labor” as its slogan, and claims to be fighting against the threat of worsening living conditions and all kinds of discrimination, has no solution. The promises of politicians have for a long time been promises that cannot be kept. It was the same with the promises of the so-called progressive labour parties that persuaded you to vote for them and to wait until they take power to change the world through elections.

The bourgeois parliamentary system conceals the violent rule of the capitalist state. It uses relatively less barbaric violence than other forms of rule, and allows periodic elections to replace the governing party by other factions of the ruling class. Elections and parliamentary systems create the illusion that the working class directly elects people to govern them and is participating in political power.  Workers are supposed to believe that they have delegated power to the elected politicians when they participate in the elections, that they participate in power by voting. However, once elected, politicians are not directly controlled by the voters, and most of them, apart from during the election period, act independently of the voters.

In addition, since bourgeois elections exist primarily to strengthen capitalist rule, they are never allowed to change capitalist rule itself or abolish exploitation and oppression. Therefore, in the bourgeois election the main forces are not ‘voters’ but bourgeois political forces, and the whole election process and its results are obliged to operate according to their rules.

It was the very same politicians who got together to make the vicious labor laws and maintained the national security laws that have turned this election into high comedy. They are defenders of the system that discriminates and excludes people with disabilities, the poor, migrants, and sexual minorities.

In this, one of the worst ever bourgeois elections, there are still many forces that want to get into the bourgeois dining room as representatives of the “Jinbojeongdang (the Progressive Party)” and as “workers’ candidates”. There is also a more radical left which supports and declares solidarity towards them, saying that it will help to develop “class consciousness”. They criticise electoralism in words but they participate in the elections in the name of “tactics”. Instead of defending the politics of the working class on the terrain of the class struggle they have idealised the “election struggle”, begging for votes at the bourgeois banquet, saying that workers' politics can be implemented at the parliamentary level.

However, nothing can be achieved for the working class through elections. This is because the electoral system itself maintains all the political systems and governing bodies of bourgeois society and strengthens the passivity of the workers, turning them into a “voting machine”. In bourgeois politics, even the achievements of the mass struggle are delegated to and used by professional politicians for their own purpose. We have experienced countless negative consequences when the struggle was delegated to bourgeois politicians and saw how rights that were not defended by struggle collapsed in an instant.

If you reflect on bourgeois politics and elections, you have to conclude that they have only brought bitter defeats for the working class. You should now turn away from the bourgeois “banquet” of the elections. Defending the working class position, we have to publicly declare that capitalism is the cause of human misery, and beyond that, a communist society is the only alternative.

The Covid 19 pandemic is a global disaster, but it is announcing even more pain and sacrifice for the working class. The situation is the same in South Korea. Regardless of the outcome after the elections, the capitalists and the government will start attacking the working class. It should not be forgotten that the one-sided sacrifice and patience of the working class is hidden by the propaganda that the Moon Jae-in government is responding to Covid-19 relatively well.

The current crisis is not new. Capitalism has already been in a deep crisis for a long time, and the Covid- 19 crisis is just the latest warning signal that will bring about a bigger crisis. The inability of bourgeois politics to prevent the capitalist crisis is facing workers with a more serious crisis, boosting racism and xenophobia, populism and fascism. With the Covid-19 crisis, capitalism has officially thrown away its universalist values of peace and coexistence. Covid-19 threatens human health and life, but the ruling class has not stopped exploiting it to generate profits, and will pass the cost of the crisis onto the working class.

Capitalism's savagery is the result of the system of exploitation itself. This is obviously a consequence of the capitalist system, not of misled leaders or representatives through elections. The only solution is to overcome the capitalist system through revolution and to replace the law of profit, which serves the exploiting minority, by organising production, labor, human and natural resources according to human needs.

The working class should not have the illusion that the liberation of the workers can be obtained through parliamentary means and winning majorities in elections. Taking power by the working class and its full political participation can only be achieved through the destruction of capitalism and its state institutions. Although there are only a few of us now, it is our hope workers will recognise that elections cannot change anything, and create a system where the majority can control society. Those who create democracy for themselves through struggles, without committing their lives to the bourgeois politics of hypocrisy and inequality, those who create democracy from below, equal to all and enabling the involvement of all, are the future of the working class.

In the period of capitalist decadence all bourgeois elections are nothing but a fraud. Every day, hundreds of workers’ struggles occur all over the world, and tens of thousands of times a year. However, with elections which are held once every few years, the working class is deprived of its potential and most of its daily life is dominated by them. This is the reality of the 'democratic rights' in which workers become slaves through elections. As long as workers obey the rules of bourgeois politics and elections, capitalism can never be overcome.

The politics of the working class is possible only in places of resistance and struggle, not in polling booths. It is only possible where workers live, debate and act, and where class solidarity and unity exist.

· In the face of this general election with the Covid-19 crisis restricting mass struggles, let's overcome electoralism and parliamentarism!

· Let's prepare for a massive struggle against the total offensive of the capitalist class that the Covid-19 crisis will bring!

· the Covid-19 Pandemic reveals that capitalism is the most serious virus. The cure is communism!

· Beyond the bourgeois elections, toward communism as the future of the working class !!!

April 11, 2020
Internationalist Communist Perspective

Graph showing the decline in the number of hospital beds and places in France between 2013 and 2018

While the epidemic was already largely spread in Europe and notably in Italy, the French bourgeoisie were very late in timidly beginning to take measures in order to "protect" the population. It wasn’t until the situation was catastrophic in certain regions such as Picardy and the Alsace that the Macron government woke up and took drastic decisions: necessary isolation, closing of frontiers, police controls and mobilisation of the army to help medical teams that are totally overwhelmed.

"We are at war!" declared President Macron in his speech of March 16. Elements of martial language flourished in the mouths of all the ministries and politicians of every stripe: "The enemy is here"! "National unity"! "War"! "General mobilisation"! "War effort"! The government even resorted to the poor old men, "heroes of World War II", in order to explain that coughing into your elbow was like an "act of Resistance".

If "the enemy" remains "invisible" and "unknowable", the fight against this pandemic has, in fact, been that of a real war: government lies and half-truths have multiplied, they send millions of workers to risk their lives at the front (economic, that is) and that's when they are not sacrificing people by telling them to walk into polling booths for the local elections; an action that's both suicidal and irresponsible!

The bourgeois state is responsible for the mass graves!  

'We are ready and ultra-ready. Should it last two years, there will no shortages of masks, hydro-alcoholic gel for our soldiers (in white uniforms)', General Macron could have declared. But the reality is the exact opposite: faced with the negligence of the state and the amateurism of Macron, the government is winging it and now relies entirely on doctors to protect the population. Thus, while the Jupiterian war-chief and his ministers play their little games, hospital personnel sacrifice themselves in order to save lives and are doing so with largely insufficient means.

Today, faced with COVID-19, working hours are lengthening in a crazy fashion in all the services and nurses are exhausted from working shifts of fourteen hours, increasing still more the risks of serious errors. The hospital workers have vented their anger on all the TV channels. In Alsace, faced with the number of dead and patients with severe breathing difficulties, the state has had to improvise a "military hospital campaign" in an unprecedented logistical fog in order to support civilian hospitals choked by the lack of beds and equipment.

As to stocks of masks, hydro-alcoholic solutions, protective caps, uniforms, respirators, there is general shortage! In 2005, the state held a strategic stock of 723 million masks (1.4 billion in 2011 following the H1N1 crisis). But in 2013, budget restrictions meant that the stocks fell to 150 million. Faced with rationing, the recourse to out-of-date masks, even the re-use of old masks, the government has drawn 12 million from the already depleted state reserves... for masks for 1.1 million hospital workers who are supposed to throw them into the bin after four hours use. That's enough for four days use if the hospital is lucky enough to get a delivery. As to "non-priority" services and laboratories doing thousands of tests daily, they face identical problems.  More masks![1] Hospital workers in "the front line" thus find themselves exposed to the sickness. An emergency doctor in Compiègne has just died due to the virus and others will probably follow him to the grave! How can Macron look at himself in a mirror when he dares to assert that health must come before everything else?

Moreover, in order to shift its responsibility and the reality of the situation, the state, acting like a banana republic, blatantly lied. The numbers of sick were thus largely underestimated and the government and the Regional Health Agencies kept quiet for several days about the fact that screenings were "no longer systematic", according to the admirable understatement of the Minister of Health. Similarly the authorities let it be understood that the "saturation of hospitals" was localised to some areas. Shameless lies! The press and even social networks buzzed with poignant witness to tearful medical staff, showing the breadth of the catastrophe.

It has to be clearly stated: this chaos is the product of the decadence of the capitalist system, of budget cuts that the state has had to make for decades in order to keep the national capital afloat!

From 2004, the state made the choice to drastically reduce basic research into coronavirus for budgetary reasons[2]. The ruling class knew perfectly well that hospitals, already drained by simple, seasonal flu, wouldn't stand up to the shock of a major epidemic[3]. The bourgeois state has deliberately chosen to let workers die in order to put its finances first.

With an unbearable paternalistic tone, General Macron today praises the courage and heroism of the doctors, nursing assistants, nurses and paramedics, forgetting very conveniently that he sent his CRS to gas them for a whole year while the “soldiers in white coats” asked for the equipment and staff in order to care for their patients! During a year of strikes and demonstrations, the bourgeoisie hasn't ceased to show contempt for medical workers, their only response being the totally insignificant[4] "hospital plan" and sickening insinuations about the privileged position of public sector workers. Macron may well flatter them by describing them as "heroes" but their wages and working conditions will not stop getting worse.

The dismantling of the health system in France

The health system in France, as everywhere else in the world, is in ruins, cut to the bone on the altar of "budgetary rigour" so dear to Minister of Public Action and Accounts, Gerald Darmanin, one of General Macron’s best soldiers. In twenty years, the number of hospital beds has been reduced by 100,000! The numbers of hospitals and clinics has gone down from 1416 sites in 2014 to 1356 in 2018[5]. Symbolic of the destruction of the health care system, the government decided in 2014 to sell the military hospital of Val de Grace, the best performing and the best equipped hospital in France.

Logically, in 2017, France had 309 intensive care places per 100,000 inhabitants against 601 in Germany[6] which (a miracle!) is suffering a mortality rate much lower (for the moment) than its neighbours. In some regions, as in eastern France or Corsica, beds and equipment are sorely lacking and the triage of patients has already begun. It's a real dose of "war medicine" where the wounded and most seriously ill (notably the elderly) are left to die and can't be treated because of the profitability of the national economy.

All this is of course accompanied by a chronic lack of personnel with those working subject to killer shifts, extra hours and wages of misery[7]. The dismantling of the care system is also shown through the so-called policy of numerus clausus, limiting numbers of medical staff from all areas into the system. For 50 years, doctors and nurses have been selected by competition with a number of laureates arbitrarily fixed by ministerial decree, in what one suspects is the strictest logic of budgetary discipline. This forced the second European economic power to literally "import" cheaper doctors and nurses from Spain, the Maghreb or the countries of the East.

The bourgeoisie has no other means than coercion to stem the pandemic

In order to lessen the impact of the health crisis on the "French production apparatus", a series of urgent measure were adopted at the highest levels of the state, the first of which was a very late semi-isolation. While the epidemic began in Europe in February, we had to wait until March 16 for General Macron to finally announce measures of isolation. Up until then his priority was to take measures of austerity against the working class, notably forcing through the pension reforms while the epidemic continued to spread.

However, the government was well aware of the danger that COVID-19 represented. Ex-health minister, the "white angel" Agnes Busyn, publicly let the cat out of the bag (motivated no doubt by the electoral results that finished her attempts to become mayor of Paris) and warned the head of the state very early on of the imminence of the catastrophe: "I know that there is a tsunami coming towards us". “January 30, I warned (Prime Minister) Edouard Philippe that doubtless the elections shouldn't take place", "They should have stopped them, it was a masquerade"[8].

The "masquerade" took place. The government knowingly aggravated the spread of the epidemic by sending millions of citizens out to vote in a great democratic mass. The crying incapacity of one of the world's major powers to provide its population with the means of effective protection (masks, gloves, washing solutions) imposed more drastic measures of confinement.

But "masquerade" doesn't at all sum up the criminal organisation of elections in the full force of an epidemic; and then, in the same speech of March 16, Macron asked his "dear compatriots" not to come out onto the streets... "... except to vote and do the shopping". This paradoxical injunction (go out, don't go out, go to work, don't go to work) meant that many couldn't believe in the reality and the seriousness of this pandemic. It was thus not surprising that numerous "citizens" lacked "civil responsibility" and took advantage of the good weather to go for a stroll by the river or in public parks.

The speech of Macron trying to play both ends against the middle is similar to his decision to maintain the first round of the municipal elections which was still an "error" that was exploited by Marine Le Pen in her electoral campaign.

Under pressure from medical bodies, Macron and his Interior Minister Christophe Castaner took the decision for a general confinement. An army of 100,000 cops and military was deployed over the territory in order to enforce the lock-down and the multiplication of curfews. Faced with the gravity of the pandemic, the dominant class had no other choice than to use coercion in order to avoid mass deaths.

On the Cote d'Azur, a drone with a loudspeaker attached flew over the communes of Nice and Cannes ordering pedestrians to go home: "Remember the rules around the Covid-19 epidemic, going outside is forbidden unless you have an exemption. Keep a distance from each other of at least a metre apart", repeated the message from the drone.

The police, with the sense of discernment that we know so well, has not hesitated in applying and aiming the government's measures at the poor and the homeless: "several homeless people have been warned by the forces of order in France because they weren't respecting the lock-down (...) Cases have been registered in Paris, Lyon and Bayonne"[9]. The cops didn't hesitate to warn four people in mourning at the door of a cemetery for "not respecting the rules", affirming that there was "nothing imperative about a funeral". The bourgeoisie can do no other than deploy its forces of order, but it also profits from the situation by habituating the population to the militarisation of society when the "enemy within" will no longer be the virus but the working class in struggle.

On all the TV channels, every day, hospital workers mobilised on "the frontline" are interviewed to exhort the population to rigorously respect the lock-down and social distancing. Because, alas, it's the only means today to fight the ravages of the coronavirus and limit the contagion.

