We are facing a crisis in the modes of production

We are facing a crisis in the modes of production

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been many political and economic  forecasts (and there will be many more) about the great changes that will loom over humanity "after the worldwide quarantines have passed" and millions? have died. There are also some opinions that nothing will change too much and comparisons with previous crisis in which, after the crisis, no structural change materialized, that is, that the crisis was functional to the capitalist system itself.

Increased social control?

Before entering the underlying theme of this article, we must respond to those who see dark clouds on the horizon, not because of the results of the pandemic, but because of the advance of social hyper-control on the pretext of those very same clouds (basically they refer to China and its technological capabilities to identify and locate online each of the majority of its 1.5 billion inhabitants, of itself a truly impressive technological feat). The answer to this is that, in principle, there are no societies (at least from the origins of the first civilizations) that are exempt from control. The very modes of organization of societies of thousands or millions of people, modes without which they would be unworkable, are in themselves, forms of control.

 That some of us have had to live in societies divided into classes but, within them, in the sector of the "affluent" classes and that, therefore, we have not been subjected to the horrifying and degrading perpetual control the "subordinate" classes suffer and the brutal lack of freedom that implies having to get up every day to get, in desperate urgency, daily food for themselves and their families, can make us mistakenly think that capitalism is a society without controls and with freedom margins. But a minimum degree of observation and reflection getting out of our class situation (putting ourselves in the other's place) allows us to see that this is not the case at all. Furthermore, it must be said that although someone in these types of class societies may feel "uncontrolled" and fully free because they do what they want and/or what "their principles" advise, those "wants" and "principles"  have been instilled in them by family and social environment, and they have been  formatted and shaped by them, by years of work under the system agencies' control of their philosophical and political thoughts.

*** And today, these agencies and their entire world of networks, from family, school, police media and many more, continue to influence him and us. The question is to what extent are we aware of the existence of these modes of control,  some subtle and others not so much, and the way they operate on us, since that's were true freedom begins.

We are not going to debate here the old issue of freedom vs. determinism, but, in any case, regarding the question of control, rather than posing the false dichotomy between societies with control and imaginary societies with large spaces of individual freedom (which do not exist nor have they ever existed), the serious and useful debate would be what are the concrete forms of social control, who implements them, who do they represent and whose interests and purposes does the general control strategy serve?

The digital newspaper Sputnik dated 8/4/20, under the headline "They stress inevitable increase in control", pointed out that "The systems of control and surveillance for citizens of any country have always existed and will only be reinforced," said Evgueni  Kosolapov, representative of the Skolkovo Innovation Center in China. "We have always been watched and under control. Any state, be it China or Korea, will locate a person, if they need it.

There was control before and there is control now, it used to be slow, with a manual gearbox, and now it is turning into an automatic gearbox, it is an inevitable process." And added that "However, at present only with respect to South Korea can speak of a system of total digital control over citizenship in the context of the coronavirus.” Still, would it have been preferable for South Korea not to use the recognition system because it was considered “Orwellian”, and had given up containing the first wave of the pandemic as quickly and efficiently as they did? 

And when the pandemic ends?

Another issue to refer to previously is the assumption expressed or implied in many of the predictive opinions about the end of the pandemic. Forecasts are made stating that what is predicted, for better or for worse, will take place "when the pandemic is over." As if on a certain date more or less close the coronavirus  will disappear completely and the world will be free from the resurgence of infections, new outbreaks, mutations or the appearance of other viruses similar or more "virulent" than this.

