In her 2017 work "Pale Rider"[1] ("La Grande Tueuse" in French), the science journalist Laura Spinney shows how the international context and functioning of society in 1918 decisively contributed to the outcome of what was called the "Spanish Flu": "Basically, what Spanish Flu teaches us is that another influenza pandemic is inevitable but its net result - whether it is 10 million victims or a 100 million victims - only depends upon the world in which it is produced". As the planet has confronted Covid-19 for many months, this lesson leads us to ask what this pandemic teaches us about the world in which we are living. The link between the development of an infection on one hand, and the organisation and state of society on the other, doesn't only concern the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-20. Marxism has already effectively discovered that, in general, the mode of production of any time conditions all social organisation and, by extension, everything regarding the individuals of that society.

From the plague of the Roman Empire to Covid-19

In the period of the decline of the Western Roman Empire, conditions of life and the expansionist policy of the Empire allowed the bacilli (a class of bacteria) of the plague to spread like wildfire, bringing about a hecatomb among the population: "... public baths became Petri dishes: sewage stagnated and decomposed under towns and villages; granaries of corn were a blessing for rats; the commercial routes that linked the Empire facilitated the propagation of epidemics from the Caspian Sea to Hadrian's Wall with an efficacy unknown until then".[2]

The Black Death, which hit Fourteenth Century Europe, found its conditions for expansion both in the development of commerce with Asia, Russia and the Middle East and also in the development of war, particularly linked to the Islamification of the Asiatic regions.

These two pandemic episodes figured hugely in the decline of slave and medieval societies by wiping-out important parts of society and greatly disorganising it. It's not the sickness in itself which engenders the fall of a system of production but, above everything, the decadence of these systems which have favoured the expansion of infectious agents. The Justinian Plague and the Black Death contributed to, and doubtless strongly accelerated, the destructive forces already well under way.

Since the beginnings of capitalism, sicknesses have been a permanent fetter on the good functioning of production by hampering the labour power which is indispensable to the creation of value. It has also hobbled imperialist undertakings by weakening the soldiers mobilised on the battlefield.

When the Spanish Flu virus began to infect the human species, the world of capitalism needed, more than ever, a human workforce at the highest levels of capacity. However, this need was linked to the conditions that themselves were the soil of a pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million human beings; between 2.5 and 5% of the world population. The world of the Spanish Flu was a world at war. Beginning four years earlier and on the point of winding up, the First World War had already fashioned a new world, that of capitalist decadence, endless economic crises and constantly growing imperialist tensions.

But the war wasn't finished. Troops remained massed on the front as at the rear, creating the conditions favourable to the contagion. The transportation of soldiers from America to Europe in particular was made by boat in deplorable conditions: the virus spread greatly here and of course, when they disembarked they carried the virus with them and contaminated the local populations. With the war finished, the demobilisation and the return home of the soldiers constituted a powerful vector of the development of the epidemic, and much more so as the troops had been weakened, malnourished and with the least medical care during four years of war. When one talks of the Spanish Flu one necessarily thinks of the war, but the latter was not the sole factor explaining the expansion of the sickness; far from it. The world of 1918 was a world where capitalism had already imposed its mode of production throughout; where its interests pushed it outwards and where it had put in place conditions of terrible exploitation. It was a world where workers were regrouped, heaped together close to factories in areas that were filthy and lacking proper food, with sanitary services largely non-existent. If workers became sick they were sent back home to their village where they ended up contaminating the majority of the inhabitants. It was a world of miners confined all day underground hacking rock in order to extract coal, gold or other minerals which often produced chemicals that destroyed their organs and weakened their immune systems; at night workers and their families slept in extremely cramped conditions. It was also the world of the war effort, where sickness didn't prevent the workers from going to work and thus contaminating fellow workers.

More generally, the world of Spanish Flu was also a world where knowledge of the origins of sicknesses and the vectors of contagion were largely unknown. The theory of germs, which put forward the concept of infectious agents external to the organism suffering the sickness, had hardly been born. If some microbes had begun to be observed, the existence of a virus was only posed as a hypothesis by some exceptional scientists: twenty times smaller than a bacterium, a virus wasn't observable by the optical microscopes of the time. Medicine then was still undeveloped and inaccessible to the great majority of the population. Traditional remedies and all types of beliefs largely dominated the fight against the unknown malady which was often terrifying and overwhelming.

The breadth of the human disaster brought on by the Spanish Flu pandemic should have made it the last great health catastrophe of humanity. The lessons that could be drawn from it, the subsequent research on infections, the unequalled development of technology since the beginnings of capitalism, could lead one to think that humanity would be able to win the battle against disease.

Health policies of the state are at the service of capitalist exploitation

The ruling class has understood the dangers that health issues represent for its system. Within this understanding there is no human or progressive dimension but only a will to do what it can so that the workforce is affected as little as possible, so that it remains as productive and profitable as possible. This concern of the bourgeoisie already appeared in capitalism's ascendency after the cholera pandemic in Europe in the years 1803 and 1840. The development of capitalism was accompanied by an intensification of international exchanges and, at the same time, the comprehension that pathogens didn't stop at capitalist frontiers.[3] The bourgeoisie thus began to put in place a multilateral health policy with the first international conventions from 1850, and above all the creation of the International Office of Public Hygiene (IOPH) in 1907. At the time the aim of the bourgeoisie was crystal clear: these measures were essentially centred on the safeguarding of the industrial countries along with the protection of their indispensable commerce and economic growth. The IOPH was composed of only 13 members. After the war, the League of Nations created a committee of hygiene whose vocation was already more international (its actions concerned around 70% of the planet) with its programme openly aiming to ensure that all the cogs of the capitalist machine functioned optimally with the promotion of health policies. After the Second World War a more systematic approach to health appeared with the creation of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and, above all, with a programme for the amelioration of health standards aiming not only at member states but the whole world population. Provided with the necessary means the WHO organised and financed its operations around many illnesses with a strong accent placed on prevention and research.

Here again, one shouldn't look for a sudden outbreak of humanitarianism from the dominant class. But in the world of the Cold War, health measures were seen as a means of ensuring, right from the end of the 1939-45 war, the possibility of getting the most productive and numerous workforce up and running, particularly during the period of reconstruction and subsequently to conserve a presence in and a domination over the developing countries and their populations: prevention was seen as a less costly solution than looking after people in hospital.

At the same time research and medicines were being developed, allowing a better understanding of infectious agents, how they functioned and the means to combat them, particularly with antibiotics which produced a cure for a growing number of illnesses of bacteriological origin, along with the development of vaccines. This to such a point that in the 1970's, the bourgeoisie had begun to think that the battle was won and that numerous infectious illnesses belonged to a distant past: the development of vaccination and notably that of children, the access to a better health system led to infant sicknesses like measles and mumps becoming rare; smallpox was virtually eradicated, as was poliomyelitis over most of the globe.[4] Capital could perhaps now rely on a work-force that was invulnerable, readily available and fully exploitable.

AIDS, SARS, Ebola... indications of a retreat in capitalist mastery of the laws of nature

The anarchic development of capitalism in its decadent phase beginning at the opening of the Twentieth Century generated a strong demographic transition, an accrued destruction of the environment (notably de-forestation), an intensification of displaced persons, an uncontrolled urbanisation, political instabilities and climatic changes which are also factors favouring the emergence and diffusion of infectious sicknesses.[5] Thus at the end of the 1970's there appeared a new virus among the human species whose pandemic origins are still with us today: AIDS. The hopes of the bourgeoisie were extinguished as soon as they were lit, because, at the same time, the capitalist system entered into the ultimate phase of its existence, that of its decomposition. It is not in the remit of this article to develop on the origins and consequences of the decomposition of capitalism but we can note that the most striking manifestations of this decomposition very rapidly affected health issues: each for themselves, short-term vision and a progressive loss of control by the bourgeoisie over its system, and all this in the context of a still-more profound economic crisis that is becoming more and more difficult for the ruling class to fight against.

Today the Covid-19 pandemic is an exemplary manifestation of capitalist decomposition. It is the result of the growing incapacity of the ruling class to manage a question that it itself raised in principle with the creation of the WHO in 1947: to get populations to the highest levels of health possible. One hundred years after the Spanish Flu, scientific knowledge about diseases, their origins, their infectious agents and viruses have developed to an absolutely incomparable level. Today, the genetic code allows the identification of viruses, the following of their mutations and the development of more efficient vaccines. Medicine has made immense progress and has imposed itself more and more over traditions and religion. It has also taken a very important preventative dimension.

However, it’s the impotence of states and panic in front of the unknown which has dominated proceedings faced with the Covid-19 pandemic. Whereas a century ago humanity reached out to progressively master the laws of nature, we now find ourselves in a situation where this is less and less the case.

Covid-19 is in fact far from a bolt appearing out of a clear blue sky: We've had HIV of course, which pointed to new pandemics still to come. But since there have also been SARS, MERS (Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome), Swine Flu, Zika, Ebola, Chikungunya (like Zika spread by mosquitoes), BSE, etc. Some maladies which have disappeared or almost disappeared, such as tuberculosis, measles, rubella, scurvy, syphilis or scabies are, along with poliomyelitis, making a comeback. All these warnings should have led to research and preventative actions; this was not at all the case. Not through negligence or miscalculation, but because with decomposition capitalism is necessarily more and more a prisoner of a short-term vision which leads it to progressively lose its mastery over its tools of regulation which, up to now, have allowed it to limit the damage caused by its frenzied competition in which all the actors of the capitalist world are engaged.

In the 1980's, the first criticisms appeared from member states of the WHO based upon its overly expensive prevention strategy, particularly when there was no direct benefit to their own national capitals. Vaccinations began to lessen. Medicine became more difficult to access as a result of cuts in public health systems. And this backward step gave way to parallel, "alternative medicines" feeding off the irrational climate favoured by decomposition. Thus, a hundred years on from the time when they didn't even know that the sickness was down to a virus, the "remedies" recommended against today’s virus (SARS Cov2) are the same as those deployed against the Spanish Flu (rest, nourishment, hydration).

Science globally lost its credibility and with it, credits and subsidies. Research on viruses, infections and the means to fight them had almost ground to a halt everywhere due to a lack of funding. Not that it's so costly, but in relation to its immediate profitability, the cost is necessarily judged to be too high. The WHO abandoned its operations around tuberculosis and was summoned by the United States, under the threat of halting its financial contribution (the WHO's most important, 25% of it), and told to focus on illnesses that the US regarded as a priority.

The needs of science, which still tends to work in the long term, are not compatible with the constraints imposed on a system in crisis, driven by the pressing need for a direct profitability from all investments. For example, when the Zika virus was recognised world-wide as a pathogenic agent causing a fall in the birth rate, there followed almost no research, neither any vaccine in an advanced stage of development. Two-and-a-half years later, clinical trials were postponed. The absence of a profitable market between two epidemics did not leads states or pharmaceutical enterprises to invest in this type of research.[6]

Cutting-back the policy of prevention reflects a society without a future

Today the WHO is almost reduced to silence and research on illnesses is in the hands of the World Bank which demands a profit-based approach (via the implementation of its DALY indicator which is based on a cost ratio/benefit in number of years of life lost).

Thus, when a specialist in the coronavirus, Bruno Canard, evokes "a long-term work which should have been started in 2003 with the arrival of the first SARS" and when a fellow virologist, Johan Neyts, states his regrets that "for 150 million euros, we could have had in ten years a broad-spectrum antiviral against coronavirus that could have been given to the Chinese in January. This done, we wouldn't be where we are today",[7] they put themselves against the actual dynamic of capitalism.

We are seeing the demonstration of what Marx had already written in 1859 in the Contribution to the critique of the political economy: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production (...) From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters".

Whereas humanity possesses the scientific and technological means to combat diseases as never before, the maintenance of capitalist society constitutes a fetter on the realisation of these means.

Thus in 2020, humanity, which is capable of understanding living organisms in all their forms and knows how to describe their functioning, finds itself forced to take up the "remedies" of the past where obscurantism still reigned. The bourgeoisie close their borders in order to protect themselves from the virus, just as they did in the Eighteenth Century when a wall was built in order to isolate Provence from the plague. Sick or suspected cases are isolated, ports are closed to foreign boats, as at the time of the Black Death. Populations are confined, public places closed, meeting-up and activities forbidden, curfews are decreed, just as in the big towns of the United States at the time of the Spanish Flu.

Nothing effective has been devised since and the return to these violent, archaic and outmoded methods shows the impotence of the dominant class faced with the pandemic. Competition, the basis of capitalism, doesn't disappear faced with the gravity of the situation: each national capital must outdo the other or die. So, at the time when deaths were accumulating and hospitals faced not being able to take a single patient more, all states still tried to confine everyone, some later than the others. Some weeks later, there was a rush to lift lock-downs and put back in place the economic machine for the conquest of competing markets. These actions showed nothing but contempt for human health and were taken despite the warnings of the scientific community of the still-lively and mutating SARS-Cov2 virus. The ruling class is incapable of going beyond the dog-eat-dog principle which reigns over all levels of society. It simply cannot achieve, just as with the question of global warming for example, the elaboration of a common strategy in the fight against the virus.  

The Justinian Plague precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire and its system of slavery; the Black Death precipitated the end of the feudal system. These pandemics were products of these decadent systems in which "the material forces of society (come) into contradiction with the existing relations of production" and were, at the same time, accelerating factors in their fall. The Covid-19 pandemic is also the fruit of a decadent and decomposing world order; it will also be an accelerator of its demise.

Should we be happy to see the fall of capitalism accelerated by the pandemic? Could communism advance as capitalism did on the wreckage of feudalism? Comparisons with pandemics of the past end there. In the world of slavery and the feudal world, the bases of an organisation adapted to the level of development reached by the productive forces were already present within the old society. The methods of production in place, having already reached their limits, left a space for a new dominant class already capable of bearing new, more adequate relations of production. At the end of the Middle Ages, capitalism had thus already taken up an important part in social production.

Capitalism is the last class society in history. Having put under its control the quasi-totality of human production, it could leave no place to another organisation before its disappearance and no other class society could replace it. The revolutionary class, the proletariat must first of all destroy the present system before posing the basis of a new era. If a series of pandemics, or other catastrophes, precipitate the fall of capitalism without the proletariat being able to react and impose its own force, then the whole of humanity will be dragged down with its demise.

The stakes of the period really lie in the capacity of the working class to resist capitalist disorganisation and inefficiency and from there to progressively understand the reasons for it and take up its historic responsibility. That's how the quote above from Marx ends:

"At a certain stage of its development, the productive material forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production (...) From forms of development that they were, these relationships become fetters. Thus opens up an epoch of social revolution."

GD (October, 2020)

For more than a year now the ruling class everywhere has been gripped by the Corona virus epidemic without any end to it really coming into sight. Up until now it was the poorest and least developed countries which paid the heaviest tribute to sicknesses, epidemics or endemic illnesses. Today it's the most developed countries which are being rocked to their foundations by the Covid-19 outbreak.

More than a century ago the outbreak of World War I signified the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1990, and the subsequent shock-wave which included the dissolution of the US bloc, constituted symptoms of the disintegration of world society, signalling the entry of capitalism into its ultimate phase of decadence - that of decomposition.

What follows capitalism then? If the global proletariat succeeds in overthrowing it before it's able to destroy humanity, there will be a unified humanity in a communist society which, faced with problems of sicknesses and other calamities, will be able to make a response that is not undermined by exploitation and the competition of capitalist anarchy.

The pandemic, a social phenomenon coming from a world in decay

In the United States, there are now at least 25 million people infected and more than 410,000 dead. There have been more Covid deaths than American soldiers killed in the Second World War! Last April, the number of dead had already exceeded the number of those killed during the Vietnam War. In the large metropolis of Los Angeles, 1 out of 10 inhabitants is contaminated. In California, the hospitals are full to bursting point. At the beginning of the health crisis, the entire American population was shocked by the huge trenches where "unclaimed" deaths were piled up in the state of New York, on Hart Island. In Europe, Sweden, which not long ago had a reputation for the "social wellbeing" of its citizens, gambled at the beginning of the pandemic on the rapid accomplishment of a herd immunity. Sweden has just broken a national record - that of the number of deaths - held since the great famine of 1869.

The Covid-19 pandemic is not an unpredictable disaster resulting from the laws of chance and nature! Capitalism itself is responsible for this planetary catastrophe, for these millions of deaths. Contrary to pandemics from animal origins in the past (such as the plague in the Middle Ages spread by rats), today this pandemic is due essentially to the degraded state of the planet. Global warming and climate changes, de-forestation, the destruction of habitats for wildlife, have, with the proliferation of slums in the underdeveloped countries, favoured all sorts of new viruses and contagious illnesses.

If this new virus has surprised and paralysed the bourgeoisie it is because scientific studies on coronaviruses were abandoned everywhere over a decade ago because the development of a vaccine was judged to be ... "non-profitable". Besides that, the necessary cutting-edge scientific research and technology, in the United States in particular, mainly prioritised products which had a full and guaranteed market or else were essentially given over to the military sector, which also includes research into bacteriological warfare.

Moreover, whereas the world is still far from getting on top of the present pandemic, even more terrifying threats arising from the same basic conditions - such as Nipah[1] - have already been identified: "an epidemic of the Nipah virus in China, with a mortality rate of up to 75% could be the next great pandemic risk (...) Nipah could explode at any moment. The next pandemic could be an infection resistant to medicines (...) It is one of ten infectious diseases out of sixteen identified by the World Health Organisation as the greatest risks to public health about which there are no plans in the pipelines of the pharmaceutical companies"[2].

The bourgeoisie surprised by the first wave and driven to desperation by the next

Several vaccines have already been made in record time, which illustrates the productive capacities which could be put into the service of the well-being of humanity. Nevertheless today, just as at the beginning of this pandemic, several problems have hampered a real management of the sickness and they are a direct consequence of the fact that this system is clearly at the service of an exploiting class which is only preoccupied with the health of the population to the extent of preserving the labour power of those that it exploits.

In fact, health systems have been completely overwhelmed because, faced with the aggravation of the economic crisis in every country, governments of the right and the left have continued reducing social budgets for decades, i.e., budgets for health systems and for research. Since health systems are not very profitable, they have reduced bed numbers, closed local hospitals, cut jobs of ancillary staff, nurses and doctors, worsened their working conditions, destroyed stocks of PPE judged too expensive to maintain. And respirators were lacking in many hospitals.

In order to limit the spread of the pandemic, the bourgeoisie has not been capable of anything better than recourse to the methods of the Middle Ages like lock-downs. Everywhere curfews are imposed, social distancing is implemented and human faces masked. Borders are closed off and public and cultural links are shut down across most of Europe. Never since the Second World War has humanity lived through such a testing time.

Furthermore, competition between the different factions of the bourgeoisie, as much at an international level as within each country and exacerbated by the economic crisis, has clearly constituted an active factor in the deepening of the health crisis from the beginning of the pandemic, giving rise to open expressions of rivalries that are sometimes so bitter that they have been called "wars" by the media.

The "war of the masks" is an edifying example of the cynical and frantic competition in which all the capitalist states are involved; each one of them trying to grab as much of this vital material as they could by over-bidding or even by pure and simple theft!

Then there's the "war to be among the first to produce an effective vaccine", in which each country in competition with all the others, jealously guards their work in order to win the race and give them access to a lucrative market. Such a situation of every man for himself prevents any international coordination and cooperation in eradicating the pandemic and increases delays of production greater than if it was the product of international cooperation.

In the "war to obtain the greatest quantity of vaccines", the stakes are considerable. In fact, the countries which thanks to vaccination are the first to obtain a collective immunity will also be the first to be able to put their productive apparatus and economy back on its feet. The problem is that even if the vaccine begins to be produced in greater quantities in a certain number of countries, it is still insufficient in relation to the overall need. This situation has given rise to very important tensions between, for example, the European Union and the United Kingdom where the latter is unable to honour, in quantities and contractual deadlines, the orders for the AstraZeneca (Anglo-Swedish) vaccine going to the EU. This would have meant Britain reducing the domestic distribution of vaccines. Faced with this the European Union has upped the ante and Germany has gone so far as threatening to take measures of retaliation in "retaining" the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccines made on EU territory and destined for sale to the United Kingdom. A consequence of this hardening attitude is that new tensions have arisen between London and Brussels regarding the "Northern Ireland Protocol", a crucial part of the Brexit Treaty.[3]

The European media congratulated itself on the good performance of Europe faced with the economic earthquake provoked by the pandemic, notably thanks to obtaining certain agreements: one bearing on the mutualisation of new debts within the EU, the other delegating the European Commission to buy vaccines for members. But in the corridors, some of the stronger member states like Germany have exchanged specific contracts with Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Curevac, which has provoked a storm in Brussels".[4]

An unexpected fact is that Germany, which up to now has had relatively good figures with its death-rates which are much lower compared with other industrialised countries, has begun to rival the incoherence of other developed countries such as France, Great Britain or the United States: "With close to 2.1 million infections in a year, Germany has shown a mortality rate of 2.4%, equivalent to that of France.."[5], half of the cases of excess deaths occurring during the two waves of the pandemic in Germany are linked to the infection of seniors. When the first vaccines arrived, there were very few of the industrialised countries in which capitalist anarchy and administrative cretinism were not involved in the calamitous management of their distribution to different vaccination centres; it was the same for needles and other medical material. The fact that governments in a certain number of countries had to bring in the military to support medical services by taking over the logistics of distribution, the tracking of orders and the protection the vaccines from theft is a significant indication of serious failings at the heart of society.

Whereas there is a shortage of vaccines in the most industrialised countries, they are absent from poorer nations who are essentially being provided with the Chinese vaccine[6] whose efficacy is unproven. On the other hand, if Israel has been able to obtain the necessary doses in order to vaccinate all its population it's because it purchased the Pfizer doses at a price 43% higher than the price negotiated by the EU.

The agony of capitalism in its final stage of decomposition infests society

Millions of workers in the world have been brutally sacked from their jobs; poverty is spreading and deepening in a considerable fashion. Surrounded by the dangers of contagion, the reality of unemployment and the plunge into poverty, important parts of the world population find themselves in uncertain and unstable conditions and sinking into despair. In the industrial metropoles forced isolation resulting from various measures of lock-down has had consequences on the mental health of populations, as witnessed by the pressure on psychiatric services and the increases in suicides.

If, for important fractions of the working class the situation arising from the pandemic constitutes a final indictment of the bourgeoisie, for significant parts of the population any reflection is on the contrary polluted by all sorts of conspiracy theories. This is notably the case in the United States, the most developed country in the world and one at the avant-garde of science. When the pandemic was unfolding on the American continent, a great part of the population in this country imagined that the virus didn't exist and that it was all a plot to torpedo the re-election of Trump!

