The Communist Left and

the COVID-19 Crisis

A Collection of texts by the Communist Left on the Coronavirus Crisis
 Contents:
1. Initial Thoughts on Coronavirus and its Fallout (09/03/2020).
2. Coronavirus: Lies and Half-Truths (10/03/2020).
3. ‘‘Unity’’ against the Epidemic? (11/03/2020).
4. On the Measures taken by the Bourgeoisie regarding the Coronavirus Epidemic; to the
Proletarians, to our Readers, to our Comrades (11/03/2020).
5. The Emerging ‘‘Coronavirus Strikes’’ and the Responsibility of Governments
(12/03/2020).
6. When ‘‘the Economy’s’’ Needs Endanger us All (13/03/2020).
7. Italy: "We're not Lambs to the Slaughter!" Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus
(14/03/2020).
8. Coronavirus: Saving Lives, not Investments (14/03/2020).
9. More Evidence that Capitalism has become a Danger to Humanity (15/02/2020).
10. Capitalism Grappling with Coronavirus (15/02/2020).
11. COVID-19 pandemic. Against the State of Alarm! Against the Anti-Proletarian Measures
of the Government! (15/03/2020).
12. It is not up to the Proletarians to Pay for the Coronavirus and the Crisis! (15/02/2020).
13. The Social Use of the Epidemic (16/03/2020).
14. There is no Real Confinement Without Workplace Closures (16/03/2020).
15. The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Symptom of the Terminal Phase of Capitalist Decadence
(17/03/2020).
16. Will the EU Survive the Coronavirus? (17/03/2020).
17. Coronavirus and Catastrophic Crisis: The Tragic Responsibility of Communists
(19/03/2020).
18. The Coronavirus Pandemic: The Main Danger is not the Coronavirus but the Virus of
Capitalism! (20/03/2020).
19. Governments are trying to save their National Capital, Striking Workers are Saving
People’s Lives (20/03/2020).
20. Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus: An Incomplete Chronicle of Events (16-21
March) (22/03/2020).
21. Coronavirus and Class Struggle (23/03/2020).
22. Humanity's Health or Capitalism's Profit? (24/03/2020).
23. When Confinement is a Starvation Sentence (24/03/2020).
24. EU Plans the ‘‘Recovery’’ after Covid (25/03/2020).
25. The Expert’s Crisis (26/03/2020).
26. Covid is an Accelerator, not a Brake (26/03/2020).
27. The True Fabricator of the Virus is Capitalism (XX/03/2020)
28. Either the World Working Class puts an End to Capitalism, or Capitalism puts an End to
Humanity (30/03/2020).
29. What Covid Reveals about Agriculture and Food (31/03/2020).
30. COVID-19 Treatment For Capitalism Mean No Relief For The Working Class
(31/03/2020).
31. The Pandemic is not Above the Classes (31/03/2020).
32. Coronavirus vs. Capitalism (31/03/2020).
33. Pandemics, Profits and Proles (31/03/2020).
 Initial Thoughts on Coronavirus and its Fallout
(09/03/2020).
International Communist Tendency (ICT)

The article which follows is a translation from ​Battaglia Comunista 3 (March 2020), paper of our Italian
affiliate, the Internationalist Communist Party. Italy has currently one of the worst death rates from
coronavirus (4%), higher even than China’s. This despite locking down over a dozen towns in Lombardy,
closing all schools and universities throughout the country, banning public gatherings and telling Italians
who attend any social gatherings that they should keep one metre in any direction away from the next
person. The lock down is now being extended right across the North (in a very confusing way) but the
infection has also reached Lazio (the Rome region) where even the leader of the Democratic Party,
Nicola Zingaretti, has been infected. Meanwhile, social life has become unbearable particularly for the
young since most places shut down by early evening. The Italian economy has had 18 months of no
growth, the collapse in tourism and the rest of economic life can only make things worse. This article
though looks at the wider context of the impact of coronavirus which in some ways has provided an alibi
for what was already a coming crisis.

And it’s not only in Italy that the state’s cuts in health and social spending are revealing a ‘health service’
in no position to combat an epidemic like coronavirus. On 4 March Boris Johnson magnanimously
announced that workers who had to go on sick leave because of infection from coronavirus would be paid
statutory sick pay from the first day of that leave, rather than from the fourth as per normal. However,
around 2 million people in the UK do not earn enough to qualify for any statutory sick pay, including more
than a third of the million or so workers on zero hours contracts. Many of these workers are engaged in
vital work in health, social care and cleaning: areas especially important for a society facing the possibility
of an infectious disease pandemic. On top of this, GP surgeries are overflowing as the number of GPs
has dropped with the government’s chopping of their pension entitlements.

The situation in the US is even worse with millions of US citizens unable to pay for emergency treatment
and a government which began in denial of the seriousness of the outbreak and is still not monitoring
people on the move. The death rate in the US so far is higher than most of the rest of the world (although
this should decline over time). A comrade from the IWG, our US comrades, tells us:

’’As the cases increase by the day and thousands are quarantined across cities from coast to coast,
the spread of the virus and its resulting media coverage have left a considerable impact on the
economy. A significant increase in demand for products like hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and
surgical masks has caused a shortage all across the country. Pharmacies and similar stores have
felt this impact in their sales since many businesses have been unable to restock the majority of
these supplies due to a limited supply and an inability to meet the demand. The sanitizing products
which remain available are significantly marked up in price in an effort to increase profit. Business
owners are not the only ones affected by the coronavirus epidemic; workers who are infected are
quarantined and most are not compensated for the time they are forced to take off work. Across the
US, school districts have been shut down, and many teachers and faculty (who are not infected by
the virus) will especially struggle to make ends meet.’’

In every state across the planet the health speculators are already making a killing, and we are as yet
only at the beginning of this saga…

1. The Health Crisis in Italy

Leaving aside the purely epidemiological aspects, which we won’t go into here, it was revealed from the
very start that the health system is close to collapse. In the past ten years alone there have been cuts of
over €37 billion with over 70,000 fewer beds, etc. This has produced two basic results: the first is that
having border controls is not enough and for some time the number of pathologies has increased that
could instead have been limited with an effective and widespread programme of prevention, control and
medical treatment. In the last decade of crisis, in which the purchasing power of families has collapsed,
one of the first expenses to be cut is per capita health expenditure.

Italian healthcare faces a dramatic situation in which the exasperation of “customers" is the fuse that
triggers the increasingly frequent attacks on ambulances and medical personnel. What might happen,
given the inability of such a remodelled health system to cope with a growing emergency, becomes clear.

The second result is one we have known for some time: there are not enough medical personnel to cope
with the emergency. The shortage of hospital doctors who are not hired because they "cost too much", is
already well reported alongside the scarcity of other staff which an emergency like this forcefully reveals.
Now the dire condition of health research is also being revealed. To give one glaring example: the three
researchers from the Spallanzani hospital who isolated the virus in Italy are all young and precarious.

2. The Economic Crisis

Though a long way from being the real reason for the global crisis, this epidemic could dramatically
worsen it (and the crisis of 2008 has still not finished). The coronavirus will weigh heavily on Chinese,
Italian, European, and global GDP for the year 2020. The figures on global debt, the slow recovery of
industrial production, the largely ineffective outcome of Quantitative Easing, the tiny increases of GDP,
etc., already illustrate one overall difficulty of the economy. It is in a crisis that has not yet been overcome
whilst a new and more devastating crisis is already approaching. Coronavirus could be the final drop
which causes the capitalist cup to overflow. The next few months will be critical. In the meantime, the
economic forecasts (and we are only in March and a few weeks since the beginning of the epidemic)
claim that this emergency will knock one to three points off GDP, which, at any rate will be the justification
for the typical heavy financial intervention which will be paid for, as always, by workers. This will be
accompanied by a decline in domestic trade which foreign companies and traders will pass on to "their"
workers in terms of wage cuts and worse working conditions.

3. Panic-Speculation-Panic
The mass media have not talked about anything else, thus demonstrating the immense firepower that the
dominant ideology has when it decides to convey a particular message. As a result the entire Italian
population has been engulfed in a moment of panic.

But panic is functional as much for social control as for economic speculation, which is always lying in
wait. In such an emergency speculators can throw themselves like sharks on a shoal of cod to seize
every mini-opportunity to make extra profits: with the boom in sales of disinfectant gel and masks the
pharmaceutical and health sector has seen numerous and significant speculative peaks. Meanwhile
supermarkets have been stormed and emptied. A big thank you from these vultures to the coverage given
by the media that so terrified the population. But speculation doesn't stop there. Tens of billions of euros
have already been burned in the Milan stock exchange in recent days, as, once again the opportunity is
seized to make those prone to be terrified, pay at least part of the cost of the crisis: like the small and
medium savers who, at every turn of the crisis, see part of their savings evaporate.

4. Social Control

In China, as in Italy, or wherever the virus is spreading, this emergency represents a test for the State's
ability to intervene. Far from being a static factor, the power of the State, its ability to control and react to
social phenomena is the product of complex human and historical dynamics. Serious emergencies are a
laboratory in which the State increases its capacity to centralise, control and regulate the population. The
global scale of the coronavirus emergency just repeats this dynamic on an even larger scale. It is here
that the State tests the capacity of its machinery to centralise the control of population flows, access
restrictions, social emergency management, etc. Today to contain the virus, tomorrow... for whatever else
might happen. The state, the ruling class, in fact know that the system is facing future disasters of an
increasingly devastating and unpredictable nature (economic crises, wars over poverty, migration,
hunger, and thirst, as well as environmental devastation, climate disasters, epidemics, even riots...), so
each new emergency is also experienced, and it could not be otherwise, as a potential test of its capacity
for action (and for Marxists, the State is nothing but the instrument of oppression of one class by another).

All this without taking into account the possible conflicts that the measures taken can produce within the
different sectors of the bourgeoisie and the politicians who represent them. In this particular case, for
example, the right wing is trying to capitalise on the situation by asking for the expenditure of tens of
billions of euros (which they know very well no-one will ever make available) for the support of businesses
and families. Meanwhile, the government has decided to ban the strikes of some sectors, scheduled for
some time this month, including that of “Non una di meno" (Not one less) on 9 March, by pulling old
anti-strike legislation out of the filing cabinet.

5. The Planet and Humanity are Sick

The coronavirus is only the latest alarm signal. The planet and humanity are suffering from a far bigger
and more serious disease than a virus, a disease that comes from the system of production itself. It
poisons social relations by commodifying them, devastating and degrading everything it encounters in
order to realise its vital substance: profit. This disease is called capitalism, the planet and humanity are ill
with senile capitalism and the coronavirus is but its latest manifestation. This, like all the other symptoms
of planetary, environmental, human, social malaise, must be turned against the disease itself to denounce
its dangers.

6. There is a Cure

There is a cure for this virus, as for all the other disasters that the capitalist disease has produced, is still
producing and, even worse, will produce in the future. The cure is not immediate and definitive, that is
clear, but it is a cure that fixes the minimum conditions for facing the environmental, human and social
emergencies that capitalism will bequeath to the society that will replace it. Communism is the cure for
this evil.

This is not a miracle cure that will, as if by magic, free humanity, and the planet from the many woes that
plague it. No. The communist cure works differently: by freeing humanity from the slavery of profit. Once
freely associated human beings no longer produce for the profit of the few, and produce only to meet
everyone's needs, then we will change the way we deal with problems. By putting human and
environmental well-being at the centre of our concerns, harmful production will be abandoned, huge
resources will be used to restore polluted environments, freely associated human beings will be able to
face the different problems for what they really are, concretely get involved and no longer give a damn, as
happens today, about the impact this can have on GDP, imperialist power, and capital growth.

We can guarantee our cure will work because it implies a radical change in mindset as well as in
economic and social relations, exactly what this planet and this humanity so dramatically ill with capitalism
needs today.

Coronavirus: Lies and Half-Truths (10/03/2020).

Nuevo Curso (NC)

In a ​televised message yesterday on Italian national TV​, Conte ended the split between the “red zones”
and the rest of the country. ​All of Italy is now an epidemic “special zone” where 60 million people are
advised to stay at home​. In ​Spain, meanwhile, the number of cases was rising exponentially​. Madrid and
the Basque Country were recognized as ​“uncontrolled” hotspots by the health authorities. ​The regional
government of Madrid closed all educational centers, recommended teleworking and not to leave home
for the elderly and people with illnesses​. This morning the ​waiting lines in the supermarkets and the
exhaustion of stocks announced that those who can, are ready to go to self-imprisonment. However,
contradictory policies and messages “to keep our peace of mind” have created a cloud of confusion.
Today we will discuss some lies and half-truths about the coronavirus that we have all heard these days
on the streets, in the media and among our co-workers.

“From demonstrating on the streets to confinement the next day? It’ s not that big a deal.”
The March 8 demonstration has become an official liturgy in Spain, a way of implementing a ​new state
ideology to which Sánchez’s “feminist government” is particularly committed. Last week it became
obvious that the government’s so-called “containment phase” no longer contained anything, but they
prioritized the demonstration over safety. The ​Health Minister urged the sick (!!) not to go to the
demonstration​. And the public television headlined the news with a triumphalist and ridiculous “​Feminism
resists the Coronavirus on the streets​“, as if gathering masses of people in the middle of an airborne virus
epidemic was nothing but recklessness.
The state, with the government at its head, set its priorities as expected in the face of the epidemic:
“tranquility”, that is to say, in the first place ​giving media prominence to feminism and its pitiful petty fights
imported from Yankee university debates​, and once the state ritual was completed, ​keeping the
productive apparatus up and running at all costs by minimizing losses, ​if necessary by increasing the
budget and increasing the very deficit normally invoked to cut health spending​.

“There’ s nothing to worry about: our health care system is one of the best in the world.”

This is the same thing ​we heard in Italy before Conte himself began to lay the blame on individual
hospitals and ​regions​. In Italy, as in Spain, ​the public health system is suffering from decades of cuts that
are now being paid for​… something governments are not going to do anything to correct.
Since the beginning of the epidemic in Spain, there have been ​complaints about the lack of basic
materials and the lack of protocols, but above all the lack of personnel​. With the first significant increase
in the number of infections and hospitalizations, it became evident that ​the system was already
overloaded and overwhelmed before the emergency​. And the “private” sector is not helping: ​pandemics
are not covered by private insurance​.
We reach today, when the government has already allocated resources so that the balance sheet of the
big companies does not suffer too much, with the newspapers telling us that the doctors “​store the
material so that it is not stolen and try to adapt to the new situation with the same resources​” that they
had until now and that the ​Madrid hospital system is already “in collapse”​.
And yes, obviously ​countries like the USA with precarious and insufficient public health systems are going
to suffer more than European ones​. But this is no competition, one has to be a genocidal nationalist to
find comfort in the fact that the situation is even worse elsewhere. In Italy, the system has not only
collapsed, but has degenerated into a regional battle in which, faced with the fear of hospital collapse, ​the
saturated regions increasingly find the doors of the hospitals closed elsewhere​. The dismantling of public
health services now puts us all, and especially workers, at risk.

“Let’s not exaggerate, it’s like the flu”

In ​our news channel we continue to tag news about the epidemic by the name by which it was originally
known: Wuhan Pneumonia. If only to keep in mind that it is a pneumonia, that is, it is a severe illness in
itself.
The media and official messages during these weeks have tried to tone the danger down by telling us that
for most of the population it was not fatal, but “something more like a flu” and that “only” the elderly were
at risk – of death. In the graph above we see the comparisons of mortality by age from the 1918 epidemic
– the famous and terrible “Spanish flu” -, the flu of recent years and the coronavirus (data from Wuhan’s
CDC). As can be seen, mortality among the elderly far exceeds not only normal influenza but also that of
the worst epidemic suffered by Europe in the last century. Moreover, it is a tremendously contagious and
disabling disease, it is after all a pneumonia.
In a society like Spain’s, with one of the highest life expectancies in Europe, the impact of the virus is
likely to be high. In fact, in Italy, another so-called “aging” society, ​the mortality rate is exceptionally high,
at 5% compared to the world average of 3.5%​, and doctors warn that ​lack of beds in overcrowded
hospitals may make it worse​.

“This time they won’t leave us stranded, this disease is “democratic” and attacks all social
classes equally”

In the United States, we have already seen that this is not true​: Hundreds of thousands of workers have
been unable to afford not to work in order to quarantine themselves or to go to the doctor. The “remote
working solution” only deepens the class divide. And ​it is the favorite solution of the companies​, of course.
This is how ​the San Francisco correspondent of Die Spiegel described it​:

‘’The platform economy can’t stay at home: the tens of thousands of low-cost drivers from Uber and Lyft,
the food handlers from DoorDash, and the parcel carriers from Amazon. The precarious workers of
Silicon Valley. While the driverless car and the drone-driven mass mailing system still don’t exist, the
beautiful digital world of remote work depends on the analog water carriers. The home office becomes a
status symbol, a matter of class: whoever can stay at home is sovereign. It is quite possible that the
Coronavirus will make this new divide more visible and deepen it in the world of work.’’

In Europe the “platform economy”, which ​Sánchez wants to normalize at all costs in the Workers’ Statute​,
is not yet as developed as in the United States, but in Italy these days the same divide between those
who could work from home and those who could not has been clearly seen. The government maintains
internal transportation for them, regardless of whether they live at home with high-risk populations, like
their parents. Priorities are priorities and for European governments they are measured in economic
terms.

Reassurance?

As workers, the main lesson to be learned from the development of the epidemic is that the threats we
face as a class are global, the virus, like the crisis, knows no borders, and what happens in one place
affects the rest. There are simply no national solutions. Moreover, the interests of individual national
capitals prevent the ruling classes from providing truly global solutions. They will always have an incentive
to “wait a little longer”, to call us to “get on with life” beyond what is sensible… as long as national capital
does not lose its competitive edge. This is what happened in China at the beginning of the epidemic, then
in Korea, Italy, France, Germany… and Spain.
The “serenity” and “tranquility” to which governments from Trump to Sánchez call us is that of the “​sacred
anti-viral union​” formed with the same class that dismantles and erodes the Health systems, the same
ones who prioritize “economic impact” over health risk and over the needs of people… ​who do not have
resources to go into luxury quarantines​. Of course, all governments have said “it’s not that bad”. Of
course they have tried to “de-dramatize”. Their priorities, beyond themselves, are focused on maintaining
social order, preventing their national capital from devaluing too much and trying to keep “normality” by
inertia. Their ideal is that we should uncritically obey the slogans of each moment and not worry or
complain. We cannot accept this. Keeping silent and blindly trusting the same people who are determined
to maintain the conditions that make any epidemic worse are something we simply cannot afford.
 ‘‘Unity’’ against the Epidemic? (11/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

US and European governments are beginning to take the coronavirus epidemic seriously. But delays in
state action and the recommendations translating class differences into different degrees of exposure by
class, generate increasing distrust in this “sacred anti-virus union”, increase the criticism against the
governments and promote the first “coronavirus strikes”.

Governments have lagged behind the epidemic because stopping the spread at all costs was not
their priority

No one doubts about Trump and his government’s inaction responsibility for the spread of the epidemic in
the United States. But until just a few days ago, governments and media ​criticized the measures taken in
Italy for accepting what media told us was an “excessive” cost​. However, to this day, it seems obvious
that those who spoke of “keeping calm” were buying some time that was neither theirs nor were they able
to use, all of this at the expense of increasing the risks to the population.
Brussels is now calling for “aggressive measures” and ​Merkel said just yesterday that 60 to 70% of
Germans will eventually suffer from the disease​… which would mean that she expects tens of thousands
of deaths in Germany alone. The nordist government of the ​Netherlands is openly criticized throughout
the continent for underestimating the possibilities of dissemination and for aggravating the epidemic​. But
the Spanish government is not lagging behind: as soon as the governmental messages, measures and
number of infections are listed in a chronological order, it becomes clear that ​the government never took
the lead in preventing the spread of the disease because it had competing priorities. However, while
invoking “scientific criteria” and the difficulties of coordination with local administrations, we are called
upon to “unite” with them and to leave “ideological” discussions aside.

The “solution” does not lie in authoritarianism but in strengthening already overstretched health
services

We are also told that ​China has been able to contain the epidemic because of its authoritarianism​. It is
true that the epidemic is ​enabling governments to ask for exceptional powers, as in Japan​, and to
recentralize some basic things such as the ​purchase of sanitary materials in Spain or the supply of masks
between European countries​.
However, the idea that authoritarianism or centralization is a solution to the deterioration of health
services is irrational. Hospitals have become saturated with this crisis. ​We have already seen the struggle
of French emergency workers​; today in Spain ​the waiting list for health services in Andalusia alone has
reached 890,000 patients​. In ​Italy, the lack of hospital beds is considered the main aggravating factor​.
Throughout Europe the state health system was designed as a mutualization, through the state, of part of
the labor operating costs. Dismantling it, like attacking pensions, has been ​an attempt to increase the
share of capital in total income​, i.e. exploitation in absolute terms. We now see the extent to which it
endangers the most basic vital needs.
The focus of state responses has not been on strengthening health systems but on reviving a
frightened capital

Yesterday the EU presented its “shock plan”: ​a fund of 7.5 billion, expandable to 25 billion, to provide
liquidity to small and medium enterprises​, financing governments to cover the delay in payment of taxes
and contributions. For instance, ​in the U.S. Congress and Trump are negotiating an economic stimulus
plan in view of a massive loss of working hours. ​In Britain the main state reaction has been a 50 basic
point rate cut​. And ​in Italy, tax incentives are already up to 16 billion​.
One only needs to listen to the employers’ organizations ​calling for lower taxes and easier dismissal
instead of increasing hospital beds, hiring and resources, to see where the real priorities lie. The needs of
capital -generating dividends no matter what- are placed above universal human needs even in the midst
of a health crisis.

Anti-propagation measures are not equal for everyone

While the ​shareholders’ meetings of large listed companies are being virtualized and the virtues and
advantages of teleworking are being touted, most workers still have to go to work every morning. But now
in Spain, in Portugal, in Italy… children stay at home. Who takes care of them? ​According to all
indications, their grandparents​. In other words, the population at risk is put at higher risk by taking care of
an age group where ​asymptomatic or mild cases are more frequent​.
But it’s not like it’s any kind of bargain for parents either. In the wonderful world of the “platform economy”
and precariousness, ​basic protective measures are neither there nor expected​. In factories it varies from
place to place, but it seems that they are failing even in emblematic sites.

The “sacred anti-viral union” doesn’t cut it

Just today, ​workers at Fiat Pomigliano​, the factory where the Panda is built, ​stopped production for an
hour because basic health recommendations had not been met​. The same thing happened on ​the
assembly line of Leonardo helicopters due to the lack of compliance with protective measures​.
These are hardly unique cases. The “sacred anti-viral union”, the ​slogan of “coming together” with
governments and national capital to “get out of the crisis together”, is not catching on. That’s excellent
news. Probably the first good news that this epidemic has brought us.

On the Measures taken by the Bourgeoisie

regarding the Coronavirus Epidemic; to the
Proletarians, to our Readers, to our Comrades
(11/03/2020).
International Communist Party (Il Comunista)

Faced with the epidemic of the Covid-19 coronavirus, in many countries the bourgeoisie has taken a
series of unprecedented exceptionally restrictive measures.
The bourgeoisie depends on a mode of production whose aim is the valorization of capital by savagely
exploiting the physical, nervous and social energies of the proletariat and the weakest strata of the
population of all countries; it is therefore congenitally incapable to structure the society so that the health
of humanity in its economic and social life; could be preserved: it is unable to rationalize the capitalist
economy in order to harmonize it with the needs of human social life and with the natural environment,
which leads to increasingly devastating crises. Therefore, it cannot cope with natural events –
earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, epidemics, climate change, etc.– with methods and means able of
effectively reducing their negative effects.

Science and scientific discoveries played a major role in the development of the productive forces in the
revolutionary era when the bourgeoisie, with the fundamental contribution of the proletarians and the poor
peasants, violently destroyed the old feudal forms of production, property and social management; but
they were inexorably bent to the interests of capitalist profit and the defense of property and production
relations guaranteeing the domination of capital and therefore of the bourgeoisie.

The congenital greed of the latter, as the owner of the means of production and capital, leads her to save
on everything that can hinder the accumulation of wealth as quickly as possible and in the greatest
quantities; this is why it considers as an obstacle the measures of safety at work and of social prevention.
The capitalists generate much more profit from disasters than from their prevention: it is an unwritten law
but systematically applied, as shown by wars and all so-called “natural” disasters. Capitalism builds to
destroy, and destroys to rebuild in an infernal spiral engendered by this mode of production. The race for
capitalist profit everywhere comes before any social interest which would slow it down! A race that will
only end with the destruction of bourgeois political power, the elimination of the capitalist mode of
production and its replacement by the communist mode of production with no money, no capital, no
goods, no market, no class divisions.

The bourgeoisie puts scientific discoveries, technical innovations and knowledge, at the service of
humanity only if it benefits either financially or in terms of economic and political domination. And
including in this case, the same economic causes which push to develop techniques of production and to
deepen the knowledge of the vital processes of nature, of which man is an integral part, causes which can
be summed up in the capitalist competition, push the capitalists to curb, even to bury, all branches of
research which cannot guarantee profits in the shortest possible time. The only prevention to which the
bourgeois class devotes its forces, is for its own existence, the defense of the capitalist economic system,
with all its laws, its contradictions, its limits, and its political and military forms of the State

The coronavirus pandemic is used by the ruling class to apply – in a period of particular economic
difficulty for many world powers – a directly anti-proletarian policy.

The fear of the bourgeoisie is the economic recession, the stock market crisis – situations which prevent
industrial, commercial and financial capital from generating sufficient profits. The economic crisis
provokes a social crisis; a large part of the population suffers from its negative effects and they react in a
thousand ways, most often irrational and uncontrolled. The only class that could reason rationally, act in
an organized way and with specific objectives, is the proletarian class, if it is guided by its class party. The
bourgeoisie is really afraid of this: the historical experience of the 19th and 20th centuries has taught it
that its deadly enemy is the organized proletariat, truly aware of its class interests – and not the
competing bourgeoisies of other countries, or the foreign bourgeoisies with which it is at war.
It is to prevent any attempt of the proletariat to resume its class struggle, to regain confidence in its own
forces and in its own class interests, that the bourgeoisie adopts these measures of “social prevention”.
The measures taken first in China and then in Italy against the spread of the epidemic, go exactly in the
direction of blocking any possible reaction movement of the proletariat.

In China, once the existence of the new coronavirus was declared, the government decided to shut down
the whole city of Wuhan, then the whole province of Hubei of which it is the capital, then other cities and
regions where infectious outbreaks had occurred. These shutdowns forced all residents to stay cloistered
at home, being able to go out only in the event of extreme medical or food necessity.

The same thing happened in Italy: in a very short time, we went from the confinement of a few localities,
to that of the whole region of Lombardy, then of 13 other provinces of Veneto to Emilia-Romagna, until
finally decreeing the whole country “Red Zone”. The increasingly drastic measures taken by the
government day after day, summed up by the official slogan “I stay at home” (as if it was a “choice” of the
inhabitants), indeed impose a round-the-clock curfew on the 60 million Italians.

Gatherings, public demonstrations and, of course, strikes, in short, the free movement of people, are
prohibited; only the police and military are allowed to travel and they verify that nobody evade these
measures. Only food stores, pharmacies, gas stations, newsagents and, of course, hospitals, are open.

As a matter of fact, under the pretext of the epidemic, the bourgeoisie is putting in place a system of
social control as a general test of what it deems necessary when the social situation is much more critical,
when the nascent economic crisis plunges the masses into disastrous living conditions and prompt them
to react against everything that represents the existing economic and political power.

The bourgeois always sing the same song: in front of a danger that can strike everyone, let us unite, we
must all do our part, no more divisions between rich and poor, no more opposition between social
classes, because union is the only way to be victorious!

The call to “sacred union” made by the ruling class during the first and second world wars, comes back
whenever the bourgeois power runs a risk, of defeat in a war or of credibility and confidence in perilous
situations, as in the case of “terrorism” or an epidemic. And for this social control, the bourgeoisie can
count on the tireless efforts of the opportunist and collaborationist parties and unions, which once again
demonstrate that they are at the service of the capitalists and their state to impose bourgeois interests
against the proletariat and his class interests.

The prevention implemented by the bourgeoisie has the essential aim of defending its power, its
domination, its privileges. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie has demonstrated its inability to prevent
epidemics and prevent them from spreading rapidly throughout the world, hiding for reasons of purely
economic interest -–as has been irrefutably demonstrated the gravity of the illness when it appeared; on
the other hand, it reveals that it has a very different objective from that hypocritically proclaimed of
“defense of public health”: the defense of the capitalist economy, at a time when the economic crisis has
already knocked at the doors of China, Italy, Germany and therefore of all of Europe. The militarization of
society goes in this direction and Italy, in this case, will serve as a model for the other “democratic”
countries.

But there was a violent reaction to the measures taken by the government: that of the prison population.
In no less than 29 penal institutions, detainees rebelled against the sine die suspension of visits from their
relatives, not to mention that no preventive measure, even the most basic, was planned for them. They
broke the bars, they went up on the roofs, they set the bedding on fire, they attacked the infirmaries; in
short, they expressed the anger accumulated over time against the unbearable conditions in which they
are forced to live, showing the hypocrisy of prison policy not only as a place of punishment for the crimes
committed, but as a place where detainees are “educated” to return to civil society at the end of their
sentence.

The overcrowded prisons, with their terrible detention conditions, in which hygiene and the treatment of
illnesses are hypothetical, are the mirror of bourgeois society. The bourgeois want to “educate” the free
proletarians as are the prisoners – who are also mostly proletarians.

The proletariat must understand that the bourgeoisie and its political and union valets take every
opportunity to submit it to the interests of the ruling class, to make them forget that, while being the class
exploited par excellence, it nevertheless constitutes a social and historical force capable of liberation of
the bourgeois influence which leads it towards an ever greater enslavement to the bourgeois state,
towards the use of its energies, its capacities, its generosity, its intelligence, for the defense of capitalism
and the various social forms put implemented each time by the ruling class. The proletariat can only free
itself from this enslavement by breaking radically with the collaboration of the classes, by fighting on all
fronts its enemy, the bourgeois class.

The closing of the borders between the nations is the further demonstration that the bourgeoisies of all
countries reason in the same way: they think above all of defending their economies, their business,
accusing the other countries of being carriers of diseases, treating them as “aggressors” against whom
one must defend oneself as in wartime: the aggressor is always the other, But viruses know no borders ...
and it will be the same tomorrow when the virus of revolutionary class struggle crosses the sacred
borders of all bourgeois nations.

The drastic measures taken by governments are also an obstacle to our activity as an international party,
both for the distribution of our press and for travel and meetings.

We won’t give up, we will continue our political work by any means we can use, and in this case the
internet is definitely useful to us. We know that tomorrow the threats against the class activity of the
proletariat will undoubtedly be very serious and that the difficulties will increase, as will also be the case
for our party activity.

But it would not be a revolutionary activity if it was facilitated by the bourgeoisie.

 The Emerging ‘‘Coronavirus Strikes’’ and the
Responsibility of Governments (12/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

In Italy, “coronavirus strikes” are spreading while evidence is being released showing that the epidemic
got out of hand because in quite a few countries – including Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the US –
governments prioritized different goals rather than halting the spread at all costs to reduce fatalities.

The “coronavirus strikes” and trade unions

While the ​first wave of layoffs due to the epidemic begins in the United States​, in Italy, as we were ​saying
yesterday​, “coronavirus strikes” are multiplying: ​Asti, Vercelli, Cuneo, Brescia​… The ​Genoa port dockers​,
a ​dozen plants in Piedmont​, the ​Electrolux factory​… In the metallurgical industry the unions themselves
have joined the movement and are threatening a strike if the factories don’t close until March 22nd.
In Spain, however, ​trade unions are calling off strikes and ​asking together with the bosses for cheaper
temporary employment adjustments in the middle of the ​first wave of layoffs caused by the epidemic. In
France, ​workers being forced to keep working in a PSA-Peugeot-Citroen factory where ​cases of Wuhan
pneumonia have already emerged​, have begun to cause ​protests still restrained by the unions​.
Failure to close factories and workplaces, even when they become hotbeds for the spread of the
coronavirus, is tantamount to sending workers to be infected with a serious disease. To give temporary or
total dismissal as the only alternative is criminal blackmail. Physical integrity and life are basic human
needs. We have reached the point of having to fight, in the middle of a global health crisis, to impose
them upon the needs of capital – that we work, no matter what, in order to generate profits – and to fight
against trade unions that are happy to have us sent home – without pay.

