Author: Internationalist Perspective

Events over the past months have been breathtaking.   The global Coronavirus pandemic has, at the time of writing, infected 16 million people worldwide with over 630,000 associated deaths.   Many governments took lockdown measures which have had direct, adverse impacts on the world economy and, specifically the standard of living of the working class has been hit hard, not least through massive hikes in unemployment, the worst of which lie ahead.   And then, the grotesque and brazen murder of George Floyd in Minnesota inflamed the entire country and led to extraordinary confrontations between protesters and town, state and federal repressive forces.   Important though these latter events are within the American context, the protests have reverberated across the world and, unlike many other police murders over the years,  led not only to solidarity actions but also to explicit tie-ins to the treatment doled out to other racial groups by colonialists and home-grown exploiters, past and present.

These recent protests have not come from nowhere.   A series of social eruptions has been going on for more than a decade now and have emerged from the specific developments of the capitalist world over the past decades in which the onslaught of the ruling class against the working class has heightened through increased exploitation and accompanied by the most widespread attack on humanity and all aspects of its humanness.    

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No need to recount those awful images. Everybody saw them. They instantly became a powerful symbol that resonated all over the world: “We’ll keep our knee on your neck until you die”, they seemed to say. It soon appeared that many felt that knee pressure on their necks: The pressure of disrespect and discrimination; the pressure of being robbed of a future; the pressure of brutal repression and control. For the second time, the desperate cry of a man being murdered by the police for having transgressed the rules of commerce, was taken over by thousands: “I can’t breathe!!!”

But now the cry is much louder, resounding in seven hundred American cities and around the world. Its symbolism too is powerfully resonating. “We can’t breathe” is a particular apt slogan for today.

We can’t breathe because you stoke hate and violence, racism, nationalism and xenophobia to divide us so you can rule;

We can’t breathe because you take away our means to make a decent living and our hopes for the future while you make the rich ever richer;

We can’t breathe because you poison our environment, as you destroy life on earth for your profits;

We can’t breathe because you facilitate pandemics, and then lock us up and send the lowest paid amongst us, more often than not black or brown men and women, to work in dangerous conditions;

We can’t breathe because, while exalting freedom, your state is an octopus extending its arms into all aspects of life; you spy on us, your police are armies, trained to harass, hunt and kill and most of all, to intimidate us, to keep us small;

We can’t breathe because while you claim to be devoted to justice, you sweat injustice from every pore.  

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The global health crisis is a true revealer of human nature and its contradictions. By partially blocking fundamental aspects of ordinary social life, such as work, human contact, transport, leisure, it throws a different light on many of the ideas, beliefs and practices on which the established order is based. This creates a “void” where reflexes, “natural” human impulses, come more easily to the surface, free of the many shackles and ideological masks behind which they live more or less repressed or disguised. This crisis has many unique characteristics compared to all the pandemics of the past. The simultaneous paralysis of essential sectors of world production is by no means the least. But for the question which interests us I would like to underline its simultaneously planetary and “wired”, character. Despite the control and limits imposed by national states, despite the great inequalities that persist between countries, the vast majority of the world’s population is connected to the rest of the humans by new information and communication technologies. More than 5 billion people owned a phone in 2017, including 3.3 billion a smartphone. (1) This gives a new dimension to the understanding of what human nature can be. I do not pretend to deduce here everything that follows from this reality.  

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LESSON ONE

The first lesson is that the capitalist system is incapable of leading us through the crisis today and those to come.

It is not just that most of our government leaders are craven bastards, shameless liars, and
incompetent imbeciles. That, of course, is what they mostly are and none more than those leading the “greatest capitalist power” — the U.S. It’s not just that politicians are making money in the stock market with insider information while others, unprepared, are left to die. It’s not just that billionaires are raking in even more billions, safe on their offshore yachts. It’s not just that the so-called bailouts are hijacked by special interests and mostly help the banks. Trickling down to whom? Not even the much-vaunted small businesses. It’s not just that we are living in a new “feudalism,” where some are lucky enough to have “lords” (or “governors”) who want to cushion the effect of the crisis on the citizens of their fiefdom, while others manifestly don’t give a damn who dies as long as tattoo parlors open up. It’s not just that people are so starved for any real information about the virus that they make heroes out of the “representatives” of the “scientific establishment” they see paraded before them, muzzled by the politicians, the ovens.  

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The viral crisis has mutated into a global crisis of social reproduction with no end in sight. With the shutdown of factories, offices, schools and countless other institutions, many millions of people all over the world are facing loss of income, housing, and access to basic survival resources. Meanwhile, the deadly pandemic is raging on, spreading to the poorer countries of the world which are even less prepared to contain it. The whole world is shocked. The trust in the wisdom of our capitalist masters, and in their ability to deal with the present-day dangers, is suffering great damage. The imposing marble columns of the temples of government and finance don’t look so sturdy anymore. A feeling grows that all this could collapse. Many are scared. Many resorted to panic buying (stock-piling toilet paper in particular, which suggests that TP might become the post-apocalyptic currency☺). Some, seeking a target for their fear, mistreated Asian people. Many more took care of the most vulnerable, helped each other, showed solidarity with the health workers and the sick. These spontaneous reactions indicate the opposite directions in which the world could go.     This is a crisis of capitalism Capitalism has not created this virus.  

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