Other less excessive versions, but still based on fantastic theories, have flourished, seeing behind the measures of the restrictions of freedom of movement the hand of manipulators looking for a pretext to "confine" us or allow the pharmaceutical companies to make their money. Some demonstrations have taken place on this theme in some countries. In Spain, some chanted "the hospitals are empty", in Israel some ultra-orthodox Jews have been demonstrating. The extreme-right is also involved in these demonstrations, in Holland in particular. Some countries have seen real riots with some actions aimed at health centres.

This crisis is the product of the present phase of decomposition within the decadence of capitalism and an illustration of its manifestations: loss of control by the dominant class over its system; unprecedented aggravation of "every man for himself"; growth of the most irrational theories and ideologies. Such are the striking traits created by the eruption of the pandemic. Since the beginning of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc these symptoms have invaded society, signalled by the growth of the most irrational, reactionary and obscurantist ideologies and the growth of religious fanaticism, as seen in the rise of Islamic State with its young suicide bombers enlisted into a Holy War in the name of Allah.

All these ultra-reactionary ideologies have been the manure which has fed the development of xenophobia and populism in the central countries and, above all, the United States. In the latter, this culminated in the assault on the Capitol, January 6, by Trump's shock-troops. This astonishing attack against the temple of American democracy has given the whole world a disastrous image of the world's greatest power the country of Freedom and Democracy looking like (and recognised by ex-President George Bush himself as such) a Third-World banana republic with the risk of armed confrontations within the civilian population.[7]

The accumulation of all these manifestations of decomposition, on a world scale and at all levels of society, shows that for thirty years capitalism has gone into its new historic period: the ultimate phase of decadence, the phase of decomposition.

More than ever the survival of humanity depends on the capacity of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism before it makes social life on this planet impossible. Further, the characteristics of a future communist society would render impossible such a level of vulnerability in the face of a major disease, in contrast to the way capitalism is dealing with Covid-19.

How a future communist society would face up to pandemics

We can't, in the framework of this short article, go into considerations of the type "why is such a society possible today whereas it's never been achieved in the past?" or again "how will the revolutionary proletariat undertake the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale and the transformation of its relations of production?” The ICC has already given over numerous articles to this question.[8] Nor are we going to risk imagining what life would be like for members of a society freed the alienation of class society. However, we can affirm that alienation and each for themselves are taking on more and more brutal and inhuman forms in capitalism's death agony. We will limit ourselves here to the economic aspect and its direct social consequences.

- Communism is not only an old dream of humanity or the simple product of human will: it’s the only form of society capable of overcoming the contradictions that are strangling capitalist society. From this, its economic characteristics will be the following:

- the only motivation of production is the satisfaction of human need;

- the goods produced cease to be commodities, values for exchange, in order to become solely values for use; in other words, production is for the needs of humanity and not for the market;

- private ownership of the means of production, whether individually as in the beginnings of capitalism or by the state as in decadent capitalism (whether in its Stalinist, fascist or democratic forms), gives way to their socialisation. That's to say the end of all ownership and hence the end of the existence of social classes and, thus, all exploitation.

In looking at the factors which underlie the very great difficulties faced by present-day society in its efforts to defend itself from Covid-19, and also to face up to the tragic social consequences of it, we have to ask ourselves about the weight that these same factors would have in a communist society. In fact they wouldn't exist.

At the origin of the pandemic is the degradation of the planet which was made worse with capitalism's decadence, more particularly since the Second World War, where: "the pitiless destruction of the environment by capital takes another dimension and another quality, an epoch in which all the capitalist nations are obliged to compete with each other in a saturated world market; consequently an epoch of the permanent war economy (...) an epoch characterised by the desperate pillage of natural resources for each nation trying to survive in a merciless free-for-all for the world market".[9]  Once the bourgeoisie is defeated on a world scale a priority task will be to repair the damage that capitalism has inflicted on the planet and make it amenable to the expansion of life on Earth. The elimination of the appearance of Covid-type pandemics will thus become a possibility.

Nevertheless, there's no guarantee that other pandemics of a different origin to that of Covid-19 couldn't appear in the future! That's the reason why, concerned for the survival and well-being of its members, the new society will develop its scientific knowledge with a view to better anticipating any eventual unknown sicknesses. Such an effort by society would be considerable compared to what capitalism can do today, inasmuch as society will no longer be subjected to the realisation of profit but will be aiming at the satisfaction of human needs. There will be distribution and centralisation of knowledge at the global level and not the "protection" and retention of scientific knowledge motivated by the realisation of profits and the consequence of competition. Sicknesses and the risks that they imply will not be hidden so that the "wheels of the economy continue to turn"; instead, the reaction will be collective and responsible without any submission to economic laws "above" humanity.

- Contrary to the present situation, since health institutions will no longer be submitted to the law of profit, they can be permanently ameliorated and not left to rot.

- However, even in a communist society one cannot exclude the possibility, despite the importance given to prevention, that humanity will face unknown challenges through, for example, the necessity to make a vaccine or a treatment at short notice. Since communist society would be free of competition between its different parts, it could mobilise in the service of this objective the associated forces of the whole of humanity; quite the contrary to what's happened with the production of the vaccine against Covid. In fact, it is not speculation to affirm that humanity will be confronted with very real dangers resulting from the damage – some of it perhaps irreversible - that decadent and decomposing capitalism has bequeathed to future generations. Faced with this the proletariat will have to take all the necessary sanitary and restorative measures for an environment in which humanity will live free from the blind laws of capitalism.

- And if despite a still greater effort against anything that could threaten the human species, humanity could find itself affected by the hardest of tests and challenges, it is through solidarity, by acting as a single unit, that it will face up to them and not by abandoning a part of itself, as today where millions are thrown on the scrap heap and forced to rely on the "good will" of capitalism.

Between the moment when the proletariat begins to overthrow the political power of the bourgeoisie in a certain number of countries, then at the global scale (a world without frontiers), and the time when a society without social classes, exploitation and money is installed, the proletariat will have to take the transformation of society in this direction... and that will take much time. Nevertheless, even if it's not possible to begin to transform society before taking power on a world scale, the revolutionary proletariat will have a different attitude to diseases to that of the bourgeoisie. This is illustrated in the article which we are publishing in our International Review, "The Conservation of Health in Soviet Russia" which is about the measures taken by the Soviets between July 1918 and July 1919.

Yes, the communist transformation is necessary, but also the revolution is possible

Up to now we've put the accent on the dangers that the decomposition of capitalism holds for society and the very prospect of proletarian revolution. It's our responsibility because it's up to revolutionaries to talk clearly to the working class without hiding from it the difficulties with which it will be confronted. But it's also incumbent upon them to insist that a revolutionary outcome to the present situation exists, particularly given the ambient scepticism. This will result partly from the fact that, despite great difficulties, the working class has not submitted to an important defeat that prevents it from reacting to the attacks of the bourgeoisie, unlike what happened in the 1930s. And if these attacks are raining down already, they are only at a beginning.

In fact, the health crisis can only aggravate the economic crisis even more. And we are seeing it already with firms going bust and growing numbers of job losses since the beginning of the pandemic. Faced with the aggravation of poverty and the degradation of all its living conditions in every country, the working class has no other choice than to struggle against the attacks of the bourgeoisie. Even if today the working class is suffering the shock of this pandemic, even if social decomposition makes the development of its struggles more difficult, it has no other choice than to fight to survive. With the explosion of unemployment in the most developed countries, fight or die will be the only alternatives posed to the growing masses of proletarians and the younger generations!

It is in its future combats, where it fights on its own class terrain despite the corrupting atmosphere of social decomposition, that the proletariat will have to re-discover and affirm its revolutionary perspective.

Despite all the suffering that it engenders, still today the economic crisis remains the best ally of the proletariat. Thus, we shouldn't only see misery in misery but also the conditions for overcoming this misery.

Sylver 17.2.21

Last summer the bourgeoisie was mounting a huge campaign around the theme “we no longer need to worry, we have the vaccines”. US President Biden stated that he wasn’t worried about the Delta variant causing another major nationwide outbreak of Covid-19 (2 July 2021). The World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Director Mike Ryan declared that the very worst of the Covid crisis has come and gone (12 July 2021). They were supported by Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the UK, who said: “almost all the scientists are agreed on this - the worst of the pandemic is behind us” (15 July 2021)[1].

All the data on daily deaths and daily new cases over the last months contradicted these statements and confirmed that the pandemic is not at all behind us. The daily measures and recommendations by the bourgeoisie show that the pandemic still has a huge impact on society and the economy: health sectors flooded with new Covid patients, coercive measures against those who refuse to be vaccinated, new lockdowns with the closure of commercial activities, schools and entertainment.

For the majority of the world population the health crisis is far from over. It is still severely threatened by the effects of the virus at all levels; in particular those who have received only one doses of the Covid vaccine or none at all, as is also the case in Japan and Australia. In some of the major Asian countries in particular, the relatively successful policies for containing the Coronavirus in 2020 in these countries created the illusion that the virus was more or less under control, as a result of which the vaccination rate remained rather low there.

The frenzied and chaotic fight for the vaccines

Scientists agree that vaccination is the main bulwark against the spread of the virus. But the bourgeoisie is incapable of developing a unified policy to vaccinate the world population and togloballycontrol the pandemic. There is no consultation at the international level that would allow the necessary scale-up of Covid-19 vaccine production. Instead, all countries have embarked on a vaccine race, with the richer countries hoarding a surplus, in an attempt to be the first to achieve group immunity.

Data from the WHO of November revealed that G20 countries received more than 80% of Covid-19 vaccines while low-income countries only received 0.6% [2]. In response to this trend UN Secretary-General António Guterres already issued a warning against “vaccine nationalism and hoarding [which] are putting us all at risk. This means more deaths. More shattered health systems. More economic misery”[3].

Each state adopts its own strategy and only the most powerful states have the means to deal with the pandemic. In seeking to guarantee the vaccination of the respective populations, a number of them gained priority in signing agreements with pharmaceutical companies or even shelled out cash to pre-order promising vaccine candidates. This policy has led to huge disparities in the distribution of vaccines, even within the EU. Some EU countries had to take refuge to the less effective Russian Sputnik V (Hungary, Slovakia) or the Chinese Sinopharm (Hungary) vaccine.

Most rich nations are guilty of an unscrupulous accumulation of vaccines. Airfinity, a London-based analytics company, projects that by year’s end the surplus of Covid-19 vaccines will have reached 1.2 billion doses. If 600 million of these excess doses is to be donated to other countries, that leaves another 600 million doses sitting unused in stockpiles, with nearly half of that in the U.S. and the rest in the other wealthy countries [4]. This hoarding policy has already resulted in a waste of millions of vaccines.

Hoarding is one reason for the disparities in the distribution, but another big problem is the enormous cost of vaccines for the poor countries. Pharmaceutical producers do not charge standard prices but vary their prices depending on the quantity purchased, and charge higher prices when there is a lower quantity. For example, while the US paid $15 million for 1 million doses of Moderna's vaccine, Botswana had to pay nearly two times more: $ 28.88.

The unequal distribution of the vaccines, and of the consequent delay in inoculation at the global level, compromises each vaccination strategy. A policy that favours vaccinations in the rich countries and does not prevent the spread of the pandemic in the poor countries runs the risk of a return of the virus to the most powerful countries, even with the possibility of the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants. The “everyman for himself” at the global level is a powerful accelerator of the spread of the Delta and Omicron variants and all new variants to come.

The patchwork of inconsistent and contradictory measures

In its fight against the Corona virus each bourgeoisie is constantly forced to give priority to the economy while maintaining a minimum of social cohesion, deliberately taking the risk of workers falling ill for a longer time or even dying because of the virus. This situation leads to a patchwork of inconsistent and contradictory recommendations and measures throughout the world and even between regions within one country. Some examples:

• No consensus between health organisations. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US announced on 13 May 2021 that fully vaccinated people, who are two weeks out from their last shot, can now roam maskless in outdoor and most indoor settings. But the World Health Organization issued different guidelines, urging everyone in the US, even those who are vaccinated, to keep wearing masks because of the threat of the highly transmissible Delta variant, which had been detected in all 50 U.S. states.
• No coordination between neighbouring regions. On Friday 17 September the Consultation Committee in Belgium suggested that wearing a mask is no longer compulsory in shops and catering from 1 October 2021. But Flanders said yes, Brussels said no and Wallonia would decide later... Each region wanted to decide according to the situation. The different regional governments took the power of decision each in its own region (as if the virus stops at regional or linguistic borders).
• Directives issued one month are repealed the next month. In July the UK government announced that all social-distancing rules would be removed, and national mask-mandates repealed from 19 July onwards. But the supermarkets immediately announced the retention of masks, while metropolitan mayors mandated mask wearing on the public transport services they control. After a long delay the British government gave in and announced the wearing of face masks in shops and on public transport as mandatory from Monday 29 November onwards.
• “Reopening” followed by even more quarantines. With vaccinations rising and cases dropping in late June 2021, the Dutch government pushed ahead with a “reopening”. Face masks were abandoned in almost all places and young people were encouraged to go out again. But when children completed their first week of school after the summer holidays, in Utrecht 10 to 15 classes were sent home every day because of positive tests while in The Hague and the surrounding area, 34 primary school classes came under quarantine and were sent home in that first week.
• A mishmash of travel restrictions in Europe. In Europe travellers are faced with each country imposing measures on its own. Each country has its own safety and quarantine measures for travellers. In some countries the European vaccination certificate is sufficient to enter the country, while other countries apply additional restrictions, such as quarantines or PCR tests. Moreover, only people entering the country by plane or train are strictly controlled.

Distrust of the government, the vaccines and the science

Since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic we have witnessed an increase in distrust of governments, of vaccines, accompanied by a surge in disinformation and conspiracy theories:

• a distrust of governments in Russia, Bulgaria, but also in different EU countries such as Poland, Netherlands, Greece which, in turn, has been reinforced by irrational claims and blatant lies by governments to cover up their negligence and impotence.
• This widespread distrust and fear of vaccines, which is nurtured by populist and conspiracy campaigns[5], with a particular strong impact in the US, leading to an extreme polarisation between the pro- and anti-vaxxers.

Bulgaria is one of the countries where the extent of misinformation and distrust of the vaccines has a real impact on the vaccination rate, which has only reached 20%. The country was approaching another peak in infections late October 2021, with more than 5,000 Covid-19 cases and 100 deaths a day; 95% of those who died had not been vaccinated. While the death toll mounted, the healthcare system became overstrained, and intensive care units were filled to overflowing. But most Bulgarians still refuse Covid-19 vaccines.

The same can be said for Russia. For more than a year, Russian propaganda agencies and internet trolls have been engaged in a systematic and aggressive disinformation campaign, aimed at fostering doubts and misgivings about Covid-19 vaccines in the West. This disinformation campaign has strongly nurtured the vaccine scepticism which is, together with the mistrust in the government, responsible for the high level of vaccine hesitancy among Russians. With less than 45% of the population being fully vaccinated, the virus has spread at its most rapid pace in the recent months.

This polarisation in the US in particular has caused a chain reaction of total irrationality, which has spread to European countries, Australia and South Africa. By taking their information from dubious websites that spread dodgy or fake reports, the real concern about the virus or the vaccine is very easily confused with far-fetched theories and a totally irrational distrust of science. One of the conspiracy theories concerns the origin of the pandemic: the theory that the emergence of the virus is due to 5G technology, which has been designed to remotely control human minds. This “theory”, which says that the WHO is part of the plot,

Covid-19 has created a health environment ripe for aggression and violence[6]. During the pandemic’s first six months, 611 incidents of Covid-19–related physical or verbal assaults, threats, or discrimination were directed toward health care workers, patients, and medical facilities in more than 40 countries, according to the Red Cross (ICRC). Supporters of the conspiracy theories have been guilty of verbal and even physical assaults on health care workers in countries such as Slovakia and the US On top of that we also have witnessed several attacks on the workers of the mainstream media.

Vaccine imperialism

Politicians repeatedly declare “never again” and that “we must learn the lessons of history,” but far from making the capitalist states see reason and work together, the ruling class, by its very nature is incapable of changing the rules of declining capitalism, in which fierce competition over the shrinking markets is the rule and any form of cooperation more than ever the exception. In the past 100 years, in decadent capitalism, the world has not only become an arena of competition between capitalist enterprises, but in particular a battlefield between capitalist states.

Competition is the engine that keeps capitalism running, but it is also the source of most of its problems. The pandemic has starkly underlined this: for years governments have been cutting health budgets to increase overall capacity to compete, with the result that numerous health systems have been overwhelmed by Covid-related hospitalisations. Of course, everyone says they agree that preventing zoonoses (transmission of disease from animals to humans) by curbing the massive and chaotic intrusion into nature will be much cheaper than paying for the consequences - but preferably in such a way that another state acts first or bears the consequences. Because of international competition none of the states concerned is prepared to restrict the destruction of forests and other wild areas at the expense of its own national economy. No rational thinking is strong enough to alter the situation.

The national framework is the highest expression of the unity that bourgeois rule can attain, and faced with the pandemic, which demands a unified global approach, it is not able to go beyond this framework. In previous health crises, like the Ebola outbreak for instance, the bourgeoisie succeeded at least in keeping up appearances by implementing a certain (and often cynical) international coordination (with the WHO, in particular, on the medical level) to defend the general interests of capitalism even in the context of the decadence of the system. But in this phase of decomposition, the tendency towards every man for himself has grown to such an extent that the ruling class is no longer even able to achieve the minimum cooperation to defend the general interests of its own system by bringing the pandemic under control. Instead, every state seeks to save itself in the face of the ongoing catastrophe.

The Covid pandemic has only intensified the imperialist race for influence over regions and markets, and the distribution of vaccines is itself being instrumentalised for imperialist purposes. The US and Europe, but also Russia, China or India, use the distribution of vaccines in a “soft imperialist” strategy to strengthen their imperialist positions in the world.

• China’s support to the Covax-program of the WHO and the “Health Silk Road” are part of its “diplomatic offensive” to push for global health leadership. In the meantime, China has delivered vaccines to nearly 100 countries in the world.
• The Kremlin launched its “Sputnik V diplomatic offensive”, and is currently registered and certified in 71 countries. Its offensive also puts the unity of the EU at the test. Some EU member states started to use the vaccine while Italy agreed to manufacture the non-approved Russia’s Sputnik V.
• India is the greatest exporter of produced vaccines in the world. Under the slogan “Neighbourhood First” it has deals with 94 countries for the export of 66 million doses. India’s own vaccine, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, will become part of the export programme in 2022.

Instead of protecting their own population these states thus use the vaccines for imperialist purposes. India, where only 35% of the population is fully vaccinated, has exported three times as many doses as it has administered to its own people.

The world-wide and deadly Covid crisis also leads to growing divisions, an intensification of tensions between factions of the national bourgeoisie, further increasing the bourgeoisie’s loss of control over the evolution of the pandemic. Important political factions of the bourgeoisie in Europe, such as the Freiheits Partei Österreich, Alternative Für Deutschland, Rassemblement National in France, but also the Republican Party in the US etc. vehemently stoke up the discontent in society about mandatory vaccinations, the health pass, the lockdowns. They are more and more involved in demonstrations for “freedom” which often result in violent clashes with the forces of repression.

Only the abolition of capitalism offers a perspective

The pandemic has spread to the entire world and radically changed it in a matter of months. This makes it the most important single phenomenon since the entry of capitalism into the phase of decomposition and confirms our thesis that “the magnitude of the impact of the Covid-19 crisis can be explained not only by this accumulation but also by the interaction of the ecological, health, social, political, economic and ideological expressions of decomposition in a kind of spiral never seen before, which has led to a tendency to lose control of more and more aspects of society” [7]. It clearly shows the decomposing superstructure of capitalist society and its effects on the economic foundations that gave rise to it.

And at the same time, it is not only the pandemic that illustrates the significant aggravation of the effects of decomposition. It’s also the multiplication of “natural” disasters like wildfires, floods and tornados, all kinds of structural violence, increasingly irrational military conflicts and the resulting migration of millions looking for a place to survive. The interaction of all these aspects is an expression of the accelerated putrefaction of the very foundations of the capitalist mode of production. It is a dire manifestation of the contrast between the enormous potential of the productive forces and the atrocious misery that is spreading throughout the world.

Capitalism had outlived its usefulness; it is a dead man walking, and can no longer offer a perspective to human beings on the planet. But in its death throes it is still able of taking the whole world to the brink of abyss. The working class has the capacity and the responsibility to prevent the annihilation of humanity. Therefore, it needs to develop its struggle on its own terrain against the effects of the economic crisis, such as inflation, unemployment, precariousness. The present workers' struggles [8], however timid they are, bear the seeds of overcoming this daily barbarism, and of creating a society free from the many scourges raging through capitalism in the 21st century.

Dennis, December 18, 2021

Mass cremations of Covid victims in India

Since the beginning of April, Covid-19 has rapidly spread to the four corners of the planet. Since November 2020, the pandemic has not ceased to worsen at the international level. If the situation seems somewhat stable in Europe and falling back in the United States after an enormous outbreak of contamination, Latin America and the Indian sub-continent are now suffering the torment. Countries like China, whose population has been massively treated by the Chinese vaccine[1], are being hit by an explosion of infections. The situation is so serious that even within the Chinese authorities some voices have been obliged to recognise the "insufficient" efficacy of the vaccine. Officially, globally, the pandemic has cost the lives of some 3.2 million people and without doubt more given the lying figures provided by countries like China and others.

If a year of research has allowed more to be known about the virus, a better understanding of how it spreads and how to fight against it, the persistent negligence of all states and the irresponsibility of the bourgeoisie works against the implementation of coherent and efficient measures to limit the scale of its spread at the international level. The states, mired in the logic of competition, have not even been capable of a minimum of co-ordination of vaccine policy.

Faced with this absence of co-ordination, each state has had to put into place short-term health measures, with lock-downs coming, going and coming again, mini-lockdowns, warnings from the state, curfews, opening this and closing that. Without the appropriate means to fight against the pandemic after decades of budgets cuts imposed by the crisis, preoccupied by "the economy" and the risks of being outdone by their rivals, the capitalist states have ended up adapting to daily deaths and have continued to adjust their health measures in order to avoid a situation of chaos in hospitals and cemeteries (with more or less success). This is what the dominant class calls "learning to live with the virus". The result? If some states have delivered rapid vaccination programmes to the population, it still leaves the virus spreading elsewhere by facilitating the emergence of variants of Covid-19 more resistant to vaccines.

