Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.]  www.epsr.org  Contact@epsr.org.uk
No 1245 Aug 24 th  2004                                                                                                                  40p Weekly

The West’s Covid floundering reflects far more than incompetence and unpreparedness by a system which has stripped away health and welfare for a decade of austerity. From  initial  “herd immunity” plans ruling class cynicism has been to the fore, letting the virus run to “cull” poor and “surplus” population and now using  pandemic to intensify trade war. Huge credit bailout a weapon for  richer nations to drive others down, keeping monopolies intact while rivals are bankrupted. Far worse to come as underlying Catastrophe of capitalism’s crisis emerges from behind pretence the virus is to blame. Covid impact severe but only a trigger for imminent economic breakdown, the inevitable extension of 2008’s global collapse. Oncoming Slump far worse than 1930s and so too capital’s World War “solution”. Only revolution to create workers states can change anything. China’s collective victory over the virus good but hampered by Beijing’s  revisionist weakness. Leninism vital 

The great shock of the deadly Covid pandemic raises a thousand urgent questions about mankind’s survival and future prospects which only long-sidelined  Marxist-Leninist science can begin to answer.
The battle for such understanding, fought out through open polemics in a purpose built party of revolutionary theory, has never been more crucial.  
And the biggest question is the class war overthrow of this callous, exploitative and ruthlessly uncaring class privilege system, treating its mass human population as nothing but disposable cattle and production unit fodder to be sacrificed in the pursuit of profit for the few, while it repeatedly drives the world into slump Catastrophe and World War.
Fruitful lessons can already be drawn from the astonishing success of the Chinese workers state in containing and riding out the virus disaster, a staggering mutually supportive collective effort demonstrating the giant advantages of a developing planned socialist society under consciously fought for and accepted class leadership, even if still hampered by revisionist weaknesses persisting in Beijing (see below). 
So stunning is this example that the usual stream of poisonous lies against communism have been upped to a deluge of demented virulence by the Trumpite White House, its petty Boris-ite UK stooges, and other imperialism, all eagerly reproduced by the Western media outlets (bourgeois anti-communist ideology’s front line), desperate to try and take the edge off this powerful example of humanity’s future possibilities and to blame them and others as scapegoats for what is the profit system’s breakdown alone.
It is all the more telling as other lessons show the weakness and confusion of self-seeking individualist Western exploitation and anarchic “free market” profiteering and spivvery, its brutal and ruthless face the complete opposite of such progress, so seemingly incompetent and callously indifferent it initially considered letting the Covid disease run unrestrained, effectively “culling” the expensive older, weaker and unemployed population currently “surplus” to requirements for slump-wracked capitalist profit margins. 
Only the nervous uncertainty of a ruling class facing the total breakdown of its world control and fearful of appalled domestic revolt, even among its usual petty bourgeois support, forced it back for the moment from such overt Brave New World cynicism*.
The suspicion remains that the seeming incompetence and prevarication (“oh dear, we lost the email for getting ventilators” (or the dog ate it perhaps????)) is itself nothing but a cynical cover-up anyway for continuing the same callous policy, now hidden behind a pretence of taking action and meaningless but chauvinist flannel about “protecting the NHS” and “national unity” (really???????).
This gross lying propaganda that we are “all standing together” (backed up by the craven Labourite pleas for “national cooperation”) is a monstrous hypocrisy of such breathtaking dimensions it could put half the population on ventilators in itself, if there were any to be had. 
Even taking things at face value, after its about turn the degenerate, vicious nature of capitalist exploitation is more deeply exposed than ever by its gross lies and organisational incompetence, on top of years of deliberate austerity unpreparedness (and sneering indifference anyway to any warnings of difficulties and shortages), and the foul treatment of the great masses of the poor, exploited and dispossessed, already hammered by post-2008 cuts, imposed job insecurity and bleak, stripped-down unprotected cities and towns (Grenfell tower block terror, collapsing railways, etc, etc) and now forced to bear the brunt of suffering, hunger and death as apparent everywhere in capitalism: 

According to the Catalan government figures, the rate of infection in working-class Roquetes is 533 per 100,000 inhabitants, while in upmarket Sant Gervasi it’s only 77. Similarly high rates are found in the satellite towns of El Prat de Llobregat (604) and Badalona (597).
Dr Nani Vall-llosera, a GP in Bon Pastor, a low-income Barcelona neighbourhood, and former president of the Catalan primary care forum, points out that many of those deemed essential workers by the government work in low-status, poorly paid jobs where they have high exposure to the virus.
“People who work in shopping centres, supermarkets and old people’s homes, as well as cleaners, are working without protection, often without masks,” she said. “These people get infected, they go home and infect those around them because there’s little possibility of self-isolating if you live in a small apartment.”
She added: “Furthermore, poverty and poor health are a vicious circle – the poorer you are the more likely you are to have health problems. And so the chances of becoming seriously ill with the virus are concentrated in poor neighbourhoods.”
Like many colleagues, Vall-llosera, is in no doubt that the ability of the health system to react has been “debilitated” by years of spending cuts in public health, especially in Madrid and Catalonia, adding that “those parts of Spain where there have been least cuts are dealing with the virus better”.
The doctor also warns of the distortion to the health system caused by the epidemic. “While we focus all our resources on the coronavirus, which is probably what we have to do, it’s also reducing our capacity to deal with other issues,” she said.
Manuel Franco, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (USA), agrees that austerity measures – particularly around Madrid – have weakened the healthcare system.
He also says that inequalities in income, gender, education and country of origin are becoming increasingly apparent as the pandemic continues.
“In many societies, care work – cleaning, looking after children and the elderly - is mostly carried out by foreign women,” said Franco. “A lot of them are not on the payroll so they have no rights when it comes to unemployment pay. They also probably live in the worst housing conditions in a city like Madrid.”
The unemployment rate, which stands at 13.7%, is more than double the EU average, while youth unemployment is at 30.6%. About half the population has some difficulty making ends meet, and poverty is persistently higher for children, migrants, and Roma populations.

