The crisis is not viral but capitalist

Presentation of the special edition

English translation from A Free Retriever’s Digest

This special issue of the review is dedicated to the crisis that has affected the capitalist system on a global scale[1].

The title ‘The crisis is not viral but capitalist’ expresses the thesis we support in the eight articles of this issue: it is an epochal crisis that finds its origin in the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

The pandemic has only exasperated and anticipated the explosion of this crisis, to the extent that in the months preceding the spread of the corona-virus there were clear signs that the world economy was rapidly marching towards a recession of historic significance.

The first article in this issue ‘The corona-virus and the communists today’ analyzes the role of the revolutionary vanguard in the new context that opened with this epochal crisis, and “wants to be an integral part of a wider confrontation, firm on the foundations of the new materialism, capable of looking at both present and future with a renewed and sharpened look.”[2].

The second article ‘Analysis of a crisis that will change the world imperialist framework’ goes into more detail about the economic mechanisms that determined the emergence of the crisis. Will the United States, the true epicenter of this devastating crisis, still manage to maintain world domination? Will the dollar still be the queen currency in the international monetary panorama, or will it be reduced by the advancing American decline? What role will China and the European Union be destined to play in the new imperialist world context? These are the questions that the article attempts to answer, with the consciousness that, without the alternative of the communist revolution, “this is precisely the world that Capital offers us, a world in which humanity will be catapulted into the spiral of permanent imperialist war, fought for the control of the production of fictitious capital, and into generalized misery”.

The article ‘The pandemic as a metaphor of the epochal crisis of capitalist society’ underlines how this crisis is destined to represent a watershed with the past. Unlike the past, “in the current crisis, in fact, a fundamental factor that hitherto had allowed the system, by virtue of the destructive power of war as well, to overcome its crises and to launch a new cycle of capital accumulation, starting from the production of an overall mass of surplus value far greater than before the crisis, has hence disappeared.”

This is followed by a series of articles dedicated to analyzing the crisis from different perspectives.

Will the social control imposed by the bourgeoisie in times of corona-virus be limited only to this particular period, or will it be the new frontier in which the domination of Capital will express itself? This is the subject of the article ‘The class struggle in times of corona-virus’.

How the world of labor changes with the crisis is the subject of the beautiful essay ‘Who is smarter, the worker or Capital?’, while the subject covered by the article ‘The school of the Covid-19 emergency. A further attack on the living conditions of the proletariat’ is all in the title.

How the spread of the virus has been facilitated by pollution and environmental degradation caused by the actions of Capital is the topic of the article ‘The desert of the barbarians’.

This issue of D-M-D' comes out without the usual contribution of our comrade Gianfranco Greco who left us last November 14, 2019. We miss Gianfranco much, and to dedicate a short memorial to him seemed the best way to close this special issue of the review.

Enjoy reading

[1]    D-M-D’ Special Edition (#15, May 2020)

[2]    Back-cover article of this issue, page 32.