It could have been contained

The graph above, ​published by the Financial Times​, shows that the countries that did not take
countermeasures promptly follow the same saturation trajectory as that suffered by Korea. Those that
took quick action suffer far fewer cases. If we compare ​the “reassuring” information disseminated for
weeks with the ​scientific results and descriptions​, the deliberateness is evident. The reality is not only that
of a virus that is very easy to spread but with a very low mortality rate. The reality is that in 17.5% of the
cases pneumonia will become serious and intensive care will be needed. Hence the need for ventilators,
intensive treatment and ​the pressure on hospitals which, in Italy, are already on the verge of collapse​.
The danger today is that hospital overcrowding will become a major cause of death.
Avoiding this, however, was a matter of priority. Just today we saw a new example of the thinking of
states and their governments. At a ​televised press conference held by the Catalan government,
Vice-President Pere Aragonès launched pearls such as “people’s health comes first because without
healthcare there is no demand for companies” and that “workers reaching their workplace” was a goal. It
could not have been made any clearer. People and their needs – their physical integrity – are not goals in
themselves but means to an end: to keep exploiting, producing and billing until the last possible minute.
This is the logic that prevailed in most governments… and that has produced the current situation.
The hospital overcrowding that today poses a danger to thousands of people would have been avoidable
if health systems had not been systematically eroded and if current governments had taken action against
disease propagation in the early stages.

When ‘‘the Economy’s’’ Needs Endanger us All

(13/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

This week has been the most intense of the coronavirus epidemic so far in Europe, the US, South
America – it is already a ​national emergency in Bolivia​– and Africa, where ​Morocco has already had its
first cases​. Yesterday was the ​worst day in history for the main Wall Street indexes and ​almost all the
European stock markets​. But even if this week we only published articles on the epidemic and its
consequences, its spread is only an accelerator in a global picture in which the antagonism between an
anti-historical capitalist system and the satisfaction of the most basic human needs is brutally evident in
every dimension of reality.

To begin with, we are told that the coming recession is a consequence of the epidemic… when the official
data itself denies it. Economic data from January in Europe are now coming out, when the epidemic was
not even considered as such in China (the first death reported in Wuhan is from the 11th). In Germany
Exports fell by 2.1% compared to the previous year​. Not only Germany, ​the G20 bloc, was already
stagnant and on the verge of recession with a total GDP growth of only 0.6% as of December 2019. ​The
“severe recession” expected in Germany this year is not a product of the virus, it was incubating much
earlier.
How have the answers been? The ECB (European Central Bank) has announced a program to ​provide
liquidity to small and medium sized enterprises, to buy more government debt and to relax banking rules​.
In addition, the ​ECB will buy $120 billion in assets by the end of the year to encourage the capital market​.
A boost for stagnant accumulation… at the expense of a greater risk of financial crisis, because in the
end, the flagship measure is that ​banks will be able to fall below the required capital requirements​. It’s not
reassuring.
The European Commission, for its part, is trying to restore the momentum towards a ​continental capital
concentration among “European champions”​, taking advantage of the fact that the fear of Chinese
competition is beginning to be greater than the disputes between neighboring national capitals, at least
between Germany and France. This is not to be welcomed: a large-scale cross-border concentration of
capital would not only aggravate the regional differences between the “European fertile crescent” (regions
with higher capitalization) and the rest of the continent but would also provide the basis for an even more
aggressive European imperialism.

And no, there is nothing “humanitarian”, charitable or universalistic about European imperialism. And
whoever wants to see this only has to take a look at the common European policy in the Mediterranean:
secret prisons for refugees​, ​families and children crammed into the holds of military cargo ships in
appalling conditions​, ​police charges and smoke canisters against those waiting at the border to apply for
asylum and… ​an “offer they can’t refuse” to those who have literally been rotting in the Greek camps for
years​: 1,700 euros ​to return to the same place they were fleeing from​.
The whole ​renegotiation of the agreement with Turkey is about increasingly opaque implementation of
this criminal and anti-human policy, paying the Turkish state to do discreetly what Brussels does not dare
to say out loud. Are we exaggerating? This week ​The Guardian revealed how crimes against humanity in
Libya were the result of “a coordinated and illegal attack by the European Union on the rights of
desperate people trying to cross the Mediterranean”​. Of course, what should have been the biggest
scandal in the history of the EU did not make the front page or open the news.

While negotiations are ongoing, Turkey continues to militarily threaten Greece. After an incident at the
Aegean Sea border in which ​a Turkish coastguard ship rammed a Greek coastguard​, Erdogan bragged
that ​he was ordering his navy to keep chasing the Greek coastguards​. Result: ​daily incidents at sea
accompanied by constant ​airspace violations and ​gunfire from a special operations group targeting a
military vehicle at the Evros border​. Yesterday, ​Turkey reported large-scale military exercises on the
Aegean, worsening the tension​.
This increased war threat follows a ​new summit with Putin that has ​consolidated the ceasefire and
reinstated joint patrols with Russia in Idlib​. Erdogan offered Putin ​joint oil exploitation of Northern Syria​.
Putin was open to the idea and even raised the possibility of inviting the US to the plunder to avoid
interference.
In other words, relative calm in Idlib has only served to shift Erdogan’s military pressure towards the
Aegean and the Western Mediterranean. No promise of plunder is sufficient for increasingly dysfunctional
semi-colonial economies. In Turkey, ​youth unemployment figures rose this week to 25% and the ​overall
rate to 13.7%​, extremely high figures for a social protection system light years behind the Europeans.
Russia, for its part, is engaged in an ​oil price war with Saudi Arabia that ​places both sides at a gross
losses on their main production and forces their oil companies to compensate with financial funds which
are obviously not in good shape either. There are no profitable applications for capital, even in the
speculative markets. Significantly, both ​Salman in Arabia and ​Putin in Russia are in the midst of purges
and legal changes to establish their power. They both know that what is coming is an aggravation of the
internal and external contradictions of their regimes and their national capitals, and they want to secure
the reins.
They are not alone. In Argentina, Alberto Fernández declared that “the world is conspiring to make our
exit [of the crisis] more difficult”… so immediately ​rumors are multiplying about an upcoming declaration
of default​. Even without the massive spread of the epidemic, the impact on national capital would ​take the
GDP from the predicted 1.4% drop to 2.7%​. While ​the president recommended drinking hot drinks as a
prophylactic against the disease -a pure urban legend that could in fact increase its spread in the country
of shared mate- the hope of the Argentine government, like that of so many others, was that the virus
would not spread with average temperatures above 30º. There is no evidence that this is the case. And in
fact, contagion within Argentina itself leads one to believe that it is not and that ​the quarantine law may
therefore only be the prologue to an extension of the epidemic.

The covid-19 pandemic is exposing the permanent disaster that capitalism is today: hospital structures
saturated by default, emergency services eroded by “anti-crisis policies,” housing in which three and
sometimes four generations are crowded together with insufficient space… and states that give priority to
keeping capital accumulation going instead of closing down workplaces, even though they know they are
putting a large number of workers at high risk of contagion from a serious disease.
In countries where the virus has begun to spread and there are cases of community contagion, there is no
other option but to close down all non-essential production, carry out tests, ensure the distribution of
drugs and food for all, and consider paid time off work during home confinement. When companies are
closed and absence from work is paid as leave, “individual responsibility” will start making sense. When
companies are closed and absence from work is paid as leave, “individual responsibility” will start making
sense. Meanwhile, they try to pass the buck by keeping us working despite increasing the danger of
disease spread. Waiting for the last moment to shut down production, however much they disguise it, will
only increase the number of infections and deaths, as the graph above shows.

In this situation it becomes clear that workers are the only social class whose interests represent
universal human needs, starting with the most basic: life and physical integrity. Underneath the
“coronavirus strikes” in Italy -which are ​still raging​– ​now also in Belgium​, and the conflicts that are
hatching from ​PSA in France to ​Renfe in Spain​, there is the only social force that represents a hope for
the whole of Humanity by affirming the primacy of human life over the agony of profits.

Italy: "We're not Lambs to the Slaughter!" Class

Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus (14/03/2020)​.
International Communist Tendency (ICT)

The Story of the Last Few Days

8 March. The Prime Minister’s Decree brought in new restrictive measures in the Lombardy-Venetia “red
zone” and many activities throughout Italy were suspended, including prison visits.

8/9 March. The situation in prisons became serious. The disturbances began over a lack of
communication about the risks and provisions relating to the coronavirus emergency. These then became
riots when news that prison visits were to be suspended spread, whilst at the same time nothing was
done to alleviate the overcrowding and the poor health and safety in the vast majority of Italian prisons.
Spontaneous riots broke out in 27 prisons throughout Italy: from Milan to Foggia, from Palermo to Turin.
More than 6,000 prisoners took part, 13 died, and dozens escaped. The demands of the riots became:
security, pardon, amnesty. As the prisoners saw it they were being treated like animals for slaughter
abandoned to fend for themselves. As often happens, they are the last to have a clear idea of what is
happening, the first to raise their heads, albeit in an ephemeral way, and also the first to experience harsh
repression. The fact is that the government was eventually forced to give them some reassurance.

9 March. That evening, Prime Minister Conte made a speech on television announcing that the Decree
was being extended so that the security zone (formerly called the “red zone“) now applied to the whole of
Italy, under the slogan #stateacasa (stay at home).

11 March. Another Conte speech announced a new Decree, closing all non-essential commercial
activities, advising citizens to work from home where possible, setting up checkpoints and introducing
fines throughout the country for those who do not obey the prohibitions. All bars and restaurants were to
be shut and only shops selling food and pharmacies were allowed to open but you could only enter these
with restrictions (limited numbers and keeping one metre away from the next person). From this point on
you could only leave home with self-certification to meet unavoidable needs (like getting food), health
needs or to go to work. But yes, you could still go to work, because the production of profit for the bosses
must continue! Marco Bonometti of ConfIndustria Lombardia stated: "It is a sign of irresponsibility not to
understand the problems that [we bosses] have". What problems? The increasing difficulty to produce
profit, of course.

12 March. In the morning workers in hundreds of factories and companies went on strike and left their
workplaces. They are all in non-essential production. The slogan "we are not lambs to the slaughter"
spread like wildfire. The demand of these workers is, at the very least, that working conditions should be
adapted in line with the health warnings to limit contagion, warnings that should apply to everyone.

Outside the workplace, everyone stays at home as much as possible, wearing masks outdoors, keeping
at ‘safe’ distances, or in quarantine. By contrast, in crowded factories, with inadequate information, there
are overcrowded changing rooms, and no disinfection. Apparently, it's much too expensive for the bosses
to comply with the instructions on healthcare: and it's “irresponsible” of workers to demand them. So while
bosses and managers have been at home for days, in the safety of their solitary confinement, the workers
have to go to work instead. It is this simple line that marks the division into social classes that crosses the
whole of society.

Class Struggle in the time of Coronavirus

An evocative image of this situation is the 5.00am bus that, crowded with people piled on top of each
other, takes the workers to the petrochemical plant in Marghera, near Venice. And there are many
reported cases of workers being threatened with the sack just for asking for the coronavirus regulations to
be applied.

The message from the bosses is “shut up and work even though we can’t offer you even the minimum
conditions to guarantee your health”. This seems to be the slogan of the bosses everywhere, which has
sparked the spontaneous strikes in Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany,
Umbria, and Puglia. Hundreds of factories have stopped working. It's a pity we are not in position to give
them all greater material solidarity, but we can at least spread the word about the strikes. We condemn
the bosses, and support and spread the demand of all the workers: nobody should work if their health is
at risk!

And it is not just in the factories and the warehouses. The same goes for the delivery riders. The
government has taken care to ensure that the delivery of meals at home will not be suspended, but done
nothing to ensure these workers are safe. It’s the same for supermarket workers, who often work without
gloves and without masks, or with DIY masks, because the firm does not supply the proper ones.
Likewise there are umpteen more or less essential workers who, like those in healthcare, find themselves
working without clear instructions and procedures for their safety. The irrationality and arrogance of the
State and of the system is once again only, and always, revealed when it comes to those who work.

A different, but equally serious, emergency comes from the tens of thousands of precarious non-essential
workers and cooperatives who have stopped working and are stuck at home without pay. As the teachers
in Naples highlighted, when they came out to demonstrate on 9 March — when it was still possible to do
so — wearing white overalls and masks, asking for their wages to be paid despite the suspension of
services. The line that divides this entire society into two social classes is today, in the time of
coronavirus, clearer than ever.

Some Concluding Remarks

1. It is only through struggle and conflict that the exploited can hope to assert their interests, starting
with the most immediate ones (in this case physical health and wages).
2. The trade union confederations (like the CIGL, CISL, etc.) put themselves forward as mediators
of the spontaneous strikes, while the various acronyms of the rank and file trade unions (Cobas)
claimed they started these strikes. They want to piggy back on the strikes on the one hand, or
claim to have invented the slogan "we are not lambs to the slaughter" on the other, or even say
that the workers joined the strike they started, etc. Take a tour of the sites of the traditional and
grassroots trade unions and you will find a wide range of sickening examples of how trade union
parochialism (putting the interests of one's own union acronym before those of the class as a
whole) is the only thing that matters to them. For the union, worker spontaneity is a beast to be
tamed and ridden, and class struggle is nothing but a phenomenon that must be exploited to
fatten and legitimise its acronym. For the unions, what matters is not the class struggle, but the
struggle against their rivals. Dividing workers by initials prevents them from joining together as a
class.
3. We have yet to see the Government’s proposals, but already they are talking about compulsory
leave, no guarantee of continuity of employment for precarious workers, etc. which means they
are making workers pay the costs of the coronavirus crisis. Until we the exploited turn this state of
affairs upside down, society will simply remain divided into social classes.
4. Protecting the health of everyone means really stopping all activities except those that are strictly
necessary, while ensuring maximum healthcare and safety conditions for all. A minimum
condition that this State, this system, proves not to be able to guarantee. In fact, building sites
remain open, non-essential goods factories continue to produce, the surplus-value pump
continues to operate... and if the crisis were to stop, it would be even more serious. This is the
 nightmare of the contradictory and sick society in which we are still forced to live: “for capitalism,
profit is everything, whilst human beings are nothing".
5. In general the capitalist system is proving to be not only not an option, but the worst of all
possible worlds. It is now clear that this virus is taking the lid off the boiling pan of a crisis of epic
proportions which capitalism has created but not solved. Locked indoors, how can those who do
not work and without pay survive? What about the those who work in the black economy? What
about small or fake VAT receipts? And, what economic and social devastation will we find when
we eventually get back on the streets again?

The need for a revolutionary alternative is more pressing than ever. The crisis that awaits us, when we
start getting out again, will be there every day to remind us of it with the increase in unemployment,
poverty and the prospect of war – the solution to all the ills of decadent capitalism.

Coronavirus: Saving Lives, not Investments

(14/03/2020).
Emancipation (NC)

The covid-19 pneumonia pandemic has already afflicted more than 145,000 people and killed
5,000. After a rapid spread in China this January, the essential characteristics of the disease
emerged clearly: high contagiousness, relatively low mortality (3-5 percent of those infected)
concentrated in the over-50 age group, and a high probability (17.5 percent) of producing a
condition requiring intensive care in order to survive the disease.

After decades of erosion if not dismantling of public health systems, a disease capable of
generating mass hospitalizations means a direct threat of health system collapse. And collapse
means increased mortality. Not only that of people with Wuhan’s pneumonia, but also that of
people suffering from other illnesses as a result of the collapse of the care system. That is why,
from the beginning, the Chinese experience made it clear that only through early measures of
mobility and public sociality restriction, including in particular workplace closures, could the
epidemic be contained.

The few countries whose authorities decided to take such restrictive measures before
accumulating thousands of cases (Singapore, Hong Kong) managed to stop the spread.
However, Great Britain and the United States seem to have chosen to leave their population at
the mercy of the epidemic. Italy, Germany, France and Spain, despite having thousands of
cases, delayed taking the necessary measures in order to keep the productive apparatus
running.

What the coronavirus reveals

The covid-19 pandemic is exposing the permanent disaster that capitalism is today: hospital
structures overwhelmed by default, emergency services eroded by “anti-crisis policies,” housing
in which three and sometimes four generations have to live together with little space… and
states that give priority to keeping capital accumulation running rather than closing down
workplaces, even though they know they are putting a large number of workers at high risk of
contagion from a serious disease.

The main lesson that the development of the epidemic must teach us as workers is that the
threats we face as a class are global: the virus, like the crisis, knows no borders, and what
happens in each place affects the rest. There are simply no national solutions. Even
“coordination” cannot be expected; the interests of individual national capitals prevent the ruling
classes from providing truly global solutions. They will always have an incentive to “wait a little
longer”, to call us to “get on with life” first and then to “individual responsibility”… as long as they
do not lose their competitive edge.

It’s not a question of “individual responsibility” or “unity”

When companies are closed and absence from work is paid as leave, “individual responsibility”
will begin to mean something. Meanwhile, they try to pass the buck by keeping us working
despite increasing the danger of further spreading disease. Waiting until the last moment to
close, however much they disguise it, will only increase the number of infections and deaths. In
countries where the virus has begun to spread and there are cases of community contagion,
there is no other option but to close down all non-essential production, carry out tests, ensure
the distribution of medicines and food for everyone and consider the time spent in home
confinement as time off work.

The calls for “unity” while mourning in advance the “loss of loved ones” that thousands of
families are already suffering, are a call for us to accept our own sacrifice to keep the national
capital running. You only have to listen to the employers’ organisations calling for lower taxes
and redundancy facilities instead of hospital beds, increased recruitment and resources, to see
where the real priorities and concerns of the European bourgeoisie and its governments lie. The
needs of capital – producing profits no matter what – are placed above universal human needs
even in the middle of a health crisis. When governments consider that their measures are not
about correcting the years-long abuses made to the health system but to put patches on them
while allocating funds to “help the treasury” of the companies, to ensure that they do not close
down, they are making it very clear what the “sacred anti-viral union” means: to increase the
spread and the deaths among working families in order to reduce the consequences of the
epidemic on national capital.
Not closing factories and workplaces, even when they become hotbeds for the spread of the
coronavirus, is tantamount to sending workers to be infected with a serious disease. To offer
temporary or total dismissal as the only alternative is criminal blackmail. Physical integrity and
life are basic human needs. We have reached the point where we have to fight, in the middle of
a global health crisis, to impose the most basic necessities of life on the needs of capital – let us
work, until our deaths if needed, in order to produce dividends – and fight against trade unions
that are happy to have us sent home – without pay.

The workers’ response

When governments could no longer downplay the severity of the disease, it became clear to
more and more workers that governments were putting workers and their families at risk. In
Italy, a wave of dozens of “coronavirus strikes” is jumping over emergency laws and trade union
containment. Similar strikes have broken out this week in Belgium and Britain, and there is
growing tension in workplaces in Spain and France, leading in more than one case to temporary
strikes to impose basic health security measures on employers.

Spontaneously, the response of the working class is taking place in the same space as the
crisis, the only one in which it can take place: the international one. And on a plane that
opposes and clearly expresses the antagonism between the most basic and universal human
needs – life and physical integrity – and the demands of capital – to keep working to produce
dividends and profits.

It is clear that workers are the only social class whose interests represent universal human
needs, unlike the ruling class which only wants to save its own national business. Under the
“coronavirus strikes” is the only social force that represents a hope for the whole of humanity by
affirming the primacy of human life over the agony of dividends.

What is to be done?

The “serenity” and “individual responsibility” that governments from Trump to Sanchez are
calling us to is that of a “sacred anti-viral union” with the same class that dismantles and erodes
health care systems, the same class that prioritizes “economic impact” over the risk and needs
of the workers they want to send to work without complaint.

But if the spread has multiplied it is because the priorities of each country’s bourgeoisies and
their governments are focused on maintaining social order, preventing their national capital from
being devalued, and trying to keep production “normal” by inertia. Their ideal is that we should
uncritically obey the dictates of each moment and not worry or criticize but remain “united” as
long as they deem necessary to the production of profits. We cannot accept this. The risk for
working families and the general population is too high. That is why it , it is time to go on strike
in all workplaces not engaged in essential production to ask for:
 1. The closure of all non-essential production and the implementation of general
confinement.
2. Reversal of all dismissals, both permanent and temporary, and compensation as medical
leave for workers throughout the period of confinement.
3. The extension of testing to the entire population with symptoms.
4. The urgent reinforcement of medical and health teams, and the setting up of a large
enough number of emergency structures and hospitals to allow the monitoring and
isolation of patients at risk.

More Evidence that Capitalism has

become a Danger to Humanity
(15/02/2020).
International Communist Current (ICC)

The emergence of this new virus and the reaction of the bourgeoisie shows how the development of the
productive forces has come up against the death and destruction caused by capitalism. So while China
has become the world’s second economic power it has been laid low by a viral epidemic, and while
medical science forges ahead capitalism cannot protect its population from disease, any more than it can
from economic crisis or war or pollution.

Covid-19 is one of a number of new infectious diseases that have emerged, particularly in the last 50
years, including HIV (AIDS), Ebola, SARS, MERS, Lassa fever, Zika. Like so many new diseases
Covid-19 is an animal virus infection that has jumped species to infect people and spread, a result of the
changed conditions brought about by capitalism in this period. We have increasingly global supply chains
and urbanisation; for the first time in history the majority of the world population lives in cities, often with
the population crowded together and inadequate infrastructure for hygiene. And as in China there are
many workers not just concentrated in cities but in crowded factory dormitories, eg Foxconn’s workers live
8 to a room. Alongside this is the use of bushmeat, and in Wuhan an illegal wildlife market is thought to
be the source of the new infection. In addition the destruction of the natural environment and the effects of
climate change are driving more and more animals into cities in search of food. Crowded cities are a
potential breeding ground for epidemics as Wuhan shows, and the increased international connections a
means to transmit them abroad.
These conditions are the result of the decadent capitalist system being driven to disrupt and pollute every
last corner of the planet in order to cope with its crisis of overproduction. The destructive impact of this
global expansion was clearly demonstrated by the First World War, which marked the beginning of this
epoch of decline. At the end of the war came the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that is estimated to have
infected about a third of the world population and killed over 50 million people in three phases. The death
rate was linked to the conditions of imperialist war including hunger and malnutrition, poor hygiene, and
the movement of sick soldiers from the trenches which bred a more deadly virus for the second wave.

In the more recent period we can see that HIV has killed 32 million, mainly in Africa, and has now become
endemic. Despite the medical advances that have turned HIV from a killer to a chronic disease, AIDS
killed 770,000 in 2018 due to lack of access to care1. Many other diseases that medical science can
prevent are continuing to cause illness and death. We hear about the measles cases in the USA, perhaps
in Samoa, and the importance of immunisation to prevent its transmission. But the media are silent on the
nearly 300,000 measles cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the deaths of nearly 6,000
children2, where the woeful health care facilities are also trying to cope with Ebola. These deaths are of
no great interest to the ruling class because unlike the swine flu pandemic in 2009 or the current Covid-19
epidemic in China they do not threaten its production and profits to the same extent. But capitalism is
responsible for the conditions that give rise to these epidemics: in this case, an unstable country, the
result of the carve up of Africa by imperialist powers, constantly ravaged by fighting over its natural
resources (gold, diamonds, oil and cobalt) which has claimed millions of lives. 50% of DRC exports go to
China. It is a particularly graphic example of what we mean by the decomposition of capitalism, the period
in which the ruling class does not have sufficient control to carry out its cold blooded response to the
crisis, a new world war, because the working class is not defeated, but equally the working class has not
the strength to take its struggle to a level that can threaten capitalism. It was announced by the collapse
of the Russian imperialist bloc, and is characterised, among other things, by chaotic localised wars3.

The persistence of polio is also directly related to decomposition, when fighting or fundamentalism
prevents immunisation, with health workers being murdered by jihadists, for instance in Pakistan. Any
publicity about this is totally hypocritical. The great powers which condemn this are perfectly willing to use
irregular and terrorist fighters – as the west used the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Russians in
the 1980s and since then in many other conflicts. In fact the rise of terrorism is a feature of imperialist
conflict in the period of decomposition.

Meanwhile, rather than spend on health or education, global defence spending in 2019 was 4% up on
2018. For the US and China it was more than 6% up and for Germany more than 9%. To give an idea of
the bourgeoisie’s chilling priorities, while the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) budget in the US was cut
from $10.8 billion in 2010 to $6.6 billion in 2020, the US has just passed a rearmament budget of $738
billion. China’s annual defence budget is estimated at $250 billion. The WHO had a budget of only $5.1
billion in 2016-2017.

Lies and irrationality

1
​ ​https://www.who.int/gho/hiv/en/
2
​https://stories.msf.org.uk/contagion-in-congo/index.html?gclid=EAIaIQobC...
3
​See ‘Theses on decomposition’, ​https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition
There are many diseases causing more deaths than Covid-19 at present, yet the bourgeoisie are taking
this seriously as a threat, as they do every new disease that may become a pandemic and may therefore
cause increased threats to their productivity and profits, for instance through increased sickness absence
– something we see with this new virus in China, as well as causing threats to human health and life.
There are many aspects of the disease that can contribute to its pandemic potential – infectivity, the
nature of the disease. It is also important that it has arisen in a large city of 11 million inhabitants in a
country that is well connected internationally for trade and tourism, and this makes it harder to contain the
spread of the virus. Harder to contain than if it had arisen, like Ebola, in Africa with far less opportunities
for foreign travel, or if it had arisen in 2003, like the SARS epidemic, when China’s economy and
connections were smaller.

Much of the initial response to this new virus by the Chinese state was criminally negligent and
unscrupulous. While they had already got preliminary genetic data on 26 December indicating a
SARS-like virus, the Chinese authorities were harassing Dr Li Wenliang for warning of the danger on 30
December. At the same time they were warning the WHO about the virus. Nevertheless the authorities in
Wuhan continued to suppress information about the epidemic, holding an enormous communal meal and
a Lunar New Year dance on the 18 and 19 January, pretending it did not pass from person to person,
before locking down the city on 23 January when 5 million people, almost half the population, had already
left for the New Year holiday.

All this has given rise to enormous anger in the population, enraged that the government should conceal
the disease from the public and make a doctor sign a false confession for ‘spreading rumours’ for warning
about it. This has engendered a campaign for free speech within China. Media and politicians in western
countries have echoed this campaign with sermons about the benefits of democracy and free speech.
However, we should not think for a moment that our own ruling class have any greater moral scruples
about lying and covering up information when it suits them, even if it puts human life at risk. Drug
companies suppress clinical trials that put their profits at risk, even when this means failing to warn that
certain antidepressants have an increased suicide risk for teenagers and young adults (see ​Bad Pharma
by Ben Goldacre, a whole book about such dishonesty). And the US and UK governments infamously lied
about weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Chinese state was completely cold blooded in putting its concern to maintain its authority above
concern for health and life of the population, a result of its rigid hierarchical Stalinist bureaucracy, which
has led it to cover up the start of an epidemic when timely action was needed to reduce and slow the
spread of the virus. This shows the brutality of the regime which takes little account of human life, but also
its irrationality as taking timely action in response to the epidemic would not only have saved lives, but
also it would have saved much of the loss we can expect to the economy and much of the damage to
China’s prestige as a growing power in the world with its ambitious Belt and Road initiative. This
irrationality of China’s regime in its response to the epidemic is linked to its paranoia about any loss of
power or control, a paranoia shown in its big labour and ‘re-education’ camps for Uighurs and others, in
its fondness for facial recognition technology and in its Social Credit system for keeping the population in
line. To preserve its authority it dare not admit any dangers or problems.

Repressive quarantine measures

Quarantining a city of 11 million by shutting all transport links and putting in place road blocks is a first. To
do so after half the population has been allowed to leave makes matters worse. Building two new
hospitals to take 2,600 extra patients in 10 days is an impressive piece of propaganda, and even an
impressive feat of prefabricated engineering (even if they weren’t ready when claimed). But it did not
provide the equipment or doctors and nurses needed – even with army medics and volunteers from other
regions. Hospitals in Wuhan have been overwhelmed, as have quarantine centres equipped with 10,000
beds. Sick people with coronavirus cannot get into quarantine centres let alone hospitals. Patients with
other conditions, including cancer, cannot get hospital treatment as all the beds are full. Sick and dying
patients in quarantine centres have no nursing care. Quarantine centres have hundreds crowded together
in beds or on mattresses on the floor wearing small paper masks of doubtful value, with inadequate toilet
and washing facilities, sometimes portable toilets and showers outside. It is quite clear that anyone
entering a quarantine centre without Covid-19 will soon get it. Those suspected of carrying the virus have
been forcibly taken to quarantine centres – one disabled boy starved to death after the relatives he relied
on were taken. It is as much a police exercise as a health measure.

Herding people together in quarantine centres which can only become centres for passing on the virus is
reminiscent of the hospitals for the poor until the 19th Century in Europe which were also sources of
infection, for instance increasing maternal mortality from puerperal fever from the 17th to the 19th
Centuries before the need for hygiene was understood.

Equipment is lacking, including protective clothing for hospital staff; doctors and nurses are working
extremely long hours, all of which makes them more vulnerable to illness. 1700 of them have been
infected and 6 have died.

Inaccurate monitoring of the disease

In these circumstances it is clear that there will be many patients dying who might have been saved with
adequate medical care. Covid-19 appears to have more than double the mortality in Wuhan than
elsewhere because of this. However, whether or not the Chinese authorities are continuing to lie about
the numbers infected, the figures are suspect because not all the cases can be confirmed. Hence a spike
in the number of cases reported in Wuhan on 11 February when those diagnosed clinically – without a
test – were included, bringing the total recorded cases to over 60,000.

It is not only in China that disease figures are likely to be inaccurate. Unlike Singapore, a rich country with
numerous connections which has been preparing for an epidemic since SARS in 2003, many other poorer
countries are not prepared. “​Any country that has significant travel back and forth with China and hasn’t
found cases should be concerned​” says a Harvard professor of epidemiology4. Indonesia, for instance,
evacuated 238 citizens from Wuhan and quarantined them for two weeks but did not test them for the
disease because it is too expensive. More to the point, what about China’s African trade and clients for
the New Silk Road? There will be many places without the health infrastructure to diagnose and care for
patients with the virus.

What is impressive is that the new virus was sequenced by 12 January. Following on from that the
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) which was set up in 2017 after the west African

4
​Quoted in ​The Economist​ 15.2.20
Ebola outbreak has been working towards a vaccine, in the hope that this can be ready if Covid-19
spreads, and particularly if it becomes a seasonal disease like flu. In fact as we write this article work on
the vaccine is under way, using a new method based on gene sequencing, which is safer than working
with a deadly virus, and has already expedited production of vaccines for Zika, Ebola, SARS and MERS.
Of course it will require testing for safety and effectiveness before it can be used, and this will take time.

However, this striking potential for the productive forces is not the end of the story. There is a lack of
factories to produce sufficient vaccine, and since with the risk of pandemic governments will not export
vaccine until they have stockpiled enough for their own use “​citing national defence or security”​ 5 CETI
needs to plan for it to be manufactured in several sites.

Effects on the economy

China’s economy has ground to a halt as it has gone into lockdown to contain the new virus. In response
it is pushing money into the economy, the banking regulator is relaxing rules on bad debt. However,
China is now responsible for 16% of global GDP, 4 times greater than in 2003 at the time of the SARS
epidemic which cut 1% off its GDP for the year. Its economy is much more integrated into global supply
chains than it was 17 years ago. This has already forced Hyundai to close car plants in South Korea,
Nissan to close one in Japan and Fiat-Chrysler to warn it may shut some European production.
Smartphone production could be down up to 10% this year. Textiles (China produces 40% of global
exports), furniture, and pharmaceuticals could all be hit. As will tourism. And China now accounts for
nearly 20% of global mining imports, and is trying to cancel deliveries of oil, gas and coal it doesn’t need.
Shares in US firms with high exposure to Chinese sales are underperforming by 5%. Coming with its
trade war with the US not resolved, this is bad timing – for China and the global economy.

In the longer term this may make China look a less reliable trading partner for multinational companies to
invest in. It certainly makes it look less a powerful trading partner and imperialist backer for its clients on
the New Silk Road. It may depend on how quickly it can get its economy back to normal.

Whatever happens with this new Covid-19 virus, whether it becomes a new pandemic, or whether it dies
out like SARS, or becomes established as a new seasonal respiratory virus, this new disease is yet
another warning that capitalism has become a danger to humanity, and to life on this planet. The
enormous capacity for the productive forces, including medical science, to protect us from disease comes
up against the murderous search for profit, the herding of an ever larger proportion of the population into
huge cities, with all the risks for new epidemics. The risk of capitalism does not end here, there are also
the risks of pollution, ecological destruction and increasingly chaotic imperialist wars.

5
​The Economist​ 8 Feb 2020
 Capitalism Grappling with Coronavirus
(15/02/2020).
International Communist Tendency (ICT)

Coronavirus has now become a pandemic that none of us wished for. And the response of the society in
which we live only demonstrates the absurdity of its economic laws which cannot cope with sudden
calamities and natural upheavals, including the climate and environmental disasters also looming on the
horizon. As the widespread alarmism makes clear, the capitalists fear that nothing less than the
"economic life" of states and their markets will be jeopardised. There is a danger of a general collapse
which – for the dominant powers – would mean the beginning of the end.