The British class system is, at its worst, a killer. Men living in the poorest communities in the UK have an average of 9.4 years shorn off their life expectancies compared with those in the richest areas; for women, it’s 7.4 years. If you travel on the Jubilee Line from Westminster to Canning Town, every stop represents a year less in the average lifespan of local citizens. For the poorest women, life expectancy is in reverse.
The coronavirus pandemic is about to collide with this engine of inequality. The super-rich are fleeing on private jets to luxury boltholes in foreign climes, while the well-to-do may deploy their private health insurance to circumvent our already struggling and soon to be overrun National Health Service. Meanwhile, Britain’s army of precarious workers have nowhere to hide, including from employment that puts their health at risk. Uber drivers, Deliveroo riders, cleaners: all in low-paid jobs, often with families to feed. Many will feel they have no choice but to keep working. While many middle-class professionals can protect themselves by working from home, supermarket shelves cannot be stacked remotely, and the same applies from factory workers to cleaners. How many could truly afford to live on £94.25 a week, which is our country’s paltry statutory sick pay?
Those with underlying health conditions are most at risk from coronavirus, and again, the impact differs depending on which rung you’re condemned to on the British social ladder. Previous research by the British Heart Foundation found that working-class Tameside in the north-west has a heart disease mortality rate more than three times higher than well-to-do Kensington and Chelsea. According to Asthma UK: “Asthma is more prevalent within more deprived communities, and those living in more deprived areas of England are more likely to go to hospital for their asthma.” Diabetes is far more common among those living in poverty, and there is a strong link between lung disease and deprivation. 1.9 million pensioners languish below the poverty line: their health will be, on average, worse than their affluent counterparts’, meaning their lives will be significantly more imperilled.
We know that depression and stress weaken our immune systems, and the research is clear: those on low incomes are disproportionately likely to suffer from poor mental health. Poor diet is another factor, and one that is strongly linked to poverty. What, too, of our most impoverished, those who are homeless with poor nutrition, weaker immune systems and a lack of access to good hygiene? And what happens to the 1.5 million children eligible for free school meals if our education sector is temporarily closed? Many could soon find themselves with hungry bellies.
As the coronavirus continues to unleash mayhem, we could be on the precipice of an economic shock on the scale of the 2008 financial crash. Despite the rhetoric, the latest budget doesn’t reverse the damage to our social fabric inflicted by a decade of austerity. Indeed, the recent budget entrenches cuts in key services outside of the NHS and police. If a renewed economic crisis is on the cards, we can expect the Tories to ensure it is once again paid for by increasingly impoverished children, benefit claimants and a working-age population that has suffered the longest squeeze in real wages for generations.

A few days into Italy’s lockdown, people across the country sang and played music from their balconies as they came together to say “Everything will be alright” (Andrà tutto bene). Three weeks on, the singing has stopped and social unrest is mounting as a significant part of the population, especially in the poorer south, realise that everything is not all right.
“They are no longer singing or dancing on the balconies,” said Salvatore Melluso, a priest at Caritas Diocesana di Napoli, a church-run charity in Naples. “Now people are more afraid – not so much of the virus, but of poverty. Many are out of work and hungry. There are now long queues at food banks.”
There have been far fewer coronavirus deaths in Italy’s south compared with the worst-affected northern regions, but the pandemic is having a serious impact on livelihoods.
Tensions are building across the poorest southern regions of Campania, Calabria, Sicily and Puglia as people run out of food and money. There have been reports of small shop owners being pressured to give food for free, while police are patrolling supermarkets in some areas to stop thefts. The self-employed or those working on contracts that do not guarantee social benefits have lost salaries, and many small businesses may never reopen.
Paride Ezzine, a waiter in Palermo, Sicily, no longer gets his salary. “Obviously, due to the lockdown, the restaurant closed,” he said. “I have a wife and two children and we’re living off our savings. But I don’t know how long they will last. I asked my bank to postpone payment instalments – they said no. This situation is bringing us to our knees.”
The ramifications of the lockdown, which is poised to be extended until at least Easter, are also affecting the estimated 3.3 million people in Italy who were working off the books, of whom more than 1 million live across Campania, Sicily, Puglia and Calabria, according to the most recent figures from CGIA Mestre, a Venice-based small business association.
“In reality, we don’t know how many are working in the black as these numbers are only estimates,” said Giovanni Orsina, a politics professor at Luiss University in Rome. “However, a significant number of people live day to day, doing occasional jobs. There are also many shopkeepers, or professionals working for themselves, who may have moderate reserves that will run out the longer they’re in lockdown.”
Officials also worry that the mafia will take advantage of the rising poverty, swooping in to recruit people to its organisation. “Criminal organisations have plenty of money and people could end up working for them, and once that starts, they won’t go back,” said Orsina.