The bourgeoisie treats the health of the exploited with the greatest contempt

The "masquerade" is also expressed in the millions of people pressed together every day in public transport, in the workshops of factories and the areas which the bourgeoisie has "confined" workers by the hundreds. The criminal "masquerade" of the bourgeoisie and its government is that thousands of businesses are still open for the production of essentials only in name. When workers in a building refused to expose themselves to the virus for no reason, the Minister for Work, Penicaud, dared to talk about "defeatism". "In the war against this epidemic, the economic world represents a rear-guard", the President of MEDEF (the French employers' organisation) underlined.

In order to get workers who want to leave their place of exploitation to stay put, the government has unleashed two of its most redoubtable arms: repression and propaganda. The state naturally counts on its trade union guard dogs to ensure discipline. The latter have continually called for "the indispensable means for the protection of the health and security of workers who have to go to work" and "to salute the engagement of workers in public services and elsewhere"[10]. This can be translated as: go to work! We are expressing concerns about your protection thanks to the "social dialogue" with the company and the boss! When the workers express their reticence more openly, the unions are quick to talk about the "right to withdraw" of each individual from "their" workplace.

"The state of health emergency" hasn't prevented the government from exhorting workers not to respect isolation when work from home is not possible. But henceforth, if workers refuse to go to work and prefer to guard their health and those of their loved ones, will we see the cops arrest them and sanction all those that the state judges a hindrance to the good functioning of the national economy? The idea of taking holidays has been mooted by employers to "compensate" for absenteeism. Even workers in some tax offices have been told not to abandon their posts. This selective confinement is part of the logic of capital, which demands that this killer pandemic mustn't prevent the "continuity" of the national economy.

"My priority is to save the French productive apparatus", thus declared Bruno Le Maire, Economy Minister/dragoon, sword drawn. As so pleasantly underlined by the journalist of Atlantico, Jean-Sebastien Ferjou, on LCI: "the real question (...) is do we prefer to sacrifice our old and weak or do we prefer to lose two points off the GDP?" The government has chosen to sacrifice the old and weak.

It's the working class who will pay the bill

Regarding its outrageous propaganda, the French bourgeoisie, in the image of its neighbours, has spared nothing. In calling for a "general mobilisation" and "national unity", the bourgeoisie has unleashed a most nauseating nationalist campaign.

The bourgeoisie has already prepared the ground for the economic devastation that this "health war" will engender, and it's the working class who will pay the bill. The "spirit of sacrifice" that goes along with a period of "reconstruction" is already the order of the day. Already, the most precarious workers have lost the hours that allow them to survive. Already, those technically unemployed will not receive their full wages, contrary to government promises. The propaganda is drummed into our heads that because of the epidemic everyone in the future will have to tighten their belts. While they made us think that "greedy bankers" and "crazy finance" was the at the origin of the financial crisis of 2008, they are trying today to make us think that it's Covid-19 which is at the origin of the economic crisis. But reality is far different: not only is the epidemic only a catalyst, an accelerant of the capitalist crisis, it is itself a pure product of the crisis.

In the press and on social networks, from television to Youtube, people out jogging alone are being designated as irresponsible for spreading the virus. Hasn't it dawned on the journalists and "Youtubers" that these impudent exercisers have found it ridiculous to be forbidden to breathe fresh air after being heaped together in their millions on trains, in factories, in warehouses, in the polling booths? The state is also unleashing a campaign of individual guilt in order to better hide its own negligence and its incapacity to stem the pandemic.  

But where the ideological campaign of the bourgeoisie is most pernicious is the call for applause for hospital personnel. TV channels have shown, on the loop, the images of an illuminated Eiffel Tower and of the surrounding areas applauding the doctors and nurses every night at 2000, sometimes from windows and even to the strains of the Marseillaise. The bourgeoisie will not hold back from any cynicism, any indecency as it did when it called for the population to redouble its applause after the death of the first doctor. "Soldiers dying for France" falling on the field of honour under popular jubilation and applause! It's nothing other than a distortion of proletarian solidarity echoing the military discourse of General Macron vaunting the "heroism" of the carers. Although the applause could warm their hearts, the medical workers have no need of medals for their good and loyal service to the "Nation". They need personal protective gear, specialised equipment, masks, tests and extra workers. They need the "recognition" of their exploiters to be shown by increases in wages and staff so they don't go under due to the diabolical hours they are working.

Anger can only spread

Faced with the negligence of the bourgeoisie and the breakdown of a health system that makes it more and more difficult to look after the sick, anger is rising among the workers. The contempt of the dominant class for human life appalls the exploited. There are many who no longer put up with the government exposing those not obeying the rules, or having to expose themselves to sanctions when nothing justifies their attendance at work. Delivery drivers of Deliveroo and Uber, the SNF workers of Andrezieux, those of La Redoute and Saverglass in the Oise thus went on strike to protest against their dangerous working conditions. At Amazon and the postal service workers also walked out. Elsewhere, numerous proletarians enthusiastically expressed their solidarity from their windows demanding equipment for the hospital workers, not applauding them as "the Nation's heroes", but with the cry of "Money! Money for the public hospitals"!

In the immediate though, what dominates is fear and paralysis faced with a health catastrophe that the dominant class is unable to get on top of. The impossibility of meeting up together doesn't allow the working class today to take up the road to struggle on its own grounds.

Nevertheless, all these expressions demonstrate that combativity is very much alive, that the proletariat will not fatally accept the negligence of those who exploit them. "We are not cannon-fodder" could be heard among health workers.

When this health crisis is overcome, the "protector" state will once again reveal its true face. The attacks on all of the conditions of proletarian life (aggravated by the plunge of the economy into the abyss of recession) can only end up, in time, not with a Sacred Union of exploited and exploiters, but with new explosions of indignation and anger.

This global health catastrophe can only contribute to reflection in the working class and a development of consciousness that capitalism is a completely rotten system, a real curse threatening the survival of the human race.

EG, 22 March 2020

Following the publication of our article “Who is who in Nuevo Curso”[1], which denounces the collaboration of the individual known as Gaizka with the high functionaries and institutions of the bourgeois state, this person has up till now maintained absolute silence. No comment. Silence is his response. And we can hardly believe that he hasn’t understood what we are saying, because his friends have immediately leapt to his defence[2]. But none of them have refuted any of the facts that we have brought to light: nothing, zero, nada.

This silence is a crying confirmation that Gaizka’s career is that of an arriviste and an adventurer. He says nothing because he has nothing to say.

This silence is a well-known kind of response which can only corroborate the fact that our accusations are well-founded, and in this respect Paul Frölich[3] relates in his autobiography an edifying anecdote about the behaviour of one of the editors of the press: “He had an instinct for tactical behaviour. Once I was very surprised that he did not respond to repeated attacks from another party newspaper. ‘Very simply’, he said, ‘I was wrong about an important point. Now I let them bark until they are hoarse and the story is forgotten. Until then I'm deaf”.[4]

However, every time that revolutionaries were accused of being agents provocateurs or of collaborating with the bourgeoisie, or simply suspected of unworthy behaviour, they dedicated all their energies to denying it. Marx spent a whole year writing a book in response to the accusations of Herr Vogt[5], according to whom Marx was a police agent. Similarly, a bit later on and along with Engels, as we can see in their correspondence[6], they took part in all the battles against attempts to discredit the International Workingmen’s Association and themselves. Bebel was accused of stealing money from the treasury of the ADAV (General Association of German Workers) and he didn’t cease fighting until he had proved the falsity of these accusations. Trotsky, though completely isolated and harassed by Stalin, was able to bring together sufficient forces to convoke the Dewey Commission[7] in his defence, and so on. But true adventurers and provocateurs have always done everything they could to go to ground, to slip between the cracks of the truth.

A deafening silence

Bakunin, for example, in response to the IWA’s internal circular on the “Veritable Split in the Internationale”, behind a scandalised tone, recognised that he could only reply with…a prolonged silence.

“For two and a half years, we suffered these filthy attacks in silence; our slanderers first began with vague accusations, mixed up with loose references and poisonous insinuations, which were at the same time so stupid that, for lack of any other reason to remain silent, the bad taste they left in my mouth during the period of my withdrawal would have been enough to explain and legitimise my silence" .[8]

In vain can the whole letter be scrutinised for some argument, which is conspicuous by its absence. However, Bakunin announced that he would convene a Jury of Honour, and that he would write an article before the next congress (the Hague Congress of 1872):"On the other hand, I have always reserved the right to call all my slanderers before a jury of honour, which the next congress would no doubt not refuse me... It’s necessary to re-establish the truth, contributing as far as I can to the demolition of the system of lies built by Marx and his acolytes, that will be the aim of a paper which I intend to publish before the holding of the congress”.

Needless to say, he never convened such a jury of honour, nor did he write any articles. Instead, upon learning of the publication of the IWA’s report on the Alliance of Socialist Democracy[9], what he wrote in a letter of September 25, 1873 to the Geneva Journal (in addition to insults against Marx, for being a "communist, a German and a Jew") was a capitulation:

"I confess that all this has deeply upset me with public life. I am sick of it all. After spending my whole life fighting, I am tired. I am over sixty years old and a heart condition that worsens with age makes my life more and more difficult. Let other young people get to work. As for me, I no longer feel the strength, or perhaps the confidence, to push the Sisyphus stone against the triumphant reaction everywhere. Therefore, I withdraw from the fight, and ask my dear contemporaries for only one thing: oblivion." [10]

Bakunin also deploys here another of the classic strategies of adventurers, which is to present himself as a suffering victim when his personal behaviour is unmasked.

Similarly, when Schweitzer [11] was accused of stealing money from sick workers who could not go to work, to spend it on champagne and delicacies, he, unlike Bebel, was never able to defend himself:

"Schweitzer was publicly accused more than once of this shameful action, but he never dared to defend himself." [12]

What’s more, when Bebel and Liebknecht denounced him as a government agent at the congress in Barmen-Elberfeld (Wuppertal), Schweitzer, who was sitting on the same stage right behind them, did not utter a single word, leaving his acolytes to respond with insults and threats:

"Our speeches contained a summary of all the accusations we had made against Schweitzer. There were several violent interruptions, especially when we accused him of being a government agent; but I refused to withdraw anything... Schweitzer, who was sitting behind us when we spoke, did not utter a word in response. We left at once protected by some delegates against the assaults of Schweitzer's fanatical defenders, in the midst of a storm of imprecations and insults like ‘rogues!’, ‘traitors!’, ‘scoundrels!’ and so on. At the door we met our friends who escorted us under their protection until we arrived safely at the hotel”. [13]

And we can also cite the historical example of Parvus, accused by Gorky of swindling money for the rights to his work in Germany, denounced as an adventurer and social patriot by Trotsky [14] , who had been his friend, rejected by Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Leo Jogiches, for trying to sell himself to German imperialism, and prevented by Lenin from returning to Petrograd after the revolution, because he had "dirty hands". Parvus never took up his defence against all these accusations, leaving others (Radek in particular) to defend him in the exile milieu in Switzerland during the war.

And we could go on, Lassalle, Azev..., etc., etc. all tried to make the accusations against them be forgotten behind a wall of silence, to disappear, or, like Parvus, to carry on as if nothing had happened.

But there is no need to go back so far; in 2005 we could see how "citizen B", who proclaimed himself "unanimously" (since it was only himself) as the "Circle of Internationalist Communists" of Argentina, put himself at the service the IFICC[15] (now the International Group of the Communist Left -IGCL) to denigrate the ICC, and then fled the scene as soon as we denounced his imposture. [16]

There are also examples of such deafening silences when the ICC has denounced adventurers in its own ranks. Such was the case of the discovery and sanctioning of the militant known as Simon [17] , to which he responded with a stubborn silence that even provoked a "Resolution on the silence of comrade Simon", which said:

"Since Comrade Simon withdrew from the life of the ICC at the end of August 1994, he has never acceded to the organisation's request that he make known in writing the disagreements he had with its analyses and statements of position, which, according to him, partly motivated his withdrawal... This silence on the part of Simon is even more inadmissible since he had fundamental disagreements with the two resolutions adopted by the extended meeting of the International Secretariat on 3 December 1994".

But this stubborn silence of adventurers and shady elements when they are caught red-handed is not only a confirmation of the accusations made against them or a way of trying to be forgotten, it is also a strategy aimed at allowing others to come to their defence.

Gaizka's friends and companions

If Gaizka has not opened his mouth since we published our accusations, his friends have wasted no time coming to his defence. And so only 4 days later the IGCL published a statement: "New ICC attack against the international proletarian camp”.

We are not surprised that a parasitic group with a gangster behaviour comes to the defence of an adventurer. It had already done the same thing in 2005 by taking up the cause of citizen B of Argentina. And perhaps we should begin to think that the IGCL has the power to see the future since it published and distributed a communiqué from the "Circle" of Argentina before Citizen B had published it on his own website.

The unfortunate thing is that the IGCL (then IFICC) duped the IBRP[18], now the ICT, which, although discreetly, without taking the floor directly, published the IFICC/citizen B communiqués denigrating the ICC , thus encouraging the unworthy behaviour of both of these rogues.

Of course, the IGCL does not provide in its communiqué any denial of what we denounce in our article, except for the statement that they "have not noticed anything": "we must point out that to date we have not noticed any provocation, manoeuvre, denigration, slander or rumour, launched by the members of Nuevo Curso, even in an individual capacity, nor any policy of destruction against other groups or revolutionary militants". We won’t waste any time on this declaration.

In reality, the purpose of the communiqué is to attack the ICC, since it is we "who have developed these practices under the guise of its theory of decomposition and parasitism and which it is now returning to". And at the same time the ICC has fallen "into the rotten domain of the personalisation of political issues".

The website Pantopolis run by  Doctor Bourrinet[19] immediately reproduced the IGCL article preceded by an introduction that competes with and even outdoes the IGCL in its hate-filled invective against the ICC.

Another group that has condemned our Gaizka exhibition is the Gulf Coast Communist Fraction in the US, which has said in a communication to the ICC[20] : "we have nothing but condemnation for this egregious and immoral hit-piece of personalized gossips completely removed from a political terrain”.

In short, two recriminations: 1) that it is not Gaizka, but the ICC that is behaving in a manner unworthy of the proletariat, resorting to denigration and provocation; 2) that in our denunciation political questions are replaced by personal ones.