Our rulers cannot allow capital flows and those of production and trade – already in serious difficulties – to
experience further slowdowns or blockages. At first, a part of the ruling class thought they could politically
exploit coronavirus to divert public attention from the ongoing crisis, but the manifest persistence of the
economic and financial "recession" has forced them to think again.

From the data on the “Asian flu” epidemic of 1957-58, and its return in 1968-69, the WHO estimates that
this pandemic caused two million deaths worldwide (another million in the subsequent return). The danger
lasted a year and was a reminder of the “Spanish flu” of 1918-19, which, according to official figures,
caused almost 50 million deaths. Today the only preventive measures against this new virus make the
other crisis, the one from which capital can no longer free itself, worse. Capitalism is forced (despite the
feebleness of its measures) to feed another virus that risks worsening its current conditions. Among
these, are the growth in debt (private and public) with a tragic economic impact for the proletariat and with
long-term threats to the system, and even to the survival of the entire species to which we belong. In
Africa, in the Middle East and in many other areas on Earth it is already leading to appalling massacres of
men and women, children and the elderly. We are faced with wars, famines, forced migration, hunger and
deprivations of all kinds.

More than a century and a half ago, Marx and Engels wrote in ​The Communist Manifesto about those
"social epidemics" that follow on from crises due to famines, wars and – today, in part – due to the
"coronavirus". This completes a pre-existing general crisis picture of the system.

‘‘Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism ... industry and
commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means
of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of
society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so
soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society,
endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them.’’

And in the light of coronavirus they are no longer able to face up to or support – and we see tangible proof
of it every day! – the consequences of forced prevention measures against the spread of infections.
Measures which disturb the prevailing economic system, as well as unleashing some primordial instincts
in a public opinion that is the product of bourgeois "culture". Such preventative measures will deal almost
mortal blows to profits which – for "invested" capital – has already been getting weaker for some time.

Let’s pause to think for a moment. We must realise that we are at the centre (and this will above all affect
the generations to come) of a succession of slow but inexorable natural transformations (in part), even
chemical ones and which include the biological mutations that have taken place around us, over the
centuries. On Earth, all this coincided with the spread of the capitalist system favouring – as today – the
same spread of viruses and diseases which, its conditions and "lifestyles" (including nutrition) tend to
favour. In certain epidemics of the past the dead were counted in the millions and the infections began to
spread centuries and centuries ago with the expansion of trade following the same dynamics of a
capitalism hungry for new markets, which then spread viruses of another type but no less deadly like
racism and xenophobia, frightening and bestial genocides, and continental wars. We can add rampant
ecological impoverishment (deforestation, air and water pollution, climate warming) to the list. All of these
facts increase the dangers that weigh on the very existence of the human species, totally imprisoned in
the logic of capital and the laws of its markets. Not only that, but the weight of this capitalist "cultural
hegemony" on the vast majority of humanity that even in the face of material evidence it still struggles to
break down and overcome these threats.

Coming then to that wealth that the bourgeoisie often boasts of having "created" (in reality extracted from
the working class that produced it, before transforming it into masses of fictitious capital accumulated in
financial oligopolies), it must be said immediately that it would be something if real goods and material
objects for the well-being of the human species were already being produced to satisfy the primary needs
of the earth's population. It could be done today! But under capitalism this is not possible because the
products – in the form of commodities – clog up world markets, whilst masses of men and women are
excluded from their "purchase".

The "development" of markets and businesses has now ceased and indeed will tend to shrink, thus
harming the masses, depressing the capitalist economy and highlighting the absurdity of current private
property relations on which the domination of the capitalist class is based: after having resorted to the
most bestial exploitation of the class that is forced into wage labour. They have thus built and imposed on
society a system of production and distribution where the rich possess and control the money that they
have made mandatory and indispensable for the purchase of goods. This money is then transformed into
capital which initiates and oversees all types of activities but only if they "further enhance" capital, thus
increasing its power and that of the class who manages it. The globalised capitalist world – both
productive and financial – has completely internationalised the chain of its "activities". This has increased
its strength but at the same time made it more fragile. Markets are shaky and the stock exchanges
tremble while the central banks do not know what to do. Meanwhile governments fantasise about reviving
the economy through measures which, instead of dealing with the real needs of humanity, call for
increased sacrifices, which demand a constant reduction in the purchasing power of wages and pensions.
Poverty and suffering are spreading everywhere. The US, the “free enterprise” beacon of "capitalist
civilisation", like the more statist Russian and Chinese mixed economies, widely and dramatically
demonstrates this!

The need to overturn this unsustainable situation has never been more necessary and urgent since it is
more than obvious that the opportunity for humanity to make a great leap forward is now here. This will
require the crucial presence and propaganda of an organised class political party to act as a guide. This is
why concerted efforts are indispensable while we can do without the personalist and egocentric "beautiful
minds" always discovering new truths. For our part, we reject both fatalism and innovative abstractions.
We can only increase commitment and sacrifice for the only task that history imposes on us: the radical
transformation of the present state of affairs.

We are all fighting the coronavirus, but it is clear that without a radical "genetic mutation" of the current
capitalist mode of production and distribution, we remain under a far more serious and lethal threat that
can drag humanity first towards total barbarism and then death. There is no doubt that this epidemic of
coronavirus is a concern for all of us. But it is also clear that as the emergency increases so too does the
crisis that was already bringing down the economic, productive and social system dominated by capital.

The worries of the bourgeoisie are palpable: they are clinging to the hope of a "new model" of
development that restores and reinforces the economic and social fabric currently being torn apart. In
international markets bottlenecks are weighing down on both supply and demand for goods – which
coronavirus is aggravating day after day. And the reduction in GDP looms like a nightmare over
everything and everyone. The so-called "activities" of manufacturing capitalism (the bit that "produces"
the added value!) are falling sharply, enough to put millions out of work. Microscopic interventions are
emphasised in support of capital investments (hungry for profits!), and therefore for a recovery in the
production of goods. They cling to a new debt issue that will aggravate the strangulation of the system!
Capitalism is a system in search of "guarantees" that no one can give it ... forcing it to draw more and
more blood from the proletarian masses of the whole world. Masses for whom the "capitalist left"
continues to promise the myth of "universal welfare" to keep the system going.

Within this situation of total enslavement imposed by capital and its profit, pocketed by a hundred
thousand bourgeois who bask in luxury and pleasures, economic and social relations cannot change
substantially until we break with "radical change": the farcical demand for a hypothetical "industrial policy
that avoids the closure of companies", reviving wage labour and the production of goods to be sold to
those who have a full wallet! Not only that, since demand is stimulated indiscriminately in every state they
simply become "competitors in the global economy"!

There are calls for “European" guarantees on debts that will be incurred due to the coronavirus
emergency. This means asking the European Central Bank to print money and then buy Eurobonds and
invest in the search for those elusive profits that are never enough to sustain capital. We are now at the
bottom of the abyss and eventually someone – and we know who – will be asked to pay for capitalism’s
debts. Let us therefore work to ensure that these dramatic "lessons" bring about a different result from the
one desired by the most foolish servants of capitalist survival.
 COVID-19 pandemic. Against the State of Alarm!
Against the Anti-Proletarian Measures of the
Government! (15/03/2020).
International Communist Party (Il Comunista)

Since last Saturday, after the meeting of the Council of Ministers of the PSOE-PODEMOS government, in
Spain an alert has been decreed throughout the country. The population must be confined to their home
... except to go to work. The army has been deployed in the main cities of the country, controlling
communications both on foot and by vehicle, the government is committed to guaranteeing the operation
of industries considered "strategic" for the national economy ... It is the most visible response that the
bourgeoisie Spanish gives to the crisis caused by the spread of the virus, with which it intends to show its
strength, its coercive capacity, its ability to maintain seamless control over the social life of the country.

But the truth is that, behind these measures that are announced to the hype by television, press and
radio, since last Friday there have been announcements of layoffs, temporary files on employment
regulation, etc. that they are going to hit the conditions of existence of the proletarians very hard in the
coming months. Given these measures, the media, the ministers, etc. they keep deathly silence. While
employers demand (and obtain) from the government exceptional measures that allow it to lay off as
much labor as it deems necessary and exceptional financing and tax conditions that do not reduce its
liquidity in the coming months, it is assumed that they will be the proletarians who pay for the broken
dishes of this health emergency situation.

The government formed by the Socialist Party and Podemos remains silent about the gloomy reality that
awaits the proletarians in the coming weeks. He has promised "aid to workers", but first he has
guaranteed military control of the country and has forced all workers to join their jobs at the risk of
catching and transmitting the virus to the most vulnerable sectors of the population. It has closed schools,
institutes and universities, but it has left the proletarians who depend on these institutions to take care of
their children (and in many cases, also their food) alone before their employers, who have flatly refused to
bear the cost. of these measures. How many proletarians have lost their jobs since Friday! Not only those
who have suffered the layoffs announced by fast food chains such as Telepizza, Domino's, etc. but also
all those who suffer from precarious workers, with hourly contracts, limited to days, etc. They have simply
seen how they are not renewed and are left completely helpless to suffer the consequences of the
isolation planned for the coming months.

Unions and employers have presented, together, demonstrating that they row in the same direction and
that they have the same interests, their demands. The main one is the deregulation of temporary
employment regulation files, that is, the right of companies to temporarily terminate the employment
contracts of those proletarians considered unnecessary. With this measure, the automotive industry
(Nissan, Renault, Iveco, etc.) have already begun to send people home, taking advantage of the situation
to stop production and cushion the effects of accumulated excess production that they have been
accusing in the last months.
Smallholders, owners of bars, entertainment venues, shops, etc. that have been forced to close, have
been able to lay off their workers without further ado and, in view of the cancellation forecasts of major
tourist events (Fallas, Easter, April Fair, etc.), they plan to fire tens of thousands of workers in the next
few months.

At this stage of the situation, it is evident that the proletarians will be the ones who carry the costs of the
epidemic on their backs, paying with their wages the social and economic cost of the virus. Tomorrow,
when the epidemic has subsided and the waters return to their course, does anyone think that something
will improve for the proletarians? Those fired will return to work in worse conditions and the anguish and
misery they will suffer these months will remain forever.

The coronavirus epidemic openly shows that in the capitalist world the proletarians bear the brunt of
society, suffer the consequences of any catastrophe, pay with their physical and mental integrity and even
with their lives for the needs of the national economy. The dismissals, the ERTEs, the aggressions that
will derive from the state of alarm, the police and military pressure ... are being carried out and will be
carried out in the future under a "social", progressive government, made up of parties that call for the
popular classes and the proletarians in particular to align themselves in their ranks, to trust the State, the
government, the institutions, etc. that through them they would be placed at the service of "the majority". It
is the government of Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias that takes the army out into the streets to
guarantee bourgeois order. Because the military has not been deployed to guarantee the health of the
population or the healthiness of the cities, but to show a strength, a power that the bourgeoisie needs to
boast of.

The proletarians cannot trust anyone, any institution, any government ... The Covid-19 epidemic has
shown the reality of the government of the coup change: there is no difference regarding the measures
that the Rajoy government would have taken, not the there are with the measures that the Italian
government has taken or those that the French will take in the coming weeks.

The bourgeoisie is unable to guarantee the health of the population. This epidemic is going to leave
thousands of dead in Europe, many of them in Spain, a country where until a week ago the government
claimed that it was absolutely impossible for this to happen ... But it is that even today no action has been
taken to really effective prevention. Home confinement, not going out if it is not essential, not meeting ...
are ridiculous measures if you consider that the main reason for displacement, the obligation to go to the
job every day to earn a salary with which to live, continues standing. The government “allows” those who
have no other option to go to work: this means that the government forces the proletarians to go and
serve their company, putting their health at risk. This ensures that the epidemic spreads to every corner of
every town and city: does it make sense not to be able to go for a walk when every morning and every
afternoon all the proletarians who keep their jobs must get on public transport, which is the main vector of
contagion in cities? Yes, it does. For the bourgeoisie health, the welfare of the population is something
completely secondary to the demands of their businesses. The proletarians are the labor to be exploited,
they are those who generate social wealth, those who produce profit ... And if they must be infected by
work, the bourgeoisie proclaims that it is essential that this be so. The stupid "I stay home" campaigns are
an exercise in hypocrisy without limit to which all the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie indulge, speaking of
individual responsibility that ends just at the point where the workers are forced to work risking his health.

For the proletarians, the coronavirus epidemic must be a lesson. They are going to pay dearly, with
thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of sick, but they must get a clear idea of ​this whole
situation: human life in the capitalist world has no value, especially if it is the life of a proletarian, of their
elders or their children. The only logic of capitalism is to exploit the labor force to the last possible
moment, dedicate all social resources to ensuring that capital is reproduced and valued, minimize costs
and maximize benefits. The bourgeoisie and its state, the government, whatever its color, the unions that
work openly to defend the interests of the bosses, show in this crisis their true face: all to one against the
proletarians, forcing them to work with the army in the streets, dismissing tens of thousands and
condemning them to misery in the coming months. All the social resources dedicated to safeguarding the
national economy and maintaining social peace, while the true control of the epidemic is left to chance,
assuming the fatality of thousands of deaths as if it were an inevitable fate for the weakest.

The Covid 19 shows the daily and raging war that the bourgeoisie waged against the proletarians on a
daily basis, a war that grows in situations like this, in which life itself is no longer assured. The proletarian
class does not have the necessary strength to react: decades of assuming the habit of collaborating with
the bourgeoisie, of democratic intoxication, of seeing the State and institutions as entities situated above
social classes, of identifying their interests with those of the bourgeoisie ... have paralyzed their social
body. The parties and unions called workers, have tied the proletarians to their class enemy for many
years, calling them to defend the general, national interest, which they present as a common objective to
all social classes. But the same force of events, the depth of crisis as the current one, inevitably drag the
proletarians onto the field of struggle. Only by means of this can they guarantee their conditions of
existence, even the most elementary ones. Each one of these situations contributes to push the
proletarian class more and more to the dilemma that sooner or later it will have to assume: it either
confronts the bourgeoisie, or rejects its demands, or struggles to impose its class interests ... or its
destiny. It is sealed.

The coronavirus is the symptom of a sick society that sacrifices its weakest members in the name of profit
and only the proletarian class can end it.

No to the State of Alarm!

No to militarization!

Against national unity between bourgeois and proletarians!

For the return to the independent class struggle!

For the reconstitution of the Communist Party!

It is not up to the Proletarians to Pay for the

Coronavirus and the Crisis! (15/02/2020).
International Group of the Communist Left (IGLC)

No to National Unity in the Face of the Pandemic Caused by Capitalism!

No to Sacrifices for the Safeguard of Capital!

It is not up to the Proletarians to Pay for the Coronavirus and the Crisis!

In addition to our position, we invite readers to read the communiqués published on March 11 by
​ arch 14 by the group Emancipation (Nuevo Curso)
ICP-Proletarian (pcint.org, not in English yet) and on M
and the article of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, ​Italy: Class Struggle in the Time of the
Coronavirus,​ on which we rely to a great extent and all of which we below. All these positions are in the
same direction: to denounce the covid-19 pandemic as a product of capitalism, to reject the calls for
national unity and to support the few proletarian reactions that have been expressed – especially in Italy.
They call on the entire international proletariat to follow this example. It is important to underline and
welcome the fact that, despite their sometimes profound differences, different communist groups among
the most active of the ’partidist’ camp, whether they directly claim to be from the Communist Left or not,
can intervene on the same side of the class barricade.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the speeches of Trump, Macron, Trudeau, Merkel, Putin, Xi
Jinping and other imperialist leaders all sound alike. They are calls for national unity6 while at the same
time strengthening police control of populations in the name of isolation and quarantine measures.
Remove the word coronavirus and epidemic and put a call for the warmongering defence of the nation
and reality is closer. In fact, a real curfew has been introduced in countries such as China, Italy, Spain
and even France, aiming above all to control the population…

The Coronavirus is Bursting the Capitalist Economic Crisis

The economic and political attacks against the proletariat can only be redoubled by the outbreak of the
economic crisis, recession and financial crisis, of which the coronavirus is only the exogenous factor, an
accident.​ The bursting of the open crisis was not only predicted for 2020-2021 according to many
bourgeois economists but from the beginning of January 2020 according to economic indices that
indicated a slowdown. In previous economic crises, gold was a safe haven for investors - this is no longer
even the case. The ECB7 says that it cannot use all means as it did in the 2008 crisis - the negative
interest rate policy and ​Quantitave Easing​ have their limits - but only a few.

In the immediate term, the trade war is still going on. For example, Trudeau is going to provide $275
million to Canadian researchers to find a vaccine. Every imperialist power wants to find it first. Heard on
French television on March 14: ​"vaccine research will only be profitable if the epidemic continues"..​ . As
Engels wrote in his introduction to ​Dialectics of Nature​, ​"the division of labour that had meanwhile become
dominant in natural science, which more or less restricted each person to his special sphere ​[we could
add to his own country]​, there being only a few whom it did not rob of a comprehensive view".

Coronavirus Reveals Capitalist Perspective of Widespread Imperialist War

"The closing of borders between nations is further proof that the bourgeoisies of different countries think
in the same way: they think above all about defending their economies, their businesses, accusing other

6
​Speeches similar to those at the time of the ​Charlie Hebdo​ Paris bombings, January 7th 2015.
7
​European Central Bank.
countries of being carriers of diseases, treating them as ’aggressors’ against whom one must defend
oneself as in times of war: the aggressor is always the other one" (Communiqué of the ICP-Proletarian,
11 March 11th 2020, pcint.org, translated by us).

The pandemic allows ​calls for returns to "’less globalized" national economies​. For example Trump, who
at first closes the American border to Europeans and not the United Kingdom (it is well known that the
coronavirus does not infect the British). This is another step towards imperialist polarisation. As for
Macron, he wants to strengthen the weight of French imperialism in Europe by criticizing the nationalism
of other European countries and by advocating, once again, a strengthening of the European Union, at
least of its hard core, today in the name of European scientific research. In the same vein, former Italian
Prime Minister Mateo Renzi, for whom ​"the coronavirus will be a change of era for Europe"​, calls for the
"recentralisation of health services (...) and investment in infrastructure that Europe needs" (interview on
French radio RTL, 12 March). The abandonment of the sacrosanct German dogma of zero budget deficits
(made official by Merkel), statements on the need to "relocate" key sectors of national production,
protectionist measures, the explosion of state deficits and debts as never before that states are urgently
taking, etc., are tantamount to concentrating and orienting the production apparatus around the states
and the economic and imperialist defence of each national capital ​in opposition to the others​, even if it
means regrouping in close alliances, another characteristic of imperialist polarisation, as in the case of the
major powers on the European continent. The coronavirus pandemic and the crisis which it is causing are
also an opportunity, for the former, and a moment, for the latter, to the strengthening of imperialist
tensions and the march to generalised war.

Capitalism Unable to Control and Check the Pandemic

One has to ask why the panic among all governments. There have been so many cuts in health and
education services that the health situation was particularly dire before the pandemic. In France,
exhausted doctors and nurses were asking for increased health budgets. And this autumn, Macron, far
from supporting them as he hypocritically does now, sent the anti-riot police to gas them. As we write,
more than two months before the start of the pandemic, capitalism is still unable to provide enough
protective masks for the populations most at risk! So let’s not even mention the lack of ventilators for
patients with acute pneumonia. As was already the case in China and Italy, health specialists are talking
about the risk of having to choose between the sick, including in the central countries of capitalism,
between those who can benefit from emergency care and those who will be sent to die at home or in the
street! While the bourgeoisie is capable of mobilizing billions to save the banks or send an armada to
bombard entire countries.

Once the pandemic over, the hypocrisy and praise of politicians will stop and attacks on health care
workers will resume. Another example that has been going on for years is that people have to wait
several hours in an emergency room before seeing a doctor in Quebec. Health care workers in most
countries are exhausted or on sick leave with budget cuts. An increase in serious cases of infection, as in
Italy, has led to the collapse of the health care system in the absence of resources, hospital beds,
respirators, and personnel.

Capital’s Only Remedy: Renewing Attacks on the Proletariat

The draconian measures implemented in some countries with the ostensibly sole goal of slowing down
the spread of the virus are a foretaste of measures that could be put in place to counter anti-war
movements or the bankruptcy of states that could no longer pay civil servants. In many countries
assemblies of 1000 to 100 people are banned. Other countries go even further, such as China and Italy,
with compulsory containment measures that affect entire cities and regions of tens of millions of people.
Despite the lock-down, the notable exception to the rule of staying at home is to continue production in
factories to produce non-essential and luxury goods despite the certain cost that this will have in terms of
human lives, because the profits of the ruling class are more important to the bourgeoisie than limiting
deaths as a result of hospitals becoming overwhelmed and capacity to provide critical care being
surpassed.

"It is in fact the social prevention that the bourgeoisie implements to defend its power, its domination, its
privileges. If, on the one hand, it shows that it does not have the capacity to prevent epidemics and to
prevent these diseases from spreading rapidly throughout the world, hiding for reasons of purely
economic interest - as has been irrefutably demonstrated - the seriousness of the disease when it
appeared, on the other hand, it reveals that it has a very different objective from that hypocritically
proclaimed ’defence of public health’: the defense of the capitalist economy, at a time when the economic
crisis has already knocked on the doors of China, Italy, Germany and therefore the whole of Europe. The
militarization of society is moving in this direction and Italy, in this case, can serve as a school for other
‘democratic’ countries" (​ Communiqué of the ICP,​ op. cit)​ .

State propaganda on the coronavirus absolves capitalism for the outbreak of the economic crisis and thus
justifies the redoubled attacks on the working class. Indeed, the calls for national unity hardly hide the fact
that the epidemic only further exacerbates class contradictions and the exploitation of the proletariat by
the bourgeoisie. In Italy, for example, in working class neighbourhoods, proletarians are left to
themselves; preventive measures are not applied; evictions of tenants continue to be carried out; bar and
restaurant employees, tourist guides, substitute teachers, etc. are without income and for an indefinite
period of time despite this they must continue to pay rent, food, medicine, disinfectant, etc.

"The coronavirus epidemic, recently reclassified by the WHO as a pandemic because it affects all
continents, shows today how the bourgeois ruling class is using an event of this kind to apply – in a period
​ nti-proletarian​ policy"​ (​idem​).
of particular economic difficulties for many world powers – a directly a

National Union or Struggle against Capital?

"Outside the workplace, everyone stays at home as much as possible, wearing masks outdoors, keeping
at ‘safe’ distances, or in quarantine. By contrast, in crowded factories, with inadequate information, there
are overcrowded changing rooms, and no disinfection. Apparently, it’s much too expensive for the bosses
to comply with the instructions on healthcare: and it’s “irresponsible” of workers to demand them. (…) An
evocative image of this situation is the 5.00am bus that, crowded with people piled on top of each other,
takes the workers to the petrochemical plant in Marghera, near Venice. And there are many reported
cases of workers being threatened with the sack just for asking for the coronavirus regulations to be
applied ​(​Italy : Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus,​ Internationalist Communist Tendency).

In this context, how can the proletariat fight? States in the hope of preventing resistance limit gatherings
to, for example, 100 people in France and 250 in Quebec. The proletariat will also have to face the trade
unions which, as in wars, support their bourgeoisie. As a small example, the first meeting of the Base
Common Front8 on Saturday in Montreal was cancelled. In spite of everything and in the Italian context,
"The message from the bosses is “shut up and work even though we can’t offer you even the minimum
conditions to guarantee your health”. This seems to be the slogan of the bosses everywhere, which has
sparked the spontaneous strikes in Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany,
Umbria, and Puglia. Hundreds of factories have stopped working. (…) We condemn the bosses, and
support and spread the demand of all the workers: nobody should work if their health is at risk!"​(​idem)​ .

In his interview, quoted above, Mateo Renzi urged the other European bourgeoisies ​’not to make the
mistakes we made in Italy’​. In the light of what we learn from the sections of the ICP and the ICT in Italy,
we better understand the profound meaning of the warning, especially since he was quick to add that ​"the
most important public demonstrations should be blocked".​ The warning of the former Italian prime
minister was not only aimed at the mere extension of the pandemic but also at the possible explosion of
workers’ and popular reactions. No doubt it was also based on the few demonstrations hostile to the
Chinese government that the press could not completely silence.

Even in the emergency in face of a pandemic caused by the very conditions of capitalist exploitation and
the circulation of goods, the reality of today’s productive capacities, which capitalism has pushed forward
as never before, would make it possible to reduce production in order to prevent proletarians from
catching the virus at work and in transport, while continuing to ensure the material well-being of the
world’s population. All the more so as it would make it possible to produce protective masks, respirators,
to take in the critically ill, etc., if all the means available were aimed at general good health. But for this to
happen, the needs of capital accumulation would have to be abandoned and the overwork, the surplus
value, extorted from the proletarians by capital itself, would have to be considerably reduced. That is why
calls for national unity are by no means a response to the pandemic. That is why the struggle of the
proletariat is the way. Just like imperialist war or crisis, a pandemic does not put class struggle on hold.
The bourgeoisie itself proves it to us still today.

It is not up to the proletarians to pay for the paralysis of production due to the pandemic and for the crisis.
This is why we endorse much of the March 14 communiqué produced by the Emancipation Group
(emancipacion.info), whose Spanish-language intervention organ is better known as Nuevo Curso or
Comunia. We submit for reflection all the slogans and demands that the comrades put forward in the
current situation.

"Not closing factories and workplaces, even when they become hotbeds for the spread of the coronavirus,
is tantamount to sending workers to be infected with a serious disease. To offer temporary or total
dismissal as the only alternative is criminal blackmail. (…).

But if the spread has multiplied it is because the priorities of each country’s bourgeoisies and their
governments are focused on maintaining social order, preventing their national capital from being
devalued, and trying to keep production “normal” by inertia. Their ideal is that we should uncritically obey
the dictates of each moment and not worry or criticize but remain “united” as long as they deem
necessary to the production of profits. We cannot accept this. The risk for working families and the

8
​ Trade unionists who want to be critical of union leadership only.
general population is too high. That is why it, it is time to go on strike in all workplaces not engaged in
essential production to ask for:

The closure of all non-essential production and the implementation of general confinement ;

Reversal of all dismissals, both permanent and temporary, and compensation as medical leave for
workers throughout the period of confinement;

The extension of testing to the entire population with symptoms;

The urgent reinforcement of medical and health teams, and the setting up of a large enough number of
emergency structures and hospitals to allow the monitoring and isolation of patients at risk" (Communiqué
March 14th of the political group Emancipation (emancipacion.info), better known under the nema of its
intervention publication Nuevo Curso9).

The Social Use of the Epidemic (16/03/2020).

International Communist Party (Il Programma Comunista)

In a series of articles in our press during the 1950s [1], parallel to the long study on the “Course of
Capitalism”, we demonstrated, with the classical texts of communism to hand, how the “murderous and
sinister dramas of modern social decadence” (floods and hydro-geological upheavals, cementification,
collapsing dams, sinking liners and so on) must all be attributed to the capitalist mode of production.
Those were the years of post-war reconstruction and an unbridled economic boom: after the unspeakable
destruction of the second inter-imperialist world massacre (and precisely thanks to it!), the capitalist
production machinery had started to function again full speed ahead – indeed, at a previously unheard of
pace. And we could already see, before our very eyes, just as we see even more clearly today, the
results of that unbridled hyper-production that has lasted at least three decades and, from the
mid-seventies onwards, has foundered on the systemic crisis we are still immersed in.

A few examples? An acceleration in environmental devastation, over-crowding in megalopolises and

depopulation in the countryside, food adulteration and air and water pollution, galloping deforestation and
desertification, increasingly difficult living and working conditions, an exponential increase in poverty,
“professional” illnesses from exposure to asbestos and other toxic substances, factory farming and the
threat of its consequences, huge economic and social imbalances between countries (that unequal
development so well known to communists), as well as dreadful and destructive conflicts in whole areas
of the planet… And we can add, because the example is clearly to be seen by one and all (as we write in
mid-March), the increasingly evident obsequience of scientific research to the law of profit, the

9
​http://fr.emancipacion.info/coronavirus-sauver-des-vies-pas-des-investissements/.
exaggerated power of pharmaceutical companies, widespread dependence on pharmaceuticals, the
progressive dismantling of healthcare structures, etc. etc.

Quite apart from any medical explanation, which is not our field of competence, this is precisely the
breeding ground for the umpteenth epidemic now gripping the world (but how many have there been over
the past decades? Mad cow, Chicken ‘flu, Ebola, Sars, Mers, Zika, Chikungunya, Dengue...). In brief,
coronavirus or Covid-19 is a child of capitalism, the child of a society divided into classes and totally,
globally subjected to the law of profit. The pure, fine souls drugged by mainstream ideology, for whom
this is despite everything “the best of all possible worlds”, should keep their silence. The society of capital
is the society of catastrophes, emergencies, fear and, above all, is incapable of dealing with the crises
that it itself fuels and spreads – on the plane of economics as on that of health or of daily life.

We do not want to dwell on this here, however: there are other aspects we should like to examine: We
want to insist on the social (political, ideological, military) use of the epidemic. Albeit in different ways and
with different timing, the ruling class in all countries has grabbed this opportunity to elaborate and put into
practice siege measures projected way beyond the current situation of the virus and contemplating
scenarios well known to it, of both class war and the war between imperialisms – i.e. measures of State
terrorism and territorial control, both at an ideological and at a military level. As well as the distorted use,
bordering on manipulation, of data, statistics and judgements – often contradictory ones – on the rate of
infection and mortality and the constant arguments between “experts”, politicians, technicians,
intellectuals, there comes a non-stop appeal from all the mass media to all citizens, regarding “collective
responsibility”, “national unity” and “becoming the State”, the exercise of power over “others”, flinging
open the door to grassing on your neighbour, today on those who don’t fully respect the decisions from
above, tomorrow on those who do not fully identify with the State and indeed intend fighting it; and this
call to arms – helped along by the skilfully induced separation and isolation of individuals – is
accompanied by suspicion and mass psychosis. The poor individual, the poor “community”, celebrated
as the high point and guarantee of democracy and then invariably trampled on, shaken up and derided!
Here, democratic dictatorship assumes increasingly clearer outlines and – with them – evident practical
preparation, though as yet in its early stages, for the management of future conflicts requiring the utmost
patriotic cohesion. Proletarians beware! This is how the preparation for the future war is effected, when
the State exhorts “all its citizens”, “united and embracing the flag” to “close ranks with its own troops”,
committed to “defending the Fatherland against the enemy.”

There is more. Firstly, as mentioned above, more or less everywhere (Italy, Germany, Great Britain, the
USA), the healthcare system is at tipping point and the measures for “containing the virus” seem to be
aiming primarily at avoiding its total collapse: but this is happening precisely because of the continuous
cuts to welfare (the welfare that was the carnation in the buttonhole of all the countries emerging from the
massacres of the Second World War) over at least the past two decades, not because of one evil
government or governor or another but out of capital’s need, when faced with a crisis that, with peaks and
dips, has been dragging on since the mid-‘seventies, to eliminate as far as possible any spending on
unproductive expenses. Secondly, it should be remembered that the so-called “recession” was already
ongoing, both in Italy and in Germany and other countries, WELL AHEAD of the outbreak of the epidemic,
as has been documented over and over again in our press: capital is already taking advantage of this
opportunity to make the epidemic shoulder the blame for the inevitable present and future measures “to
save the national economy”, with all the accompanying unemployment measures, layoffs, step-ups in the
pace of work, suspensions and repression of conflicts – thus without having to take the trouble to cast
around for excuses to deny that this is an out-dated and murderous mode of production! Proletarians will
be in the front line once again in this emergency, the first to pay the price of the serious consequences of
the epidemic on living and working conditions (and it will be interesting to observe if and when the
statistics on deaths at work and due to work will start circulating again!).

An encouraging and revealing symptom for us, after the rebellions in overcrowded prisons with sanitary
conditions that are miserable to say the least of it (during which it seems at least a dozen prisoners in Italy
committed suicide, seized by… a sudden and irresistible desire to overdose!), the spontaneous outbreak
of labour struggles all around Italy, France and possibly elsewhere, with improvised strikes (unforeseen
by the mastiffs of the State unions) by workers from factories and warehouses, as well as by delivery staff
and riders, protesting against the lack of even minimum safety measures at their places of work. A further
demonstration, on the one hand that proletarians do not become visible until they take action and, on the
other, that precisely when they take action without the control of the union hierarchy, the State is obliged
to make concessions, whatever the entity of them. On these occasions the workers experienced and
proved their potential power and it will be the task of us communists to ensure that this experience was
not in vain or that it might be destroyed or forgotten in the rank and file of the proletariat. As to the real
consistency and above all the respect of the measures taken, we reserve our doubts: we shall see, we
shall see… In short, from the prison of prisons to the prison of wage earning, there have been some
feeble but telling responses, and the “cannon fodder” has made its voice heard.

