Revolution or Barbarism
In recent years our days have been filled with news of deaths, with numbers of dead, with the words of “experts” who command arrogantly and boastfully from the power they have been given. They are filled with unreasonable orders and outrageous government impositions. We do not intend to extensively analyze positions on the health crisis. The tragic shortages of medical personnel, equipment and infrastructure, the “stain” of 100 deaths a day, i.e. the dire consequences of decades of privatization of public health care. The provocative strengthening of the private sector, exemplified by the big pharmaceutical companies and health giants, whose profits have reached historic highs. The re-emergence of the ‘strong’ state model to restore capitalist equilibria. The strengthening of centralised powers and the emergence of a new caste of all-round technocrats, with the role of abdicating and covering up the responsibilities of the state apparatus and shifting the responsibility for the spread of the virus to the individual. These are just some of the points that shape the management of the pandemic by the capitalist states.
Throughout the pandemic, the key issues that have dominated the public debate have been around public health, mental health and the effects of incarceration, the social exclusion of increasing segments of the population, growing class inequalities, the wider capitalist division of available resources, the role of science and technology, civil rights and the diminished role of bourgeois democracy in emergency situations.
The health crisis has affected in a universal way the relations constituting the social reproduction of capital. The inability of the social formation to reproduce the formed conditions of capitalist production led to an ideological crisis of the applied model of neoliberalism, while at the same time, following the dictum that “for capitalism every crisis is an opportunity”, it served as a key tool for the organised transition to a new era. The capitalist restructuring under way is the huge-scale operation to rescue a system that is plunging into chain crises of a structural nature. It is also the attempt to move capitalism into a new phase, something that its apologists of all kinds openly admit. It is a given that the contradictions that are developing within societies, states and big bosses will be on a trajectory of bloody conflicts in the coming years. The emergence of a powerful bloc within the imperialist bourgeoisies, consisting of the owners of the great technological giants, with the decisive potential for extracting cultural hegemony, is shaping a historical intersection in which the passage to the new capitalist formation will universally determine the lives, habits and lifestyles of the social majority. In the new totalitarian capitalist world that is emerging, the possession of information (data) will be (to an even greater extent than now) only one of the many fields of profitability of these oligarchs, who, in addition to the sharp increase in their profits, will concentrate even greater powers in their hands. On the other hand, those who live within the hyper-connected metropolises will literally become fully exploitable commodities, as they will not only sell their labour power, but every field of social, personal, consumer, recreational interest will be a profitable process for capital, they will constitute an uninterrupted flow of data. Every click, every piece of information unlocked by the algorithms on their screens will fill the pockets of their provider with profit in an endless game of exploitation and total control of every aspect of human activity. Continue reading “Greece: Direct Action Cells – Responsibility claim for a barrage of incendiary attacks in Athens and Thessaloniki” →