And that is just in the “rich” countries, while the ruthlessly and tyrannically exploited Third World with no universal health systems, no financial reserves and no means of even basic “social distancing” measures etc in crowded tenements and outright slums, faces an unstoppable holocaust of both virus deaths and the starvation and homelessness imposed by lockdown and economic paralysis (giant India already seeing conditions as bad as the great Partition horrors of 1947-8).
The disaster facing the jam-packed refugee camps in the war-ravaged Middle East, and even more the monstrously oppressed Palestinians in the effective prison camp of the Gaza strip, under worse siege cutoff than normal, does not bear thinking about:
for the Israeli government, there is no such thing as solidarity.
As soon as the first coronavirus infections were detected, the Israeli authorities demonstrated that they have no intention of easing apartheid to make sure Palestinians are able to face the epidemic under more humane conditions.
Repression has continued, with the Israeli occupation forces using the excuse of increased police presence to continue raids on some communities, such as the Issawiya neighborhood in East Jerusalem, home demolitions in places like Kafr Qasim village and the destruction of crops in Bedouin communities in the Naqab desert.
Despite four Palestinian prisoners testing positive for COVID-19, the Israeli government has so far refused to heed calls to release the 5,000 Palestinians (including 180 children) that it currently holds in its jails. And there has been no sign that the debilitating siege on the Gaza Strip, which has decimated its public services, would be lifted any time soon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also trying to exclude the mostly Palestinian Joint List from the formation of an emergency unity government to tackle the outbreak, calling its members “terror supporters”.
At the same time, the Israeli authorities have been quick to depict Palestinians as carriers of the virus and a threat to public health.
In early March, when the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced it had confirmed the first seven cases of the coronavirus (which causes COVID-19 disease) in the occupied Palestinian territory, Israeli Defense minister Naftali Bennett was quick to shut down the city of Bethlehem, where all the cases were located.
Of course, the concern there was not the health and safety of Palestinians in the city, but rather the threat of them infecting Israelis. The nearby settlement of Efrat - which also had confirmed infections, of course - was not put on lockdown at that time.
Shortly after, the health ministry issued a statement advising Israelis not to enter the occupied Palestinian territories. 
Then last week, Netanyahu asked the “Arab-speaking public” to follow the instruction of the ministry of health saying that there is a compliance problem among the Palestinians. No such concerns were expressed about of some members of the Jewish population of Israel, who outright refused to shut down religious schools and businesses.
This attitude towards Palestinians is of course not new. The writings of early European Zionist settlers are full of racist assumptions about Arab hygiene and living conditions, and the threat of the disease coming from the Palestinian population was an early justification for apartheid.
Apart from the decades-old repression and discrimination, during the COVID-19 epidemic, Palestinians will be facing another consequence of occupation and apartheid - a broken healthcare system.
The roots of its dysfunction go back to the mandate era, when the British discouraged the formation of a Palestinian-run healthcare sector. The Palestinian population (mostly the urban parts of it) was serviced by a number of hospitals that the British colonialists set up, as well as health facilities established by various Western missionaries. Meanwhile, the Jewish settlers were allowed to set up their own healthcare system, funded generously from abroad and run independently of the mandate.
During World War II, some missionaries left and closed down their clinics, and after 1948, the British withdrew, leaving behind an ill-performing healthcare infrastructure. In 1949, Egypt annexed Gaza. The following year, Jordan did the same with the West Bank. Over the next 17 years, Cairo and Amman provided for the Palestinian population living under their rule, but they did not really establish a well-functioning healthcare system.
UNRWA - the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - had to step up its services, providing primary healthcare, while the Palestinians started building a network of charitable healthcare facilities.
After the war of 1967 and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Israel as an occupying power was legally responsible for healthcare of the Palestinians, but unsurprisingly, it did nothing to encourage the development of a robust healthcare sector. To illustrate the point: in 1975, the budget allocated for healthcare in the West Bank was smaller than that of one Israeli hospital for the whole year.
In 1994, the Palestinian Authority was created and took over service provision. Needless to say, the continuing occupation and the fact that the Authority’s budget was dependent on foreign donors and the whims of the Israeli government, as well as the corruption of PA officials, did not allow the Palestinian health sector to improve. 
As a result, if you were to enter a Palestinian hospital in the West Bank today, you would be struck by the overcrowding of patients, the shortages of supplies, the inadequate equipment and the substandard infrastructure and sanitation. Medical professionals have repeatedly protested the poor working conditions in their hospitals, most recently in February this year, but to no avail.
With just 1.23 beds per 1,000 people, 2,550 working doctors, less than 20 intensive care specialists and less than 120 ventilators in all public hospitals, the occupied West Bank is facing a public health disaster if the authorities do not contain the spread of COVID-19.
...in the Gaza Strip it is simply catastrophic. The United Nations announced that the strip will be unlivable by 2020. It is now 2020 and the residents of the Gaza Strip - apart from inhuman living conditions - are now also facing a COVID-19 outbreak, as the first cases were confirmed on March 21. 
The Israeli, Egyptian and PA-imposed blockade of Gaza has brought its healthcare system to the brink of collapse. This has been compounded by cycles of destruction of health facilities and a slow rebuilding efforts following repeated large-scale military offensives by the Israeli military. 
The people of Gaza already face dire conditions: unemployment is at 44 percent (61 percent for the youth); 80 percent of the population is dependent on some form of foreign assistance; 97 percent of water is undrinkable; and 10 percent of children have stunted growth due to malnutrition. 
Healthcare provision is on a constant decline. According to the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, since the year 2000 “there has been a drop in the number of hospital beds (1.8 to 1.58), doctors (1.68 to 1.42) and nurses (2.09 to 1.98) per 1,000 people, leading to overcrowding and reduced quality of services”. Israel’s ban on the import of technology with possible “dual use” has restricted the purchasing of equipment, such as X-ray scanners and medical radioscopes.
Regular power cuts threaten the lives of thousands of patients relying on medical apparatuses, including babies in incubators. Hospitals lack about 40 percent of essential medicines, and there are inadequate amounts of basic medical supplies, such as syringes and gauze. The 2018 decision of the Trump administration to stop US funding for UNRWA also affected the agency’s ability to provide healthcare and bring doctors to perform complex surgeries in Gaza.
The limits of the Gaza healthcare system were tested in 2018 during the March of the Great Return, when Israeli soldiers opened mass fire on unarmed Palestinians protesting near the fence separating the strip from Israeli territory. In those days, hospitals were overwhelmed with wounded and dead, and for months they were struggling to provide proper care for the thousands injured by live ammunition, many of whom were permanently disabled.

Even in better off Britain, the whole “national unity around the NHS" is a total Goebbels lie by a ruling class which has been dismantling, privatising and PFI plundering the health service for years, while resource starving all the vital social service backup it needs, and driving much of the working population into a precarious and desperate existence which makes it more unhealthy and vulnerable anyway. 
Suddenly, the workers are increasingly joined by the petty bourgeoisie, being bankrupted and driven into despair, (despite supposed bailout measures for some), as many are forced down into the ranks of the unemployed and desperate, exactly as predicted by Karl Marx and denied ever since by smug reformism and middle class complacency:

Almost a fifth of UK small businesses are at risk of collapsing within the next month as they struggle to secure emergency cash meant to support them through the coronavirus lockdown, according to research by an accountancy network.
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has pledged unprecedented aid to companies to try to cushion the blow from much of the economy shutting down but businesses and politicians have raised concerns that there are gaps in the schemes.
Some 18% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) either probably or definitely will not be able to obtain additional cash from the government to survive for a four-week period, according to the Corporate Finance Network.
Its accountancy firm members estimated that almost a third of their 13,000 small-company clients from around the UK would be unable to acquire the cash needed to ride out an extended, three-month lockdown.
Those concerns included some banks’ use of personal guarantees in the form of savings and mortgages to secure lending to small businesses under the government’s hastily formulated business interruption loans scheme. ...banks offering the government-backed loans were putting in place “punitive” interest rates that made it impossible for companies to borrow.
“The challenge now is getting the money out of the door to support businesses before it’s too late,” Rachel Reeves, Labour head of the business select committee told BBC radio. “There are many businesses who if they don’t quickly access this cash they are going to go under.
“That will have huge consequences for employment and also our ability to grow the economy when this pandemic has passed. If businesses collapse they won’t be able to ensure our economy can recover. They will be lost for ever.”

