Auteur/autrice : IoULeeM0n

Movement has by definition a non-linear nature. If this were not the case, it would necessarily tend inversely to linearity and therefore to the abolition of movement as such. As movement does not imply the abolition of movement as a universal principle specific to matter, but the abolition of the matter which carries movement, that is to say its transformation since its abolition is impossible.

There is always movement, because there is always matter. But so that the movement does not stop, without which there would be no more matter expressing it, it must be the matter itself which stops, and as it cannot stop, it is transformed. Matter carries movement, is abolished by movement, is constituted by movement.

But nothing can constitute matter. Therefore is matter movement and movement matter.

What is at stake here is the question of quality. A line, even an ascending one, does not evolve, it carries a uniform direction. And who says uniform direction says absence of rupture. Even a movement uniformly experiencing breaks would, by definition, have no breaks due to its continuous dimension. It can therefore not exist.

Therefore, the break is not sufficient in itself to go beyond the principle of a linear movement.

If we take a uniform line, we have no breaks.

∕

If you accept the breaking principle and integrate it into the movement, then you have a leap, but only in terms of form. This jump only adjusts the direction, corrects it, it is a qualitative correction of the quantitative. The break applies to development, to its expression – but it is not development itself.

A break, a qualitative leap, is not enough to formulate quality.

A qualitative leap knows quality, it is not quality. A jump is not quality in itself.

__ ∕

Concretely, we can see in the development of the phenomena that there is advance, retreat, revolution, restoration, counter-restoration. The final transition to a higher stage is never unilateral. It is never linear.

It is never linear either with a single « jump », since there are backslides, a push forward, a counter-push, etc.

So there is not simply a « break » in the course of development. There is not a trend, then suddenly a qualitative acceleration breaking with this trend while continuing it. This can only be a summary description, losing the substance of quality.

What is at stake here is the contradiction between the new and the old. If we stop at it, we have the principle of rupture, in a way however formal.

This contradiction in fact also implies the contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. There is no abstract struggle between the new and the old, only a concrete struggle.

This contradiction in fact also implies the contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. There is no abstract struggle between the new and the old, only a concrete struggle.

The development being internal, the crisis does not occur from the outside, bringing about a transformation, but inside and it is carried by the inside itself; in fact it is the interior itself.

Any development of a phenomenon is a crisis carried by an internal tear. It is not the « form » of the phenomenon that is affected by the crisis, but the contradictory substance of the phenomenon that carries it.

There is therefore no linear movement, because the movement itself undergoes a change in nature by the change in the substance of what carries it.

The changing movement is the changing matter, the changing matter is the changing movement. Movement is transformation of matter and transformation of matter is transformation of movement.

Thus, there is a contradiction between the change in the nature of the movement and the change in the substance that carries it. The old wears the old movement, the new the new movement. But the old and the new are one and the same phenomenon, thus carrying so contradictory both the old and the new movements.

There are thus:

– contradiction within the phenomenon (or more adequately contradiction of the phenomenon), producing the movement;

– contradiction within the phenomenon, between the old and the new;

– contradiction between the new movement and the old, within the phenomenon;

– contradiction between the old movement and the new, within the phenomenon;

– contradiction between the movement and the phenomenon.

There is no negation of negation, because each stage constitutes a qualitatively new terrain. There is no linear movement, nothing is linear, everything comes under the non-linear character – including the non-linear character.

This is because the contradiction is always concrete – there is no movement in itself – it is the dignity of the real that prevails.

Viruses, the most common organisms on Earth, can only be understood in their relationship to living things; they are in fact not able to carry out metabolic processes, because they do not have any of the physiological mechanisms necessary for the implementation of these processes. They cannot reproduce or feed on their own.

A virus simply consists of a protein capsule protecting a DNA or RNA. It can only reproduce by means of a host, from which it diverts part of the operation for its own benefit. In doing so, it can also cause its own genetic code to intrude into that of its host.

Viruses, by their massive spread on the planet, are a key in biochemical exchanges; at least 8% of homo sapiens DNA is viral from its origin. The placenta owes its function to viral DNA.

This fact alone completely ruins bourgeois conceptions of heredity as « fixed », frozen, separated from reality, etc.

Viruses form, concretely, a pivot in the more complex development of matter.

This material always comes from the universal unity of the processes as well as from the qualitative character of the movement, while being carried out in a particular way and through quantity.

It must be understood that there is nothing existing in a separated way and that nothing is regressing in its development. What is called “disease” is therefore improperly defined, because the negative effects are completely secondary to the main aspect of the general process of complexification of matter which involves dialectical relationship.

Only a small minority of viruses are thus pathogenic to humans, even though they form a material aspect of the utmost importance. It is an expression of uneven development.

The types of viral populations in the ocean are at least 200,000 and it is predicted that they would be a billion. In the ocean, the number of viruses per milliliter of water is estimated to be between 10 exponent 6 and 10 exponent 8 (between one and one hundred million).

