GUEST BLOG: Dave Brownz – Eliminating Covid aways meant eliminating Capitalism

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From the outset Covid told us that it was caused by capitalism and that to defeat it we had to defeat capitalism. I wrote about this over a year ago in my post, ‘From the Coronavirus to the Commune’.  

The cause was capitalism’s disruption of the ecology forcing viruses to jump from the wild species to humans. Everything about the origins of SARS CoV-2 proves this. 

Since capitalism’s downward spiral into its End Stage is likely to create the conditions for many more pandemics, we cannot expect it to offer any solution. In fact the opposite is true. 

The progress of the pandemic proves that capitalism will not divert profits to maintain the survival of the working masses. Capitalism does not have the health of workers in mind unless it is vital to keeping their labour-power alive to exploit for profit.  

The proof of this is in the massive reserve army of unemployed used to fill the jobs of those who need replacing due to overwork, starvation and pandemics. We call this form of unnatural selection where the rich and powerful eliminate the poor and weak eugenics. 

This explains the fate of Covid ‘elimination’ in Aotearoa. Elimination of the virus which threatens most the poorest and weakest of the working class, will always come second when it threatens the elimination of rent and profit extracted from the working class.  

For capitalism, elimination means ending any threat to its existence from the terminal crisis of declining profits, climate collapse and many more pandemics. 

Against these forces, the Labour Government has adapted to capitalist elimination.   We will now all adapt to Delta by means of vaccination, sacrificing the deaths or long Covid of the poor and weak, so that capitalism may live to survive another day. 

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

But why should we be interested in a return to capitalism as usual, thanks. 

I say, as I did more than a year ago, that for workers to live capitalism must die.  To do that we need a strategy for workers to take power, to end capitalism and its destruction of humanity, and build a socialist society in harmony with nature. 

 

Dave Brownz is TDBs guest Marxist blogger

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29 COMMENTS

  1. Perhaps it would be advantages in a future blog posting to paint a picture of what New Zealand society will look like under a communist system. All we ever hear is capitalist=evil. Property owners=evil, workers=saints. How do you see your ideas coming to fruition? Through the ballot box where one person=one vote? Or by the barrel of a gun?

    Maybe start at the most contentious. Will the state own everything? Will the “workers” own nothing and be happy?

    How does the state owning everything fit in with Maori ownership of property. Will they have to forfeit just like the 85% will?

    Never thought I would say this but the TOW will prevent any communist uprising in New Zealand.

  3. Counter view – the virus was manufactured in a lab by a communist state
    Capitalism created the vaccines in record time that have the potential to save billions

    Here’s another good one – Labour NZ, amongst whom some members happily call themselves proud socialists whilst achieving and delivering nothing for the poor and needy despite an unheard of majority in an MMP environment

    • Yeti living the Covid conspiracy in which Xi’s body is taken over by a Yeti to destroy the world.
      China has no interest in germ warfare. It has the most to lose releasing it in Wuhan. Nor is Xi so stupid as to allow the US to do it on China’s soil for the same reasons.
      Plus, China and US are global rivals and China is winning.
      What did you expect that Labour would do in power? It sold out the workers when it was formed in 1916.

      • He is right though. Of course the usual counter argument is that the countries that self described as being communist and went on to murder tens of millions of their citizens, weren’t actually communist countries at all. Which basically says that like heaven, the communist workers utopia is amazing, but no one has actually been able to find or create one on Earth (and people have to die to get there).

        Socialist alternatives are generally better than pure “greed is good” capitalism, but communism is pretty much dead in a ditch, along with many of it’s victims.

        • The caricature of socialism and communism long promoted by the ruling class is that is is violent, anti-democratic, and dysfunctional compared with the wonderful capitalist market.

          None of this reflects the historical truth.

          Socialism failed in the USSR not because it was undemocratic, as the majority of workers and poor peasants (mainly as soldiers) ruled. It is true that the working class was a minority compared with the peasantry. Yet the revolutionary government that was formed in 1917 included the Left social revolutionaries and its peasant program of land to the tillers was adopted. That unity ended when the peace negotiations with Germany in the hope of sparking off revolution in Germany collapsed with its invasion in the South.

          Meanwhile the warring imperialist powers faced armed mutinies of the troops. They rapidly stopped fighting one another to send armies to destroy the revolution and restore the White Russian regime to power. A flagrant abuse of the right of nationals to self-determination, a fundamental right of bourgeois democracy, revealing itself to be a charade when used against a workers’ and peasants’ republic.

          While the Red Army won the ‘Civil War’ 1918-1921, the result was the further destruction of a ‘backward’ country and the decimation of the working class. Russia did not recover economically to its pre-war GDP until well into the 1920s. But that fact alone was a major achievement compared to the period of economic stagnation in Europe leading to the Great Depression proving the potential of the workers’ economic plan over the capitalist market.

          At the same time as ongoing destruction of the Civil war, the socialist revolution in Europe failed because the social democrats united with the bourgeois and the remnants of the aristocracy to smash the armed uprisings of workers. Without revolutions in Europe, Russia was further isolated and the advanced industry of Europe could not rescue Russia from its economic underdevelopment.

          Thus the failure of the Russian revolution to build socialism, let alone communism, where classes no longer exist and the state withers away, had nothing to do with the lack of workers majority rule, but were the combined efforts of the global rulings classes to isolate and embark on a policy of quarantining and destroying the threat of Bolshevism to world capitalism, going from crisis to crisis, (depressions, wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions).

