The Nazis were once corralling inmates into gas chambers under the pretext that there was a bathhouse there and the people needed disinfection before getting settled in barracks.
Around the beginning of the 80s, Nazis did the same in Chile, when they raided and corralled workers into stadiums – “to check housing registration” or “for mass vaccination against fever”. The difference was that in case of the gas chambers only corpses would come out, because it was necessary to ‘dispose of waste material’, i.e. slaves who were no longer able to work, or to cover up the traces of crimes at the end of war. And in case of the Pinochet stadiums, Chilean workers were taken to labour concentration camps, i.e. to perform slave labor at copper mines, coal mines, etc. The U.S. monopolies and the state capitalists of Chile received huge profits from the labor of prisoners.
Isn’t that the direction the global bourgeoisie today is headed, with its new campaign featuring the so-called “coronavirus”? The latest events show that it is indeed the exact same direction.
Crisis
The financial capital everywhere is switching to the fascist phase of its dictatorship. It’s trying to get out of non-stop series of crises this way, each heavier and longer than the previous one. And every time before a crisis hits, it suddenly turns outs that too many goods have been produced, much more than can be distributed, i.e. sold for money.
But the goods cannot be sold not because all the needs of the society have been met with excess. On the contrary, the majority of the population, especially the proletariat, cannot fully satisfy even their most urgent needs.
During a crisis, there are plenty of goods, but their price does not fall, because monopolies are able to keep it high. Monopolists no longer need to drown their surplus goods in the sea or burn them in the furnaces. Instead they can declare a global epidemic and this way achieve forced sale of commodity surpluses, and not just at the usual price, but extremely overpriced because of the artificially created shopping frenzy.
At the same time, a large number of companies close down or reduce production. The small and middle bourgeoisie goes bankrupt on a massive scale and “proletarizes”. Unemployment reaches huge proportions, the wages of workers fall below the biological need to reproduce the labor force. Workers en masse fall into extreme poverty and starving existence.
During a crisis, a significant part of the society’s productive forces is not used and is inactive. Some things get demolished and destroyed, as if already redundant (to capitalists, not to the people!). At the same time, enormous theft and destruction of productive forces takes place.
Time passes, and the goods are gradually sold, they dissolve little by little. Then, the crisis is replaced by depression, that semi-faint state of the capitalist economy gradually regaining consciousness. Slow growth in production begins. Enterprises that have previously stopped working come to life a little bit. Fixed capital gets renewed, enterprises somehow get new equipment, which allows to get high profits even when selling goods at relatively low prices.
The depression is followed by a short revival, which is supposed to turn into a rise in production. But in imperialist crises, especially in recent years, a revival has long stopped turning into recovery (“economic growth”), instead collapsing into another crisis. However, production still recovers a little. At the same time, after a very short while, it once again turns out that too many goods have been produced for which there is a huge (real!) demand of the working masses, yet, there isn’t enough paying demand, because the working class and other laborers simply don’t have the money to buy everything they need. This means that the sale of goods is again at an impasse, and again, a heavy crisis breaks out.
The global capital is trying to delay its death and get out of the prolonged and deepening crisis. For this purpose, it’s using every conceivable and unthinkable method and technique, including faking a global pandemic.
The main thing is that capital sees the growth of the revolutionary movement in the world and does everything to weaken, slow down and strangle this movement of the proletariat and other oppressed workers. The policy of armed, total and general terror is best suited for this purpose.
In this policy it is necessary to divide the working class not only of neighboring countries, but also within their own country. It’s impossible to send all workers to the concentration camp at once. But it is possible to isolate under some pretext one worker’s neighborhood from another, one district from another district, one city from another city, one region from another region. Even one warehouse from another warehouse or one enterprise from another enterprise. The bourgeoisie figured, why not kill two birds with one stone: under the pretext of coronavirus, corral workers into isolated reservations, separate them from each other and introduce a full-on concentration camp regime in these reservations – all the while screeching about a flu epidemic.
The benefits of this are two-fold: firstly, you have the weakening of the organization of proletarians, breaking them up into small groups and putting them under a 24-hour surveillance; and secondly, you have the huge savings of variable capital, since the enslaved prisoners only require a little food and some accommodation.