It is not the first time that in the face of rigour in the defence of the proletarian milieu and the denunciation of unworthy behaviour, revolutionary organisations have been attacked with slanders about their "authoritarianism" and their "manoeuvres", as if they were employing the same means as the adventurers and provocateurs who have been unmasked. This was also the case in the IWA: "The bourgeoisie, which understood, from its point of view, the historical danger for its class interests represented by the lessons drawn by the First International, responded to the revelations of the Hague Congress, doing everything possible to discredit that effort. And so the press and the politicians of the bourgeoisie pointed out that the struggle against Bakuninism was not a struggle of principle, but a sordid dispute for power within the International, accusing Marx of having eliminated his rival, Bakunin, through a campaign of falsification. What, in other words, the bourgeoisie was trying to instil in the workers is that the workers' organisations used the same methods, and were therefore no better, than the organisations of their exploiters. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the International supported Marx was attributed to the ‘triumph of authoritarianism’ in its ranks, and to the supposed tendency of its members to see enemies of the Association lurking everywhere. Bakuninists and Lassalleans went so far as to spread rumours that Marx himself was an agent of Bismarck”. [21]

Bakunin himself did not hesitate to present the struggle of the International for the defence of its statutes and functioning against the sectarian spirit and its intrigues as a "fight between sects”. Thus, in his "Letter to the brothers in Spain", Bakunin claims that the 1872 London Conference resolution against secret societies, aimed in particular against the Alliance, has only been adopted by the International "in order to clear the way for their own conspiracy, for the secret society, which under the leadership of Marx has existed since 1848, founded by Marx, Engels and the deceased Wolff, and which is none other than the almost exclusively Germanic society of authoritarian communists (...)

One has to recognise that the struggle which has broken out in the midst of the International is none other than between two secret societies"[22]..

In the world view of elements like Bakunin, the IGCL, or Gaizka, there is no room for honesty, organisational principles or proletarian morality; they only project onto others their own way of behaving. As popular wisdom says, "the thief believes that everyone acts like he does”

However, “Much more serious and dangerous is when such denigrations find a certain echo within the revolutionary camp itself. This was the case with Franz Mehring's biography of Marx. In this book Mehring, who belonged to the determined left wing of the Second International, declared that the pamphlet of the Hague Congress on the Alliance was ‘inexcusable’ and ‘unworthy of the International’. In his book, Mehring defended not only Bakunin, but also Lassalle and Schweitzer against the accusations made by Marx and the Marxists.

Mehring's discrediting of the Marxist struggle against Bakuninism and Lassalleanism had devastating effects on the workers’ movement in the following decades, for it not only led to a certain rehabilitation of political adventurers like Bakunin and Lassalle, but above all allowed the opportunist wing of social democracy before 1914 to erase the lessons of the great struggles for the defence of the revolutionary organisation. It was a decisive factor in the opportunist strategy to isolate the Bolsheviks in the Second International, when in fact their struggle against Menshevism belongs to the best tradition of the working class. The Third International also suffered from Mehring's legacy: in 1921, an article by Stoecker (‘On Bakuninism’), likewise based on Mehring's criticisms of Marx, justified the most dangerous and adventurist aspects of the so-called March Action of 1921 by the KPD (German Communist Party) in Germany”. [23]

The fact that the IBRP allowed itself to be pulled behind the IFICC and “citizen B” in 2005 also gave a boost to parasitism, hampering the struggle against it in the proletarian milieu.

But let’s move on to the second charge, that of personalising political issues and, more precisely, evoking "gossip or private affairs". To begin with, our accusation was not based on airing intimate matters, but on exposing public political behaviour, which is widely documented. What we exposed about Gaizka are facts that belong to the sphere of the public activity of bourgeois politicians, and therefore they should be carefully considered by communist militants. What was an individual who had repeatedly frequented the high-level political circles of the bourgeois state doing in the area of the Communist Left?

Now, in the second place, there are "private" facts (intrigues, manoeuvres, secret contacts, obscure relations etc.) which need to be made known in order to understand and be able to denounce destructive actions against the proletariat or against revolutionary organisations. Denouncing them has nothing to do with gossip.

Here, rather than ourselves answering, let Engels do it. In one of the many articles Marx and himself had to write in defence of the IWA, attacked by the whole bourgeois press, and by the provocateurs and the followers of Bakunin, and questioned by the undecided militants themselves, Engels answers an article in Vperyod by Peter Lavrov[24] , which questions the report of the Hague Congress Commission on "The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWA ([25]) because it is a “caustic polemic on personal and private matters with information that can only come from gossip". This is how Engels replies:

"The main charge (against the report on the Alliance, editors), however, is that the report is full of private matters... of gossip. His statement is in any case extremely frivolous. The facts in question are proven by authentic evidence and those involved have been careful not to answer them.

But Friend Peter [26] is of the opinion that private matters, like private letters, are sacred and should not be published in political debates. To accept the validity of this argument in whatever terms is to make it impossible to write about history... So, if one is describing the history of a gang like the Alliance, in which one finds such a number of tricksters, adventurers, scoundrels, police spies, swindlers and cowards, along with those who have been deceived, should one falsify that history by knowingly concealing the individual villainies of those gentlemen as ‘private affairs’?

When the editor of Vperyod nevertheless describes the report as a clumsy concoction of essentially private facts, he is committing an act that is difficult to characterise ... No one can read ‘A Plot Against the International’ without being convinced that the private affairs interspersed in it are the most insignificant part, are illustrations to provide a more detailed picture of the characters involved, and could be suppressed without calling into question the main point of the report. The organisation of a secret society with the sole intention of subjecting the workers' movement in Europe to the hidden dictatorship of a few adventurers, the infamies committed in pursuit of that purpose, particularly by Nechayev in Russia - that is the central theme of the report, and to maintain that everything revolves only around private matters is, to say the least, irresponsible”. [27]

Conclusion

Can we tolerate in the proletarian political milieu an element that has maintained contacts and collaborated with high officials of the bourgeois state? Can we accept that someone like that now presents himself as a representative of the Communist Left? Can we build organisations of the proletariat and prepare the future party of the revolution with individuals like this? Gaizka's silence is a confirmation of his collaboration with the bourgeois state. His service record mainly to the PSOE [28] and at some point to the liberals, and then his contacts with the Communist Left and his disappearance when questioned about problematic aspects of his behaviour, constitute the trajectory of an adventurer. [29]

The aspiration of a group formed around this element to be considered part of the Communist Left would mean the introduction of a Trojan Horse whose purpose could only be to distort and undermine the heritage of the proletarian tradition and the programmatic and organisational principles represented by the organisations of the Communist Left. And this regardless of the honesty of the members of the Gaizka group, who may well have been deceived by him.

In that sense, and keeping all proportions in mind, just as Bakunin, as Engels says, wanted to impose his dictatorship on the International, which grouped together the workers' movement in Europe, Gaizka wants to play a similar undercover role behind a group – Nuevo Curso - where there are possibly elements who have been duped; he wants to appear as a reference point of the Communist Left, especially for young people in search of proletarian political positions. But his link with the Communist Left can only confuse the positions of the latter by passing off leftist or Stalinist notions and the methods of adventurism as positions of the Communist Left.

In this criminal endeavour, Gaizka has the organised support of the parasitic and gangster group of the IGCL, which presents him precisely as a champion of regroupement; but he also draws benefit from the silence towards his initiatives from other groups in the proletarian milieu.

ICC 11.4.2020

The picture is bleak, the deaths are counted in their hundreds, the smell of acid floods several sectors of the city, entire families have perished, as have many health workers. So far, the Ecuadorian state has recognized 315 deaths from Covid-19 [1], without specifying how many of these took place in the city of Guayaquil. However, the number of deaths from Covid-19 in Guayaquil does not represent the objective number of people, doctors, journalists and foreigners who have witnessed the enormous tragedy; for its part, the state, unable to respond to the health emergency, is trying to hide the numbers of bodies scattered on the streets and avenues which, in response to the complaints of many people, are gradually being removed and stored in three hospital facilities; furthermore, the morgues are full of unidentified bodies. In the face of this situation, every day hundreds of families live through the drama of claiming the remains of their loved ones in order to proceed with a dignified burial. It is a horror show resulting from the lack of hospitals, without sufficient medical personnel, without medicines, the result of permanent budget cuts, which indicates that the bourgeoisie is not interested in solving the elementary needs of the population. The cynical and lying behaviour of the bourgeoisie is the behaviour of criminals.

For the time being, the city of Guayaquil remains immersed in hysteria and fear, the images of which are travelling around the world, provoking the indignation and solidarity of many workers. The same reaction is occurring in many places where the state cannot take care of thousands of people infected by an epidemic that the bourgeoisie has known for years was bound to occur.

How does the bourgeoisie respond to the effects of Covid-19?

The media expose the scale of the disaster; no country has really been prepared for an emergency of the magnitude that humanity is experiencing. On the contrary, we have seen the neglect and deterioration of the health systems in China, USA, Spain, Italy, and one could even predict the same effects in countries that have supposedly become models of excellence in bourgeois administration like Denmark. In all countries the behavior of the bourgeoisie has been similar. First they minimised the impact of the pandemic, then they changed to a display of concern. But either way deplorable health systems are being exposed, systems that cannot respond to the Covid-19 epidemic that has been latent for the last twenty years. The hypocritical behaviour of those in power can be summarised as: save the economy at the expense of human lives, as the U.S. Vice President put it in early March 2020.

As part of the deterioration of the global health system, the Ecuadorian state, as has happened in other countries, laid off 2,500 workers in 2019, including doctors, nurses and cleaning staff. As for the health budget for 2020, the National Assembly approved it minus $81 million compared to the previous year, when it stood at $3,097 million. If we compare the 2019 health budget with the payment of the foreign debt for the same year, which was $8.107 billion, this shows the preference of the Ecuadorian state in capital accumulation. The health of the population comes a poor second.

For this reason, the impact of Covid-19 in Guayaquil is due to a bourgeoisie that is not interested in the health of the population, in investing in infrastructure, let alone in health workers. Thus, since March 16, when the pandemic was officially declared in Ecuador, that same day the Minister of Economy Richard Martinez declared his intention to pay $325 million to the holders of State Bonds, which became effective on March 21, in the midst of a health crisis that was overflowing with deaths everywhere. This same act led to the resignation of Health Minister Catalina Andramuño, accusing the Moreno government of failing to provide her with the resources to deal with the pandemic. Meanwhile, the right-wing Mayor of Guayaquil, Cintya Viteri, transferred the responsibility for removing the bodies to Moreno's central government. For his part, since March 16, Vice President Otto Sonnenholzner appeared as a hero in the face of the pandemic, although in truth, he is waging a campaign promoting himself for the upcoming presidential elections. This panorama sums up the degree of decomposition of the bourgeoisie in Ecuador and in many countries of the world.

The tragedy that the city of Guayaquil is experiencing is probably the most crude and dramatic to date, but the responsibility does not lie with the virus nor with the population who are often blamed for being ‘undisciplined’. The responsibility lies with the capitalist system, which is incapable of satisfying human needs. As we declared in our article published on March 25, 2020 : “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”. [2] A predictable announcement, precisely because of the contradictions of capitalism at the global level. 

What are the consequences of the ineffectiveness of the bourgeoisie in Guayaquil?

The bourgeoisie’s response to the pandemic in Guayaquil has a number of distinguishing features:

• Keeping the decomposing body of a relative who has died from the pandemic indoors for some days without any response from the state will obviously have psychological consequences, but also brings the risk of an endless contamination process.
• Faced with this situation Ecuador, like other states, has decreed mandatory quarantine at the national level. In order to comply with this provision, the state has mobilised the army and the police, who are acting in a very repressive manner towards people who cannot stay at home because they don’t have a roof over their heads; neither does the state guarantee that people will have enough food during the quarantine, so the chaos may become more dramatic than it is today.

• The health crisis has prompted complaints from doctors and nurses about ill-treatment and the deplorable conditions in which they are forced to work, but they have gradually been silenced.   
• The state acts in an authoritarian way to the population as a whole, but to the bourgeoisie it says nothing, as for example with regard to the thousands of redundancies that took place during the quarantine.  

The health crisis has demonstrated the bourgeoisie’s true attitude to human needs. For this reason, the workers, in addition to recognising how their enemy class behaves, must be prepared to intervene in the not too distant future to change the root of the capitalist society that promises no future. The only way out of this horrible quagmire is proletarian revolution guided by a communist perspective. In this impasse of the bourgeoisie, it is clear that:  

1. Bourgeois society promises nothing but desolation and death as demonstrated by the worldwide pandemic,
2. In the midst of a situation of anguish and despair of the population, the states have resorted to the use of force to silence those who protest against the inability of the capitalist state to meet basic needs of food, protection, medicine, and to enforce the confinement the scientists recommend to prevent the increase of contagion.
3. It has been demonstrated that for the bourgeoisie and its state, its priority is not the people, much less the workers, but its own sordid interests, which is why, without morals or principles of any kind, it resorts to lies, hiding the quantity of dead without being able to give them a dignified burial, as happens in Ecuador.

A chaotic society that seeks only profit cannot envisage the satisfaction of human needs. The productive forces potentially available to humanity derive from the labour of the international working class which is exploited in the service of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, it will be the same workers who will be able to carry out the world revolution to change the destiny of humanity, so that it can live in a single world human community. 

Against the virus of decomposing capitalist society,

Proletarians of all countries unite!

 

Internacionalismo, Ecuador Section of the ICC, April 2020.

 [1] At the time of publication of this article, the Ecuadorian government has acknowledged 369 deaths, which is a gross underestimation. Source: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-51705060 [14]

 [2] “Either the world working class puts an end to capitalism, or capitalism puts an end to humanity” https://en.internationalism.org/content/16826/either-world-working-class-puts-end-capitalism-or-capitalism-puts-end-humanity [15]

Germany - once again exception, once again world champion?

The whole world is threatened by a new kind of pandemic: the new giant China initially tried to hide it, and then mobilised the power of its dictatorial, state capitalist machine; then it hit countries at the historic heart of capitalism: Italy, Spain, France and Great Britain. The pandemic knows no borders and surprises completely unprepared countries; almost 200,000 people have died (at the time of writing this article); the health apparatus is collapsing in several regions. Currently, the crumbling world power of the defunct era of the Cold War, the USA, is being shaken[1]. And Germany? After the authorities were similarly unprepared and hesitant in the first phase, they then proceeded more forcefully and left the international impression that they were more effective in combating and managing the pandemic, and, apart from South Korea, appear almost as a successful exception.[2] The availability and utilisation of intensive care beds and the rate of deaths (which had topped the 5,000 mark at the time of writing this article) are cited in particular as indicators.