India, Brazil... a vision of the future

But in this danse macabre, it's probably in India and Brazil that one witnesses the worst scenes of catastrophe. In Brazil "the epidemic is out of control" in the word of a Brazilian scientist: new cemeteries are opening up all over the place, bodies are transported by bus and the sickness carries away thousands of victims daily. Soon the numbers of deaths will reach half-a-million, overtaking the United States in this race to a grim record. Hospitals full, people dying on their stretchers while waiting for a bed; and all this in advance of a new variant coming from Manaus, the largest city in the state of Amazonas where, at the end of 2020, a mirage of herd immunity was being peddled, at the same time as a second wave swept through Brazil. During this time, Bolsonaro, the president of the country, who pretended that the virus was a "little flu" (gripenzinha) continued to repeat that "it's necessary to go back to work and stop complaining", while changing his ministers like shirts in a disastrous governmental merry-go-round.

In Brazil the trafficking of animals from the Amazon and massive de-forestation has exposed humans to viruses which up to now have been "under cover". The biologist Lucas Ferrante, a researcher in Manaus writes: "It is in the Amazon that there is the greatest risk of a new virus appearing and this risk is infinitely more important than what we've seen in Wuhan"[2]. The destruction of the Amazonian forest has taken on catastrophic dimensions these last years and the bourgeoisie, who benefit greatly from its exploitation, are not ready to stop it.

But for a couple of weeks now the situation in India has made it to Number One on the news. It's difficult to find words to describe the horror of the health catastrophe in the country which today is the most populous in the world. Despite its economic development, health services were already underdeveloped prior to the pandemic; health is not a priority for the state. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, a kind of messianic alter ego of Bolsonaro, boasted in February of having "beaten the virus" and that the country "was an example to the world". Modi was even able to tail-end China and the other major powers possessing vaccines, using them for its imperialist influence. Now however the export of vaccines has been forbidden.

Since January, this government, which is very strongly marked by Hindu fundamentalism, has deliberately encouraged a pilgrimage (Kumbh Mela) of immense crowds coming from all over the country. During the first two weeks of April, 2.8 million Hindus were packed together, without masks, distancing, tests or temperature control, and immersed themselves in the waters of the Ganges, waters infested by the ritual cremations of infected bodies. Real virus bombs - and on top of this we should not forget the crowded meetings of the electoral campaign!

The backlash from such arrogance and contempt wasn't long in coming. Figures for the contagion and the death rate shot up: 4,000 deaths and around 4 million infections daily, "statistics much lower than reality", according to the press, confirmed by the distressing spectacle of the lack of oxygen, beds occupied by several people, queues in front of the hospitals with people dying on barrows, in motor-cycle sidecars or on the ground!

All this is a payoff in a country which, like Brazil, presents itself as an economic giant. Instead of that we see images of families looking for some empty spaces anywhere in which to bury their loved ones. Funeral pyres lined up over hundreds of metres have sprung up all over the place in order to incinerate the bodies which have piled up, rendering them a last miserable and undignified homage. As in Brazil and elsewhere, it's the most deprived parts of society, the proletariat and the non-exploiting layers, who pay the greatest price for such negligence and the traumas that they engender.

And to think that these two countries, along with South Africa[3], have been classed as having the potential of a development similar to that of China and are presented as part of the dynamism of an eternal capitalism.

Capitalism sinks into decomposition

The Covid-19 virus, as other pandemics and scourges that threaten the human race, is not only a product of but also a powerful accelerator of social decomposition at the planetary level. The India of Modi and the Brazil of Bolsonaro, even if they are led by populist governments which make particularly stupid and irrational decisions, are only two extreme expressions of the impasse that capitalism represents for the future of humanity.

Make no mistake: Modi, Bolsonaro, Trump and many other representatives of the powerful growth of populism, despite their erratic and narrow-minded administrations and "anti-elitist" speeches, remain fierce defenders of the national capital and embody the needs of world capitalism: brutal exploitation and pillage of the Amazonian forest encouraged by the soya-importing countries, as well as the extraction of minerals on a massive scale. As for Modi's India, the law on the end of "protected" agriculture has been enacted so as to open still more rural areas to the needs of capital[4].

As we say in our "Report on the Covid-19 pandemic and the period of capitalist decomposition" (July 2020): "The Covid pandemic (...) has become an unmistakable emblem of this whole period of decomposition by bringing together a series of factors of chaos that signify the generalised putrefaction of the capitalist system. These include:

- the prolongation of the long-term economic crisis that began in 1967 and the consequent accumulation and intensification of austerity measures, has precipitated an inadequate and chaotic response to the pandemic by the bourgeoisie, which has in turn obliged the ruling class to massively aggravate the economic crisis by interrupting production for a significant period;

- the origins of the pandemic clearly lie in the accelerated destruction of the environment created by the persistence of the chronic capitalist crisis of overproduction;

- the disorganised rivalry of the imperialist powers, notably among former allies, has turned the reaction of the world bourgeoisie to the pandemic into a global fiasco;

- the ineptitude of the response of the ruling class to the health crisis has revealed the growing tendency to a loss of political control of the bourgeoisie and its state over society within each nation;

- the decline in the political and social competence of the ruling class and its state has been accompanied in an astonishing way by ideological putrefaction: the leaders of the most powerful capitalist nations are spewing out ridiculous lies and superstitious nonsense to justify their ineptitude.

Covid-19 has thus brought together in a clearer way than before the impact of decomposition on all the principle levels of capitalist society – economic, imperialist, political, ideological and social (...) The present health catastrophe reveals, above all, an increasing loss of control of the capitalist class over its system and its increasing loss of perspective for human society as a whole (...) The fundamental tendency to self-destruction that is the common feature of all periods of capitalist decadence has changed its dominant form in the period of decomposition from world war to a world chaos that only increases the threat of capitalism to society and humanity in its entirety".

If the appearance of the pandemic has brought a halt to the development of the workers' struggles in the world, it has not altered the reflection on the chaotic character of capitalist society. The pandemic is another proof of the necessity for proletarian revolution. But this historic outcome depends first of all and before everything on the capacity of the working class, the only revolutionary force, to re-discover the consciousness of itself, of its existence and of its revolutionary capacities. Because the proletariat alone, mobilised and organised around the struggle for the defence of its own interests and class autonomy, has the power to put an end to the tyrannical and deadly yoke of the laws of capital and give birth to another society.

Inigo, May 6, 2021

 

The article that follows was written before the current row between Britain and the EU over supplies of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The EU, responding to AstraZeneca’s delays in supplying the agreed quantities of its version of the vaccine, threatened to respond by restricting supplies of the Pfizer vaccine to the UK, by taking AstraZeneca to court, and by suspending its own rulings about trade with Northern Ireland. The British minister for vaccines, Nadhim Zahawi, hit back: “Vaccine nationalism is the wrong way to go. No one is safe until we’re all safe”[1]

Noble sentiments indeed. But as our article shows, “vaccine nationalism” is precisely the way that nations and companies are going because they cannot escape the laws of profitability and the sharpening tendency of “every man for himself” in international relations. Zahawi’s own government is tireless in its rhetoric about safeguarding “the country” or “the British people” as if there could really be “Covid safety in a single country”. The richer countries are racing ahead of the poorer countries in producing and distributing the vaccines among themselves. The pharmaceutical companies vie to be top dog on the vaccines market. Israel is hailed as a world leader in the number of citizens vaccinated, but accepts no legal responsibility for immunising the Palestinian non-citizens under its military occupation, while the Palestinian Authority insists on going its own way by ordering cheaper (and very poorly tested) Russian vaccines.

No one is safe until we’re all safe. But capitalism, a system which is genetically incapable of going beyond national competition, will never ensure that we can be kept safe from the succession of disasters it is visiting upon humanity.

***

When the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared in May 2020 that the vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 would be for the "world’s public good", you could only believe that by clinging to illusions in the capacity of the capitalist world to play a positive role for humanity in the midst of an unprecedented world crisis. Similarly, calls for compulsory licensing[2] only show a naive utopianism.

In fact, there is nothing to lead one to think that the anti-Covid 19 vaccine would escape the laws of capitalism and their consequences: competition, races for markets, espionage, theft of technology, etc., even when it's a matter of saving millions of human lives. And for good reason, because the health crisis comes at a time when the world is prey to the decomposition of the capitalist system of production. The pandemic, while being the direct fruit of this process of decomposition, further contributes to its acceleration.

From the beginning of the sickness and the discovery of its infectious agent, a virus unknown up to now, the scientific community knew that only a vaccine could bring it under control. Elements of the pharmaceutical industry were happy to work in their own corners in the race to be the first to deliver the precious vaccine. But beyond the considerable commercial stakes for research laboratories and pharmaceutical groups, there was an evident political bonus for states able to access it.

Human health is a market...

From the first moments of the pandemic the war of vaccines began, just as it did in preceding epidemics or pandemics. There are numerous examples but we can cite two of them: Firstly AIDS.[3] The battle began in the research for the agent responsible for this unknown illness. The teams of Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur institute were followed by those of Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in the United States. The driving force of these teams was evidently not to rapidly identify the agent in order to begin the fight against it, but to be the first to be able to claim property rights over it and take a step forward on future treatments and vaccines.

In January 1983, the French team won by a short head. But the war had only just begun and it really took off around the question of tests, where this time the Americans took their revenge. It was the Abbot Laboratory which positioned itself best in this promising market, potentially offering the possibility of providing billions of tests likely to be made around the world in a few years. The war of treatments then followed where the greatest contempt for human life was shown; France in particular was out for revenge after its defeat in the war of tests. As soon as the first hopes were raised around the drug Cyclosporine, the Health Minister at the time, Georgina Dufoix, publicly gave it the "French label", before seeing those hopes finally dashed by the first tests undertaken on the molecule. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Deputy General Secretary of Health announced the miracle solution of AZT while test results were still inconclusive.

These scandalous announcements incarnate the stark interests of these two competing states in addition to a total disinterest in the thousands of sick people who had put their hopes in a rapid treatment saving them from certain death. But each state only counted on the necessity to be the first in the race to lead the world.

The "blood contamination scandal" in France in the 1980's[4] revealed that the state had sat on blood donor screenings of HIV and Hepatitis C for six months, while, as an American study showed, this technique was in place by late 1984. The "war of tests" and the obsession with budget cuts led to the maintenance of deliberately criminal practices of contaminated blood transfusions given to haemophiliacs and other patients in order to get rid of old stocks and make economies whatever the cost, provoking the death of thousands between 1984 and 1985.

Today, the war around the AIDS virus vaccine continues even if lack of profitability as a long-term treatment (lifelong in fact) dictates that research has slowed greatly under the impulse of austerity, leading states to scrape the bottom of the barrel by considerably reducing basic research budgets.

In 2019 in Africa, the situation was somewhat similar around the epidemic of the Ebola virus[5] in a climate of accusations about the diversions of funds towards the Congolese leadership but also against the WHO regarding the choice of one vaccine over another. While the German laboratory, Merck, had proposed an efficient vaccine but in insufficient quantities, the American laboratory, Johnson & Johnson announced another, complementary to it but never tested on humans! The fight was on to introduce this newcomer with lobbying operations and other means of pressure.

The present situation goes along the same lines. While the grand speeches and announcements around international cooperation about creating a vaccine abound, while "good common sense" would have you think that the coming together of international forces of pharmaceutical research would bring about a more rapid and efficient result, reality is quite different. In November 2020 there were 259 proposed vaccines in the world, of which ten were in Phase 3 (the last phase before the drug is authorised prior to being put on the "market"). That's 259 teams each working in their own corner, keeping a wary eye out for the advances of others so as to not double up, and looking not for efficiency but for exclusivity of process. The first to make a move, Pfizer and BioNTech announced 90% efficiency for their vaccine. A few days later Russia announced an efficiency rate of... 92%. Modena put its nose in front by announcing its vaccine's 94% efficiency. Never mind that, Pfizer declared that it had reviewed its calculations and announced a final efficiency rate of 95%! Who's the best? This cynical bidding-up, both chilling and appalling in the promotion and marketing of these products, while dozens of millions of victims’ lives are at stake, sums up the deadly functioning of this rotten society.

... and an issue of war between states

Many denounce this race for the financial windfall that a future vaccine implies, but they are mistaken when they lay the blame at the feet of "Big Pharma", the few giant laboratories fighting each other over the health market. Also mistaken are those that demand public authorities regulate the situation and "constrain" the industry to cooperate for the public good.

Because what is at stake here isn't the greed of some players but a logic which embraces the whole planet, all human activity: the logic of capitalism. Scientific research does not escape the laws of capitalism; it needs money to move forward and money only goes where profits can be expected: you only lend to the rich!

Should individual states bring in regulation in this world-wide free-for-all? But these same capitalist states are at the heart of such wrangles and are the first to direct research according to their own financial resources In a world beset by imperialist rivalries, it is of course in the field of defense and armaments that research is the best funded. But the health sector is not exempt! After the September 11 attacks of 2001, the US authorities revised their strategies on vaccine research which up to then they had neglected, in order to finance research into the so-called "large-spectrum" vaccine capable of immunising against several viruses in the concern to combat a growing threat from bio-terrorism. In another vein, the very active Chinese health policy in Africa these last decades is animated solely by its imperialist interests[6]. Anything goes in getting a foothold and increasing its influence on the planet. China has been increasing its presence in Africa: investments, economic implantation, political and military support, "humanitarian" assistance and... health.

Today all states are behind their own laboratories and all are defending their own interests without the least concern for principles. With a constant contempt for the bloody consequences of the disease, states are fighting each other in order to get hold of the maximum number of vaccines, knowing that in this battle only the richest will do well out of it and that, consequently, the greater part of humanity will not have access to the vaccines, or very slowly at least. Last April, the COVAX platform was set-up, a multilateral platform dedicated to the purchase and distribution of future vaccines and promising equitable access for all. All state leaders have congratulated themselves over this cooperation. But, underhandedly, each of them has entered into bi-lateral agreements with laboratories in order to reserve their own doses. Whereas the industry aimed to produce four million doses from now to the end of 2021, the furtively made reservations amount to five billion, solely destined to a few countries: the United States, China, the European Union and some of the less wealthy countries trying to come out of their miserable lot, like Brazil for example.

Today only the British Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is available to COVAX, less costly than its competitors but whose proven efficiency up to now has not gone beyond 62%[7]. The poorest countries, notably lacking the necessary means for the conservation and transportation of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, will have to be content with what stocks Britain has left.

Capitalism's logic of death

In the meantime people die... and the bourgeoisie continues to be overwhelmed by events, continuing to react day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour with the same negligence, the same health and logistical shortages, the same irresponsibility it's shown with the two successive waves of the pandemic. At the very heart of the great industrial countries the vaccination campaign is severely hampered by logistical deficiencies in member countries of the EU, such as Germany where transportation and distribution of the vaccine has been disrupted in several towns following doubts about the temperature-controlled transport chain of thousands of doses that have been held up in Spain for example. In the United States, despite the impressive logistical mobilisation led by the army, "There have been misfires" according to the celebrated Dr. Fauci and only a little more than 4.2 million people have received the first dose of one of two vaccines authorised by the state (Pfizer and Moderna), far from the 20 million people vaccinated before the end of the year promised by Trump who left it up to the initiative of each state governor. And when the pandemic broke daily records for contamination and deaths in saturated hospitals[8] (close to 21.5 million cases, more than 360,000 deaths to January 4 this year) those responsible for the programme, in order to increase the numbers involved in the campaign, raised the possibility of administering the vaccine in ... half doses!. The British decision to widen the gap between the administration of doses by some weeks is also quite irrational from an immunological point of view. Vaccination procedures are excessively slow and totally inadequate given the urgency and the crying needs created by an ever-mutating virus. In a caricatural manner, France declared the last week of December to be "Operation Media" with televised vaccinations of some old ladies while dozens of millions of others waited until the end of January to receive their first injections, with unlikely excuses such as "it will take time to vaccinate the elderly". It is no secret in France that if some EHPAD (nursing homes) residents who were prioritised over health professionals, it is because that there weren't enough doses for the latter!

The latest "health scandals" only show, once again, the incapacity of capitalism to react otherwise than through "each for themselves", for the defence of its short-term interests, with unpreparedness and improvisation. In France this has ended up with a functioning that relies on the good will of pharmacies and doctors who are limiting logistical costs and setting up the strict minimum of super-freezers in hospital pharmacies and centralising transport in town pharmacies, who must organise themselves in order to then distribute the flasks in the establishments.

Under these conditions we are nowhere near the end of this health crisis. And after that, there will be others...

But the most fraudulent aspect of the campaign around vaccinations is that it is not just promoted as a panacea for the health crisis; above all it is presented to us by the ruling class today as the only means of beating the economic crisis and the accelerating deterioration of living conditions which everywhere are being aggravated. This campaign is trying to mask the impasse, the insurmountable contradictions, engendered by capitalist relations of production.

Because what is presently hitting humanity is not caused by bad luck but it is a product of a system at the end of its road whose decomposition threatens to drag us all down with it. Consequently, the negligence of the bourgeoisie is not the result of the incompetence of some leaders but of the incapacity of the dominant class to contain the effects of the decay of its system: this class can do nothing other than act in the defence of its own interests. And as long as such logic remains in place, humanity will not escape from the scourges that flow from it.

GD (6.1.21)

In 2020, with the meteoric rise of Covid-19 in the world, the African continent appeared to have been relatively spared, and this on a continent where one epidemic follows another, that has run-down or even non-existent health services, where corruption reigns and where one can legitimately ask if its bottomless pit of misery is ever going to end. But in 2020, Africa appeared to have escaped a new calamity, with the exception of South Africa where the official mortality rate from Covid-19 has remained high since last spring. However, just by looking at the situation of this country, the only one in Sub-Saharan Africa that's provided with an up-and-running health service, one can only imagine what's happening and what could happen in the rest of the continent if the pandemic propagates further. With the new "South African variant" this threat is made very real.

Certainly, there are serious dangers from the virus, but above all there is the fact that the majority of African states are governed by kleptomaniac, clan-riddled and parasitic national bourgeoisies, a young ruling class but one that is already well-rotted.

Populations are victims of state neglect

During 2020 and in order to justify the general inaction of states, a whole series of myths, lies and beliefs have circulated in Africa[1] sown around by different powers: Covid-19 wouldn't affect Africa because the majority of its population is young; the climate isn't favourable to its spread; there is less inter-action with other continents and, even, it's a "disease of the Whites". And all this seasoned with more or less ancestral beliefs. The bourgeoisie and its states use these beliefs in order to render their African populations more submissive and resigned - populations that have already suffered the ravages of one epidemic after the other. During this time the virus continued to spread, but in some countries that was mainly registered by cemeteries taking on the morbid job of keeping statistics, with gravediggers playing the role of accountants.[2]

Certain lies have served the self-mystification of some leaders: "In Zimbabwe, the heights of the state decimated by the epidemic", headlined the French newspaper Le Monde (January 2121): "Since December 2020, several members of the government posed arm-in-arm, faces uncovered, some ministers (particularly those that dethroned Robert Mugabe) became ‘national heroes’ victims of Covid: they seem convinced that they were immune thanks to their privileges". Three weeks ago, the Vice-President of this country said that reports of witnesses saying that the hospitals were overflowing was just "story-telling penned by mercenary writers". At the beginning of February, "when three of these leaders were buried, the tone changed": "(The virus) makes no differentiation between the powerful and the weak, the privileged and the disadvantaged, those who have everything and those that have nothing". We have no pity for a bourgeoisie responsible for the hecatombs but rather pity the populations held hostage by such a breed.

In Tanzania, the authorities assured everyone that the country was a victim of simple pneumonia: "Up to the end of last year, the government of Tanzania tried to convince its inhabitants and the world that Covid-19 could be cured by prayer, while refusing to take measures to stop its propagation until it was faced with the multiplication of deaths by ‘pneumonia’ and when a Zanzibar politician admitting contracting the virus".[3]  All these lies in order to protect Safari tourism!

Since last December, populations have been hit by the full force of the consequences of capitalist negligence, along with the intolerable arrogance of a dominant class as vain as it is rotten. "The second wave of the Covid-19 outbreak turns out to be more devastating in Africa", according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on which the African Union depends. Already, officially, many countries have gone beyond average death rates. In Nigeria, the most densely populated country in Africa, health authorities report having "to choose what patients to take in and whom to refuse care", according to the CDC. Everywhere there is a lack of oxygen and protective equipment. In Ghana the young are becoming infected and all this faced with a "South African" variant 50% more contagious than the first Covid-19.

South Africa: a macabre "example"

For some years now South Africa has been celebrated as an example for the continent to follow, as much from the economic as the social point of view, while boasting about a "democratic multi-racialism" after the sinister period of Apartheid[4]. But once the euphoria evaporated the "new" post-Apartheid bourgeoisie showed its true colours: brutal repression of workers' struggles[5]; corruption at all levels of the state; systematic destruction of the health services and, as a result, a laughable and criminal management of the AIDS epidemic. The misery of the townships has only increased and baleful, racist murders against immigrants have even taken place in Soweto.

It's within this context that the pandemic has arrived in this country; and disaster is added to disaster. As we've underlined, the rate of infection in South Africa has reached the highest since the first wave: officially 36,000 deaths; but doubtless around 80,000 taking into account the evolution of the number of natural deaths. One issue raised by Le Monde was one that the bourgeoisie couldn't really hide: "Some carers, their feet immersed in water from the intense rains, look after Covid-19 patients sheltered by a simple metallic structure on a parking lot. Published on an Instagram account and suppressed since, the image has become the symbol of the new health crisis which has hit South Africa. Overwhelmed by the numbers of gravely ill, the Steve-Biko hospital in Pretoria had no other choice than to look after them in tents initially set up to triage arrivals"[6]. On top of all this comes the weight of the new variant which is more lethal than the first. The only thing that the authorities have done for hospitals is to ban their workers from making declarations about their disarray faced with their nightmarish working conditions.

Vaccinating Africa: China on the lookout in the world-wide free-for-all

The African Union has promised at least 600,000 vaccine doses for 2021 added to those of the WHO (and its "equitable" distributor, Covax). The state powers, above all the European ones, have more or less realised that if Africa becomes an uncontrollable hotbed for coronavirus it will only add more chaos to the disorder. Thus, we have the alleged "help Africa" programme with ridiculously low numbers of doses for a continent which has need of 2.6 billion of them. In the present context, despite all the promises from here and there, no-one is capable of saying when and how these vaccines could be properly distributed across the continent[7] where only four or five countries have super-freezers and, above all, the financial means to take on the task.

But it's above all China which has found, with the vaccine, a supplementary means to increase its imperialist influence in Africa: it is using its "health diplomacy" inaugurated last year with masks, medical material or even the annulations of certain debts as those of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country hit by as much by coronavirus as by the resurgence of Ebola.