But while plenty of liberals and the fake–“left” are now pointing to the inequalities, the floundering and sick complacent (seeming) stupidities of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson’s repellent crew, India’s Hindu sectarian Narendra Modi and other “reactionary populists” (fascists to call them by their proper name – another evasive denial by the fake-“left”), and can denounce correctly enough much more of capitalism’s unfairness, hypocrisy and outright lies, they are still missing the critical point.  
The real sickness in the world is not deadly illness, disruptive and frightening as it is, but the capitalist system itself and all its inequality, incapacity, and ruthless repression.
That is not simply because of its arrogant incompetence and stupidity in letting this virus run out of control, unnecessarily sacrificing thousands, or tens of thousands of lives and spreading misery and fear everywhere.
Covid-19 might have been the trigger for the unfolding societal and economic collapse, and the production shutdowns it has forced obviously make things much worse.
But it is not the pandemic which is causing disaster.
The great breakdown of commerce, finance and industry, expressed in the greatest Stock Exchange turmoil ever, (beyond 1929, 1987, 2008) has much deeper roots.
The real disaster unfolding, wiping out lives and livelihoods on a titanic scale, is the great economic Catastrophe of a bankrupt and out-of-time system which has been brewing for decades and especially since the global bank disaster.
It was ready to break open imminently, well before the virus was a tickle in the first infected throat as Marxism has constantly and urgently warned the working class (see multiple EPSRs over decades eg No1243 27-07-04 among many or Perspectives 2001, 2002, 2003 etc) and as many of the more thoughtful or socially aware bourgeois commentators have fearfully declared:

According to the chief economist and the CIO of Saxo Bank Steen Jakobsene, it’s pretty clear that the coronavirus became the catalyst of the crisis but the market was already leveraged too much. And the “model we had was too complacent on and too dependent on debt,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say that the corona is the only reason why but it was definitely a very powerful catalyst because of course it will make the whole world stop and slow down.” He added that “we had not had a situation like this since the 1920s-1930s.”
Jakobsen noted that “We live in a global economy and everyone will have to deal with the ramification of this downside. There are no winners, there are only losers…”
This is the single greatest financial crisis of our time, the economist told RT. It is worse than 2008 and perhaps the biggest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, he added.
The reason for that is that there’s a simultaneous collapse of demand, the supply chain and the energy sector, he explained.
Those three components and the social distancing that is going on around the world means that consumption has collapsed, Jakobsen said, reminding us that the global economy is driven 70 percent by consumption.
“So, this is the biggest crisis that we have ever seen in magnitude… The global economy will be in recession in 2020, that’s already guaranteed, it’s not a matter of if, it is absolutely certain that we will have it.”
Jakobsen added that “We will see a collapse of GDP growth rate from 20 to 50 percent in Q2 and the whole year will be a loss for GDP.”

That oncoming Slump will continue to unfold with far more deadly effect than anything yet seen, or even to be seen, directly from the Covid outbreak.
Its savage impact will go on long after the disease is contained with whatever vaccines or “herd immunity” might be developed, at whatever cost in lives (undoubtedly many millions, away from the metropolitan “advanced” countries”).
The Labourite call above (typically focussing on the petty bourgeois SMEs and not the workers) is deliberately and disarmingly lying to workers when it talks of ensuring companies can survive for “when the economy can recover” or as the Tory spin phrases repeat, “when we reach the other side”.
It is not going to stop.
It is certainly not simply an “intertwined” financial pandemic as another bourgeois economist tries to explain it away :

It might make more sense to expect a stock market drop from a disease pandemic than from a recent earthquake, but maybe not a crash of the magnitude seen recently. If it were widely believed that a treatment could limit the intensity of the Covid-19 pandemic to a matter of months, or even that it would last a year or two, that would suggest the stock market risk is not so great for a long-term investor. One could buy, hold, and wait it out.
But a contagion of financial anxiety works differently than a contagion of disease. It is fuelled in part by people noticing others’ lack of confidence, reflected in price declines, and others’ emotional reaction to the declines. A negative bubble in the stock market occurs when people see prices falling, and, trying to discover why, start amplifying stories that explain the decline. Then, prices fall on subsequent days, and again and again.
Observing successive decreases in stock prices creates a powerful feeling of regret for those who have not sold, together with a fear that one might sell at the bottom. This regret and fear prime people’s interest in both pandemic narratives. Where the market goes from there depends on their nature and evolution.
Coronavirus pandemic has delivered the fastest, deepest economic shock in history
To see this, consider that the stock market in the US did not crater when, in September-October 1918, the news media first started covering the Spanish flu pandemic that eventually claimed 675,000 US lives (and over 50 million worldwide). Instead, monthly prices in the US market were on an uptrend from September 1918 to July 1919.
Why didn’t the market crash? One likely explanation is that world war one, which was approaching its end after the last major battle, the second battle of the Marne, in July-August 1918, crowded out the influenza story, especially after the armistice in November of that year. The war story was likely more contagious than the flu story.
Another reason is that epidemiology was only in its infancy then. Outbreaks were not as forecastable, and the public did not fully believe experts’ advice, with people’s adherence to social-distancing measures “sloppy”. Moreover, it was generally believed that economic crises were banking crises, and there was no banking crisis in the US, where the Federal Reserve System, established just a few years earlier, in 1913, was widely heralded as eliminating that risk.
But perhaps the most important reason the financial narrative was muted during the 1918 influenza epidemic is that far fewer people owned stocks a century ago, and saving for retirement was not the concern it is today, in part because people didn’t live as long and more routinely depended on family if they did.