These are the goals pursued by the bourgeoisie in its transition to the fascist dictatorship: fighting the revolution and maximizing profits. For all this, labor “colonies” and labor concentration camps are better suited than all other forms of capitalist oppression. By the end of the imperialist era, the hired capitalist slavery, having made a turn in its development, becomes a mixed type of slavery, when the worker is not free both economically and personally. In other words, the class antagonistic society uses every type of slavery that ever existed in history, including the most ancient one, in order to preserve itself. This is because each new crisis pushes the need and despair of the working masses to the limit, and in the face of the upcoming revolution, the bourgeoisie has nothing else left to do but implement total fascist deception, terror, war and arms race. In order to preserve its parasitic existence, its factories, banks, enterprises, lands, deposits, the world bourgeoisie tries to swim up to the surface at the expense of even greater enslavement and exploitation of the working class and other workers.
But those are not the only reasons for the transition to fascism. Financial capital is looking for a way out of the crisis through wars. For a better preparation of the war for the redistribution of markets, imperialists must have a “strong rear”, where the revolutionary organizations are defeated and weakened, where the working class is divided, intimidated and fooled by the power of the state and the fascist media. For this, apart from traditional prisons, police and social fascism, the operation “Coronavirus” is well suited (back in 2003 it was the “bird flu”, in 2009 – “swine flu”, in 2014 – “Ebola”, all of which “accompanied” global economic crises).
In this operation, international fascism is looking not only to slam the borders of different states and wipe its feet on the remains of freedom of movement and other human rights and freedoms, but also to set one nation against the other, the workers of one country against the workers of another country. History shows turning nations against each other really helps the exploiters to mobilize the army, prepare it for aggression and at first keep the fighting spirit of the army at a high level. It was like that in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion campaigns, or right before the Crimean War, before the Russian-Turkish wars for Straits and the Franco-Prussian War. It was the same before World War I, French workers were told by their “own”, “home” bourgeoisie that all Germans were dirty swine, and their houses were breeding grounds for infestation and lack of culture; meanwhile, German capitalists assured German workers that most French people were inherently syphilitic pedophiles.
Tanks in Paris
What the global capital is actually planning for its salvation was accidently revealed by the French president Macron. He said, “We are at war”. He spoke the truth. The global capital, hiding behind the smokescreen of an “epidemic”, has openly declared class war against the proletariat and all oppressed workers. It’s waging this war like a bloodthirsty maniac that has been finally cornered, in order to live at least another day, another month, six months, a year, in order to delay being buried for good, at any price and by any means.
But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Why did the French bourgeoisie immediately, without any interim measures, brought tanks and troops to the streets of Paris and other major cities of France? Because now the French workers and laborers are in the vanguard of the global proletarian movement. The bourgeoisie sensed that there is a danger of a huge mass protest lurking in Paris and its suburbs, Lyon and other cities, a protest that could potentially overturn the government and cause a revolutionary storm in neighboring Spain, Germany, Belgium, etc.
Hence the immediate extreme military measures against the Parisian workers. The bourgeoisie takes into account the experience of revolutions and class battles of the 19th and 20th century and acts ahead of time. During the Paris Commune and in November – December of 1905 in Moscow workers had time to organize combat and defense units, but now the right moment is gone. Back in those days, the government troops were brought into capitals after the beginning of street combat, now the bourgeoisie is bringing its troops into the cities before any clashes begin, trying to warn its troops in advance, because it understands very well that under the current conditions, when the bourgeoisie class is negligibly small and has lost its support in the masses, once a revolution featuring the organized labor starts, it’s unlikely to be stopped.
But, as the French say, “à la guerre comme à la guerre” (“at war as at war”, meaning that in a war situation you have to act accordingly). The bourgeoisie has struck the workers with its armed forces. How will the proletariat respond? Obviously, according to the laws of history, every armed force shall have an equal and opposite armed force. And if the bourgeoisie, as an act of desperation, went nuts and, abandoning its usual lies about the good of the nation, put the cards on the table and summoned its army, it’s last hope and support, then things are going pretty badly for them. One class openly stood up against the other class, oppressors against slaves.
How to get rid of extra goods?
Another prominent feature of today’s imperialism is that the bourgeoisie uses the fascist dictatorship not only in domestic but also in foreign policy. Capitalism has long outgrown all national boundaries, so the term “national” in case of the bourgeoisie living in different countries is very arbitrary.
