From Coronavirus to the Commune
The following is reprinted from our comrades of the Communist Workers’ Group of New Zealand/Aotearoa (CWG-ANZ)
From Coronavirus to the Commune
The response to the coronavirus pandemic cannot be read in isolation of capitalism in terminal decline. In a sentence it is another example of nature biting back against its destruction at the hands of capitalism over centuries; a contradiction which is exploding today. A coronavirus that has jumped species from bats to humans is but one of the many breakdowns of capitalism in terminal crisis which needs to be traced back to its fundamental cause in order to eliminate it with a socialist revolution.
We can work back from the pandemic through immediate causes to intermediary causes all the way to the fundamental causes of terminal crisis so as to then discover the knowledge necessary to build a new society.
To illustrate this, the virus itself has probably been around in bats for a long time. Not as long as the viruses that lurk beneath the tundra that are about to be spread through methane bombs. But bats and humans had distinct ecologies, and co-existed with their viruses, until the late 19th century when global capitalism began to invade and eliminate human and other species boundaries. This has been turbocharged by the effects of extreme climate change forcing migration from existing habitats.
All this apparent chaos is not the function of globalization, overpopulation or neo-liberalism as such. They are symptomatic of deeper causes. Globalization is global capitalism, the effect of the rise of global imperialist exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies to plunder and extract human and physical resources to the point of ecological collapse.
Nor is overpopulation more than a symptom. It ignores the way in which people are distributed by imperialism – into overdeveloped rich nations and underdeveloped poor nations and regions. The demographic of the rich nations is of a declining white race. That of the poor nations is an impoverished, overcrowded and black and brown reserve army of cheap labour.
Nor is the free market of ‘neo-liberalism’ more than a symptom of capitalism in its end days privatizing public assets and destroying the historic gains of the labour movement to restore profits. A futile effort when the conditions for profitability are being terminated by the capitalocene in extremis.
Capitalism in decline has exposed in all its hubris, many chaotic forces over which it has no control and which destroy the conditions for its own existence – in sum a functioning ecosphere. Taking off for planet B is a rich man’s Silicon Valley sci-fi fantasy.
Obviously, these same chaotic forces are manifest as pandemics, drought, famine, floods, nuclear meltdowns, ecological collapse, wars etc., threatening the extinction of all life on the planet. Yet despite such forces being beyond capitalism’s control, they do not absolutely determine the fate of humans who have the capacity to free themselves from the chaos of dying capitalism.
What separates humans from other species is the capacity for reflective thought and planned action. This can be seen when politicians, representing capital-in-general, act to defend capitalism’s conditions of existence, i.e. a population of healthy workers and consumers necessary for profits.
Thus, China, Taiwan and Singapore used proactive authoritarian methods to lock down and screen population movements to contain if not stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Other nations caught up with more ‘democratic’ pretensions, are unprepared having decimated their public health systems in the last decades. So, they wait on advice from the WHO and have failed to proactively mitigate or contain the spread.
Clerical dictatorships like Iran and India put social control above public health exposing their working populations to the decimation by the pandemic.
What this illustrates is that the capitalist state-representing the interests of the collective capitalist, can go some way to mitigate pandemics that threaten capitalism’s existence. But at the same time, they cannot become truly collective, certainly not democratic, or driven by an informed public, or based on the best science. They cannot break with the interests of the capitalist ruling class which refuses to fund public science and a health system that can cope with let alone prevent pandemics.
This is evident in the failure of capitalist governments to respond adequately to climate science on the capitalocene. These responses will be too little, too late, uncoordinated, meet resistance from below, and be overwhelmed by the manifold accumulating effects of a collapsing capitalist world economy.
Therefore, the only hope of humans surviving this tidal wave of destruction is to eliminate the root cause, the deadly inertia of a dying capitalism with its hidebound institutions locked into the short-term profiteering of the tiny ruling class.
We can turn globalisation from imperialist destruction, into global unity of working and oppressed peoples. We can turn overpopulation from slums, disease and famine, into communes everywhere capable of building sustainable habitation. We can turn the chaotic capitalist market into its opposite, the economic and social plans of the communes, representing the democratic will of the people globally to build a new society in harmony with nature.
This is the logic of humanity rescuing itself from disaster. It needs to happen, and it is already happening now, in the migration of peoples from poor to rich countries; the spontaneous uprisings against military dictatorships; the millions on the streets fighting for basic rights; the women and youth mobilizing against dying capitalism; but what is lacking it a clear vision of the new society and how to get there.
There is only one vision of a society beyond capitalism that has shown the way forward, and is capable of learning from the lessons of history. That is revolutionary socialism in the form of a revolutionary international party and transitional program representing workers of all nations. The party applies the program and tests it in the struggle to open the road to the socialist revolution going from the most immediate demands to the overthrow of the capitalist system.
