COVID-19 Proves Workers Are Essential and Capitalists Are A Drain
March 27, 2020
By Jasmine Duff
Republished from Red Flag.
The Marxist argument that it’s the labour of workers, and not the supposed intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit of bosses, that keeps society running, has long been ridiculed by defenders of capitalism. In the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the truth of Marx’s claim has been brought into sharp relief.
Those whose work has been deemed essential under the current restrictions aren’t the CEOs, bankers, mining executives – or the politicians who serve them. It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to anyone but themselves, that these so-called wealth creators can spend months isolated in their mansions or country estates without this having any impact on the basic functioning of society.
The rest of us would be better off without them. The people we depend on in this crisis are those whose labour we depend on in everyday life: nurses, teachers, those who grow our food and those who transport it to the supermarket shelves, and the people who, despite the health risks, continue to serve us in the supermarkets and chemists.
We’re told that corporate bosses like Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and mining magnate Gina Rinehart deserve their immense wealth because they play a special role in the economy. Typical of this perspective is the argument made by Forbes columnist and “leadership strategy” expert Rainer Zitelmann in a 2019 article. “For entrepreneurs, who usually earn far more than top-tier managers, high earnings are usually a reward for particularly good ideas”, he wrote. “The richest people in the world are those who have the best ideas.”
The ideologues making these arguments want us to believe that workers are unimportant and replaceable – nothing more than a “human resource” to be exploited at the whims of the capitalists. If you’re a worker, they think, it’s because you’re not smart, creative or driven enough to have climbed through the ranks. That’s why you deserve low wages, poor job security, a shitty education in chronically underfunded schools and a lack of decent health care.
The COVID-19 crisis has torn this argument to shreds. The global economy is grinding to a halt because many workers have to stay home. The CEOs self-isolating in their mansions can do nothing to save the situation. All their supposed creativity and intelligence is useless without the labour force that their wealth was built on.
The actions of our political leaders confirm this. The only creative and intelligent thing they’ve thought of to do to stave off the prospect of a deep recession is to keep as many workers as possible at their posts – recklessly sacrificing our health to protect the profits of their corporate masters. Prime minister Scott Morrison gave the game away when he said in a press conference on 24 March that while all “non-essential” workers would be sent home “everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker”.
As Morrison put it, “It can be essential in a service whether it’s a nurse or a doctor or a schoolteacher, or a public servant who is working tonight to ensure that we can get even greater capacity in our Centrelink offices, working until 8:00pm under the new arrangement in the call centres, these are all essential jobs. People stacking shelves – that is essential.”
When the basic functioning of society is on the line, it’s not the Alan Joyces or Gina Rineharts who are deemed essential. It’s the shelf stackers. Without workers, the capitalists are nothing.
The flipside of this equation is expressed in Marx’s description of the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism. Workers are the engine that keeps society running. When our labour stops, society comes to a halt.
Already, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen numerous examples that illustrate this potential. Thousands of Italian workers in the auto and metal industries have walked out in wildcat strikes to enforce social distancing, refusing to risk their health and the health of their families for Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte. Conte had made clear his desire to keep profits flowing despite the country having a 10 percent mortality rate from COVID-19 infections – tweeting on 14 March that “Italy doesn’t stop”. Workers, however, had other ideas.
Workers in Argentina who took over a factory in 2017 that previously sewed police uniforms are now using it to produce surgical masks. Another group of Argentinian workers who in 2011 took over one of the largest printing presses in Latin America are now using it to print 3D protective masks and produce hand sanitiser.
There has even been some action by workers here in Australia. Early in the morning on 27 March workers at a Coles warehouse in Melbourne’s western suburbs walked out in protest management’s refusal to provide adequate protective equipment. The industrial power of these workers is immense. A three-day strike at the same warehouse in 2016 resulted in supermarket shelves across Victoria and Tasmania lying empty for weeks.
Workers have the power to prevent capitalists exploiting our skills as pickers in warehouses, shelf stackers in supermarkets or as truck drivers. In a world without bosses, we could collectively and democratically decide how our skills should be used to advance the interests of everyone. We could distribute food, for example, according to human need. This would end the barbaric reality that exists under capitalism, where millions starve to death every year despite enough food being produced to feed the world 1.5 times over.
We could use our skills as construction workers to rapidly build hospitals, rather than, as this the case today, endless luxury apartments and shopping malls for the rich – so that in any future health crisis no one would be forced to go without a bed.
Working class solidarity, democracy and collectivity: these are building blocks of socialism. Socialism is a society in which workers can democratically decide, using all our skills and creativity, what kind of world we want to live in, rather than allowing a wealthy minority of capitalists to run society in the interests of profit. The bosses need us. We don’t need them.