We should stress, in principle, that "when the pandemic ends..." is a juncture to be considered carefully, since the one we are undergoing won't end for a long while, at least not definitively. Even if the cases of COVID 19 caused by the SARS cov2 virus decrease significantly, these possible worldwide infections that had already started earlier, such as SARS, Ebola or influenza A, are only ways in which the latent danger of worldwide contagion of communicable diseases is expressed in a humanity with seven billion –going on 10 billion– inhabitants, all interconnected and in permanent displacement. What we are coming to realize is that we have transformed the world into a “pandemic world” and what we have to deal with from now on is how we modify our ways of life to neutralize and overcome the health effects that are generated . Thomas Wright, head of the Brookings Institution, in his article "Stretching the international order to its breaking point" –with which, in general terms, we disagree regarding his vision of possible solutions to the economic crisis– says that “The biggest mistake that geopolitical analysts can make may be believing that the crisis will end in three or four months. It is very likely that a long crisis may stretch the international order to its breaking point. Even after a vaccine is available, life will not return to normal. COVID-19 was not a black swan and will not be the last pandemic. A jumpy world will be in permanent change. Never before has a single event changed everyone's life simultaneously and so suddenly.” In other words, it is a unique event in the entire history of the human species, as, after all, is globalization and the current demographic density, and, henceforth, the consequence would be to continue to experience situations previously unknown in our history.

In the aforementioned digital newspaper Sputnik another headliner reads "The 'American way of life' could be nearing its end. That, and many of the lifestyles of the globe. The culprit: coronavirus. The author of the statement is Gideon Lichfield, editor of Technology Review, a journal closely associated with the well-known MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)."

There are scientists, for example, who relate this high potential of viruses to spread with the industrial production of animals for consumption (interview to  Silvia Ribeiro, researcher of the action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration in the Argentine newspaper Página 12  of April  3), an industrial practice that, for the moment, cannot  be abandoned as well, without triggering a food problem of gigantic proportions that would cause many more deaths than any pandemic.  A simple example of the challenge we are facing.

There is also talk of outbreaks of the current pandemic in the city of Shanghai as pointed out by Dr. Zhang Wenhong, who is leading the fight against the coronavirus, and claims that within half a year the world will undergo a new outbreak of the covid-19 (published in Sputnik on 19. April 14, 2020). In another RT article , from April 29, Luis Segura states: “Although almost six months have passed since the outbreak of the coronavirus or covid-19 pandemic and, for the moment , there have been more than three million infected and more than 200,000 dead, we cannot even predict an immediate future because there are many uncertainties that have not yet been resolved ... a vaccine could be obtained, but it would not serve to end the virus as SARS-CoV-2 is constantly mutating. In Spain and in the month of March alone, twenty different strains were identified, which, moreover, are not the same as the original one that appeared in China. Therefore, even if a vaccine is found, it could be ineffective. What's more, the virus could even mutate and become more aggressive and affect age groups that it had not previously affected.”

"The Economist", house organ of the international financial groups, in its May 1 issue, under the title "The 90% economy that the lockdowns will leave behind" recognizes that even if the entire world economy reopened now, a large number of people would not start shopping or use the services, at least not as often as before, and in some cases the return to consumption would be almost nil, due to a certain fear or apprehension that would have already settled in the irreversible universal culture from the traumatic experience that we have been living for more than two months and that will continue for a considerable time.

It seems then, that it will be necessary to live a long time with viruses and with fluctuations in the number of infected and consequently with death rates from these infections. So, most likely, from now on, we should start living in permanent semi-quarantines, trying to avoid, as much as possible, crowds and making the most of the possibilities of teleworking and meetings online and obviously interpersonal communication online (the latter was already being done but now it will have to occupy a more exclusive place). Even the masks will become, perhaps, part of the daily apparel of the new abysmal reality. When it is said that life as we have known it until now is not going to go on the same, we are talking, among other things, of this.

We can´t have crowded means of transportation anymore, or crowds attending shows or events just for fun, at least not in the way that has been done until now. We are entering in earnest the era of virtual communication. The lyrics of the song by the Argentine rock band "Los Redonditos de Ricota" anticipated "the future has arrived" and "it came as you did not expect it ... quite a shock, you see ". (Todo un Palo. 1987. Del Cielito Records)

Given all this and although it is obvious, it should be noted that in no way does this mean that the action, the demonstrations, the institutionality, the theory or the political research has ended, since politics is basically the force (and the confrontation) of ideas. This force, today, is most important given that, according to how correct is our  characterization of the situation and how right our predictions of what is to come, the more effective will be the actions that are undertaken to overcome it. Furthermore, these ideas today have many means of manifesting themselves and expanding exponentially that do not imply necessary rallies or marches (and are as or more effective than actions with physical contact). Although it is also obvious that, when circumstances warrant the physical congregation, it will happen, inexorably, beyond any pandemic, or any social control, even if it means hundreds of thousands on the streets wearing masks and homemade protections.