But this is all eclecticism, avoiding the real issue of capitalism’s “overproduction” crisis, which did come home to roost – separately – ten years later in the Wall Street Crash demonstrating that it was not the pandemic which was responsible at all.
Attempts to blame the economic disaster on Covid-19 are nothing but confusion and excuse-making to cover up the real cause.  
This is the great collapse of capitalism, already started in the global bank failures of 2008 and unravelling since, even during the illusory BIG LIE “recovery” of the last decade, which was only ever a hollow fraud held up by insane money printing.
The world’s biggest Ponzi scheme (pyramid fraud racket), Quantitative Easing was a gigantic ever expanding bubble of valueless dollar credit always ready to burst and take down the world trading system.
Now it has.
And it will not be saved by the oodles of yet more valueless dollars pumped out.
Without a great revolutionary struggle it is a collapse that can only culminate in world war destruction to dwarf anything that has gone before, and far beyond this pandemic.
The first great crisis collapse of the imperialist monopoly capitalist epoch (see Lenin’s Imperialism) led to the Great War of 1914-18 in which some 22 million were killed as the great powers slogged it out for markets and colonial dominance with as many more wounded, often horribly disfigured or psychologically shattered, and yet more killed in the immediate civil war to suppress the Bolshevik revolution which it caused and which finally stopped the mechanised slaughter and shattering devastation across Europe.
World War Two killed 70 million and destroyed half a dozen major countries, and many smaller ones.
The non-stop warmongering, coup making and repression by the victorious US imperialism ever since, has butchered tens of millions more in “peacetime” wars and invasions, or through tinpot propped-up fascist stooges and state terror, along with the slow death by starvation, poverty, slavery and filthy living conditions of unknown millions more (many children) every year through its brutally maintained Third World exploitation.
Anyone who believes capitalism and its lying “democracy” rule, wants to save lives, needs their head examined.
All that lies ahead is far greater collapse and a great Depression deeper than seen in the 1930s, inevitably dragging the world into an international war to dwarf anything yet seen.
The ruling class knows what is coming.
It has deliberately started Third World War already in the local and regional wars and invasions “test run” begun with the nazi-NATO blitzkrieg of tiny Serbia (the nationalist remnant of the former Yugoslavian workers state) in 1998 and escalated into the full-on invasions of Iraq, and Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and constant continuing ground conflicts with “jihadists” and other rebelliousness throughout Africa and the Middle East, butchering, torturing and maiming many hundreds of thousands of civilians and local resistance.
All that has been warming the world up and preparing it for the much greater destruction to come once the real antagonisms in the system, between the great monopoly capitalist blocs (Europe, Japan, the US Empire, and upcoming powers like India, Brazil etc) reach the final breaking point.   
It underlies the demented belligerence of the American Empire and its increasingly fascist bullying turn to world warmongering, from the New American Century aggression under George W Bush to the fascist irrationality of Trumpism, and its America First international hostility in all directions, but especially against the great European monopoly capitalist bloc.
Capitalism needs and wants such war devastation, as its “solution” to the disastrous paralysis the monopoly capitalist system has run into, the inevitable and unstoppable outcome of the “over-production” contradictions built into production for private profit (see Marx, Lenin page 6) and manifest in deepening cutthroat trade war over decades.
That is how it can “cull” the world of the great surplus capital mountains which have clogged its system and the surplus workers too, and at the same time “take down” its rivals.
In that light, not from some doomy Cassandra mythological pessimism, but thrown by objectively analysed Marxist perspectives, the prevarication and stupidity of the pandemic begin to look a lot more sinister, with an obvious international trade war purpose.
There is no need for all-out conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet, to see that the pandemic is being used deliberately and consciously to ramp up the trade war, class war and international conflict, the major monopoly powers ready to impose brutal consequences on everyone else in order to keep their economics afloat while driving others into destruction.
Of course, it is not ruled out that the virus may even have some deliberate origin as speculated, and there is no doubt massive resources have been sunk in to biological warfare ever since the US hunted down Japanese Second World War live-prisoner experimenters in the years after 1945, not to punish them but to extract their results for American use.
And the peculiar Covid mortality age profile is oddly useful for a “cull”.
But the risk of getting lost in such disputable conspiracy byways can only divert from  the broadest picture of the crisis itself which tells the story anyway of vicious and inhumane conflict. 
As much liberal handwringing has bemoaned, far from seeing the international cooperation obviously required to battle the disease, both in research, equipment provision and cross border coordination, the pandemic has seen every country out for itself, refusing aid, blocking exports and ramping up chauvinism.
The tone was set from the start when Trump’s White House shut down air travel to Europe, while exempting its little stooge “ally” Great Britain (albeit panicked into a reversal on that later).
Medically it made no sense to leave such a route open and passengers free to travel back to America; but as a trade war blow against the European monopoly bloc whose competition has been slaughtering American companies (and restricting its monopolies’ operations in Europe too) it made every sense.  
And trade war is exactly the guiding principle for all the subsequent policies, and most of all the great bailouts of mass credit and Quantitative Easing.
These are nothing to do with humanely salvaging the lives of each country’s population as the cynical and hypocritical frontmen for the ruling class pretend (grovellingly backed-up by an acquiescent Labourite and TUC and the deluded prattle of the Trots and revisionists that the ruling class has been “forced to move left”).
Far from sly propaganda flannel from the lying Tories that “look, this time it is not the banks but ordinary people who are being rescued”, it is precisely the great corporations and enterprises who benefit from the splurge of credit creation.
Funding the payrolls is intended to keep their profit structures intact and their finances afloat under siege conditions, paying out just enough to workers to hold any rebellious turmoil at bay, that could be triggered by immediate full-on desperation from immediate economic implosion.
Like a century of reformism before, this deliberately works on divide and rule principles, favouring the “labour aristocracy” of salaried workers while condemning the zero-hours and freelance “precariat” to a much delayed and more uncertain future, with claims for “holiday pay” held back to poverty levels and the state payouts for suspended “self-employed” workers tangled in bureaucracy, unavailable until June and uncertain anyway.
Tens, or hundreds of thousands will fall through the “net” so called, or face financial disaster as rent and other demands fall due, and more so as weeks stretch into months. 
And this goes hand in hand with the deliberate jingoistic atmosphere created already with Brexit or America First and wound up further now with “national unity to fight the virus” propaganda. 
The initial “let them die” response, may have been amended but only to preserve national workforces for competitive reasons.  
Each country is being set one against another.
While the detailed technicalities and consequences of how such gigantic splurges of credit and spending can be conjured out of thin air – and how long they can continue - is mindbendingly difficult to untangle, what is clear is that they are not holding up the international economy but favouring each at the expense of the rest.
In this round of money printing it is the handful of richest countries which have the financial clout to obtain such unprecedented credit on the markets or issue their own bonds and currency, most obviously US imperialism, with the staggering $2 trillion debt bailout signed off by Donald Trump to prop up US corporations, and significant amounts from countries like Germany and the UK for their own economies.
But weaker economies like Italy and Spain, Greece and others on the periphery of the European Union are limited in the amount of government bonds they can sell, without their effective interest rates soaring to unsustainable levels.
These brutal trade war pressures are now threatening to tear the European Union apart as the national monopoly interests of each bourgeoisie override the common alliance, and the more powerful northern economies prepare to ditch the southern countries, or force them to bear a deeper burden, a more extended version of the post-2008 credit failures and their cost forced onto Europe by US financial bullying then:

