Today is Saturday, in our Telegram channel we have not even finished our daily exhaustive “combing” of the news of the press of the five continents. And yet… the contradictions of the system which brutally portray the historical moment we are living in, emerge in the journalistic notes themselves.
Social morality and the propaganda machine combine and feed each other in a game of hypocrisy and barbarism. This week the media reaction to a slap at the Oscars, the silences of feminism over Ukraine, the claims of European farmers or the drifts of the anti-war movement in Russia, made it clear to us: nothing but inhumanity and decadence can be expected from the ruling class nor the petty bourgeoisie.
“Food security” is moving to the forefront of the priorities of European states. The agrarian war economy that shaped the EU in the Cold War is back on the immediate agenda. Far beyond sunflower and grains, globally there will come a famine and a new international division of agri-food production; and in Europe a regression of social relations in the countryside and a new push towards the most harmful elements of the agri-food industry. Agri-food production is on the way to becoming war production.
While the war in Ukraine occupied all the media attention this week, a whole series of news stories that we cannot overlook slipped off the front pages. We list headlines with brief commentary.
Chips are in short supply. Souring the hopes for improvement heralded a few months ago, the industrial world is still in turmoil due to a lack of components. Imperialist squabbles are aggravating the situation and driving the militarization of chip production.
Peak Covid deaths: The Spanish government reported on February 1st 408 Covid deaths, a number not seen since March of last year. In France there were 357. The UK broke the record for the year with 1,121 deaths. In Argentina 240. And in the USA the average number of deaths continues to hover around 2,500 per day. And yet, the worldwide news is the end of the Covid restrictions following Denmark and Norway’s examples, where, by the way, cases are multiplying.
It is expected that 65% to 70% of the world’s population will be crowded into cities by 2050. The news warns about the urban population of tropical countries literally dying of heat exhaustion in their cities, while there is no week in which images and videos of some new Chinese ghost city -product of large-scale real estate speculation- fail to show up in the international media.
Media around the world spoke this weekend of the tornadoes in the U.S. and their impact on a candle factory in Kentucky, an Amazon distribution center and hundreds of razed homes. The White House called for investigating whether the disaster is related to climate change. But the cause of the human disaster is much simpler: precarious workforces and bonded laborers who can’t walk off the job even in the middle of a natural disaster as well as wooden houses unable to withstand storms and freezing temperatures.
Environmentalism is beginning to be refined and distilled as a state ideology beyond the pressing need to impose the Green Deal. This trend goes beyond propaganda. It constrains scientific development and paves the way for a brutal acceleration of poverty imposed on the working class.
The Anglo-Saxon press keeps the origin of Covid’s virus -SARS-CoV-2- as an open question. Scientists however realized long ago that the theory of “escape from the laboratory” has no material basis. The theory of animal origin, defended in the WHO report, strengthens and, far from excusing Chinese capitalism, reveals its most anti-human contradictions… and those of capitalism in general.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery and purification of insulin, a natural hormone crucial for treating the growing epidemic of diabetes and on which, in theory, there has been no patent attached for decades. However, the world’s insulin production is still monopolized by a handful of companies in Europe and the U.S., which sell it at astronomical prices. The WHO has described this situation as a “catastrophic moral failure” and it certainly is, but how did this happen, and more importantly, how do we get out of it?
Right now there are over 7.4 billion tons of plastic on the planet and it is estimated that by 2050 there will be 40 billion tons. In 2010 alone between 5 and 13 million tons of plastic wound up in the seas and oceans. The EU insists on selling us a “circular solution” and the press reassures us with miraculous technologies and bacteria. But the problem of plastic and its pollution is cumulative… and it is accelerating further with the Green Deal. The causes are not to be sought in the technology or processes themselves, but in the very heart of the capitalist system.
The industrial development of antibiotics is often presented as one of the last great contributions of capitalism to human development. It was so, but fraught with contradictions from the very beginning. Antibiotics were industrialized for war and were the basis on which the great global pharmaceutical monopolies were built. All in all a breakthrough for the species. But the triumph against bacterial infections is a race against the clock and is being lost. The reason? Developing up-to-date antibiotics is not attractive enough for big capital.
A statistical study conducted at Princeton University that uses the contents of 14 million books in English, German and Spanish as its source material has just been published. The study spotted verbal patterns typical of each language which indicated “cognitive distortions” associated with depression, anxiety and pathological pessimism. The researchers’ hypothesis is that this degeneration of written language reflects how “entire societies may become more or less depressed over time.” They are not misguided.”
China is getting ahead of the U.S. in the quantum race. Last week, it announced beating Google’s most advanced quantum computer. Meanwhile, IBM began installing a major quantum computer development project in Germany, announced to great fanfare by the German government, which it claims will generate €75 billion of “value.” The imperialist conflict is being played out in several fields at once. Information technologies and in particular the quantum race are among the main ones.
It is well known, and this is stated in all official scientific reports, that climate change increases the risk of extreme weather events. However, this is something very different from such events necessarily translating into death and destruction of entire villages as we have seen in Europe or massive fires as we are seeing in the USA. If this has been the case, it is because states are not fighting against climate change and its impacts on populations, but for the Green Deal, that is, for subordinating this goal to the recovery of capital’s profits by extracting income en masse from the workers.
Climate change exists and has been caused by capitalism’s inability to generate real human development. The Green Deal, on the other hand, is a direct and immediate attack on living and working conditions whose goal is not to solve climate change but rather to revive an ailing global capital.
Chips are in short supply. The production chains of the semiconductor sector, have been in crisis for several months. Industrial branches that depend on electronic components – 60% of all factories in some French regions, for example- report that they are suffering from critical shortages and automotive production lines are forced to slow down their production. Producers of microprocessor manufacturing machinery and other components are running out of capacity. And this situation will last for long.
This week, the WHO reported that global working hours keep lengthening and that excess working hours kill nearly three-quarters of a million people a year worldwide. Late last month it was also reported that excess mortality -not taking into account covid- has multiplied in recent decades in the US. The overall health of the population keeps getting worse as GDPs and accumulation keep growing, but this wasn’t always the case. There was a period when the health of the economy and the health of the general population were aligned, but that ended a century ago and there is no going back. What happened and what is left for us to do to reverse this trend?
The “No profit on the pandemic” campaign is spreading an important message throughout Europe: the intellectual property of pharmaceutical companies is a barrier in the way of halting Covid’s spread. Unfortunately, the reasoning is at the very least incomplete and the means unproductive. But it is worth a discussion.
Is it possible to open borders? Why do states say they can’t even absorb refugees?
Agricultural and food production has become dysfunctional even within the parameters of the system itself. If agriculture and the food sector are increasingly regulated, subsidized and financialized, it is simply because capitalism does not even work to meet social food needs and the system itself has to prop it up by accumulating band-aids… that do not fix its own underlying dynamics.