After the war of masks and of respirators, we now see the free-for-all at a global level around vaccines in a danse macabre between states and between states and the pharmaceutical industry[8], everyone against everyone else, and that despite the urgency of the situation, highlighting the dog-eat-dog frenzied rhythm of state policies. Thus, China profits from the pandemic in order to accelerate its "soft power" diplomacy - or as the Mao/Stalinists pledge hand on heart: a "stronger African/Chinese community of destiny" by making the African countries debtor-hostages in perpetuity. It presents itself in Africa as the antithesis of the old colonial powers with softer, friendlier words.

Thanks to the pandemic, China has made great strides in its grip on Africa. Its "soft" presence will fix nothing, it won't bring populations out of their misery and it will do the same as the other powers, which, in a more and more chaotic world, it will end up confronting.

After all the talk about the "African miracle" it is necessary to be clear: neither the "emerging countries", nor the new oil economies will come out of crisis. Without going into detail, the future of much of Africa is going in the opposite direction - towards "Somalisation" rather than stability. The arrival of the pandemic has only added to the woes of the African populations: accentuation of famines, inter-ethnic violence, the criminal actions of sects (mass kidnappings in Nigeria for example), violent displacements of populations (as in the Sahel) as well as - of course - inter-imperialist confrontations all over the place. And the pandemic will amplify all of these dramatically.

In this context, what can revolutionaries say? We are not prophets of doom and we don't rejoice in the misery inflicted on the proletariat and the exploited of this country; we'll leave that to the vultures of the exploiting class who don’t hesitate to profit from a capitalist world in full putrefaction and who bide their time before replacing the hyenas already there.

As much as in Africa as the rest of the world, it's the struggle of the proletariat that offers an outcome from the hell of decadent capitalism. Faced with mystifications and all sorts of nonsense propagated by its national, ethnic or religious "liberators", the exploited must become aware that they are part of one and the same class whose international struggle contains the germs of a future society.

Fajar. February 5, 2021.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant around the world. No one knows at present what will happen tomorrow, so chaotic, contradictory and ultimately irresponsible are the policies of all states in the face of the contagion.

Two years ago, when the Covid-19 lock-downs began, hopes were pinned on the development of a vaccine. According to the entire bourgeoisie, a race was on to produce a vaccine capable of stopping this devastating virus on a global scale. By December 2020, the scientific community was mobilised, with more than 200 candidate vaccines under development, leading to the approval of a number of them, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the first to be validated by the WHO. The WHO's Assistant Director-General for Access to Medicines welcomed this:

 “This is very good news for global access to vaccines (...) global efforts must be intensified (...) to meet the needs of priority populations around the world (...) It is essential that we secure the essential supply for all countries in the world to contain the pandemic.” The bourgeoisie has been telling us for months that vaccination will put an end to the pandemic and relieve hospital overcrowding once and for all.

One year later, the pandemic has officially killed over 5.5 million people worldwide. The WHO estimates that the death toll from the pandemic, taking into account excess mortality, could be two to three times higher, i.e. 10 to 15 million! These figures, hardly imaginable a year ago, are nevertheless the sad reality of today.

Capitalism is responsible for the worsening of the pandemic!

Is such a figure the result of the failure to develop vaccines, of the failure of all scientific mobilisation around the world? Of course not! Because although the vaccination campaigns have resulted in gigantic vaccination rates, with nearly 8 billion doses administered worldwide, they have been carried out primarily in the western, industrialised world. But in the peripheral countries of the capitalist world, only 2% of the population has so far received a full vaccination schedule! With such a disparity, the hypocrisy and negligence of the global bourgeoisie in the face of the evolution of the pandemic is obvious: the mutations of the virus continue because the non- (or insufficiently) vaccinated areas of the world constitute a fertile ground for their propagation and contaminations are now exploding in many countries.

As the new Omicron variant spreads at breakneck speed, can lead to more hospitalisations and deaths in absolute terms, the bourgeoisie tries to clear its name by stating the obvious: “rich countries are piling up vaccines at the expense of poorer states”. But this falsely indignant opposition between “rich countries” and “poor countries” is an evasion aimed at hiding the responsibility of capitalism as a whole and the market logic on which it is based. Vaccines are not exempt from the law of supply and demand and therefore from the fierce competition between different states to appropriate them. Contrary to all the nonsense propagated lately by the bourgeoisie, in the capitalist world, the vaccine can never be a “common good”. It is condemned to remain a commodity like any other, which only the highest bidders can get hold of. Therefore, the calls of the great democracies for access to vaccines in the poorest areas of the world were nothing but fine promises and crude decoys.

The global vaccination campaign is a caricatured example of the almost total absence of cohesion and cooperation between capitalist states. The “management” of the pandemic has brought to light the reign of every man for himself and the total disorganisation of capitalist society, aggravated by the increasing negligence of each bourgeois state and their inability to contain the devastating effects of the historical crisis of capitalism.[1] Hence the deafening cacophony: here, a total lock-down; there, everything is left open to the point of implementing, as in South Africa, a despicable policy of letting the virus spread freely on the pretext that the Omicron variant is less deadly than the original strain. In several European countries (UK, France...), although less openly, the bourgeoisie is also letting the Omicron variant spread. And so much the worse for the thousands of deaths among the exploited and the most fragile layers of society!

In these conditions, the bourgeoisies of the central countries fear that a new “wave” will disorganise all the strategic sectors of the national economies and further weaken the social climate and disrupt the productive apparatus: food distribution, security, transport, communications and of course health, a sector already on the brink.

In order to hide the responsibility of the capitalist mode of production, all the national bourgeoisies peddle justifications that amount to no more and no less than putting the responsibility for this umpteenth wave of Covid on a part of the population: the unvaccinated who clog up the intensive care units, the Western populations who want to have the first shot at vaccination in order to preserve the “quality” of their way of life...

Another aspect that the bourgeoisie tries to carefully hide is the inexorable deterioration of the health and social protection systems in the same logic of “savings” and the “profitability” of capitalism in many countries, including the most “developed”. This affects and alters both the growing shortage of material resources used to cope with the worsening situation, and the quality of care. Both the deterioration in the living and working conditions of medical staff and the growing inability to respond to the needs of patients reflect, in fact, the impasse and chaos into which capitalism is pushing humanity.

The working class is not resigned despite the difficulties

But at this stage, the very real economic disorder is likely to turn into social disorder and stir up anger at all these states, sorcerer's apprentices who boast about the "general interest" and act like vulgar shopkeepers.

Faced with this grim picture, how is the working class reacting? For a few months now, struggles have been emerging all over the world, like in the United States this autumn[2], in Spain in Cadiz recently[3], mobilising hundreds, thousands of workers from all sectors who are finally trying to get their heads above water. But the bourgeoisie is quick to mobilise its trade union and leftist watchdogs to divide the struggle, to bring it to a dead end, to sterilise it and of course to conceal its existence from all the other proletarians in the world!

In other countries, the anger of health workers and other sectors at critical working conditions has been expressed through demonstrations and days of action. But these reactions are also sterilised by the unions, easily fostering division and isolation[4]. In addition, a huge amount of anger has been diverted to the rotten ground of opposing the vaccine pass (or even of anti-vax movements) in the name of “fundamental freedoms”, as we have seen in the Netherlands, Austria or, recently, in Guadeloupe[5].

It is therefore the perspective of the autonomous struggle of the working class, its confidence in its own forces to lead a large-scale struggle around its own demands that is being sabotaged, trampled underfoot, by all the social firemen at the orders of the bourgeois state. In order to try to thwart the multiple traps set by the ruling class, the working class must revive the methods of struggle that have constituted its strength and have allowed, at certain moments in its history, to shake the bourgeoisie and its system:

• the search for support and solidarity beyond “your” company, sector, city, region, or country;
• the widest possible discussion of the needs of the struggle, regardless of the company, the sector or the country;
• the autonomous organisation of the struggle, through general assemblies, without leaving control in the hands of the unions and other bourgeoisie organs.

Only the development of class of unity and solidarity on an international scale can enable the working class to arm itself for the struggles of tomorrow.

Stopio, 30 December 2021

 

Late last year the ICC held two ‘virtual’ discussion meetings with invited contacts and sympathisers in Europe and America on the theme of ‘The Pandemic and the Working Class’, examining issues in their historic and current aspects.

Anyone who has used the internet for meetings – work or social gatherings – will be aware of the pitfalls and shortcomings of such a method. Yet both these ‘virtual gatherings’ organized by the ICC (audio only, the cameras are off!) enabled participants to state their views, questions, concerns and criticisms in an organized manner, without everyone trying to talk at once, while a notepad shared by all kept track of the major points raised and could be referred to afterwards. Comrades didn’t merely talk at or over each other but tried to respond and develop ideas and positions as the discussions progressed. There was a collective will to make it work: to clarify proletarian politics. In this sense, both meetings could be counted as conscious attempts to overcome the isolation of revolutionaries not just from their class (which is an historic phenomenon and a real problem) but from each other in this time of plague, lockdowns and separation, even at the workplace.

The two meetings, separated by a week, revealed different concerns. While both were preceded by the same short ICC presentation, the first - with around 15 participants mainly from Europe - tended to focus not only on the pandemic or the conditions which gave rise to it but on the more general characterization of epochs in the development of capitalism: ascendance, decadence and decomposition. In particular this first meeting raised disagreements, issues around the existence or otherwise of the period of decomposition and the events that preceded it.

By contrast, the second meeting was attended mainly by younger and more recent contacts in the US and tended to focus on the immediate situation facing the working class: the post-pandemic evolution of the economic crisis and state capitalism; the pauperisation of the workers, the ruination of the petty-bourgeoisie and the danger of widening divisions based on race rather than class

What General Period?

One sympathiser familiar for many years with the politics defended by the ICC, posed it this way: “You (the ICC) describe present day capitalism as having a temporal history of ascendance and decadence. An historical approach is necessary. But capitalism was and remains a way of organising society based on exploitation and the destruction of existing communities and the environment… Post WW2 there was a 'great acceleration', (the ‘post-war boom’) while the destruction of the biosphere has accelerated. So this doesn't match any description of 'decomposition', or the idea of capitalism reaching the end of its ability to overcome its own contradictions. The system doesn't seem ‘weak’ to me.”

The ICC replied: it’s very true that capitalism arises “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx said. However, there are three additional elements to this violent expropriation of the producers:

• The first is that capital, by developing the productive forces (including the proletariat) on a global level, was at one stage creating the potential for a society of abundance, rather than scarcity: the material basis for communism - “what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”, as the Communist Manifesto puts it.
• The second point was that this ‘progressive’ function ended around the turn of the 20th century and the First World War – more destructive and widespread than the wars of the previous century and involving all levels of society, not merely the military - signalled that violence had taken on a qualitatively more institutionalised, and permanent aspect, all  social life, above all through the medium of the state and its war economy. This is a reflection of the growing contradictions at the heart of the capitalist economy, proof that it had reached its decadent epoch.
  Engels had pointed towards this period which would pose not the reform of capitalism but the perspective of its necessary overthrow - ‘socialism or barbarism’ - while for Rosa Luxemburg the war demonstrated the nature of capitalist barbarism with worse to follow if the Russian Revolution failed to encompass the entire globe. Following her, the Communist International declared this new period to be that of the epoch of ‘wars and revolutions’.
• The third point: this period of decadence has its own history. Following two world wars and a major economic depression, the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, followed by the unravelling of the western bloc, both signified and were products of a pre-existing decomposition of society, capitalism’s final phase, a situation engendered by the inability of either major class to impose their opposing perspectives - world war or world revolution.

Thus today, capitalism continues to grow, but it is a profoundly diseased growth because the system is at the same time rotting on its feet. The acceleration of destruction on many levels – environmental, economic, social - is indeed real, but so too is the ruling class’s growing instability and inability to control and direct the political and economic forces it has set in motion, to the detriment of civil society. The ICC has long insisted that the longer capitalism rots, the more the conditions for revolution are undermined. Though the perspective of class revolts and revolution are not off the agenda, time is not on the side of the proletariat in an historical sense.

For the ICC, the Covd-19 Pandemic is not some ‘natural’ event but one shaped by and born into social – i.e. man-made - conditions. It is both product and proof of the period of decomposition, at the level of heightened ecological destruction leading to increased instances of zoonotic and other diseases, some of them previously banished, combined with the dynamic of every man for himself which had seen the dismantling or downgrading of international structures (World Health Organisation,  WTO); ‘wars’ over the acquisition of vaccines and PPE and, crucially, the run-down of research into and the medical facilities to deal with epidemics. One sympathiser insisted that “the ruling class is not some bystander in this process but is complicit in this situation of confusion and carnage, obeying the diktats of capital and the hunt for profit, despite all the technological and medical advances which could ameliorate the situation”.

Disagreements on the notion of decomposition and the evolution of the class struggle

The understanding and reality of decomposition was questioned at different levels.

While 1989 was a significant event relating to inter-imperialist antagonisms (the crumbling of global alliances existing since World War II), for one comrade, the notion of a ‘stalemate’ between the classes lasting for decades was questionable. In fact, the bourgeoisie had launched a “counter-offensive” against the workers in the 1980s which had succeeded in “defeating” the proletarian resurgence following the struggles of 1968 and the early 1970s. In particular, according to this comrade, the defeat of the miners’ strike in GB (1984-85) signalled the success of this bourgeois plan and enabled the ruling class to re-order production (globalisation) on an international scale. It would be wrong to make a schema out of the theory of decomposition or a fetish about the effect on the working class of the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989. If there had been a stalemate for 30 years, “the ruling class was winning it”.

Another view called for a complete re-assessment of the history of capitalism and the class struggle since the end of the 1950s and asserted it was incorrect to place too much emphasis on the bourgeoisie’s growing loss of control.

Several responses from the ICC and other comrades took up these issues:

• The modern proletariat, the first revolutionary class which is also an exploited class, has no ‘alternative’ economy of its own to build up within capitalism. Consequently, the existing social order always reigns, and the bourgeoisie is permanently ‘on the offensive’ outside pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations. In this sense, it is always ‘winning it’. The notion of a ‘workers’ offensive’ outside a revolutionary period is wrong.
• Also flowing from the unique nature of the working class is its progression to a revolutionary perspective through a series of defeats. The question then remains: what kind of defeats were comrades in disagreement talking about regarding the GB miners’ strike? A defeat like that of the 1930s when the workers were massacred after the failure of the revolutionary movements emanating from Russia and then dragged behind different bourgeois factions to be slaughtered in World War Two – the counter-revolution, in fact?
• The ruling class didn’t wait until the 1980s – Thatcher and Regan, etc – to confront the proletarian struggles after 1968 but had already in the early 1970s put forward its left teams in government to head off the workers then, later, put the left in opposition to soak up and divert their resistance to the attacks of the right.
• The struggles of the workers in Poland, 1980-81 – the highest point reached in terms of combativity and self-organisation since the re-emergence of struggles in the late 60s – ended in repression and defeat. But this didn’t prevent the emergence, less than 2 years later, of a third and vigorous wave of workers’ combats centred in Europe. To look at the eventual inability of this third wave to reach the heights seen in Poland only through the defeat of the UK miner’s strike is to examine international developments through the lens of one country, an incorrect method.
• Furthermore, such an approach ignores the reality of important class movements which very quickly followed the defeat of the UK miners – in Spain, Belgium, France, Italy and Scandinavia amongst others – in which workers clashed with the suffocating embrace of the trade unions by organising and extending their struggles, learning important lessons in the process.
• Most importantly, the idea that the defeat of the miners’ strike in the UK was a decisive turning point in the 80scompletely under-estimates the very real and long-lasting, global dampening of the class struggle precipitated by the collapse of the Eastern bloc (30 years and more, a prolonged period not anticipated by the ICC). The campaigns around ‘the end of communism’, the ‘victory of capitalism’, hit the proletariat precisely at the nexus of its greatest difficulties – that of its revolutionary perspective and the development of its political class consciousness. Indeed, it is at this level – the difficulty of the class in assimilating the political dimension of its struggle – which was already at the core of the problems encountered by the working class in the years prior to 1989, but which were taken onto a qualitatively new level by the historic earthquake of 1989. 

The ICC has written extensively on this question (1) and the debate on this particular issue continues on the thread “Internal debate in the ICC on the international situation” in the ICC’s online Discussion Forum. (2)

In addition, at the first meeting, the ICC defended the notion (already put forward in the Theses on Decomposition from the early 1990s) that decomposition was more and more the driving force in society (viz the Covid-19 Pandemic, an event unprecedented since 1989 or even 1929). This was not ignoring the class struggle as the motor force of history or the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour as some comrades at the meeting had suggested, but was precisely the product of the social stalemate which, if not overturned by revolution, will culminate in their mutual ruin.

There was no discussion of the question of the subterranean maturation of class consciousness. The absence of a world war since 1945, the meaning and definition of barbarism as understood by the marxist movement (though reference to Syria and Libya were given as present-day illustrations) and the degree to which the proletariat had been infested by populism were among other items raised but not fully explored. 

Perspectives for the economic crisis and class struggle

The following elements were raised mainly in the second discussion

The ICC said that the undefeated nature of the working class could be illustrated by the unprecedented ‘financial rescue packages’ launched by the bourgeoisie in the US and elsewhere. In what other period have the capitalists mobilised trillions of dollars, pounds, Euros and the rest and paid workers to stay at home, to keep society going? Sympathisers noted that many workers (particularly in the US) didn’t receive all or any of what was promised and that such disbursements were also aimed at supporting businesses and are subject to massive cronyism, corruption and fraud. Nonetheless, the ICC said, intervention and subvention on such a massive scale shows state capitalism at work, still attempting to compensate for the bourgeoisie’s waning control over its own functioning.

Could or would an inevitable crash or financial crisis stimulate the class struggle, asked one participant? It’s not a given, the ICC replied:

• The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing ‘Depression’ and mass unemployment did not ‘provoke’ a response by the working class decimated by war and fatally weakened by the crushing of its revolutionary wave (1917-23)
• Furthermore, the bourgeoisie has for decades been adept at phasing in its attacks and managing through debt and delocalisation (onto other capitals) the effects of its historic impasse.
• Rather than await some catastrophic ‘crash’, it is necessary to examine the concrete conditions in front of our eyes.

The pandemic has already plunged millions of workers into poverty and this is just the start of the latest phase! Up to 50 million going hungry in the most advanced capital in the world! Mass unemployment and ‘Uberisation’ are the on agenda. The pauperisation of the proletariat on a global level – even if with different rhythms in different countries and zones – is underway and workers will be obliged to defend themselves.

Before the pandemic, in France, the reaction of the workers in their thousands on the streets, as a class and not as citizens wearing the ‘Yellow Vests’, against the government’s pension ‘reform’, was a welcome breath of fresh air, showed a marked change in attitude from earlier years of quiescence. In Italy the US, and elsewhere, at the beginning of the pandemic, there were angry reactions about the conditions of work and lockdown. Today, in the immediate, with lockdowns and distancing, the struggle is difficult. But this phase of the Covid-19 pandemic will pass: the vaccines will take effect. On top of everything else, the workers will then be asked to foot the bill for all the ‘stimulus’ cash the bourgeoisie has thrown around. Proletarian reactions to these attacks are on the agenda. Without making predictions, it’s a question of understanding what obstacles and dangers the workers will face.

Obstacles and dangers confronting the proletariat and revolutionaries

A sympathiser posed the question: given the anger and confusion generated at the beginning of the pandemic, including some strikes and demonstrations, might this have constituted a revolutionary moment, a time when the ruling class “can’t govern as before?” Perhaps the missing element was the revolutionary party? The ICC responded:

• There’s certainly a need for the existence and intervention of revolutionary organisations – including and importantly a Party of the Proletariat – and the working class, for historical reasons, is ‘behind the curve’ in this regard. However, as outlined in the presentation, the working class is in no position to mount a revolutionary challenge at present and is having trouble even regaining its class identity. The same conditions governing this situation also have a bearing on the formation of a party – which nowhere exists – and even when it does, its task is not to ‘organise’ the workers or, indeed, the revolution.
• While revolutionaries must take a global and historical view, the specificity of particular countries and the immediate situation must also be analysed. In this regard, the United States presents particular problems for the proletariat. In the past year the US has witnessed disorientation and confusion: no other country bears such a weight of racial oppression. The wholly bourgeois Black Lives Movement, the riots in response to the killing of George Floyd - these movements are immense dangers for the working class which has to take up its own struggle on the terrain of the defence of its economic interests as a class, which is the only framework in which racial divisions can be confronted and overcome.
• There is no other developed country where the impact of decomposition hits harder. It is said that 40 per cent of the population adheres to neo-creationist beliefs, and the US has become the world’s supermarket for conspiracy theories.  This, plus the white supremacist movement, its counterpart the BLM, each for himself, Q-Anon, and the rest are a dark cloud of divisions that hang over the workers.
• Then, there was the US election, a mass mobilisation for a false choice. Many more millions were enrolled whereas previously, voters had fallen away. While the populism of Trump won’t disappear, the Democrats under Biden will attack the workers using new language, ‘The Great Reset’, ‘The Green Economy’ etc.
• The leftists – some of which have been calling for a ‘general strike’ to increase state ‘stimulus’ pay-cheques in the US - aren’t a merely ideological force but have a real presence on the ground, often via the unions, but also linked to the left of the Democratic Party. Following this discussion and the subsequent ‘storming’ of the Capitol early in January 2021, one close sympathiser of the ICC was inspired to elaborate on the dangers posed by the left in the US. (3)
• The proletariat is not the only class being decimated: the petty-bourgeoisie in its myriad forms is also squeezed by the aggravation of the crisis and can appear to produce ‘radical’ solutions from the self-managed ‘Mom & Pop’ stores which seek to make common cause with the proletariat to the libertarian right and its calls for inviolate individual ‘freedom’ against capital. The polarisation between, for example, the populist right and the ‘anti-fascist’ left, is a real threat to the proletariat, its forms of organisation and its class consciousness. Without a strong working class movement, elements ruined by capitalism are drawn into these conflicts which are not on a class terrain. Parts of the proletariat itself are prey to this destructive dynamic.

Thus the working class in the US, despite its historic combativity, faces a stern political test. The coming period will also demand a unity and clarity from its revolutionary minorities - those fractions who today are acting as a bridge towards the party of tomorrow. In this regard, the ICC’s virtual meetings are continuing. In February online “public meetings” on the pandemic and the events in the US were held in a number of languages, and the ICC also aims to produce summaries of the main points of discussion from these meetings.