Why is Germany just barely scraping by in the face of a potentially catastrophic situation for all countries?

The creeping capitalisation of the health and care sector

As in Italy, Spain, France or Great Britain, the health and care sector in Germany has been restructured in recent years in a determined manner, partly privatised, with costs being ruthlessly kept down.[3] Hospitals, for example, became pure "investment opportunities" for hedge funds, from which the highest possible return was expected. In fact, Germany was a pioneer in this kind of restructuring. The simultaneous restructuring - and thus the cuts - in the social sector (Agenda 2010, Hartz IV) but also the restructuring of former state enterprises (Deutsche Post, Telekom, Deutsche Bahn etc.) laid the foundations for Germany, backed by its industrial strength and export capacity, to make substantial profits by international standards over the past 15 years, bucking the trend of the worsening crisis.

If we now take a closer look at the health and care sector, we find that 37% of hospitals have already been privatised. But what is more important is that the management of the hospitals has been very heavily submitted to the laws of the capitalist economy for all the funding bodies (including the public and church authorities). This applies, for example, to the rationalisation of work processes, the settlement of accounts with health insurance companies and the closure of hospitals. Whereas there were 2263 hospitals in Germany in 1998, these have been reduced from 2007 to 2087 and in 2017 to 1942 hospitals. Accordingly, the number of hospital beds was reduced by around 10,000 within ten years, from 506,954 (2007) to 497,200 (2017). Despite increased labour intensity, nursing staff has been reduced since 1993.[4]

A similar trend can be seen in nursing homes, with a simultaneous ageing of the population. The exploitation of nursing and health care personnel has increased massively. Already in 2016 it was predicted that in 2025 there would be a shortage of between 100,000 and 200,000 trained nursing staff, and at the same time the attractiveness of the nursing profession has declined due to the unbearable working conditions[5] . The length of time people stay in the profession of nursing for the elderly is just 8 years. The various international recruitment attempts are unable to entice staff to go and work in the country where milk and honey flows.[6] In other words, people leave and change professions as soon as possible, since, among other things, shift work, changed work schedules at short notice and, in particular, the confrontation with inhumane working conditions are things that nobody can stand for long.

The capitalist reality in the health factories was structurally inhuman even before the pandemic in Germany. The hospitals are supposed to patch up the sick workers for further use and disgorge them as quickly as possible. The poorly paid personnel, who were subject to a strict work regime, had to be recruited from the low-wage areas.

As in the economy as a whole, where an ever higher proportion of machines is used (an ever higher organic composition of capital), the proportion of "apparatus medicine" has also steadily increased in the field of medicine. Medical technology produces increasingly expensive and technically complicated medical equipment, which is used in health factories and has to generate profit, but can only be operated by highly trained specialists. These new apparatuses and new technologies can offer a huge advance in the field of diagnosis and treatment, but because of the enormous costs of acquisition, maintenance and operation involved, they accentuate the need to "channel" more and more patients in order to have the highest return on the equipment, pay the staff and finally make a profit.

At the same time, medicine in the 21st century has not been able to shake off the old scourge of illness (and death) in hospitals due to lack of hygiene, from which most hospital patients died in the 19th century before the introduction of modern hygiene techniques. According to the Robert Koch Institute, it is estimated that up to 20,000 people die each year from hospital germs caused by an estimated 600,000 hospital infections each year.[7]

Ultimately, this means, on the one hand, that the patients only appear as "customers" in the health care business, to whom one tries to sell as much "service" as possible, and the employees are squeezed like lemons to push the accumulation of value in the health care industry to the highest possible level. The patient faces the carer for whom he becomes a commodity, the social relationship becomes a service, the work process is subject to enormous time pressure and compulsion. This perversion describes very well what Marx analysed as objectification, dehumanisation and exploitation. The actual purpose of the activity (the use value), the healing and/or care of people almost completely disappears. The fixation of under-cared-for people in nursing homes, the general neglect caused, among other things, by understaffing, blatant abuses that go unrecognized for a long time[8] , the questioning or refusal of certain operations for the elderly are expressions of this structural inhumanity, which is only broken up by the proletarian solidarity and sacrifice of individual care workers in the face of this daily and structural dehumanisation and objectification. Even before the outbreak of the pandemic, the social contradictions of a rotting system in health factories had already appeared very starkly.

Political ignorance and lack of preparation for pandemics

Medical historians and epidemiologists have long warned that the danger of worldwide pandemics is increasing. In addition, the living conditions under capitalism reinforce the negative and destructive forces of such pandemics: the destruction of natural habitats for wild animals, their sale and consumption without proper veterinary controls, the industrialisation of agriculture and in particular of animal husbandry[9] , urbanisation, which mainly takes the form of "slumisation" etc. reinforce the tendency of viruses to cross species boundaries[10] .

In anticipation of such pandemics, investigations, business simulations and emergency drills were carried out worldwide, including Germany 2012, where an "extraordinary epidemic event" was played out: "Anti-epidemic measures, phase-oriented recommendations for action, crisis communication, official measures, assessment of the effects on the forementioned objects of protection, monitoring the development of the spread and the number of new cases of the disease, etc.". etc. etc. "[11] If we observe the first weeks of the response to the crisis, and if we take all the indications of a severe lack of available protective equipment, emergency capacities, personnel etc. together, we can only see this as an irresponsible reaction by the political class. Hospital beds, personnel, infrastructure, equipment have been cut in many areas instead of being built up preventively. A male nurse from Berlin reports about the use of self-made protective clothing[12], several Berlin hospitals write a joint appeal, the Berlin hospital association asked volunteers to sew masks, nursing workers who complain are confronted with repression ... [13]

In Germany, too, we see the destructive nature of capitalism, which already kills under normal circumstances and now, in the face of a worldwide pandemic, refuses to do what is scientifically possible. This is causing outrage among the workers in the front line: many reject the false praise of politicians and the symbolic applause. In Mittelbaden, the first nurses are said to have quit their jobs due to the lack of protective equipment[14], in Brandenburg, protective clothing was demanded in an open letter at the beginning of April and the situation was clearly analysed: "Our hospitals became factories and health became a commodity "[15]. It may be surprising that the mortality rate in Germany is still much lower than in Italy, Spain and France[16].

The mobilisation of the German bourgeoisie

There are many factors that must be taken into account in the particular course of the pandemic in Germany. For example, one can even speak of some fortunate circumstances, to a certain extent, because the first cases could still be localised immediately and thus quickly isolated. Secondly, a large wave initially affected mainly young and sporty skiers; thirdly, the family structure in Germany is different from that in Italy and Spain, where many grandparents live close to their children and grandchildren; and fourthly, despite all the savings and restructuring, the health system is still much better equipped than in other European countries[17] and even worldwide.

The decisive factor, however, is the ability of the German bourgeoisie to mobilise much more strongly and cohesively after the first weeks of disorientation than in other countries. Germany, as the motor of the EU, still has a stable economy. Its political class is not free from the disintegrating tendencies in world capitalism, and from the urge to behave irresponsibly, which is becoming more and more widespread[18] , but populism here, for example, unlike in almost all other European countries (and the USA), has not yet eroded the political apparatus. And, as a further central factor in the ability of the ruling class to mobilise itself, the particularly strong role of the trade unions in Germany must be emphasised. Although difficulties in global supply chains (especially the links with China and then Italy) had made the German automotive industry aware of the effects of the corona virus at an early stage, it took a wake-up call from the Chairman of the Works Council, Bernd Osterloh, to close down VW's plants as early as March 17 (before the official political shutdown by the German government!)[19] . VW, with its historically close amalgamation of State-Länder and capital (the Volkswagen of the National Socialist system), is virtually a leading company, virtually a representative of the avant-garde of German state capitalism.

After the Second World War, this role was strengthened and further developed through the close involvement of the IGM. While on March 17th the assembly lines were still running at BMW, and Porsche and Daimler had only planned a break for a few days (to allow for the care of children), the IGM via VW set the trend. Unlike in other European countries (or even the USA), where national capital, despite medical knowledge, ordered the workers to the assembly line under life-threatening conditions, thus provoking strikes (see our articles on this subject), the German bourgeoisie, with the help of the unions and in agreement with its state apparatus, demonstrated its instinct for power. The sophisticated "social partnership system" between trade unions and capital to control the working class, to strengthen national capital and Germany’s world role appears as a game of give and take. The collective bargaining conflict which would have been on the agenda in the metal and electrical industry on 31 March (including possible warning strikes) was called off in the face of the crisis in the collective bargaining district of North Rhine-Westphalia by an emergency agreement without any wage increase (after years of boom)[20]. This emergency agreement was immediately adopted by other districts.

After a short phase of political negligence and lack of planning[21] , the bourgeoisie has again demonstrated this partly reduced but still economic strength and political power instinct. This allowed political decisions to be made which were by no means marked by concern for the health of the workers per se, but rather by a long-term strategy of maintaining power and continuity of the capitalist production process. For the capitalists, it is a question of calculation: either a workforce contaminated by the pandemic and therefore sick for a long time, with much higher health costs, or a controlled reduction in production and cessation of economic activities as an "economically" more favourable option.

First, the sober natural scientist Angela Merkel gathered a scientific team from the Robert Koch Institute around her and had a strategy[22] for action drawn up, which she announced on 18 March[23] in a television address: lockdown and social distancing. Germany, the world's leading exporter, closed almost all business with the public (excluding grocery stores, pharmacies, drugstores, etc.). In close coordination with the trade unions, the entire automobile industry was shut down[24] , setting the course for other sectors. Schools, universities and kindergartens were closed. This shock measure was flanked by a mobilisation of the state-capitalist money bazooka, at the centre of which was the tried and tested means of short-time work[25] , accompanied by countless municipal and federal variations of emergency money. On 20 March, a supplementary budget of 150 billion euros was adopted, to which several billion euros were added from state and EU funds. It is assumed that a total of 750 billion euros will be spent as  emergency money, and new subsidies for other ailing industries are announced daily.[26] What is now perceived as an immediate "rescue" from redundancy etc. will sooner or later lead to the most violent attacks in various forms, for which the working class in particular will have to pay. It will be left to a later article to analyse the catastrophic consequences of this growing mountain of debt.

The military is involved in all this: for example, a hospital for 1,000 beds was to be built in Berlin within a month with the support of the Bundeswehr; the Minister of Defence AKK reports an increasing number of requests for administrative assistance by the army and brings the mobilisation of reservists into play. This mobilisation of the military cannot be compared quantitatively in any way with that in France. In Germany any war rhetoric was completely missing; nevertheless the creeping strengthening of the military and its medical utilization is [27] remarkable given the background of German history. All in all, the measures should send out the signal: "we'll do anything for you" and at the same time, Germany has renounced draconian curfews and contact restrictions as for example in Spain, Italy, or France, thus rallying the population behind its government[28].

This shows that the German bourgeoisie, in comparison with other leading states in world capitalism, is still able to act skilfully and has not lost its political intelligence. This is the only explanation for the fact that a study classifies German crisis management as the world leader.[29] This political intelligence of the German bourgeoisie is based on its historical success in fending off the revolutionary onslaught in Germany of 1918/19, albeit with much blood. The counterrevolutionary elements active at that time, consisting of trade unions, social democracy (majority and Independent), the Free Corps and big capitalists, have 'grown together' in a solid state-capitalist block 100 years down the line. This is the historical background to the German bourgeoisie’s pronounced instinct for power.

Today, this is expressed in an apparently greater consideration for the health of the workers, which is not, however, based on a greater "humanity", but on the one hand on the concern for the best possible, most cost-effective preservation of the workforce, but also on the knowledge of the dangerous consequences of a mobilisation of the working class in Germany. We have already mentioned elsewhere that the centrifugal forces of capitalist disintegration and especially populism have not spared Germany, and yet the political apparatus in Germany is still far more stable than in France, Italy, the UK, and even more so in the USA. It can already be seen that elements of populism have been partially absorbed and applied in the measures taken by the bourgeoisie through the mobilisation of the state apparatus (it remains to be seen whether this means the beginning of a decomposition of the apparatus or whether populism will thus be easier to control) and thus the populist party AfD is weakened for the time being. The crisis management shows that the German bourgeoisie has incorporated a strong state, closed borders, indifference to the misery of the refugees and national egoism into its reservoir of action and that for now the AfD is only an annoying troublemaker.

In view of the worldwide character of the pandemic and completely inadequate preparation for it on a world scale, even the ruling class in Germany has not been able to escape the pull of the each for himself. In the desperate search for masks, the German government's regulation that medical equipment may only be exported if Germany's vital needs are met was also applied in Germany. This applies even if a lack of protective equipment in other countries endangers human lives. Defending the nation‘s interests comes first. And in its attempt not to let the EU fall apart, but to proceed in this ever-increasing chaos in a way that is as nationally coordinated as possible, German capital has turned on the credit tap for the domestic economy almost indefinitely At the same time the German bourgeoisie has remained largely intransigent towards the faltering "partners" in Italy, Spain and the demanded introduction of coronabonds. What consequences this will have for the EU cannot be foreseen at present.

Nor can anything be said today about the prospects of being able to ward off the increasingly aggressive appearance of Chinese imperialism in Europe and elsewhere. The mountain of follow-up costs of the economic rescue[30] measures decided by the world's ruling powers will lead to an increase in debt[31] , where the tendency of the every man for himself will become increasingly devastating. In the midst of this chaos, the German bourgeoisie may have been more successful than its rivals to date, but as one of the countries most dependent on exports and international stability, it cannot, despite certain advantages, escape the shocks of the crisis and the chaos it has brought about in the long run. What challenges this poses to the working class will be discussed in a forthcoming article.

Gerald, 23 April 2020

We are publishing this article because of the paramount importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the rise of Chinese capitalism in the last three decades, and more specifically of the aims of its “New Silk Road” project. It should be noted that it was written some time before the current Covid-19 pandemic, which will certainly have a significant impact on the global imperialist pecking order. It also puts forward a number of elements – such as the sections on the “Mackinder Doctrine” and on the development of the “credit economy” in Stalinist regimes – which are currently under discussion in the ICC. We therefore offer it as the contribution of an individual comrade.

