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.
The climate crisis is accelerating before our eyes and the whole world sees it. Australia is burning, floods and other disasters abound. Not long before the smoke of burning trees darkened the skies of Australia, it did so in South America, where the deforestation of Amazonia rapidly progresses. This catastrophe is the subject of the following text, translated from “La Oveja Negra” (“The Black Sheep”), a group and publication based in Argentina, with an outlook similar to ours. Brazil’s right-wing president is often blamed for the burning of the Amazon Forest, but this article shows that left-wing governments did and do the same thing; that it is not a particular government that causes the climate crisis but capitalism itself. As scary as the burning forests are, for La Oveja Negra , it’s even scarier, “that we continue to bear the unbearable, that we continue choosing the lesser evil. The most worrying thing is the inability of human beings to imagine something other than life in capitalism, just at the moment when this way of life is falling apart. The deforestation of the imagination is as dangerous as the deforestation of the Amazon.”Is this inability permanent and irreversible? There are signs that this might not be the case.
Finally, the climate change deniers have about as much credibility left as the flat earth society. The evidence is too overwhelming. The scientific data is clear: if man continues to produce and consume in a way that releases massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the air, we are headed for a catastrophe that might be more destructive than all the wars of past centuries combined. Already, we see rising seawater levels threatening low lying areas, more devastating storms, more giant floods here and monster fires there; mass extinction of animals, spread of tropical diseases, a mounting drinking water crisis, drought that turns fertile areas into wasteland and provokes mass migration, microplastics in the ocean, in our food, in the rain that falls on our head…the list of disasters goes on and on. No wonder that this trend worries more and more people. Especially young people, who will inherit a planet that may become to a large extent uninhabitable. The movement of school kids striking for climate which began in Sweden and spread all over the world is thus a welcome sign. It expresses a rising sense of urgency of fundamental change. But what must change?
In the article, looking at the relationship between capitalism and the environment, E.R. wrote:
Capital’s relationship with nature has a history of its own; it has a trajectory of development, of ‘advancement’, of ‘progress’. But, we need to ask, an advancement and progression toward what? Capitalism has transformed nature over the years no less than it has transformed labour and the working class. Capital has to such an extreme extent, by today’s advanced stage in its historical development, interfered with, appropriated, manipulated, in a word, messed with the earth’s overall natural environment that it is in fact increasingly difficult any longer to find any feature, any aspect, any part of it that hasn’t been changed in one way or another as a result. This change, this messing with nature by capital has by now done such catastrophic damage to the natural, evolving, inter-connected, highly complex and self-sustaining ecosystems and processes of the planet that the question of sustainability itself in regard to capitalist economic processes in interaction with the natural environment has become an increasingly important concern for the capital class itself (at least at the political level).
No, a good year it wasn’t. 2018 was a year of gathering thunder clouds. On all levels: economic, ecological, political and social.
It became painfully clear that climate change is not just a problem for our grandchildren. Climate disasters were on the rise, including in the US where in the midst of forest fires and floods, the president continued to claim that nothing was going on, that no drastic change is needed, that on the contrary more coal has to be consumed. And the new president of Brazil is giving a green light for a wholesale clear-cut in the Amazon rain forest. Hallucinant. What is done to the causes is so ridiculously little compared to the scale of the threat that one can expect that the weather will not be less extreme this year and perhaps even more disruptive.
On the social level, one of things that struck me the most was the visible growth of the gap between rich and poor. In New York, I see more beggars almost every day as more and more shiny towers scratch the clouds, with luxury apartments sometimes sold for over a hundred million dollars. In Los Angeles I saw tent camps of homeless people occupying endless sidewalks.
At 4:30 PM, Mon., Jan. 14, Mac Intosh, of Internationalist Perspective, will be speaking on: “The Communist Left, Class Lines, and the New Reading of Marx.” An open discussion will follow.
Please join us at Victrola Cafe, 411 15th Ave. E., Seattle.
About the talk:
The historical Communist Left traces its origins to the revolutionary wave that erupted in 1917-1918, and then proceeded theoretically and politically to the theoretical-political critique of the emerging counter-revolution in Russia, culminating in the emergence of Stalinism and the so-called Bolshevization of the communist parties across the globe. The very class lines separating the fundamental and historical interests of the working class from those of capitalism have been clearly drawn by the communist left over the past century. Those class lines and their political underpinnings, have their own theoretical bases in the works of Marx, his analysis of the value form and its fundamental role in shaping the very modes of subjectivity of the working class, and the obstacles to its overcoming of the reified social forms to which capitalist social relations subject it. The new reading of Marx based on the publication of all the manuscripts and drafts of Capital, and their analysis, has provided a theoretical basis for understanding and politically confronting the power of capital; a basis for clearly drawing the class line.
(The article below is written by a comrade of the ‘Cercle de Discussion de Paris. The original text is on our french page)
Not so long ago it was often said that the class struggle was practically doomed, if not almost extinct. In fact, this reflected above all the reality of an exploited class which for decades has been under the steamroller of “neo-liberalism”, that is, the policy driven by the systematic and violent search of lower labor costs, the policy which uses unemployment and the threat of unemployment to impose social submission. It was as if the working class was laying on the ground with the foot of the ruling class planted on its neck. The movement of the Yellow Vests appears first and foremost as an awakening, a massive refusal of this situation. Everyone agrees today: the rising fuel prices were only the trigger.
Like virtually every major social movement under capitalism, it was born spontaneously. It was neither foreseen nor organized by the political and trade union apparatus that are usually charged with “commanding their troops”. What’s more, the rejection of any control by these institutions has not only been clearly, repeatedly and loudly claimed from the onset, it remains a major feature of its DNA nearly a month later.
Nous saluons le mouvement tres important des “gilets jaunes” en France. Nous y reviendrons bientot. Pour maintenant, nou republions, sur notre page “en francais”, une analyse du site “Grand Large”, qui est animé par des camerades qui ont quittés PI, malheureusement sans nous expliquer pourquoi.
We salute the very important movement of the “yellow vests” in France. We will soon come back to this subject. For now, we republish, on our french page, an analyis from the website “Grand Large”, which is animated by comrades who left IP, unfortunately without telling us why.
Among the clearest signs of capitalism’s obsoleteness, at least from the standpoint of humanity, is the growing dislocation of people caused by its crisis, by the poverty, the wars and the hopelessness it creates. The story is horrific from beginning to end. Horrific circumstances at home prompt ever more people to flee. Horrific travel circumstances cause many of them to die. And when they do reach their destination, many are locked up and many are deported, while many others remain stuck on the lowest rungs of society. Most are considered “illegal”. Increasingly, they are terrorized by the state. The influx of refugees is used, like the threat of “terrorism,” as a lubricant for the militarization of society, a license for more state control and surveillance. It is also politically very useful. Power can be gained by scapegoating immigrants (especially Muslim immigrants who can be linked to terrorism); by giving even the poorest compatriots the satisfaction of standing above someone else.
If you can’t offer real hope to the masses, you have to give them at least that.
At least for now this strategy works, as the electoral victories of Trump, Orban and other creeps show. The success of the populist right has also pushed more traditional parties in Europe towards “tougher” policies on immigration.
Climate disasters were on the rise, including in the US where in the midst of forest fires and floods, the president continued to claim that nothing was going on, that no drastic change is needed, that on the contrary more coal has to be consumed. And the new president of Brazil is giving a green light for a wholesale clear-cut in the Amazon rain forest. Hallucinant. What is done to the causes is so ridiculously little compared to the scale of the threat that one can expect that the weather will not be less extreme this year and perhaps even more disruptive.