But there will no longer be, at least not outright, a "when it ends...". The new normal has already begun, and it began in this way, so let's adapt, and look for the pertinent forms of political action, because it is here to stay.

Continuity of capitalism?

Going into the heart of the matter advanced in the title of this paper, we see that –leaving aside those who think (and want?) that nothing will change or that capitalism will come out of this strengthened– there are those who think, in the face of the economic crisis aggravated or accelerated by the pandemic, that what is in the pillory is neoliberalism or "capitalism as we have known it up to now" and dismiss the need for important "reforms", making it clear that in their opinion, capitalism will continue to exist, only that it must be improved, based on the "empirical" basis that it has existed for a long time and its fall was predicted in other occasions but this was not the case and that in previous crises capitalism came out even "strengthened".

Those who hold this view, imagine in many cases a return to a generalized form of welfare or interventionist state in the style of Europe or the USA of the WWII postwar period, (as if history had not run its course and their despair could make it go back). There is also a certain fallacy in the proposition since, if state intervention is autonomous and free from private interests and for all countries and regions of the world (absolutely all) and not only for industrialized countries (as it was in the 20th century), what you are imagining, in reality and although you avoid expressing it, is a world system that could no longer be called Capitalism and which would be more suited to the term Socialisn (not Social Democracy) or in its way to socialism .

There are also forecasts that announce the disappearance of capitalism but do so superficially. Slavoj Zizek is undoubtedly a scholar and to him we owe that the references to Marx and even Lenin and Mao have been maintained even in the darkest times of postmodern balderdash and also the refreshing diatribes against that regressive thought of this last modernity. He is a "rock star" of philosophy, as he defined himself a while ago. He likes to startle with his provocative statements and generally succeeds. This time he has launched the (second-hand) option of "barbarism or reinvented communism". If I had left it in the plain terms of Engels or Rosa Luxemburg it would not have been original, but, at least, opportune. However, he had to add "reinvented" with which he emptied the famous proposed formula, since, as long as he does not define (and indeed doesn't) what such "reinvention" consists of, the alternative becomes: barbarism or something ( "some form") that is in Zizek's head, though he does not explain even in large strokes.

Capitalism has come to an end (that is to say, the moment when humanity ends it)

In his article "The world economy at the beginning of the great recession" published in Herramientas n ° 28, 2020 (https://herTool.com.ar/articulo.php?id=3171), Francois Chesnais referring to Michael Roberts, recalled that for this guru of the theory of diminishing returns, three Marxist laws were the fundamental ones and quotes him: “1° The law of value: only work creates value, 2° The law of accumulation: the means of production expand to increase productivity and dominate work. 3° The law of profitability: the first two laws create a contradiction between the increase in the productivity of labor and the decrease in the profitability of capital. This can only be overcome through recurring crises of production and investment; and in the long term, by substituting capitalism”. The highlight is ours while here we are proposing that this long term has already come to its end.

Chesnais adds that “the problem is not to give it an un-historical formulation. ..state the law in terms that transcend the successive phases of development (free competition capitalism, monopolic capitalism, financial capitalism) that have been identified by Marxist thinkers (Hilferding, Lenin, the theorists of financialization)...". And includes a chart by Roberts

A worldwide rate of profit 1869-2007, Michael Roberts, 2020

Chesnais also refers to Argentinean author Esteban Maito, from whose work Roberts extracted the data for the first years of his chart, when he quotes Henryk Grossman: “As counter-tendencies weaken, the antagonisms of global capitalism gradually sharpen and the collapse tendency gets closer and closer to its final form of absolute termination”.

Finally  Chesnais points out that “many parameters have changed compared to the crisis period of 2007-2008. It is not only about the loss of effectiveness of monetary instruments, the loss of effectiveness of central bank interventions and the high level of public debt, but also about the capacity of action of the world bourgeoisie.