All leading groups of the global financial capital have a mosaic ethnical composition. These major capitalists, whoever they may be “by blood”, have long thrown away the banner of national independence and sovereignty of their countries and peoples. The huge monopolies owned by these capitalists are no longer buy off individual governments, they buy off entire alliances of states. These monopolies are extremely competitive with each other, but if needed, quickly unite and work together against the international proletariat. This means that this or that group of financial capital, having a base and relying on one or more countries, can establish fascist terrorist regimes across an entire continent.
Under what disguise such a broad, literally worldwide fascist attack on the proletariat, on workers’ rights and freedoms will be carried out, is not so important. If necessary, all of Latin America and Russia will get “quarantined” under the pretext of a “flu epidemic” – the local governments, dependent on the more powerful financial groups and dancing to their tune, will gladly fulfill the will of their masters. Workers of several countries, cut off from each other, divided into small groups, imprisoned within the “cordon sanitaire”, i.e. taken under armed guard, are tens or hundreds of millions of slaves of one or two groups of financial capital.
But these hundreds of millions of workers are also the main consumers of the goods that are produced at capitalist enterprises and thrown on the market. An average slave, as you know, cannot buy anything for himself, he doesn’t have the money for it. So, the following question arises – under slavery, to whom will the capitalists sell mountains of their products?
The thing is that the bourgeoisie will not treat its slaves the same way as the slave owners in the ancient world did. After locking up the working masses in reservations, the bourgeoisie will temporarily create shortages of consumer goods and shopping frenzy inside them. The population will buy up the goods that had been stuck in warehouses and had not been sold before the world hysteria around “coronavirus”, handing all of their savings over to capitalists and their governments.
But the bourgeoisie will not sell its accumulated goods at low prices, as it did in the era of classic capitalism. On the contrary, the monopolists needed the coronavirus not only to escape the crisis of overproduction, but also to get the maximum profit. For instance, in Italy over the past 10 days citizens have purchased €70 billion worth of goods, giving their last money to the capitalists. In Russia and Ukraine people have swept away a two-year supply of thermometers, gauze, alcohol, gauze masks and bandages, enriching the owners of the respective monopolies. Thus, giant mountains of products in warehouses have somewhat dispersed and are now ready to accept new mountains of products.
On the other hand, one can already tell that financial capital is planning to get out of the crisis through hidden lockdowns covering entire states and even groups of states. Let’s look at what is happening at individual enterprises as an example. The owners of a plant, factory, firm, etc. don’t bring their enterprises to a standstill and switch to downtime, because they don’t want to pay their employees 2/3 of their average earnings during this downtime which is entirely their fault. Instead, they announce “quarantine related to coronavirus” on the plant’s premises, “inspection and disinfection of warehouses”, etc. and simply inform the workers that there is no need to come into work for an indefinite period of time.
When the workers raise the question of how they’re supposed to survive over that period of time and where their downtime payments are, the owners tell them that legally there is no downtime, instead, there is force majeure, the decisions of government agencies on quarantine, the actions of “irresistible force”, and that’s what caused the production stoppage. And in case of force majeure, the law does not provide for any payments or penalties.
Moreover, in conditions of force majeure, all contracts lose their force, including employment contracts. Meaning that the members of the contract don’t have to fulfill their obligations (for example, to pay wages to workers) and shall not bear any responsibility for this. Disgruntled workers may, of course, appeal to the court, but the courts are bourgeois, and the laws in a bourgeois state are bourgeois, too. And they explicitly spell out the above-mentioned regulations concerning force majeure (circumstances or actions of “irresistible force”). Sorry, capitalists have nothing to do with it – “coronavirus” is to blame! Ask “coronavirus” where your salary at.
Here, check this out. March 14, 2020. The Mayor of Moscow issued Decree №20-UM “On Amendments to the Decree of the Mayor of Moscow from March 5, 2020 № 12-UM”, which declared:
“…Establish that the spread of a new coronavirus infection (2019-nCoV) is an emergency and unavoidable circumstance that led to the introduction of a high alert regime in accordance with the Federal Law of 21 December 1994 № 68-FZ “On the protection of the population and territories from natural and man-made emergencies”, which is a force majeure”.
At the same time the decree specifies that “in the current situation this measure will simplify the resolution of disputes related to failure to fulfill obligations”.
