May Day 2020 marks a critical time where humanity has to choose between keeping a dying capitalism on its feet at the expense of nature and humanity, or, rejecting this bleak future by taking over the global economy and running it under workers control.
Capitalist destruction impacting on nature and humanity is compounding year by year, and under the pandemic, week by week. The market has has failed as evidenced by falling profits, by toxic industries still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and a pandemic that has triggered the next great depression.
All of this has come about because capitalism could not continue to exploit its resource base in nature, including the labour of workers, enough to maintain profits. Each crisis sees it attempting to eat into its finite resource base to the point where nature is now fighting back.
So the precondition for the revival of capitalism coming out of this terminal crisis no longer exist. Nature will not passively submit to being plundered. Nature is biting back, and as part of that, workers are resisting complete destruction. Already parasitic and destroying its host, capitalism is doomed.
Look as what is happening now as half the worlds workers are locked down in many cases to die in large numbers. All around the world workers are rising up against paying for the crisis with their lives. In the US there is a call to workers to launch a General strike on May Day to build towards a mass movement by the election to oppose both Trump and Biden who both support propping up dying capitalism at the expense of workers.
While governments are providing some aid to displaced workers this is not enough for survival. It is a measly dole and casual or informal workers do not qualify. So to live workers have to organise their own means of subsistence. Food riots are beginning among the unemployed in Europe, Latin America, Africa. Surplus food is being requisitioned by workers in the US. Strikes are breaking out when workers refuse to work in unsafe conditions. In New York Transit workers and Nurses are striking jointly.
All of this points to workers rejecting the inevitability of capitalism staggering zombie like to the destruction of nature and extinction of more species including ours. And the way forward is seen as joining forces with nature to rescue humanity as the source of all wealth and basis of future survival on the planet.
But as the various social movements like Extinction Rebellion show, there is a lot of political confusion about how to make this happen. In general the spontaneous, instinctive response to market failure still looks to the state to rescue is from the market.
In Aotearoa, there is a debate about the role of the state. Today it is moving towards a consensus on the return of the central state managing the market. Some quibble over how much influence the state should have. Bomber Bradbury on TDB is for a strong central state that can bring in a program to correct for market failures. Matthew Hooton denies reality in the face of a pandemic claiming that the state cannot substitute for the market. But our history is one of many market failures and depressions, which have all been ended by state intervention.
The problem is not just that the market has failed and can be rescued by periodic state intervention. The problem is that facing a terminal crisis it cannot be rescued by the state There is a need to shift thinking from old dogmas about capitalism and get to the roots of the problem.
Capitalism is today destroying the basis for its existence when it can no longer exploit nature and workers labour enough to profit and grow. The reason is that capitalism has a finite life and that is running out. Profits depend on extracting value from labour by processing nature. Both are in rebellion. Neither will lie down and be sucked dry. Capitalists are in denial about this of course because their wealth is at stake. And their useful idiots continue to preach ‘business as usual”.
More significant however, are those who remain convinced that capitalism is not the problem and can be part of the solution. They play a role that hinders the majority taking the second option, that of life and survival. That is why we need in this debate about the state the voices of Marxists who can show that only the working class, the producers of value, of wealth, can guarantee our future. We are the vast majority, we are the ones suffering from the terminal crisis, and we have the power to take over the economy and run it in the interests both nature and humanity in a state of harmony.
May Day 2020 must be a signal to the world’s workers to unite to overthrow capitalism and fight for a socialist future!
Dave Brownz is TDBs guest Marxist Blogger because every Left wing blog needs a Marxist.
Yep agree.
The cry for returning to pre-Covid BAU is like saying to a cancer survivor that they’ve been cleared and can go back to smoking 20-a-day and weed spraying without PPE.
We must move away from the system that’s killing us.
Ignore the propaganda of the exploiters and profiteers.
Despite what you’ve been told, there ARE democratic alternatives.
Democratic socialism is a great start.
Also, Anarcho-Socialism. eg the Spanish Revolution MKII
How can we all unite when we are all in isolation?