One of the motives of US capitalism for the economic war it has begun, under Donald Trump, against China, is that the “One Road One Belt” (OROB) Initiative of Beijing[1], China’s most ambitious ever imperialist project , is seen in Washington as a direct challenge to the status of the United States as the sole remaining world “super power”. The intention of this central project of the Chinese ruling class, also known as the “New Silk Road”, is to cover and link together Asia, Europe and Africa with an ultra-modern infrastructure of motorways, railways and harbour facilities. It constitutes the most ambitious infrastructure in world history, with a volume calculated at anything between one and two trillion dollars. The project is audacious, not only financially, but also technologically. It proposes, for instance, to link the Finnish capital Helsinki with its Estonian counterpart Tallinn through a railway tunnel under the Baltic Sea. Even more ambitious is the plan to link Korea and Japan through a similar tunnel. It is no surprise, therefore, that the OROB has aroused the interest, and whetted the appetites, of the so-called business community throughout the world. In a situation in which the growth of the world economy is faltering and threatening to grind to a halt, China presents the “New Silk Road” (as it is also called) as a blessing for the economic development of the world.

A project greeted with misgivings and hostility

This notwithstanding, even at the economic level, the Chinese mega-project has met with a very mixed response. On the one hand, dozens of so-called “developing” countries have already acquired elements of a modern infrastructure and even of industrialisation thanks to massive Chinese investment. Although the countries receiving such investments often have to offer key resources as security for credits (resources which risk passing over into Chinese hands in the event of repayment default), for the ruling class of such countries, the New Silk Road is often the best possibility they have at present of the developing the economic basis of their power. But there are also other, more developed countries, for example European Union members in the east and south east of Europe, but also a European heavyweight, Italy, which welcome China as an investor and as a counter-weight to German and French (but also to American) capital on the European continent.

On the other hand, however, there are a number of countries which are either wary and hesitant, or even downright hostile towards the OROB. What is striking is that this group includes a majority of the main capitalist countries other than China. One of the most important of these countries is Russia. Already for geographical reasons, a project with the goal of placing an infrastructural grid over the Eurasian double-continent will always be very incomplete unless it includes Russia (the largest country in the world). Yet at present, the north and north-west bound motorways and railway lines beginning in China mostly end at the Russian border. The Kremlin stubbornly continues not to fulfill its part of the agreed projects. In the words of its head of state, Vladimir Putin, “Mother Russia”, after successfully averting the danger of becoming what he calls an “economic colony” of the United States, must now take care not to be colonised by China instead. This is why Moscow is demanding from Beijing “equal partnership” in at least that part of the OROB which takes place on Russian soil. For the moment, China has not given Russia the guarantees it is looking for. This is why the whole Russian sector of the New Silk Road is, for the moment, more or less blocked.

To the group of wary, middle-sized powers also belong the three leading economic powers of western Europe: Germany, Britain and France. Since, unlike Russia, they are not immediate neighbours of China, the ruling class in western Europe feels less immediately in danger of being economically or otherwise “colonised” by China. Nonetheless, not unlike Russia, they demand an equal share of and an equal say in the European part of the OROB. For the moment, they have been no more successful than Moscow in obtaining this. Indeed, despite the blocking attitude of the western European powers, Beijing has, to date, been much more successful in advancing its projects in Europe than it has been in Russia. This is because China was able to get a number of eastern and southern European states on its side. The attempts of Berlin, Paris and London to forge a united negotiation position of the European Union towards Beijing have largely failed. Above all, the defection of Italy (the first G-7 state to actively adhere to the New Silk Road, in the “spirit of Marco Polo” as Rome argued) was a huge blow to this unitary endeavour.

Of the countries which more openly oppose the Chinese initiative, the most important ones are Japan, India and (most significant of all) the United States. Their hostility has a number of dimensions, as we shall see. But already at the economic level, the three forementioned powers are particularly displeased. Whereas Japan has the impression that China wants to progressively nudge it out of the continental Asian market, India feels itself not only by-passed, but also encircled by the massive Chinese investments in surrounding countries such as Pakistan, Myanmar or Sri Lanka.[2] As for the United States, one of its concerns is that the OROB will strongly contribute to enforcing a kind of Eurasian hub as the powerhouse of the world economy. Instead of helping to “make America great again”, this could even, in the long term, render the position of the US economy, not peripheral, of course, but less central than it is now. As things stand, the USA is not only by far the leading military power, it is also, without a doubt, the economic/scientific/technological heart of the world capitalist system. Its ruling class is clearly determined to ensure that things stay like that.

To begin to understand why its main rivals are so worried about China’s “blueprint for the 21th century”, it may be helpful to take a look at the infrastructure grid with which it intends to cover Eurasia and Africa. It immediately becomes apparent that this network resembles less a grid than the spokes of a wheel, the hub of which is China. Beijing plans to finance as many of these projects as it can on its own, contracting mainly Chinese companies and employing Chinese labour. At the economic level, the intention is obviously that China assumes the role which the old capitalist powers of western Europe once used to play: the masters of Eurasia/Africa. But that is not all. In the robbers’ den of global imperialism, such things as infrastructure, trade routes, secure and reliable supplies of raw materials and labour power all have to be “safeguarded” by military might, which is the foundation of every imperialist expansion. No surprise, therefore, that the New Silk Road has an essential “security” dimension, the heart of which is the establishment of military bases along the transport and coast routes of Asia, Africa, and beyond (where possible in Oceania, Latin America and even Europe). To this must be added the striking of military agreements with governments in states along the OROB wherever possible. The full realisation of this dimension of the New Silk Road would give China a considerable degree of control over the trade routes and sources of labour and raw materials on which its main rivals, above all in east and south-east Asia and western Europe, so heavily depend. A control which at present the United States almost exclusively exercises.

The Mackinder Doctrine

To better understand the extent to which the New Silk Road represents a challenge to the existing balance of forces between the main imperialist powers, it is useful to know that, since the time of World War I, the United States has consistently adhered to the so-called Mackinder Doctrine originally developed by its predecessor as “world leader”, the United Kingdom. First formulated by the British geographer Mackinder, this doctrine poses the modern capitalist contest of imperialist powers in mythological, biblical terms as a struggle between the land-based monster Behemoth and the sea monster Leviathan. The core of this concept consists of two very simple ideas, ideas however which have the advantage of corresponding rather closely to the reality they describe. The first idea is that, in a struggle for the domination of the world between mainly land-based and mainly naval powers, the latter are likely to win out in the end. This is because capitalism (unlike any of the modes of production which preceded it) was a global “system” from the beginning. For example, the first modern capitalist mass production industry – the British cotton industry – was based on raw material grown mainly in the southern states of the USA, and cultivated through slave labour deported from Africa. Thus, by means of an effective sea blockage, mainly land-based powers can be brought to their knees. The second idea formulates the exception to the rule contained in the first one: the Eurasian continent is so large (and it even has a narrow land connection to Africa via the Sinai peninsula) and so populous that it could, if made into some kind of a unit, more or less immunise itself from any sea blockade. In other words, if ever Eurasia, or large parts of it, were to come under the domination of a single or an alliance of its main land-based powers, the ensuing power bloc would have a real chance of gaining the upper hand over its maritime rivals.

Precisely this doctrine helps to explain why, in both world wars of the 20th century, the United States took the side of Britain against Germany – and this despite the fact that London was the main rival of Washington in many parts of the world. The main concern both of the United States and the United Kingdom during both world wars was that Germany, by overrunning Russia, might gain the degree of domination in Eurasia which Mackinder had warned against. Following the same logic, the Number One enemy of the USA during the “Cold War” was always the USSR (although its main commercial rivals lay elsewhere, in western Europe and in Japan). Alongside the deadly nuclear ballistic threat Moscow represented to America, perhaps the most important single reason for this was, once again, the concern about the control of the “Eurasian Heartland”. Although its fears about this were somewhat alleviated once China began to break with the Soviet Union, this concern remained a central factor of US world policy until the Eastern Bloc fell apart in 1989. In the years which followed, the powerful economic development of China was not perceived as a serious threat to the US (or to western Europe or even Japan for that matter). To a certain extent, even the contrary was the case. China was seen as a more than welcome outlet for profitable “western” investments, attracted in particular by the unrivaled cheapness of a Chinese labour power which could be exploited to the hilt. During these years, the old capitalist powers (who were still busy celebrating themselves as the “winners of the Cold War”), underestimated the long-term consequences for themselves of the rise of China.

In a certain sense, the ruling class in the United States in particular allowed itself to be distracted from its Mackinder guidelines by another of its doctrines, one much in vogue after 1989: that of “neo-liberalism”. According to this latter concept (in its American version as formulated by Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys”), economic development anywhere in the world will, sooner or later, mainly benefit the kingpin of global capitalism – which is of course the US. Certainly there was an element of truth in this. Of course the Chinese boom was the single most important factor enabling crisis-ridden capitalism to continue to accumulate. Of course the USA, but also western Europe and Japan, over many years, as the leading established capitalist powers, at many levels benefited most from the momentary stabilisation of a world “system” of which they were the leading players. But they were deluding themselves in thinking that this would always and necessarily be the case. Today, under Donald Trump, it has become blatantly clear that, for US imperialism, China has become the enemy Number 1. The so-called “Asian turn” of the US bourgeoisie in fact already began under Barack Obama. The central idea of this “Asian turn” is that the first priority, in the defence of US interests, is no longer Europe or the Middle East, but Asia. To an important degree, the Asian turn is a RETURN to the Mackinder doctrine in American foreign policy. Already under Obama, and again under Trump, the Pentagon has published its global analysis according to which the main threats to American supremacy are China and Russia.

We have already seen how, during the 20th century, the main candidates for Eurasian leadership which the US (and the UK) first and foremost opposed, were Germany and Russia (in the form of the USSR). Two things in particular are striking about the present list. The first thing is that Russia is still on the list. This is partly connected to the economic strengthening of Russia since it abandoned its Stalinist model. Today we can see more clearly that the main reason for the backwardness of the USSR was not the level of qualification of its work force, its technicians and scientists, but a chronic scarcity of capital resulting from the Stalinist economic regime. In this context, Russia is again seen today as a threat to the USA because it has proven able to modernise its atomic ballistic military power, which is second only to that of the USA in its size and capacities. After the break-up of the USSR in 1991, when Russia inherited its nuclear arsenal, this appeared of lesser importance than it does today. Back in 1991, the ruling class both east and west still adhered to the doctrine that a thermonuclear war cannot be “won” - it would by literally MAD (resulting in Mutually Assured Destruction). But things have changed at this level also. Both in Washington and in Moscow, a new doctrine is gaining ground, according to which an atomic war can be limited in space and time and thus be “won”. To this end, both sides are busily producing so-called tactical atomic weaponry with more localised explosiveness and nuclear fall-out. This “evolution” of military doctrine (literally insane from any point of view other than the capitalist one) largely contributes to putting Russia back on the list of the main enemies of America. But the other main reason for this lies not in Russia itself. It is the rise of China. This has the effect of “re-charging” the importance of Russia as the geographical lynch-pin of Eurasia. Russia is the only country covering significant portions both of Europe and of Asia. In other words, if Russia were either to ally itself with, or be overrun by, any other Eurasian power, the worst-case scenario Mackinder wanted to avoid would be on the agenda.

To understand how potentially unstable the imperialist situation of Russia presently is, it is important to realise that Russia would be quite unable to defend its frontiers by conventional means alone against a direct military threat either on its western borders (NATO) or to the east (China). Russia thus sees itself reliant, to an exorbitant degree, on its nuclear arsenal. It is on this level that Russia is still far superior to China (whose own atomic apparatus is still considered to be inferior to that of France, for instance).

The second striking aspect of the present list of enemies of the US is that Germany (the main enemy throughout much of the first half of the 20th century) has been overtaken by China as the leading threat to  US hegemony. Today Germany represents a threat to the US above all at the commercial level. As far as the military dimension is concerned, a possible strengthening of the (relatively still very weak) German fire power is a problem for Britain much more than for the USA. Germany’s bid for leadership in Europe would devalue the status of the United Kingdom. But as long as Germany is unable to defend itself militarily in the face of Russia, it will remain dependent on the kind of support which, as present, only the United States can supply. As long as Germany remains militarily so inferior to Russia, it is not likely to dare to make an alliance with Moscow.

Thus it is China which today is, in a sense, assuming the role played by Germany in the first half of the 20th century: the latecomer to and main challenger of the existing imperialist pecking order (this pecking  order cannot be called a “balance of forces” precisely because it is out of balance). Here also lies the essential difference between the respective roles of Moscow and Beijing today. Russia, to its west, having lost eastern Europe and the Baltic states to NATO, is concentrating on preventing other former “Soviet Republics” from becoming NATO states. To the east, it has to meet the challenge of the US, and more recently, of China above all in the former “Soviet Republics” of central Asia. It is also worried about signs of a Chinese migration into southern Siberia. In other words, Russia is a power mainly on the defensive – not because it is less belligerent, but simply because it is being pushed back and is facing frictions and tensions with countries on all sides of its territory. As opposed to this, the role of China in the so-called concert of powers has become an offensive one. It was not the case under Deng, when China was concentrating on its economic “reforms”. This began to change under the successors of Deng. It is under Xi Jin Ping, however, that China has most clearly gone over onto the offensive. This offensive includes, for example, the development of “conventional” middle range missiles and the establishment of new naval bases “offshore” (on artificial islands). The heart of this offensive is the One Road One Belt initiative. More than anything else, it was this project which made the American bourgeoisie realise that China is no longer just another serious economic rival, but a challenger at the imperialist level.

And that is the decisive point. The twin goals of the ruling class under capitalism are profit and power. One of the most common misunderstandings about marxism is to assume that profit is the more important of these two goals. Many anarchists, on the other hand, are able to understand that the pursuit of power is the more important factor. But anarchism tends to explains this through some kind of intrinsic craving for power which can only be overcome through the libertarian re-education of humanity. In recognising the importance of power in the contemporary world, anarchism concludes that marxism overestimates the importance of economic factors in capitalism. But what marxism in fact realises is that, under capitalism, economy and power are inseparable. Many capitalists fail to make a profit. Their elimination through capitalist competition is not a problem for bourgeois society, but on the contrary essential to its mode of existence. Much more important than the profit of any capitalist or group of capitalists is the maintenance of capitalist class rule, the control of that class over society as a whole, the defence of the basis of its domination – bourgeois private property – by the state. This defence of its property, both against the threat from below (proletarian revolution) and against the threat from other capitalist robber states, is the precondition for everything else. All its wealth and privileges depend on this class rule. This is why almost any bourgeois class, faced with the unfortunate choice between the defence of its rate of profit and the defence of its “security interests”, will always be more likely go for the latter. This is why the main rivals of China, even in the case that they can themselves benefit economically from OROB or some of its projects, are ready to plunge the world economy into turmoil if necessary, should they feel their imperialist “vital interests” under threat.