Today, more than ever, the economy has lost relation with the productive sphere, there is a huge paper economy, basically fueled by the persistence of public deficits and financial innovation mechanisms, which does not correspond to the real situation of the economy. Ever greater bases of speculative and fictitious capitals move from place to place looking for a return in financial investments that they cannot find in the real sector of the economy due to the drop in profit rates. Thus we can conclude that the capitalist system has actually become a fictitious capitalism, whose rules are radically different and even antagonistic to the classic productive capitalism, i.e. the one based on the generation and accumulation of surplus value (see “21st Century Crisis of a Civilization”, Machalita Bbmuckk, Academia Edu.)

It is clear, then, that the problem facing the terminal capitalist world is that of its mode of production. In fact, this mode of production in its global neoliberal phase favors, when it does not directly generate, these pandemics and many other "collateral" ills, but the main damage it generates is chronic and growing poverty and social exclusion, and individual alienation, war and social violence and the destruction of the ecological balance of the planet. The "modes of production " that capitalism, in its neoliberal financial stage, imposes and needs are "hindering the development" of the "productive forces" in the strict Marxist sense of the terms.

By this we should understand that today, "development of productive forces" directly implies the development of sustainable conditions for human life, without exclusions and in harmony with our environment. And the inescapable conclusion is that capitalism  in its current form of neoliberalism, not only obstructs this possibility, which is real considering the present level of technical scientific development –with the current available resources the entire population of the planet could live with their basic needs met and opportunities for individual development for all– but on the contrary, it alters the performance of human productive forces by imposing particular, irrational, unnecessary and superfluous consumption patterns (and therefore production) leaving more than half of the global population without basic resources. And finally it destroys those productive forces with the massive deaths of human beings in wars, forced migrations and pandemics, and destroys the very source of the resources, that is, the planet.

A concrete example of this irrationality at the present time is the US decision to underfund no less than the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic or to put blame on China instead of uniting to fight against an evil of which the USA is the main affected. This article from Sputnik 04.14.2020, whose essential paragraphs we reproduce, is striking in this regard:

“The pandemic expanded at the speed of airplanes because the large transnational corporations and the financial world did not want to interrupt their businesses in time. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson underestimated the disease, until the British Prime Minister ended up in intensive care. The big factories in Bergamo,  Italy, refused to stop producing. Confindustria, the Italian industrial business association, launched a campaign on February 28 with the hashtag "#YesWeWork", "Bergamo non si ferma" (Bergamo won't close), and they continued the activity until March 23, when the outbreak was already raging, forcing workers to mass protests and strikes  to force factories to close, despite which numerous activities were exempt. In the financial heart of the world, New York, with 20 million inhabitants, the quarantine only took effect on March 22, when there were already more than 7,000 infections. "Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers," said Governor Mario Cuomo on March 2, "we believe we have the best medical service in the world right here in New York. When you compare what happened in other countries with what happens here, we don't think it will be that bad" he said."  Capitalism in its purest form.

 It is clear that when we say that we could all live well and in “biospheric” balance, we are assuming an immeasurable reduction in superfluous expenses and luxuries and essential modifications in consumption patterns, whereas, without those premises, it will be impossible to provide home, clothing, education, health and food for all, because the planet itself could not bear it. It is a certainty that, for a world without exclusions, in real terms, to be possible, it will be necessary to adopt some forms of demographic planning, but this cannot be done until the dialectic of masters and servitude that has passed down through millennia has been overcome. Otherwise, instead of humanitarian demographic planning, there would be a high risk of falling into racial and class deprivation of reproductive rights.

The time has come when it is necessary to replace this mode of production (and life) globally with a superior one, as Marx had already announced, because now the Leninist conditions begin to exist when: “those from above cannot and those at the bottom refuse to" keep the current system going. In this regard, it must be said that for the first time within the capitalist world itself, the nature of property relations and the very principles of private property are increasingly being questioned legally, in view of the urgent need to make the public prevail over the private. There is already talk of taxes on big fortunes, big car factories are ordered to produce respirators, and government strategies are increasingly ready to move against any private interest if the urgency requires. State projects and actions that would have been unimaginable until very recently.