Gday Sam, its possible if workers can go on strike rather than work in unsafe conditions. One of the oldest grounds for strikes going back to the early days of industry. Follow the US MayDay
https://paydayreport.com/?fbclid=IwAR2u-MmWPkyT0TFlag4ajexBNrVhgkxWAgBE_YKeEPwl61ZpBZF-zMgTHxI
I agree that historically pandemics have shifted power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat in the form of increased wages we saw that during and after the Black Plague which all but ended feudalism and gave us capitalism. I mean how cold we possibly weaken the central governments grip over property rights when they’re facing a far larger threat of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps demoting the bourgeoisie to low level Chiefs does involve forcing them to throw all their toys out of the cote so to speak?
“Marxist”, “Left wing”, yeah, right LMAO
I totally agree with your expression of the need for drastic change. Capitalism is akin to a cancer, and it is destroying its host while at the same time destroying/degrading/depleting the very things it needs to continue. A bit like yeast in a container, converting sugar into alcohol until there is no sugar left or the alcohol its has produced kills it.
Although commonly used, I disagree with the term Capitalism because in most cases there is no capital, no stack of gold: most capitalist activity is facilitated by loans conjured magically out of air by banks, both central and commercial.
So-called capitalism is actually largely about the conversion of natural resources into waste in such a way that is generates increases in the size of numbers in computer systems of the participants, with financial, ecological and social debts being handed down by those who have profited by exploitation of natural resources or human labour to those that follow, i.e. a planet depleted of resources and undergoing thermal and biological meltdown.
Needless to say, a system predicated on looting and pollution, and predicated on ever increasing use of resources and ever-greater generation of waste (along with ever increasing numbers of humans to provide a base for expansion of everything) has no future.
The fact that the system has no [long-term] future does not stop those who think they are in charge* from doing all they can to squeeze every last drop out of these dysfunctional arrangements while they still can. Much as expected, Trump is now focused on ‘saving’ the US fossil fuel sector, which is suffering from the low prices that accompany the glut of oil being sucked out of the ground at lower extraction cost that prevail in America, and by the demand destruction that accompanies Covid-19:
‘Fossil fuel firms linked to Trump get millions in coronavirus small business aid.’
‘US fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50m in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back, according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.
A total of $28m is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.
The other $22m is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners….’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/01/fossil-fuel-firms-coronavirus-package-aid
* Nature, in the form of mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology, is in control, of course, And the War on Nature that characterizes the recent form of industrial civilization, as epitomised by America is coming to a climax, with Nature well ahead and certain to win.
In the meantime, those with short-term vested interests in current arrangements will continue to promote the myth that ‘civilised’ humans know what they are doing, and if we only apply a bit more technology all will be well in the end.
It’s going to get mighty ugly when the food riots start, and those who think of themselves as better than everyone else attempt to continue to get more than their fair share.
On the matter of food (or what the military-industrial-complex regards as food) shortages, I see that the chief Covidiot has instructed meat packing plants (abattoirs) riddled with Covid-19 to remain open (or those that have closed to reopen), There is no surer way to decimate the sector than to insist it remain operating at full capacity when infections are rife.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/crisis-processing-thousands-meatpacking-workers-infected-deaths-hit-20
From a Kiwi but not new information. Long forgotten by a generation who argue and spout a load of crap but have no idea of where things are going.
https://waterqualitynz.info/2019/11/10/limits-to-growth-youtube-talk/
One of the keystones to planning is to know what lies ahead.
Ecology and Democratic Socialism.
Two science-based system-theories that presently provide most useful approaches for strategic analyses and radical transformation.
Synthesis of both.
Organization is everything.
https://isreview.org/issue/84/ecology-and-socialism
Marianne Faithful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCn_6RBe0X4
Yes Dave a lot of what you have said here has merit but it will have too be fought for as the corporate system is exactly what George Orwell was writing about.
COVID-19 is the great revealer. It has exposed the full truth of the global class divide. Why are hundreds of millions now facing starvation while big companies are being bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars — and the tax havens of the rich remain wholly intact?
https://www.adbusters.org/
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