Right now, capitalism is in crisis. Workers have more power than ever, but we’re being forced into more barbaric conditions every day. To quote German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the context of the of the epochal slaughter of World War One, we now stand at a crossroads, “Either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
Every day, new sacrifices are made at the altar of corporate profits – whether it’s the destruction of the environment, or the destruction of human health. The task of organising for a socialist future has never been more urgent.
March 24, 2020
The Wall Street Journal's Pitch for Mass Murder is Catching on in Capitalist Circles
By J.E. Karla
Not even two weeks into an extraordinary response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the upper echelons of capital are wondering whether saving millions of lives is really worth the damage being done to their investment portfolios. According to reports, the debate among the ruling class is over whether or not to walk back some of the measures taken to slow the spread of the virus -- efforts already considered tardy and inadequate by public health experts -- in order to minimize business losses.
Like many elite notions, this idea was first launched in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. An unsigned editorial there is the most visible the vanguard of the bourgeoisie ever really make their deliberations, and this one last week (behind a paywall, of course) was especially candid.
After opening paragraphs congratulating the response to date, hoping that “with any luck” the nation’s health care system won’t collapse, they lay out their basic thesis:
“Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.”
After some attempts at pulling heart strings over the entrepreneurs that will eat the most shit in the months to come -- using the petit bourgeoisie as human shields for big business, as is custom -- and some other telling admissions we’ll return to, they end with this:
“Dr. (Anthony) Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has explained this severe lockdown policy as lasting 14 days in its initial term. The national guidance would then be reconsidered depending on the spread of the disease. That should be the moment, if not sooner, to offer new guidance on what might be called phase two of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.”
They do not have the guts to explicitly state that this “phase two” would mean allowing most normal activity -- the contact the virus needs to continue its spread -- to return, but their weasel word description of “substantial social distancing… in some form” (emphasis mine) says it all. “This should not become a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate… But no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health.”
They don’t want to debate how many lives to sacrifice in the name of saving “jobs,” -- a euphemism for the fortunes of employers, the bourgeoisie -- but that’s a great way to describe dialing back the only measures so far demonstrated to work against this plague in the name of economic “health.”
How many lives are we talking about? As I write, 565 people have died of the disease in the United States, with fatalities doubling every 2-3 days. The experience in Europe and China indicates that response measures take roughly a week to slow the virus down. That means that we should see 2-3 more doublings before last week’s actions finally take effect, 2260 to 4520 dead people this week. The Journal and their allies are suggesting that we should let those effects last a week, and then ratchet up the spread of the virus again.
Even assuming a very optimistic scenario where the doubling drops by half -- i.e. to once every 4-6 days -- and then lands somewhere in the middle -- say 3-5 days -- that would mean somewhere between 72,000 and nearly 600,000 dead people just a month from now.
But it’s worse than that, because there are about 5 times as many critical cases as there are fatalities. The absolute best case scenario puts us at more than 360,000 critical cases in a country with less than 100,000 intensive care beds. The worst case puts us at 3,000,000.
You can then add thousands of deaths from non-coronavirus causes that could not get adequate treatment -- car accidents, allergic reactions, heart attacks, etc. And that month cut off is arbitrary; the deaths would continue after that. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof quoted a British epidemiologist as estimating a best case of 1.1 million. That best case involves much more distancing than what the Journal and company are proposing. They are calling for hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, to be sacrificed for the sake of “economic health.”
This blood thirsty logic is precisely the sort of thing capitalists project onto communists. This, however, brings us to the admission I alluded to above, buried in the middle of the editorial:
“Some in the media who don’t understand American business say that China managed a comparable shock to its economy and is now beginning to emerge on the other side. Why can’t the U.S. do it too? This ignores that the Chinese state owns an enormous stake in that economy and chose to absorb the losses. In the U.S. those losses will be borne by private owners and workers who rely on a functioning private economy. They have no state balance sheet to fall back on.”
We don’t need to debate the class character of the Chinese state -- even the Communist Party of China will admit that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” accommodates global capital. Regardless, the Wall Street Journal openly admits that the options at hand are a state-controlled economy capable of stemming the plague’s advance or letting potentially millions of people die for the sake of sustaining a privately-owned one.
The US government could easily freeze all debts, rents, and other contractual payments, guarantee a short-term income for all families, and take all necessary measures to maintain provision of food, medicine, utilities, and vital services until the virus has run out of steam. But even a momentary economy run on the basis of human need and not the accumulation of profit poses the threat of a good example. It’s bad enough that China does it incompletely, hence official bellicosity against them even in this hour of mutual need.
There is no amount of human lives the ruling class wouldn’t trade to prevent that risk, especially when they know they are the least likely to die.