Netto 20.2.2021

Notes:

1. See, for example, "Theses on decomposition" (International Review no 107, 4th semester 2001). Theses on decomposition | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [4]
2. https://en.internationalism.org/forum/16901/internal-debate-icc-international-situation [54]
3. See https://en.internationalism.org/content/16971/initial-reactions-january-6th-storming-us-capitol [55]

The number of people infected with the Covid-19 virus has been rising sharply in recent weeks in many parts of the world, especially in Europe, which has once more become one of the epicentres of the pandemic. The “possibility of a second wave” announced several months ago by epidemiologists is now a reality and it is highly likely that it will be much more virulent than the previous one. In several countries, the daily death toll already stands at several hundred and the intensive care units needed to treat the most seriously affected patients are already reaching capacity, and some are even overflowing as in Italy, even though we are only at the beginning of this new wave. Faced with the seriousness and the rapid deterioration of the situation, more and more states have no other option than to impose local or national curfews or stay-at-home orders to minimise the spread of the virus... outside of working hours, of course.

The criminal negligence of the bourgeoisie

In recent months, the media in many countries have been broadcasting unsympathetic and misleading messages coming from the authorities, repeatedly making accusations about “irresponsible and selfish youth” assembling in large groups “to organise clandestine parties”, or of those holidaymakers who want to enjoy the few remaining warm days of summer outdoors, and having removed their masks, drinking at the pavement cafés (when the governments of the Mediterranean region strongly encourage this to happen to “save the tourism sector from collapse”!). This widespread campaign aimed at “public irresponsibility” is nothing more than a smokescreen for the negligence and the lack of preparation which the dominant class has demonstrated over many years [[1]] which has been replicated in recent months with the “first wave showing a relative retreat”.

While governments were well aware that there was no effective treatment, that the development of a vaccine was far off and that the virus would not necessarily go away on its own, no steps were taken to prevent a potential “second wave”. The numbers of staff employed in hospitals hasn't been augmented since last March, nor have the number of intensive care beds increased. Policies dismantling the health care systems have even continued in some countries. All governments have therefore pushed for a return to “the way things were”, reminiscing about “the good old days”, with only one thought in mind: “It's necessary to save the nation's economy!”.

Today, it is with the same concern that the European bourgeoisie is requiring the exploited to once again lockdown, while at the same time urging them to still attend their workplaces, disregarding the fact that people mixing with one another leads to the proliferation of the virus (especially in the large metropoles), and when there is a lack of sanitary measures to ensure the safety of people in the workplaces as well as in the schools!

The carelessness and irresponsibility shown by the ruling class in recent months shows it to be once again incapable of controlling the pandemic. As a result, the vast majority of European states are clearly tending to lose control of the situation. The great misfortune rests with those required to go to work worried and fearful of contamination, for themselves and their loved ones.

Profit or life?

Contrary to what is claimed, there is no doubt that the objective of the ruling class is not to save lives but to limit as much as possible the catastrophic effects of the pandemic on the life of capitalism, while trying to avoid the tendency towards worsening social chaos. For this, the functioning of the capitalist machine must be assured no matter the cost. In particular, it is essential that companies are able to make a profit. No work can take place and no profits can be made if workers are not being employed in the workplaces. This is something that the bourgeoisie wishes to avoid at all cost and so production, trade, tourism and public services have to be kept at a maximum level; the consequences to the lives of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of human beings are of minimal importance.

The ruling class has no other choice if it is to guarantee the survival of its own system of exploitation. Whatever it does, it is no longer able to stop capitalism sinking into its inexorable historical crisis. This irreversible decline therefore sees it exposed for what it really is, completely insensitive to the value of human life and ready to do anything to preserve its own rule, including letting tens of thousands of people die, starting with senior citizens, considered “useless” in the eyes of capital. The pandemic sheds a harsh light on capitalism continuing to survive, rotting on its feet, and its threat to humanity.

Only class struggle can put an end to all pandemics.

The exploited therefore have nothing to expect from the states and their governments which, whatever their political colours, are part of the dominant class and remain at its service. The exploited have nothing to gain by accepting without question the “sacrifices” imposed on them to “save the economy”. Sooner or later, the bourgeoisie will be able to limit the damage to health of this virus by deploying an effective vaccine. But the conditions of social decomposition that led to this pandemic will not disappear. In view of the war being conducted between the states in the mad “race for a vaccine”, its distribution already seems to be highly problematic.

As with industrial or environmental disasters, it is more than likely that humanity will be confronted with fresh global pandemics in the future, even more deadly diseases. In the face of the economic catastrophe aggravated by the pandemic, the explosion of unemployment and the increasing pace and pressure of the poverty it will bring, the working class will have no choice but to fight to defend its living conditions. Already there is widespread anger and the bourgeoisie is trying to attenuate it in the short term by promising all working families that the end of the year celebrations will still take place (even if it will be necessary to limit the numbers who can meet). But this “pause” in the lock-down for the truce of the confectioners (to benefit the hospitality sector) will change nothing of substance.

It is clear that 2021 will be no better than 2020, with or without a vaccine. At some point, the fight will have to be resumed, once the shock of this pandemic has been overcome. It is only by resuming the path of struggle against the attacks of the bourgeoisie, its state and the employers, in both the public and private sectors, that the working class will be able to develop its unity and solidarity. Only the class struggle, by breaking the holy bond that ties it to its exploiters, will be able, in the long run, to open a perspective for the whole of humanity threatened with extinction by a system of exploitation in full decay. Capitalist chaos will only continue to worsen, with more and more catastrophes and fresh pandemics. The future is therefore in the hands of the proletariat. Only the proletariat has the capacity to overthrow capitalism, to save the planet and to build society anew.

Vincent, 11 November 2020

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” as Marx famously said. Today, the reality of most people’s ‘being’ across the globe is deteriorating in a dangerous and bewildering manner: wars, economic hardship; environmental degradation, enforced migration and this year, in addition, a new virus. These material conditions of growing chaos and confusion – plus the apparent absence of a credible alternative – are the soil nourishing the proliferation of ‘conspiracy theories’.

As millions are infected and hundreds of thousands of people die across the globe as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, a myriad of explanations for the cause of this scourge are on offer, many taking the form of conspiracy theories. Despite pronouncements by bodies such as The World Health Organisation and the United Nations[1] that the origins of such diseases lie in the destruction of natural habitats resulting in the unregulated intermingling of animal and human species (to which we would add the intensive and unhygienic processing of animals on an industrial scale),  vast numbers of the population believe that the pandemic has been unleashed deliberately by individuals, cabals, or malign countries for their own sinister purposes.

Such ‘theories’ range from the accusation by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, that ‘Communist’ China both manufactured and spread the Covid virus, to the widely-held notion that the Pandemic is being used by states to monitor and control their citizens by a sinister ‘global elite’ or by individuals such as investor George Soros or Microsoft multi-millionaire Bill Gates to further their own designs of world domination.

Such ‘theories’ do not remain on the purely ideological level but manifest themselves in everyday life, in action, through protests, lobbying and social media that influence the behaviour of millions - particularly but by no means exclusively in America. Witness, for example, the growth from the fringe to the mainstream of the ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement - those opposed to the state-mandated use of vaccines used to prevent disease – which in 2019 was said to have contributed to the worst measles outbreak in a generation in America. In May this year, a survey showed that almost a quarter of US citizens said they would refuse a vaccine against Covid-19, even if one was developed! In Australia, the figure was closer to 50%.

More sinister still is the development of a pogrom spirit, manifested in physical assaults on people of Asian appearance held responsible for the spread of the virus. India’s television news channels, already notorious for spreading hatred against Muslims, accused Muslim missionaries of “deliberately” spreading COVID-19, dubbing them India’s “virus villains” and “human bombs.” The orchestrated wave of anti-Muslim violence in New Delhi left at least 53 dead and over 200 injured,

The medium is not the message

It’s certainly the case that the development of global internet outlets such as Facebook and YouTube have fostered the growth of all kind of conspiracy videos, channels and sub-groups featuring figures such as David Icke or InfoWars’ Alex Jones, past masters at peddling world views in which Jews, bankers, the Illuminati or sinister ‘globalist’ organisations run and manipulate the world – at the very time when international bodies dealing with World Trade, World Health, arms limitation or Climate Accords are being side-lined by rampant nationalism.

On the internet dwell and organise the ‘wellness’ adherents whose bodies are their temples into which no state-promoted vaccine must pass; their loathing of ‘big government’ or ‘big pharma’ is shared by those ‘libertarians’ of the left or of the right who are convinced that the spread of Covid-19 is a deliberate policy of the world’s leading states in order to document and control their populations. Those who burn 5G telecommunication towers live here too. On the fringes of such movements, the armed wing of the crushed petty-bourgeoisie such as the weapon-worshiping Boogaloo fraternity which promotes ‘race war’ creating (in their warped vision) space for their particular brand of self-managed mayhem. The myth of the rugged, frontier-busting individual so prevalent in US culture – the ‘mask refuseniks’ among them - is merely a reflection of the extreme division of labour exerted by capital in which each person appears to be reduced to a hopeless, helpless being, divorced from the means to produce a livelihood and from the products of his/her labour.

But it’s not the development of technology that’s responsible for the proliferation of millennial-style sects – the medium should not be blamed for the message. That honour falls to disintegrating capitalism itself. And the ruling class is perfectly able to use its own putrefaction to wage war against its own population and its enemies.

We’ve already mentioned President Trump’s citing of China as the culprit responsible for creating and distributing the new virus. This chimes well with US imperialist interests which promote a vilification and weakening of their rising enemy. Trump is egged on in this arena by Democratic Presidential candidate Biden. Trump’s own supporters at QAnon, meanwhile, are happy to present America and the world in the grip of a traitorous band of gangsters (which include many previous US presidents but bizarrely excludes Reagan and Kennedy) in which Trump and ‘a few brave men’ are the only true patriots… [2]. For this ruling cabal, conspiracy theories are an idiot’s useful smokescreen: Covid-19 is a ‘hoax’, fake news, as are claims of Russian bounties for the killing of US soldiers. The Democrats – who harbour a wide-range of ‘alternative’ solutions to pandemic and economic crisis – also employ conspiracy theories to portray the Trump clique as the sole cause of America’s decline in the world, with Trump as the puppet of Russia’s Putin. ‘Rational’ posers such as The Alliance for Science debunk the anti-vaxxers and their conspiratorial ilk … while promoting the production for profit of genetically modified foodstuffs.

Scapegoating in history

In times of plagues past, as well as a certain social solidarity in the face of tragedy, there were repeated attempts to look for scapegoats. “Europe’s most deadly and devastating disease, the Black Death of 1347–51, unleashed mass violence: the murder of Catalans in Sicily, and clerics and beggars in Narbonne and other regions; and especially the pogroms against Jews, with over a thousand communities down the Rhineland, into Spain and France, and eastward across large swathes of Europe eradicated, their members locked in synagogues or rounded up on river islands and burnt to death – men, women and children.” [3] In Italy, the Flagellants had blamed the Jews as well as a corrupted church hierarchy for bringing down God’s wrath. To avoid giving them ammunition, Pope Clement VI absolved the Jews (and God and the church, of course) and held a misalignment of the Planets responsible. 

Thus in addition to targeting ‘outsiders’, ‘the other’, or minorities, blame for disruptive disease could also be laid at the door of the ruling class: Pericles gets shamed for leading virus-weakened Athenians against their Spartan rivals during the Plague of Athens, 430-426 BC, and during the Antonine Pandemic (there were many in the Roman Empire ) of 165-190 AD, between 170-300 notable Matrons were ‘tried’ and executed for “poisoning” male members of the ruling class who had been victims of the plague. This impotent lashing out at ‘elites’ is an important aspect dictating the form and function of conspiracy theories in today’s epoch of decomposition and political populism. [4]

The rise of irrationality

Despite limited insights in Antiquity (eg contemporary historian Thucydides’ view that the Athenian Plague “was caused by the crowding of the rustic multitudes together in small dwellings and stifling barracks”) it was impossible in bygone days to have a scientific understanding of the origin and transmission plagues. Hence the hunt for fall-guys and the proliferation of irrational explanations.

Today, humanity’s grasp of what’s going on is – at least in theory – much greater. The Covid-19 genome (the complete set of genes or genetic material present in a cell or organism) was mapped within a couple of weeks of its formal discovery early this year. This makes the widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic and attempts to ameliorate it appear even more of an anomaly, even allowing for the fact that this is a new virus with, at present, unknown aspects.

However, plagues and pandemics arise out of specific social conditions and their impact similarly depends on the particular the historic point reached by a given society. The Covid-19 crisis is a product of capitalism’s profound decay and the immense contradictions arising from the juxtaposition of astounding advances in all branches of technology and the appearance of pandemics, droughts, fires, melting icecaps and urban smog. All this finds its expression at an ideological level, as do the manifest disparities between a growing pauperisation and unemployment of a large part of the planet’s population and the enrichment of an exploiting minority.

Conspiracy theories today rival religions in their attempt to describe and explain complex reality: like religion they offer certainty in an uncertain world. The various ‘truth’ movements personify the hidden, impersonal processes of crippled capitalist accumulation by pointing the spotlight on individuals or mysterious, connected cliques. They appear convincing to the extent that their ‘critiques’ often contain some basic truths – for example that the state is bent on collecting, collating and storing ever-more data on its citizens, or that there exists a ‘deep state’ which operates behind the façade of democracy.

But conspiracy theories place these half-digested truisms in utterly false frameworks, such as the idea that it’s possible to opt-out (or go ‘off-grid’) and avoid the cold gaze of the state’s surveillance technology (the survivalist mentality) without destroying the state apparatus itself or, in the case of the ‘deep state’, that this is the product of a cooperative international cabal, rather than the expression of evolving state capitalism,  a direct expression of capitalism’s competitive nature, dictated by the  drive to dominate or destroy rival states in an increasingly barbaric series of wars of each against all. Conspiracy theories thus become not only a misinterpretation of the world but a blockage against the development of the consciousness required to change it. 5]

Capitalism abuses science

Arising out of the same deep distrust of ruling ‘elites’ which led to the populist phenomenon of recent years, the taste for irrational explanations of reality has gone hand in hand with a growing rejection of science. Hence the frustration of Donald Trump’s medical enabler, Dr Anthony Fauci: “There is a general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling among some people in this country – an alarmingly large percentage of people, relatively speaking,” said the USA’s chief medical spokesman on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. This from the figurehead who lends scientific credibility to the Trump administration, purveyors of conspiracy theories par excellence! In Britain, a Commission of the House of Lords (yes, there still remain Lords of the Realm!) investigating the power of digital media was told of “a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation …If allowed to flourish, these counterfeit truths will result in the collapse of public trust, and without trust, democracy as we know it will simply decline into irrelevance. The situation is that serious.”

But if the ruling class uses and abuses science to lend credibility to its policies – as we saw clearly in the UK in the way that the government initially toyed with a half-baked version of “Herd Immunity” theory as a possible justification for its utterly negligent reaction to the pandemic – it is not surprising that science itself increasingly loses credibility. And if the rise of “counterfeit truths” also leads, as the House of Lords report fears, to a loss of conviction in the idea of democracy, this poses even greater difficulties for the capacity of the ruling class to maintain control of society through a political apparatus which is broadly accepted by the majority of the population.

The sound of silence

But the loss of control by the bourgeoisie does not in itself contain the potential for positive social change. Without the development of a serious alternative to bourgeois rule, it leads only to nihilism, irrationality and chaos.

The growing cacophony of conspiracy theories - the prevalence of nonsensical denials of shocking and frightening reality – is not merely predicated upon the ruling class’s loss of control over its economic system and its own political apparatus. It above all arises from a social vacuum, an absence. It’s the lack of a perspective – an alternative and vitalising vision for the future but rooted in the present - arising from the relative retreat of proletarian struggles and consciousness over the past 30 years or so that contributes to today’s social confusion. In 1917, in the midst of a seemingly endless and deadlocked World War killing millions and destroying decades of accumulated human civilization, it was the Russian Revolution, organised and executed by the working class itself, which inspired a wave of revolutionary movements across the world, forcing the ruling class to end the war and offering the possibility of a different way of organising the world, one based on human need. Humanity has paid the price for the failure of the soviet power that arose in Russia to spread across the globe, thus dooming it to internal degeneration and counter-revolution.

From the point of view of the ruling class, the proletarian revolution is itself only possible as the result of a conspiracy: the First International was denounced as the hidden hand behind every expression of working class discontent in 19th century Europe; the October insurrection was no more than a coup d’Etat by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But while communist ideas are most of the time only put forward by a minority of the proletariat, revolutionary theory can at certain moments become evident to large numbers once they begin to throw off the torpor of the dominant ideology, and thus transform itself into a “material force”. Such profound changes in mass consciousness may be a long way ahead of us, but the capacity of the working class to resist capitalism’s attacks also points to this possibility in the future. . . We saw this in an embryonic way at the beginning of the pandemic, when workers refused to go ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ into unprotected factories and hospitals for the sake of capitalism’s profits. And if today’s conditions of plague and orchestrated sideshows like the Black Lives Matter movement cut across the international proletariat’s ability to unite, the terrible privations currently unfolding – increasing rates of exploitation for those at work, development of mass unemployment around the globe - will oblige it to confront all the false visions clouding its consciousness of what is to be done.

Robert Frank, 7 July 2020

Bus station chaos during India's first lockdown

“At all levels, various authorities are working in sync to ensure COVID-19 does not spread. No stone is being left unturned to ensure people are healthy.” This is what the Indian Prime Minister Modi tweeted on March 16, 2020. At this moment India is caught in a perfect storm of crisis, facing its worst public health catastrophe since independence in 1948, with devastating consequences for the livelihood of more than a billion Indian people.

India: the giant awakes!

If we believe what bourgeois propaganda tells us in the past years then India, a country with about 1.35 billion inhabitants, is one of the most successful countries of the last thirty years. Thanks to trade liberalisation and the lifting of import licences (de-licensing), the nation’s annual GDP growth rate reached a robust growth of 6 to 7 % per year between 1991 and 2016. In the same period, it has doubled its share of world GDP. Between 2005 and 2015, the economy grew at double-digit figures, making India the fastest growing economy in the G-20. As icing on the cake, India succeeded in displacing the United Kingdom, the former coloniser, as the sixth largest economy in the world in 2017.

Moreover, the country seems to have become richer every year: “The number of households in India with disposable incomes of more than US $10,000 has risen twentyfold in twenty-five years. The Indian household savings rates also tripled between 2005 and 2015, with many more households having a significant disposable income. During the eight-year period between 2004 and 2012, the middle class doubled in size from 300 million to 600 million. In 2015, fewer than 19 % of Indians lived below the poverty line.” [1] Between 1990 and 2019 life expectancy in India has risen from 59.6 years in 1990 to 70.8 years in 2019.

As proof of this growing prosperity and wealth, India has stepped up its space programme. “Although India’s space program began as early as the 1960s, it has gained new prominence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.” (Washington Post, 12-07-2019). In 2014, India put a satellite in orbit around Mars, and became the fourth national space agency to actually land on the ‘red planet’. In March 2019, India carried out a successful test by firing a satellite into space. According to Modi, India can now call itself a real space power and is working towards a manned space mission in 2022. India's space programme is making giant leaps to the moon, Mars and beyond.

For the bourgeois of India, the question is crystal clear: the next decade belongs to India!

On the base of all these developments it could be argued that India would easily be able to create the conditions and the instruments to face the pandemic that broke out in the first months of 2020. Nothing is further from the truth! Despite the steady growth of the economy, despite the increase in prosperity, despite the huge technological advances, the management of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a disaster, failing to prevent millions of infections and making a total mess of steering Indian society through this pandemic storm. The declaration of the first national lockdown was made with little or no serious planning and vast numbers of seasonal workers, forced to head back to their villages, were given absolutely no support – neither food nor adequate transport, leading to chaotic scenes on India’s roads and bus stations. Since then, the profound inadequacies of India’s health system have been starkly revealed, making it clear that India’s dizzying growth has brought minimum benefits to the majority of the working class and the most oppressed social strata.

The failing public health system         

For its 1.35 billion people India has fewer than 15,000 state hospitals and only one hospital bed for every 2000 people, one of the lowest ratios in the world. The ratio of intensive care (UCI) beds in public hospitals is one to 37,500 people. Of the currently functioning health centres, only 10% are operating as per Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS). Many of these centres are even lacking basic services such as electricity or running water. [2]

India’s public health units are also severely deficient in hospital staff. The country has only one doctor in the public health system for every 11,082 people. In the public sector none of the institutions manage to meet the World Health Organisation recommendation of 1:1000 doctors to population. India has a shortage of an estimated 600,000 doctors and 2 million nurses. Furthermore, more than 50 % of the doctors have no or an insufficient qualification. Low salaries and poor working conditions in public hospitals have led around 100,000 doctors to emigrate.

In state hospitals treatment is supposed to be largely free. Nevertheless, patients end up buying consumables and medicines from private pharmacies because the hospitals simply don’t have enough in stock. Also, illegal payments have to be made sometimes to bribe doctors and nurses. State hospitals "are poorly staffed. They have employees who sometimes don't show up. You may have to bribe every employee at every level of the system”, says Ravi Ramamurti, director of the Center for Emerging Markets at Northeastern University.

The private medical care factories

India has one of the most privatised health systems in the world. Total private infrastructure accounts for 62% of India’s entire health infrastructure - an estimated 43,487 private hospitals versus 25,778 public ones. Even if the healthcare in the public hospitals is largely free, more than two-third of the population goes to private hospitals. The poor quality of service in public hospitals, the long queues and in some cases the absence of the required specialists force people to visit private hospitals and medical centres for treatments.

The private healthcare system in India is largely unregulated, opaque and often unscrupulous, overcharging patients for unnecessary treatment. In private hospitals average medical expenditure per hospitalisation case is as much as seven times higher than in public hospitals. Because 86% of India’s rural population and 81% of its urban population have no health insurance, they have to pay for this from their own pockets, which means very frequently they have to get themselves into debt.

At the same time medical tourism has become big business and is rapidly expanding. The country is home to some of Asia's top hospitals and medical tourists come to these centres from as far as the United States. Top hospitals offer a whole range of healthcare services. Advanced facilities, doctors trained in western countries, a growing compliance on international quality standards and of course low-cost treatment make India an ideal destination for half a million medical tourists a year. 

Indian capitalism is putting out red carpets for these tourists, dazzled by their dollars. It is vigorously promoting medical tourism by providing tax concessions. Since 2015 it has also created a special medical visa that lasts up to one whole year, which can be given for specific purposes to foreign tourists coming to India for medical treatment. Medical tourism is a slap in the face for all Indian people who cannot afford decent medical treatment.

No wonder that the state stimulates the trend toward privatisation of health care, as an analysis by the Centre for Budget Governance and Accountability (CBGA) in 2019 states. “Despite an evident need for investing in building and strengthening the public health system, the trajectory of health policy in India is unapologetically shifting towards an insurance-based model of healthcare, which essentially strengthens the private healthcare industry.” [3]

Nearly two-third of the medical system has been turned into a business with the use of marketing tactics and a race to achieve the maximum profits. According to T. Sundararaman, former executive director of the National Health Systems Resource Centre (NHSRC) one thing is certain: “the neglect of a robust public-health system in favour of privatised, insurance-led healthcare has weakened India’s ability to deal with a national health emergency. India’s weakened public health infrastructure is unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Serious warnings about infectious diseases

India has always been a hospitable environment for infectious diseases. And the coronavirus has proved to be no exception. While many parts of the world have also controlled infectious diseases through immunisation and better medical care, India still struggle to manage these epidemics.