“It was the straitjacket of the organisation of the world into two opposing imperialist blocs (permanent between 1945 and 1989) in preparation for the world war that prevented any disruption of the hierarchy between powers. China's rise began with American aid rewarding its imperialist shift to the United States in 1972. It continued decisively after the disappearance of the blocs in 1989. China appears to be the main beneficiary of ‘globalisation’ following its accession to the WTO in 1991 when it became the world's workshop and the recipient of Western relocations and investments, finally becoming the world's second largest economic power. It took the unprecedented circumstances of the historical period of decomposition to allow China to rise, without which it would not have happened.

China's power bears all the stigma of terminal capitalism: it is based on the over-exploitation of the proletarian labour force, the unbridled development of the war economy through 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 and the fierce repression of the  populations of Uighur Muslims and Tibet. In fact, China is only a giant metastasis of the generalized militaristic cancer of the entire capitalist system: its military production is developing at a frenetic pace, its defence budget has increased six-fold in 20 years and has been ranked second in the world since 2010”. (Resolution on the International Situation from the 23rd Congress of the ICC).

The Chinese Economic Boom Approaches Its Limits

Xi Jin Ping is the initiator, but not the cause, of the OROB. In general, phenomena tend to have more than one cause. This goes all the more so for a project of the magnitude of the New Silk Road. The stage of development reached by the Chinese economy when Xi came to power explains the use by China of its economic weight in order to take decisive steps on the geo-strategic, imperialist level.

Here it will be helpful to compare the example of China with that of Japan. Throughout the 1980’s, the growth of the Japanese economy, the success of its exports, the expansion of its finance sector, the development of its methods of production and its technology, were such that most of the “experts” at the time thought it would only be a matter of time before Japan eclipsed the United States as the world’s leading economy. But during the past thirty years, nothing of the kind has happened. Not only did the gap between the US and Japan not continue to grow smaller. On the contrary, since the beginning of the 1990’s the gap has not ceased to widen again. Whereas the USA consolidated its economic, financial and technological lead, Japan was in for three decades of economic stagnation.

Something similar has started to happen now in China. Until a few years ago, a lot of economists and statisticians were debating, not about if, but about when the Chinese would overtake the American economy. In the meantime, the doubters on this issue seem to be getting the upper hand. Not surprisingly. The recent data for China begin to resemble those for Japan from the early 1990’s on. Economic growth is beginning to fall, the rate of urbanisation starts to lose some of its dynamic, the mass production of cheap goods begins to be transferred to countries with lower wages, the average age of the population is rising, and an increasingly insane portion of investment goes into property speculation. These similarities with Japan (although the Chinese slow-down is less abrupt) are striking. And they are hardly a coincidence. Both express the same “leveling off” process after a long expansion period. Something similar happened in South Korea or in Taiwan and will happen in Vietnam or India.

As Karl Marx analysed in Capital, capitalism came into the world through the separation of the producers from their means of production and the transformation of these producers into wage labourers. Marx called this process “primitive accumulation”. According to the marxist analysis of Rosa Luxemburg in her book The Accumulation of Capital, capitalism accumulates through expanding into and gobbling up the pre-capitalist world around it. Two main phases of this process can be distinguished. The first phase is not “obligatory”: it only applies when capitalism encounters so-called natural economies: subsistence production in which money plays little to no role. In such cases, capitalism usually first endeavors to convert those who exclusively or mainly produce their own means of subsistence into producers for the market. At the heart of this transformation is the introduction and generalisation of monetary relations, for instance through the state imposing taxes only payable with money. Or it lures producers into debt. In so doing, capitalism expands a little bit each time the market it needs.

The second phase however is the decisive one: the conversion of simple commodity producers (who own their means of production, whether individually or collectively) either into proletarians who no longer sell their own products, but instead sell their labour power, or into capitalists who own the means of production but no longer work them themselves. Like the first phase, the second one opens up new markets and thus new possibilities of accumulating capital. Both phases radically change the way of life and the nature of economic activity in the countryside. But in addition, the second transformation leads above all to the industrialisation and urbanisation of society.

It is not least for this reason that the contribution of this second transformation to capital accumulation is of a much greater magnitude. Industrial society requires the construction of factories, mines, power stations, roads and railways; the new proletarians need to be housed, clothed, fed, transported to and from work, but also to be policed, distracted, ideologically manipulated and so on. As soon as this transformation has been completed, these additional proletarians and capitalists no longer represent a new or additional market for capitalism. But it would be wrong to imagine this as an overnight act, where the peasants leave their farm one day and start work in a factory the next. Whereas pre-capitalist producers often provide for much of their own means of subsistence, construct their own cottages, produce their own food etc. not only for themselves, but for their children, all of this must be provided for by capital in order that proletarisation can even take place. It is not easy to say exactly when, in each individual case, or as a whole, this transformation has been completed, so that it no longer represents an area of capitalist expansion. Theoretically it is over when a new generation is born and is brought up whose parents are already proletarians (or capitalists), so that they have become part of the existing capitalist market. It should be noted, however, that extra-capitalist areas still remain even within industrialised, urbanised capitalism.

In principle, however, once the producers outside capitalism have been transformed into proletarians or capitalists, they constitute part of the existing capitalist market, no longer providing new outlets for capitalist expansion. On each occasion, therefore, this process of absorption is a one-off event, limited in time and space, which cannot be repeated with the same persons. This is why capitalism cannot expand and accumulate eternally. At the latest when the great majority of humankind has been turned into either wage labourers or their “employers”, the system reaches its expansion limits. This is not yet completely the case today at the planetary level. But the “leveling off” of the expansion of China today is a clear sign that, although this expansion has not yet reached this limit, it is coming close enough to it to markedly slow things down. In so doing, the situation is increasingly destabilised. This phenomenon is not at all specific to China. As we have seen, it already happened in Japan, and not only there, but, in one way or another, in Europe, in North America, everywhere where there is a developed capitalism.

Another important aspect of the present slow-down in China is the following: as long as the Chinese capitalists could recruit their work force mainly from the countryside, more specifically, from societies which do not produce on the basis of wage labour and capital, they receive this influx of labour power without having to pay for its upbringing. This is almost certainly the main reason why wage levels in countries like China can be drastically lower than in the highly developed countries. But when the abundant supply of this kind of cheap labour begins to falter, and/or when capitalist competition obliges newly industrialised countries such as China to expand into high technology production (requiring a highly trained work force such as the countryside cannot provide), the likes of China progressively lose their advantage as a low wage location. This today is also contributing to the “normalisation” of Chinese growth rates.

The  dynamising effects of Deng’s post-Stalinist “reforms” also approach their limit

China has this basic scenario in common with neighbouring east Asian countries like Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. But there is an additional, very important factor of the Chinese “economic miracle” which distinguishes it from the likes of Japan or South Korea. This is the fact that, between Mao’s victory over the Kuomintang at the end of World War Two and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping which began in the 1980’s, the Chinese economy was organised on the Stalinist model. Stalinism was a form of capitalism, based as it was on the exploitation of wage labour serving the accumulation of capital by the ruling class. But it was a weird kind of dysfunctional capitalism producing a chronic scarcity of capital. In fact, the development of the Stalinist form of state capitalism was a kind of freak product of history, resulting from the taking of power by the proletariat in the Russian Empire, followed by the international isolation and the destruction from within of that revolution. What was left over in the Soviet Union was capitalism without a proper capitalist class. The new Stalinist state bourgeoisie assured its power and privileges through state ownership of the means of production. This form of state ownership, while tending to be economically less efficient, is not in itself incompatible with a properly functioning capitalism. The problem was first and foremost a political one: the hostility of the Stalinist bourgeoisie towards any other forms of ownership than its own state one – which it falsely identified with socialism. For this reason, a “normal” bourgeois credit economy could not develop. Credit is based on forms of private property where debtors vouch with their property and forfeit if they cannot meet their debts. Capitalism, however, is credit economy par excellence. Before it can be used to exploit wage labour as the source of surplus value, private property is the source of credit for investment. But under the Stalinist regimes, it was forbidden to forfeit state property. The resulting shortage of credit was the most important reason for the phenomenon of scarcity of capital in these economies. This was also the case for Maoist China. The perhaps most important single economic “reform” of Deng, therefore, was the legalisation of forms of private property, which provided the conditions for an important increase of agricultural productivity and the creation of a huge amount of surplus labour power, virtually freed from the land. It was on this basis that a real capitalist credit system could develop. At this level, although the Stalinist industrial sector and state services were already based on the capitalist exploitation of wage labour, Deng’s property reform had an effect similar to that of the integration of pre-capitalist resources, to the extent that these resources (factories, machines, buildings, terrain, blueprints etc.) could now be used to create credit for capitalist accumulation. This juridical act, this modification of the way the capitalist state defines and legislates private property, was to have enormous implications for the Chinese economy. Indeed, precisely the characteristic combination of the absorption of huge pre-capitalist areas and populations (in particular hundreds of millions of peasants) within the country, with the possibility of starting up a proper credit economy, mainly accounts for the spectacular economic rise of China. In fact, in some ways at least, China has gone through a transformation over the last two decades which in the United States took one to two centuries. A comparable combination of these two factors can exist in a developing, modernising Stalinist-led country such as Vietnam. But a similar dynamic is less likely in other big “emerging” countries such as Brazil, Mexico or India.

Today, however, the Chinese expansion is approaching its limits also at the level of its credit economy. Not only have credits already been taken on the main property assets, they are also taking on an increasingly risky, speculative character. All of this helps us to understand that the present slowing down of the Chinese “powerhouse” is not a momentary problem, but a fundamental one. Its own inner logic is leading China towards the kind of “leveling off” (which will eventually lead to stagnation, or worse) which now seems to permanently afflict Japan. But if this is the case, why is the ruling class in the US and elsewhere so worried? Why can they not patiently wait for the rise of China to come to a halt of its own accord? The reason is that China is not Japan. Beijing has options which Tokyo did not have. Today, this Chinese option is embodied in particular by the New Silk Road Project.

China plans its expansion beyond its own borders

As we have seen, the most important factor of the Chinese boom has been the possibility, within the country itself, of tapping the resources of pre-capitalist zones (soil, terrain, natural resources, raw materials, labour power, markets, and everything which can be used to generate credit), exploiting them through their ongoing conversion to a capitalist, and in the last analysis, wage labour based mode of production. It is thus fairly evident that, when the Chinese bourgeoisie begins to approach its limits within its own country (limits which, as we have indicated, are elastic rather than iron), it can attempt to do something similar beyond its border. When we say “beyond its borders”, we mean neither the influx of foreign investment into China, nor the flooding of the world market with products “made in China”. Both of these things have been going on for three decades already, nor is there anything new about them. Britain was the first industrial capitalist country in the world, and every other major power which followed in its footsteps (including Germany and the United States) relied to an important extent on capital investment from abroad to fuel their own economic lift-off, and on export offensives on the world market to consolidate it. What we mean here is the presence of extra-capitalist zones in the neighbourhood of China. This was not the case for Japan, for instance, once its economic rise lost momentum in the 1990’s. It invested heavily in China, for instance, thus participating in and profiting from the absorption of its extra-capitalist zones. But in the end it was China rather than Japan which benefited most from these investments. This was because Beijing was largely able to impose on the Japanese and all the other foreign investors its own conditions: obligatory Chinese majority shares in Joint Ventures with foreign companies, limitations to the transfer of profits out of China, mandatory technology transfer to Chinese partners, strict state control of when, where and how much foreign capital is invested etc. In other words, one of the main differences was and is that Japan is under the military domination and politico-strategic tutelage of the United States. China isn’t. A second very obvious difference is that Japan is an island country, whereas China is a mainland one (moreover with the world’s biggest population). If Japan wants to not only invest on the Asian mainland, but also to politically control, or at least strongly influence, the areas where it invests, it would need to accompany its investments with an invasion army. This is actually what Japan did in the past, particularly between 1904/05 (war with Russia) and the end of World War Two. At present, however, Japan is militarily much too weak for such an option.

As opposed to this, China can indeed follow such an option. Its principal means to this end at the moment is the OROB Initiative. In a sense, its gigantic infrastructure projects represent the economic dimension of the imperialist invasion, by which “it seeks to expand its industrial, technological and, above all, military expertise and power”.[3]

This Chinese invasion is particularly difficult to stop, not only because China is so much stronger than any of its neighbouring countries, but also because these countries themselves, in some ways, need this invasion (i.e. the infrastructure which Beijing supplies) in order to develop their own economies. It happens to be the case that many of the countries in the proximity of China still have pre-capitalist resources for exploitation. It is the case, for example, for Myanmar, Pakistan, or for the central Asian former “Soviet Republics”. On the other hand it also makes China more dependent on these countries. Being the creditor of all these huge infrastructure projects, in case of a payment default by the countries concerned, the Chinese state will have to find ways to compensate.

These resources, even if they could all be added together, would not contain a potential on a par with China’s own former internal ones. But this does not mean that they are not important. Moreover, the OROB method of infiltration via infrastructure construction allows China to spread its imperialist tentacles ever farther afield, reaching out towards potential resources of a similar kind, in western Asia or Africa (and even in Oceania and Latin America). And as we have seen, this expansion has a military dimension of paramount importance. Far from being a peaceful project (as the Chinese government of course claims) it is a preparation for future wars.