This epidemic, like those that have preceded it and those that will follow, will pass. But it is important that
a few cracks have appeared in the steel wall concealing the real, destructive and murderous nature of this
mode of production that has become so out-dated and disastrous for the human species.

There is no Real Confinement Without

Workplace Closures (16/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

Too late and too little is the recipe to ensure that this epidemic ends up decimating workers and their
families. We have to stop all non-essential production in order for confinement to serve any purpose. And
we have to stop layoffs disguised as “emergency measures”.

Confinement came too late…

As we denounced a week ago​, the policy of “normality” and “tranquility” promoted by the Sánchez
government at a time when the epidemic had already taken hold was at best foolish. More than a week
ago, when transmission was already community-based, confinement should have been established, but
instead the government called for participation in the 8M demonstrations.

Epidemiological models are very clear​: the sooner radical containment measures are established, the
sooner the trajectory of contagion buckles, and obviously it is not the same to buckle it early as it is to do
so when the epidemic has already spread. Of course, ​no one could claim ignorance:
‘‘China bought us time. Despite its initial delay in acknowledging what was happening, as soon as it did so
it took very drastic measures that offered us a month to act. The problem is that most of the rest of the
world, including Spain, wasted it.’’

What was unacceptable was, as the chorus of media propagandists did, to describe the government’s
actions as an early reaction. If we start counting the days by the beginning of the epidemic, Italy had
already reacted not only less radically but later than China, but ​Spain reacted even later than Italy​:

‘‘Italy was already late with respect to China when it decided to close Lombardy. “When China closed
Hubei Province it had 12 cases per million. At that time, it had already recruited doctors from all the
provinces and started building a total of 16 hospitals. It was a brutal effort, and yet the mortality rate was
30 times higher in Hubei than in the other provinces,” he explains. “It’s true that the health system in
Spain and Italy is much more robust than in China, but not so much that it justifies such a delay in
decision-making. Every day now counts more than ever.’’

The result: if we compare the data from day one of the epidemic in each country, Spain is the place where
the number of infections and deaths is growing the fastest and has the highest number of deaths in
relation to the infected population.

…and it’s too little because it doesn’t affect workplaces

What is even worse, the prescribed confinement is no real confinement when workplaces are not closed.
Confining the population ​except for work​ is a deliberate choice that condemns us to the Italian horizon.

In Italy, which boasts about having the “best public health system in Europe”, ​those over 80 are no longer
cared for, but left to their own devices because the hospital system has already collapsed. Italian doctors
now openly say that the epidemic’s great ally has been the austerity cutbacks and that 150,000 hospital
beds and 46,000 health workers were removed in just over a decade. They are right… partially. Because
ever since confinement was established, ​factories and large workplaces have been the major source of
infection​. Today in Madrid, Sevilla, Valladolid or Barcelona it is easy to understand why.

And messages have already begun to appear from workers in some of the major factories, denouncing
the lack of conditions.

Let’s save lives, not investments!

If the spread has increased, it is because the priorities of the bourgeoisie and the government are focused
on maintaining social order, preventing the devaluation of national capital, and trying to ensure that the
“normality” of production is maintained by inertia. Their ideal is that we should uncritically obey the
slogans of each moment without worrying or complaining, and instead remain “united” as far as they
deem necessary to the production of profits. We cannot accept this. The risk for working families and the
general population is too high. That is why it is time to go on strike in all workplaces that are not dedicated
to the essential production to demand:
1. The closure of all non-essential production and the implementation of general confinement.
2. Reversal of all dismissals, both permanent and temporary, and compensation as medical leave
for workers throughout the period of confinement.
3. The extension of testing to the entire population with symptoms.
 4. The urgent reinforcement of medical and health teams, and the setting up of a large enough
number of emergency structures and hospitals to allow the monitoring and isolation of patients at
risk

The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Symptom of the

Terminal Phase of Capitalist Decadence
(17/03/2020).
International Communist Current (ICC)

Introduction

The coronavirus epidemic is leaving thousands of dead around the world. Why? Because research into
this kind of virus, which has been known about for a long time, was abandoned because it wasn’t seen as
profitable! Because when the epidemic took off it was more important to the Chinese bourgeoisie to do
everything to hide the gravity of the situation in order to protect its economy and its reputation; it didn’t
hesitate to make up all kinds of lies and put pressure on the doctors who had sounded the alarm!

Because in all countries, the measures of isolation were taken too late, since the first concern of the state
was “not to block the economy”, “not make business suffer”! Because everywhere, there weren’t enough
masks, cleansing gel, equipment to test for the illness, hospital beds, ventilators…Is it necessary to recall
that in France care workers and emergency workers have been striking for a year, denouncing the lack of
human and material resources in the hospitals?10 The politicians have the nerve to talk about protecting
those most vulnerable to the virus, elderly people, at a time when the workers in residential care homes,
the EHPAD, have also been out on strike over the past year, indignant about the mistreatment of the
“residents” that results from a lack of workers to look after them. In France, which is the second biggest
European economic power, it is impossible to find any masks. Even within the pneumological services, at
the front line of the fight against the pandemic, the doctors have to limit themselves to three masks a day.
In Italy, the same shameful situation prevails. Workers are forced to go to work, herded together on public
transport, because they have to keep the economy going … as in the car factories for example, where
they are again pressed together on the production line, without masks, soap or any other precautions.

Strikes have broken out in this country in the last few days. Here is a short extract from a testimony in
Bologna, where workers raised the slogan “​The workers are not lambs to the slaughter”. ”Strikes in the
factories are multiplying. Forced to work without any health protection, workers are in revolt: ‘I am obliged
to work in a work environment which puts my health in danger, the health of those close to me, my
comrades at work, the people I meet…inside the warehouses and the factories none of the wise precepts

10
Macron made a speech on television full of detestable boasting about the “excellence of the French health system”, supposedly 
free and accessible to all, while saluting the devotion of the health personnel. The response was immediate: numerous photos on 
social media of carers, nurses and doctors brandishing a placard addressed to the president: “​You can count on us. The inverse 
remains to be proved!”
we hear about all the time are worth anything. In many of these places, there is a total absence of the
minimal conditions to avoid the spread of the virus:

● The presence of workers in large numbers in reduced spaces has never been put in
question
● There isn’t even soap in the toilets!
● Calling for gloves and masks? The bosses say these are just excuses by people who don’t
want to work’”

The rallying cry for these strikes is “​Your profits are worth more than our health!”. And this is indeed the
reality under capitalism, this decadent system of exploitation. But these struggles show that hope does
exist. The working class is the bearer of solidarity, dignity and unity. It is the bearer of a world which is no
longer governed by the hunt for profit.

Faced with this pandemic, we not only have to develop solidarity, look after the most vulnerable, but also
reflect on what capitalism is, why it’s rotting on its feet, and discuss such questions as much as possible
in order to develop our collective understanding. The article that follows aims to contribute to this process.

**********************************

At the end of our first article on the Covid-19 pandemic, we underlined: "​Whether this new Covid-19 virus
becomes a new pandemic, as happened with SARS, or whether it persists as a new seasonal respiratory
virus, this new disease is a new warning that capitalism has become a danger to humanity and to life on
this planet. The enormous capacity of the development of the productive forces, including medical
science, to protect us from disease is being undermined by the criminal pursuit of profit, by the excessive
concentration of a large part of the human population in unbearable cities, with the risks of new epidemics
that this entails.​ "

Today, this pandemic has become a problem on a major scale worldwide and has provoked a veritable
economic "tsunami" with disastrous consequences. We will not go into the analysis of its economic
implications here; we will do so in a future article. Here we will show the way in which this epidemic
reveals the disease of capitalism.

We have confirmation: Covid-19 is a manifestation of capitalist decomposition!

Today, the most pessimistic predictions are confirmed and the WHO (World Health Organisation) has
recognised that this is a global pandemic that has already spread to 117 countries on all continents, that
the number of people affected has exceeded 120,000, that the number of deaths in the first weeks of the
pandemic was over 4,000, etc. What began as a "problem" inside China has now become a social crisis
for the world's major capitalist powers (Japan, United States, Western Europe, etc.). In Italy alone, the
number of deaths has already exceeded those caused worldwide by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03. And
the draconian population control measures taken one month ago by the "tyrannical" Chinese authorities,
such as the confinement of millions of people11, and those of a veritable "social Darwinism" consisting of
excluding all those who are not a "priority" from hospital services in the fight to contain the disease, are
now commonplace in many large cities in all the affected countries on all continents.

The bourgeois "media" are constantly bombarding us with information, with recommendations and
endless "explanations" of what they present to us as a kind of scourge, a new "natural" disaster. But there
is nothing "natural" about this catastrophe; it is the result of the asphyxiating dictatorship of the senile and
outmoded capitalist mode of production, in conflict with nature and a threat to the human species.

Revolutionaries are not equipped for producing epidemiological studies or in making prognoses on the
evolution of diseases. Our role is to explain, on a materialist basis, the social conditions that make the
occurrence of these catastrophic events possible and inevitable. We have therefore made it clear that it is
in the nature of the capitalist system to put exploitation, profit and accumulation before human need and
that it is not possible for any different kind of capitalism to exist. But we can also affirm that those same
capitalist relations of production which, at one point in history, had made possible an enormous
development of the productive forces (of science, of a certain mastery of nature to limit the suffering
imposed on humanity ...) have today become an obstacle to their development. We have also explained
how the prolongation for decades of this phase of capitalist decadence has led, in the absence of a
revolutionary solution, to the entry into a new phase: that of social decomposition12, where all these
destructive tendencies are even more concentrated, producing a downward spiral of chaos, barbarism
and the gradual collapse of the very social structures that guarantee a minimum of social cohesion,
threatening the very survival of life on planet Earth.

Are these the delusions of a handful of old fashioned marxists? Certainly not. The scientists who speak
most authoritatively about the development of the current Covid-19 pandemic affirm that the proliferation
of this type of epidemic is caused, among other things, by the accelerated degradation of the
environment, which leads to a greater contagion from animals (zoonoses) that live among the human
populations in order to survive, and is, at the same time, further assisted by the concentration of millions
of human beings in megalopolises that produce a truly dramatic rise in contagion. As we explained in our
previous article on Covid-1913, some doctors in China had indeed tried to warn of a new risk from a
coronavirus epidemic, starting in December 2019, but they were directly censored and suppressed by the
state, as this would threaten the image to which Chinese capital aspires as a major world power.

The ICC is also not the first to insist that one of the main driving forces behind the spread of this
pandemic is the increased lack of coordination of the policies of various countries, which is one key
features of capitalism, but which is reinforced to an ever greater extent by the advance of "every man for
himself" and the inward-looking attitude which characterises states and capitalists in the phase of
decomposition of this system and which tends to permeate all social relations.

11
​Clearly, it was necessary to prevent people from travelling and to encourage them to stay at home, to prevent the spread of infection. But the
way in which these measures were imposed (virtually no state support for the care of children or the elderly, where it was needed, heavy
monitoring of the population - and all this while the work in the factories, for example, was not affected) bears the mark of the modus operandi of
capitalist state totalitarianism. In our next articles, we will also come back to the impact of these actions on the daily life of the exploited in the
world.
12
See our Theses on Decomposition (​International Review​ No. 107, 4th Quarter 2001) ​Theses on decomposition​ ​and the Resolution 
on the International Situation of the 23rd ICC Congress on our website: ​Resolution on the International Situation (2019): 
Imperialist conflicts; life of the bourgeoisie, economic crisis
13
​More evidence that capitalism has become a danger to humanity
We are not revealing anything new when we point out that the danger of this disease lies not so much in
the virus itself, but in the fact that this pandemic is taking place against a background of enormous
degradation, over decades and on a global scale, in health infrastructures. It is, in fact, the
“administration" of these increasingly leaner and more defective structures that is dictating the policies of
the various states, who have tended to delay the announcements of the appearance of new cases, even if
it means prolonging the effects of this pandemic over time. And this irresponsible degradation of the
resources accumulated by decades of human work - knowledge, technology, etc: does it not reflect an
absolute lack of perspective, a total absence of concern for the future of the human species, which is
characteristic of a form of social organisation - capitalism - that is in its phase of decomposition?

How is it possible that in the 21st century there is an epidemic that the world's most powerful
states are unable to contain?

Of course, there have been other extremely deadly epidemics in the history of mankind. Nowadays, it is
easy to find in the bourgeois "media" investigations and books on how smallpox and measles, cholera or
the bubonic plague caused millions of deaths. What is missing in such claims is an explanation that the
cause of these deaths is essentially the result of society's shortcomings, both in terms of the living
conditions and the knowledge of nature. Capitalism poses, precisely, the historical possibility of
overcoming this stage of material scarcity and, through the development of the productive forces, of
laying the foundations for an abundance that could make possible a true unification and liberation of
humanity in a communist society. If we consider the 19th century, namely the highest point of capitalist
expansion, we can see how health, and therefore sickness, were no longer seen as fatalistic, how there
was progress not only in research but also in communication between different researchers, how there
was a real change towards a more "scientific" approach to medicine14. And all this has an application in
the daily life of populations: from measures to improve public hygiene to vaccines, from the formation of
medical specialisations to the creation of hospitals. The increase in world population (from one to two
billion people) and especially in life expectancy (from 30-40 years at the beginning of the 19th century to
50-65 years in 1900) is essentially due to this advance in science and hygiene. None of this was done by
the bourgeoisie in an altruistic spirit for the needs of the population. Capitalism was born "dripping with
blood and mud", as Marx said. But in the midst of this horror, its aim was to obtain maximum profitability
from the labour force, from the knowledge acquired by its wage slaves during the decades of learning
new production techniques and to ensure the stability of the transport of supplies and goods, etc. This has
made the exploiting class "interested" - at the least cost, to be true - in prolonging the working life of its
employees, in ensuring the reproduction of the commodity that is labour power, in increasing relative
surplus value by increasing the productivity of the exploited class.

This situation was reversed with the change of historical period between the ascendant period of
capitalism and its decadence, which we revolutionaries have identified, along with the Communist
International, since the First World War15. It is no coincidence that, around 1918, one of the deadliest
epidemics in the history of humanity occurred: the so-called "Spanish flu" of 1918-19. In the magnitude of
this pandemic, we see that it was not so much the virulence of the pathogen itself as the social conditions
characteristic of imperialist war in capitalist decadence (global dimension of the conflict, impact of the war

14
By searching for the objective causes of the infections and not religious or fantastic causes (the "4 humours" theory of ancient 
medicine, for example), by trying to get a materialist view of human anatomy and physiology, etc., it became possible to 
identify the causes of these infections.
15
See in the most recent issues of our ​International Review​ (Nos. 162 and 163) our articles on the centenary of the Communist 
International.
on the civilian population of the main nations, etc.) that explain the scale of the catastrophe: 50 million
dead, almost twice as many as in the trenches.

The horror of war had a second, even more terrifying expression in 1939-45. The atrocities of the first
imperialist carnage, such as the use of asphyxiating gases, were briefly set aside before the barbarities of
the World War of 1939-45 were unleashed by all the participating powers: the German and Japanese
military using human beings in experiments and the industrial mass murder of the Nazi concentration
camps; the early use of biological weapons (the British military experimented with anthrax, for example);
the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans.

And how should we understand the so-called period of "peace" that followed? It is true that the major
capitalist powers created health care systems, based on the model of the British NHS created in 1948 -
which is considered one of the founding landmarks of the so-called "welfare state" - to provide "universal"
health care that aimed, among other things, to prevent epidemics such as the Spanish flu. Was this
'capitalist humanitarianism' and a victory for the workers? Certainly not. The purpose of these measures
was to ensure the renewal, at the lowest cost, of a workforce (a precious commodity because the war had
sent large sectors of the proletariat to the grave) and to ensure that the productive work of reconstruction
was fulfilled. And this does not mean that the "remedies" employed do not themselves become sources of
new disorders. We see this, for example, in the use of antibiotics prescribed to combat infections but
which, in serving the needs of capitalist productivity, are abusively prescribed on a regular basis to
shorten periods of sick leave. This has led to a major problem of bacterial resistance - the so-called
"superbugs"- which eventually diminishes the medicinal arsenal for attacking infections. This has also
manifested itself in the increase of diseases such as obesity and diabetes, caused by a worsening quality
of the diet of the working class - that is, a devalorisation of the reproduction of the labour power of the
exploited class - and of the poorest strata of society, to the point that capitalism's use of food technology
is a factor in the spread of obesity. And we can also see how the drugs dispensed to make the pain that
this system of exploitation inflicts on the working population more bearable, have led to phenomena such
as the epidemic caused by the extensive use of opiate substances. Until the arrival of the coronavirus,
this was the number one health problem in the United States, causing more deaths than all the victims of
the Vietnam War.

The Covid-19 pandemic cannot be separated from the rest of the problems affecting the health of
humanity. On the contrary, they show that the situation can only get worse if it remains subject to the
dehumanised and commercialised machine that is the capitalist health system of the 21st century. The
origin of diseases today is not so much humanity’s lack of knowledge or technology. Similarly, current
knowledge in epidemiology should make it possible to contain a new epidemic. For example: within just
two weeks of the discovery of the disease, research laboratories had already succeeded in sequencing
the virus that caused Covid-19. The obstacle that the population has to overcome is that society is subject
to a mode of production that benefits an exploiting social minority and has become a hindrance to the
fight against disease. What we are seeing is that the race to develop a vaccine, instead of being a
collective and coordinated effort, is actually a commercial war between laboratories. Genuine human
needs are subordinated to the laws of the capitalist jungle. Fierce competition to get a product to market
first and to be able to take advantage of that advantage is the only thing that matters to any capitalist.
Who is threatening the future of humanity, is it "irresponsible" individuals or the pressures of
decomposition within the social system?

At our recent 23rd International Congress, we adopted a resolution on the international situation, in which
we returned to and re-affirmed the validity of what we had written in our Theses on Decomposition:

“​The May 1990 theses on decomposition highlight a whole series of characteristics in the evolution of
society resulting from the entry of capitalism into this ultimate phase of its existence. The report adopted
by the 22nd Congress noted the worsening of all these characteristics, such as:

- ‘​the proliferation of famines in the ‘Third World’ countries…;

- the transformation of the ‘Third World’ into a vast slum, where hundreds of millions of human beings
survive like rats in the sewers;

- the development of the same phenomenon in the heart of the major cities in the ‘advanced’ countries, …
;

- the recent proliferation of ‘accidental’ catastrophes (…) the increasingly devastating effects, on the
human, social, and economic levels, of ’natural’ disasters …;

- the degradation of the environment, which is reaching staggering dimensions’ ​(Theses on

decomposition, pt. 7)”

What we see today is that these manifestations have become the decisive factor in the evolution of
capitalist society, and that it is only through them that we can interpret the emergence and development
of major social events. If we look at what is happening with the Covid-19 pandemic, we can see the
importance of the influence of two elements characteristic of this terminal phase of capitalism:

- First of all, ​China is not just the geographical setting for the origin of the most recent epidemics with the
SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 and Covid-19. Beyond this circumstantial element, it is necessary to
understand the characteristics of the development of Chinese capitalism at the stage of the
decomposition of global capitalism and its influence on the current situation. In a few years, China has
become the second world power with an enormous importance in world trade and economy, benefiting at
first from the support of the US after its change of imperialist bloc (in 1972), and, after the disappearance
of these blocs in 1989, as the main beneficiary of so-called globalisation. But precisely because of this,
"​China's power bears all the stigma of terminal capitalism: it is based on the over-exploitation of the
proletariat's labour force, the unbridled development of the war economy of the national program of
‘military-civil fusion’ and is accompanied by the catastrophic destruction of the environment, while
‘national cohesion’ is based on the police control of the masses subjected to the political education of the
One Party state (...).In fact, China is only a giant metastasis of the generalised militaristic cancer of the
entire capitalist system: its military production has developed at a frenetic pace, its defence budget has
increased sixfold in 20 years and it is ranked second in the world since 2010"​ .16

This development of China, which is so often put forward as an illustration of the enduring strength of
capitalism, is in fact a clear manifestation of its decrepitude. Its technological conquests or its expansion
throughout the world thanks to spectacular initiatives like the new "Silk Road", should not make us lose
sight of the enormous conditions of overexploitation (the exhausting workdays, the poverty wages, etc.)
where hundreds of millions of workers endure extremely poor housing, food and general living conditions,
which, moreover, are further deteriorating. For example, per capita health expenditure, already meagre,
has fallen by 2.3%. Another edifying example is that food is produced with very low hygiene standards or
by ignoring them, as in the consumption of the meat from wild animals purchased on the black market. In
the last two years, the worst epidemic in the history of African swine flu has spread inside China,
necessitating the slaughter of 30% of these animals and causing a 70% increase in the price of pork
meat.

- The second element that shows the growing impact of capitalist decomposition is ​the erosion of the
minimum level of coordination that existed between the different national capitals​. It is true that, as
marxism has showed, the maximum unity to which capitalism can aspire - even reluctantly - is the
national state, and therefore a super-imperialism is not possible. This does not mean that, when the world
was divided into imperialist blocs, a whole series of structures were not created, from UNESCO to the
WHO, which tried to implement a minimum of common interests between the different national capitals.
But this tendency towards a minimum of coordination is deteriorating as the phase of capitalist
decomposition progresses. As we have also analysed in the already quoted resolution on the international
situation of our 23rd Congress: "​The deepening of the crisis (as well as the demands of imperialist rivalry)
is putting the multilateral institutions and mechanisms to a severe test”. (​ Point 20).

This can be seen, for example, in the role played by the WHO. The international coordination in the face
of the SARS epidemic in 2002-03, as well as the speed of certain discoveries17 in laboratories around the
world, explains the low incidence today of a virus from a family very similar to that of the current Covid-19.
However, this role has been jeopardised by the WHO's disproportionate response to the 2009 influenza A
epidemic, in which the institution's alarmism was used to generate massive sales of the antiviral "Tamiflu"
manufactured by a laboratory in which former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had a direct
interest. Since then, the WHO has been almost relegated to the role of an NGO making pontificating
"recommendations", but it is incapable of imposing its directives on the various national capitals. They are
not even able to unify the statistical criteria for counting infected persons, which opens the door for each
national capital to try to conceal, for as long as possible, the impact of the epidemic in their respective
countries. This has happened not only in China, which tried to hide the first signs of the epidemic, but also
in the United States, which is trying to sweep under the carpet the number of people affected so as not to
reveal the weaknesses of a health system based on private insurance to which 30% of American citizens
have practically no access. The heterogeneity of the criteria for the application of diagnostic tests, or the
differences between the protocols for action in the different phases, undoubtedly have negative
repercussions for containing the spread of a global pandemic. Worse still, each national capital is

16
​Resolution on the International Situation (2019): Imperialist conflicts; life of the bourgeoisie, economic crisis​.
17
​For example, the role of civets as an intermediate transmitter of the disease to humans led to a lightning elimination of these 
animals in China, which very quickly stopped the spread of the disease.
adopting protectionist measures in terms of the provision of protective and hygienic equipment or artificial
ventilation devices, as Merkel's Germany is doing.

These are measures which put the defence of national interests above what might be more urgent needs
in other countries.

How to overcome the threat to health produced by capitalist social relations?

The media propaganda is constantly bombarding us with appeals for individual citizens to show
responsibility in order to prevent the collapse of the health systems which, in numerous countries, are
showing signs of exhaustion (physical exhaustion of the workers in the sector, lack of material and
technical resources, etc). The first thing to denounce here is that we are dealing here with ​the chronicle
of a catastrophe foretold​. And not because of the irresponsibility of citizens but because of decades in
the reduction of health spending, of jobs for health workers and budgets to maintain hospitals and medical
research18. Thus in Spain for example, one of these countries closest to this “collapse” we are being
called on to avoid, successive cuts have led to the disappearance of 8000 hospital beds19, with beds in
intensive care below the European average and with materials in a poor state of repair (67% of ventilators
are over 10 years old). The situation is very similar in Italy and France. In Britain, presented as the model
of universal healthcare, we have seen a continual deterioration in quality over the last 50 years, with more
than 100,000 vacancies for healthcare personnel. And all that well before Brexit!

And it’s these same health workers who have seen their living and working conditions get worse and
worse, facing growing pressure to provide care to more patients and deal with more illnesses, with staff
numbers being reduced more and more, who now face the added pressure of a collapse of health
services as a result of the pandemic. And those who applaud the courage and self-sacrifice of these
public employees are the same people who have been driving them to exhaustion by getting rid of official
breaks, transferring them from one job to another and making them work – in the face of a pandemic
whose future evolution is not known – without adequate protective equipment (masks, clothing, etc) or
adequate training. The fact of making health personnel work in these conditions makes them all the more
vulnerable to the impact of the disease itself. As we have seen in Italy where at least 10% of health
workers have caught the virus.

And to force the workers to obey these orders, they resort to the repressive arsenal of the “state of
emergency”, threatening them with all kinds of sanctions against those who refuse to obey. These policies
of the authorities have in a number of cases made the existing chaos even worse.

Faced with this situation, which imposes on the health personnel the ​fait accompli of the disastrous state
of the care system, the workers in this sector are forced to apply methods which are close to those of
eugenics, since they have no choice but to devote the meagre resources available to them to those
patients who have the best chance of surviving, as we have seen with the directives issued by the Italian
association of anaesthetists and emergency staff, which characterises the situation as a “state of war”20.

18
​In France for example, research into the coronavirus family which followed the 2002-3 epidemic was suddenly interrupted in 
2005 as a result of budget cuts.
19
​This tendency is a dynamic which can be seen in all countries and under governments of all political colours, as we can see 
from this ​graphique d’Euroestat​.
20
​See (in Italian) ​Recomendaciones UCI en Italia
And this is indeed ​a war on human need waged by the logic of capital​, where the workers in this
sector are afflicted with growing anxiety because they have to apply these inhuman laws. The anguish
expressed by many of these workers is the result of the fact that they can’t even rebel against such
criteria, or refuse to work in shameful conditions, or even reject making sacrifices in their living conditions,
because if they did this by going on strike this would have a serious impact on their own class brothers
and sisters, on the rest of the exploited. They can’t even meet together with other comrades, physically
express their solidarity with other workers because that would contravene the rules of “social isolation”
imposed to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

Our comrades in the health sector can’t come out in open struggle in the present situation but the rest of
the working class can’t leave them on their own. All workers are victims of this system and all workers will
sooner or later pay the costs of this epidemic. Whether it’s as a result of cuts in non-priority health
services (suspension of surgical operations, medical consultations etc) or through the suppression of
thousands of temporary contracts, or the reduction of wages to the level of sick pay etc. And to accept all
this would give the green light to new and even more brutal anti-working class attacks that are being
prepared. We must therefore continue to sharpen the weapons of class solidarity with rage in our hearts,
as we saw recently with the strikes in France against pension “reforms”.

The explosion of the insurmountable contradictions of capitalism at the heart of the health system are
unequivocal symptoms of the terminal phase of capitalism’s senility. Just as the virus has the strongest
impact on aging bodies, provoking the most serious illnesses, so the healthcare system has been
profoundly weakened by years of austerity and “management” based not on the needs of the population
but on the demands of capitalism in crisis and decline. The same goes for the capitalist economy, which
has been kept going artificially by manipulating the law of value and plunging head first into a sea of debt.
This has made it so fragile that the epidemic could well trigger a new and brutal global recession.

But the proletariat is not merely the victim of this catastrophe for humanity that is capitalism. It is also the
class which has the potential, the historic capacity, to eradicate the system once and for all, through its
struggle, through developing its consciousness and its class solidarity. Only the communist revolution can
and must replace human relations based on division and competition by relations based on solidarity, by
organising production, labour, the resources of humanity and of nature on the basis of human need and
not the laws of profit which serve an exploiting minority.

Will the EU Survive the Coronavirus?

(17/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

The ​European Union closed its external borders​. The internal borders have fallen one by one, from
Germany to ​Spain​. Now only goods and those who transport them can move around Europe. Although
these are temporary measures, the closure of internal borders has been preceded and accompanied by a
real display of meanness on the part of Germany and France. Today, the European Union can no longer
hide its nature and more and more voices are presenting it as the first major political victim of the
coronavirus.

When governments accept “hundreds of thousands” of deaths in order to keep capital

profitable…

Thomas De Quincey warned in a famous satirical essay that if you allow yourself to murder someone you
may end up “failing to be polite and leaving things for the next day”. And that seems to be the most
accurate description of what is happening in Europe. Britain now “finds out” that ​its “strategy” for the
epidemic -to let it unfold- ​will cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, exceeding the NHS’ capacity to
treat patients by more than eight times​. Britain is no longer part of the EU, but its strategy is the same as
that actually being pursued by Germany and followed by France until yesterday.

The ​German government is delaying far beyond reason the confinement and closure of businesses​.
Merkel’s statements asserting that ​between 60 and 70% of the German population will suffer from the
epidemic is an open confession that as long as the productive apparatus does not stop, the state accepts
with no hesitation a minimum of 150,000 deaths.

The pompous brutality of the German press was ready ​to cheer Altmaier, the German Minister of
Economy, when he presented his “bazooka” against the economic effects of the coronavirus
accompanied by a call to restructure production chains in order to reduce dependence on China no
matter what, even opening the door to the nationalization of key sectors. It was overkill, the press of all
kinds ​had been exhibiting a “strategic sinophobia” since the start of the industrial recession in the last
quarter of last year. War-geared ​state capitalism in its purest form. A show of force of the capacity of
centralization of national capital. The German bourgeoisie seems willing to do everything… Everything
but confine the workers to avoid the spread of contagion.

Macron delayed action until yesterday, multiplying the danger of contagion in order to hold elections last
Sunday. And only yesterday, as soon as the recount was over, ​he brought out the war speech – “we are
at war with an invisible enemy”-, blamed the population for trusting in the trivialization of the epidemic that
the government itself and its media were encouraging, and ​decreed the confinement​. Like Sánchez with
8M… but a week later, which is a double crime.

…no international “solidarity” can be expected

Had Macron and Merkel really done nothing? Actually, they did, and their “measures” are the key to
what’s to come. Their first reaction was to isolate Italy and soon after ​close their borders​. The second was
to ban the export of medical materials and even masks​… despite Italian appeals for help. ​The famous
“solidarity” between countries came to nothing​ as soon as Italy asked for help.

Brussels, threatening fines​, got ​both Merkel and Macron to reconsider their ban on the export of masks​.
But the original gesture, as much as it had been corrected, and the borders, which are still closed, made it
clear that ​the EU had not attempted even the minimal basics of a joint policy against the spread of the
epidemic​. On the contrary, each state has tried to “hold out a little longer” than its European neighbors
and its global imperialist rivals (the U.S. and China) in order to gain “competitive edge”.
Reaction times have depended only on the strength of the political apparatus. Conte and Sánchez, in the
utmost precariousness, have been the first to take -although late- measures. Johnson, reinforced by a
parliament tailored to his needs and a purged party, is heading for a mass slaughter by inaction. Macron
held out as long as he could until the elections and Merkel is trying to navigate as usual: affirming as a
misfortune without alternatives ​the primacy of the national interest, that is, that of national capital, even if
it is a direct danger to the lives of the great majority​.

Nationalism kills

But there is something else that stands out. When the US closed down flights to Europe, ​Brussels made it
look like “one-sidedness”​. But in reality, it was the same thing that Europe had done with air traffic and
would immediately afterwards do with the land borders of ​Austria or France with Italy and what ​Germany
would soon do with France and Austria​.

As the epidemic spread and the measures that were not yet in place became more and more urgent,
there was more incentive, not only for “erasmus” (international exchange students), but also for retired
people living in countries other than the one where their passport was issued and for a large number of
displaced workers, to “go home”. The deliberate delay in imposing confinement thus reproduced between
countries what had previously happened between regions within each country: by failing to restrict
mobility, ​the regions with the highest number of infected people sent thousands of people to those regions
that had been relatively safe​ … further spreading the epidemic.
Not least, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia… began to receive infected nationals from Spain while the
Sánchez government delayed confinement in order to celebrate 8M and keep businesses open until the
last moment. The same thing happened in the Maghreb and in half of Africa from France. The experience
of previous pandemics made it perfectly predictable. An airborne virus tends to reproduce in its contagion
family and personal relationships, which in turn reflect previous commercial and migratory flows, ​that map
of migrations and exiles that has historically shaped the working class beyond national borders​.

The family and personal fabric of millions of people in Spain and France with South America and Africa
made it even more important to stop the spread as soon as possible. But no government, neither the
Elysée, nor Moncloa, nor even less the regional governments of each country, counted among their risks
what the extension in their territory would mean for those who do not live in them. The flight and border
closures, the mass repatriations, encouraged or directly organized, by the states and regions were done
under a nationalist implicit: to blame the spread on the “imported” cases from abroad in order to present
as ” yet” unnecessary the confinement that was coming too late. Thus, nationalism once again covered up
the subordination of people’s lives to the reproductive desires of capital… and became a justification for
an even greater spread and internationalization of the epidemic.