From Disaster Capitalism to Survival Socialism
The coronavirus pandemic coming on top of a global economic slowdown compounded with climate breakdown will be more than enough to tip the world into depression. And when it happens it will be the last depression. China which produced most of the goods to pull the rest of the world out of the Global Financial Crisis cannot do the same today. Central banks interest rates are already on close to zero or negative interest rates. Bosses are in a panic and it’s about their survival, not ours, the working people, the producers of wealth.
So here we are now scraping the bottom of the barrel. The global capitalist economy is on a drip feed of the state spending printed money that we working people will ultimately pay for out of our labour. Unless we refuse.
All of this is glaring at us in the face. So why should we be shut up by quarantine or curfews and let the rotting capitalist system get transfused with our blood?
If there ever was a Disaster Capitalism it is now. And that is saying something after several major depressions and world wars. Isn’t it time to say that there is a way out other than yet again bosses’ making working people pay with our livelihoods and our lives? We must say, no more!
We know that the bosses’ state will print money to bail out the corporates whose interests the state serves anyway. Parliament is a talk shop to keep the masses diverted from the real business behind the facade of democracy. But the real business is now bust and Parliament stands exposed.
Let’s say NO. Your crisis is our opportunity. We will not die while you insulate yourselves in your bunkers. We will not pay for your luxury with our wages and taxes. Your profits are nothing more than our or accumulated surplus labour anyway. We won’t be falling for disaster capitalism this time. We want survival socialism!
When the assorted capitalist regimes from Boris to Donald to Modi to Jacinda all come out with rescue packages that will keep the bosses’ businesses alive we must reject handouts to the rich in our name since we will pay for it. The bosses’ and their political stooges have preached neoliberal doctrine at us for decades swearing by the market as our saviour.
Now they are turning around and saying, the state must save us all in the national interest. It doesn’t embarrass them in the slightest that this is the repudiation of their free market shibboleths and it is us workers who are paying for the bosses’ welfare state. So, let us stick it to them.
In the place of rotten capitalism rooting us with its disaster capitalism, let’s say no, we want survival socialism. When business complains that the state must pay for their lost profits we say no, you are bankrupt. We won’t be fooled that the state subsidizing our wages makes your viable. That goes out of our pockets into yours.
Prove that you deserve to exist by paying living union wages, paying us for sick leave as long the pandemic threatens, or if you’re so fragile and can’t survive in a rotting capitalist system which makes workers die for your profits, you should end in the scrap yard.
Instead of state spending to revive dying capitalism and the further destruction of nature, workers must demand that any state subsidies to business have to be on the terms of the majority of working people. If ‘public health’ is to mean anything but a healthy workforce to be exploited, let’s redefine it as a healthy publicly owned economy.
This means instead of handouts as bailouts, the state should take shares of the same value as public assets. But to qualify, firms must be productive of goods that we need, growth must be sustainable, carbon negative, and not at the expense of nature.
Moreover, since we, the workers make the wealth, part of which you claim as reward for your failed entrepreneurial skills, we demand to set the terms for sharing our wealth with you. We will take over the running of the business and employ you as manager under our supervision.
If the bosses refuse our terms and close down the business, those that are viable will have their assets taken back as our expropriated wealth, and we will run them under workers’ control.
As we can’t run businesses without capital, we want to expropriate the assets of the shareholders of the big banks (not the worker’s and pensioners’ assets) and create one big development bank to fund social production.
If the business is worthless and we are left unemployed we demand that the state pays us redundancy and an unemployment benefit we can live on. By the way, we are the ones who know what our cost of living is, not some bureaucrat paid to make it up.
The current compounded disaster proves one thing: that the tiny minority of wealthy owners of capital have shown they cannot profit anymore by destroying nature, by making workers’ pay for their crisis, and by creating conditions that allow pandemics to rage through the working population, while they retreat to their resorts.
And since capitalism was built on centuries of stolen labour-value produced by workers, we will take it back to finance survival socialism. This will allow us to scrap the market chaos which piles one disaster upon another, and where scarcity, poverty and misery are our fate.
It will allow us to plan and build a socialist economy where assets are jointly owned and controlled by the working people, and were production for need rather than profit is the goal; where each works to their ability and gets what they need; where living conditions are sufficient for a healthy, good life, in harmony with nature.
Of course, no capitalist government will do any of this as their loyalty is to the ruling class. So, working people as the big majority need to build their own movements and parties to the point where they have the power to take control of the economy and win mass support for a working peoples’ government able to implement survival socialism.
We have to do this for humanity to survive all these crises now accumulating as a terminal crisis. We had better start building now.