From a historical materialist point of view, i.e. for Marxism, socioeconomic systems have, precisely, historicity, that is, they have a beginning and an end.

We know this (those of us who want to know it seriously) from, at least, Vico or Hegel, and Marxists already know this more precisely from works such as "The German Ideology" (1853) and the "Grundrisse" (published in 1939) and the Manifesto itself (1848).

It is true that Lenin predicted the end of capitalism after it entered the imperialist phase (c. 1880 ) and, presumably, he expected (never said it) – with the revolution spreading throughout the world from the Bolshevik triumph in Russia (1917)– that, at the latest, by the 30s or 40s of that century in which he lived (20th), it would have already spread, definitely triumphant, throughout the whole or almost the entire planet or, at least, to the most industrialized countries. That is why he spoke of "imperialism" as the highest phase of capitalism in the second and last sense.

 Curiously, or perhaps not so much, in the 1930s and 40s what developed was Fascism, which the great European capitals (including those of the "anti-fascist" countries) used to drastically put an end to the possibility of an expansion of the socialist revolution throughout Europe and consolidated the world economic isolation of the USSR and the People's Republic of China.

But now, with perfect hindsight it is possible to know that the stages of capitalism were not two (free competition capitalism and imperialism) but three (precisely the dialectical number ). 1) free competition capitalism (1400-1870 / 80), 2) imperialism (1890-1985/90) and 3) (and last) neoliberal and financial globalization (this we have developed in our “Third -and last- stage of capitalism", Ed. Luxemburg, Buenos Aires, 2011). So, from our point of view, the crisis of neoliberalism, so often announced these days, triggered by the pandemic, implies the end of the entire capitalist system as a mode of production and not only of its neoliberal guise introduced in the 80s and 90s . Some authors who also see it that way are Wim Dierckxsens and Walter Formento. On the website of the fiormer, they claim that: “What is coming upon us is a crisis of a magnitude that has only been seen twice in the last two thousand years. The first was between the 4th and 6th centuries (between 300 and 500 AD), when the Roman Empire and slavery disappeared and feudalism arose. And the second moment came with the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism from the 16th century, each with its own economic rationality."

From the dialectical point of view, that is to say from the purest Hegelian-Marxist analysis, one of the most important differences between the mechanistic idealist position of the rectilinear gradual evolution of "obstinate repetition" and dialectical evolution is the discovery of the leap from the quantitative to the qualitative, a revolutionary leap. The Leninist challenge is to determine the point or the nodal line where the discontinuity arises and this should not be done in the form of irresponsible gambling (which leads to consider each moment that we are in a revolutionary situation) but to realize from the analysis of the "concrete situation at the specific moment", from the data of reality when we are truly facing the objective and subjective conditions for a great revolutionary transformation. We believe that the factual summary displayed in this article provides sufficient elements for this.

The system crisis predates the pandemic

 It should be said that this end of the cycle is obviously not determined by the pandemic, which is (maybe) a totally  conjunctural effect, but was anticipated much earlier, at least since the 2008 crisis, from whose effects, incidentally, the world had not yet emerged when the pandemic began. In other words, this is a crisis within that crisis. The debacle was looming. In fact one of the triggers of the financial and stock markets crisis was the current oil crisis, which according to Dierckxsens and Formento developed: “as a form of a war for energy and real production, a geopolitical war to maintain Europe divided; so that the post-Brexit anti-globalist European Union does not consolidate its articulation with Russia and the BRICS multi-polarism ”.

And this oil crisis brings along a monetary crisis that, as the authors themselves point out, leads "to a very high fragility in the world oil-dollar reserve currency scheme, imposed by the North American multinational corporations in 1973", but "Now, the crisis of the oil-dollar monetary standard has entered another crisis... A crisis where it becomes evident that the monetary pattern imposed by a determined correlation of world power –1950 -1973– has also come to an end dragging with it the financial system...” (Wim Dierckxsens internet page). The never-before-seen collapse of oil on April 20 of this year is just part of the syndrome indicating terminal system illness.

In other words, these energy, commercial and monetary crises were not generated by the pandemic, but preceded it and were, and are, symptoms of the general financial and economic crisis of the system, which no longer has the possibility of recovery under the rules that led to the present situation.