Having prepared a safety net all around itself, the bourgeois state simply brushes off the workers robbed by capitalists and/or caught up in lockdowns, and using its armed force, immediately puts the workers under ordinary, domestic or “medical” arrest – also under the pretext of “fighting the epidemic,” prohibiting them from gathering in public places (no more than a hundred or fifty people, doesn’t matter). But in reality, they’re doing this so that the workers can’t conspire against them and come out on a mass protest against the shameless robbery, lockdowns and fascism.
How long will the patience of the proletariat last? We suppose not long. Firstly, hunger makes you think faster, and secondly, the bourgeoisie has roughly trampled the very foundations of the human existence of tens of millions of workers, i.e. the roots of class interests. The workers, though still being under the influence of the bourgeoisie, are getting spontaneously drawn to socialism. This means that the socialist theory more and more clearly defines the causes of the working class’s calamities, and therefore workers understand it better and better. And since the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat fundamentally contradict each other, since the proletariat is now learning much faster than in the not so distant past, because of the newly arrived fascist campaign going by the name “coronavirus”, the proletariat will now be able to realize much faster that without a social revolution there is no way out.
The Bolshevik Party is not yet in place, but the open attack of the bourgeoisie under the pretext of a “virus pandemic” and the inevitable resistance of the proletarian masses to this attack will undoubtedly speed up its formation. All the more so since the human resources for this party are already available to a great extent, life itself creates them hourly. The task of this party will be to complete the revolution as soon as possible, consciously, in the most expedient way and with minimum casualties.
Witch Hunt
Operation “Coronavirus”, in the course of its development, allows to put entire countries under lock and key, or, to be more precise, the labor of these countries. But the labor also contributes to the dirty work of the bourgeoisie. In recent days, frightened ordinary people have been willing to attack anyone who had a runny nose or a cough. Let us hope that it will not come to lynching and burning at the stake those who have a runny nose and a cough, but the bourgeoisie clearly expects that the mass psychosis it has created under the guise of the flu will facilitate the divide among workers, increase competition among them, make it difficult for them to unite against the onslaught of capital and create workers’ organizations.
On the other hand, it is true that a sick worker should be treated on an outpatient basis, at home, lying in warmth and comfort, resting, staying away from the cold outside and regaining their strength. Or, staying in hospital if their condition has deteriorated. A person of labor should be able to have a quiet period of sickness and a speedy recovery, knowing that in case of illness he will be getting material support and will be truly protected by the state laws. But do we really have all that?
Is it a mystery that at many capitalist enterprises being sick is a luxury available only to the top management? In small and medium-sized companies and firms, the owners formally recognize the Labor Code, but nonetheless shamelessly announce to their hired workers and employees that they don’t need people who get sick often and for a long time, that they will get the boot, they will be disposed of.
How can the employee figure out if they get sick often or not, whether they were sick for too long the last time or not? Well, that’s the whole point of the capitalist’s threats: to intimidate the hired slave, to make them realize that they have no right to be sick at all, whether it is often or rarely, long-term or short-term. The employee begins to perceive going on sick leave as a catastrophe which puts them on the verge of complete loss of livelihood, i.e. on the verge of dismissal and, as a consequence, on the verge of survival.
In some firms, the owners do it the easy way. They simply tell their workers, “We don’t have a sick leave. If you want, stay home at your own expense. There is no sick pay”.
What can the hired worker do? Obviously, keep working while being sick. They swallow medicines and go to work – with a runny nose, cough and fever. Another example is when a pensioner is forced to go and solve pension issues in different institutions while having a cold. If that elderly worker had a well-deserved rest, material support and cultural entertainment, and didn’t have to worry about “re-registration,” “verification,” “recalculation”, “clarification” and other kinds of capitalist bullying, would they commute on crowded public transport and sit and stand in excruciating lines? Would a pensioner, having all the well-deserved benefits of socialism, get a gig job somewhere to make ends meet or save his children (grandchildren) from extreme poverty?
Probably not. It wouldn’t be necessary. But as of now such necessity hangs over the heads of all workers and laborers under capitalism, regardless of whether they are former, present or future slaves.
In recent days, the situation with common cold has worsened. Workers are afraid to openly reveal their sickness, because they only expect punishment in return, both from their employers and from the fascist state. The workers are afraid that they will simply get fired for having flu (no matter how). They are afraid that if they get sick, they will be arrested or put in a punitive “infectious disease center” where anything can be done to them. For example, they will be forced to test drugs that are not officially allowed to be tested on people. Or test slow action combat poison, etc. (Who knows what you’re being injected with!)