In April 2017 a study of the Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) in Washington already concluded that South Asian nations, including India, are “vulnerable” to emerging infectious diseases and their level of preparedness is “inadequate” to protect public health. The highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus A/H5N1, which was introduced to the subcontinent through wild birds, has since become endemic across large parts of northeast India. Inadequate surveillance and uneven health system capacity may accelerate the spread of these kinds of emerging infectious diseases, putting millions of lives at risk.

On top of that India has some of the most severe issues with infectious diseases on the planet. In the country the number of cases of the top three Soil-Transmitted Helminthes (a parasitic worm) totals more than 280 million cases. (20-08-2016) Communicable diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis accounted for over 46 per cent of preventable deaths in children aged 5-14 years in 2016. Death rates from these communicable diseases were nearly 20 times higher in India than in China, and 10 times higher than in Brazil and Mexico. (14-03-2019)

And what has the Modi government done since this study? Nothing substantial. Despite the warnings public spending on health has been stuck at around 1.2% of GDP for close to 15 years. In 2017 the Government of India made a commitment to raise public spending on health to 2.5% of GDP by 2025 (“Modicare”). But there is so far no sign of any significant increase in health spending by the government, ranking India to the lowest countries in the world in public health spending: in contrast to Thailand ($166 per capita), Sri Lanka ($63) and Indonesia ($38), India only spends $16 per capita.

When the first case of Covid-19 infection was reported in India, on January 27, 2020, private hospitals refused to treat Covid-19 patients on a massive scale, while they have the best facilities; the biggest part of the ventilators is in the private hospitals. And according to Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director, Population Foundation of India, a Delhi-based NGO, private hospitals hold almost 65% of available ventilators, and are only handling 10% of the critical load of Covid-19 patients. (26 June 2020) It is clear that the already abysmal health care system and its workforce were completely unprepared for this massive increase in Covid-19 cases.

For months there was a severe lack of testing.

Despite significant testing capacity in both public and private laboratories, India was slow to provide testing. Testing in the early days of the epidemic was limited to a few public laboratories. As of June 1, 2020, many experts have noted that testing capacity is still drastically insufficient for the needs of the population. Daily Covid-19 tests per 1,000 people are only 0.08 in India compared with 1.16 in the United States and 1.02 in Italy (30-05-2020). India’s Covid-19 testing rate is among the lowest in the world and falling.

Results of India's first nationwide study of prevailing coronavirus infections, conducted by scientists from the Indian Council of Medical Research, found for every confirmed case detected in May, authorities were missing more than 100 others. The study showed that 6.4 million people were likely infected already. The virus had already spread to India's villages, straining fragile health systems. The study confirms that India's limited and restrictive testing masked the actual toll. It actually found antibodies in people who lived in districts that hadn't yet reported cases!

In August India tried to step up its testing, almost doubling the number of tests conducted during the month of August. The country’s current testing policy aims to track and test all contacts of at least 80% of new Covid-19 cases. However, India still has one of the lowest rates of testing per capita in the world. Only about 82 of every 100,000 people in India are being tested per day, according to Johns Hopkins University -- compared to about 284 in the US and 329 in the United Kingdom.

The low levels of testing manifest India’s inadequate health infrastructure and the weak capacity of public health systems to track and scale-up rapid testing in the community.

The bourgeoisie willingly downplays the number of infections. The data of the government is full of gaps since it has failed to accurately record the deaths of its own citizens for years. In the beginning of September India's reported mortality rate was surprisingly low, apparently standing at 1.7%. For context, the same rate was about 3% in the US, 11.7% in the UK, and 12.6% in Italy (Johns Hopkins University). Antibody tests suggested that India might also be under-counting infections at least by a factor of 50, which means that the true number of infections in September could be more than 60 million, as opposed to 4.4 million Covid-19 cases being reported by the state’s institutions.

The spread of the virus: growing chaos in healthcare

When the number of infections started to rise, after the national lockdown was lifted in the middle of May 2020, the medical sector was soon overwhelmed and a general chaos, first in June-July and still more in September-October, could not be avoided.

In June 2020, when “only” 298,000 Covid-19 cases and 8,500 deaths were registered, there were already reports of people who “are dying due to the non-availability of medical treatment. It has also become very difficult to get admission in hospitals. There is also a serious shortage of oxygen facilities and ventilators. The worst victims are the poorest, as it is extremely difficult for them to get admitted into the hospitals.” [4]

In the same month it was the public health-care system in Mumbai, epicentre of India’s worsening coronavirus outbreak, which was overwhelmed as Covid-19 patients poured in and hospital staff worked around the clock. Patients were asked to sleep on the floor until beds opened up. Medical care for non-coronavirus patients had basically been shut off due to a lack of resources. Patients were dying all over the place because hospitals refused to give them the required treatment.

India TV, in its programme on 10 June 2020, showed videos which indicated the pathetic condition of the patients admitted to hospital and the deplorable condition of the wards. Patients were in the wards together with dead bodies. Cadavers were also seen in the lobby and waiting area. The living were not supplied with oxygen or any other support; no saline drips were shown with the beds and there was no one to attend to the sick and dying. This was the condition of the Government Hospital of Delhi with the capacity of 2,000 beds.

India's public health system on the verge of collapse

At the beginning of August, the pandemic spread seemed to be successfully contained, with cases slowly subsiding. But very rapidly there was a resurgence of the virus across the country and in mid-September a second spike in Covid-19 cases put the health care system really at risk. Some parts actually tended to collapse under the pressure of the surge of the Covid-19 cases.

• Data from the local government's hospital occupancy app, Delhi Corona, showed there were no ICU beds with ventilators available to coronavirus patients in eight of the capital's 11 top private hospitals, even as the total coronavirus cases here surged above the 200.000. (20-09-2020)
• In Mumbai doctors had to wait for oxygen every day. “Every day, we are worried if the oxygen will arrive or not. If they - the supplier of oxygen - had arrived even a couple of hours late, we could have lost five or six patients.” (Ravindra Khade Patil, a doctor who manages two private hospitals in Mumbai, 16-09-2020).
• At the beginning of November 2020 hospital beds in Delhi were filling up again illustrating the advent of another crisis. At least 66 % ICU beds with ventilators were occupied. India's largest public Covid-19 hospital tended to crumble under the weight of soaring coronavirus cases, with only 6 per cent ventilator beds vacant in the hospital (07-11-2020)

A surge in Covid-19 cases has overwhelmed India’s health system. Above all the government hospitals faced a very heavy caseload of severely ill patients, with only a few beds and very few ventilators available. Reports mentioned Covid-19 patients dying in a hospital in central Madhya Pradesh state because of a lack of adequate oxygen.

The appalling conditions of the healthcare workers

“The working conditions for doctors are abhorrent too; both in government and private hospitals. Doctors are overworked, without proper sleep, food or water. They are staying away from their homes for days and months. Even after working in these circumstances, they become the victims of violence at the hands of the aggressive relatives of some patients. The worst part is that doctors can’t even protest or strike against their lot, as the lives of millions depend on them”. (In Defence of Marxism, 12 August 2020)

During the pandemic the working conditions for the healthcare workers have seriously deteriorated. They were obliged to work day and night in an already overworked and overburdened infrastructure. They have been denied wages and protective equipment, muzzled, persecuted, and made to work overtime. Doctors and nurses are being overworked without proper Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), putting their lives at risk. PPE shortages forced doctors to use raincoats and motorbike helmets.

Due to insufficient safety measures the “heroes of the nation” in India have been contracting the virus at an alarming rate. At the beginning of September already 80,000 health care workers tested positive. Of these infected workers more than 600 have died in the meantime. At the beginning of October, 2,500 doctors were infected with the disease and 515 of them died. The recording of the number of health care workers who have contracted the coronavirus and died is done by the Indian Medical Association since the Modi government completely disregards this task.

At different moments Indian healthcare workers have been protesting against extremely harsh work schedules without any leave or are simply being forced to work under unsafe and hostile conditions. Despite their courageous efforts, their commitment and combativity, most of these protests remained isolated and didn’t see their demands being met by the authorities who threatened the hospital workers with dismissal.

The fight against the attacks on human lives

In the autumn India was going through a new wave of infections. But, while several countries in the world have decided on a second nationwide lockdown, a joint statement from different health institutions said that the lockdown in India should be discontinued. Even in October a committee of experts, appointed by the Department of Science and Technology, advised the central government not to impose fresh lockdowns. Since a full flowering of the pandemic might lead to the healthcare system being overwhelmed and labour power being decimated, a more rational bourgeoisie might aim for a strict lock-down. But not the Modi regime.

The government of India, an obvious manifestation of populism, is permanently in denial about the gravity of the situation and encourages the use of traditional remedies against the Covid-19 virus [5]. In April the government set up a task force for scientific validation of Ayurveda and in October the Indian health ministry begun to recommend medicine based on Ayurveda. In the concrete practice of everyday life however such a policy is based on the ideology of herd immunity, with all the resulting horrors for the population in general and the working class in particular.

Herd immunity is not an official policy of Modi’s control of the virus, but there are several experts and institutions who openly speculated about the herd immunity option:

• A sero-prevalence study, done by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), suggests that most regions in India may be inching towards acquiring “involuntary” herd immunity against Covid-19.

• The daily Covid-19 cases are beginning to decline but certain parts of the country have started attaining herd immunity, experts said on India Today TV. (31-10-2020)

“Whether they do this with a deliberate policy, laissez-faire, wishful thinking or a combination of those and others” [6], without a vaccine such strategies will cost the lives of millions of people in India alone. “This is not a question of the defence of one scientific theory against another” [Ibid], but a question of denouncing every policy that does not prioritise human lives. In order to avoid doing that, the bourgeois is making sure that people will die like flies. It is the responsibility of communist minorities, as the most conscious elements within the working class, to take up a firm position against any attack, generated by capitalism, on the lives of human beings.

Dennis, 2020-12-18

[1] “The Middle Class in India: From 1947 to the Present and Beyond”; Spring 2018; https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-middle-class-... [62])

[2] Source: “Modinomics = Corporatonomics Part IV: Modi’s Budgets and the Social Sectors: Health”, Janata Weekly, 02-06-2019; https://janataweekly.org/modinomics-corporatonomics-part-iv-modis-budget... [63]

[3] https://www.cbgaindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Numbers-That-Count-... [64]

[4] https://www.bodhi-project.be/blog/covid-19-in-india-13 [65]. In many cases hospitals in Delhi and Mumbai refused to admit critically ill Covid-19 patients.

[5] The latest expression of this tendency is the decision of the Central Council of Indian Medicine (CCIM) to allow Ayurvedic traditional medicine doctors to conduct certain surgical procedures after the completion of their 3-year PG course, provoking a nationwide protest by  doctors in India.

[6] “The British government's "Herd Immunity" policy is not science but the abandonment of the most sick and vulnerable”; https://en.internationalism.org/content/16848/british-governments-herd-i... [14]

We are publishing an article written by our comrades in France which shows that the bourgeoisie’s negligent and irresponsible response to the Covid-19 pandemic is not limited to populist government’s like those in Britain and the US. It is followed by an article that highlights the similarity of government action on both sides of the Channel. This article was written by a sympathiser but is fully in line with our position on this question.

France

According to the official figures, which are systematically underestimated by states[1], despite the isolation of nearly half of the world, Covid-19 has become the third most deadly global disease today in the number of daily deaths[2]. In France, between March 16 and May 3, there was a 39% increase in excess deaths at the national level[3] and close to 180% over two months in certain communes of the Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest in metropolitan France[4]. With a virus as dangerous as this still circulating within a population not immunised against it[5], without any vaccine or remedy being found and a health system on its knees, it is evident that all premature raising of the tardy precautionary health measures introduced by the state can have serious consequences for a great part of the population, notably among the working class.

"Capital that has such good reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the out-cry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits?"[6]

Thus, encouraged by certain flatterers of capital openly declaring that the country couldn't "sacrifice the young and active in order to save the old"[7] , so as to get the maximum of workers back on the job, the French government therefore reopened crèches and primary schools on May 11 under the hypocritical pretext of wanting to reduce the gap in teaching coming from isolation and a growing number of pupils in difficulties. But the priority given to the youngest, notably to "children of essential workers for the management of the health crisis and the continuity of the life of the nation" as well as for the children of workers who can't work from home, fools no-one.

In order to keep up illusions, teachers are told to follow an inapplicable health protocol of 63 pages laid out by the Minister for National Education, made impossible by the typical bureaucratic absurdity of its recommendations, which can’t be kept to when you’re dealing with such young children. And all that, of course, without taking into account the age-old shortages of masks and other protective equipment. In such conditions, despite all the efforts of the adults looking after them, the school becomes a sort of dangerous and traumatising "day-care prison" where children feel themselves deprived of physical contact, fearful of infection -  as happened in the Tourcoing infant's school and having to deal with physical distancing marked on the ground, showing the ludicrous and dehumanising side of the situation.[8]

But there is one point that the government has been clear about and that's the surveillance of any critical expression tending to denounce the criminal negligence of the bourgeois state and its responsibility in the advance of the present health crisis. Thus, in a particularly explicit manner, the Minister for Education has put some "educational" sheets on-line for teachers that read as follows: "the Covid-19 crisis could be used by some in order to show the incapacity of the state to protect the population and try to destabilise fragile individuals. Various radical groups exploit this dramatic situation with the aim of rallying new members to their cause and trouble public order". Also, if "children say something manifestly unacceptable (...). The reference to state authority for the protection of each citizen must then be evoked, without going into polemical discussion. Parents will be alerted and met by the teacher, accompanied by a colleague and the situation reported to the school authorities"[9]. Clearly, young children are being used by the state to identify and intimidate parents who dare to question governmental action. This procedure, which reminds one among other things of the practices of Fascist or Stalinist regimes, is further evidence of totalitarian character of bourgeois democracy in the epoch of the decadence of capitalism[10].

This present situation comes from the fact that, for French capital, as for others nations, the rapid return to work is an economic imperative compared to which the physical and mental health of the workers and their families, children included, doesn’t have much weight.

DM, May 24, 2020

Britain

During the continuing uncertainties over the development of the Covid-19 pandemic the general weight among parents of schoolchildren, particularly those of the working class, has been not to trust the government and to make their own decisions about their children going to school or back to school. Thus of the million school places given to vulnerable children and those of "essential workers" only 5% have taken them up. The British government's "back to school" line, alongside its "back to work" line, has been supported by the Labour Party with two of its former education secretaries - David Blunkett and Alan Johnson - weighing in to blame the teachers for being wary about the conditions awaiting them and the children on the return. The trade unions that were pushing for a quick return (the teachers are divided by a number of unions, "militant" or "moderate" and all part of the state) have been rebuffed by both concerned teachers and parents.

The return to school (return to work) plan of the state has been as chaotic, incompetent, contradictory, negligent and mendacious as all the other aspects of its handling of this pandemic from the beginning. One plan was for "Nightingale" schools, purpose-built and tutored by volunteers, "coaches", retired teachers, etc.  The idea was as empty and useless as the "Nightingale" hospitals turned out to be with the prospect of many children alone with tutors they did not know and who weren't checked for working with children. Such "disclosure" checks before the Covid-19 pandemic were taking over three months to come through so, given the present chaos in the Department of Education, this "good" idea was quietly dropped. Another idea has been "bubbles" in schools which, as the name implies, seem to mean anything to anybody. The Welsh government has helpfully come up with a booklet for teachers with the rules for schools re-opening in August: it is 53 pages long, with further references and impossible to follow. The "devolved" governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all played the role of a "more caring" opposition to Whitehall while following precisely the same policies.

The "actively encouraged" (to quote the British Prime Minister) June 1st return to school collapsed into another farce as teachers refused to work and most parents backed them. Schools in Britain closed on March 20 this year and an estimated 2 million children, one in five, have done little or no school work since the lockdown (Guardian, 19.6.2020). Despite this the risks still weigh heavily on parents, particularly when necessary supports like the "world-beating test and trace" system, supposedly up and running on June 1st has now put back to sometime into the future, and the "breakthrough" app accompanying it has broken. It's the same old stories with promised (promised April 19) lap-tops still not turning up in schools (about 50% have arrived so far) and "real progress" (Prime Minister, June 19) being made on testing and tracing. It is no wonder that very few parents, particularly working class parents, have any faith in the words of the state and its "statesmen" and have voted with their feet. Another concern for parents, and particularly working class parents who have done wonders in looking after their children, is what type of school our children are going back to - regulated prisons for infants?

Now the campaign is on to get children back to school proper and the main drive behind it is the need for the British state, like all states, to get the economy going and profits generated. It comes on top of many concerns being generated by the state and its politicians about the "well-being" and "adverse mental health" of young children; these concerns are pure hypocrisy[11]. For decades now both Labour and Conservative governments have been attacking all the living and working conditions of the working class and this obviously affects its children: "Over the last five years, child poverty has risen in every London borough (because of) high housing, child-care and living costs, as well as low-pay. 72% of children in poverty are in working households". Footballer Marcus Rashford's dignified intervention on behalf of working class children showed the contempt of the government for the issue. As for the "U-turn" on school meals, what it means is that for a further brief period, with the usual bureaucratic delays, some children's families will receive vouchers of a pittance. And those children receiving a daily school meal find their quality has been affected by years of cuts and the bulk of which is unwholesome carbohydrates.  Public Health England (PHE) has refused to comment on the nutritional value of school meals, saying it's a decision "for ministers to take". Professor of food policy at London's city university, Tim Lang, described this as "the leave-it-to-Tesco's approach" (Observer, 21.6.2020).

The "concern" of the ruling class for the well-being of working class children is limited to its concern that its wage slaves get back to work as soon as possible; sacrifices are demanded and will be demanded by the state in order to keep its moribund system going, and working class children are part of that. We look in horror and disgust at the ritual sacrifices of children in certain civilisations such as the Aztecs for example. But, as this Covid-19 pandemic has shown, as its whole history shows, the capitalist state demands sacrifices of the old, the weak and vulnerable and that includes our children and their future.

Baboon 24.6.2020

 

It is astonishing how countries with the most advanced technologies are unable to control and contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Supporters of conspiracy theories say that there must be something behind this and indeed there is something behind it, but not a conspiracy. It's the decline of the capitalist method of production that's the cause and it is increasingly hindering not only the development of the forces of social production but also threatening the very survival of mankind.

The governments knew it would happen, but still seemed unprepared

Evidently the second wave is showing itself to be just as contagious as the first [1]. It is another catastrophe in health terms and, with a foreseeable extensive lockdown, it will be disastrous for certain sectors of the economy. How is this possible? Did the authorities learn nothing from the first wave? Apparently very little, because in the months leading up to the second wave, the governments contented themselves with a few palliatives: they proposed some limited social measures in various sectors which only amounted to plastering over the problem.

The bourgeoisies in the Netherlands and in Belgium had all the time they needed after the first wave to draw the lessons and take the measures necessary to prevent a second wave by, for example, developing a good testing strategy and by setting up an effective source and contact register, and they could have at least provided the Covid-19 patients with the care they needed by training more medical staff and care workers, by creating more intensive care beds, etc.

The governments in both countries had indicated that, in the event of a second wave, they would in no circumstances accept the inevitability of a new general lockdown that would shut down all non-essential parts of the economy. They believed they could restrict the measures to a few special and localised sectors initially and then see how badly the second wave would turn out to be. This short-sighted approach would prove to be disastrous.

When the predicted second wave unfolded, the governments publicly announced their surprise at its magnitude. This sham ‘shock’ was barely credible because, even before the first wave, international studies on communicable viral diseases had already issued grave warnings of the danger of pandemics by 2020. The most recent warning issued by the WHO was in September 2019 in its report “The World at Risk - Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies”, i.e. on the eve of the current pandemic. [2]

There was no justification for being taken by surprise by the second wave. The experts in virology and epidemiology in every country had on more than one occasion clearly warned that the virus was still present and that a second wave was inevitable. Faced with the choice, defending the profitability of the system of exploitation (the production of surplus value), it would win out. The consequences were again disastrous: hospitals swamped, nurses under unbearable pressure, and still thousands more deaths.

The cynical negligence and administrative incompetence of governments

The many unnecessary deaths in the first and second waves are the result of the culpable negligence and incompetence of the Western governments. That is also the damning verdict of a book by Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, published this summer. He sees the many unnecessary deaths as “evidence of systematic misconduct on the part of the government, a reckless negligence in breach of the duties of public authorities”. [3] The political situation in the Netherlands and Belgium is no exception; on the contrary, both governments showed such a disregard in the spring and autumn that control of the epidemic completely slipped out of their hands at peak moments.

In many cases, the irresponsible actions of the politicians were not merely misguided decisions, but were largely dictated by a cynical policy that put the economic interests of the national capital first and increased the health risks to the population:

• with millions of people dependent on public transport to get to work every day, the government failed to make buses and trains safe with social distance measures to reduce the likelihood of contagion.
• while various data sets indicated that workplaces and schools are the main sources of infection, it was decided to keep them open despite the risks. [4]
• while a country like Senegal had managed to set up a large-scale and efficient testing policy, the Netherlands and Belgium failed completely in this area. That the Netherlands and Belgium failed to do so shows, at the very least, their false priorities and, at worst, deliberate negligence.
• while the two governments spent tens of billions of euros in 2008 bailing out the banks, now in 2020, health personnel are applauded and obliged to work in hospitals which, even more so than during the first wave, are swamped by Covid-19 patients bringing the health system once again close to the brink of collapse. Where human lives are concerned, the difference in approach is shocking.

Nevertheless, the new government in Belgium has announced that there will be no penalties for those responsible for this catastrophic development during the first wave which, from its point of view, is quite understandable because it would shine a light on the cynical choices of the ruling class and the systematic failure of the system. On the contrary, the recovery programme of the new De Croo government is designed, with its fine promises and superficial measures, to promote the idea that the crisis is just a fact of life, that little can be done about it, and that we must therefore unite in facing up to and dealing with the consequences of the situation.

And why could no-one do anything about it? The deaths of thousands of citizens could have been avoided. The governments of Belgium and the Netherlands have deliberately put the health of their respective inhabitants at risk [5] in favour of keeping production going. Profit maximisation, which for the bourgeoisie has the power of natural law, means giving absolute priority to production, while trying to limit all the harmful effects as much as possible.