The supposed post-2008 economic recoveries of the large capitalist economies (among which, obviously, we do not include China) occurred, not from real increases in production, nor from a reorganization of production, but from huge amounts of money issued within the so-called "quantitative easing". In other words, the crisis was not solved, but rather “the ball was kicked forward,” granting themselves credit through issuing of money and securities in an uncontrolled way! Money that was not even directed to the productive or consumer sector, but exclusively to the financial sector.

The trillions of dollars injected by the US government in order to avoid an implosion of its financial system have basically benefited that sector. The big banks that received these funds did not lend them to revive the real economy. What they did, first of all, was to improve their balance so that they could pay their managers unprecedented gratifications with the fraudulent consent of the government, they adjusted the fictitious values ​​to the real ones, and all this was done for bank speculation to continue. Thus, the four largest banks have placed trillions of dollars in derivatives. (See “21st century-Crisis of a civilization”, Machalita Bbmuckk., Academia Edu.)

These days there has been a reactivation of production, mainly thanks to the North American FED and the Treasury, effected through, once again,  an enormous issue of trillions of dollars, never before seen, (it must be admitted that this time a part was destined to consumption and productive sectors, although without too much planning), but it is no longer enough, the stock markets (true to their short-term nature) may  fluctuate, and even improve, but their final decline is unstoppable.

If we consider the historical process of Capitalism as divided in stages, and accept the hypothesis that  these stages are three, then we can claim that now we are, indeed, at the final  and last stage of the whole capitalist system and, that the effects perceived are just the start of a transition period towards a new mode of production and new economic and social  structures in the full marxist meaning of those terms.

Present day Leninism

However, the  onset of worldwide socialism (neither social-democracy nor benefactor state, both relics of the 20th century) will not come about with triumphal parades of liberating armies or victorious guerrillas coming to power but rather with the superior competence to offset the crisis in countries where the Communist Party is in power (particularly China, but also Viet Nam, Cuba and North Korea) or "populist" governments and also,  by the civic uprising and the determined ballots of the people from the Third World and even the central capitalist countries against the global financial corporations and other parasitic elements in their societies. However, all these multiple and diverse local and global agents –institutional and popular– will need to coordinate  in a complementary synergy of solidarity and alliances, allowing them to become a single great international political subject with their own national expressions. The whole of this complex set conforms today the revolutionary historical subject (as explained in Ciafardini, M., El sujeto histórico en la globalización,  Ed. Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, Buenos Aires,  2015).

As regards the Chinese superiority when facing health or economic crises, John Ross, senior fellow at the Chongyang  Institute for Finantial Studies of Renmin University, in his article  “Human life must trump economics in a pandemic”, states:  “China’s outperformance of the US in both the 2008 crisis & the Covid-19 outbreak will see a geopolitical shift in Beijing’s favor. The longer the US continues with its disastrous pandemic response, the greater the shift will be. The pandemic has a clear global course. Despite the coronavirus outbreak beginning in China, Beijing has brought it rapidly under control – the number of domestically transmitted cases was reduced to virtually zero by the end of March. In the US and Western Europe, on the contrary, the number of cases is rising vertiginously with no peak in sight.”

And added  "In the last 12 years, the world has passed through two huge global tests – the international financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. In both, China has far outperformed the US. This will necessarily lead to a major shift in geopolitics in favor of China. The longer the US continues with its present disastrous response to the coronavirus, the greater that shift will be.”

It must be borne in mind that, most likely, the large economies of neoliberal Western capitalism will not implode abruptly in the face of the crisis (a good thing, considering the people who live there). More likely, we will see increasingly centralized leaderships, leaning heavily towards neo-Roosveltian industrialism and Keynessian planning, and, with a growing participation and citizen control (possibly through accountability mechanisms), sit at summits of world powers, along with the block of those countries allied today with China's strategic alliance with Russia (but are actually much more than that). And what will begin to be discussed and agreed upon in this new space (whatever form it takes) will inevitably be new forms of political and economic world organization, which will necessarily involve economic planning and reformulation of modes of production but mainly consumption patterns. These agreements will have to be exclusively interstate alliances (without direct or indirect participation of private interests), and they will have to contemplate, fundamentally, the redistribution of wealth to see to the primary interests of all inhabitants of the planet and of the planet itself, without excluding any nation.