These viruses play an essential role in the ocean in their relationship to bacteria and living things; their role is still unknown, but it appears that they regulate the bacterial population, that of micro-algae and even living beings.

In other words, the decomposition resulting from the activity of viruses has a biogeochemical activity, playing on food in the oceans, the equilibria of the beings therein, neutralizing the development of bacteria, having an essential function in the presence of CO2 on Earth through activity in the carbon cycle (by capturing carbon to transform it as sediment in the seabed).

Many chemical elements are still involved here in the activity of viruses in the ocean (phosphorus, sulfur …) and research is new, dating from the very end of the 20th century and the very beginning of the 21st century.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that we were able to see viruses, using electron microscopes; it was not until the beginning of the 21st century that viruses, like the bacteria, appeared as an essential scientific field.

If this statement is true on the level of practical studies, dialectical materialism had already noted the nature of viruses in the early 1950s, within the framework of the socialist USSR led by Stalin, and had asked the question of their role in biogeochemical processes.

In a summary on dialectical materialism of 1953, Peter Belov, in his article On the primacy of matter and the secondary character of consciousness, says that:

“The data of advanced modern science as to the essence and origin of life can be briefly summarized as follows.

Living is not something random on earth. The totality of all living things on earth – the biosphere – is a natural product of the geochemical development of the planet’s surface.

The biosphere continues to play an essential and extremely important role in all the other geochemical processes of the earth’s crust, determining the nature of the rock formation, the formation of the soil, the composition of the atmosphere and in general the distribution of the chemical elements in the upper layers of the earth’s crust, hydrosphere, atmosphere.

“Living organisms, from a geochemical point of view, are not an accidental fact in the chemical mechanism of the earth’s crust; they constitute its most essential and inseparable part. They are inextricably linked to the inert matter of the earth’s crust, minerals and rocks … The great biologists have long been aware of the inextricable link that connects the body to its surrounding nature.” (V.I. Vernadsky, Essays on geochemistry, State Publishing House, 1927)

Living things are made up of the same chemical elements that make up the rest, the mineral part of nature.

The composition of a living body includes almost all of the chemical elements (including radioactive) in the periodic table, some largely, some in smaller proportions. But whatever the quantitative proportion of certain chemical elements in the composition of the protoplasm (their presence in organisms is only detected by spectral analysis), they however also play an important role in the life of the protein, their absence leads to death of the body.

Modern advanced natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology) have fully exposed the idealist theories of “eternity of life”, “panspermia”, etc. Life on earth is of terrestrial origin, the result of an extremely long natural synthesis of increasingly complex organic substances (…). The Living is inseparable from the conditions of its existence and can only be conceived as a product of the development of these conditions themselves.”

The question that inevitably arises here is that of placing the virus: is it an organism falling under living matter or is it inert matter?

Virologist Konstantin Sukhov rightly noted in 1950 in the journal Questions of philosophy that:

“The self-reproduction of viral particles marks their capacity to assimilate and is a quality that fundamentally distinguishes them from bodies of inanimate nature.

At the same time, due to the simplicity of their organization, viruses retain a number of properties which make them extremely close to molecular substances.

This includes their ability to crystallize and their chemical reactivity.

At this stage of the development of living matter, life turns out to be reversible, it can completely stop and resume depending on environmental conditions.”

This point of view is essential, because it poses the viruses “in the middle” of inert matter and living matter.

There are two opposing points of view here, indeed, in the socialist USSR at the time of Stalin, implying themselves a whole conception which, if it is wrong, shakes up the scientific perspective itself.

If we say that viruses come from inert matter or living matter, there is indeed a compulsory validation from a parallel point of view.

The question arises in the following way: either it is said that viruses are not alive, but by-products of life, that they are basic living forms but having degenerated and having lost everything except their DNA. This places them in a subordinate role, consequent to the development of living matter and bringing them back to inert matter.

Or, on the contrary, it is said that viruses are part of the process of life itself, that they are there from the start in this process.

The Soviet biochemist Alexandre Oparin (1894-1980) considered for example that this second conception was wrong, because it would bring to consider that viruses would be a “brick” of life, which would lead to a metaphysical conception of a “creator” at the origin of such a brick.

Oparin was head on against Vernadsky here. Oparin reasoned in terms of “primordial soup” where living matter is inert matter experiencing a leap, while conversely Vernadsky considered that the universe had always known an opposition between living matter and inert.

However, Vernadsky had still not resolved the question of viruses in 1938; he then formulated the problem as follows in Inert matter, living bodies and biosphere:

“We have never observed a spontaneous generation of a living organism from inert bodies: the principle of F. Redi (all life comes from life) is never violated.

The concept of inert (dead) and living natural bodies as distinct natural objects is an ancient concept, taught over the millennia – a concept of common sense. It cannot be doubted and is clearly intelligible to all.