Therefore, those of our philistines who are ready to attack their sick brothers in class and drag them to the police, should be reminded that they are applying their feverish energy in the wrong direction. There is no need to go crazy and lose the remains of class consciousness and elementary human conscience. Otherwise, it will come to the point when such unaware workers will simply turn into fascism’s little helpers.
In medieval Europe, a sick person would occasionally get point at by some small feudal lord or monk who would say: “It’s a sorcerer, he brought plague upon us”. For the ignorant crowd, this was enough to attack that man and kill him.
In the 1930s in Germany, philistines helped the Nazis during their raids on Communists, when the Nazis declared Communists mentally ill, dangerous psychos, who had to be caught and placed in locked hospitals. Communists were snitched on by neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances, i.e., the workers who believed in fascist propaganda. Communists were caught and handed over to the Gestapo, and then the Nazis completed the massacre: Communists were locked up in psychiatric institutions and concentration camps where they were maimed and killed. All of that was accompanied by the approving howl of uninformed workers who turned into the helpers of the executioners.
Almost the same thing happened in the 1950s and 60s in Portugal, where PIDE, Salazar’s security service, was spreading semi-official rumors that members of the local Communist Party were not only psychos, but also cholera spreaders (the contemporary version of “coronavirus”), cattle poisoners. The hunt for Portuguese Communists was most successful in the northern areas of the country filled with wealthy farmers, where many fooled peasants and artisans as well as part of the urban proletariat organized their own raids in places where members of the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) supposedly lived and operated. Moreover, captured Communists were not always handed over to the PIDE, but were often beaten to death or killed on the spot. There was no criminal liability for this.
It should be understood that these days the bourgeoisie may also use the mass psychosis around a common cold for its narrow class purposes. And under the pretext of that introduce not only “self-isolation” at home and not only the closure of international borders, but also actual concentration camps where all workers with symptoms of a cold or an upset stomach will be dragged. And in this case, our frightened and politically illiterate philistines can become of great help to the fascists.
First and foremost, the bourgeoisie will try to lock up the progressive workers and unionists who are trying to organize the labor in order to fight against the onslaught of capital. Would it be difficult to spread rumors that these “inconvenient” workers have “coronavirus” and are spreading it across the factory? No, it wouldn’t be difficult to arrest such workers and all other workers who protest against fascist terror and war, advocate democracy and human rights, and send them “to quarantine” in any special “zone” – under the pretext of “protecting society from the carriers of coronavirus”. While the historical Nazis had punitive psychiatry, the contemporary Nazis are clearly developing a global terrorist “infectious disease center”, where political prisons and concentration camps will operate under the banner of “infectious medical facility”, “quarantine point”, “hospital”, etc.
Therefore, for a start, our “pandemic fighters” should unite at their production sites and at least ask their owners and union leaders why the collective bargaining agreement, which states, among other things, that hired employees have the full right to be sick, while the employer is obliged to provide all material and organizational support, is not implemented in practice?
Why don’t our zealous “pandemic fighters” unite and ask their owners why they are unwilling to comply with their own law, the Labor Code, for example, which clearly states that employees have the right to be sick and receive sick pay?
Why don’t our workers, who are ready to strangle a coughing worker on a bus, collectively ask the local authorities why these authorities cover private owners of factories and firms that force workers not to go on sick leave but to die on their feet, producing added value?
Why don’t our workers gather all over cities and ask the authorities on what basis the main constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens have been taken away from them? Why not remind the authorities and, most importantly, ourselves that according to the bourgeois constitution itself, the only source of the power in the country is the people, i.e. their absolute majority – the workers and laborers? And those people have not made any decisions concerning some “epidemic” and the cancellation of their legal rights.
Anger must be applied in the right direction, otherwise you will inevitably end up aiming at yourself. It is very easy to throw yourself at your equal, at your oppressed brother in class. He will not shoot and will not send you to the concentration camp. It is easy to throw yourself at an ordinary pensioner, forced to become a warden in order not to die from starvation, cold and lack of medicine. She won’t put you on trial, you can just throw her out of the bus or tram. And then what? And then the “pandemic fighter”, who is currently acting like a fascist, having joined the ranks of other inhumane thugs that have forgotten basic empathy and compassion, will himself end up in the position of those he is bullying today (or it will be his parents and children) and will himself experience all the delights of the fascists concerns about the “health and safety of the nation”.