The twin health-economic emergency is by far the worst crisis Europe has had to face since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957: worse than the oil shock of the mid-1970s, worse than the banking meltdown of 2008.
If ever there was a time for the EU to act as one, for the richer countries to show solidarity with those less fortunate, then this is it. Yet when Italy pleaded for fellow countries to send it medical equipment such as masks, France and Germany not only failed to respond, they placed export bans (since lifted) on the export of the kit Italian hospitals were crying out for. In the end it was left to China to show EU how to respond to a country in dire need.
Another problem for Italy is that because of its slow growth and high levels of public debt it has to pay a higher rate of interest on the money the government borrows than is the case for Germany and, when the hospitals in the cities of Lombardy started to fill up with Covid-19 cases, this gap – or spread – started to widen. It was therefore deeply unhelpful for Christine Lagarde, the president of the ECB, to say that it was not the job of her institution to “close bond spreads”.
Lagarde, to her credit, quickly recanted and the ECB is now doing its utmost to help Italy and the wider eurozone economy. But the crisis has highlighted the weaknesses of the eurozone: the lack of coordination between monetary policy run by the ECB from Frankfurt and fiscal policy under the control of member states; the lack of a sizeable, single budget; the absence of financial tools that would make a collective approach easier.
Last week’s virtual meeting of EU leaders was supposed to come up with a joint approach to the crisis but was instead a complete car crash. One group of countries – including Italy, Spain and France – wanted the creation of corona bonds, which would be issued collectively by all eurozone countries.
The thinking behind a corona bond is simple. By pooling risk, hard-pressed countries such as Italy and Spain would benefit from the reputation for financial probity of countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Of the money raised, the lion’s share would go to the countries at greatest need and at lower rates of interest than they would have to pay if they were issuing their own national bonds.
Yet even in these quite exceptional circumstances, corona bonds proved to be a non-starter. Germany thought Italy should ask for assistance through the European Stability Mechanism, where the money comes with strings attached. Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, said under no circumstances would he agree to common bonds. For Germany, the Netherlands and a number of other northern European eurozone members, it is a question of moral hazard: the countries that are running big budget deficits will never change their ways if they think they can always borrow on the cheap.
The Italians and the Spanish also dug their heels in, preferring for the meeting to end with no agreement rather than accept the stigma of conditionality. So, in time-honoured fashion, the can was kicked down the road, with eurozone finance ministers given a couple of weeks to come up with something.
One possible solution would be to get round the moral hazard problem by making the corona bonds a one-off solution to a quite exceptional crisis. If, as is possible, the emergency is relatively short-lived, the Germans and the Dutch ought to be able to support the idea of corona bonds are for 2020 only.
This is not just about providing a lifeline to Italy, important though that is. Nor is it simply about avoiding the meltdown of already shaky Italian banks, which would have ripple effects across the eurozone. It is about political legitimacy and whether the EU goes forward or backwards.
.. The message being sent out is that Europe is a project for the good times and that when the going gets tough people can only really rely on their own government and the nation state.

The message is much more profound and basic than this petty bourgeois “analysis” from the Guardian’s Larry Elliot and its jingoistic conclusion about “people and their own government”, making clear the chauvinist essence of the Brexit line he has always supported (along with half the class-collaborating fake-“left” from the SWP and the Corbynites to the revolution-avoiding Stalinist CPGB-ML now wallowing in their own red-white-and-blue “Workers Party of Britain” national-socialism).
It is capitalism’s historically evolved nation state structure built around the “free market” and private ownership of the means of production which has run into the buffers, historically outdated, outmoded and capable only of dragging the world into the most destructive inter-imperialist conflict ever seen.
And that applies not just to Europe, but the entire world.
Complex as the financial bailouts are to comprehend, the core aspect is that their purpose is aggressive conflict, each of the major powers hoping to sustain its own industries in the teeth of the greatest catastrophic collapse ever, hoping it can ride out the disaster while others are bankrupted.
This is the next stage of the Third World War with the biggest power, the US Empire obviously in top position, pouring out dollars on a mindboggling scale to bully and intimidate.
But it is a desperate gamble.
There is a reason the ruling class imposes austerity and “deficit cutting”.
Such huge money printing can only be massively inflationary (on top of colossal inflation already in the system) and will bring even closer the total collapse of the dollar as long discussed by Marxist science (without sufficient information to make precise predictions).
The US Empire might try to escape by issuing some kind of New Dollar, reneging on all existing dollar holdings and debt as the expense of the entire world as previously speculated in the EPSR.
But such a move sets it even more against the entire bankrupted world, already seething with hatred and rebellion, (mostly in the crude but persistent “jihadist” form but spreading constantly in multiple forms).
It more sharply than ever exposes the gigantic fraud of an “international community”, a “United Nations” living by the “rule of law” and “democracy” and forging a new world of “peace and ever growing prosperity through enterprise and competition now that communism is dead” etc etc.
Just the opposite, the dog-eat-dog law of the jungle prevails ever more viciously:

The U.S. has bought out a large shipment of Chinese-made face masks originally bound for France right before they were shipped off from airports in China, according to French government officials.
“A regional president explained to us that his order for masks had been bitten at the airport itself by the Americans, who paid three times the price, in cash. It is pretty incredible,” Renaud Muselier, the president of the Provences-Alpes-Cotes d’Azur region, told an interview with BFMTV.
Jean Rottner, the president of the Grand-Est region and an emergency room doctor also has said that the Chinese-made masks had been purchased for two or three times more.
He blamed the U.S. intervention for the mask shortage his region had to face.
“Indeed, on the tarmac, the Americans take out the cash for orders we have placed,” he has said.