Workers, not governments, fight internationally

It is already clear to everyone that little can be expected from the EU and its governments in the face of
this epidemic. They aim to minimize the damage to national capitals from declines in activity and
consumption, and willingly accept as necessary a certain number of deaths among workers, in some
cases, as we have seen in Britain or Germany, even in the hundreds of thousands. ​To keep factories and
workplaces open even during confinement is simply to concentrate disease hazards on the workers​.

That is why the spontaneous strikes that began in Italy demanding the closure of workplaces are so
important. First of all because they are not “national”: just yesterday a series of outbreaks in large
Spanish factories (​Mercedes​, ​FASA Renault​, ​IVECO​…) gave the signal for thousands of workers to join
the struggle in Spain. Today the workers of ​Balay joined the strike. A struggle that is internationally
emerging in Italy, France, Belgium and Great Britain and that makes it clear that it is time to go on strike
in all workplaces that are not dedicated to the essential production to demand:
1. The closure of all non-essential production and the implementation of general confinement.
2. Reversal of all dismissals, both permanent and temporary, and compensation as medical leave
for workers throughout the period of confinement.
3. The extension of testing to the entire population with symptoms.
4. The urgent reinforcement of medical and health teams, and the setting up of a large enough
number of emergency structures and hospitals to allow the monitoring and isolation of patients at
risk.

What we mustn’t forget

What we are witnessing is that in the face of a global danger, the bourgeoisie and its governments are
incapable of acting not just globally but even regionally.

(‘’The main lesson that the development of the epidemic must teach us as workers is that the threats we
face as a class are global: the virus, like the crisis, knows no borders, and what happens in each place
affects the rest. There are simply no national solutions. Even “coordination” cannot be expected; the
interests of individual national capitals prevent the ruling classes from providing truly global solutions.
They will always have an incentive to “wait a little longer”, to call us to “get on with life” first and then to
“individual responsibility”… as long as they do not lose their competitive edge.’’
«​Saving lives, not investments», Emancipation’s communiqué​)

If anyone ever believed that the European Union could serve to moderate the appetites of national
capitals and put the most basic universal human needs first, they can see their hopes refuted today, ​once
again​, with absolute clarity. On the other hand, those who doubted the ability of the working class to stand
up to the barbarity of capital across national borders have a palpable demonstration these days of how
the working class not only exists as a ​universal class but that its struggle is the only one capable of
affirming the primacy of human needs effectively and across borders.

Coronavirus and Catastrophic Crisis: The Tragic

Responsibility of Communists (19/03/2020).
International Group of the Communist Left (IGLC)

"The Coronavirus Calls for Wartime Economic Thinking"​(​The New Yorker,​ March 16th 202021). ​"We are at
war" (French President Macron, March 16). ​"I look at it. I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president. I
mean, that’s what we’re fighting. It’s a very tough situation"​ (Trump, March 18th).

21
​The Coronavirus Calls for Wartime Economic Thinking"
(​https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-coronavirus-calls-for-wartime-economic-thinking​).
The rupture is historic and brutal​. In addition to the victims of the pandemic and the health tragedy, the
recession is sudden and deep. Entire, often essential, sectors of world production are paralysed. At a
standstill. The bill will be exorbitant. We’ll see later how capitalism makes the world proletariat pay for it.
In the meantime, ​war against the virus has been declared. The police and the army are the only vaccines,
containment and curfew, against the coronavirus that capitalism has been able to find.

The same goes for the crisis. ​"You can’t think in normal terms. This is more like a wartime crisis than a
normal economic situation" (Ian Shepherdson, the founder of Pantheon Macroeconomics cited by ​The
New Yorker ​in the article above). The general drop in production will exacerbate trade and imperialist
rivalries as never before. In the sinking of world capitalism, the desperate struggle of every national
capital to board the few lifeboats will be savage, fierce and violent.

In order to gain access to the few lifeboats and exclude the others, some talk of "reorienting the economy"
– in opposition to the so-called liberal excesses of globalization – around each national state, even if it
means, they all declare today in panic, nationalizing certain sectors indispensable to the defense of
national capital. Others differentiate between ​essential and ​non-essential goods, the former to be
preserved, the latter to be abandoned. For the crisis will destroy entire sections of the national production
apparatus. It goes for the weakest economic sectors as the weakest people in the face of the coronavirus.
The health services are thinking about the criteria to be used to choose between those who will be saved
– due to lack of personnel, beds and ventilators – and those who will be sent back to die at home or in the
street. The same will soon apply to the weakest sectors of the economy, which are sickened by the crisis.
The state, the supreme representative of each national capital, will decide which sectors are to be
safeguarded at all costs and which are to be sacrificed, or left to die. The essential criterion will not be of
an economic order but of a political and imperialist order: the strategic sectors for the defence of national
capital are the ​essential goods that each state will seek to preserve at all costs. For behind the crisis and
imperialist tensions, the generalised imperialist war is looming ever more. The militarized response to the
coronavirus pandemic is an illustration of this, a particular moment and accelerator. The process, one
could almost say the mechanism, determined by the contradictions of capital, inevitably leads to
generalized imperialist war if the former is not destroyed and overcome.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, capitalist crisis and imperialist war are conjugating in the present. The
dynamic relationship between the two now compels every bourgeoisie to impose absolute misery, with
"non-essential" goods disappearing, and equally absolute discipline in the workplaces and in the streets
for the production of "essential goods" in defense of national capital. The march to imperialist war
demands that the bourgeoisie provokes a generalized confrontation against the proletariat in all countries.
The coronavirus and the crisis it causes leave no room for doubt: the time has come for massive, violent,
dramatic, international confrontations between the classes. Their outcome will resolve in one way or
another the alternative of ​revolution or war​.

The storm is of unprecedented proportions and the Communists are now just a wisp of straw, in danger of
being swept away and further dispersed by the turmoil. One of the tragedies of the historical drama that is
unfolding is likely to be, because the irresponsibility and inconsistency of the Communist forces, the
absence of an effective World Communist Party in the very confrontation that is beginning. There is still
time for the main so-called "partyist" forces, resolutely fighting for the constitution of the party, to rise to
the height of their responsibility and work accordingly, quickly and concretely, to clear the way for
international consolidation around the historical positions of the Communist Left and its main groups. It is
up to them, first and foremost to the Internationalist Communist Tendency, to take their role seriously and
to take charge, overcoming all sectarianism, of the development and strengthening of the proletarian
camp as a whole.

The Coronavirus Pandemic: The Main Danger is

not the Coronavirus but the Virus of Capitalism!
(20/03/2020).
Internationalist Voice

Introduction

In recent weeks, in addition to the problems directly caused by the atrocities of the barbaric capitalist
system, the spectre of a new type of coronavirus (COVID-19) has been casting a shadow over society.
Coronavirus has spread across the globe. We no longer feel safe in the workplace, in the classroom, at
home, in the street or anywhere. Noisy cities like Paris and New York have become ghost towns because
of the virus. The most vibrant cities evoke the tranquillity of the cemetery. For the first time in human
history, most countries have closed their borders.

This is not the first pandemic in the disgraceful history of the barbaric capitalist system. In May 1918, a flu
outbreak in Spain became known as Spanish Influenza. A third of the world’s population (500 million
people) were affected at the time, and 50 million became victims. The number of Spanish flu victims was
higher than the number of World War I victims.

Can such pandemics and events like this be controlled? Are such incidents due to the bad management
of dictatorial and corrupt governments like China, which have failed to control the spread of the virus and
have enabled it to spread to other countries? Should the right and left of capital require better
management of the coronavirus pandemic by capitalist governments?? On the contrary, we believe that
the coronavirus pandemic and other natural disasters are the product of capitalist savagery and an
integral part of capitalism’s metabolism – a system in which the goal is neither to satisfy human needs nor
promote human welfare but to maximize profit at any cost. It is only by eliminating the virus of capitalism
that catastrophic events like this pandemic can be overcome; until such time as the aim of production and
services ceases to be profit and becomes the satisfaction of human needs.

What are the Origins of Coronavirus?

Since World War II, we have witnessed the spread of viruses among human populations which are of
animal origin. In other words, this virus, like others, has spread from animals to humans, and such viruses
have all been characterized by destruction of the body’s immune system. AIDS, Ebola and Zika etc. are
examples of these diseases. However, animals are definitely not to blame. Many of these viruses live in
the bodies of animals without harming the animals and pose no threat to their bodies. But when these
viruses spread to the human population, some of them evolve and become pathogenic, playing a
destructive role.

One prominent example of such transmission is the outbreak of the Ebola virus. Research has shown that
deforestation in Central Africa forced bats to nest in gardens and fields. In other words, the destruction of
forests by humans moved bat habitat from forests to fields and gardens. Humans were also exposed to
bat secretions by eating or coming into contact with crops and trees. As a result, bat viruses which had
hitherto been safely inside their bodies were transmitted to the human population, taking on the form of
disease, killing thousands of people. The problem of ecosystem changes brought about by the capitalist
system, and the devastating consequences of these irresponsible changes in the face of the human
world, for the sole purpose of profiteering, is now manifest, revealing the true nature of the capitalist
system.

Ecosystem Changes

The growth of capitalism required unbridled industrialization, and this required humanization, urbanization
and other housing complexes, which, in turn, led to the destruction of forests and farms. Environmental
changes that are only made for the sake of profit bring about abnormal changes in the ecosystem.
Research shows that malaria-carrying mosquitoes reproduce less in areas left untouched, compared to
areas where humans have inflicted changes. Another example is Lyme disease (carried by mites), which
results from the destruction of mice. The consequences of irresponsible ecosystem changes increase the
chances of viruses being transmitted to the human population and attacking the human body.

Transmission of viruses from animals to humans is not a new thing, but rather it is associated with the
neolithic period when humans began to destroy the environment, to create agricultural land and to
domesticate animals. But the more brutal the transformation of the environment has been, the greater the
rate of transmission of viruses from animals to humans. With the beginning of the colonial era,
environmental destruction accelerated, and with the growth of capitalism, it became violent. In recent
decades, we have witnessed the height of environmental destruction by the capitalist system, which
operates only for its own benefit. Researchers at the US One Health Institute have identified hundreds of
viruses that result from human interference with the environment.

The US (one of the world’s largest polluters) has not only abandoned the Paris climate change treaty. The
Trump administration has also allowed the mining and extraction industries to remain exempt from
environmental regulations. The result is irresponsible environmental manipulation by industries and
mines, paving the way for further destructive changes to the ecosystem and, in turn, reinforcing
transmission of viruses from animals to humans.

The Hypocrisy of the Bourgeoisie

Secrecy, lies and a lack of clear information about the coronavirus are not just for dictatorial countries but
also occur in democracies, arising from their capitalist interests. The bourgeoisie (in both metropolitan
and peripheral capitalism) did not prioritize the coronavirus epidemic until such time as it became a threat
to the cycle of capital accumulation and profitability, and did not take the necessary measures to prevent
the coronavirus from becoming epidemic.

In China, the authorities covered up the virus disaster and failed to make it known to the rest of the world
in order to protect its own interests, which does not present China in a good light. Government officials
tried to pretend that everything was normal, celebrating the Chinese New Year with great feasting in late
January in Wuhan. Only when the capital accumulation cycle was disrupted did China impose a
state-enforced quarantine for the 50-million population of 6 Wuhan. The same is true for South Korea,
Iran, Italy, the US and so on. In Iran, too, the Islamic bourgeoisie initially denounced the existence of the
coronavirus and even announced that it would legally treat “propaganda” rumours about the coronavirus
as “disturbing public opinion”. But when the epidemic in society became a reality, the Tehran
representative in the bourgeois parliament confessed to lying about the spread of the coronavirus,
admitting:

“We lied in some incidents. Facts about the corona outbreak were also delayed, which also heightened
mistrust.”

In Iran, the Islamic bourgeoisie was aware that the actual announcement of the death toll from
coronavirus would impose a heavy cost on the bourgeoisie and would affect its economic, political and
strategic interests in the region, so it pushed for a delay in declaring that it was facing an epidemic, at the
cost of many lives. Trump, like state officials in other countries, initially tried to minimize the coronavirus
outbreak, pretending that the US was well prepared to confront it. He said that last year, 37,000
Americans died of the flu, that nothing was shut down, and that life and the economy continued as usual,
while only 22 people had died in the US because of the coronavirus:

“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per
year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of
CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

Trump even claimed that the number of people with coronavirus would soon be zero and recommended
that those with the virus should go to work if they felt well. He even went so far as to say that “The
coronavirus is the Democrats’ ‘new hoax’.”

Trump said that anyone who wanted to be tested for coronavirus could be. The US Food and Drug
Administration initially announced that a million people would be tested by 6 March 2020, but its director
later admitted that only a limited number could, in fact, be tested. In America (where much of the world’s
wealth is accumulated), there are 40 million people living in poverty, who cannot go to the hospital to
undergo coronavirus testing.

Inevitably and unfortunately, the coronavirus spread across the US and became an epidemic there too.
Trump also had to admit that the US, like most other countries in the world, had been struck by the
coronavirus. It was subsequently recommended that in order to fight the coronavirus, the 40 million
residents of California should not leave their homes (in other words, go into quarantine). Thirty percent of
Americans have no health insurance, which increases the chance of a coronavirus outbreak in the US,
compared to Europe.

Increasing the Military Budget while Reducing the Health Budget

In recent years, countries have increased their military (war) budgets (those characterized by metropolitan
capitalism and also those characterized by peripheral capitalism) while cutting 7f their health budgets.
Defence budgets (war budgets) increased by 4% in 2019 compared to the previous year. Increased
spending on defence in metropolitan capitalism was significant, but the same could also be seen in
peripheral capitalism. The military budget of Asian countries has increased by 50% over the past decade.
The same is true of the Islamic bourgeoisie; the budget of religious and military institutions in Iran has
increased. Only after the assassination of Qassim Suleimani by the US, the Islamic bourgeoisie approved
(with the highest priority) a plan for €200 million to swiftly avenge US actions.

While military (war) budgets have generally increased worldwide, we are seeing a decline in health and
education etc. We are witnessing the most severe austerity policies. For example, while the US defence
budget has increased by 6.6%, the US Center for Disease Control’s budget dropped from $10.8 billion in
2010 to $6.6 billion in 2020. Scientists at Predict were looking for the next Ebola vaccine, which was cut
by the Trump administration. In early February 2020, the US government announced that it plans to cut
funding to the World Health Organization by 53%. The Islamic bourgeoisie, while increasing the funding of
religious and military institutions, has reduced the share of health in the budget for 2019, compared to the
budget for 2018. The budget for specific conditions such as haemophilia has been cut by 25%.

It is not the Coronavirus but Capitalism that kills People

Can the coronavirus outbreak and events like it be controlled? Although such phenomena cannot be
100% predicted in advance, the consequences can be greatly reduced. The outbreak of coronavirus, the
Ebola virus and other natural disasters are a product of the capitalist system and are an integral part of
the capitalist system’s metabolism – a system in which the goal is neither to satisfy human needs nor to
promote human well-being but to maximize profit at any cost.

It is not only internationalists who say it is not the coronavirus that is killing people but, in fact, capitalism
that is massacring humanity. In capitalist society, everything is for profit only. Professor Christian Drosten,
a German virologist, emphasizes that the reason for people dying from coronavirus is not the
dangerousness of the disease but the lack of facilities, even in advanced and modern societies. Most
importantly, the austerity policies that capitalism has imposed on society in recent decades have limited
medical facilities and are now showing their effects. The German virologist says:

“The reason people die from coronavirus is not the dangerousness of this disease. It is because there are
no facilities. The possibilities are scarce even in modern and advanced societies because no government
has ever built thousands of hospitals in a time of pestilence, when a pandemic occurs. Secondly, the
stone that has been put in place by adopting money-saving policies and reducing the number of hospital
staff has now fallen on society. You cannot put nurses out of a job when you are well and then wave a
magic wand to find nurses again later. You cannot. The community has no facilities.”

The same German professor claims that it is not old age and weak immune systems but a lack of facilities
that cause death. If the oxygen supply was adequate and all patients could be put on ventilators, the
death rate would be much lower than it is now. He says:

“Three to four percent die because of a lack of facilities, not just because they are old, and the immune
system is weak. The current facilities are not enough for everyone. If the disease only affected small
groups of people, they could be connected to oxygen devices for three days until they could all breathe in
the normal way; everyone could be monitored, and fewer people would have died.”

In the past decade, austerity policies have even been applied to the health sector. Hospitals, healthcare
services and nursing homes everywhere are faced with staff shortages and reduced facilities. In Britain,
the health minister, Mr Hancock, has said that there is a shortage of artificial respirators for people who
may be severely affected by the coronavirus. Currently, Britain has only 5,000 breathing apparatuses
ready but needs more.

Health also has a Class Stamp

In capitalist society, everything – including health – is related to class. People’s class status and
economic status play a decisive role in their illness and treatment. Workers upon who are the creators of
essential living, medical, health, etc. facilities are often unable to use the same facilities. A large
proportion of the working class and other lower strata of society are unable to acquire essential hygiene
materials, masks, disinfectants, etc. A reporter from the Hamshahri newspaper has said that based on his
observations of various neighbourhoods in Tehran, class differences are quite evident in terms of access
to preventive devices for the corona disease. Although class divergence is manifested in peripheral
capitalism more violently and inhumanely than in metropolitan capitalism, it is not specific to peripheral
capitalism and is also evident in metropolitan capitalism. This is not due to bad management on the part
of the authorities but to the way in which the capitalist mode of production (that is, capitalism) has given
the social classes such traits and characteristics.

The US alone accounts for 34.3% of the world’s total wealth, and the home of the Statue of Liberty is
known as the land of fortune. In this land, class distances are more visible and sharper than elsewhere.
One out of five Americans cannot afford the cost of prescription drugs. In the US, people do not have
public health insurance. They have private health insurance, and, crucially, people’s right to life is
determined by their wealth. Most health insurance companies in the US work on a split-cost basis, which
means that policyholders must pay part of the cost of their treatment before claiming the rest from the
insurance company. According to Al Jazeera, high treatment costs make it difficult for Americans to get
tested for the coronavirus. For this reason, those with no money who contract coronavirus are unable to
go to hospital for examination and testing, so the actual number of those infected is unknown. No private
insurers are willing to pay for this social crisis. The 39 states of the US have no conceptual sick leave. In
other words, if someone gets sick, he or she is expected to be at work, which, in turn, 9 increases the
virus transmission rate. On the other hand, official medical advice stresses that anyone who shows
symptoms should be quarantined for two weeks, which means living without pay for a fortnight.

Essential hygiene items such as masks, gloves and disinfectants have become scarce because of the
excessive demand. It is not only the pharmacies and health stores of peripheral capitalism but also those
of metropolitan capitalism where shelves are empty of the most basic means of prevention. In response,
the black market has boomed, offering much sought-after goods at several times the normal price.
Corruption and the black market are not the product of corrupt governments but are a product of the class
system and a product of the dirty capitalist system. On 16 March 2020, 50,000 masks – masks that were
needed most to fight coronavirus in the hospital – were stolen from Cologne Hospital in Germany, and we
are not talking, here, of corrupt countries but the heart of Europe. The stolen masks will undoubtedly be
on the black market now. The affluent strata of society will certainly have a better chance of accessing
essential health supplies and will be able to use the facilities of private but very expensive hospitals in the
current crisis.

Coronavirus and the Workers

One particular narrative would have us believe that coronavirus works democratically, infects everyone,
does not distinguish between the workers and the bourgeoisie, and kills anyone that it can. The question
we should be asking is are humans truly equally at risk of coronavirus? The answer is no. The
coronavirus is more likely to be transmitted by contact with affected persons or by touching surfaces that
affected persons have previously touched. People who work or live in crowded environments have an
increased risk of getting the virus. Workers are in close contact with one another because of their working
conditions, and they share common tools. Shared use of toilets, public transport and shared dining rooms
etc. increases the likelihood of transmission of the virus. Due to their economic conditions, these workers
are compelled to continue working despite being ill. Unfortunately, the level of preventative measures for
workers is very low, so coronavirus is more likely to spread in the workplace than elsewhere. Poverty,
malnutrition, poor access to healthcare, inadequate housing and limited access to medical facilities etc.
make the working class and lower strata of the population more vulnerable to coronavirus.

What is the fate of workers who are quarantined for having corona? Many workers are engaged on
projects, temporary contracts or small units etc. with no insurance coverage. Society should continue
even in the event of quarantine, and this can only be done by working people. So, in some areas, workers
even have to work overtime.

Widespread layoffs have already begun because of the economic crisis caused by the spread of
coronavirus, not only in peripheral capitalism but also in metropolitan capitalism. Widespread deportations
have already begun in Europe. According to CNN, more than half of all American job opportunities are
likely to be lost because of the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis will 10 be more violent in periphery
capitalism than in metropolitan capitalism. In Iran, 1,600,000 job opportunities are likely to be lost due to
mass spreading of the coronavirus. The loss of 1,600,000 job opportunities will be a severe blow to the
working class, which is currently struggling to survive. Millions of working families will be poorer than they
are today. One worker who has recently become unemployed has said the following about the current
situation and his job prospects:

“Where do we go with corona now? How do we pay for Nowruz [Iranian New Year] expenses? Where do
we look for a job? While affluent people are staying at home and quarantining themselves, workers leave
the house in the morning and work as usual, as if there was no disease in poor areas.”

In a capitalist society, labour power is a commodity and the value of this commodity in the capitalist
society, like any other commodity, is to be determined by the amount of necessary social labour for its
reproduction. In other words, the value of labour power at any point in time or location (country specific)
will be different. In the metropolitan capitalist countries, the reproduction of this commodity is more
expensive and its value is high, hence its maintenance is more important. However, in the capitalist
periphery, the cost of reproducing this commodity is low and its care and maintenance are not of
considerable importance.

Science at the Service of Capital

It is a fact that in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has been able to expand itself
worldwide in the name of capital, and so has science. Capitalism is keen on science and knowledge as
long as they are aimed at boosting labour productivity, reducing production costs and increasing profit
rates.

If the context or phenomenon is not profitable (or in the interests of imperialism), scientific research will
cease. Medical and pharmaceutical research is being marginalized if it does not benefit the owners, while
last year alone, 10 major US pharmaceutical companies made $69 billion profit.
There is no vaccine for this virus yet, although Germany, the US, Iran and others have claimed to have
taken major steps towards producing a COVID-19 vaccine that will soon go into production. However, it
will take a long time to complete the various stages of testing, and any prospective product must be
approved before it can be mass-produced. It is unclear whether such a vaccine is possible and how
widely available it would be around the world. Recently, Trump tried to persuade German researchers at
the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac (which is researching a vaccine for corona) to
secure the vaccine for the US only in return for a huge payment of $1 billion. Such a monopoly by anyone
will only serve as a pressing tool for imperialist interests and an indicator of the extent of humanitarianism
and bourgeois morality.

The key question for any serious human being is why do the military and intelligence/espionage services
make important inventions? Bourgeois governments spend billions of dollars each year on military,
intelligence and espionage investigations; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone will cost the US $4–6
trillion. How much medical research, and how many medical and pharmaceutical facilities could be
provided to society at the expense of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Following the Ebola outbreak in
West Africa in 2014 (which soon spread to the US, Spain, Britain and Italy, with around 11,000 victims
within two years), what serious preventative measures were carried out to curb the spread of similar
viruses?

Crash of the Stock Market

The economic, social and psychological consequences of coronavirus will be catastrophic, and the
working class and lower strata of society in all countries will be the main victims and will pay the price.
This is the major difference between the current coronavirus pandemic (COVID19) and previous viruses.
The coronavirus has had devastating effects on the world economy. Just like an earthquake centred in
China, it began in China, and its destructive waves reverberated throughout the capitalist world.

One example of this is the fall in stock prices, especially in capitalist metropolitan countries. On Monday 9
March 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, tremors shook the world stock market. The fall of
the New York Stock Exchange only 34 minutes after its opening led to a 15-minute halt (which has not
been seen in 11 years, i.e., since the financial crisis of 2008). When trading resumed, the stock market
continued to decline, so Black Monday was introduced. The decline in the New York Stock Exchange, of
course, was a continuation of a trend that began in the Asian financial markets, then reached European
markets and later reached the New York Stock Exchange. Two Republican US senators, through
information rentals, realized the new conditions and sold millions of dollars in stock before shares
crashed. One repercussion of coronavirus has been the winding down of various industries and reduced
demand for oil. Saudi Arabia and Russia have failed to agree on a drop in oil production, and oil prices
have fallen sharply in world markets, echoing the fall of January 2016.

Factories and industries (especially in metropolitan capitalism) are closing down one after the other, and
many small companies are going bankrupt. The world economy is estimated to have lost more than $6
trillion due to the coronavirus. These are the consequences of capitalism in the face of a virus.

Corona and Bourgeois Morality

The coronavirus outbreak has removed the camouflage from bourgeois morality and civilization, and it
has undermined the reality of bourgeois morality. Italy is the cradle of history and civilization, and millions
of people from all over the globe travel there annually to get acquainted with this history and civilization
and to become acquainted with the civilization that flowed from ancient Rome and is still evident to this
day. It is one of the eight most 12 industrialized countries in the world and also has the most highly
developed medical system in the world, with one doctor for every 169 people, according to WHO
statistics.

Italy is one of the countries most severely affected by coronavirus. People with coronavirus have flocked
to Italian hospitals on an unprecedented scale, and the hospitals are unable to accommodate so many
sick patients. The medical staff in Italy sometimes work up to 80 hours a week, and hospital staff are truly
devastated. Doctors are faced with the difficult decision of choosing life or death for their patients,
irrespective of their own wishes and their professional ethics. It is painful to imagine but true all the same.
They decide which patients to treat and which patients not to treat:

“If a person between 80 and 95 years old has severe respiratory failure, it's likely we will not go ahead.”

Imagine; those who have worked hard their whole life and built a community now do not even have a
chance of being treated. Dr. Christian Salaroli, head of the intensive care unit at Bergamo Hospital in
Lombardy, has told the Corriere della Sera that the psychological pressure on medical staff is devastating
and that some doctors in his team are being crushed under the pressure of the decisions they have to
make, and he has said the following:

“This is happening to both senior physicians and young physicians who have just arrived and have to
decide the fate of a human being. This happens in large numbers too. I have seen nurses with thirty years
of experience crying; some suddenly in crisis have become psychotic and trembling.”
Other European medical personnel have said that if conditions in these countries become critical and they
continue to face a lack of facilities (such as in Italy), they will have to make the same decisions despite
their best intentions and conscience. Medical personnel are doing an arduous job and have to make such
decisions because of a lack of medical facilities. It is capitalism that implements austerity policies in
health, hospitals, healthcare and other centres. The capitalists themselves have access to state-of-the-art
private healthcare and state-of-the-art hospitals, and the working class and lower strata of society must
go to public hospitals. Civilization and the civilization of barbaric capitalist society is no more. In this
so-called “civilization”, profit comes first and last, not human lives. As for the capitalists themselves, they
have access to private hospitals equipped with the latest technology and the most sophisticated
personnel, whereas the working class and lower strata of society have to go to public hospitals.

Corona and Peripheral Capital

Iran is also one of the countries most severely affected by coronavirus. Official statistics provided by the
Islamic bourgeoisie are inconsistent with reality. The Islamic bourgeoisie has been trying to
under-represent the statistics. Hospital staff who have tried to provide accurate statistics have even been
harassed by security forces. The key question is why the coronavirus 13 could become an epidemic in
Iran. The following factors should be mentioned in relation to this issue:
● Despite the prevalence of coronavirus in society, its existence has been denied by the Islamic
bourgeoisie on the occasion of the anniversary of the “revolution”. This show is important in
providing legitimacy to the Islamic bourgeoisie.
● Holding a parliamentary election circus was important for presenting an image of bourgeois
parliamentarism to the Islamic bourgeoisie. However, this election circus subsequently became a
political disgrace to the Islamic bourgeoisie.
 ● Failure to impose a quarantine in the city of Qom led to coronavirus spreading. This contradicts
the ideological superstructure of the Islamic bourgeoisie, which considers the city of Qom to be
sacred.
● Because of Western economic sanctions, the Islamic bourgeoisie has a closer relationship with
China and has continued to allow Mahan to operate flights to China.
● Although Iran’s medical science staff are highly trained and even comparable to metropolitan
capitalism, Iran has an extreme class divide like the US. The affluent can access the highest
standards of care, while the working class and lower strata of society are deprived of such
facilities.

Corona and Imperialist Rivalries

Coronavirus has laid bare the imperialist tensions that already existed, with humanitarian gestures being
made in nauseating and humiliating ways, supposedly in the name of culture and civilization. While the
virus was killing in China and Iran (before having reached Europe and North America), competitors in
China and Iran were not only unhappy but also happy about the spread of the virus and its economic
impact. They even abandoned human-friendly demagogues, and easily and clearly expressed their
wishes and happiness. They proudly claimed to have the most advanced treatment system and to be fully
prepared for the spread of the coronavirus. US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross has said that the deadly
coronavirus outbreak in China, which has plunged the Chinese economy into a serious crisis, could be
advantageous to the American economy. In a television interview, he said that:

“I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

Apparently, these civilized barbarians thought the trade war now consisted of the coronavirus, without the
need for an actual trade war or sanctions. Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Washington-based
“Foundation for Defense of Democracies”, also sided with the Israeli government, saying that the
coronavirus had done something that US economic sanctions against Iran could not do and that it was
better to put a stop to Iran’s non-oil exports (posting his views on Twitter:

“Coronavirus has done what American economic sanctions could not: shut down non-oil exports.”

Capitalist Virus

Capitalism is the source of the coronavirus pandemic, the Ebola virus, the destruction of the environment,
the nightmare of war, chaos and dozens of other problems. Capitalism has become a serious threat to
humanity and life on this planet. It is the nature of capitalist systems to prioritize exploitation, profit and the
accumulation of capital over human needs.

For years, the austerity policies of the filthy capitalist system have frustrated health systems, not only in
peripheral capitalism but also in metropolitan capitalism. A shortage of personnel and medical equipment
etc. is evident in the most advanced countries. The possibility of achieving health for all humanity within a
capitalist social system is no longer an illusion! Coronavirus and the like are not the product of bad
management by officials in this or that country, but rather they are the product of capitalism which is itself
a virus.

It is only by eliminating the capitalist virus that production and services can be directed towards meeting
the needs of everyone – not towards financial gain. With the disappearance of the capitalist virus, harmful
production purely driven by profit will also disappear, and a new focus can put on ethical environmental
changes and human health, rather than the austerity policies that have been forced upon us.

To prevent the spread of coronavirus, social isolation has been imposed, not only on the working class
but on all humanity. We are faced with exceptional circumstances, and these are painful because the
material conditions for workers’ protests are extremely limited. Nevertheless, we are witnessing a class
struggle in Italy, the country that has suffered the most from coronavirus in Europe. Italians object to their
situation and reasonably proclaim, ​“We are not a Lamb to the Slaughter!”

Capitalism smells of blood, filth and sludge; capitalism is the source of all misery and troubles, not only for
the working class, but for the whole of humanity. If the working class does not act on its historical
mandate, that is, to overthrow capitalism through communist revolution, the destruction of humanity is
certain. The barbarism of capitalism is not only seen in world war; but world war is only one of its forms
and can take on other forms, such as virus pandemics, capital atrocities, environmental catastrophe or
the collapse of humanity.

Governments are trying to save their National

Capital, Striking Workers are Saving People’s
Lives (20/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

Faced with the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, states are ​organizing “shock” economic plans
that are actually massive income transfers from labor to capital as the ​ongoing imperialist conflict
deepens and takes on new forms​. The logic of capital means that the more this epidemic spreads, the
more reluctant the states become to actually ​enforce confinement in the only way possible: closing down
businesses​. But by refusing to do so they have set in motion the working class, which has responded with
the largest international wave of simultaneous strikes in a century.

The states’ criminal reaction…

Last night on BBC Boris Johnson persisted in his ​“strategy” of avoiding confinement at any cost​. Britain
already counted 144 dead and 3,269 infected, but Johnson and his scientists no longer talked about
achieving “herd immunity”. Partly because relapses and contagion of new patients by theoretically
“recovered” ones make it difficult to sustain. But mostly because the government’s own circulating papers
estimate that the ​National Health Service (NHS) will eventually handle eight times as many patients as it
can manage given its capacity​. The result of a sharp increase of nearly ​eight million patients in a
constantly overcrowded system can only be a worsening of mortality and an escalation of death figures
beyond the hundred thousand. It is not even easy to predict numbers. One doctor wondered “​how many
people will die because we accepted to work on the brink of collapse for too long?​“. Significantly, ​many
migrants, including Italians, preferred to leave their jobs and give up their residence permits rather than
stay in the UK in the face of such a prospect.

In Germany, Merkel’s speech on the national TV channel two days ago made it clear that the German
bourgeoisie is well aware of what it is dealing with…

‘‘Germany has an excellent health system, perhaps one of the best in the world. But our hospitals would
also be overwhelmed if too many patients with severe coronavirus disease were admitted in a short time.
These are not abstract figures in a statistic, but a parent or a grandparent, a partner. They are people.
And we are a community where every life and every person matters.’’