Social gatherings above three not allowed
The bourgeoisie released the coronavirus lies into public for a reason. It’s testing the workers: wanting to see whether they will revolt against the monstrous and brazen violation of the main civil rights and freedoms, or whether they will submissively, like a large flock of sheep, sit in their barns and daily give their meat and wool to the shepherds. So far only we’re only witnessing the former. And the bourgeoisie, unafraid, keeps pushing forward in its fight against revolution. In various countries, the working class and other laborers have already been subjected to flagrant and lawless restrictions on freedom of movement and social gatherings, which even violates the bourgeoisie’s own regulations. Under the pretext of the virus, the authorities prohibit workers from organizing their own lives. In some places the fascists even remembered the days of Franco in Spain and have forbidden their citizens to gather in groups of more than three people. In other countries, they have forbidden social gatherings above 20, 40, 50 people, etc. Violation of this ban is followed by punishment, which ranges from getting shot to a fine of a hundred euros.
Workers and laborers are banned from going out in their private time, but somehow, they aren’t banned from going to work. So where exactly is the fight against the epidemic here? Where is the logic in all of this – if during the commute of huge numbers of workers in the morning and evening and during the work process itself, there is a constant exchange of matter among those huge crowds, including the exchange of microorganisms, viruses, etc. Is that what you call “quarantine”?
Why, the logic is simple – the workers can and must work for their capitalist masters, and the rest of the time they must sit in their dens, without even trying to stick out their noses. This is one of the main tasks of the so-called “coronavirus”: to physically prevent the preparation and organization of strikes, demonstrations, protests, rallies and proletarian marches on a global scale. Not to allow the functioning of Marxist clubs and factory groups, in which covertly or under the disguise of legality the working class creates its own political organization. Here, the specific goal of the global financial capital is to achieve, under the guise of an “epidemic” and with the help of “viral” terror, such conditions when all working masses live and act as prisoners in solitary confinement: in the morning they are taken to work, in the evening they are driven back to their cells. No communication, no meetings and no organizations.
But the bourgeoisie must go all the way. After all, the workers have the opportunity to communicate with each other in warehouses and at work stations. And this means that there are opportunities for revolutionary work and organization. These opportunities are provided by the very public nature of large modern production.
What should capitalists and their governments do? How can they divide the workers? Return to small handicrafts? That’s impossible, just as it is impossible to make everyone work from home. What’s left are Hitler’s old tricks, supported by modern technology – namely, infiltrating plants and factories with spies and security agents, recruiting regressive workers as snitches, paying supplements for whistleblowing (or allowing such workers to keep their job during redundancies), total deception, brutal exemplary massacres of progressive workers, security cameras everywhere, even in women’s toilets, etc.
Will all of this save the bourgeoisie from the revolution? Obviously not, but it can still harm the worker’s movement significantly, especially if there are no counteractions and everyone keeps quiet with each new increase of oppression and pressure tactic.
Biological perspective
For the last 30 years, the bourgeoisie and its lackeys in the scientific world have been screeching about flu outbreaks and their mutations almost every season. One time they invented the “swine flu”, and the fascist authorities, acting on the instructions from international agro-industrial monopolies, began destroying the medium and small pig farming businesses in their countries. Then they announced the “bird flu”, and the authorities did the same to commercial poultry raised by the petty bourgeoisie, and especially to the poultry that workers raise for their own consumption.
The purpose of such “flu” outbreaks is clear: the monopolization of the meat market, cleansing it from small producers, forcing the masses to buy and consume only the meat that is supplied by the largest agricultural companies belonging to the world financial capital. While small producers are not allowed to grow or bring their meat to the market, all markets and all borders are open for the goods of large corporations, as if there is no epidemic whatsoever.
Now “coronavirus”. But what is the use in banging on about how “there is an epidemic” and that “the flu mutates” for 30 years? The influenza virus, being a complex protein body (based on nucleoproteins), shows metabolism and is able to reproduce similar protein bodies. The virus is a living body during its active reproduction, but its life is only possible in unity with certain environmental conditions. The virus is constantly evolving and changing, as is all matter. Viruses are able to move from an inactive state to physiological activity, which is exactly what happens when a person or animal is infected. It is at this moment that a lifeless substance of the virus is transformed into a living being. The life of the virus is reversible. But viruses are not immortal. Their heredity is subject to variability depending on living conditions: a deadly virus can be changed into a safe form and a vaccine can be made on this basis. Therefore, shouting for one third of a century that the flu is mutating, and this is shock horror, is like shouting that a grain is germinating or a child is growing and changing.