The only silver lining is that one way or the other most of us will come out on the other end of this nightmare, and when we do the argument we must make is clear: capitalism will continue to kill us by the millions and billions until it is stopped. You don’t even have to take our word for it -- you can read it in the paper.
March 22, 2020
Capitalism, COVID-19, and Crisis: A Class Analysis
By Ikemba X
THE CAPITALIST/IMPERIALIST CLASS
In the past week, the global economy experienced its worst week since 2008 (following a series of “Worst Weeks”, it keeps getting worse), and the economic crisis is sure to deteriorate as time marches on. Three years of growth in the market have evaporated, unemployment has seen a spike, multiple industrial sectors have slowed to a crawl or stopped moving altogether, and the trillion-dollar injection into the market by the Federal Reserve did almost nothing to stop the free fall (other than transfer toxic assets to the public). If the recession hasn’t already hit us, we’re in for a catastrophe when the bills are due. The following is a brief outline on how we got here, and how much worse it's going to be this time around.
The modern capitalist economy simply cannot function without large amounts of fiat currency in the form of government-backed loans. As the bourgeoisie continues its song and dance of improving the means of production, increasing production of commodities, and better perfecting the division of labor, the price of operating such vast and complex industrial armies and machines is simply too much. In order to compensate for this massive cost, the bourgeoisie in the global core have forged an alliance between industrial and finance capital, exporting ever increasing amounts of production overseas, so that cheaper labor can be exploited. At home, the use of credit, loans, and ownership of companies into shares have allowed capitalists to continue their operations, though the market has grown more unstable than ever before. The financial crisis in 2008 drove capitalism to the brink of collapse, and it was caused specifically by inherent contradictions in the system. The rate of profit has continued to fall, production has become more expensive and commodities are produced in greater volumes for lower prices. Any panic in the market has a ripple effect, and the harsh truth is that a large majority of the world’s “wealth” is artificial, mere symbols in a computer program that rely solely on blind faith. If the bourgeoisie becomes scared enough to taking out its money and halting production, the whole rotten structure collapses. If not for the action taken by the Feds over the past few decades, including multiple bouts of quantitative easing under Obama, the global market may very well have imploded long ago. It took almost a decade for the economy to mostly recover from the 2008 crisis, for the working class a recovery never really came, and some of its effects are still felt in more isolated sectors of the economy today.
Leading up to the COVID-19 scare, there was an already existing crisis in imperialism and capitalist production. Notably, the Trade War between China and the United States has had negative effects on the rival imperialist powers, who were willing to threaten economic crises while jockeying for hegemony in the world market. The global energy sector was also entering a crisis, with Russia and the OPEC countries at an impasse on restricting oil production, which had the effect of flooding the market with oil. The overproduction of commodities in this critical sector of the economy was causing problems for the bourgeoisie in the United States, who have responded by seizing oil fields in Syria and beating the war drums, threatening Iran with invasion. Meanwhile, European nations are experiencing a contraction of unified dominance as Brexit causes a fracture in European imperialism, and a potential crisis in the UK with the looming threat of a No-Deal Brexit. This would have significant ripple effects on the global market, as the UK is one of the largest economies in the world.
It is important to remember that this crisis was caused purely through the anarchy of capitalist production. Once the capitalists were bailed out following 2008, imperialist plunder continued and the bourgeoisie recovered, leaving the proletariat to fend for themselves and foot the bill. This time around, production really has stopped, and the effects on the capitalist economy will be disastrous. The Chinese economy today makes up 16% of global Gross World Product, is the second largest economy in the world, and has the largest pool of cheap labor, as well as being a rising imperialist power, offering predatory loans to African countries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, factories responsible for 70% of China’s exports have simply ceased to operate or have cut production massively, and travel to and from the country has been shut down completely. Several other countries have shut down massive sectors of their economy such as the airlines, and Italy has shut down its country altogether. Therefore, this latest crisis isn't caused by capitalists being unable to pay for their ventures, but rather there simply is no movement of capital, and no production of commodities. With this monumental economic halt/slowdown, we are staring in the face of a crisis the likes of which we have not seen in almost a century. The COVID-19 is sending the capitalist system into a freefall, and as always, the bourgeoisie and their governments will do everything in their power to make sure the workers absorb the brunt of this fall.
THE PROLETARIAN SITUATION
The situation in the United States is dire for the proletariat. For starters, there is a debt crisis, $14 trillion consisting mostly of mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards. Deepening wealth inequality has accelerated the fall of real wages, and today (even before the arrival of COVID-19) most proletarians are in dire straits. Half of Americans make $30 thousand a year or less, and 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a $400 crisis. Real unemployment was sitting at about 5% and has now spiked to almost 20%, and underemployment or those who have given up on finding jobs represent a forgotten sector that the US government is fine keeping in the dark. With the COVID-19 scare, layoffs are rising at an unprecedented rate, and those who aren't being fired are having their hours cut. In a country where health insurance is tied to employment, a pandemic which causes a spike in unemployment is probably the worst-case scenario for a proletarian.