It is astonishing too to see the US relying on Chinese production just as it is ramping up international hate campaigning against Beijing, attempting to blame it for the pandemic and intensifying trade war.
From the other side such incidents could be argued as weaknesses too in China’s overall approach and its use of capitalist methods in the economy with attitudes to match, constantly regenerated because of it.
But it could also be argued that China as a workers state is not beholden to any particular part of imperialism. 
If such incidents are a flaw it would still be a minor black mark on idealistic “moral grounds” against the actual record of the country’s stunning demonstration of the advantages of a planned economy in handling the initial virus outbreak and now continuing to keep it from recurring.
And it would have to be set against the massive international aid effort made by Beijing in offering help in supplies and medical personnel to various countries in the world such as hard-pressed Serbia, Spain and Italy, even while its own problems and needs continue.
It is a complete contrast to the vile hate-filled actions of Washington’s foul regime against Iran and others with anti-imperialist form, using ramped up fascist lie campaigns to justify vicious siege conditions which are costing thousands of lives as urgent humanitarian supplies are cut off:

Cuba has slammed the US’ “criminal blockade” of the country after the embargo stood in the way of the delivery of Covid-19 test kits and ventilators donated by Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma.
“The criminal blockade of the imperial government violates the human rights of the Cuban people,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted on Wednesday.
Cuba’s envoy to Beijing, Carlos Miguel Pereira, explained that an American firm was hired to deliver medical goods necessary to fight Covid-19, which were donated by a fund run by Jack Ma, Chinese philanthropist and owner of e-commerce giant Alibaba. However, the firm refused to deliver the shipment “at the last minute,” Pereira said.
According to the Xinhua News Agency, the company had specifically worried about the possibility of violating the 1995 US Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened sanctions against Cuba.
Cuba has 212 confirmed Covid-19 cases, with six deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Ma announced last month that his foundation would donate emergency medical supplies to Cuba and 23 other Caribbean and South American nations. The donation was said to include 2 million masks, 400,000 test kits, and 104 ventilators.

US President Donald Trump has announced a massive naval deployment in the Caribbean to prevent drug cartels from ‘exploiting’ the Covid-19 pandemic, with the military singling out Venezuela as a major threat to America.
“We must not let the drug cartels exploit the pandemic to threaten American lives,” Trump said at the outset of what was scheduled to be a daily Covid-19 task force press conference.
Raising the specter of a national security threat, the US military officials warned Americans of a growing menace from “criminals, terrorists and other malign actors,” but called out only Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by name.
“The Venezuelan people continue to suffer tremendously due to Maduro and his criminal control over the country, and drug traffickers are seizing on this lawlessness,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Also present for the announcement was General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who declared three wars in a single breath – on the coronavirus pandemic, terrorists and drug cartels – distracting from the fast-accelerating health crisis gripping the country.
Attorney General William Barr was on hand as well, to announce the action. The Department of Justice indicted Maduro on “narco-terrorism” charges last week, accusing the socialist leader of conspiring with Colombian militants to “flood” the United States with cocaine. Apparently short on evidence, however, the State Department on the same day issued a $15 million reward for any “information related to” the Venezuelan president.
In addition to Maduro, the US accused 14 other current and former Venezuelan officials for their alleged roles in the drug trafficking conspiracy, though Washington has yet to offer up evidence to support any of the charges.
While Esper declined to say how long the mission would last, the Caribbean deployment will involve several Navy destroyers and other warships, Air Force surveillance craft and some 10 Coast Guard cutter vessels, which Trump said would double US drug interdiction efforts in the region.
Seemingly thrilled about the prospect of a Manuel Noriega redux – the Panamanian leader charged with drug trafficking in the 1980s and later ousted from power in a US invasion – Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) taunted Maduro, who he said would not find the American military presence near his borders “comforting.”
The change of strategy comes after more than a year of efforts to remove Maduro from office, imposing a raft of crippling sanctions targeting the country’s vital petroleum sector, as well as supporting self-declared “interim president” and opposition figurehead Juan Guaido, whose attempted military coup last April fizzled out. 
Seeing that Guaido was unlikely to seize the reins of power anytime soon, the US State Department called on the politician to renounce his claim to the presidency on Tuesday, instead asking him to take part in a “transition framework” under which Guaido and Maduro would share power until new elections could be arranged.
Caracas swiftly rejected the “pseudo-interventionist proposal” as ridiculous, insisting it would not accept “tutelage from any foreign government.”

This dirty Nazi provocation, simply using Covid as an excuse but planned and set in train long before, makes clear the new norm of deranged fascist aggression for imperialism as its system slides into total paralysed chaos and breakdown, not from the pandemic but its own intractable contradictions.
And it will make the example of China’s workers state increasingly attractive to the working class worldwide, even with its yet revisionist leadership.
Philosophically this has been eating away at the whole of the Western “democracy” ideological fraud as the efficiency, confident organisation and humanity of the Chinese actions to control the virus have been more and more starkly contrasted to anarchic chaos in the West whose relentless exploitation, slump cuts and profiteering have hollowed out any capacity to handle the desperate medical crisis, even it really wanted too.
Particularly in private profit America, where Covid patients have already died after being turned away from hospitals because they have no insurance, but everywhere else too, it is the self-seeking, “every man for himself” tread-on-the-face competition and antagonism of its society which blocks a sensible response to the crisis and sees hysteria, scapegoating and spivvery rampant.
A deluge of confusion mongering and sour-grapes obfuscation has poured out in the West, not least from the ranks of the poisonous Trotskyists, filled with hatred for the authority of the dictatorship of the proletariat to belittle and talk down China’s example.
“Of course you could never do this in the West because their’s is an authoritarian society with constant surveillance” is the commonest thread (as if universal database surveillance by the Amazons and Facebooks did not exist already and neither the massive state monitoring of all communications etc (and via “backdoors” into the Internet companies’ software) by the $billions cost US National Security Agency and stooge Britain’s satellite division, GCHQ, as well as the spy agencies of MI6, MI5, police infiltrations into every minor protest group, let alone the “left”, and even the official if unwilling recruitment of all teachers and university lecturers via such forced censorship and monitoring as the “Prevent” programme, and even communities encouraged to become snitches on their neighbours as seen again with Covid).   And hidden in this petty bourgeois fantasy of some supposed “liberal democracy” road forwards of individual “freedom”, is the deep seated fear and panic of the comfortably complacent that it might be necessary to submit to a common collective purpose in order to transform the world and end this horrific and rapidly degenerating fascist imperialism.
So the liberals and the fake-“left” rail against the alleged “totalitarianism” of China and communism in general, still fooling the working class with the centuries long pretence that bourgeois democracy is for real instead of explaining that it is now and has only ever been a cover for the brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and one which is ever more threadbare as the ruling class is forced to turn to outright brute force to hold onto its sweet life of insane wealth and power.
Of course China is “totalitarian” if by that is meant, a dictatorship. 
But such descriptions convey nothing if the class content is not analysed and made clear, the aspect always fudged over and ignored by Western ideological confusion mongering.
China has proletarian rule, established after a 30 year campaign of conscious Marxist revolution (itself with a highly disciplined party leadership) to overturn and end for good the domination of past class society, feudal remnants and bourgeois capitalist exploitation (still persisting in exile Taiwan as an anti-communist stooge outpost for Western imperialism).
And such a proletarian dictatorship is a vastly different thing to the fascist regimes run and sustained by Western imperialism, using the foulest torture and butchery to terrorise and hold in thrall their populations in order to continue the slave and wage slave exploitation by which the imperialist ruling class holds and extends its privilege and wealth.
A workers state is the opposite, the means by which the working class can take and crucially hold power, against the domination and fascist colonialism of imperialism which is dragging the world to destruction and against all the remnants of domestic counter-revolutionary disruption and nonstop outside subversion which obviously is always trying to restore capitalist rule.
Its power and discipline is accepted by the great majority (even when they sometimes infringe its rules), knowing that its purpose is to develop society and take it forwards with ever greater participation by all as they become more and more educated and mature in Marxist understanding. 
It is a path of real democracy, which in a dialectical contradiction, is itself less and less necessary as more and more of the population becomes self disciplined and aware of necessity (such as accepting the lockdown)).
The calm responses have hugely undermined bourgeois reaction and its echo on the fake-“left” from the poisonously anti-communist Trots (who go along with every counter-revolutionary stunt from Hungary 1956, the 1968 Prague Spring and the bogus “trade union” Solidarnosc revolt in Poland which went on to create the current ultra-reactionary restorationist government) which constantly tries to paint China as a “horrible nightmare regime of repression and torture”. 
The Trots and near Trots like the Weekly Worker are still at it, swallowing the demented Trumpite line that “China is to blame” in their latest bilious output (even as they “balance” their comments with some uncontentious obligatory lashes at Trump, Boris and Nigel Farage for their “racism”).