But when it comes to the truth, every person “matters so much” that confinement is not imposed, let alone
business closures, only mass acts and some trips are restricted, presenting the measure as an
“​extraordinary sacrifice of democracy​” that would be extremely dangerous if extended to compulsory
confinement. This sudden and hypocritical concern worthy of an irresponsible anarchoid is combined with
the sober estimate, stated by the Chancellor herself, that if this were to continue, between 60 and 70% of
the population would be infected without any scandal or mass protest. But if there is no scandal or
protest, it is only because the ​German numbers are hard to take seriously​: many infections and practically
no deaths. One of three: either the Germans have a very unlikely genetic immunity to covid-19, there is a
mistake in the numbers because of their method of calculation or the epidemic started in so many
simultaneous outbreaks that it has not yet had time to cause deaths but they will come anyway and in
bulk soon. Obviously, misinformation about the real risks of death for hundreds of thousands of Germans
is no “danger to democracy”.

Pretty much the same thing happens in the United States. Let’s not forget that ​the much-vaunted
confinement decreed by the state of California not only does not affect businesses… ​it is voluntary and
will not be monitored by the state​. Like Trump’s anti-epidemic actions, this is more “security theater” than
real action. If they do anything, it’s to highlight structural shortcomings. For instance, the promised
deployment of hospital ships to New York, that is, the use of the military, not only shows the absence of
minimally scalable health and emergency systems, it shows that even the military is not capable of
responding, in any one place, to a health emergency: ​hospital ships will take several weeks to arrive​.

And on a national level, the reader is probably able to imagine the scene. Not only is there a ​lack of
ventilators throughout the country, but ​the absence of a universal health system means that in any of the
spreading scenarios, the saturation of the hospitals will be almost immediate and with it the increase in
mortality. Mortality and contagion will be ​aggravated by a massive precariousness fueled ​even more by
the health crisis itself​… and by the Trumpist shock plan which, like those elsewhere, is attempting to fix
the ​damage to the national capital by organizing ​a massive transfer of income from the workers to capital
through ​coordinated fiscal and monetary policy​.

Not unlike the government’s reaction in Chile: “​state of catastrophe​” without confinement and ​estimation
of future critical cases and deaths as if the country were a ranch with sick cattle​. In Argentina, by contrast,
the government decreed confinement last night after ​school and border closures proved insufficient and
hospital construction times deemed too long to have any impact on the spread. In any case, Argentina,
like all semicolonial countries, adds an extra problem: even if it were to close the productive structure left
standing despite the economic crisis -something that the national bourgeoisie wants to avoid even at the
cost of thousands of deaths- the 40% of workers in the informal sector would go straight into hunger. In
fact, a good portion of them, the most precarious, are already starving
…and the working class response

In Italy at this point, it is obvious to everyone that if ​the death toll is higher than in China​, it is because
Italian capital is trying to keep exploitation no matter who dies. And thousands have already died. The
disaster in Bergamo​, where the army has had to intervene in order to bury the bodies that were piling up,
is explained, ​even by the mayor of the city​, by the actions of the factory owners… and a law of
confinement which, like the Spanish, French or Argentinean law, did not include the closure of factories
and workplaces.

It was actually ​clear from the beginning​. And so the strikes that began at ​Fiat Pomigliano​, ​Leonardo​, the
port of Genoa​, ​all of Piedmont​, ​Electrolux​ and ​the metal​ spread massively throughout the country.

The unions could not avoid the strikes by ​throwing themselves into the arms of the companies and
disqualifying the workers together with the president of the industrial employers’ association​. Companies
from all sectors, from ​Piaggio to ​Amazon and from ​Cornelliani’s textiles to ​Pozzo d’Adda’s Lear​, did not
settle for symbolic measures and masks sold by the unions. The extension of the strikes is in fact leading
to the closure of the main Italian industrial nodes or, at least, as in ​Arcelor Mittal​, to reductions of more
than 40% of the workforce with paid leave.
The movement had its ​first aftershocks in Belgium​. It was followed by a string of struggles in Spain,
especially in the automotive sector –​Mercedes​, ​Renault and ​IVECO​– jumping this week to electrical
appliances –​Balay​– and aerospace –​Aernova​. If the movement seems to have slowed down in the last
two days, it is because ​the government immediately began to facilitate temporary layoffs and their
extension​. That is, temporary layoffs during which the worker will receive unemployment benefits.

In France the first news of the strike came from ​Amazon in Chalon-sur-Saône and from the famous
Neuhauser bakery​. Shortly afterwards, the workers stopped ​Bombardier​. The permanent workers will be
paid a partial strike at 82% of the salary, although the situation of the temporary employees is not yet
clear. The latest high-profile ones are the ​Saint Nazaire shipyards and the ​Saverglass factory. There is no
sign of stopping. Only yesterday, a worker from ​ID Logistics​, also on strike, declared: “They are sending
us to the slaughterhouse”. At least ​two factories in Austria​ are also on strike to stop production.

The movement has not remained in Europe. The workers of ​Fiat Chrysler are on strike in Canada​. In
Brazil, workers at ​the port of Santos (state of Sao Paulo), Brazil’s main port​, were followed by those at
CAOA-Chery​ and ​three car assembly plants​.

Where are we?

On the one hand, we have practically all governments trying to evade even the confinement declaration
and when they do so they avoid closing down workplaces. Governments that, at the same time as, as in
Spain, ​plan to deny respirators to patients -that is, to deny saving the lives- of the elderly​, governments
that design and test “shock plans” against the economic impact that are nothing more than massive
transfers of income from work to capital to “pay back” capital’s losses.

And on the other hand, we are facing the most extensive, simultaneous and internationalized wave of
struggles of the last century. A wave of struggles in which the workers of dozens of factories in at least
two continents have raised the same demand that clearly expresses the open antagonism between the
logic of capital and its states – to maintain exploitation at all costs, even if thousands of people die – and
the logic of the workers – to save lives, avoid spreading the epidemic, avoid infecting families which would
condemn the elderly to death.

In other words, the pandemic has suddenly raised the level of contradictions in the system to the point of
exposing at least two fundamental truths: the radical antagonism between human needs – the first of
which is to stay alive – and capitalism, and the second truth, that workers are the ​only political subject
capable of representing and asserting these universal interests throughout the world​.

Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus: An

Incomplete Chronicle of Events (16-21 March)
(22/03/2020).
International Communist Tendency (ICT)

The following review is a small depiction of what’s happening in the world, outside Italy (for the situation in
Italy, see: ​leftcom.org​).

In some ways the coronavirus has unified workers around the world under one slogan: ​we don't want to
die for your profits.

The examples which follow aim to show:

1. Italian workers are not alone in their struggle to guarantee safety conditions, nor are those
workers in non-essential services alone in their fight to stay home on full pay;
2. that immediate proletarian demands are the same all over the world today;
3. that immediate demands, however much they may be justified, are not enough.

Safety conditions for workers in essential jobs and full pay for everyone else who is forced to stay at
home is to be supported, but be aware of the limit this implies: namely that class struggle must
IMMEDIATELY shift to a political denunciation of capitalism. We are calling for this clearly and forcefully –
something the unions, by their very nature, cannot and will not do – but we are calling in every gathering,
every strike, in any flyer, leaflet or statement, that beyond the immediate demands of today, we know that
the enemy is capitalism. In fact it is capitalism that puts profit before human lives, that exploits us every
day and kills us in the workplace, and it is capitalism which has produced a sick, polluted society fraught
with misery.

Let these first signs of struggle be the moment to raise the anti-capitalist consciousness among the
working class. This is what is needed today more than ever.

Argentina

18.03 In the grain exporting ports of Urgara there has been unrest by workers threatening to strike at this
crucial time because they are not guaranteed adequate protection from infection by the virus.

Austria

18.03 Despite bans, there has been a spontaneous strike and protests by workers in
Linz-Bindermichl-Keferfeld. The company was guilty of failing to put workers in a position to operate
safely.

Myanmar

17.03 Almost 800 workers at the Global Textile Factory in Kampong Speu province have forced
management to pay wages and premiums in arrears. The factory had stopped its operations in
mid-February due to the coronavirus.

Brazil

17.03 Unrest in prisons in the south of the country following restrictions on visits and cancellation of
prison holidays as a measure to limit the spread of the virus. Some 1,350 prisoners escaped in riots.
(​yeryuzupostasi.org​)

17.03 Workers of the ports of Santos, Sao Vicente, Guarruja, Cubatao declared the immediate cessation
of all activities for the whole period of quarantine declared by the government of São Paulo. The
Chairman of the Board of Directors of Logistics and Transport of São Paulo replied: "There are several
alternatives. The most drastic is the declaration of a state of emergency throughout São Paulo to suspend
individual rights and strikes". The workers, for their part, declared themselves willing to carry out loading
and unloading activities related only to essential services. (​www1.folha.uol.com.br​)

20.03 Employees of Almaviva do Brasil in Consolacao (one of the main call centers in the country, with
37,000 employees) have downed tools, stopped all work and blocked the road due to fear of the virus.
Their slogans called for the distribution of disinfectant alcohol gel to all employees. Workers who are sick
are not being paid, cleaning is being carried out without changing cloths, soap is missing in the
bathrooms, work stations do not adhere to safety distances. (​noticias.uol.com.br​)

France
16.03 Workers at the Neuhauser bread factory in Folschviller – one of the country's largest bread
producers – forced the factory to close for 24 hours after one of their colleagues tested positive for the
virus.

16.03 In Lille, the factory of the Canadian railway manufacturer Bombardier de Crespin (North) is closed
until further notice, and all employees working in production have been partially unemployed since
Monday. (​lapresse.ca​)

17.03 After an employee tested positive for the virus on day 16, Amazon workers at the Montélimar,
Chalon sur Saône and Douai sites went on strike, denouncing the lack of safety distancing, the absence
of safety devices and sanitary disinfectants. Workers garrisoned themselves in front of the Severey site,
respecting safety distances. (​info-chalon.com​)

17.03 Several hundred workers from the Atlantic shipyards in Saint-Nazaire have left their jobs because
they have not been guaranteed safe conditions. The shipyards employ in total over 10,000 workers.
(​enoughisenough14.org​)

17/18.03 Twenty employees in the glass business and more than forty in the decoration business
(Saverdec) went on strike on 17 and 18 March at the Saverglass company in Feuquières (Oise) due to
the failure to adhere to the rules for safeguarding the health of staff. (​actu.fr​)

18.03 Spontaneous strike by ID Logistics employees in Les Herbiers. They’re demanding to stay home on
full wages as a form of prevention against coronavirus.

20.03​ Amazon workers in Lille fighting the non-application of security measures against the virus.

Iceland

13.03 To protect themselves from infection, bus drivers have been picking up passengers only from the
central and rear entrances, and without asking them for a ticket. (​yeryuzupostasi.org​)

Panama

20.03 Intense unrest by the workers of Minera Panama (over 6,000) after the first cases of coronavirus
broke out among them. The company refused to intervene on safety in the workplace and in digs, where
company workers often live piled up six in one room. (​panamaamerica.com.pa​)

Spain

17.03 1,000 Balay workers in Zaragoza impose a closure against coronavirus. The Balay management
had refused to close down despite the absence of security measures. (​izquierdadiario.es​)
18.03 The Aeronova plant in Berantevilla (Álava), which employs 450 workers, temporarily suspended
activity on Tuesday following marches on 17th March by the plant’s employees. The workers demanded
the closure of the factory because of the situation created by the coronavirus pandemic.

Turkey

19.03 Workers at the Sarar textile factory ignored the advice of their trades union and stopped production
for half an hour to protest the fact no action was being taken to protect them against the virus. They
wanted guarantees the premises would be cleaned. There was no disinfectant at the entrance and
hygiene conditions in the canteen are poor. (​yeryuzupostasi.org​)

20.03 Workers at the Galataport shipyard in Istanbul started a strike because no measures have been
taken against the coronavirus despite many requests to management. (​yeryuzupostasi.org​)

21.03 Post and telegraph workers' went on strike after the regional management of the PTT allowed
permanent workers to stay home on Saturdays imposing overtime on almost 200 subcontracted workers.
(​yeryuzupostasi.org​)

Canada

14.03​ Workers at Fiat-Chrysler's Windsor assembly plant in Ontario spontaneously walk out.

USA

17.03 GM, Ford and FCA factories: increasing complaints by workers about poor hygiene and safety
conditions at the factory while most managers and employees work from home. The managers of these
three large companies have refused to close the factories for two weeks as requested by the workers.
(​labornotes.org​)

17.03​ Workers temporarily closed the paint shop at Chrysler's Warren truck assembly plant near Detroit.

18.03 Spontaneous 24-hour strike by Detroit public transport drivers who were not provided with safety
devices or adequate hygiene or the disinfection of vehicles. Transport was suspended throughout the day
in the entire city. The unions were forced to cover the strike. (​labornotes.org​)

18.03 Spontaneous strikes at the Sterling Heights assembly plant (SHAP) in Fiat-Chrysler, Michigan after
two employees tested positive for the virus. The factory closed as a result of these strikes.
 Coronavirus and Class Struggle (23/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

Amidst growing worker mobilizations worldwide to shut down non-essential economic activity in all
countries affected by the coronavirus epidemic, leaders at different levels of the state are divided, factions
are forming within governments, and governments are clashing with each other. After years spent selling
us “solidarity” between territories and states, this health emergency reveals that the seams of the ruling
class itself barely hold without snapping. The bourgeoisie is clearly incapable of directing society
anywhere but towards a massacre. But is any of them really pulling in the same direction as the workers
who are striking to extend confinement by closing down workplaces? Is anyone really putting saving lives
ahead of saving investments?

Social classes today

For a century now, national capital and the bourgeoisie Have been developing their centralization as
never before, relying on the state to the point of merging with it in different degrees and forms depending
on the imperialist context and the strength of each national capital. The result is the contemporary form of
organization of the bourgeoisie and capital: state capitalism. The existence of state capitalism in all
countries -from North Korea and China to the USA and Britain- does not mean that the bourgeoisie has
become monolithic, nor that its internal contradictions have been overcome. The state contains but does
not “settle” them, just as supra-state organizations such as the EU frame and contain, but do not eliminate
and often not even mitigate the contradictions between national capitals. What we are seeing today is a
first glimpse of how the coronavirus health crisis, and its character as an accelerator of ​the economic
crisis that is dragging down global capitalism​, reveals these conflicting interests among different groups
and factions of the ruling class within and between states.

In addition, there are contradictions between the interests of the national capital as a whole and the petty
bourgeoisie. Under state capitalism, the petty bourgeoisie is no longer limited to the small merchant, the
businessman and the academic chairman. In the gigantic business and state structures thrives a
corporate and salaried bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie. They are paid a salary, but their task is to organize
workers’ teams and groups. Their salary, usually extended through “bonuses” and “options”, is in fact a
share in profits and their position is that of a workshop owner and manager who has been absorbed in the
unstoppable process of capital concentration.

And above all, the main contradiction of capitalism: the workers and their struggle for universal interests in
the face of the increasingly anti-human and anti-historical needs of capital.

Workers and the coronavirus

The worker who sees that the source of infection is the industrial area where he works every day,
immediately fears for his family and that of his colleagues. It is obvious to everyone that there is no other
way to stop the killing than to close down the company until the spread stops. The workers’ interest is
easily understood because it reflects the most basic and universal need: to defend life. And that means
closing down the productive apparatus, extending confinement and maintaining essential production so
that there is no lack of food and basic supplies to each and every one during the epidemic. The most
significant thing? It’s the same from Italy ​to India​.

The business-owning petty bourgeoisie

In the current historical moment of capitalism these measures, so basic and evident, are immediately
perceived by small individual capitals as a danger to their survival. And the choice becomes clear to their
owners when it comes to choosing between watching their capital being depleted or risking the death or
injury of almost a third of “their” workers or their families. For the individual capitalist, owner or investor of
his or her personal capital in a typical small and medium sized enterprise of less than 500 workers, the
struggle of his or her workers to close down during the epidemic is directly “anti-capitalist” because it
endangers the survival of capital “that creates jobs and wealth for the commonwealth”.

Of course, there are also sectors of the petty bourgeoisie that, under a general situation of confinement,
prefer to close down because they are left without a market. We have seen these sectors everywhere.
The interesting thing is to see how governments like the ​German or French ones then accuse the small
businessmen of being “lazy” and “defeatist” for closing down their businesses​.

The petty bourgeoisie and the lower levels of the state

But what is true for the small industrial exporter is not necessarily true for the whole petty bourgeoisie as
a class. The corporate petty bourgeoisie and the petty state bureaucrat have discovered the delights of
teleworking. They don’t even realize that the main source of contagion is in the workplace. He or she, the
center and raison d’être of the universe, has become a hero for not going to the office, sings the national
anthem at nine o’clock to celebrate surviving another day without being able to leave the children at
school, and seriously believes that the cause of the spread is all those who go out for a stroll for no good
reason.

However, the lower levels of the state, “local officials”, even if they are part of the same social class,
cannot afford the worldview of official propaganda. In Italy it was the ​mayors of the most affected areas
who first asked the central government to close the factories. Their aim does not consist in maintaining a
single business, but in business as a whole, for which it is convenient to avoid social conflicts as much as
possible. It is not good for the city’s future capital absorption capacity if the factories rise up one by one
with the workers organizing themselves, in most cases, through “wildcat” strikes, that is, outside trade
unions, the other state apparatus in the front line.

The state’s middle levels

In Spain, ​regional chieftains, the so-called “barons” who run the regional administrations​, both ​in the PP
and in the PSOE​, were the first to ask the government to stop non-essential economic activity. But there
is a catch. The Basque president is quite different from the Murcian president. The Basque president runs
an industrial region and if he were to stop non-essential activity, he would have to close down the main
companies in the region, the most capitalized and globalized ones. That is why he tried to help
industrialists fight the wave of strikes in Álava and Vizcaya. Murcia, on the other hand, ​protects an
industry that concentrates capital in transport, agro-industry and agricultural production, all essential
industries​. The closure of essential industries would not harm the region’s capacity to attract capital, if
anything, it would increase it.

The bourgeoisie and the states’ political apparatus

In general, the political apparatus of the state, and with it the government, represents the national interest,
that is, the interest of national capital. Governments are expected to assist in ​accumulation by avoiding as
much as possible any shocks to national capital. In other words, they should put the sustainability of large
capital groups and national monopolies first and do their best to make the country attractive to global
capital.

This is the common agenda, but of course there are nuances and differences. The current state
bourgeoisie is the result of ​a long sedimentation of property-owning layers​. In countries like Germany or
Spain this includes from the large landowner ruling classes, who still consider the classical industrial
bourgeoisie as beneficiaries of a royal concession, to sectors of the petty bourgeoisie that have become
“technocratic” high bureaucracy. To the origins must be added the place occupied in the state: from the
political apparatus to the heart of the judiciary and the repressive bodies, each with its own particular
interests.

In this case, the objective of the bourgeoisie as a whole is that national capital should be devalued as little
as possible and if possible, less than its rivals’ capital. Dead workers in principle are either considered a
sad inevitability, as in Britain, or an exhaustive recount is avoided, as seems to be the case in Germany.
The primary objective, as we have seen in half the world: is that everything should remain the same in the
workplace and in consumption… despite the thousands of deaths. Everything is solved by keeping
“serenity” and deploying “experts” with the message that “the common flu kills many people, even more
than this pandemic”.

The inevitable result: confinement is decreed too late, there is a multiplication of infections, the number of
serious patients increases, the healthcare system becomes saturated… and ​only as a last resort and if
there is a danger of strikes spreading… confinement is extended to the closure of none-essential
workplaces​, the only way to make it really effective… and ​even then, in Italy for example, some may
reconsider it at the last minute and return to considering even hairdressing salons as essential​.

But speaking of the current Italian and Spanish governments, there are more considerations to be
considered. During the last years of the open recession in 2008 and especially from the first symptoms of
“recovery” in capital ​accumulation​, the petty bourgeoisie, increasingly strangled, ​demanded a part of the
transfer of income from labor that capital was absorbing in order to recover from the crisis. The result has
been a real global revolt of the petty bourgeoisie. We saw then the rise of European nationalisms
(​Corsica​, ​Catalonia​, ​Ireland​, ​Scotland​…), the ​revolt of the “yellow vests”​, the ​taxi mobilizations​, the
farmers’ protests​… and not only in Europe: the petty bourgeois, ​“popular” revolts spread to America, Asia
and Africa​.

The Conte government and the Sánchez government are attempts to respond and accommodate with the
Italian and Spanish expressions of these petty bourgeois movements. In the case of Spain, ​Sanchism is
trying out a new “social pact” between national capital and the petty bourgeoisie dressed as the left​, i.e.,
pushing for an attack on the basic conditions of life, work and retirement under the discourse of “social
justice”. The invention’s fragility is reflected in the heterogeneity of the government and goes beyond the
division within the cabinet between members of the PSOE, Podemos, IU and “independents”.
This heterogeneity is what the coronavirus crisis revealed. The press reported today, for example, that ​the
Spanish government was divided between those who want to keep businesses open at all costs, such as
Minister Calviño, the former Director General of Budgets at the European Commission, and those who
now see the need to restrict non-essential production. The latter are a predictable coalition of technocrats
like Escrivá, representatives of the petty-bourgeois revolt like Iglesias and PSOE apparatchiks closely
linked to local power like Ábalos and Mate.

But as we have seen, if their positions on closing down non-essential businesses coincide with those of
the workers, it is for such different reasons that they make evident the antagonism of the interests that
motivate them. In fact, the fact that the government of Sánchez or Conte “has room” for positions in favor
of the closure of workplaces is a strategic asset. If the pressure to close down ceases to come from the
striking workers and becomes part of a faction of the executive, not only will it be possible to manipulate
what is an “essential service”, as in Murcia or ​Italy​, until the concept loses all meaning, but the working
class strength gained during the struggles will come to nothing. It will be handed over to a part of the
same class that is ​already discussing how to distribute the burden of reanimating national capital among
the workers of each country​ “when it is all over”.

Humanity's Health or Capitalism's Profit?

(24/03/2020).
International Communist Tendency (ICT)

Socialism, or communism, or whatever you want to call a society of the future, will not save us from
occasional epidemics. It would however deal with them in an entirely different way.

In the first place it would not try to shut up (in both senses of the word) the first people who spotted there
was a problem, like the late Dr. Li Wenliang22. All China's political leaders could see was that Dr Li was
bringing “China” into disrepute. This was for them both a political and economic threat since international
reputation means everything in a world of globalised trade. It means even more in the middle of a crisis of
capitalist stagnation which has produced trade wars across the planet. Dr. Li was an embarrassment to
the Chinese state and his death from the virus will remain a perpetual indictment of it.

A Global Threat requires a World System

But a socialist society would have no “nations” and no borders. There would instead be world
administration for health organised, as in every other sector, to protect the health of the community from

22
​Chinese doctor who tried to raise alarm on coronavirus in Wuhan dies on ‘front line’ of medical fight
localities and regions to a global level. Today, the nearest thing to this is the dis-United Nations. The
health body of that ineffectual organisation is the World Health Organisation. Its Director-General, Dr.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has from the beginning of this pandemic insisted that “test, test, test” was
the key to halting the spread of the virus23. But who is listening? Apart from states which have already had
experience of SARS and MERS as well as other flu epidemics (like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and
Hong Kong), his words have been largely ignored. In the listed states the testing regime has been
accompanied by serious isolation measures in good time. Not so elsewhere, especially amongst the top
economic dogs on the planet.

Whilst the WHO declares that "This virus is presenting as an unprecedented threat … We can come
24
together against a common enemy, an enemy against humanity" , there is already a war of words over
who started it.

The US Government regularly refers to the virus as “the Chinese disease” whilst China has retaliated by
spreading the story that the virus was developed in a US laboratory in the Ukraine before being
unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens of Wuhan. Both are expelling each others’ journalists as part of
this upgrade of the trade war. As this pandemic proceeds this imperialist competition could yet bring us
more misery in the form of even more wars to add to the massacres in Syria, Libya, Yemen and the
Sahel.

The British Government Response: From Eugenicism to “Socialism”

The Director-General is not the only one to call for “people” to unite in the face of Covid-19. In a
remarkable couple of weeks of contradictory government pronouncements and U-turns, Boris Johnson
and his entourage have flipped policies.

On 13 March, flanked by Whitty and Vallance, his scientific advisers, he declared that the British public
must "prepare to lose loved ones before their time". Vallance went on to tell Sky News that about 60% of
the UK population, or around 40m people would need to contract the virus. “Herd immunity” it was
declared would, over time, build up the resistance of the general population. That some would die before
their time was a price worth paying. So British citizens were left to face the greatest health emergency for
a century, with a policy of “just wash your hands whilst singing Happy Birthday twice”! There was no need
for 'social distancing' or other protective measures. This was not just the politics of the ostrich but
calculated inhumanity. The Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, is a self-confessed
eugenicist and not the only Tory to have voiced the beneficial effect of getting rid of the “unproductive”
elderly segment of the population.

The real agenda behind this “laissez-faire approach” to health was to avoid inflicting further economic
pain on an already stagnating economy, still reeling from the 2008 meltdown and the uncertainties of
Brexit. Profits before people has always been the aim of the game. The Government thus left it up to
individual head teachers to decide whether or not to close their school and Johnson denied any need to

23
​WHO coronavirus briefing: Isolation, testing and tracing comprise the 'backbone' of response
24 ​WHO coronavirus briefing: Isolation, testing and tracing comprise the 'backbone' of response
shut down mass entertainment and leisure venues, even as the Premier League (whose management is
not renowned for its wisdom) announced an end to football fixtures.

In fact this particular game began to unravel quite quickly. Two days later, as the Health Secretary (Matt
Hancock) called on "anybody who can" to turn production over to ventilators ("no number is too high") he
let it be known that the government intended to bring in emergency legislation to 'oblige' people over 70 to
self-isolate for up to four months. (By then the official number of Covid-19 cases in the UK had reached
1,372 with 35 deaths. But since hardly anyone is being tested all figures can be no more than rough
guestimates.)25

Then, lo and behold, less than a week later, Johnson announced compulsory and indefinite school
closures (though with so many caveats about their remaining open for children of "key workers" and
others that teachers even now do not know what the shutdown really means). Headteachers are still
awaiting instructions from the government. In another U-turn the Government finally decided (Friday 21st
March) to order the closure of all cafés, pubs and restaurants, cinemas, gyms, nightclubs and leisure
centres by Saturday morning. The bosses in these sectors were demanding this, since they were already
in crisis anyway (and that was before coronavirus hit them) and can now claim insurance.

Predictably these flip-flop pronouncements have been accompanied by references to the mythical World
War Two spirit of the Blitz and invocations for everyone to pull together in "one gigantic national effort".
So not unsurprisingly, many across the UK have responded to the uncertainty and prospect of domestic
lockdown by stocking up for the siege. Another government minister, George Eustice, Environment
secretary has conceded that there is now £1bn in unconsumed food in UK homes. In a press conference
he asked people to stop panic buying, saying that if you’re under lockdown or can’t get to the shops
before they’re looted you don’t need to worry too much – "once people have stocked up with food this
surge will taper off." In a further move that will reassure no-one, Defra has hired an executive from Nestle
to be director of food supply and set up a ”war room” which will ensure the UK’s food security! As for toilet
rolls and stuff like that, they won't come under the war room remit because it's best that "retailers come
together" to decide the "appropriate level". Nothing like handing responsibility to retailers to reassure
everyone! The retailers, that is, whose bottom line is to make a profit come what may. The retailers who
came up with the great idea to give over-Seventies early morning purchasing priority slots at the same
time as workers on the coronavirus front line who are thus most at risk of having and spreading the
infection. Add to that the retailers who have hardly a thought for the protection of their workforce. How
many check-out workers or shelf-fillers have you seen with gloves or face masks? How many stores are
requiring customers to keep a safe distance from each other, either outside or in?

The Scandalous Treatment of Healthworkers

And the lack of support for the doctors, nurses and other front line staff is nothing short of a criminal
scandal. For a start there were already 100,000 unfilled posts in the NHS before this crisis erupted. On
top of that there has been consistent underfunding of the NHS since the present crisis of accumulation
broke out in the 1970s. The first cuts came under Callaghan in 1977 (to get a loan from the IMF) then

25 "At the time of writing UK officially confirmed cases are 4,080 with 178 recorded deaths. Worldwide 284,000 people are confirmed to be affected with 11,600

confirmed deaths. (John Hopkins University, CSSE, reported in the Financial Times 'Coronavirus Tracked', 21.3.20) And when you read this these figures will be

already well out of date.

Thatcher cut the wards but kept the beds in storage. These were disposed of on Blair’s watch, and the
last ten years of Tory austerity have finished the job off.

Now doctors and nurses are either issued with sub-standard personal protection equipment (expect to
hear more about PPE) or have to buy their own. The Government’s guidelines on covering up against
coronavirus fall well short of WHO recommendations and even where staff have cover they cannot
change it often enough because they don’t have time. As one doctor told the ​New York Times:​

‘‘Britain has fewer intensive-care beds than most other European countries. Occupancy rates are
high, and there’s a daily struggle to discharge enough people to make space for new patients. Even
when a bed is available, we do not have the nurses to staff it. A decade of cuts and underfunding
has left us dangerously exposed. This is the perpetual winter of the NHS.26

13 doctors have already died and the rest of the service is at serious risk in a society where the
determination of the Government to downplay the epidemic is already having consequences they thought
they could avoid.

All in this Together?

As it is they have now been forced to take measures, including a nation-wide lockdown, that are
unprecedented in peace time and will have repercussions for years ahead. In addition to a £350 billion
loan package to support business (provoked by the collapse of both the pound and the stock market) it
has finally dawned on them that the massive unemployment created by the end of much economic activity
especially in the service sector would lead to a domino effect of collapsing demand. Consumer spending
had already fallen in the third quarter of 2019. With average household debt in the UK over £15,000
according to some sources, there was serious danger that this too would dry up for many.27 This is why
they have decided to pay 80% of the wages of some workers up to £2,500 a month. This will likely cost
£78 billion more on top of any other bailout plans. They will have to resort to more printing of money but
unlike quantitative easing this will not be to cover past debts of the financial sector. It will instead enter
directly into circulation and thus is likely to be inflationary. This in turn will trigger a rise in interest rates
and those already struggling to pay even at the virtually nil interest rate will find that they cannot pay their
debts.

The Government package has come too late for many of those already sacked and they will be forced to
take Statutory Sick Pay (if they are eligible) or wait for Universal Credit. Those classed as “self-employed”
(5 million) are not covered nor are gig workers. And of course Chancellor Sunak’s scheme is not due to
kick off until mid-April. However it is clear that this unprecedented step has been forced on the
Government by the realisation that this crisis poses an existential threat to capital, including the possibility
of serious 'social unrest' of a kind that would make the riots of the past look like a tea party. In short the
agenda is still about saving UK inc. from an even worse economic and social meltdown, rather than

26 Dr
​ Jessica Potter “I’m a Doctor in Britain. We’re Heading Into the Abyss” From the ​New York Times​, March
18, 2020
27
​Average UK household debt now stands at record £15,400
saving those who create its wealth in the first place. It certainly is not “socialism” as many social
democrats are trying to claim.

Aiding and abetting the Sunak plan is the TUC which, above all else, wants to secure the survival of
capitalism, especially the home-grown kind. Preferably, of course, with itself in a new position of
responsibility.

‘‘The TUC has written to the Prime Minister urging him to pull together unions, business and
government agencies to minimise the economic and health impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The
aim of the taskforce will be to bring stakeholders together to co-ordinate support and ensure that
measures are being effectively targeted, delivered and accessed by employers and workers in need.
The taskforce should be chaired by a Cabinet Minister.’’28

One union boss on BBC radio news warned that Sunak's measures were necessary to prevent
people “who cannot put food on the table” taking to the streets. Union leaders elsewhere, like Landini
in Italy, were urging the same on their government, as a wave of strikes rippled across the country.29
This forced the Conte Government to shut down all non-essential (i.e. non-food and non-health)
factories and workplaces.

As ever the unions are re-emphasising their role as defenders of the national capital (as they did in 1914
in supporting imperialist war across Europe and the world). They have already joined the chorus of unity
of “we must all pull together” to the rescue of a system which is once again showing that it is not only long
past its sell-by-date but is also a menace to the lives of so many. This global crisis is not just a health
crisis but an exposure of the real priorities of capitalism. Preservation of the profits system comes before
meeting the real needs of the world’s population. As its impact deepens it remains to be seen how the
world’s working class will respond and whether or not the programme of world revolution gets a wider
hearing. One thing is certain – it is time for the world’s working class to come together politically if we are
to end the misery of billions.

