People locked up. Hospitals and intensive care units that cannot cope.
Nursing homes converted into morgues. Breweries and aircraft factories
open. New construction sites empty. Gardeners in the parks and public
transport full of workers. The military patrol whilst police arrest,
fine and raid the immigrants gathered in squares.
We are witnessing the acceleration of an historical era. The coronavirus
hasn’t invented anything. It’s a pandemic caused by the logic of capital
and in turn is speeding up the systematic crisis of capitalism. It seems
important to us to weigh up the catastrophe that we are currently
living.
That which concerns every government is not the people but the health of
its national economy. That’s why, from the beginning, they trivialised
the virus saying that by April it will have been forgotten by the whole
world, insisting on the continuation of normal life. That of production
and commercial activity; that of work and consumption; that of public
demonstrations or sporting events. Everything is fine in the kingdom of
trade, Ada Colau told us whilst insisting on celebrating the Mobile
World Congress.
Governments only take measures when things get out of hand, from Pedro
Sánchez to Conte, Xi Jinping to Boris Johnson, and not forgetting Donald
Trump. That which concerns them is neither peoples’ health nor the
concern that the expansion of the virus will effect production or
commercial activity. What worries them is that which may sweep away
their world, the world of capital, and its immediate collapse by the
death of millions of people. That’s why the Spanish government will not
stop certain sectors of production until 6,000 official deaths are
registered (El País, never suspicious of anticapitalism, already
acknowledges the real death count to be significantly higher) and, of
course, one will have to give back to businesses everything, down to our
last drop of blood.
Whoever may govern, governs the same, with the same concerns and aims:
defence of the national economy, the presence of police and military on
the streets in order to prevent predictable social revolts, collective
dismissals, credit to the companies and other measures in which all the
political factions agree. The state of alarm prevails. Mobile phones are
tracked to control our movements Police on the streets give out more
than 180,000 fines and there have been almost 1,600 arrests in the
Spanish state. All of this under the democratic government of PSOE and
Podemos and not the supposed fascists of Vox. There is nothing
inherently bad within capitalism: capitalism is that which is inherently
bad. Every political party is nothing but an agent of the capitalist
disaster. There is no better or worse for those that vote.
It’s important to understand these lessons with regards to the future.
Not only for the human catastrophy that we are experiencing – much
deadlier in Nou Barris than in Sarria, in Vallecas than in La Moraleja –
but for that which is coming. We are not all in the same boat. They
praise the medical community whilst treating them like cannon fodder,
being infected without means of protection. They save the national
economy and the functioning of companies at the cost of a huge debt to
the Spanish state. A debt that, in the coming months, will be
accompanied by a brutal fall in the GDP and will have to be payed in the
form of tax hikes, interests on personal debts, massive cuts in salaries
and dismissals. The immediate future is one of exacerbation of the
capitalist crisis, of the acceleration of a catastrophe that will come
in the form of huge rebellions and revolts like those in 2019.
Rebellions like those that are sensed in the workers that refuse to
continue their production of death in the factories of Italy, Spain,
Brazil and North America.
We are living in historical times, and in historical times it is
important to make historical decisions. The future is already written
and it will be one of the struggle for life or death, class conflict and
combat between humanity and capital. We will prepare ourselves with
clarity and determination.
29th March 2020
barbaria.net