The article which follows comes from the November Annual General Meeting of our Italian affiliate, the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista). It reiterates what all the affiliates of the Internationalist Communist Tendency have said from the beginning of this pandemic; that the virus is not only the result of developments within capitalism but that the capitalists, by putting profits before people’s lives, have also vastly increased the death rate.
Ever since the capitalist mode of production came into the world, the bourgeoisie has always oscillated between two "visions" on how to manage the workforce and get it to submit to working for a wage, in other words, that of Malthus or De Mandeville. Either by the threat of starvation, but with the risk of sudden outbursts of anger, controllable with open violence, or through a "compassionate" management of hunger, which convinces, so to speak, workers to suffer exploitation and domination by the employers.
It seemed unlikely but it happened. On 19 December, Gabriel Boric, the centre-left candidate for the Chilean presidential elections, beat his opponent, the ultra-reactionary right-winger, José Antonio Kast. It was probably also the fear that the latter – openly nostalgic for the “good old days” of the Pinochet dictatorship – would become president, which prompted a part of the electorate to go and vote, lowering the number of abstentions to 44%, when normally it is around, or well above, fifty percent.