'Every man for himself' and the competition between the nation states 

Another event that makes the management of the Covid-19 crisis even more chaotic is the conflict between states. During the first wave, we already witnessed the struggle between countries for masks and protective clothing. This situation of “every man for himself”, so characteristic of the period of decomposition, is irrupting today into a war for the vaccines on which that the ICC has already published an article [6]. In June, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy had already decided separately to be the first to gain access to a vaccine for Covid-19. In recent months, this tendency has accelerated to such a degree that the Head of the WHO was obliged to warn against “'vaccine nationalism”.

Vaccines to protect against the Covid-19 virus are now being developed at an unprecedented rate. At an equally unprecedented rate, governments are concluding single, double and triple contracts with the various pharmaceutical companies in order to acquire sufficient vaccines for their own populations. In the context of this mad scramble, the WHO’s COVAX plan to distribute the still-scarce number of vaccines more widely and equitably has been completely scuppered. Contrary to the reassuring statements by the Chairman of the European Commission, Von der Leyen, and the President, Michel, that there are enough vaccines for all countries in the world, the EU is still acting very aggressively to secure a sufficient number of shots for itself, with the support of the governments of both the Netherlands and Belgium.

The rejection of lockdown measures

The decline of the capitalist mode of production has heralded a period of dissolution of the system, in which “every man for himself'” and the disintegration of the cohesion inside society are becoming increasingly significant. This is also a strong feature in this Covid-19 crisis, particularly in the form of an increasing number of protests by groups such as Virus Truth (formerly Virus Disillusion), which, again, on 24 October in The Hague, along with other groups, brought together several hundred people to protest against the “undemocratic” lockdown measures. A similar demonstration, planned for 25 October in Brussels, which would bring at least as many people together, was prohibited by the authorities.

In order to hide their own failure, the governments are trying to shift the responsibility for the emergence and expansion of the second wave on to the “irresponsible behaviour of the citizens”' and, in particular, to “disobedient and selfish young people”. This is all the more cynical a manoeuvre because it is essentially the authorities themselves who provoked this reaction by giving absolute priority to safeguarding the needs of production and not intervening in time with the necessary preventive measures which could have contained the second wave. Against the backdrop of a growing loss of control over society, their choice of actions has led to an even greater loss of credibility, for which the same authorities are now facing the consequences: large sections of the population are adhering less and less to the government's guidelines and are deciding to make up their own minds. In recent months, the police have intervened in several places and even carried out numerous raids to shut down “illegal” parties. In addition, there is also a great deal of scepticism with regard to the announcements about the vaccines.

The flight into conspiracy theory

“Some people, who are tired of the measures, doubt the reality of the spread of the virus and the seriousness of the infection. There are many misconceptions circulating on the Internet and conspiracy theories”, said Steven Van Gucht, virologist in Belgium. The influencers on social media in Belgium [7] make their followers believe that Covid-19 is a fabrication, call for them not to follow lockdown measures and openly declare themselves against a vaccine.

More and more sections of the population are resorting to pseudo-scientific explanations for the existence of the pandemic which provide them with arguments to question the official expert opinion and to oppose the government measures. The increase in the number of Covid-19 deniers is just as great as the number of people infected by the virus. A study by Kieskompas shows that in the Netherlands one in ten people believe that Covid-19 is part of a conspiracy against humanity.

The longer the pandemic lasts, the more the mood of the deniers inside the population gets more heated and reactive. In the last six months, four 5G pylons in the Netherlands and two in Belgium have been set on fire because, according to the protagonist of this theory, it is not Covid-19 that makes us sick, but the radiation from 5G pylons that weakens our immune system. The latest news is that a test station in Breda (Netherlands) was attacked by Covid-19 deniers, who wreaked havoc and intimidated a traffic officer.

The working class at a crossroads

In the current conditions, there is also a growing risk of sections of the proletariat being dragged into the populist protests against the lockdown measures that have taken place on a large scale in other European countries, such as Italy, Spain, France and Germany. So far, this has not happened in the Netherlands or Belgium: the working class has not been actively involved in such protests. In both countries, however, the period in which such a manifestation can be ruled out is coming to an end.

The workers are still able to fight on their own terrain in defence of their health against unsafe conditions at work, such as at InBev, Colruyt, Carrefour and so on. However, it is becoming more and more difficult because the blackmail exerted both by the state and by companies is beginning to weigh more heavily on the combativity of the class. The discontent and anger at the government’s negligence have not gone away, but the chances of this being expressed in open combativity pn a class terrain in the coming period are very slim.

However, the working class still has its historical memory and class consciousness. This is a beacon that can prevent it from falling prey to the growing irrationality and incoherence of thought that is so characteristic of the conspiracy theories that animate populist protests. It is based on a solid programme that shows how the perspective of class struggle opens the way to a society in which the domination of the economy over humanity, but also the opposition between society and nature, are overcome. Harmony with nature, which can thus be restored, will ensure that zoonotic viruses (transmissible from animals to humans), for example, will be less frequent and take less of a toll.

2020-12-10, Dennis & Jos

Notes

[1] In the second half of November Belgium has risen to the top of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center's mortality league table. The country has suffered 133 deaths from COVID-19 per 100 000 population (for comparison, the US figure is 77).

[2] For more information on the different studies and warnings, see: Ignacio Ramonet: “The pandemic and the world system”, 14-01-2020; https://en.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/especial-coronavirus/la-pande... [74]

[3] Richard Horton, “The Covid-19 Catastrophe. What’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again”, Polity Press, 2020.

[4] More than 21% of the infections occur at work. After the workplace comes education (19.5%), contact with the wider family circle (17.3%) and leisure activities (15.8%). (Research by the eleven general practices by Medicine for the People, of the Belgian leftist political party PVDA/PTB)

[5] With regard to Belgian residential care centres, the Amnesty International report even speaks of human rights violations: the right to health, the right to life and the prohibition of discrimination were, according to the investigation, trampled underfoot.

[6] “War of the vaccines: Capitalism is an obstacle to the discovery of a treatment”; ICConline; https://en.internationalism.org/content/16894/war-vaccines-capitalism-ob... [75]

[7] In Belgium, influencers on social media have been used to inform certain groups of young people who are resistant to the normal information channels about the Covid-19 virus.

At the level of imperialist tensions, the situation at the beginning of 2020 was characterised by an increase in conflicts between first, second and third rank bandits, which illustrated the intensification of 'each against all' in the struggle between imperialist powers, and provoked an extension of warlike barbarism and chaos. As a consequence,

• the decline of US leadership, especially in the Middle East, was leading to all-out confrontations and the dismemberment of entire countries, such as Iraq, Syria or Yemen;
• the economic and strategic conflict between the USA and China tended towards an increasing polarisation of the tensions between these two powers;
• the disruptive and provocative behaviour of Russia, but also of Turkey and Iran, became an increasingly strong factor of instability in imperialist relations;
• the unpredictable decisions of populist President Trump, his questioning of traditional alliances and his more or less open flirtation with the Kremlin, contributed to unstable relations between imperialist powers and accentuated tensions within the US bourgeoisie on the best strategy to follow to defend its interests.

And then the pandemic struck. The scale of infection and death in conflict zones, such as the Middle East for example (two million cases and nearly 60,000 official deaths, including 400,000 positive cases and 25,000 deaths in Iran), and the dangers of infections in the armies (cf. the crews of US and French battleships in quarantine) called for caution. Also, the intensity of military operations had, at least initially, apparently declined and a truce had even been declared in Syria and Yemen.

However, from the onset of the pandemic, China’s initial attempts to camouflage the spread of the virus, Trump's designation of Covid-19 as a ‘Chinese virus’, the refusal of many countries to ‘share’ their stocks of materials with their neighbours, or even Trump's attempt to reserve the first vaccines for exclusive use in the United States already indicated that the pandemic was not going to alleviate imperialist tensions, on the contrary. Moreover, in recent months, a range of news items during the period of lockdown confirmed that tensions continued to grow: ‘mysterious acts of sabotage’ against various buildings linked to the Iranian nuclear programme, a confrontation between Turkish battleships and NATO ships (of which Turkey is also a member), the former preventing the latter from monitoring the cargo of ships heading for the Libyan port of Misrata, a violent clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers in Ladakh in Kashmir, etc.

Consequently, there are a number legitimate questions on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the evolution of imperialist relations.

1. Has Trump's disastrous handling of the pandemic and the chaos it has caused led the populist president to scale back his unpredictable foreign policy initiatives?

The chaotic way in which Trump has handled the pandemic, as well as the dramatic economic consequences for the US economy and for the living conditions of the working class, with the lack of a social safety net faced with massive unemployment and the cost of going to hospital, strongly jeopardises his re-election, insofar as he intended to base his campaign on the booming health of the American economy. However, Trump is ready to do anything to win the election: to sabotage and destabilise the electoral process, by casting doubt on postal voting and by denouncing the interference of all kinds of forces aimed at manipulating the ballot, forcing drug companies to race to be the first to produce a vaccine, blackmailing other countries to get what he wants, etc.

More specifically, domestically, he has not hesitated to throw oil on the fire of the demonstrations and riots that have shaken the country in order to be able to present himself as the only defence against chaos - a mind-boggling paradox. Externally, he has systematically stirred up the trade and technology war with China (Huawei, TikTok) and exploited any incident on the international stage to rally the population behind a man who presents himself as the sole guarantee of American greatness.

This all-out attempt to be re-elected can only accentuate the unpredictability and the dangerous nature of American policy, because, even if the tendency of the US leadership to decline is confirmed, the country still has many economic and financial strengths, but above all its status as a military superpower.

2. Is China the big beneficiary of the pandemic?

The opposite is true. The Covid-19 crisis is causing huge problems for China:

1. on the economic level, the Chinese economy is facing a serious crisis: independent estimates speak of 205 million unemployed (Monde Diplomatique, June 2020, according to Hong Kong sources); a relocation of strategic industries by the United States and European countries (Germany, France, Britain) is underway, not only towards industrialised countries but also towards strategically safer countries (Vietnam for example); in addition, the country faces very serious food supply problems.
2. on the political level, mistrust of China is growing: the tour of Western Europe (Paris, Rome, Berlin, etc.) by Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi in the second half of August led to disappointing results: “If it was for the world’s most populous country and its chief diplomat to capitalise on this summer tour to polish its image somewhat to a sceptical European audience (…) and place Beijing back at the heart of a more European-compatible dynamic, the net benefit of this operation must disappoint its promoters” (“China: Wang Yi in Europe or the frustrated courtship process”, Asialyst, 5/9/20).
3. on the imperialist level, anti-Chinese feeling is growing in South West Asia: the Philippines has confirmed an agreement on aid with the USA, Cambodia has refused the Chinese navy access to its main port, Indonesia is increasingly irritated by Chinese provocations in the China Sea, and a military mutual aid treaty has been concluded between India and Australia.

As a result, China is finding it more and more difficult to bring about the ‘New Silk Road’ project, which is due to financial problems linked to the economic crisis but also to growing mistrust in many countries and to anti-Chinese pressure from United States. Also, it should come as no surprise that in 2020 there was a collapse of 64% in the financial value of the investments injected into the ‘New Silk Road’ project

This difficult situation must be understood in the context of the shifts that have taken place in Beijing over a number of years in the balance of power at the top of the State between the different factions within the Chinese bourgeoisie: the ‘turn to the left’, initiated by the faction behind President Xi, meant less economic pragmatism and more nationalist ideology. However, “Beijing's precarious situation on several fronts can be explained in part by this cavalier attitude of the central power, Xi's great turn to the left since 2013 (…) and by the disastrous results of the ‘war diplomacy’ carried out by the Chinese diplomats. However, since the end of the Beidaihe annual retreat - but also a little before - we have noticed that Beijing and its diplomats are trying to calm things down and seem to want to reopen the dialogue” (“China: in Beidaihe, 'the Party's summer school', internal tensions come to the surface", A. Payette, Asialyst, 6/9/20). This is demonstrated by Xi's recent dramatic statement that China wants to achieve carbon neutrality for its economy by 2060.

In short, there is also a certain instability here: on the one hand, the Chinese leaders are launching a more nationalist and aggressive policy towards Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, the China Sea; on the other hand, internal opposition within the party and the state is more evident. So, there are “the lingering tensions between Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping over economic recovery, as well as China’s new position on the international stage”. (A. Payette, Asialyst, op cit).

3. Does Russia's disruptive game make it a beneficiary of the pandemic?

The Kremlin indeed has the capacity to play the troublemaker on the imperialist scene (mainly because the Russian army is still considered the second most powerful army in the world) and it has demonstrated this again recently by its particularly active efforts in destabilisation in Mali and in the countries of the Sahel against France. However, the impact of the pandemic on Russia cannot be underestimated, both economically and socially. Its oil and gas revenues are dropping sharply and its industry is doing poorly. Thousands of workers have protested against job losses. But economic success was the driving force behind Putin's popularity, and it is now at historically low levels: 59% among the general population and only 12% among those under 25.

The Covid-19 crisis highlights more clearly than ever that, if Russia is a powerful factor for destabilisation in the imperialist arena, it does not have the economic means to consolidate its imperialist advances. For example in Syria where, for lack of its own funds to begin the material reconstruction of the country (at least of certain vital infrastructure), it is forced to accept the reintegration of Damascus into the ‘Arab family’, in particular through the restoration of links with the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman (cf. “Syria: muted return to the Arab family”, headline in Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2020).

In addition, Putin is now under significant pressure in his own backyard through the 'democracy movement' in Belarus. Meanwhile, the poisoning of Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny, who was evacuated to Germany, heightens the threats of an economic boycott by Germany, and, in particular, the blocking of the construction of a pipeline under the Baltic Sea connecting Russia to Western Europe, which would have catastrophic consequences for the Russian economy.

These various elements illustrate the growing pressure on Russia: its fundamental structural weakness necessitates a growing disruptive aggressiveness, from Syria to Mali, from Libya to the Ukraine. “Russia copes well with ‘frozen conflicts'. It has already demonstrated this in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. This low-cost approach gives it a destabilising influence (…)” (Monde Diplomatique, September 2020).

4. Does the pandemic attenuate 'each against all' between different imperialisms?

Several factors have to be taken into consideration:

First, the two major imperialisms, the USA and China, are suffering, as we have shown above, a heavy economic and social impact from the Covid-19 crisis and, faced with this, the ruling factions in the two countries tend to accentuate (even if it goes hand in hand with strong tensions within the respective bourgeoisies) a policy of nationalist glorification and economic and political confrontation: Xi's ‘self-sufficiency’ or Trump's ‘all that matters is America’ are the quintessential slogans of an ‘each against all’ policy.

Then, the pandemic and its economic consequences also destabilise various important local imperialist actors and push them towards imperialist intransigence. In India, the populist government of Modi seeks to divert attention from its failing health policy and management of the crisis by heightening tensions with China or stepping up its anti-Muslim policy; Israel, facing massive protests against government health policy and a new lockdown, escalates tensions with Iran; Iran itself, faced with the destructive health and economic ravages of the crisis, has no alternative than to intensify warlike barbarism.

This headlong flight into imperialist confrontation is particularly striking today in the case of Turkey. As Le Monde Diplomatique of September 2020 underlines, Erdogan is under increasing economic and political pressure within the country: with setbacks for his party, the AKP, in the last municipal elections in March 2019, where the opposition won local elections in Istanbul and Ankara, two splits occurred within the AKP this year, testifying to divisions within the president's faction. In the face of this, he escalated imperialist threats with the aim of exacerbating Turkish nationalism and rallying the people behind him. “Turkey's domestic and foreign policies are intertwined. Foreign policy serves as fuel for domestic policy” (Fehim Tastekin, Turkish journalist, on the Daktilo 1984 site, 6/21/20, quoted by the Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2020).

After its intervention in Syria, its direct engagement (arms, mercenaries, elite soldiers) alongside the government of Tripoli in Libya and its unilateral claims on large areas of the eastern Mediterranean, rich in gas and oil, not only provoked an exacerbation of tensions with Greece but also with Russia, France, Egypt and Israel. More than ever, Turkey is a major driver of imperialist ‘each against all' (the founding principle of Turkish foreign policy has for decades been ‘the Turk has no friends, only the Turk’, Monde Diplomatique, October 2019).

A final level to consider is the fact that the Covid-19 crisis also emphatically heralds the disintegration of alliances that have played a major part since World War II.

• NATO is one of the major remnants of the Cold War between the eastern and Western blocs. Today, however, the ‘strategic consensus’ between the USA and European powers no longer exists: Trump also tends to favour in Europe a strategy based on totally subjugated allies, such as Poland associated with Lithuania and the Ukraine; on the other hand, tensions between NATO member countries are growing, such as between Greece and Turkey over drilling in the Mediterranean, but also conflict between France and Italy in Libya. NATO’s decomposition is becoming more and more inevitable.
• the prospect of a single EU foreign policy is also increasingly looking illusory. From the Middle East to North Africa, from the Mediterranean to Russia, Germany, France, Italy and even Spain are each pursuing their own policies inspired by their own imperialist interests.

The obvious inability of decaying capitalism to deal in a coordinated manner with the pandemic crisis can only have as a corollary a massive accentuation of the tendency towards ‘each against all', towards fragmentation and chaos on all levels. Data concerning the development of imperialist tensions largely confirm this general orientation. For the entire population and for the working class in particular, it is more than ever the prospect of an exacerbation of warlike barbarism and bloody massacres.

R. Havanais, 25/9/20

“Building Back Better” is the British bourgeoisie’s latest vacuous soundbite meant to convey, like its predecessor “Levelling Up”, that an equitable and just society is necessary and possible post-pandemic. What both phrases inadvertently acknowledge is that society continues to be divided along class lines and that “we” are most certainly not “all in it together”.

From health to housing, education to income, what the ruling class’s own statistics confirm is that the working class, having previously suffered decades of austerity, has been hardest hit over the past 12 plague months. From this perspective, it’s necessary to see that the economic crisis and social deprivations accelerated by Covid-19 have roots deep in the decadence and decay of capitalism in general and the decline of Britain in particular.

We will also see that sections of the proletariat, under the most difficult conditions, have nonetheless attempted a defence of basic class interests.

Health – an historic decline

Poverty has an absolute negative impact on health of the people. Take for instance the question of the life expectancy, as it had been reported by Sir Michael Marmot already before the start of the pandemic.  “Life expectancy has stalled for the first time in more than 100 years and even reversed for the most deprived women in society, (…) which shows the gap in health inequalities is yawning even wider than it did a decade ago, in large part due to the impact of cuts linked to the government’s austerity policies.”

“Sir Michael Marmot’s review, 10 years after he warned that growing inequalities in society would lead to worse health, reveals a shocking picture across England, which he says is no different to the rest of the UK and could have been prevented… Real cuts to people’s incomes are damaging the nation’s health for the long term. Not only are lifespans stalling, but people are living for more years in poor health…. ‘This damage to the nation’s health need not have happened. It is shocking,’ said Marmot, director of the UCL [University College London] Institute of Health Equity.” [1]

The new Marmot Review, published in February 2020 [2] was said to imply a “15-20 year difference in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest areas of the UK.” [3] For men in the poorest areas, “you could expect to live nine years fewer than someone in one of its most affluent areas” [4]

So when Covid-19 and then lockdown hit in February-March 2020, it affected most “Those living in the poorest parts of Britain [who] have a greater chance of suffering from heart and lung disease, and their children are more than twice as likely to be obese as those in the richest parts. People condemned to poor-quality housing are more likely to have illnesses such as asthma, and with mental health disproportionately damaged by the stresses of poverty, the poorest men are up to 10 times more at risk of suicide than the richest.” [5]

Poor housing, health and diet – the lot of much of the British proletariat - became breeding grounds for the spread of Covid and encouraged its most pernicious repercussions.

“For some of the most deprived areas in England, January [2021] was the deadliest month since the pandemic began. In January the Covid mortality rate in Burnley [Lancashire] was more than double the English average, and deaths from all causes were 60 per cent higher than the English average.” [6]

Not just in the North of England: The capital, London, has been home to the so-called “Covid Triangle” of three Boroughs. “Barking & Dagenham, Redbridge and Newham were competing for the highest rate of infections in the whole country. In Barking & Dagenham, one in 16 people was reported to be infected … Within this area, a high proportion of the workforce are either essential staff who cannot stay at home … or those forced out to work by job insecurity … As the more contagious mutation sent death rates skyrocketing locally, it also exposed a complex web of deeper problems that have built up over many years. In particular, the increased exposure to the virus collided with the problems faced by an already susceptible population, many of whom suffered from comorbidities and poorer health outcomes.”

“High levels of deprivation and job insecurity, vast income inequality, housing discrimination and medical disparities have long had a severe impact on the tangle of communities and ethnic minority populations that live in these boroughs. But when combined with the necessity to go to work, to take public transport and to share space in densely packed housing, they also provided the perfect breeding ground for a deadly virus. The domino effect would prove catastrophic.”[7]

The above description, from the “boss’s newspaper” the Financial Times, explains very clearly that the issue here isn’t simply one of “ethnic” or other minorities being singled out for suffering, but that their suffering is part and parcel of the working class’s generalised immiseration.

Britain’s statutory workers’ sick pay – to which the lowest earners aren’t even entitled – is amongst the most meagre in Europe. Through necessity, many workers avoided being tested for Covid – one factor which helped render the “world beating” test and trace system ineffective. A study by King’s College London and Public Health England found that of those who reported the key Covid symptoms only 18% had self-isolated. “Our study did indicate … that financial constraints and caring responsibilities are common barriers to adherence.” [8] The bourgeoisie’s historic decimation of the social wage – payments to support individuals in need and to maintain hospitals and care services - is thus a primary factor driving Covid infection rates in Britain to “world beating” levels.

For those workers made unemployed, furloughed at home on reduced wages or obliged to recover from illness there, life could be fractious. With schools closed to all but the children of those judged “key workers”, parents, many of them working extended hours from home, were obliged also to become teachers, cut off by lockdown from (unpaid) family or community care networks. The proletariat as a whole suffered disproportionately. The term “digital poverty” was coined to explain why many working class kids had no laptops for distanced learning or even a home internet connection.

“Towards the end of 2020, 23 per cent of the UK population was living in poverty. The 700,000 people plunged into hardship during the pandemic included 120,000 children. Growing poverty levels were driven by a few factors. Stay at home orders have driven up living costs, with households paying more for gas and electricity as well as spending more on food for children who might normally get free school meals. That combines with soaring unemployment as lockdowns made it difficult for sectors like hospitality and retail to operate. The UK’s unemployment rate hit 5.1 per cent at the end of 2020, meaning 1.74 million people were out of work. Office for National Statistics figures showed a 454,000 rise compared to the same point in 2019 and the highest unemployment numbers since 2016.” [9]

This report by Big Issue magazine also said that three quarters of children living in poverty came from households where one parent was in or was seeking work. At Christmas time 2020, the United Nation’s Unicef charity launched a domestic emergency response in the UK for the first time in its 70-year history to help feed children hit by the Covid-19 crisis!

