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How the ruling classes are using the pandemic to hide the historic fall of capitalism and avoid social revolution

20 mai 2021, 06:13, par David

The COVID-19 pandemic is a trigger event in world history that is accelerating the already far-advanced economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system. It is creating conditions for an immense intensification of the class struggle on an international scale. The working class is confronted with a crisis for which there is no progressive solution, apart from a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, leading to the conquest of state power, the establishment of democratic control by the working class over the economy, the replacement of the anarchy of the market with scientific planning, the ending of the nation-state system, and the building of a global socialist society dedicated to equality, the elimination of poverty and all forms of oppression and discrimination, a massive rise in the standard of living and the level of social culture, and the protection of the environment.

In defining the pandemic as a “trigger event,” the World Socialist Web Site has compared it to the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, which initiated a chain of events culminating in the outbreak of World War I. “Had the assassination not taken place,” the WSWS wrote, “it is doubtful that war would have come in August. But sooner or later, perhaps in the winter of 1914 or in the following year, the economic and geopolitical contradictions of European and global capitalism and imperialism would have led to a military conflagration. The assassination accelerated the historical process, but it acted upon preexisting and highly inflammable socioeconomic and political conditions.”

While the specific conditions that produced the coronavirus have an accidental and contingent character, the response to the pandemic has been determined by the pre-existing conditions of capitalist crisis and the interests of the ruling class. The capitalist class has continued and intensified the same parasitic economic relations and social policies that it employed during the previous period.

The situation is critical. The pandemic is spiraling out of control. As of mid-July, more than 13 million people globally have been infected. The death toll is nearly 700,000. New cases are at record highs, and the virus is accelerating rapidly throughout Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia.

“How long will it be until the pandemic is brought under control ?” This is a question being asked by billions of people. The usual response is that the pandemic will continue until an effective vaccine is developed. This fatalistic answer is premised on the assumption that the COVID-19 crisis is almost exclusively a medical problem. What is left out are the social and political dimensions of the fight against the pandemic. As the uprising of the working class was necessary to bring an end to World War I, the class conscious intervention of the working class, in a struggle against capitalism, is necessary to create the conditions for an effective social response to the disease. Even if a vaccination is developed in the near future, and even if it provides long-term immunity, which is not guaranteed, its distribution will be subject to the profit interests of the corporations and the geostrategic conflicts between the major capitalist powers. Moreover, the pandemic’s containment will not bring the social and economic crisis to a conclusion. As was the case in the aftermath of World War I, the pandemic will leave deep scars and have long-lasting consequences. There will be no return to the conditions, as bad as they already were, that existed before its outbreak. The economic, social and political crisis will develop on the basis of the conditions created by the pandemic. The scope and intensity of the class struggle will increase, not diminish.

Not surprisingly, the bourgeois media has attributed the staggering fall in the global markets entirely to the pandemic. But this is not sufficient. Before the coronavirus began to spread, it was apparent that the wild rise in share values had assumed a malignant character, fueled by the limitless availability of QE funding and the historically unprecedented suppression of interest rates by the Fed and central banks in Europe. There even emerged the phenomenon of negative interest rates. The mountain of fictitious capital made possible the innumerable gimmicks employed by the ruling class to drive shares ever higher (such as share buybacks) and enrich itself.

The most striking feature of the market sell-off of the last three weeks (notwithstanding the three day “dead cat’s bounce”) was its astonishing speed. Trillions were lopped off share values in a matter of days—faster than any other decline in modern history. The velocity of the collapse was determined by the unreal character of the previous magical levitation of share values. This is what led immediately to hysterical demands for the multi-trillion-dollar bailout. The passage of the bailout—with a few crumbs to hold back a social explosion for a few months—is the continuation, on a new and even more gigantic scale, of the creation of fictitious capital, i.e., the conjuring up of value independent of production. The bourgeoisie knows full well that this gigantic economic Ponzi scheme cannot last. And, for this reason, the pandemic becomes a real problem. It is one thing to expand debt levels when production is taking place. It is quite another to do so when production is seizing up all over the globe. The disparity between the expansion of debt and the massive decline in the production of value through the labor process (in all the forms in which it is manifested) cannot be concealed. And this gives rise to the demands from Trump and the capitalist oligarchs for a speedy resumption of work. “The cure to the pandemic cannot be worse than the disease.”

We are approaching a critical stage in the historical crisis of capitalism. Confronted with bankruptcy as a result of the collapse triggered by the pandemic, the ruling class is demanding that its state place at its disposal trillions of dollars to stave off bankruptcy. At the same time, it is preparing to employ the same state to launch, as soon as it has completed the necessary political and logistical preparations, a ruthless attack on the working class.

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