As we have seen, capitalism is not in the first instance an “economic system”. It is a form of class rule, one which, as never before, mobilises economic means in order to multiply its power, to consolidate its class rule. In other words, capitalism is, in the last analysis, more a “political” than an “economic” project. In order to hide this, it prefers to refer to capitalism in purely economic terms as a “market economy” or as an “industrial” (or even “post-industrial”) society. By the same token, it pretends (even to itself) that capitalism, historically speaking, developed spontaneously and naturally out of the division of labour and out of equivalent commodity exchange. In reality, however, the birth of capitalism was a political act: the separation of the means of production from the producers, and the transformation of the latter into wage labourers (often after initial, more or less long phases of the exploitation of different kinds of forced labour such as the workhouse system, slavery, and different forms of debt serfdom, for example the “coolie” system). At the heart of this process is always the establishment, enforcement and spreading of bourgeois private property. Its priorities are above all political. This is illustrated by the fact that, during the last third of the 19th century and large parts of the 20th century, the established capitalist countries, through the colonial and (after World War Two) the post-colonial systems largely hindered the economic development of large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They did so not only because they wanted to keep for themselves the benefits of the exploitation of the labour power and the natural resources of these zones, but above all in order to prevent the rise of new and dangerous imperialist rivals. In so doing, they actually contributed to hampering the development of their “own” world capitalist economy. The priority of the military over the economic dimension is particularly well illustrated precisely by the exceptions to this rule. After World War Two, in Asia, the economic development of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were encouraged mainly because they were “front line” states of the US-led imperialist bloc during the “Cold War”, as was Cuba for the Soviet bloc.

Similarly, the willingness of the Chinese bourgeoisie to invest in the development of countries economically neglected and even held down by the old capitalist powers is mainly directed against these latter. In so doing, Beijing itself takes great care not to inadvertently beef up any potential rival which could become a threat to it. It is striking, for instance, that the OROB does not connect much with India.

A potentially unstable social situation

As was pointed out above, the ruling class has to defend its power, its private property, not only against bourgeois rivals, but also against the proletariat, the class from whose labour it mainly lives. This is also the case in China today. Already during the economic boom of the past 30 years, China has possibly been the country which has witnessed the most widespread manifestations of workers’ protest. In this context, the perspective of the beginning of the end of the economic expansion phase threatens to exacerbate social tensions. This is all the more worrying for the Chinese bourgeoisie – still led by its Stalinist party – since it does not dispose of the more politically sophisticated instruments of the old western powers such as “democracy” or “free trade unions”. Although it tries to compensate for this through a kind of total Big Brother Plus surveillance (presently being complemented by a system of individual rewards and punishments in order to enforce social conformism), the more the economy tends to slow down, the more these mechanisms risk proving insufficient. In particular the perspective of mass lay- offs and rampant mass unemployment must be truly daunting for the ruling class. This is all the more the case since, during the past three decades, the Chinese bourgeoisie has mainly relied on economic growth in order to control the social situation.

All of this does not mean that there is any threat of a proletarian revolution in China in the foreseeable future. We also have to take into account that the working class in China lacks the historical experience of its counterparts in the old capitalist countries, and that it is cut off from the traditions of the workers’ movement and from the perspective of communism by their perversion through Stalinism. But this does not mean that the Chinese ruling class can afford to ignore or neglect the situation on the social front. This is all the more the case since the danger for Chinese capital today is not only the proletariat, but also that of the general crumbling of social cohesion. A possible loss of cohesion which also threatens the ruling class itself.

In the old capitalist countries, the relatively high degree of unity of the national bourgeoisie of the leading countries which it was possible to maintain during the second half of the 20th century (under western style ‘liberal’ state capitalism) is now partly giving way to increasing divisions within its ranks. Far from being immune to such tendencies, their Chinese counterpart is in some ways even more at risk on account of the more rigid character of political Stalinism. In addition, the present governing generation in China has certainly not forgotten the painful lessons of the past: the decades of internecine conflict between “warlords” before the Maoists came to power, or the factional clashes during the so-called Cultural Revolution which were almost on the civil war level. For all of these reasons, the social motive and component of the One Road One Belt Initiative plays in the background too. The attempt to maintain economic growth, to obtain new contracts and outlets for Chinese companies, and to find new employment for Chinese workers, all these things are part and parcel of the OROB. A project which, in relation to the social question “at home” has not only an economic, but an extremely important ideological function. During the 19th century, the dream of a new life in America was one of the main utopias which ascendant capitalism put forward. Not only deported convicts, but also millions of European emigrants, also embarked for Canada, Australia, Algeria or Argentina in the hope of escaping misery, and lured by the prospect of acquiring a more favourable social status as part of the project of reproducing one’s existing culture in a very different part of the world. A “utopia” which already, at the time, more closely resembled a dystopia, often entailing murdering one’s way through the “aboriginal” populations from one coast to the other. The infernal character of such projects under the conditions of decadent capitalism came to light in particular through the attempted colonisation of western Russia and parts of eastern Europe during World War Two, when the Nazis were promising to convert (“reconvert”) millions of Germans into land-owning farmers. The result was mass murder on an even more monstrous scale, whereas the project itself failed. Today, probably the first time in history, the population of China is being called on to “go west!” The move, not only into western China, but into central Asia (where big stretches of land are being put under cultivation), has already begun (as it has, more stealthily, into southern Siberia). The development, not only of infrastructure, mining or industry, but also of agriculture in the republics of central Asia and in parts of Africa, is also intended to ensure food supplies to a China suffering severely from desertification and generalised environmental destruction.

The opposition of the other powers

OROB thus has the potential of helping to maintain the rise of China as a great power in face of increasingly adverse circumstances. But whether or not, or to which extent, this potential can be realised depends not only on the politics of China’s ruling class, but also on a number of other factors. Of these, the most important one is probably the threat that it will be sabotaged by its rivals. Although these rivals are not, for example, the cause of the present protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese government, they are certainly doing what they can to encourage them. The United States obviously has influence in high circles, in what is one of the most important financial centers of the world. This is all the more the case for Britain with regard to its former “crown colony”. On the other hand, not only in Hong Kong, but within the Chinese community throughout south-east Asia, there are very rich and powerful Chinese clans with strong family ties to mainland China and are ready to assist Beijing against its rivals. In the first years of Deng’s economic reforms, more than half of the foreign investment in China is said to have come from this Chinese diaspora (which also probably advised Deng and Co. about how to set up a “properly” functioning capitalism). Taiwan, which Beijing considers as part of China, can be expected to become even more of a hot spot in the confrontation between China and its rivals.

More globally, we can speak of a three-pronged attack aimed at stopping, or at least at putting a break on, the rise of China. The first one is America’s economic war against China. It began as a “trade war”, but more recently has also threatened to escalate into a “currency warfare” (i.e. a devaluation contest between Yuan and Dollar). The degree to which this offensive against China is not just a caprice of Donald Trump was clearly revealed at the last G-20 summit of the world’s leading economic powers in Japan, by the reaction in Washington to the offer made by Trump to Xi Jin Ping to lift the technology embargo he had imposed on the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei: not only the Democratic Party, but also many Republicans (the party of Trump) were furious. They made it clear that, for them, what is much more important than customs and tariffs, is the need they see to impose a technology transfer embargo on China something along the lines of that levied on the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

The second prong of this offensive against China is of course the military dimension. An example of this is the decision of Washington to install middle range missiles in the Asian Pacific region, aimed at China. This in turn is partly a reaction to the development and production of such missiles by China. It is an open secret that one of the reasons the United States and Russia recently scrapped their treaty agreement mutually restricting such weapons is that both Washington and Moscow want to react to developments on the Chinese side.

The third prong is the stirring up of trouble along some of the most important routes of the New Silk Road itself. This is at least one of the reasons for India rekindling its conflict with Pakistan in Kashmir, or for the USA heating up its conflict with Iran.

We must conclude, therefore, that, far from being the blessing to humanity as the OROB announces itself, this project is one of a number of additional factors exacerbating the contradictions of decomposing capitalism. A development fraught with dangers for the world. Far from being proof that world capitalism is still something progressive, the rise of China, and the conflicts this leads to, are another confirmation that, with the two World Wars of the 20th century, capitalism irreversibly entered its phase of decadence. More than anything else, the characteristic of the decadence of capitalism is that the continuation of the existence of bourgeois society puts at risk the continued existence of humankind.

Steinklopfer,  28 August 2019.

[1] On our website: https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201809/16572/china-s-silk-road-imperialist-domination [40]; “China’s Silk Road to imperialist domination”; September 2018.

[2] On our website: https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201211/5331/deadly-string-pearls [41]; “A deadly “string of pearls”; International Review - Special Issue - Imperialism in the Far East, past and present, Imperialism in Asia in the 21st century.

[3] On our website: https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201807/16486/report-imperialist-tensions-june-2018 [42]; “Report on Imperialist Tensions (June 2018)”. 

A debate with a group of comrades in Alicante, Spain, about the significance of the present pandemic.

 

Contribution by the comrades of Alicante - Debates against the virus of capitalism

In these strange days in which the abnormal has become the norm, faced with the exacerbated suffocation of everyday life, with an increasingly empowered capitalist state as the mediating entity of all social life, a group of comrades who have been sharing militancy in various initiatives in the city of Alicante and its surroundings for many years, have come together to initiate a debate on the current and historical situation. Our militancy, which has gone in different directions over the years, retains two elements from a class point of view: the affirmation of the real need for the autonomy of the working class (our class) and proletarian internationalism. Consequently, even if there are divergent views on certain questions, we recognise ourselves in the historical and international revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

General framework from which we started:

• The permanent need for capital accumulation determines the permanence of its crises. The historical science of the working class has come to establish a time pattern: every 10 to 15 years the crisis is an unstoppable phenomenon.
• The crisis was solved through the destruction of people, goods and markets; war is the most favoured means for the necessary destruction imposed by the suicidal logic of capital.
• The globalisation of capitalism (since the beginning of the 20th century), and the progressive disappearance of pre-capitalist markets, exacerbates inter-bourgeois rivalries and gives rise to a situation of accumulated crisis, where large-scale imperialist wars with a power of mass destruction are developing.

• The Second Imperialist World War and the terrible destruction it caused (as a continuation of the First Imperialist War), with the consensus of the workers in all countries allied with their respective bourgeoisies under the banners of fascism or democracy (both perverse faces of perverse capital), bring about the economic recovery of the so-called ‘glorious 30 years’, years of reconstruction and accelerated growth. A shot of oxygen for capital, cornered by its own development.
• Since the return of the crisis (1970s) and of the proletarian struggle, there have a number of attempts by capital to mobilise us for a great war, or for local wars that have been fought over our bodies and those of our class brothers and sisters.
• However, two factors have prevented the development of a large-scale war in the classical sense: humanity refuses to be enlisted in new wars, there is a consciousness (not yet class consciousness) of the logical rejection of war from a pacifist, non-revolutionary point of view. A forced attempt by capital towards war could accelerate the current slow awareness. On the other hand, the proliferation of nuclear weapons could turn into an ultimate war adventure. The bourgeoisie, an unscrupulous class, is not afraid to spill the blood of others if it fears for its own skin.

The current coronavirus crisis raises some issues that need to be weighed and clarified:

• On the ideological level, it exacerbates the most brutal elements of the dominant ideology, the pillars on which the false consciousness of reality rests: nationalism, the defence of the nation and the united struggle across class divisions of society against the evil virus, the union of rich and poor beyond reality itself, the constant appeal (amid cheers and applause and cascading songs) to the sacrosanct NATIONAL UNITY. The strategy of atomisation and separation, crystallized to perfection in the lock-down, the prohibition of contact, affection and solidarity.
• Politically, it renews the need for state capitalism, the superior and preponderant role of the state as the guarantor and direct mediator of all human relations. And let us not forget (as the capitalist left so fervently does) that the state is the organ of power of the bourgeoisie, it is not a neutral state that objectively watches over the interests of the majority, it is the state of power, of a minority. Repression under the viral pretext, the militarisation of social life, are only a few symptoms of this disease, and perhaps they will remain. We talk about a war economy, a state of war, and they want to turn us all into little soldiers, according to this disgusting MILITARY logic.

In the economic field we have looked at various options, which we are not able to elucidate at the moment:

Obviously, the truth is that what's going on will only start to become more or less clear after a while.

In the economic field we see how it affects more or less all countries and it is not so clear that the ‘imperialist bloc’ will be the winner.  Although it is true that the free movement of goods benefits accumulation, it is no less true that in recent years a trade war has being waged between China, the USA and the EU. Protectionist policies have increased in the face of a smaller pie (the world) to be divided among the same scavengers. How the phenomenon of the coronavirus affects this and how capital will take advantage of it remains to be seen, but a hypothesis is looming and intertwined with the needs of imperialist war:

We wonder whether the viral phenomenon can be a substitute for classical imperialist warfare, since it could come to equate its capacity to destroy labour power, goods and markets, thus favouring cyclical processes of reconstruction. If this option is viable (it does not depend only on the will of the bourgeoisie), the re-edition of these situations, states of emergency and the temporary and partial paralysis of certain economic areas, will become cyclical and permanent. In fact, this type of situation already occurs in certain regions of the planet, where what is considered exceptional here is everyday normality. This could be proof of the irreversible decadence of the capitalist system, or a way of accumulating in the face of its irreversible decline. In other words, it would be the form of a large-scale imperialist war in the immediate future.

However, we have serious doubts about this hypothesis, since for this to be the case, it would have to cause, in addition to the destruction of markets and goods (which is feasible due to the economic collapse), millions of deaths in order to destroy enough labour power that would otherwise be left in poverty.  This does not seem to be the case: the number of deaths, even if it is given much media hype, is far from alarming, rather it seems that what is wanted to be avoided is the collapse of the hospitals. Daily misery alone is already causing millions of deaths from hunger and disease or pollution in industrialised countries... And while equally feasible, it is too dangerous even for the elites, being comparable with a nuclear war. In other words, a true major viral pandemic would affect both rich and poor, unless they had the vaccine beforehand.

Nor should we ignore the repeated warnings about the imminent destruction of millions of jobs by robotisation, mass migrations due to climate change, and the overpopulation of cities that have been converted in many cases into gigantic slums.

Perhaps this ‘pandemic’ will serve as a pretext for a new approach to labor relations, increasing precariousness, etc., and for a new world order, but this would enter the realm of conspiracy, with its capitalist ‘International’ capable of dictating what policies states must comply with (all of them?) Although, to tell the truth, the capitalists have their International in different bodies such as the World Bank, the IMF, the G7, the WHO.

We know about the simulation of a viral epidemic that was carried out in September and which has come to light. Could it be that this is a smokescreen hiding an ‘imminent’ collapse of the world economy and that this  could serve to reset the system... and in so doing sneaks in new repressive measures for another time?