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) warned of the likely repercussions of the Pandemic: “These include depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, hopelessness, feelings of entrapment and burdensomeness, substance misuse, loneliness, domestic violence, child neglect or abuse, unemployment, and other financial insecurity. Appropriate services must be made available for people in crisis and those with new or existing mental health problems. Of greatest concern, is the effect of economic damage from the pandemic. One study reported that after the 2008 economic crisis, rates of suicide increased in two thirds of the 54 countries studied, particularly among men and in countries with higher job losses.” [10] As we have seen, far from providing the “appropriate services” demanded by the BMJ, the British state has been whittling away at these for the past 30 years.

Faced with a growing pauperisation, nearly nine million people borrowed more money last year because of the impact of coronavirus.  “Since June last year, the proportion of workers borrowing £1,000 or more had increased from 35% to 45%, said the Office for National Statistics. Self-employed people were more likely than employees to borrow money. There was also a large increase in the proportion of disabled people borrowing similar sums.” [11] A photo of hundreds of people queuing in the snow for food at a soup kitchen in Glasgow “went viral” as the demand on food banks soared over the winter.

Not everyone even had a roof over their heads during the first year of the pandemic. Despite the state’s attempts to “clear the streets” by opening some hostels and hotels to the homeless, “Almost 1,000 homeless deaths occurred last year across the UK... The Museum of Homelessness said the figure rose by more than a third on the previous year, and called for more to be done to stop such ‘terrible loss of life’”. [12]

Death in harness

We have seen how, for many workers made unemployed or furloughed on reduced pay, life “at home” or on the streets was and remains fraught with danger. For many, this option just wasn’t and isn’t available: sick or at risk, the need to earn a wage obliged them to work. And it is therefore no surprise to discover that Covid took its greatest toll in areas traditionally manned by the working class.

Given the well-documented shortages of PPE, poor social distancing and the callous clearing out of the untested elderly from hospitals into largely ill-prepared care homes [13], it was the nurses, care workers and other “front-line” staff who bore the brunt. Figures from the Office for National Statistics [77] show that care-home workers and nurses are among those most likely to die from coronavirus, alongside machine operatives, home carers, chefs, restaurant managers, and bus drivers.

Like ill-health, exhaustion leaves workers prone to viral infection and at the start of the pandemic there were some 100,000 vacancies within the NHS, including 20,000 in the nursing sector. As over-crowding and staff illness took its toll, fewer and fewer medical and support staff dealt with more and more patients, adding to their own risk of infection. Hospitals themselves became breeding grounds for Covid-19. In January, 2021, “52,000 NHS staff are off sick with Covid. Over 850 UK healthcare workers are thought to have died of Covid between March and December 2020.” [14] 1 out of 4 people who were hospitalised with Covid caught it in hospital!

UK food processing plants - including abattoirs - were also viral hotspots, while bus drivers were found to be particularly at risk, especially because of the delay in installing protective screens for the drivers. The long-term effects of cancelled hospital treatments coupled with failing services for vulnerable, disabled or mentally ill people have yet to be calculated, although almost 5 million NHS patients were in early April 2021 awaiting treatment cancelled or delayed “because of Covid”. The working class in general does not have the means to source “alternative” or “private” treatments.

The State’s attitude to the working class in GB

The British bourgeoisie has considered it prudent, in the face of its worst economic crisis since the 1930s to “invest” an estimated £400 billion in various forms of “rescue” packages, including furlough payments and a temporary extension of Universal Credit. This debt-driven disbursement of value previously created by the working class, or predicated on its future exploitation, has not been actioned out of altruism but to preserve whole industries and firms from bankruptcy, to maintain a minimum workforce, and to ensure a modicum of social cohesion. In this sense, today’s situation – mirrored in most major industrial countries – holds certain similarities with the ancient Roman Empire which in its decadent epoch was obliged to feed its slaves, rather than be fed by them.

However, determined to show that despite its “relief” measures the state is no ”soft-touch”, the Government of Boris Johnson – those who coined “Building Back Better” and “Levelling Up”, - insisted that yesterday’s “heroes”, NHS staff including nurses, should be limited to a pay rise of one per cent: around 60 pennies a day after tax. This was coldly calculated to send a signal to the working class as a whole: “if the deserving nurses aren’t going to be showered with money, neither are you”.

Ramming the idea home was a well-publicised Supreme Court ruling in March 2021 that care staff across the UK, who sleep at their workplace in case they are needed, are not entitled to the minimum wage for their whole shift.

And in case the message wasn’t clear enough, tens of thousands more workers face their existing terms and conditions being torn up and replaced by much harsher regimes of exploitation – the policy of “fire and rehire”, gateway to the extension of precarious work, zero-hours contracts and the “gig economy”. Tesco, British Telecom, British Gas, and various bus companies are amongst the businesses employing this “tactic”. One in 10 workers was said to be affected by such plans. All this in the name of “greater productivity” and higher “efficiency”. It’s the working class that’s being presented with a £400 billion bill.

Backing up all this is the state’s threat of greater repression enshrined in the “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill” which has sparked protests across Britain. [15] Sabotaging the struggle from within, the trade unions are gearing up to pose as the “natural” defenders of the working class, in the face of these new attacks – the Royal College of Nurses’ (RCN) strike threat and 12% pay claim to counter the government’s 1% offer being just the most obvious example.

Working Class Resistance

The traditions and lessons of widespread working class struggles (like those in 1972 and 1984 in GB) have largely been buried over the past 30 years or so and the recent lockdowns in response to the pandemic impose further restrictions on workers’ ability to defend their interests. Nonetheless, there have been expressions of working class anger and attempts at self-organisation, including last summer’s demonstrations by health workers across Britain [16] and the recent rent strikes by students in GB and student demonstrations in France. [17]

In the health sector, as mentioned above, the RCN nurses’ union and the Unison union “representing” other NHS staff were obliged to talk of organising strike or protest action in the face of growing anger at poor pay and life-threatening conditions on the wards and in theatres. At least one protest (in Manchester on March 7, 2021) against the pay rise was met with dispersal orders and arrests “for breaking social distancing rules”. For the moment, such union actions appear to have helped delay any self-activity and to have defused the militancy, if not the resentment, of nurses and other NHS staff.

Other incidents of struggle in this sector were noted by the AngryWorkersWorld Blog of March 5, including: “In January 2021, porters went on 11 days of strike action organised by Unison against ‘fire and re-hire’ by the NHS Trust at Heartlands in Birmingham... In March 2021, more than 150 porters, cleaners, switchboard and catering staff employed at Cumberland Infirmary by facilities company Mitie, took a first day of action with Unison over missing payments for working unsocial hours. Mitie workers also took action with the GMB at Epsom & St Helier NHS Trust for unpaid wages. These disputes affect mainly the outsourced fringe.” [18]

On April 6, around 1,400 workers at the government’s vehicle licensing offices (DVLA) in Swansea began a four-day strike against inadequate Covid safety provisions which have seen over 500 cases of infection across two facilities. At the same time an “indefinite strike” by almost 500 bus workers at Go North West in Manchester entered its sixth week in the face of a company plan to impose a fire and hire contact implying losses of pay up to £2,500 a year and massive cuts in sick-pay provisions. In the capital, over 2,000 bus drivers at London United, London Sovereign and Quality Line have been taking “rolling” strike action since the end of February in opposition to fire and rehire schemes. Around one third of drivers are said to have rejected the Unite Union’s proposed settlement with the bosses and there have been pickets at bus depots.

Early in March, thousands of British Gas field engineers staged a four-day strike – the latest in a series of their actions in opposition to fire and rehire proposals. The company issued dismissal notices to almost 1000 workers refusing to sign up to the new deal on April 1. April 5 saw hundreds of Deliveroo drivers – some of whom earn as little as £2 an hour and whose precarious terms of service epitomise the “gig economy” – go on strike and stage a protest outside the company HQ in London. The anger of up to 50,000 engineers and support staff at British Telecom at site closures, 1000 proposed job losses and contract re-writes has so far been contained by a two-pronged attack: from the company in the form of inducements of cash payments of between £1000 and £1500 and by the Communications Union which has engaged in a series of ballots and talks with management aimed at taking the heat out of the situation.

The above actions - by no means an inclusive account - show that workers have not been cowed by the pandemic nor government propaganda but also that, in general, their resistance has so far been relatively well-corralled and defused by the trade unions and has largely been unable to resist the austerity being proposed or imposed. The attacks on workers’ conditions and living standards can only increase in the coming period, whatever stage the pandemic has reached.  The resistance of the working class to these attacks will be more necessary than ever.

Robert Frank, 17/04/2021

The International media always try to depict Sweden as a “paradise on earth”, a Welfare State with almost total equality among the citizens. Nothing could be further from the truth. For more than three decades, privatisations and outsourcing of schools, hospitals, GP surgeries, as well as other sectors, like care for the elderly, has created a situation where the health sector has suffered from increased cuts. The corona crisis has clearly shown the cracks in this illusion. Today, the number of hospital beds in Sweden has decreased to one of the lowest levels in Europe.

Just as in the rest of the world, the development of the corona crisis in Sweden gives us a clear illustration of decomposing capitalist society in general, as well as of the criminal negligence of the bourgeoisie. Because Sweden has been regarded as a model for the “Welfare State” historically, the present crisis is the last nail in the coffin of this illusion.

Today, when Sweden is in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic, the chaos is increasing, with hospitals and Intensive Care Units overburdened. More than half a million have been infected by the virus and more than 10,000 dead in a population of around 10 million, spread over a vast geographical area. This is a clear contrast to countries like Norway and Finland, despite geographical similarities. The so called “Swedish strategy” with lesser restrictions and lock-downs, has certainly not spared the population. Today, the chaos is accelerating. The state and government are blaming the regions, responsible for providing health care, and the regions are blaming the local councils. In the midst of this stand the health workers, who just a couple of months ago were threatened by new lay-offs, when the first wave ended in the summer.

The roots of the present situation are to be found in the continuous slaughter of the health sector in Sweden since the 1990s. The process of “de-regulation” and privatisation of hospitals, all over the country but especially in Stockholm, has meant continuous cuts in hospital beds and staff. Protests among hospital workers and the local population have been common, especially in the North where local hospitals have been closed, where all kinds of patients, including pregnant women, must travel long distances to get to the nearest hospital.

The same development has been seen with the pharmacies, which has meant that essential stocks of medicines had disappeared from hospitals and pharmacies, largely due to the privatisation of the former state pharmacy monopoly (and a proliferation of private pharmacies), leading to disappearance of vital medications. The same development can be seen with the national stocks of essential medicines for crisis situations – this disappeared around the millennium.

At the same time, the situation in the elderly care sector has been worsening for decades (this has been the responsibility of the local councils since the beginning of the 1990s) and there have been lots of “scandals” in the media, often focusing on the situation in privatised nursing homes where basic hygiene routines have been neglected because of the overburdening of the workers. Many workers in these institutions have a precarious work situation, are called in at short notice and do not have a steady sickness insurance – so they can’t stay home if they are sick.

In fact, during the autumn 2019, massive protests took place in the hospitals in Stockholm after an announcement of major staffing cuts (doctors and nurses), protests that were gaining sympathy from the general public, both in Stockholm and in the rest of the country.

This was the situation in Sweden in the beginning of the year when the corona virus hit the country. The state and the responsible authorities, the regions (greater councils) and local councils were totally unprepared for the outbreak. Basically, there was no preparation, no stocks of medicine, masks or shields, no possibilities for testing and tracing.

Was there a conscious Swedish strategy?

The Swedish authorities’ strategy of avoiding lockdown has been both criticised and hailed in the rest of the world. In the beginning, the epidemiologists thought that there would not be any risk of the virus spreading outside Asia, then they discussed –behind closed doors– the possibility of acquiring a “herd immunity” in the population on the basis of models of influenza viruses (something they later denied) and adopted the policy of “recommendations” instead of “restrictions”. The Swedish Strategy has been marked by a certain ‘scientific arrogance’: “We are doing it right and the rest of the world is doing it wrong”. The main spokesman for this policy, former state epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, talked about “allowing” the virus to pass through the population– although he never talked about “herd immunity”. He was later got rid of because it turned out that he was, at the same time, on the payroll for advising certain “interested” corporations…

This whole approach led to a massive spread of the virus, especially in the care homes, and the workers were blamed. Those who were most exposed, such as bus and taxi drivers, had no protection and the virus spread rapidly in the immigrant communities in the suburbs. The authorities talked about “lack of information” and problems of housing, but no measures were taken to protect these workers. The main theme of this so-called strategy is that you, yourself, have the responsibility and it is your own fault if you get infected!

Now the authorities are trying to blame each another – the government blames the greater councils, and vice versa. Scientific experts openly criticise the Public Health Authority and the state epidemiologist for not recommending masks. As in the rest of the world, to “work from home” is only possible for professionals and a minority of employees, while the majority of the working class must use overcrowded public transport systems to go to work.

The myth of the Welfare State

Sweden has always been seen as an example of a smooth functioning Welfare State, with a history of social reforms, high levels of public spending and high levels of “trust” in authority and government. The corona crisis has revealed massive cracks in this façade, due to decades of cutting down and privatisations in the public sector. The cynicism of the Swedish bourgeoisie towards the elderly population reminds us of the dark side of the Swedish modernity project, when cynical experiments and sterilisation programmes were carried out until the 70s. The “Swedish strategy” has proved to be another cruel experiment. Today, all parts of the national bourgeoisie are happy about the good effects of the Swedish strategy for the Swedish economy – at the same time as unemployment is peaking at unprecedented levels. As usual, it is the working class that takes the blow, both at the level of disease and death, and on the level of attacks on its living conditions.

Svensson

All the media recognise that the world pandemic SARS-CoV2 (Covid 19) which, at the time of writing, has infected ten million people and caused the death of 500,000 of them, has pushed the scientific community into a race against time for the development of a vaccine. But they are also obliged to admit that this "race for a vaccine" is still far from being at the stage of a "final sprint".

Since the nineteenth century and the creation of the first vaccine against rabies by Louis Pasteur in 1881 using the principle of inoculation, there has been enormous progress in methods of cellular culture in viruses on the basis of biotechnologies and genetics, allowing the emergence of several viral vaccines, but now we are being told that a vaccine against Covid-19 will only be available at the end of 2021! In fact, all the specialists agree that it takes on average 10 to 15 years to find a reliable vaccine and put it to work because, outside of delays in its conception and fabrication, an uncompressed three-staged, large scale experimentation programme is indispensable: test the vaccine on animals, test it on a non-infected population and finally test it on the sick: "That means that there are many trials, many errors, but we have many other options to explore" judged Benjamin Neuman, virologist at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, "Because a very efficient vaccine against a member of the family of coronaviruses has never been designed for humans".

Late or abandoned preventative measures

It's an astonishing declaration because coronaviruses are not unknown to science! SARS-CoV1 (which appeared at the end of 2002 in south-east China) and MERS-CoV (appearing in Saudi Arabia in 2012), the two big brothers of SARS-CoV2, had already given rise to some scientific research with a view to creating a vaccine. In the first case, research was halted and plans for a vaccine dropped even before any experimentation on humans. In the second, research is still ongoing and being tested on animals. Despite the fact that for some years scientists have envisaged "the threat of a pandemic like Covid-19", scientific studies on coronaviruses and the development of vaccines have been judged to be ... "unprofitable"! The domain of scientific research in the service of public health is constantly under threat, hampered by the lack of financial and logistical means. It was one of the first victims of budget reductions whatever the political colouring of the government in power: "In May 2019, Donald Trump shut down a special unit of the UN Security Council, composed of eminent experts charged with the fight against pandemics"[1] "After Swine Flu in 2009, functionaries of the European Commission published a report containing political recommendations but the Commission was then rebuffed by EU member states (...). After SARS in 2003, the European Centre for the Control of Diseases was created and it did excellent work. But it counted only 180 collaborators (...). At Sciensano (the national institute for public health in Belgium) there were very competent personnel ... but the institute is weak because of a lack of investment"[2] .

Now they tell us: "In order to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV2, researchers are basing themselves on studies concerning SARS-CoV1 and MERS-CoV"[3]. 17 years have passed since the appearance of the first virus! 17 lost years in the search for a vaccine which could have saved thousands of lives!

The competitive race against time...

Faced with the breadth and the present ravages of the pandemic across the world, simple logic tells you that it is necessary to develop cooperation, an international coordination of concerted scientific efforts and a concentrated mobilisation of scientific knowledge in search of a vaccine in order to catch up as much as possible after the unavoidable delays in the struggle against this scourge.

But that's not at all the case in the present reality; on the contrary. The current world race that we are seeing in order to find vaccines and treatments takes on frenzied, chaotic and disordered allures, everyone for themselves: "More than a hundred projects have been launched in the world and a dozen clinical trials are underway to try to find a cure against the sickness"[4]. According to the media, all the pharmaceutical giants like Sanofi (French pharmaceutical enterprise), Gilead Sciences (US pharmaceutical laboratory), GlaxoSmithKline (British pharmaceutical giant), Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (New York based business), Johnson and Johnson (American firm) and the Chinese business, CanSino, to name only a few, are doing some of these trials but are doing it on their own.

Why are we faced with such a situation? These are the very laws of capitalism, reflected by the weight of ambitions of all states and the competition between them, which doesn't allow society to function other than through the law of profit and generalised competition in a dispersed and chaotic manner. In the same way, capitalism has held back, slowed down, sabotaged and stopped all measures of prevention and research budgets in all sectors of health; and the functioning of capitalism and its laws are directly opposed to the common pooling of information and the indispensable centralisation of resources needed for the discovery of an effective vaccine.

... at the expense of the health of the population...

This sprint to find a vaccine and a "miracle remedy" against Covid-19 is not without tragic consequences for the rest of world health: throughout, researchers and virologists warn against the dangers of this sudden precipitation: "Some deaths are due to reckless research (...) Today science goes too quickly and that has considerable consequences (...) There's not enough time for critical reflection on scientific results, which has serious consequences"[5].

A considerable amount of work is being carried out on "substitute vaccines" and oriented towards recycling older virus treatments, resuming research into abandoned vaccines such as the ones against malaria or Ebola, which were judged in the past to be "non-profitable"[6] but which have become, from one day to the next, an "interesting perspective" for the access of new markets opened by the pandemic of SARS-CoV2. That shows the total impotence and disarray of the "scientific community".

But above all, this can only end up with the precipitous circulation onto the market of "cheap" vaccines, of poor quality and insufficiently tested. That also means that an incalculable and dizzying number of new victims will pay for the consequences with their lives.

... but for the profit of states.

In reality, capitalism, the bourgeois class and its states do not care about the health of their populations: "If the insane amounts invested into military expenses and research had been invested in health and the well-being of populations, never could such a pandemic develop"[7].

“From the businesses developing the vaccine against the coronavirus, who will be the first to commercialise it?”[8] "A vaccine against the coronavirus: will country be the priority?”[9] These are the big questions that the bourgeoisie are posing through their media! The facts are clear: instead of centralising and unifying all scientific work in order to produce as quickly as possible a treatment and a vaccine, each pharmaceutical firm jealously guards the stages and levels of research in its own laboratories in order to be the first to find a vaccine, to get the patent which then gives it the monopoly of manufacture for a period of at least 7 to 12 years. In order to cover the immense costs required for their work, they turn towards the highest bidders in exchange for the most sordid mercantile agreements. Among these, the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, which, without scruples, announced that it would distribute an eventual vaccine giving priority to the United States, which had invested 30 million dollars to support its research, in addition to the 226 million dollars from the American government already concluded in December 2019 with this firm on the production of vaccines against the virus... of the flu. The scandal provoked by this revelation about Sanofi and particularly the indignation of Macron are nothing but a masquerade. In reality, behind their hypocritical declarations and their "humanitarian" vows that a vaccine can't be subject to the "laws of the market", that "it must be used for the public good" and that "its access must be equitable and universal", hides the fear of Europe of losing points in the international race for a vaccine on the world market. Beyond the will of pharmaceutical companies to make their own profits, conforming to the logic of competition, the principal motor of capitalist society, they cannot escape the laws of state capitalism which makes each national state exercise the most tight control and the most strict vigilance on the orientations and management of its national economy and on the businesses which depend on it, including the most powerful "multinationals"[10]. In other words, it is the state which directs the financial policy of its enterprises.

A manifestation of the impasse of capitalism

Just like the "war of masks", the war of the vaccines is an "extremely edifying example of the cynical and frenzied competition which involves every state"[11] who are pursuing a simple objective: either to be the first to get their hands on a vaccine and hold a monopoly on it, or to claim certain privileges over it, or again, to avoid being run out of the race and having to "beg" for help. Bourgeois commentators recognise this: "Between American and European rivalry over a future vaccine and new tensions between Donald Trump and China, divisions between the major powers are deepening"[12]. Faced with the US and Chinese states, "Europe is throwing billions in the fight to obtain a vaccine (...) No member state (...) has a complete portfolio in order to develop the vaccine"[13]. Thus the Trump administration has subsidised research at AstraZeneca with 1.2 billion euros, in exchange for 300 million doses of the vaccine. And the states of the EU (Germany, France, Holland, Italy) want to tap into "urgent funds" of around 2.4 billion euros in order to accelerate negotiations on the preferential provision of the vaccine with pharmaceutical firms. It remains to be seen if this attempt to create a common purse succeeds, given the incapacity of the European Union to establish concerted measures regarding lock-downs and the management of the shortages of medical material.

The actions of the United States in withdrawing funds from the WHO, led by the Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who is accused by Trump of being used by China, is also a striking illustration of the savage and pitiless commercial and imperialist war being undertaken by the three main sharks (China, United States, EU) on the planet[14],  with all of them rejecting, with the greatest hypocrisy, the responsibility for the lack of coordination: while the United States accuses the WHO of "collusion" with China, the EU castigates the "egoistic" behaviour of the United States.

Left-leaning papers like The Guardian or similar are obliged to recognise that there is a lack of coordination but their lamentations only serve to mask the responsibility of the capitalist system as a whole. What is absolutely clear in this battle of the vaccines is that the preoccupation of the health of populations is not at all the central preoccupation of the state and the dominant class. The latter are only concerned to use health in order to impose and strengthen their place in the imperialist arena.

The greatest loser in the war of vaccines is humanity which will have to pay tribute, with an even greater number of victims, for the survival of this incurably sick system which can only lead to still more suffering. Only a society capable of mobilising itself, unifying and centralising its efforts in an associated manner at the world level can overcome this situation by starting from the basis of real human need.

 

Aube, June 30, 2020.