Capital Kills
Sacrifice, resistance, morale of victory, unity (between employers and workers). These words constitute the mantra that the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been repeating in a crushing way since the beginning of the pandemic. It is not accidental: they want us proletarians to see our needs gagged, to not struggle for our interests, at the time when our life is threatened.
Sacrifice, resistance, morale of victory and unity are synonymous with passivity, letting ourselves be killed as cannon fodder, submitting to the needs of the government and capital, of its logic of accumulation.
This spring tens of thousands of people died in the Spanish State and more than a million people died throughout the world, although the real figures are always much higher than the official ones. On that occasion it was flagrant how all the States put the needs of the national economy above lives and health. The Spanish government actually introduced, at the beginning of the summer, accelerated post-lockdown measures to promote tourism and hotel industry, one of the main economic activities of the local capital increasingly in crisis. The local TV news programs dedicated more than half of their reporting to show us terraces of crowded bars. The news began its broadcast while greeting the return of German tourists in Mallorca. The government triumphantly announced that “we had defeated the virus”. Sacrifice, resistance, unity and morale of victory had won. And yet…
Yet, it was very easy to foresee that it will not happen, that the virus would be back with the strength of the revival of production and commodity circulation. And much earlier than any expert had foreseen. It happened already during the summer, first in Aragon and Catalonia, and since August in Madrid.
And yet the State had not taken any measures, and this is not by chance. What is the State interested in is that the economy is advancing and growing, because that’s how capital feeds on, how it devours us and makes us collateral but necessary victims. At the end of the summer, the television showed us with a crushing insistence the importance to open schools at all costs, never mind there’s a lot of damage. The Minister of Education, Celáa, even announced in El País that the benefits of opening schools far outweighed the risks (i.e. the illness and death of workers and their families). The benefits related to the fact that the machine would continue to operate, that society would continue to produce and consume, and for that to happen, the students would have to be confined to schools. The struggles that aroused against the opening of schools, like that in Madrid, were important but very minority. So far there is at least one dead teacher to add to the cold statistics of those killed in combat. All this under the name of unity, resistance and morale of victory.
Little by little a second lockdown is announced. The disease does not stop growing and with it the number of people hospitalized, admitted to intensive care and to be dying each day. Collateral victims of the morale of victory, capital’s cannon fodder. And yet, a second lockdown will be very different from the first one. In fact, it already is. Because there are no solutions within capital: lockdown means, within capitalist parameters, unemployment and poverty, misery and hunger, layoffs and job insecurity. That’s why the polarization between left-wing and right-wing parties is false. If there are no solutions within capital, the politicians, no matter which side they’re on, can only manage the catastrophe and send the police when we protest. And among them, the Left does it by lying. The most progressive government in the history of Spain, as its followers called it with the theatrics that characterize the progressive Left, said through the mouth of its second Deputy Prime Minister that they were not going to leave anyone behind. But it is already known that words are words and talk is pretty cheap. What counts are the needs of national economy that are expressed by thousands of evictions per week, hundreds of thousands of layoffs a month, millions of people in poverty and misery.
This is the inflammable material that will feed the present and future bonfires of social rage. The rage has been already expressed in the mobilizations of these last days, in a very confused way, with some participation also of far-right groups, but we cannot let the trees prevent us from seeing the forest. What we have here is an enormous social rage that is accumulating and will accumulate ever more strongly. In the background, we are witnessing a world that has reached its limits, that has exhausted its propulsive base (the accumulation of capital as a value) and which develops on top of that a catastrophic accumulation of crises, from the pandemic to climate change. It is important to analyze these disturbances and demonstrations in a perspective, not as a picture of the moment, but as a process. The snapshot does not allow us to recognize the sequence of events; the latter can only be understood within the more general dynamics of capitalism. And this dynamic is catastrophic.
We come into the end of a long history, into capital’s crisis of survival. This is not to say that the road is easy or simple, quite the contrary. We will encounter a lot of inflammable material during these years, material that will stir up struggles and social polarizations. The decisive factor is that these struggles provide themselves with a class direction and consciousness. And to do this we must constitute ourselves as a united combatant body – that is, as a class – against all our enemies. And this includes the fascists but also the social democratic leftism in all its variants.