The COVID-19 scare has also affected the mentality of the working class, who have begun panic buying commodities. This almost immediately resulted in a shortage of goods, which has ripped away the veil which hid the scarcity that does exist in capitalism, just like any other system. Lean manufacturing, or Just-in-Time manufacturing, provided us all with the hallucination that there was always an abundance of products for us to buy. However, after being put under pressure, the lie has been exposed for what it really is. In a nutshell, the transportation system has been developed enough that capitalists can rely on the nomadic lifestyle of proletarians in that industry. There is no large-scale storage of goods, but rather far-away sites that remain available whenever products are needed. Such a system is incredibly volatile, and any disruption in the distribution chain can cause an immediate and drastic shortage. We saw a glimpse of this with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when the natural disaster destroyed the colony of Puerto Rico. The result was that there was a global shortage of IV bags, since Puerto Rico was the hub of production for these goods. Now, imagine a crisis like this, but in multiple industries on every level of the production process, and not just based on production itself being shut down, but also on the transportation industry being paralyzed (like what we’ve seen with the decline in airline traffic and mass layoffs of truckers). China produces most of the world’s steel and, as stated before, their industrial production has been slashed in 70% of factories. And that is just one country. Globally, we are already seeing crippling shortages of medical supplies, most notably in Italy, the United States, and Iran, which has been the hardest hit of the three due to imperialist sanctions.
There has also been a growing trend of social distancing and self-isolation as a result of the pandemic. The cultural effects of this have the potential to negatively impact us all. Sowing fear and distrust of each other, the COVID-19 scare threatens to further divide us, further alienate us, and further fuel xenophobic and racist tendencies among white proletarians, as indicated by the recent uptick in racially-motivated attacks against proletarians of East Asian descent. This directly plays into some of the most reactionary and chauvinistic ideas in the US, expressed clearly by the Bourgeois slogan “China Lied, People Died” and scapegoating, such as labeling COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus.”
In December of last year, the service sector accounted for 97% of new hires according to the Labor department. Additionally, the US economy relies heavily on consumer spending, and while the rush on grocery stores and online shopping may offset this in the short term, less and less people will be able to sustain this spending as incomes dry up in the coming months. Couple this development with the above-mentioned fact that most workers live paycheck to paycheck, and we see a crisis in consumption of commodities, one of the basic causes of capitalist crisis.
In short, the situation looks bad for the proletariat. Congress can’t even pass basic measures, and the clock is ticking. There have been discussions in Congress about a potential UBI bill, but if this crisis continues for several months, one-time checks will not be enough to stop the bleeding. Successive monthly checks may stop the bleeding in the interim, but the ripples effects of mass unemployment are sure to carry well into 2021, if not multiple years beyond. In other words, we’re going to see a crisis the likes of which the world has never seen before.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
There have been some policies proposed by Social-Democratic elements of the Democratic Party in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures proposed are attempts to treat the symptoms, and not cure the problem. Things like Medicare for All and nationalization of the healthcare system, as well as nationalizing any industries which seek government bailouts, do not get rid of the underlying economic problems which lead to the crisis we are faced with today. Medicare for All in theory protects us all from the virus, but we have seen clearly that the capitalist system of production and distribution has utterly failed the Italians, who have been hit by a chronic lack of medical supplies for their patients. In other words, what good will universal healthcare be if the medical industry itself cannot handle the demand. Currently, the for-profit system in the US offers less than 1 million hospital beds, in a nation of 330 million people. Additionally, our aim should not be to simply treat the sick. We must have a centrally-planned economy, with systems in place that prepare large storages of medical supplies we need for when viruses like this are unleashed on the world. We need an economic system that does not collapse after one month of a fraction of its production being cut.
Activists should be cautious moving forward in their political work. The most important thing we can implement right now is Serve-the-People survival programs, specifically in terms of food and medical supplies. In doing our work, make sure to have hand sanitizer, gloves, and masks on hand for use and distribution. We should also not allow social distancing and hygiene practices to be spurred on by panic, and use them with clear heads, knowing full well that we are protecting the lives of others through these actions, not just ourselves.
The large-scale demonstrations are coming. No society can have mass unemployment and shortages of basic materials without intensifying the class struggle as a result. We must be prepared to go among the masses where they organize, and organize our own demonstrations, building strong links with the people. Go to the masses, learn from them, and educate them. Most of all, stay safe. Use the time given to us in this crisis to study theory from revolutionary teachers such as Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Do not hesitate, and do not be afraid of study. Study the conditions of the people. I strongly recommend we all crack open Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done” again, in preparation for the coming months.