          Any use of the term socialism today by Marxists who take Marx seriously, assumes the majority working class must rule democratically, and that capitalism must be overthrown to stop the destruction of the revolution by the tiny global ruling class.

          Any attempt by the masses to mobilise, organise and plan how this is to be done, cannot be reduced in advance to a to a road map, let alone a Redprint, when it is the democratic right of the masses to make these decisions themselves.

          So if the majority rules and controls the economy it can reverse the current capitalist hoarding of wealth and deprivation of the masses, and plan production efficiently, eliminating private profits and the parasitism of finance capital, ending artificial waste and scarcity, and producing plenty.

          As you must surely know, Marx stated that socialism would create the conditions for communism (the commune) only when scarcity was ended by plenty, and shared according to the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.

          And if Russia 1917 is any guide, the majority succeeded in taking power by mass struggle where the state forces were overwhelmed and power conceded with very little violence and bloodshed. In every revolutionary situation the violence comes from the ruling class defending its economic interest to continue extracting its wealth from the labour of the masses.

          Compared with workers’ democracy as defined here as the pre-condition for socialism and communism, bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the exploiters (the 1%) masquerading as popular democracy. The contradiction between capital which exploits nature and humanity to the point of the extinction of many species including we humans, and the capacity of nature, including humans, to fight back, and take back control of society as an international commune, expresses our predicament: either socialism or extinction.

    • Trevor – I think you meant Capitalism.
      Capitalisation means turning small letters into capital ones, unless you are talking of capital in financial jargon.
      Of course, the alternative (leaving everything in small letters) would be a terrible disaster..

  5. Ae! With nearly all of the first $100b tranche of QE been spunk’d, about $83b. The poor living in motels and those on bene’s are going to wear the brunt of this. Mark my words!
    They will get pressured to get non-existent jobs and to move into none existent housing in the unaffordable private sector!
    That’ll start early in the new year.

    That’s when the hating middle-class will blame them, the poor for all that is wrong. Does that ring any bells? The Covid vaccination uptake? Who is going to be blamed for that? Not the Health system or the government. The poor are! It’s started already.

    When the ‘Big Pusch’ happens. They’ll drop the second tranche of $100b that Adrian Orr & Robo have already ok’d onto the middle-class just to shut them up before the 2023 election.

  6. “The cause was capitalism’s disruption of the ecology forcing viruses to jump from the wild species to humans. Everything about the origins of SARS CoV-2 proves this.”

    Utter nonsense. Diseases have been jumping from other species to humans for many thousands of years, long before capitalism was ever a thing. Some of the most dangerous diseases of humans crossed over from livestock, like smallpox originating from rinderpest.

    Covid-19’s just the latest disease to cross over from another species – it happens every now and again.

    • Pope I think your world view may be stuck in the Middle Ages. The Zoonotic jumps today are exponential. As capitalism decays it deliberately destroys habitats. Prepare yourself to succour your suffering souls when they flee a flood of viruses released by methane bombs.

      • “The Zoonotic jumps today are exponential.”

        Any evidence to back up that big claim?

        “As capitalism decays it deliberately destroys habitats. ”

        Deliberately? How so?

        • @ Pope Punctilious II…
          Ah…?
          “As capitalism decays it deliberately destroys habitats. ”
          Deliberately? How so?
          Are you serious @ Pope Punctilious II ?
          You don’t get out much do you?

  7. Great piece of work @ DB.
    Capitalism, dictatorships, communism and fascism are one and the same thing.
    The only way I can see for humanity to elevate itself above that lowest, most common denominator that is the mental illnesses of voracious greed and manipulative cruelties to sate fragile egos is a socialist democracy powered by compulsory voting.
    Just look around you?
    Our AO/NZ pride in our world first politics and economics was born of exactly that. Pay your taxes, have awesome shit happen, everybody’s happy, no one’s hungry and lonely in the streets then BANG! We’re fucked.
    Socialism was murdered and left in the gutter along with the homeless while the captains of the dung barge that’s capitalism lied to us all then stole off with our resources and state built assets and now they’re old and closing in on death with our money while we’re left going “Whaaaa??? What????? But how????? ”
    I’m left almost breathless at the crude overconfidence of the odd moron who dares to show off their feeble arguments above. If it were not so entertaining it’d be tragic.

  8. Socialism in harmony with nature? Hmmm, when has that ever happened? The communisms were as much into the project of rapid industrialisation with all its resource depletion and pollution as the capitalisms were. And with the collapse of the communisms from the period around 1989 it is hard to see any kind of working class solidarity anymore. Consumerism, the neoliberal attacks on the unions and the shift away from manufacturing has certainly destroyed any semblance of working class solidarity in the Western countries. The former communisms of USSR and China are now brutal, authoritarian oligarchies on a dangerous mission of reviving good old fashioned nationalism. So much for the global alliance of the working classes. Will the working classes and peasants of China stop Xi from an egotistical invasion of Taiwan and risking global nuclear war? I can’t see it. And will the working classes of the USA get over their racist/nationalist MAGA madness and stop the GOP from gerrymandering the electoral maps and all the other attacks on democracy aimed to facilitate the corporate bullies to remain in power forever? I can’t see it. Cellphones, Tik Tok, guns, racist resentment and intolerance of difference have all done their bit to squash the socialist dream. And who reads Marx or Lenin for their utopianism anymore? Whereas their critiques of capitalist economics and imperialism, respectively, remain valid and useful.

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