For the last 30 years or so we have heard little from those in power but the virtues and the inevitability of capitalism. Today we are witnessing in the face of the ever-spreading coronavirus epidemic a failure so total that literally it manifests itself in the lives of everyone on this earth.
The scale of the virus"s effects where no country is immune liquidates distance or lines of combat, metaphorical or otherwise.
Emblematic is the idea of Security! Bandied about by every political rogue and racist charlatan against immigrants, poisoning the mind and sowing division among workers, with the catch-cry of "Order and Discipline!"
Now where are they? And who really threatens us"
"Order and Security" Where?
The daily experience of everyone today delivers a different answer from in the past.
Hospitals without ventilators, territories without hospitals, lack of qualified medical health workers, doctors and nurses sent out without protective equipment, constrained to work twelve hours daily, compelled even to decide who to treat and who not.
While the ill are loaded on top of each other in emergency units, the bulk of the population search desperately for protection and testing equipment like tampons.
A nightmare of mounting horror capped by the living death of entrapment in what for many have become mortuaries, and thousands at home dying a terrifying end of solitude beyond even official record.
And at the same time millions of workers are still compelled to work in conditions of extreme vulnerability, the employers having once again, behind the weasel radical phrase-mongering of trade-union leaders like CGIL's Landini, imposed continuing production while grief and pain multiply.
This is no science fiction film! It is the daily scenario that invests Europe and America, the two most powerful and richest areas of the globe.
Nor is it the inevitable product and price of the pandemic. Rather, the pandemic's searing flash of light has exposed as never before the ugly, monstrous and sadistic face of bourgeois society behind the makeup and the expensive lace.
Now each of us can look at it as it is. A society constructed on the ruthless exploitation of work, on the sacking of the environment, on the anarchy of the profit-driven greed of the market, incapable of confronting a natural pandemic. that it above everything else has triggered!
That is the truth no-one can refute or hide with a cynical shrug. It is there before the eyes of the world to see. And everyone is compelled to look.
More than ever striking is the contrast between the potentialities of technology and science, and the misery of the reply that capitalism has to offer to humanity.
On the one hand artificial intelligence, robots ,the new frontiers of communication technology; on the other hand the inability to produce masks and ventilators in measured proportions to need and to distribute them with a plan of rational and efficient organisation.
The production companies are wordwide. But everywhere barriers between and within nations, regions, districts, even, to protect sanitary equipment for "their people" underline the fact that at the very moment when their historic failure to provide according to need is exposed, the criminal war of competition is unleashed.
Pharma companies and bio-tech outfits have grown as never before on the stock markets, notwithstanding the collapse in the last 30 years of Italy's public health system that they leeched off, along with the private hospitals under their control. And meanwhile the defence and aerospace industries flourish, blessed by governments and military bigwigs.
Marx said that the world of the bourgeoisie stood things on their head, and it was necessary to put those things back on their feet.
It was a simple and powerful metaphor for the task of a revolution - a democratic, internationalist socialist revolution - that fell to revolutionaries.The new international scenario opening before us re-proposes more sharply and concretely than ever the reasons in all their dramatic and compelling urgency.
We the human species are living through a terrifying moment in our history, a battle against the virus.
But if history teaches us one thing it is certainly that such experiences can often reawaken intelligences, passions, the thirst for clarity, answers and the will to action in pursuit of newly discovered fresh, redemptive and reawakened beliefs and values.
New generations look on the contemporary reality with a political consciousness, no doubt for many reasons confused but without the burden of defeat.
The fight to disperse the confusion and to forge, in collective action of thought and deed, a revolutionary socialist movement, is more than ever our task today.