The logic of capitalism undoubtedly requires the destruction of labour power, while making it cheaper overall, and from different viewpoints (some more conspiratorial than others) this is taken for granted. Overpopulation is a security problem and a major concern for all states.

Nor can it be excluded that these pandemics are in fact due to climate crises and the harmful relationship between humans and other species, in addition to the inability of States to provide solutions beyond the implementation of police/military measures …. and perhaps in passing making some money.

Other necessary considerations:

• The limits of capital are not only, nor mainly in its economic contradictions, in this mathematical tendency to decrease the rate of profit. Capital demonstrates in this sense, its creative capacity to develop new forms of accumulation, even if on a false basis, to keep its head above the mud and the blood.
• The real limit of capital, in the sense of the POWER to overthrow it and transform the world at its roots, to establish true life as opposed to mere survival, is the world proletarian revolution.
• As in every imperialist war, the bourgeoisie focuses its efforts on the ideological terrain, bombarding us with a barrage of banal activities to be carried on during the lock-down and to keep us active and thoughtless (like good zombies), while ferociously expanding its classic ideological elements: defense of the national economy and rejection of ‘what is outside’ (now turned into a dangerous disease) and distrust of our equals. Loneliness will continue to kill us, faster than any virus.
• It is not necessary to deny the existence of the virus to demand the need to deny, in practice, the brutality of existing society, the military and warlike logic of capital.
• Today, as yesterday, the internationalist and revolutionary slogan of the proletariat will be to confront all the bourgeoisies and their states, to insist, if we have the choice, that we choose our class autonomy because, undoubtedly, all the fractions of the bourgeoisie are worse.

Our intention is to continue discussing and debating, the most subversive activity that can be developed today is to recover the weapons of criticism, and we wish to open that discussion to all comrades who wish to approach it and share their positions with us. So this document is only the beginning of a tool for debate... IT WILL CONTINUE...

• Proletarians of all countries, let us embrace
• Proletarians of all countries, we cough loudly against the nearest bourgeois

Fdo: ex­-CAUs

 

ICC’s response

We welcome the initiative to meet and discuss. It is an expression of the effort of the self-consciousness in the working class and simultaneously a contribution to its development.

The comrades take as their starting point their adherence to the working class and internationalism. They see this as a framework for discussion where divergences can be expressed. On the other hand, they conceive their reflections as something open, evolving, and declare their intention “to continue discussing and debating: the most subversive activity that can be developed today is to recover the weapons of criticism, and we wish to open that discussion to all comrades who wish to approach it and share their positions with us.”

We think this is the right method in the proletarian milieu: starting from what unites us in order to address what may differentiate us through healthy and open debate. This is the method we are going to follow in our response in order to encourage a discussion involving other groups and comrades.

In the face of the pandemic crisis and the looming economic crisis, the comrades reject the fact that capitalism will disappear by itself, crushed by its own contradictions. On the contrary, they affirm that “The real limit of capital, in the sense of the POWER to overthrow it and transform the world at its roots, to establish true life as opposed to mere survival, is the world proletarian revolution.” Therefore “It is not necessary to deny the existence of the virus to demand the need to deny, in practice, the brutality of existing society, the military and warlike logic of capital.” So “Today, as yesterday, the internationalist and revolutionary slogan of the proletariat will be to confront all the bourgeoisies and their states, to insist that, if we have the choice, we choose our class autonomy because, undoubtedly, all the fractions of the bourgeoisie are worse.”

We fully share these positions, as well as the denunciation of how capital is ‘managing’ the pandemic crisis: it takes advantage of the confinement to impose an ideology of war and of National Unity, which favours atomisation, individualism, every man for himself, all against all, the fear of ‘the strange’ and therefore insidiously stimulates xenophobia and racism. “The bourgeoisie focuses its efforts on the ideological terrain, bombarding us with a barrage of banal activities to be carried on during the lock-down and to keep us active and thoughtless (like good zombies), while ferociously expanding its classic ideological elements: defense of the national economy and rejection of ‘what is outside’ (now turned into a dangerous disease) and distrust of our equals. Loneliness will continue to kill us, faster than any virus.”

Sharing this valuable common ground, we want to analyse what we do not find valid in the positions expressed by the comrades.

One part of their text develops speculations about the possibility that the pandemic was provoked by capital so that, by massively extinguishing lives, it played the role of an imperialist war: liquidating labour power and goods in order to resume the accumulation of capital [1]. The comrades themselves have serious doubts about these ideas.

The Covid-19 pandemic is triggering a social crisis of global dimensions

However, the comrades are still a bit skeptical about the seriousness of the pandemic: "The number of deaths, even if it is given much media hype, is far from alarming. Daily misery alone is already causing millions of deaths from hunger and disease or pollution in industrialised countries...". It is not the strictly virological nature of the disease that makes it so deadly, but a series of historical and social factors of great relevance: the collapse of health systems all over the world; its rapid and dizzying spread based on the enormous intensification of world production in recent decades; the social and economic disorganisation and paralysis that it has brought about and aggravated; the very response of states that reveals evident incompetence and outrageous negligence. It is this set of factors, linked to the historical phase of the decomposition of capitalism [2], that makes the virus the catalyst of a social crisis of global dimensions.

In the history of mankind, the great pandemics have been linked to historical moments of decline in a mode of production. The Black Death of the 14th century broke out in the decadence of feudalism. The First World War, the entrance of capitalism in decadence, brought with it the terrible pandemic of the Spanish flu that caused 50 million deaths.

Covid-19 is, for us, an expression of the decadence of capitalism and more precisely of its terminal phase, the phase of decomposition. It needs to be understood within the framework of a system whose contradictions have caused enormous catastrophes such as two world wars and an endless chain of even more devastating local wars; the great economic cataclysms that result in chronic unemployment, worsening precariousness, collapsing wages, and widespread impoverishment; in climatic change and environmental destruction that also lead to catastrophes labeled as ‘natural’; in the general deterioration of health; and, not least, social dislocation with a moral barbarity and ideological decomposition that favours all kinds of mystical and irrational aberrations.

It is very positive that the comrades insist on the need for world proletarian revolution as the only possible answer to this escalation of barbarism. But what is the material basis for this demand? For us it is the decadence of capitalism, as the Platform of the Communist International (1919) has already pointed out: “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat.”

This pandemic shows precisely the validity of applying the marxist concept of decadence - when the mode of production becomes a brake on the productive forces it has developed - to the situation of capitalism today. In the14th century the cause of the plague was not understood; in 1918-1919 viruses had not been discovered. But today? The Covid-19 virus was sequenced within weeks. The unbearable thing about the deaths from the coronavirus is not their quantity, but that all of them would be perfectly avoidable if the science and technology that already exist were not subjected to the laws of profit and competition.

Cyclical crises or chronic crisis?

The comrades develop certain ideas that relativise the notion of the decadence of capitalism. Thus they affirm that "The constant need of capital accumulation determines the unstoppable permanence of its crises. The historical science of the working class came to establish a time pattern: every 10-15 years the crisis is an unstoppable phenomenon".

In the ascendancy of capitalism (its heyday in the 19th and early 20th century) crises had a cyclical character as they were “a manifestation of the fact that the old markets were saturated and a new expansion was nee­ded. They were thus periodic (every 7 to 10 years …..) and were resolved by the opening up of new markets. (…) They broke out abruptly (…). They were short-lived (…). They didn’t generalise to all countries. They did not generalise to all branches of indus­try. They led onto a new phase of industrial growth (……). They didn’t pose the conditions for a political crisis of the system.” [3].

In the ascendant period the cyclical crises were the manifestation of the development of capitalism: each one of them was a stimulus for new expansion all over the world, for the conquest of markets and a spectacular development of the productive forces.

In contrast, in decadence (since the second decade of the 20th century), crises “develop in a progressive manner. (…) Once they’ve begun, they last for a long time. Thus, while the relationship between recession and prosperity was around 1:4 in the 19th centu­ry (2 years of crisis in a cycle of 10 years), the relationship between the length of the de­pression and the length of the revival has been around 2:1 in the 20th century. Between 1914 and 1980, we’ve had 10 years of generalised war (without counting the permanent local wars), 32 years of depression (1918-22, 1929-39, 1945-50, 1967-80): a total of 42 years of war and crisis, against only 24 years of reconstruction (1922-29 and 1950-67). (…) Whereas in the 19th century the economic machine was revived by its own forces at the end of each crisis, the crises of the 20th century have, from the capitalist point of view, no solution except generalised war. These crises are the death-rattles of the system. They pose, for the proletariat, the necessity and possibility of communist revolution. The 20th century is indeed the ‘era of wars and revolutions’ as the Communist International said at its founding congress”

Since 1914 the capitalist economy does not function according to the crisis-prosperity scheme in an upward dynamic, but rather, it tends to become a chronic crisis, which, despite the massive state intervention - state capitalism –gets worse and worse.

Wars in decadence of capitalism

The comrades clearly denounce the imperialist nature of the war and firmly oppose the flags with which the forces of capital (from the extreme right to the extreme left) intend to mobilise the proletarians behind them: nation, fascism, democracy etc.

This is completely right and we share it. However, they consider that “two factors have prevented the development of a large-scale war in the classical sense: humanity refuses to be enlisted in new wars, there is a consciousness (not yet class consciousness) of the logical rejection of war from a pacifist, non-revolutionary point of view. A forced attempt by capital towards war could accelerate the current slow awareness. On the other hand, the proliferation of nuclear weapons could turn into an ultimate war adventure. The bourgeoisie, an unscrupulous class, is not afraid to spill the blood of others if it fears for its own skin”

We are in complete agreement on the first factor. If humanity did not sink into a Third World War in the 1970s and 1980s, it was because of the resistance of the proletariat in the large industrial concentrations. This resistance was rather passive and occurred on a limited basis, which seriously limited its strength as the comrades say.

Now, the second factor they point to does not seem to be right to us. The imperialist war has an infernal logic which, once unleashed, creates a vortex of destruction and barbarism that is almost impossible to stop.

In the ascendant period of capitalism “war had, in general, the func­tion of ensuring that each capitalist nation had the unity and territorial extension needed for its development. In this sense, despite the calamities it brought with it, it was a moment in the progres­sive nature of capital. Wars were, therefore, limited to two or three coun­tries, they were short-lived, they didn’t lead to much destruction, they resulted in a new burst of development both for victor and vanquished.”

On the other hand, the wars of decadence “no longer derive from the economic necessity to develop the producti­ve forces of society, but have essentially po­litical causes: the balance of forces between the blocs. They are no longer ‘national’ wars as in the 19th century: they are imperialist wars. They are no longer moments in the expansion of the capitalist mode of production, but express the impossibility of its expansion. They no longer aim at dividing up the world, but at re-dividing the world in a situation where a bloc of countries cannot develop, but can only maintain the valorisation of its capital at the direct expense of a rival bloc: the final result being the degradation of world capital as a who­le. Wars are now generalised across the whole globe and result in enormous levels of destruction for the whole world economy, leading to generalised barbarism. (…) The wars of the 20th century are in no way ‘youth­ful maladies’ as some claim. They are the con­vulsions of a dying system.”

Imperialist wars do not offer any solution to the contradictions of capital; on the contrary, they aggravate them. While it is true that, as the comrades say, "The second imperialist world war and the terrible destruction it generated (...), brought about the economic recovery of the so-called ‘30 glorious years’, years of reconstruction and accelerated growth. A shot of oxygen to capital, cornered by its own development", this reconstruction was due to the fact that, on the one hand, the United States did not suffer any destruction in its own country, so it could become a factor of accumulation on a world scale; and, on the other hand, that there were still non-capitalist areas on the planet to allow that shot of oxygen to capitalism.

From that point of view, imperialist war is an irrational machinery that is beyond the control of the different participating national imperialisms. It is possible that each one ‘regrets’ the ruin that has been caused, but the bet of each national capital is to come out as the winner and to make its rivals (and its own working class) pay for the consequences of the war. Hence, the current proliferation of nuclear weapons constitutes not the least obstacle in the sense of making the capitalists ‘rational’ and avoiding going ‘too far’.

The increasingly uncontrollable nature of the system and its contradictions, far from expressing any rationality even according to the system’s own logic, allows us to understand the current pandemic. In the same way that imperialist wars - especially those that are generalised - become an unstoppable mechanism, pandemics, like the current one, are like a machine that, once set in motion, is very difficult to control.

This irrationality leads to the point where the most ‘advanced’ countries are stealing from each other the supplies needed to deal with the pandemic, even if this means aggravating it on a global scale! And thus sooner or later for themselves. As we pointed out in the article on “The War of the Masks” [4], in the face of global problems, the exploiting class cannot get rid of its fragmentation into competing national interests. The irrational centrifugal dynamic in the current pandemic is also expressed in the phenomenon of regional administrations within nation states fighting and cheating each other over the supply of health products, as we have seen in the United States, Germany and Spain.

We are seeing that the pandemic will exacerbate a nascent global economic crisis that was already taking shape, and will take on proportions that many analysts even consider will be greater than in 2008.

Focusing on the epidemiological dimension, they talk about ‘passing the quarantine’ in the hope of the ‘day after’. However, first of all, that ‘day after’ is slow in coming and tends to be prolonged. Secondly, there is a consensus in the scientific community that new waves of infection may occur with unpredictable consequences. How will these health systems, already badly damaged before the pandemic, cope in the face of many other diseases? Let us not forget that in recent years epidemics as Ebola, dengue fever, AIDS, cholera, zika, etc. have proliferated.

Therefore, we think that the key question is not the pandemic itself, but the historical conditions in which it is developing; as a result and accelerating factor of the serious contradictions ravaging capitalism after a century of decadence and more than 30 years of social and ideological decomposition.

International Communist Current 2020-04-20

[1] ‘Conspiratorial’ ideas about the virus, including those which completely deny its existence, have been having some impact. A survey in the US showed that 33% of respondents believed that the pandemic was artificially caused. We intend to write an article on the subject.

[2] See: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition [43]; “Theses on decomposition”, International Review 107.

[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/023_proletariat_under_decadence.html [44]; “The proletarian struggle under decadence”, International Review 23. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotes that follow are from this document. 

 [4] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16832/war-masks-bourgeoisie-class-thieves [45]; “War of the masks: the bourgeoisie is a class of thieves!”