Barring some action of this type there is no possible way out of the crisis (even for those who see it from the most conservative point of view). The possibility that "these global meetings" occur (and occur in these terms) lies in a class issue: there are millions of small, medium and large entrepreneurs in the world and particularly in the most economically developed countries like the USA, but not so rich as to be part of the financial oligarchic group that tries to dominate the world in every condition (wars, terrorism, political destabilization or general bankruptcy with famines and epidemics) represented in the financial “cities”, mainly in London and New York.

That economic-social and political mass is as little interested as the workers in a world collapse in which they would simply and materially disappear. The synergy of such social actors with the express will of the peoples will compel rulers to seek a rational and comprehensive solution so that the world system may work again, undertaking the necessary transformations no matter how radical they may seem as long as smaller businesses are part of the new economic structures and that pressure will be greater when the government in office has reached it thanks to them.

The aforementioned Dierckxsens and Formento also state that: “the Great Emerging Social Formation (with China as its epicenter and the Sino-Russian tandem as its engine) proposes to reconnect the fictitious capital to the productive economy, trade networks, infrastructure investments and exploitation of energy in progress, aiming at an energy transition. And to generate a Stability Zone, in short, to provide the world with a post-crisis alternative with a view to a possible gradual transition to post-capitalism (...) it would not be surprising that Trump and Xi Jinping may reach an agreement to conform an international front to face the coronavirus…. There will be no doubt then, that Xi Jinping is in an optimal position to negotiate with Trump who has already had telephone communication with the President of China. Putin, Trump and Xi Jinping are already talking about sitting down after the elections in the United States, and deciding the new rules of the game for this post-crisis world.”

Why not think then that a transition towards post-capitalism will inevitably be "uneven and combined", with profound advances in some areas such as the de-financialization of the economy, the de-commodification of health and social security (for example) first, and proceed immediately to control the financial speculation markets –aware of the resistance of the big financial bourgeoisie and taking into account the correlations of force–, the nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry so that medicines stop being a merchandise produced according to profitability, and of the strategic industries and the media, in addition to the public repossession of the so-called "natural resources" (common goods, actually). In other words, the foundations of world socialism could begin to be built from large international agreements of a new type, involving mainly, but not exclusively, the great world economic powers together with the leaders of the great religions and organizations such as the United Nations and other actors of global relevance. Agreements of a new type, aimed at eliminating the hyper-multibillion-dollar concentration of capital in the hands of individual owner-decision-makers or elitist groups such as current global financial groups, that is, dispossessing the "super" wealthy this time

 In any case, it is necessary to be alert to calls to establish forms of "global governance" actually intended to institutionalize centralized control by the financial giants of international politics and economy. We must learn to distinguish the suicidal globalizing attempts of the neoliberal political alienation from the sincere call for a construction of a solidarity-based, inclusive, rational globalization in consumption and ecology-friendly production and, finally, socialist.

What to do?

Our concern as responsible, individual political subjects, is to spread and explain, by means of our organizations, the idea that the conditions for revolutionary structural change are now in place, even at global level, and to bring about the formation of governmental blocks at regional levels and worldwide, demanding that the first order of business, on the first day of operation of these international and regional entities, should be to deal with the question of how to start implementing the bases of post-capitalist and socialist structural changes. Obviously all this will have to be done together with the ceaseless struggle for the specific demands of each labor or social sector, in each specific place, because the fact that the conditions are in place for the great change we have always dreamed of does not mean that such a change will take place by the law of universal gravitation.

WHAT IS COMING TO AN END IS NOT JUST NEOLIBERALISM, CAPITALISM AS A MODE OF PRODUCTION. (THIS MUST BE UNDERSTOOD TO CREATE WITH SUFFICIENT DETERMINATION FORMS OF ACTION RELEVANT TO BRING ABOUT THE CHANGE)

Mariano Ciafardini

Doctor of Political Science