When Confinement is a Starvation Sentence

(24/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

Argentina, Morocco, South Africa, India, Brazil, Russia… decreed different forms of confinement.
However, the material significance of confinement for the workers in these countries is even more
destructive than in Europe and attacks the most vulnerable segments of the working class to a greater
extent. For this reason, the slogans of struggle must be adjusted and pushed forward even further in
order to defend the same objectives as in Spain, Italy or France. It could not be otherwise. The struggle

28
​TUC Protecting Workers’ Jobs and Livelihoods​, p.13
29
​Italy: "We're not Lambs to the Slaughter!" Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus
against coronavirus cannot be separated from the struggle against governments and bourgeoisies that
make saving lives contingent on saving investments.

Semi-colonial countries and workers’ situation

The term “exporting” or “emerging” countries is a propagandistic euphemism for what are actually
semi-colonial countries. Unlike the territories under colonial rule in the 19th century, the national
bourgeoisies sooner or later held a state of their own there, and the world wars gave them the illusion of
an accelerated accumulation of national capital around the export sector.

These are national capitals in need of markets and applications of capital in which to invest what they
have accumulated, as much or even more than the rest of national capitals, that is, no less imperialist
than any other. But their way of expressing these needs and coping with them is particular. In
semi-colonial countries, the growth of national capital as a whole is conditioned by international prices
and the volume of global demand for a few products, usually in the primary sector.
First problem: the primary sector is the one that holds the lowest limit to the incorporation of new capital
both from internal sources and from the world capital market, so, given its importance, it “pulls” wages
down, limiting domestic demand and the capitalization of industry.

Second problem: Only those few primary products and the basic transformation industries linked to them
are competitive in the world market. The state, through export taxes, redistributes profits to maintain an
internally-oriented industrial sector by targeting the local or, at best, regional market and to maintain
precarious public services. The artificiality and lack of scale of industry, a fact wielded by nationalism to
cleanse the bourgeoisie’s own guilt of “imperialism”, cannot hide the fact that the tendency towards the
formation of monopolies and the consolidation of the national bourgeoisie in and around the state is
strongest the weaker national capital is. That is why it is in these countries -from Chile to Cuba- that ​state
capitalism​ shows its clearest contours.

What does this mean for the workers? Lower capitalization means that capital gains come out of higher
exploitation in absolute terms​: lower wages, higher levels of ​poverty​. And also, ​much greater “informality”​,
that is, ​precariousness of ​labor power​: workers who have to seek work daily and must accept the salary
they receive that day. Unemployed and “informal” workers form a gigantic “reserve army” that stabilizes
the prices of the labor force downwards. A mass of workers who, under the conditions of the ​decadence
of capitalism, have proliferated beyond being a mere “reserve” in these countries and have even become
the majority of the workers.

Confinement and the workers in semi-colonial countries

In India, ultra-precarious labor occupies about 90% of the country’s labor power and accounts for about
half of its GDP. Workers do not have any regular income expectations and only very limited access to
health care. Confinement means for them ​weeks without pay, shelter and food​… as for ​most workers in
Manila or ​in South Africa​. Even in Brazil ​, 32% of the favela population currently does not have enough to
eat​.

In Argentina, if we add the 35% of ultra-precarious workers and the 10% of unemployed without
coverage, we have that ​45% of the workers are in this ultra-precarious situation​. ​The government has
granted two 10,000 peso vouchers​. In a country where the basic food basket is not much cheaper than in
inland Spain, we are talking about ​only one payment in April of ​less than 150 euros… and limited to
families who do not receive any pension​. And even add to that the closure of the schools. In countries like
Uruguay, Brazil or Argentina, schools are the guarantors of basic food for children. A burden that ​now
falls on the already saturated soup kitchens​.

If we add it all up, the real alternative is not much better than ​in Morocco: mass precariousness makes it a
choice between going hungry and risking one’s own life​.

That is why in the whole spectrum of semi-colonial countries confinement has been accompanied by ​a
turn towards militarism​: police patrolling the neighborhoods so that no one roams the streets, traffic
controls, tanks in the streets… preventive repression in the face of the fear of hunger-induced riots. In
some neighborhoods, such as Rio de Janeiro, where the mafias and the “comandos” dispute with the
state over control and exploitation of the population, ​organized lumpen rule the neighborhoods by
decreeing their own curfew.

What is to be done?

All these countries, like those in the core countries, are forcing factories and offices to remain in operation
despite the obvious public health risk. But at the same time they are decreeing confinement for millions of
working families in the “informal economy,” condemning them to hunger and tightening repression to
enforce it.

It is not a question of whether or not there should be confinement. This is about imposing even tighter
confinement to prevent the spread of the epidemic, shutting down non-essential production, but at the
same time ensuring that production serves basic human needs. Food, water, energy, supplies and
medicines must reach everyone and in sufficient quantity during the confinement. “Vouchers” that cannot
be used to feed a family are not enough. And it is certainly not acceptable to militarize the neighborhoods.

Today, it is clear that only the workers are fighting for effective quarantine and that only they can organize
it. In the workplaces, in distributing products according to need, and in organizing the neighborhoods.

EU Plans the ‘‘Recovery’’ after Covid

(25/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

The European Commission President, ​Ursula von der Leyen, barged into the Spanish television evening
news last night​. This time she did not rehearse an ​empty, almost pope-like message as she did on the
Italian TV​. Instead, she deployed a series of judgements that could only shock the audience. This picture
completed the results of the ​emergency meeting of the finance ministers​. Germany is in the process of
providing “Greek-style treatment” to the states most affected by the pandemic.
Von der Leyen began by emphasizing the value of the joint purchase of medical material, insisting that
thanks to it “Spain will have everything it needs”. And he listed: “masks, gloves, glasses which is what
Spain needs”. In fact, what was obvious to anyone who had watched the news last night or on any of the
previous days, is that what is needed, both in Spain and in Italy, France, Greece or Portugal, is ​medical
staff, hospital beds and equipped intensive care units​. By now, ​even morgues are needed​. In other words,
everything that was undermined and reduced over the years as part of a general policy of dismantling and
privatizing health care in which all governments – right and left wing alike – participated and which found
its guiding principle in the EU and its stimulus in the “austerity policy”. For decades governments
transferred income from labor to capital by reducing the “maintenance costs” of ​labor power (through
limited access to health care) while weakening the general capacity to respond to an emergency like the
current one. And now it turns out that “nothing happened here” and everything can be fixed with a few
tons of masks and disposable glasses.

But if the comments about the health crisis were hurtful, those pointing to economic policy were even
more so. Two brutal ideas: the kindness and “flexibility of EU rules” would have been demonstrated by
allowing ​Sánchez’s “shock plan” ​and, in the face of Sánchez’s demand for a “Marshall plan” based on
“Eurobonds”, a Merkelian black humor: “the EU budget is a Marshall Plan”.

What does the debate on Eurobonds mean for workers?

Yesterday, the ​EU’s Council of Finance Ministers met ​. The tools that will shape the economic policy of
“recovery” Are under discussion. They are basically in agreement, which is why all the shock plans are so
similar: the aim is to revive national capital through a massive transfer of income from labor to capital.
This is nothing original. As we see in the graph above, every recession and crisis of national capital has
ended up with a transfer of this kind… the accumulated result in Spain has been that the share of wages
-which does not only include those of the workers- in the national income fell by 20% between 1978 and
2018.

Even before the epidemic, it was clear that European and global capital, almost twelve years after the
2008 crash, ​was still not recovering ​. And if at that time ​they were discussing the “green deal” as the way
to organize a shock transfer ​, now the fall in global demand and the halt in activity that confinement
entails are speeding up the planning of “recovery” plans at our expense.

The question is how the burden is shared out between countries, that is, how much is taken from the
workers in each state. The alternatives are the same as in the face of the ​debt crisis in Greece in 2009​: a
financial cushion that mutualizes risk between states. The first option is the famous “Eurobonds”, now
re-baptized “coronabonds”, the second one is the “European Stability Mechanism” (ESM).

Eurobonds would mutualize risk between states, i.e. the “country risk” of those most affected would not
increase significantly and therefore the interest rate that states would pay to finance themselves would
not be too far removed from the German one that serves as a reference. As a result, attacks on living and
working conditions – including cuts in the health system – would be relatively homogeneous across the
states. National capitals would not lose “competitiveness” by being a little less draconian.

The ESM option would in the first place entail much less volume… which would push states to be more
aggressive against the conditions of their workers. It would also increase the “country risk” of those
affected. This means first of all that Spain, Portugal, Italy or France, would have to pay higher interest on
their public debt… and therefore, to recover the health of national capital, they would have to be even
swifter and more brutal in assaulting the real earnings of the workers. Secondly, the difference in rates
would cause gigantic flows of speculative capital to seek refuge in Germany, the Netherlands and other
lower-risk Northern European countries. Yes, ​German capital became stronger and obtained billions of
euros on account of the Greek disaster​. So now the German bourgeoisie started playing the game of
denying that the epidemic was really affecting the country and consequently refusing to take measures
against the spread and that is why the Netherlands and Germany are the heads of the resistance against
Eurobonds. They are already playing a strategic position thinking of a capital transfer in their favor.

The future of the EU and the workers

1. A partnership between states and capitals with a more conflicting basis than today’s EU is difficult
to conceive of: the harder things get for their partners and captive customers, the better the
balance sheet of German capital will be. It is not that, as we are told in the media, ​the coronavirus
is going to encourage the irrationalist fever of “anti-European populism”​, it is that the national
bourgeoisies, especially in the countries that suffer most from the epidemic, are going to be
increasingly reluctant of the balance they can obtain if they continue working within EU
mechanisms that are tailored to Germany.
2. But let’s not kid ourselves. The difference between ESM and Eurobonds, like all the differences
between camps in the internal imperialist battles of the EU, do not represent any alternative for
the workers and the large majorities of society in any country. Winners and losers of the
inter-imperialist brawls in the EU have a common objective: “recovery”, in other words, organizing
a brutal transfer of income from labor to capital. Once again, as always, as in any imperialist
conflict, ​the main enemy is within the country itself.

The Expert’s Crisis (26/03/2020).

Nuevo Curso (NC)

Spanish trade unions claim that ​they have to consult “the experts” before taking a position on the closure
of non-essential companies​. But who are “the experts”? Why are governments now turning to them? Why
is there so much mistrust of them?

If we remember well, the “experts’ crisis” began during the Brexit referendum. The “remainer” campaign
used all kinds of reports from institutions, university groups and organizations to predict the greatest evil
should Britain leave the EU. An apocalyptic report from the Bank of England had just been made public
when one of the spokesmen for “brexiter” conservatism, ​Michael Gove​, claimed something that would be
passed on to posterity:

‘‘The people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they
know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.’’
Since then, the discredit of experts among the population has been one of the favorite topics of the “big
media” in their attempt to demonstrate that “populism” is pure irrationalism. Several people pointed out at
the beginning of this crisis that one of the few positive things it was bringing about was “the return of the
experts”. But have we already forgotten what role they played in the stages that turned the epidemic into
what it is today?

“The experts” and the spread of the disease

Johnson’s first strategy towards the coronavirus basically consisted in ​leaving the population to its own
devices ​. And while the Prime Minister lamented that “many families will lose their loved ones”, ​“renowned
experts” in British epidemiology came out to say that the best thing to do was to seek “herd immunity”
based on mass contagion ​. Of course, there also were ​epidemiologists who denounced that little act as a
farce​. It was actually the beginning of a tragedy. But was it different in the rest of the world?

Not really, ranging ​from Chile​, which ​up until today did not decree confinement to ​Japan​, countries were
reaching critical masses of community contagion and yet experts kept saying what governments wanted
to hear: that we had to maintain “serenity” and keep going to work.

Remember Spain? We even had a congress of “experts” whose public results were headlines as biased
as «​“The seasonal flu has more incidence and mortality than the coronavirus” (incidence part true yet
irrelevant, mortality one misleading) or «​. Never had so many virologists been so concerned about this
«​“scaremongering that makes the Wuhan pneunomia worse than it is”. But let’s be honest,
“scaremongering” affects governments and in the context of an epidemic it affects production and
therefore the profitability of capital, while viruses affect all those people and families, mostly retirees and
working families, who are now dying in field beds. Under ​state capitalism the first group is what defines a
successful political-academic career, the second is not.

The “experts” performed so well that, Simón, the greatest expert of the kingdom, on the 7th of March and
asked by the journalists what he recommended about the celebration of the following day, he answered ​:
“If my son asks me if he can go, I will tell him to do what he wants”. The reality is that the figures of
contagion in Madrid and Euskadi had been advising total confinement for days. But the priorities were
different:

‘‘The March 8 demonstration has become an official liturgy in Spain, a way of implementing a ​new state
ideology to which Sánchez’s “feminist government” is particularly committed. Last week it became
obvious that the government’s so-called “containment phase” no longer contained anything, but they
prioritized the demonstration over safety. The H ​ ealth Minister urged the sick (!!) not to go to the
demonstration​. And the public television headlined the news with a triumphalist and ridiculous “F ​ eminism
resists the Coronavirus on the streets​“, as if gathering masses of people in the middle of an airborne virus
epidemic was nothing but recklessness.
The state, with the government at its head, set its priorities as expected in the face of the epidemic:
“tranquility”, that is to say, in the first place ​giving media prominence to feminism and its pitiful petty fights
imported from Yankee university debates,​ and once the state ritual was completed, ​keeping the
productive apparatus up and running at all costs by minimizing losses, ​if necessary by increasing the
budget and increasing the very deficit normally invoked to cut health spending​.’’
“​Coronavirus: lies and half-truths ”​ 10/3/2020
And we could go on country by country. Even in the last ones where the epidemic has arrived, ​like
Argentina​, there has been no lack of reassuring experts. Even in ​Mexico, an obvious candidate for health
system overload​, there were television experts to support ​AMLO’s show with his “detente-virus” good luck
charms​ purportedly devising “strategies” where there was only neglect.

What does the “crisis of the experts” mean?

The recourse to the expert is a self-vindication of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class. It is a way to reinforce
in moments of crisis that only the bourgeoisie holds social knowledge and that it uses it for the benefit of
all. Of all the branches of knowledge, it was surely the ​birth of Epidemiology which expressed most clearly
the moment in which the bourgeoisie was capable of thinking the social as something that aligned with its
own interests as the ruling class of society.

But ​just as with Economic Theory and its experts​, social knowledge and the needs of capital diverge
because human needs and capital ​accumulation are increasingly antagonistic. The “expert” then
becomes a stuntman whose task is to justify policies and to reassure the population. The discourse can
only fall in a situation where the class that runs society declares, at best, that its objective is to seek a
“balance” when faced with ​the alternative between saving lives and investments​. In practice, ​the
bourgeoisie shows that its priority was, is and will be to maintain economic activity as much as possible​,
even to keep political ceremonies running… and only later, to stop the spread to avoid the hospital
collapse and mass deaths that are already being experienced in Italy or Spain.

Covid is an Accelerator, not a Brake (26/03/2020).

Nuevo Curso (NC)

The crisis driven by the Covid-19 epidemic is hastening one by one the system’s contradictions. First the
contradictions between national capitals that are fighting each other with increasing violence to secure
their space in a post-epidemic world. But above all and across borders, between governments wanting to
save investments and conduits of national capital at all costs and workers trying to assert through a
worldwide wave of strikes the primacy of life and the most basic human needs.

The acceleration of inter-imperialist conflict is already being felt even in South America. ​Colombia
militarized the border with Venezuela​, in theory to stop the arrival of refugees who might suffer from
Covid. But soon after, the Venezuelan government denounced a ​“Bay of Pigs” style operation organized
by Colombian and U.S. military intelligence​. This was followed by an ​accusation against Maduro in the
U.S. for drug trafficking​, that is, the insinuation of an ​invasion like that of Panama in 1989​.

It is certainly not the only hot spot. ​China is accelerating its claims in the South China Sea​. It is using
more and more fishermen’s militias reinforced with the navy in a permanent wager. ​The United States,
which has been arming anyone opposing China​, responds to the Chinese advances by ​firing missiles
from its warships​. The situation is becoming increasingly dangerous and at any moment may give way to
direct armed confrontations.

This military tension is the extreme result of a growing trend of inter-imperialist conflicts that is also
accelerating, causing international cartels and trade alliances to be blown up in the first place. An
immediate example: ​the OPEC’s blow-up​. A further example is the European Union.

In Europe, the governments’ watchword is to “​save companies at any cost​” within their borders, while ​at
the same time fighting for to lower said cost against the other states in the EU​. Because let us not forget:
the debate between Eurobonds and conditional credits is not only a debate about forms and volumes.
The Eurobonds defended by Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Belgium and
Ireland would mean an equal and relatively low cost of financing for all. The conditional financing via the
ESM (European Stability Mechanism) that Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the Nordic countries
are trying to impose would mean significantly higher interest rates for the countries most affected… and a
direct transfer of billions of euros of capital to Germany in the form of shifted attractiveness of investment.
So vital is this battle for the national capital of the southern countries that, ​for the first time in decades, the
Spanish media legitimize “anti-European” disaffection​, a disaffection which was disqualified until
yesterday. We are still far from ​Spexit​… but the Spanish bourgeoisie wants to let us know that it no longer
rules it out, although in principle it would prefer any other way out.

The tensions and skirmishes between the European imperialisms are serving at least to open up holes in
the general rehearsal of war censorship that we are experiencing. If seeing the Spanish results were not
enough for us, we could turn to the ​German press to discover the criminal ineptitude of the Sánchez
government​; to the ​Italian press to remind us that under the “German mystery” there is only a deliberate
lack of victim and contagion protocols​; and to the Spanish press to discover ​how the Dutch state
organizes a mass crime in the purest eugenic style, by systematically not allowing the weakest to enter
hospitals​.

But trade wars, expansionism and military interventionism are only three, and surely the least constant, of
all manifestations of imperialism. The intensified and constant struggle with other states for resources,
access to markets and investment opportunities is only part of the global picture that defines ​imperialism​.
The concentration of capital, the formation of monopolies, the centralization of the economic and political
leadership of national capital until the exacerbation of ​state capitalism​, the tendency to directly control and
organize the population, are its most constant manifestations. And all these elements, the clearest and
most classic of what “inward” imperialism means, are shown in this crisis with a renewed harshness.

In Argentina, the organization of confinement in the working class neighborhoods turn into the
establishment of ​militarized ghettos​, regardless of whether the conditions of ​generalized substandard
housing enhance, instead of curtail, the spread​. In ​Portugal, transportation workers are practically
militarized​. ​In Israel, construction workers become “essential workers” and, most of them being Gazans,
they are crowded by their employers into inhumane sleeping quarters because the borders are closed​.
When the army detects an infected person, they are sent back to the border crossings. In other words, ​the
criminal two-handed system of exploitation between the Palestinian and Israeli bourgeoisies has
automatically adapted itself to a new intensification of the most savage exploitation. In Kerala, India,
population control reaches the point of f​orcibly removing the Tamil workers​.

But if the Covid crisis sharpens the conflicts between capitals and the increasingly anti-human and
anti-historical character of the leadership of society by the bourgeoisie (what is called the “​nation​”), it also
sets in motion the affirmation of its opposite through workers’ struggles.

Between last Sunday and this morning alone, we had recorded on ​our Telegram channel @huelga more
than thirty strikes. These are only the tip of the iceberg: the ones we have found by reading international
media. Many more, most of them, have escaped us. Many others are not even in the press. Many of them
are “wildcat strikes”, that is, with the trade unions openly opposing them. The objectives were the same
from ​Senegal to ​Brazil and from ​Italy to ​New Zealand​: stop non-essential production to avoid further
contamination and meet the basic needs of the whole population during the confinement.

We are in the middle of the most synchronous and geographically widespread wave of strikes and
struggles in the last century. It shows to what extent universal, human needs can only be defended by the
workers as a class, because only to the workers do they present themselves as their immediate and
direct objective throughout the world. And what is no less important, it shows that we workers are capable
of affirming a global alternative when we break with the subordination of our demands to companies’
profits, in other words, when we break with the discourse that unions have been hammering out for years
and that they continue to repeat today from ​Cádiz​ to ​Detroit​.

By imposing the lives and needs of all on companies’ priorities, by asserting that ​saving lives is more
important than saving investments​, the current strikes are not only denying the dictatorship of the
profitability of capital over society in practice, they are affirming the urgent need to organize society for the
satisfaction of human needs. That is why this wave of struggle is already a “real movement that cancels
and overcomes the current state of affairs”. Whether it can develop from here, and after the epidemic, into
its ultimate and necessary consequences​, will depend very much on the ability of those of us who realize
its profound significance to do so ​consciously​ among our own comrades and within our class as a whole.

The True Fabricator of the Virus is Capitalism

(XX/03/2020)
International Communist Party (El Comunista/Internationalist Proletarian)

The problems of pollution, increasing desertification, melting of the poles, etc. have been present and
deepening for a long time. Now a new VIRUS has come to the fore "out of nowhere" with the curious
ability to choose the dates (Chinese New Year) and places (China, Iran, South Korea, Europe) that are
most convenient for certain powers such as the US whose hegemony in the world trade war recedes
unstoppably (without this meaning that it does not affect them and may even turn against them).

It is impossible not to see behind it the manifestation of economic shocks between different groups of the
world bourgeoisie. However, without prejudice to these economic interests, THE DRAMATIC REALITY IS
THAT CAPITALISM IS DESTROYING LIFE ON THE PLANET.

In capitalist society, the driving principle and the ultimate goal is PROFIT, which can only be obtained
from the EXPLOITATION of wage labor (and as long as private property, the exchange of
COMMODITIES and money subsist we will be in full capitalism).

Leaving aside if the coronavirus is caused or has arisen spontaneously, as well as all the inconsistencies
and contradictions of the official explanations: even according to the official version, the problem is not the
coronavirus itself, which has little effect in the majority part of the population. The PROBLEM is that the
CRIMINAL POLICY of reduction of resources in health means that in the Spanish State there are only
3,508 ICU beds (plus 896 private ones) while there are more than 47 million inhabitants, that in the Italian
State there are only 5,090 hospital beds. ICU when there are more than 60 million inhabitants, etc. This
means that, although it severely affects only a minority in percentage, this minority surpasses the
ridiculously SMALL NUMBER OF BEDS AVAILABLE. The only GUILTY in this situation is CAPITALISM
that makes us live on a huge powder keg: overproduction and trade war.

The spread of this and other viruses is facilitated by the concentration of the population. But ... What
makes us agglomerate in urban concentrations that constitute real bombs of environmental contamination
and the spread of disease? The need for companies to have a large mass of labor to earn PROFIT from
it, along with the urgent need for this workforce to find work where there is. In other words, the
exploitation of WORK ASALARIATED by CAPITAL.

The capitalist states take measures of "QUARANTINE", of "CONFINEMENT", of prohibition of

demonstrations and concentrations, of prohibition of displacement, etc. They quickly impose the force of
the State, decreeing "alarm status", and imposing the authority of their class State.

Suddenly, thousands and thousands of workers have their contracts suspended or they are FIRED, while
thousands more (most workers with TEMPORARY CONTRACTS) lose their jobs. The State promises aid
and covers unemployment benefits, but let's not be fooled: with the general stoppage of production and
the undercut left by the sinking of speculative capital, the resumption of this CRISIS will make us pay the
working class if we do not organize to face the Employers.

In this society driven by PROFIT there is always a great BUSINESS behind the falsely called “natural”
catastrophes: pharmaceutical companies running to enrich themselves with vaccines and patented
treatments, supermarkets making gold with the fear of the population, companies taking advantage of
massive dismissal, etc. .

This virus also serves to cover up the OVERPRODUCTION CRISIS. In this way, the fall in the production
of the price of oil (below $ 30 a barrel) due to its overproduction that floods the world's reserves can be
silenced or blamed on the coronavirus, the fall in the Stock Exchanges - CRACK FINANCIAL E
INDUSTRIAL type 1929 - which had been preparing and maturing since 2008 can be attributed to the
coronavirus and not to its true cause: THE CAPITALIST MERCANTILE SYSTEM. For the past few years,
this sick system has been surrounded by the contradictions of the overproduction crisis, with negative
interest rates (the denial of capitalist logic itself, paying to lend money ...) and injecting money and more
money produced from scratch ( giving the ticket machine) how to inject drugs into the ADDICT. This
BUBBLE had to burst. It was an open secret even among the most defended economists of the capitalist
system. This coronavirus has a surprising ability to get the moment right in this regard as well.

They repeat to us on television, a thousand and one times: the coronavirus problem affects equally “rich
and poor”. There is nothing more convenient for the bourgeoisie than convincing the working class that
we are all equal before God, before the Law, before the Climate and, now ... before the CORONAVIRUS!

Do the working class neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie have the same
conditions? Do viruses and disease have the same effect on a body pounded by work as on a healthy
and rested body? Is the state of health and the immune system the same in those who can afford to eat
quality food as those who have to eat anything because the salary is not enough? Is the food that the
working class can afford the same as the quality food that the bourgeoisie can afford? Are we subject to
the same conditions of intoxication and dangerousness in the workplace? Can we access the same
treatments and medicines?

But there is another greater destruction if possible and it is WAR. Capitalism has two world wars behind it,
with 15 million dead in the first and 80 million in the second. The culminating work of bourgeois civilization
is the atomic bombs dropped on the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since then, military destructive capacity has only increased, but it is not the only thing that has changed.
The capitalist system is immersed in a great crisis of relative OVERPRODUCTION of capitals that
requires a DESTRUCTION of productive forces to relaunch another cycle of ACCUMULATION with a
high rate of profit.

The partition of the world made in Yalta and Potsdam after World War II has been blown up and the
United States continues to back down as they continue to try to trigger military conflicts across the globe,
trying to trigger World War III when they can still think in winning it.

The trade war is openly proclaimed and the rest of the imperialist countries (EU, China, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, the two Koreas, etc.) also occupy positions and intervene militarily
throughout the world to defend their economic interests. . The insatiable thirst for capital gain leads the
various imperialist powers to overcome any imaginable limit for the continuation of their trade war by other
means.

Comrades, we have to juggle capitalism before, with the development of wars, pestilences and laboratory
or "natural" viruses, it destroys human life on earth. Therefore, CAPITALISM MUST BE DESTROYED SO
THAT IT DOES NOT DESTROY THE PLANET, and this requires the integral, COMMUNIST and
INTERNATIONAL Marxist PARTY.

This bourgeois world is sinking and threatens to drag us with it, we have no patches or patches to put on
it but a new society to fight and live for. And not a caricature of this current society with the changed
names (as in Russia, China or Venezuela), but a truly communist society: without wage labor, without
money, without a market, without anarchy of production, without private property, without a State , neither
crisis nor wars ... in which "the free development of each will be the premise of the free development of
all" (Communist Party Manifesto).
 Either the World Working Class puts an End to
Capitalism, or Capitalism puts an End to
Humanity (30/03/2020).
International Communist Current (ICC)

We are publishing an article written by our sections in Spain and Italy, which shows that in all
countries the bourgeoisie is displaying the same criminal negligence towards the pandemic and
the same contempt for the lives of the exploited.

The capitalist state is presenting itself as our saviour. This is a scam of the worst kind. Faced with the
spread of the pandemic, what have they done? The worst! In all countries they took measures at the last
minute, forced to do so by the rising death toll; they have kept millions of workers at their workplaces, with
no masks, or gel or gloves, and all crowded together. Why? To continue production at any cost. They
want to win parts of the market by taking advantage of the difficulties of their competitors. “China is on the
floor? Keep producing!” “Italy is down? Keep producing!” And so on. Even when the pandemic really
began to bite, when the lock-downs started, the pressure to ensure the “health of the economy” didn’t go
away. The declarations by Trump or Bolsanaro about the economy coming first are just a caricature of the
murderous policy of the leaders of all the governments on the planet. And yet, in acting this way, each
national bourgeoisie, by facilitating the spread of the virus, is putting its own economy in danger.

In response, we have seen a number of strikes in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, the USA, Brazil,
Canada…Certainly these struggles are limited, how else could it be during the lock-down when it’s
impossible to gather together in large numbers? But their appearance in different countries in these
extremely difficult conditions shows that, in certain parts of the working class, there is resistance to the
“sacrifices” being demanded, to the idea of serving as cannon fodder for the interests of capital. We
cannot afford to bow down to the capitalist state which takes advantage of its role as "coordinator" in the
fight against the pandemic to further strengthen its totalitarian control, to deepen our atomisation and
develop an ideology of national unity and even of war.

More than ever, this pandemic shows us the alternative: either we allow ourselves to be dragged down
into capitalist barbarism, or we contribute, with patience and a vision of the future, to the perspective of
the world proletarian revolution.

Today, the streets of Madrid offer us the spectacle of ambulances rushing at high speed, of chaos in the
health services, of suffering comparable to the terrorist attacks of 2004 (193 dead and 1400 wounded).
But this time this is a pandemic which has already killed 2,300 people and infected 35,000 in Spain,
according to the official figures; an epidemic which is spreading faster than in Italy, which, a few days ago,
had already beaten all records in terms of daily deaths. The death toll (over 7000 at the time of writing)
already shows this pandemic to be the worst health disaster in the two countries since the Second World
War. What’s happening in these two countries is only a preview of what will probably hit the populations of
big cities like New York, Los Angeles, London. And it will be even worse when it hits Latin America, Africa
and other regions where health systems are even more fragile or don’t exist at all.

But for weeks before this, the leaders of Spain and Italy – just as in France (as we show in our French
publication30) and other capitalist powers – could easily have imagined the damage the epidemic would
cause. However, like the other capitalist states (and not only those led by populists like Johnson in the UK
and Trump in the US), they decided to put the needs of the capitalist economy before the health of the
population. Now of course they are boasting historically that they are ready to do everything to protect the
health of their citizens, and they have declared all out “war” on the virus.

But the responsibility for the deaths caused by the pandemic is entirely linked to the present social
conditions, to a mode of production which, instead of dedicating the productive forces, natural resources
and advances in knowledge to the benefit of life, is sacrificing human life and nature on the altar of profit.

The exploited class is the main victim of this pandemic

We are constantly being told that this pandemic affects everyone without distinction between rich and
poor. They tell us all the famous people (like Prince Charles and Boris Johnson in the UK) who have been
infected or even killed by Covid-19. But these news items are put around above all to hide the fact that it
is the conditions of exploitation which explain the rise and propagation of the pandemic.

First, because of the overcrowding of the neighbourhoods in which the exploited have to live, a fertile soil
for the spread of epidemics. This is easily verified given the higher incidence of the pandemic in regions
of dense human population brought together by the needs of exploitation (Lombardy, Venice and Emilia
Romagna in Italy, Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain) than in areas of lower population,
such as Sicily or Andalusia. The worsening of housing conditions for proletarians further accentuates this
vulnerability. In the case of Madrid, the hospitals which are most saturated and where services are
collapsing are essentially those which serve the population of the industrial towns of the south. In
dilapidated and overcrowded apartment blocks it’s also much more difficult to put up with the quarantine
decreed by the authorities. In the luxury chalets of Somosierra or the villas of Nice where Berlusconi has
taken refuge with his children, isolation is a lot easier to deal with. The exploiters’ talk about their “civic
sense” is just cynicism.

Not to mention the impact on those living from precarious jobs or looking after children or elderly people,
massed together in these kinds of dwellings. The situation of the elderly is particularly scandalous: having
been exploited their whole life, many of them are forced to live alone or neglected in “care homes” run by
the laws of capitalist profit. With one carer for 18 residents on average, care homes have become one of
the main sources for the spread of the pandemic, as we have seen in Spain not only among the residents,
but also those working there on temporary contracts and miserable wages, trying to take care of patients
often without the basic measures of protection. The situation is identical in France, up till recently
presented as a model of social protection run by the state. In Spain, the pits were reached when we saw
hospitalised patients having to remain isolated in their wards next to the corpses of their fellow
unfortunates, because the funeral services are overrun or lack the protective equipment to enable them to
dispose of human remains. At the same time, numerous sick people, especially the old, who have been

30
​https://fr.internationalism.org/content/10088/pandemie-covid-19-france-lincurie-criminelle-bourgeoisie
transferred to the saturated hospitals are relegated to the third and fourth rank by a “triage” organised
according to the available resources and personnel, and by a cost-benefit analysis which is a real affront
to human dignity, to the social instincts which enabled humanity to develop in the first place. This
“treatment of the fittest” system has been openly put in place by the Italian, Spanish, French and other
authorities.

To this we can add the intensified exploitation and exposure to the virus among the health workers, who
make up to 8% of those infected: more than 5000 in Spain alone. Even these statistics are widely
falsified, because a large number of these workers could not be tested. Nevertheless, they are frequently
obliged to work without the necessary masks, gloves and overalls, which were previously seen as
“superfluous” expenses by health budgets dictated by the needs of the capitalist economy. Beds in
intensive care units, ventilators, research into coronavirus, into possible vaccines….al this has been
sacrificed in the name of profitability. Today the media’s list of complaints, often expressed by politicians
on the “left”, is used to deflect anger onto the “privatisation” of healthcare systems. But whoever owns the
hospital, the pharmaceutical lab, or the care home, the truth is that the health of the population is
subjected to the rule of the profits extracted by an exploiting minority at the expense of society as a
whole.

