To Labourers and the Youth of the World
As we entered 2020, capitalist system was expected to be dragged into a new economic crisis, as a continuation of the great crisis of the 2008. The unexpected was the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic, which has already left hundreds of thousands of deaths, has paralyzed the capitalist economy by creating a long global general strike effect. What happened in this process has strikingly demonstrated that capitalism is a rotten and irrational system.
Capitalist governments first concealed this epidemic, and then tried to make it trivial … Because the capitalist market has to work. While pandemic requires international planning and coordination, this has never been possible in a world divided with imperialist competition and nation states. Scientists have been warning about such an epidemic for years, but the capitalist system did not take the necessary measures and was completely unprepared as a result. The system has focused on the health of the capitalist market instead of prioritizing the health and needs of billions of workers against the pandemic. For this system, of course, the life of the working people does not have importance in the face of the profits of the companies and the wealth of the capitalists. In this system, citizens are seen as customers, the public health system is collapsed, social security is marketed, the resources obtained from the workers are transferred to private insurance companies, private hospitals and pharmaceutical companies … We saw the most painful consequences of this in the USA, Italy, France and Britain. The richest capitalist countries have been collapsed in the face of the epidemic. There were no necessary intensive care units, the most basic health equipment, life-saving devices such as ventilators, and not enough health workers. And under those unprepared conditions health workers were forced to work in the middle of this fire that thousands of healthcare workers lost their lives worldwide.
The public health crisis that capitalism failed immediately turned into a major economic crisis. Hundreds of millions of laborers have lost their jobs, and hundreds of millions have been pushed below the hunger and poverty line. But even in this process, capitalists continued to be get richer. The CEO of the Amazon, the richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos added $ 24 billion to his fortune in this process. The shares of the company, which experienced the enthusiasm of trillions of dollars to be injected into the market and much of it will be spent on speculation, has already compensated for the losses in the stock market. This reveals the parasitic nature of the capitalists and how they have distinct interests from the rest of the world.
Governments have launched trillions of dollars to save sunken companies, as in the big crisis in 2008. According to the bourgeois propaganda, the companies should be saved so that the workers to be saved. In other words, the companies should survive so that some of the employees continue to have jobs. So always the priority is the capitalists. Workers, on the other hand, have to work harder and get on well with the boss to avoid being fired. Still, those who will lose their job will have to take care of themselves. So what will happen to the wreck of these sunken companies? It is desired that the workers to burden it. More taxes, more work, social cuts and so resources transfer to capitalists will continue. In other words, they want the laborers to become poorer, the capitalists to become richer.
The crisis in 2008 impoverished the working class and exacerbated the class struggle. The Occupy Movement, the Tahrir Revolution, the Gezi Uprising, the great working class struggles in Greece, France and Latin America, and many more had shaped as the product of the process. But the reactionarism also reaction manifested itself in this process through civil wars, imperialist interventions, the rising fascist movements, and right-wing populist governments like of Trump.
In 2020, we are facing a much deeper economic crisis than 2008. The results can be just as severe. To overcome this difficult process, capitalist reactionism will have various plans to divide the working classes, prevent the development of class consciousness and to weaken the struggles. But the priority will be in the reckoning of working classes with capitalist governments.
In the USA and Britain, whose tendencies in the capitalist metropolises are decisive, Sanders and Corbyn’s neo-reformist alternatives have been eliminated as a result of the intense efforts of bourgeoisie. This means calling the workers to the streets and strike movements. While still the pandemic has not slowed down in Lebanon, laborers and activists did not left the streets. Let’s not forget that 2019 has already been a year when class struggle exploded in many countries from Iran, Chile, France to Lebanon. So we have to be prepared for the upcoming big challenges as class-conscious workers and youth. It is possible to get rid of capitalist barbarism. We have to be get organized for this. It is vital that we acquire spontaneous social eruptions in a socialist perspective. We need to be able to convey millions that our problems stem from capitalist functioning as a whole. If we can achieve this, the future will be ours. In line with this perspective, we invite all workers and youth to contact and join the ISL.