That’s not the point. From 1925 to 1955, Soviet Stalinist biologists and doctors defeated smallpox, cholera, tropical fever, typhoid, plague outbreaks in Soviet Turkestan, etc. By the early 1950s, Stalinist scientists came close to finally defeating the flu and putting an end to its vile existence. They figured, if this virus prevents the Soviet people from living peacufully, if it threatens the life and health of our people, if it brings great losses to the cause of communism, it means that we must put an end to it, decisively and quickly, just as in case of any enemy of socialism and the working class. This is what the internal policy of socialism is all about and this is what the real (not declarative!) care for people is actually like.
How to put an end to it was merely a technical question: no matter how complex and heavy the task was, the powerful productive forces of socialism, which was already turning into communism, would allow to quickly destroy the flu and any other contagion, no matter its nature and form. This is the way the basic economic law of socialism works: all forces of state and society have to be united to ensure a happy and fulfilling life for all workers. No enemy could withstand such forces, be it an epidemic, be it a drought, be it an army of imperialists, or weeds harming the produce.
After the counterrevolutionary coup in 1953, the work against influenza in the USSR certainly continued – that cannot be denied. But the main path in biology was gradually lost. The fight against diseases and epidemics requires a strict materialistic approach to biology in general, and to microbiology in particular. This implies solving all issues of microorganism genetics only in a dialectical-materialistic way. The idealistic genetics of Weisman-Morgan, spread by the Trotskyites and the Right in 1955-1989, led Soviet scientists to a dead end, the nature of influenza was not getting fully explained, often the explanation would be erroneous, and the methods of fighting the infection would only skim the surface. This meant that all those counteractions were not aimed at destroying the cause of the disease, but only at its consequences. The cause of occasional big scale influenza outbreaks in the late Soviet Union was not uprooted. This has to be recognized.
But today, it seems that the productive forces of society have moved forward, especially in terms of microbiology and new medicines. So, what prevents the end of influenza in all its known forms, including coronaviruses? Why shout about influenza when all you have to do is destroy it completely?
The only thing that prevents us from doing that is capitalism. Instead of destroying a disease, capital only shouts about it.
Is moving away from primitive burning of oil possible today? Probably not, as it will lead to destruction of the largest oil companies. Is it possible that soon the flu and other common human diseases will be eradicated? No, we can’t even hope for it, because it will lead to the destruction of large pharmaceutical corporations, whose owners are part of the 0.3% of the population, that is, part of the global financial capital.
Can these major capitalists give up the colossal profits that they sustainably derive from epidemics, from global diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, influenza, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, etc.? Clearly, they cannot. They, these capitalists, like madmen in an asylum, congratulate each other o the beginning of a war, on the outbreak of an epidemic, on the spread of plague in Africa and Asia, on the poisoning of drinking water in large rivers, on the increasing complexity of forms of cancer, etc. But this isn’t surprising: this is how the main economic law of modern capitalism, the law of private owners of the means of production, of maximum profit at any cost, manifests itself.
How many people died last year from the coronavirus influenza? Hardly anyone remembers. Judging by the fact that hardly a few thousand people all over the world have actually died from this kind of influenza virus in recent months, we can definitely say that a negligible number of people have died from this virus in all the time it’s been known.
One should not think that the bourgeoisie cares much about the health of the working masses. It maintains the state health care system only because it is itself afraid of epidemic outbreaks.
But who has scientifically proven that the current situation with coronavirus is an epidemic? Who in recent years has studied the influenza virus, from the materialistic perspective of Michurin’s biological science? We have no evidence of that kind of research. And what do we have? In reality we have military and police backed actions of bourgeois governments against workers, i.e. a class war; general hysteria in the media, lies and cries; actors and all kinds of “celebrities” and other dirty doormats of capital reporting about their “coronavirus infection” in front of a television camera and advertising self-isolation at home. Accurate statistics on the disease is nowhere to be found. Only the insane numbers provided by the bourgeois media, which, if you look carefully, completely expose the bourgeois lies and forgery.