it is all too obvious that the highly educated, highly intelligent, medical and scientific advisors that governments employ would have been collating the latest epidemiological studies and drawing on the best minds in the field. Regular warnings would have landed on the desks of their masters. Contingency plans would not have been lacking either. Indeed, it is surely the case that wargaming simulation exercises are organised on a regular basis involving all the relevant arms of the state.
So, given the tardy response to Covid-19, the visible lack of preparation, the running down of health services, the shortage of acute hospital beds and lack of protective wear, one thing above all is abundantly clear: governments criminally ignored their medical and scientific advisors.
How to explain this astonishing complacency? It is clear that governments in the US, China, the UK, etc, are committed to serving the interests of capital accumulation ... and, therefore the billionaires and the multibillionaires.
Frankly, Xi, Trump and Johnson deserve to go on trial. Though we programmatically oppose capital punishment as a matter of principle, perhaps an exception should be made in such a case. I, personally, would advocate a firing squad.
Covid-19 could have been stopped in its tracks months ago, in December or January. It is now far more difficult.

It is not remotely clear that the virus could have been “stopped in its tracks” at that point. 
But it is obvious that in China it was stopped, rapidly and efficiently, with a full provision of organised food deliveries for the quarantined, health checks and necessities in the 11 million strong Wuhan city and the wider province, (and elsewhere in China too) whatever initial mistakes might have been made. 
It did not prioritise the accumulation of capital.
If there was an initial bureaucratic woodenness and uncertainty it was perhaps tempered with some understandable caution early on about what was actually happening in an outbreak of a then unknown disease.
China then also mobilised fast and warned the world quickly, supplied it with the genetic sequences to allow vaccine development and has since sent out aid and support (EPSR last issue).
And for China this outbreak was truly “unprecedented”, unlike for the rest of the world, continuing to excuse itself that “we have not seen this before”, when China had already shown the way. 
But the facts do not get in the way of the odious ordure poured out by the addled egg brains of the Trot middle class, poisoned with anti-communism and perhaps more than a smidgeon of outright racism as they delicately hold their noses at the traditions of this 3000 year old culture. It would not be the first time:

China has been reporting that it is now on top of the infection. Internal cases have been dramatically reduced and new cases are coming from Chinese citizens returning from abroad. This has brought praise from the World Health Organisation. Not that China is above criticism. The outbreak began in the filthy Wuhan market: full of wet fish, caged animals and all manner of jungle meat.

EEuugh!!! So different to the Brie and Bordeaux the CPGBers like to see the supermarket shelves stocked high with “for the working class” (see EPSR 891 18-02-97 for example).
All that can be got back it seems if only the workers -  

insist that the capitalist class, not the working class, pays for this crisis. Profiteering must be subject to brutal levels of taxation. Speculators too. Only possible though by facilitating general access to the computer records of businesses. Secrecy and offshoring profits must be ended. Tax havens - not least the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands - must be abolished. Capitalists must be forced to pay their taxes.

Perhaps we could also “insist” that the virus stop infecting people too???? It would be about as realistic.
Not a mention of course of the Catastrophe which makes all such pie-in-the-sky even more of a reformist evasion than it has ever been, nor of the only possible path forwards, defeat and setback for imperialism’s world bullying and terrorising exploitation, and the development of revolutionary leadership for the inevitable turmoil growing everywhere to take the masses forwards to the conscious class war overturn of the whole stinking festering system.  
Meanwhile, as much analysed by the EPSR there remains the great question of revisionist leadership and its errors, with the need for a constant polemical struggle to push forwards and clarify perspectives and most of all to restore the Leninist fundamentals of revolutionary transformation of the world as the central aspect of understanding.  
Despite the brilliant lessons in organisation and social collective effort being delivered with the pandemic, Beijing still is not delivering any great understanding of the great economic crisis collapse which is shattering the world.
Nor does it explain – proudly – the importance of its own dictatorship of the proletariat. 
Nor does it constantly warn the working class of the need to maintain revolutionary perspectives in all the world’s struggles.
But this unfolding disaster demonstrates more clearly than ever that capitalism has to go, possible only by total class war revolution to overturn its degeneracy, callousness, grotesque cynicism and monstrous hypocrisy. 
Build Leninism
Alan Scott

E P S R BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

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