The defence of life against the laws of exploitation

The dictatorship of the laws of capital over human need is clearly revealed in the quarantine and
lock-down measures in Italy, Spain and France, countries which have imposed draconian restrictions on
shopping trips and visits to elderly people, while being totally lax when it comes to inciting people to get to
the container docks and to keep up production in various factories (textiles, domestic appliances,
automobiles). And to “protect” the conditions of exploitation, while hassling a few joggers or workers who
share a car to reduce the cost of travelling to work, they still allow people to crowd together on a reduced
tube and bus service to get to work and ensure that national production continues. Many workers have
been scandalised by the criminal cynicism of the bourgeoisie and have expressed their anger through
social networks, since in present conditions it is impossible to get together in the streets or in general
assemblies. Thus, in response to the media campaign around the slogan ​“Stay at home​”, there is a
popular hashtag: “​I can’t stay at home” launched by Uber and Deliveroo workers, home helps, workers in
the huge underground economy etc.

Protests and strikes have also broken out against working conditions which risk the life and safety of the
workers. As workers shouted out at demonstrations in Italy: “​Your profits are worth more than our health!”

In Italy, this anger exploded on 10 March at the FIAT factory in Pomigliano where 5000 workers are
present every day. Workers went on strike to protest against the unsafe conditions in which they are
being forced to work. In other factories in the metallurgical sector, in Brescia for example, the workers put
an ultimatum on the firms to adapt production to the workers’ need for protection, threatening strike
action. Finally, the firms decided to close the factories. And on 23 March, when a decree issued by Prime
Minister Conte gave a green light to continuing work in industries that are not really essential,
spontaneous strikes broke out again, which obliged the CGIL union to make a show of calling for a
“general strike”.
In Spain it started in the Mercedes factory in Vitoria: after a case of Covid-19, the workers decided to stop
work immediately. The same thing happened in the Balay domestic appliance factory in Zaragoza (1000
workers) and the Renault factory in Valladolid. It should be said that in a number of cases, it was the firm
itself which decided on a lock-out (as at Airbus in Madrid, SEAT in Barcelona or Ford in Valencia in the
same period, then at PSA in Zaragoza or Michelin in Vitoria), so that the funds of the state (in other words
the surplus value extracted from the working class as a whole) would pay part of these workers’ wages; in
fact, before the pandemic, there were already planned redundancies (in the Ford factories or Nissan in
Barcelona).

But there were also open expressions of class militancy, wildcat strikes outside and against the unions,
such as with the bus drivers in Liege (Belgium), which was one of the first countries to bring in a
lock-down. It was the same with the Neuhauser bakery workers and the naval shipyard at Andrézieux
near Lyon in France. There were also some militant demonstrations at the shipyards in Saint-Nazaire.
One of the workers said in a TV interview: “​I am forced to work in a confined space with 2 or 3 colleagues,
in a booth 9 metres square and without any protection, then I have to go home to my wife and children
who are self-isolating. And I ask myself anxiously if I am a danger to them. I can’t put up with this”.

As the epidemic spread, with its disastrous effects on workers, we saw further workers’ protests against
this imposition of the logic of capitalist exploitation, even if only amongst a minority: we saw it at the
FIAT-Chrysler factories in Tripton (in Indiana, USA), where there were protests against having to go to
work when outside the factories it is forbidden to gather. There were further reactions at the Lear factory
in Hammond Indiana, the FIAT factories in Windsor Ontario or the Warren truck factory outside Detroit.
The Detroit bus drivers also stopped work until the firm provided a minimum of safety at work. It is very
significant that, in these struggles in the USA, the workers had to impose their decision to stop working
against the advice of the union (in this case the UAW), which had been encouraging them to carry on
working so as not to jeopardise the interests of the company.

In the port at Santos, Brazil, workers demonstrated against the authorities obliging them to go into work.
Also in his country, there were growing concerns among the workers at Volkswagen, Toyota, GM etc
against having to continue production as though the pandemic wasn’t there.

However limited these protests may be, they are an important element in the class response of the
proletariat to the pandemic. Even on a purely defensive terrain, the exploited are refusing to be reduced
to cannon fodder in the interests of their exploiters.

The response of the bourgeoisie: hypocrisy and state totalitarianism

The bourgeoisie itself is aware of the potential for the development of class consciousness and
combativity contained in this accumulation of indignation at the sacrifices being demanded of the workers.
Even the main protagonists of “austericide”31 (like Merkel, Berlusconi, or in Spain Luis de Guindos) are full

31
​It’s a term that was made popular in describing the measures decreed by the European Union following the 2008 crisis, and 
which involved, among other things, a dismantling of health services. 
 
 
of promises of social assistance. But the weapons of the exploiting class are the traditional weapons of
the whole history of the class struggle: deception and repression.

For example: the hypocrisy of the campaigns of applauding health workers, programmed and organised
everywhere. Of course these workers deserve recognition and solidarity because it is essentially they
whose efforts are devoted to keeping the health system going. They have been doing this for years in the
face of lay-offs and the deterioration in material resources. What is repulsive however is the sight of the
government authorities, the very ones who have created these conditions for the over-exploitation and
powerlessness of these workers, cynically seeking to advertise their “solidarity” with the health workers
and proclaiming that we are “all in it together”, singing the national anthem and propagating patriotic
values as a response to the spread of the virus. The disgusting nationalism of these “mobilisations”
promoted by the organs of the state are aimed at hiding the fact that there cannot be the slightest
common interest between exploiters and the exploited, between capitalists and those affected by the
degradation of the health infrastructure, between those whose only concern is to maintain production and
the competitive edge of the national capital, and those who put respect for life and human needs first. The
“country” or the “nation” are just a tall story as far as the workers are concerned, whether it’s put forward
by populist factions like Salvini or Vox, or by the sirens of democracy like Podemos, Macron or Conte.

In the name of this fake “national solidarity”, citizens are called on to denounce people who flout the
quarantine, creating a witch-hunt atmosphere towards people like mothers of autistic children or elderly
couples doing the shopping, or even towards health workers on their way to the hospital. It’s particularly
cynical to put all the blame on the minority flouting the lock-down rules for the spread of the virus or the
deaths it is causing or the stress suffered by health workers.

There is nothing more anti-social (i.e. contrary to the human community) than the capitalist state, which is
there to defend the interests of the minority class of exploiters, and which hides this precisely with the fig
leaf of false solidarity. In a doubly hypocritical way, the bourgeoisie is trying to use the disaster caused by
the negligence of the capitalist state to divide some workers against others. If the hospital workers refuse
to work without protective material, they are denounced as being “against solidarity” and threatened with
sanctions, as was recently the case with the sacking of the medical director of the hospital at Vigo in
Galicia, for daring to denounce the “blah-blah” of the bourgeois politicians on the issue of protective
measures. The local government of Valencia (composed of the same parties as the “progressive”
coalition governing Spain at the national level) have threatened to censor images showing the disastrous
state of hospital care in the region, citing the right to privacy of the patients crowded together in the
emergency wards!

If the workers of local authorities’ funeral services refuse to work without protection with bodies killed by
Covid-19, they are accused of preventing family and friends from taking part in the funerals of their loved
ones. Like in the housing estates or the public transport where we are herded like cattle on our way to
work, or at the workplaces where ergonomics is applied not to the physiological needs of the workers but
to the need for productivity, those killed by the coronavirus are also piled together in buildings
transformed into improvised mass morgues, like the Palacio de Hielo in Madrid.

All this brutality is presented to us as the highest expression of a united society. It’s no accident that, at
the press conferences of the Spanish government, faced with repeated questions like “when will the tests
arrive?” And the masks? And the ventilators?”, we always get the same imperturbable and evasive
response from the health minister: “In a few days….”, while alongside him stand army generals, police
chiefs, heads of the civil guard, bedecked in their medals. The aim here is to impregnate the minds of the
population with a militarist atmosphere: “Obey without asking questions”. The bourgeoisie is also profiting
from the events to habituate the population to all kinds of restrictions on their so-called “civil liberties”, all
at the discretion of the government and some with highly dubious usefulness, but all of which favour
social self-discipline and snitching, presented as the only barrier to disease and social chaos. Neither is it
any accident that the western bourgeoisie is displaying a thinly-veiled admiration for the control which
certain totalitarian regimes, like the one in capitalist China32, are able to exert over their population. If the
success of China’s lock-down in slowing the spread of the virus is today being saluted, it’s also to
camouflage their admiration for the instruments of state control being used (facial recognition, following
people’s movements and encounters, and using this information to categorise the population according to
their level of ‘social threat’), and to be able, in the future, to present these means of totalitarian state
control as a more effective way of “protecting the population” against epidemics and other products of
capitalist chaos.

The only alternative is communism

We have shown how a crisis in society reveals the existence of two antagonistic classes: the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie. Which one is actually using its best efforts to try to limit the impact of this pandemic?
It’s essentially the work of the ambulance drivers, the public transport workers, the workers of the
supermarkets and the food industry who are doing the real work, hindered at every turn by the negligence
of the state. It has been shown once again that, on a world scale, the proletariat is the class which
produces social wealth, and that the bourgeoisie is a parasitic class which profits from the tenacity, the
creativity and the team efforts of the workers in order to enlarge its capital. Each of these antagonistic
classes offers a completely different perspective to the global chaos into which capitalism has plunged
humanity: the capitalist regime of exploitation is hurling humanity into more and more wars, epidemics,
poverty and ecological disasters; the revolutionary perspective will liberate the human species from
subjection to the laws of private appropriation by an exploiting minority.

But the exploited can’t make an individual escape from this dictatorship. They can only escape by
reacting collectively against the chaotic orientations of a state which is working for the mode of production
which rules the whole planet. Individual sabotage or disobedience is the impossible dream of classes who
have no future to offer humanity as a whole. The working class is not a class of powerless victims. It is a
class which carries within itself the possibility of a new world free of exploitation, of division into classes
and nations, of the subjection of human need to the laws of accumulation.

A philosopher (Byung Chul Han), who is becoming very fashionable because of his description of the
chaos provoked by capitalist social relations, recently declared that “​we can’t leave the revolution to the
virus”​ . That’s certainly true. Only the conscious action of a world-wide class, aimed at pulling out the roots
of class society, can constitute a real revolutionary force.

32
​ ​Obviously, for genuine communism, Russia, China, Cuba and their variants are just the extreme expression of the universal 
domination of totalitarian state capitalism in the period of capitalist decadence.
 What Covid Reveals about Agriculture and Food
(31/03/2020).
Nuevo Curso (NC)

Border closures have jeopardized this summer’s harvest. Newspapers and news reports from all over
Europe are already warning of a possible supply crisis and some states, such as France, are calling on
the confined population to march into the countryside as volunteers. The unmentionable becomes even
more evident: under the current system agricultural production is dysfunctional for the alimentary needs of
the great majority of the population.

Spanish farmers say that ​they lack workers for the April harvest of watermelons, peaches and cherries ​.
Strawberries alone would require 8,000 more workers than are available… because they are migrant
seasonal workers who come and go for the harvest. ​In Britain they fear food shortages ​for the same
reasons. And these are not isolated examples. We have seen this before in ​Italy ​, where due to border
closures, farmers lamented the absence of 370,000 foreign laborers, and in ​Germany ​, where the
employers tried to bring refugees to the countryside. In France, the same government asked those who
are now unemployed because of confinement to ​work as day laborers for the “great army of French
agriculture” ​to supply the cities. They needed 200,000, they got ​150,000 volunteers ​… who will work
below the minimum wage.

If the agrarian petty bourgeoisie has obtained its ​labor power from migrant workers, it is because the
wages they could pay to fruit pickers, for example, were not enough to cover the cost of living in Spain.
Only if they were spent in countries where the purchasing power of those wages was higher, would it be
worth accepting such work. In other words, before the epidemic, the lack of workers did not lead to higher
wages either. Instead, petty owners and businesses organized, hand in hand with the state, a whole
complex flow of migrant workers. Now, without the migrants. Today, with that flow cut off by the closing of
borders, they are back at square one: with this level of wages… there are no willing workers.

Because, lest we forget, agricultural wages are simply paltry. Although it now seems to have happened
months ago, February in Spain was marked by farmers’ demonstrations, the rural petty bourgeoisie,
demanding to be able to pay salaries below the minimum wage​. Meanwhile in Italy the agricultural
workers’ camps, ​where there is even a lack of running water​, were already ​becoming real “sanitary
bombs” with the epidemic​.

In other words: there is a lack of workers, but those who are there are paid so little that their conditions
are miserable, and they become potential victims of this or any other epidemic. But… if workers are
missing, why don’t they raise their salaries?

Why is agriculture only profitable on starvation wages?

Under capitalism, the share of profits that a sector receives tends to correspond to the percentage that its
capitalization represents in relation to total capital. The basic problem of the agricultural sector is that it
soon finds a limit to the productive absorption of capital. If the vineyards are trellised (supporting
latticework to align the plants) and the harvest is automated, profitability will rise. But this can only be
done once. If the owner of a cereal plot who already has the number of harvesters he needs, tries to
capitalize by investing in another one, he will surely neither save costs – on the contrary – nor increase
the amount of product. The limit of profitable capitalization is very low and only rises when there are really
important innovations: greenhouses for tropical fruit, the change from dry to irrigated land, incorporation of
desalination plants, extension of the trellis for mechanized harvesting, new forms of beating the olive
tree… that is, sporadically and in general, demanding a concentration of fields to make them profitable.

But while the owner of a small farm is waiting for some new technology to give him breathing space,
agricultural production services have invested massive amounts in creating networks of refrigerated
warehouses and fleets of trucks, opening markets where they sell the fresh vegetables thousands of
kilometers away and making them the main sources of demand. In other words, they have become
increasingly productive for the capital invested in them: they produce more profits and increase their
output. And logically they take a bigger and bigger slice of the total profit pie. A profit that, in turn, tends to
decrease for the food sector as a whole (production, industry and services) with respect to other more
“cutting-edge” industries, such as “advanced services”. And all this within a framework in which the
average returns on capital are very low (which is why credit interest rates were already negative) and in
which the growth of national capital in the central countries as a whole has been creeping up for ten
years. To sum up: the agricultural owner is entitled to less and less of a piece of a total cake that is hardly
growing. And there is nothing to suggest that this will change significantly for him, if not for the worse.

The only way for smallholders, the agrarian petty bourgeoisie, to maintain a return on investment is to
increase ​exploitation in absolute terms​, hence the miserable wages of day laborers, the hiring of irregular
migrants without legal rights, and the thousands of daily abuses throughout Europe and America.

Why the food industry makes you eat increasingly worse

Since the ability to use capital in a profitable way is what makes a business successful, it is normal for
incentives in the agricultural sector to focus on industry and services. The use for which larger amounts of
capital can still be useful is to increase product shelf life to facilitate logistics and reduce transport and
storage costs while increasing availability over longer distances. This means more industrial food, more
ready-made food and new ways of preservation.

The ​widespread consumption of “ultra-processed” food in the US and other countries​, the spread of a
culture in which most workers do not actually cook, but heat and prepare foods previously processed by
industry, does not come out of the blue. The problem is that ​processed food dramatically increases health
risks​. And it’s not just in the Anglo-Saxon world and its sphere of influence. Latin countries, so proud of
their gastronomic culture, have for decades been replacing almost entirely the consumption of
pasteurized milk (the “fresh” one) with ultra-pasteurized milk, which delays its expiration date. No one
thought that anything important was lost in the change. Yet it ​seems to be the case​. Let’s not even talk
about replacing traditional olive oil with ​cheap fats and palm oil by increasing the consumption of
industrially produced foods such as cookies or oil cakes.

About vegetables… in the city we buy them green and tasteless, with the skin full of varied insecticides
that ​nobody knows how to wash away​. Insecticides are supposed to reduce crop losses… but today a
large part is left unharvested because the prices don’t even pay the wages of the workers, or because
there is always a part of the crop that doesn’t fit in the measurements or the characteristics that allow its
standardization for international sale. ​In the EU alone, 88 million metric tons of food are wasted each
year​.

Agrarian capitalism leads to such miserable wages that it forces owners to literally look outside the market
for workers, to squander crops and to increasingly unhealthy diets that become the basis for real social
epidemics. Can there be a clearer example of the dissociation between growth and development that
characterizes the ​decadence​ of the system?

Why not make food healthy and free?

Agricultural and food production has become dysfunctional even within the parameters of the system
itself. If agriculture and the food sector are increasingly regulated, subsidized and financialized, it is
simply because capitalism does not even work to meet social food needs and the system itself has to
prop it up by accumulating band-aids… that do not fix its own underlying dynamics.

But we’re seeing something else with this epidemic. Something very different from the “great army of
agriculture” organized by the French state. In the few places where there are day laborers’ cooperatives,
as in Caserta, Italy ​, the workers offer free harvest collection, if the food is distributed for free as well.
Obviously, the solution will not come from isolated initiatives.
But experience shows where the solution to all this antisocial and anti-historical chaos lies: to
decommodify production , to attack capitalist relations from day one, to begin to overcome the absurd
logic that leads to rewarding the use of capital over and above the satisfaction of human needs. To affirm,
instead of capital, the criterion of “to each according to his needs” of consumption in quantity and quality.

Providing food to each one according to their needs, not only in quantity but in quality, is very much
possible and its cost in hours of social work, minimal over the total we do collectively today. True food
abundance -healthy and varied food for everyone around the world and in sufficient quantity- is possible
by de-commercializing and de-decommodifying production… ​all production​ from day one.

COVID-19 Treatment For Capitalism Mean No

Relief For The Working Class (31/03/2020).
International Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista)

American capitalism in its self-assured manner has come face to face with a foe it was never prepared to
fight: a quickly spreading viral outbreak. Despite much warning from the situation in China and repeated
caution from the Centers for Disease Control, the ruling class did nothing for the countries it benefits from
and claims to be custodian of. To the surprise of no one, the virus has spread across the planet. In the
wake of this impending pandemic, the markets have wavered and crashed, and media-fueled panics have
set in across the population. What has resulted is an economic crisis on top of the viral outbreak.
The ruling class government has only recognized the rupture in what was previously a booming financial
up turn. In response the United States has acted with lighting efficiency to inject funding into the
economy. Much of the financial relief, to the sum of $1.5 trillion in short-term loans, will be used to smooth
out market fluctuations. The working class will only hope for some of this to trickle down to them in the
future, and long after the pandemic has passed. Where legislators have proposed paid sick leave in the
House of Representatives, the bureaucratic sparring in the federal government for the bipartisanship
required to pass the legislation in the senate further delays this relief. Further, the language of the bill
provides businesses and corporations the opportunity to opt out of providing sick leave altogether. The
government’s immediate proposals for financial support to working class people and their families is all in
the form of tax cuts. Any material support the working class can find will come from their continued
subjection to the employment regime, even at the risk of becoming ill.

Along with quick mobilization to support finance capital, the American federal government has also begun
extensive slashing of social services to make up for costs. Reforms to the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP), now provide for only 3 months of food stamps unless participants are
working to receive more in the future. A holiday for student loan interest has also been proposed.
However, graduates will still need to go to work to come up with the money to pay off their loans if they
are to hope to be rid of as much debt as possible before the interest rate returns. Even the supposed
support for the fuel of capitalist social institutions crumbles in the face of this viral outbreak – it truly
becomes every person for themselves. The ruling class has shown where their priorities lie, and it’s not
with the working class, but with the continued economic high achieved from successful markets and
profitability. To keep the economy going, the ruling class will continue to force working class people to
keep working through the pandemic to ensure this happens.

These skewed priorities also bleed into the management of the health crisis. Despite the increased
chance of infection that comes with continuing to work, the federal government has all but abandoned the
need for viral testing. Similarly, the insinuation that another capitalist firm of the United States would be
coordinated enough to recognize when the president declared their cooperation in a testing scheme and
would already have viral testing facilities prepared is farcical at best. The medical system, being
privatized, does not offer the ability for appropriate responses to a rapid viral outbreak. The past interests
of capital have shaped the American health system, and that is now materializing as the inability to
provide medical aid to the working class and the unemployed who run the risk of infection every day the
pandemic continues.

This problem is not isolated to the United States: across the globe the interests of capitalism are colliding
with the ensuing viral pandemic. Working class people everywhere are still expected to go to work,
despite the fact that people are aware of their infection only after they have become contagious. In China,
where work has continued since February, the rising price of food is creating intolerable living conditions.
Despite the Chinese government having the power to redistribute food to where it’s needed, the only thing
the ruling party can request is that people return to work to drive down food prices later. Even with the
increased pressure to work, all recreational events have been cancelled, and in Italy a ban on labor
assemblies has been imposed. Capitalist society has thrown off its facade of peaceful existence between
classes to lay bare its attitude towards the working class, and it’s to work towards a profitable economy
despite the pandemic.

This has resulted in many working class organizations demanding that work be stopped in all
nonessential industries until the pandemic has passed.
In Italy strikes are spreading across the whole country and major rank and file unions – Usb, S.I. Cobas,
Cub – are supporting them calling for national strikes across all nonessential industries to the fight against
the pandemic, asking for close the factories and full salaries payment. Regime unions (Cgil, Cisl, Uil)
instead on 14th March have signed an agreement with bosses and government to don’t stop the
production. This is being done to push the Italian government to accommodate the safety and needs of
the working class people of Italy.

Workers at vehicle assembly plants in Canada have similarly refused to work due to concerns over their
wellbeing. In the United Kingdom, where Parliament and the Prime Minister have all but decided to wait
for the viral outbreak to pass “naturally”, workers have begun staging strikes to force the British
government and their employers to recognize the working class’ needs and safety.

It is only through the union of the working class along this industrial front that capitalist governments will
acknowledge the class’ needs and demands. And all of these working class strikes have similar demands:
universal access to relief and the stoppage of work during the outbreak.

In the United States, the bureaucratic structure of The American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) has done nothing to force the hand of the Americangovernment.
Despite being in a position to form a similar industrial front as the Italians, the AFL-CIO leadership has
only proposed petitions. Petitioning capitalist governments to forsake economic progress in order to
mitigate the harm caused by a pandemic is as farcical as the government hoping for capitalist firms to
have a commitment to collective action. By appealing to the illusory “common interests” capitalist firms
and the ruling class have with the working class, AFL-CIO union bosses demonstrate they only wish to
maintain their positive relationships with the ruling class. They do this even at the expense of the
American working class, both those they represent and those they don’t.

Where the union leadership drags their feet, working class people across the country affected by the
outbreak begin to move. Medical workers in New Orleans, who must work excessively in hazardous
conditions during the health crisis, have begun to demand the needed material support that the unions
have failed to call for. In New YorkCity, where the mayor has kept the public schools open, teachers are
calling for sick outs to push for school closures. And where the capitalist government refuses to alleviate
material shortages caused by the panic, working class people support one another with what resources
they have. The demands of the working class in the United States are the same as the demands of the
class across the planet: total and immediate relief during the course of the pandemic.

Only the working class together is capable of making their objections to the mindless activity of the ruling
capitalist governments known. Joining hand in hand with the working class of Europe and Canada who
are already striking, and in solidarity with the suffering workers of East Asia, the American working class
can demand the desperately needed medical relief and a pause to work during the pandemic as a class.
Through this very united class front, the international working class can change society and prioritize the
human needs during this crisis and into the future. This class union, in coordination with the International
Communist Party, can smash the demands of the market for the continued profitability of institutions that
will never feel pain in their lungs. Where the ruling class of capitalist society will expend all of its energy to
treat the ailments of a contradicting system, the united working class can bring its own relief.
Pandemic is not Above the Classes (31/03/2020).
International Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista)

The different forms of life constitute a totality in the constant and infinite twists and turns of their evolution.
The human species coexists with many other forms of life, some of them within the human body itself,
sometimes useful, sometimes harmful. Humanity has learned how to counter the aggression of the larger
animal species, but remains vulnerable to the smaller ones, including many insects, some single-celled
organisms and viruses.

It would certainly be useful to write a history of the great epidemics which, over the centuries, have had
significant effects on the development of humanity, from those that marked the end of the Middle Ages in
Europe, to the rubella and smallpox that exterminated the Native American populations, to the so-called
“Spanish flu”, which was brought on by the First World War and ended up doubling its victims.

Let’s ask ourselves: is humankind better prepared to respond to the threat of epidemics than in the past?
The answer is without doubt, “yes” with regard to the many scourges that, until a few decades ago, were
prodigious dispensers of bereavement and disability, often inflicted on the young, bringing diseases such
as trachoma, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis: the first two caused by a bacterium, the third by a virus. These
are epidemics whose spread persists only in the poorest regions of the planet, among the lower social
classes and where healthcare is less available.

Life expectancy is also increasing, but it sinks sharply in the chasm opened up by economic crises or
caused by political disarray, as happened, for example, to a great extent during the breakup of the
Russian Union from 1989 onwards.

Because what does not work to preserve the health of the species is capitalism, which creates an
incurable conflict between the laws of reproduction of capital, and those of the reproduction and
conservation of living species – and first and foremost, the human species.

It is no coincidence that the current epidemic originated in China, a country that in recent decades has
seen extraordinarily rapid growth, which has taken it to the forefront of modern capitalist economic
development.

It is clear that the dilemma we confront today is as follows: Should we defend humanity from this invisible
aggression, which could cause (we do not know yet) the extermination of the species; or, should we
defend the continuous functioning of the relations of production based on waged labour and the
circulation of commodities? Should we defend the human species or, should we defend its
historical-productive expression in the capitalist era, which goes by the name of “the nation”?

The dilemma is there for all to see, all around us: in the tense procrastination, “to close or not to close?”
much time is lost in the effort to prevent infection. In Japan, for example, the great threat and the great
concern for the bourgeois class is the loss of big business presented by the Olympics.
Faced with a maturity of knowledge and of human labour that tends to make the whole planet a single
intelligent and collaborative machine, each bourgeoisie, perched in its own State and surrounded by its
own “scientists”, delays sounding the alarm for as long as possible, closing the borders to those who want
to enter, but not to those who want to leave. And they set quotas for tests with nasal swabs to reduce the
number of infected! Meanwhile, they also take advantage of the disease to exploit any kind of fraud and
speculation.

In the current senile crisis of world capital, the profit system is hovering on the edge of a recession and
overproduction. But let’s not allow a pandemic to keep workers safely away from the factories and
construction sites! let’s not block the containers stacked up on the docks, 95% of them full of goods that
are of no use to us! Let’s not keep planes on the tarmac, as that could do serious damage to “tourism”,
the cure for the boredom of the petty bourgeoisie.

Closing schools and cinemas is cheap. But closing the factories until the danger has passed?
Unthinkable! Madness! Heresy! Indeed, even trade unions like Unite in the UK call for “financial
assistance” to industries such as aviation to “deal with the calamitous collapse in bookings”. Because
workers must go to work, no substantive rules on hygiene must be allowed to disrupt industry or the
workers’ means of getting to work. We are better off dead!

The mere setting up of a health prophylaxis, with the temporary modification of the rhythms and means of
production, knowledge and consumption, implemented according to an international plan, a necessary
break in the cycle of collective human life on the planet, is incompatible with the rhythms and the cycle of
capital, for which production and consumption must not, and can never stop.

The working class must not accept this, it must enforce the payment of wages to all workers dismissed
from work because of the virus, not least temporary workers and workers in the “gig economy” whose
lives are already precarious enough as it is. The pandemic is not above social classes and the proletariat
must not entrust its management to the predatory class of the bosses and their State.

Coronavirus vs. Capitalism (31/03/2020).

International Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista)

We are in the moment of a great pandemic crisis, that pandemic being caused by viruses. There are two
viruses causing a pandemic at this time. One you may know as COVID-19, the Coronavirus. The other
virus isn’t as talked about as much, that virus is capitalism.

While white collar workers are told they can work from home, blue collar workers are forced to continue
working and keep production going. Even in Crisis the Capitalist machine would rather suck the life out of
its seemingly endless supply of labor, in the chance that profit can still be pumped out of the workforce.
Faceless and humanless, the lack of compassion for the ill, the bourgeois will work its labor to the bone,
risking their life. However, for most, the risk of losing their hourly wage is still too great in order to sacrifice
skipping going to work. The workers must still sacrifice their life in the hopes that they will still be paid.
As a response the bourgeois government has attempted to ease the burden of the pandemic. First, by the
Democratic party passing a sick leave bill for only 20 percent of the workforce. To now Universal Basic
Income being implemented, a payment of 1,000 dollars to every person. However, UBI is just another way
in which the Capitalist system attempts to warp itself and adapt to yet again another crisis. Low wages,
meaning that workers have less and less purchasing power, create sky rocketing profits for the owners,
yet the owners can never fully purchase everything, exacerbating the crisis of overproduction. This has
led to several crises for the bourgeois government to adopt minimal solutions. One introducing credit to
be used as a purchasing power, to make up for the low wages, engulfing the victims of Capitalism to
slowly trap themselves in a seemingly never ending build up of debt.

Since wages were stagnate, the major contradiction began to form in corporate debt. Ultra low interest
rates have caused a mass amount of loans to be taken out for companies to take those loans and inflate
their own stock prices. This as well has allowed for corporations to centralize capital into fewer hands,
with acquisition and mergers used with these loans. At the end of 2019 about half of the world economy is
made up of corporate debt.

As companies panic over not being able to pay this debt back due to having their profits suffered because
of this pandemic, a price war for oil between Saudi Arabia and Russia has also triggered many negative
effects. As OPEC countries and Russia gathered to plan production cuts due to coronavirus. Russia
decided to break a three year pact that manages global oil supply, refusing to sign on to Saudi Arabia’s
cuts. This allowed for more production of oil and slowly this overproduction began shooting the price of oil
down. As the price of oil drops, stocks begin to crash hard.

As of 3-20-2020, the stock market has lost 35% of its value in the past 3 weeks. In comparison the Great
Depression was triggered by a 24.8% drop. The workers will feel all of the burden of this crash. Much as
they did during the Great Depression, and Great Recession. The government will bail out the companies
that fail, that recklessly inflated their own stocks with fictitious capital. Workers will get laid off, retirement
savings will be erased, and average working people who spent their whole lives just trying to get by, will
lose everything. Those who get sick will not be able to afford the private health insurance bills, and won’t
be able to see a doctor, causing the coronavirus to keep spreading and spreading.

Yet, in this deep dark time of grave uncertainty, the working class must not devolve itself into petty
individualism, instead it must unite itself and come together in solidarity. Those who are still able to work
will begin to see their conditions worsen, as the corporate bourgeois government begins to batten down
the hatches for the looming uncertain future. Workers must organize and fight back, and they must stand
together, beyond borders, with the working class of all countries. As the coronavirus itself isn’t limited by
borders, neither should the working class. Workers must call for medical leave, and call for a pause to
work during this pandemic. Through this very united class front, the international working class can
change society, and prioritize the human needs in this moment of crisis and any looming future crisis. The
class union, in Coordination with the International Communist Party, can smash the demands of the
market, for continuing to force workers to labor their lives away during a pandemic, just for a small chance
of below liveable scraps, without any compassion for the families or lives that are torn apart and
destroyed, all in the name of the never ending, continuous and pathological pursuit of profit.

Where the ruling class only concern in this moment is their own relief to the arrogance and stupidity of
their reckless spur of the moment lining of their own pockets, pinn headed imperialism, and concern only
for profit, the working class must use the cure, Communism, for this virus and eradicate the long term
sickness of Capitalism.
 Pandemics, Profits and Proles (31/03/2020).
International Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista)

Much has been written in the course of the COVID-19 crisis about the necessity of public health
infrastructure. In the United States, the pandemic has amplified socialdemocratic calls for a public
healthcare system.

Medical research and pharmaceutical development are often left out of these demands. The present
situation demonstrates that state health insurance is not enough to protect human health. All aspects of
medicine – education, research, industry, infrastructure, and clinical practice – must be centralized under
the proletariat’s control.

The example of Remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed by Gilead Sciences, illustrates the issues
inherent in medical development for profit. Gilead, the thirteenth-largest pharmaceutical company in the
world, has been reluctant to participate in drug trials in China for fear of losing control of its intellectual
property. A Chinese research laboratory, for its part, has applied for a patent on the use of Remdesivir to
treat COVID-19. As the number of infections and deaths grows by the day, international capitalism
remains concerned with its property regime.

The search for a vaccine further demonstrates the failing of bourgeois medicine. At present there are at
least 20 separate companies working on vaccine development. Each has its own profit motives, its own
methods, and its own intellectual property concerns. The countries in which they operate have their own
national interests to protect. Several academic institutions are also running their own searches.

This epitomizes the anarchy of production. If ever there has been a time for the centralization of the
medical industry, it is in response to the current pandemic.

The international proletariat should have exclusive and unified control over all aspects of medicine.
Medical discoveries are the common possession of all of humanity, thus there must be a common project
to put them into practical use.