For example, here’s a report explaining the reason for high mortality from coronavirus in Italy – 8%, no less! Turns out, that reason is extremely simple – the average age of the deceased is 79 years old! The average, Karl! All of the people who died from the virus were by some strange coincidence burdened by other diseases, and, unlike coronavirus, very severe and serious at that: ischemia, oncology, diabetes, hypertension, etc. So why are we even mentioning coronavirus here if it is quite clear that all those people died from completely different causes? Why, because mentioning coronavirus benefits the global monopolies. Meanwhile, the global media were screeching about “a new terrible epidemic” that hit Italy.
The crisis of the world economy, the rise in prices, the attack on the living standards of workers, the police and terror of the bourgeoisie is being blamed on “people dying from coronavirus”. According to official data, the number of “infected with the virus” is 180 000 people, i.e. about 0.00257% of the world population. The number of people who died “from this virus” has allegedly already approached 6 000 people. That’s about 0.000086% of our planet’s population. It isn’t hard to calculate that the total number of people allegedly “infected with coronavirus” and allegedly “killed by coronavirus” is 0.00266% of the population, or rounded 0.003%.
But now, according to mass media reports, it appears that 100 000 people out of 180 000 allegedly infected with the virus have already recovered. Which means that initially there were 180,000 patients, 100,000 have recovered, 6,000 have “died” and the remaining 74,000 have destroyed the global economy.
But who are those 74,000, or 0.001% of the world’s population? By the bourgeoisie’s definition, they are “mostly ordinary people”, i.e. workers. In order to believe that 74,000 workers caused the breakout of a terrible economic crisis, you have to be a total degenerate.
But the whole irony of this story is that 74,000 people can indeed be blamed for the global crisis. As long as you realize that they aren’t the deceased workers, they are the members of the global financial capital.
Can we say that less people die from tuberculosis, yellow fever, cholera and other acutely contagious diseases than from the notorious coronavirus? Can we say that fewer people die from heart disease or cancer than from coronavirus? No, the figures for losses from these diseases cannot even be compared with coronavirus: tuberculosis, cholera, cancer, diabetes, and heart diseases kill millions of people every year, while the notorious coronavirus may have caused several thousand deaths. So why doesn’t the bourgeoisie raise any howls because of the huge losses from these longtime enemies of humanity?
Because tuberculosis, cholera and fever are social diseases caused by poor living conditions and preserved only under exploitative systems such as capitalism. To recognize the root of these diseases is to recognize that capitalism is genocide in the literal sense.
As for cancer, diabetes and heart problems, these diseases are conservative, individual and do not create epidemics. They are inconvenient for intimidation and deception of whole nations. While the flu, due to its prevalence, high rate of spreading and mass character of the disease is very convenient as a pretext to introduce all kinds of fascist measures in order to “combat the epidemic”.
Profit
The way the bourgeoisie is planning to climb out of the overproduction crisis has already been mentioned above. But it will not stop there. The end of the depression and the beginning of the revival in capitalist production is associated not only with the dissolution of goods, but to a greater extent with the renewal of production, that is, with the production and purchase of new means of production.
For this the capitalist class needs colossal funds, which can only be taken from the proletariat and other oppressed workers. In order to achieve this, simple wage cuts and price rises are not enough. That’s why the bourgeoisie, with the help of their governments, conducts another redistribution of national income, withdraws part of the workers’ wages and adds it to the governmental budget in the form of taxes, fees and fines.
It uses this money not only for the renewal of fixed capital, but also to increase the exploitation of workers, to strengthen capitalism, and to prepare and wage imperialist wars. The coronavirus scam fits perfectly here. In addition to the rise in prices for basic commodities, “naturally” caused by the “epidemic,” the bourgeois governments are already introducing new taxes and fees or increasing (optimizing) the old ones. At the same time, all government agencies are ordered to start a direct robbery of workers though fining them “for violating quarantine measures” and moving freely in the country, for meeting with friends, for unwilling to be a sheep at the slaughterhouse and obediently stay inside the house.
We used to laugh at the scene in the “Cipollino” cartoon, when Prince Limon was reading a list of new taxes – a separate tax on plain rain and on rain with thunderstorms, a tax on breathing, a tax on the wind, etc. It appears that in recent years laughing about such matters has waned substantially.
M. Ivanov
