We are not interested here in entering into controversy "pro/against vaccination", a pretext exploited exclusively for squalid political ends, (especially in times of elections: and when are we not facing elections in the sacred régime of a democratic mechanism?). On the other hand, we know quite well that bourgeois science in all its variations, including pseudo-sciences, is subject to the laws of profit and competition, in a word to the capitalist economy: the excessive power of the pharmaceutical industry, the fact that research depends wholly on private and public financing, the drastic cuts to non-productive spending (including that on healthcare), total subjection to the conservation of the capitalist mode of production, etc. etc.
Don’t let us forget the authentic disaster of the headlong rush towards the use and abuse of antibiotics (with the result of “having to invent” increasingly powerful ones), the now forgotten tragedy of Thalidomide (the sedative that caused serious malformation of the limbs in over ten thousand children), the obscure episode of Cronassial (the “miracle drug” based on bovine brain tissue, amongst the most widely sold in Italy, which before being taken off the market because of suspected severe side effects, partly following the outbreak of the so-called “mad cow” epidemic, counted a celebrated Nobel prize-winner amongst its sponsors), the so-called “opioid crisis” (which accounted for over half a million deaths in twenty years and because of which the now celebrated Johnson & Johnson along with three other American pharmaceutical companies were obliged to “settle”)… Only a handful of “famous cases”, which should make us reflect and understand that we are far removed from the science of the human race, which is only possible in a classless society, in communism!
We are not even interested in entering into another argument, just as specious and “political” which, on opposing sides, means to set “individual freedom” against “the well-being of the community”: polemics that hypocritically conceal the exemplary fact that on the one hand the much celebrated “bourgeois individual” is entirely dependent on the economic-social dynamics of capitalist economy, like a simple cork caught up in the streaming river of Capital, and, on the other hand, in a society divided into classes there is no homogeneous “community” that does not suffer, day by day, minute by minute, the effects of social and cultural splits running through the whole of bourgeois society characterised by the war of all against all, by different and conflicting interests, by tensions impossible to resolve within the framework of the status quo. It is banal to recall that the clandestine “community” of tomato pickers labouring fifteen hours a day and sleeping in tin huts is not the same one of those who enjoy a steady job and a regular salary; that the “community” of those who from the very beginning of the pandemic were obliged to work in the authentic hotbeds of infection constituted by the factories or logistics warehouses is not the same as the one formed by those who can enjoy a solid pension and afford expensive medical fees… To sum up, we are not “all in the same boat”! What is “individual freedom” then, or “the well-being of the community” under the Iron Heel of Capital and its unavoidable laws, which are expressed and implemented through the State-gendarme?!
What interests us, instead, is to emphasize the increasingly evident dynamics to which we have returned several times in our press and which the “pandemic shock” has accelerated and aggravated: the ideological preparation for future war. To whose who are not completely blinded, deafened and stultified by the drums and bugles of the media, it must be more than evident that in the space of just over a year during which the pandemic roamed the world, one of the main preoccupations of the ruling class by means of its State/s was to impose on its citizens total obedience to any “health” measure (even the most irrational or the most approximative or contradictory), using a head-splitting campaign of denunciation and reporting intended to locate the “uncooperative”, “the different”, in the name of a “unity of intention” that does not exist and cannot exist in this society.
Right from the start of the establishment and progressive exasperation of the “state of emergency”, which continues to exist, the bourgeois State (in its national variations) has introduced increasingly repressive measures to “fight the virus” (!) and isolate all those who fail to comply with them (interpreted as: the non-patriots). An authentic field drill, formidable in its capillary nature, since it can count on all the means of communication, persuasion and control the ruling class has at its fingertips: the radio, television, the press, the social media, schools, churches of all faiths, the medical profession (as argumentative as ever within its own confines but united in the work of terrorism), the police and the army, day-to-day language, “common opinion”, “good sense”, the neighbours, the “man on the street”… Right up to the invention of the so-called Green Pass, initially conceived by the French government and gradually introduced into various other countries, which has provoked numerous, vociferous reactions of various types. In particular in Italy the Green Pass has been clamoured for by Confindustria, the Italian Manufacturers’ Association (with the establishment unions giving their consensus as long as it all happens according to… a law passed by the State!), which would like to see it strictly applied in all workplaces: i.e. with the threat of demotion, suspension without pay, or even layoff. Briefly, a little present for the bosses, who recur to it so that they are able to select and cut their labour force as they wish, at the same time causing useful divisions inside it, without having to always resort to “unpopular” shows of strength. What could one possibly fail to do in the name of the … “community” … the “civic sense of responsibility”!
What is all this if not an anticipation, a dress rehearsal (not so much planned and/or plotted around a table but the conditioned reflex of centuries-old experience of dominion), of what the bourgeois State will do when another “enemy” appears on the horizon and another war will threaten “our dear Fatherland”.
As we are constantly remarking, in all corners of the world there are increasing signs of an accumulation of explosive material destined for a new world conflagration: the persistent economic crisis, the growing inter-imperialist tensions, the constant regional wars in which the leading States are involved either directly or by proxy, the constant increase in military spending in the budgets of all countries. When the breaking point comes, the ideological-patriotic mobilization will be directed and enacted with bloodshed against all those who, instinctively or consciously, for ethical reasons or due to their political orientation, in various ways oppose the umpteenth bloodbath intended to destroy the excess that has been been produced and is engulfing the market (human beings included) and thus ensure a new cycle of brutal capitalist accumulation – that is, unless the level of destruction and self-destruction reached by the capitalist machinery has not caused “the common ruin of the contending classes” (Communist Party Manifesto, “Chap. I: Bourgeois and proletarians”).
We communists will (as from today) have to fight to spread, and when it becomes possible, to organise revolutionary defeatism, the only tool able to block or obstacle the war effort, in the arduous but increasingly necessary prospective of opening up another path for the tormented human race: the one finally leading to a classless society – to communism. In fact revolutionary defeatism is not generic “pacifism” nor an appeal to individual “conscientious objection”, but the difficult and patient work of reintroducing into the proletarian class a sense of the need and practice of a collective refusal to be subjected to the “superior demands of the Nation” both in the field of economics and work, and in that of military strategy, thus opposing its own conscious and organized strength to the power of the ruling class. And we shall be the “plague spreaders”, the “traitors of the Fatherland”, those “in the pay of the enemy”, those who stand “against the community” , the adversaries of the “holy union of all, against the enemy”.
The national States are already taking steps in this direction. It is time to become aware of this and take the other path, starting right away to react in an organised way against the repressive, anti-proletarian measures implicit in the “state of emergency” - but above all working with devotion and passion to strengthen and root the revolutionary party internationally.
July-August 2021