After centuries of scientific work, there have been very few doubtful cases where one wonders whether a specific natural body should be considered as a living or inert body, or whether a given natural phenomenon is a manifestation of living or non-living processes.

The issue of viruses is one of those rare cases, and it is probably the most profound illustration of this.”

Here is the problem. Oparin is right to say that there cannot be an absolute border between living matter and inert matter: this would be an absolutist idealism. However, it follows from his reasoning that viruses would be a regression, but a regressive process is not possible, since it is opposed to the principle of the dialectical movement.

Vernadsky is thus right to see in viruses a theoretical problem, but he sees himself blocked by his positioning opposing unilaterally inert matter and living matter.

In fact, the answer is in the question and Mao Zedong’s teachings on dialectical materialism, his insights into movement and its nature, make it clear.

There are two aspects, which has been well seen. First, it is clear that living matter requires an internal process and that viruses do not have it.

Friedrich Engels tells us about living matter, in the Anti-Dühring, in 1878, that:

“Life is the mode of existence of albuminous bodies, and this mode of existence essentially consists in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituents of these bodies.

The term albuminous body is used here in the sense in which it is employed in modern chemistry, which includes under this name all bodies constituted similarly to ordinary white of egg, otherwise also known as protein substances (…).

Wherever we find life we find it associated with an albuminous body, and wherever we find an albuminous body not in process of dissolution, there also without exception we find phenomena of life.”

There are no vital phenomena relating to viruses. So it seems that viruses do not come from life, from living matter.

However, at the same time, viruses have DNA or RNA, which inert matter does not have. Viruses are capable of having a direct relationship with living matter, while inert matter has an indirect relationship.

This is where the key lies. Vernadsky is wrong to oppose living matter to inert matter, but Oparin is wrong to assimilate them by saying that one comes from the other. Indeed, by doing so, he himself opposes one to the other and returns to Vernadsky’s unilateral idealism.

The latter is moreover more materialist despite his idealism, because he recognizes the dignity of the real: in opposing in the past living matter to inert matter, he is wrong, but in opposing them today he is right because it allows us to understand their combination, their dialectical relationship in a whole which is the Biosphere.

By opposing one to the other, Oparin is materialist because he says that matter comes from matter, but he loses the dialectic because he separates living matter and inert manner unilaterally and therefore misses the leap made by matter.

His point of view is thus regressive compared to that of Vernadsky, because it breaks the unity of matter and arrives at an abstract schematism where inert matter would have remained after all “behind”.

Viruses are, in such a framework, the proof of the leap in matter and at the heart of the contradiction that this leap implies.

Viruses are not either inert matter or living matter, they represent the expression of uneven development in the leap of matter bringing about the existence of living matter.

Viruses are the nexus of the inert and the living, of the spread of the complexification of life (by the transmission of DNA) and of death (by diseases and bacteriophage activities, massive in the ocean).

Viruses are fixed, they do not change in size, and yet they can transform, recombine. They have genetic material but cannot reproduce on their own.

They have a form depending of mineralogy but are turned towards the living.

Viruses are the nexus of the relationship between life and death, and as such a key to understanding the development of living matter as we know it.

The “primordial soup” of which Oparin speaks cannot exist in the past only, such a reading is anti-dialectic.

In reality, there is no negation of the negation, a break rejecting the legacy of the past, and the soup still exists, having experienced qualitative leaps. Viruses are at the heart of the contradiction of this soup where living matter and “inert” matter both attract and repel each other, as opposites.

The emergence of a particular strain of coronavirus, never identified in humans, is no coincidence. It is a product – entirely new, a qualitative leap from the virus – of the collision between cities and countryside caused by the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

These cities and countryside are, moreover, themselves largely shaped by the CMP, which is true of the way of life of humanity in general. And all of this is happening on a planetary scale.

We should not therefore think that the health crisis comes from outside of humanity, from outside the CMP, on the contrary. It was born from within the CMP and from the world it formed in its image.

A world which is by no means finished, firm, stable, permanent … and which is collapsing under the blows of what is new, exponential, in rupture.

Capitalism is a mode of production now planetary

Capitalism is not only an economy, i.e. a particular distribution of property and a particular distribution of wealth. It is, more concretely, the way in which humanity socially finds the material means to exist and to develop.

It is a mode of production.

And having reached an immense development of the productive forces at the beginning of the 21st century, and being by nature universal, the CMP subjugates all planetary activities. Its consequences concern all aspects of life on Earth, all the time.

It was this historic situation that brought about the emergence of a new strain of coronavirus and gave it a global dimension.

It is this same historical situation that has brought global warming and the same goes for deforestation, the massive annihilation of wild animals, the massive use of animals in industry, the uncontrolled development of areas constantly expanding urban areas, etc.

The concrete origin of coronavirus disease 2019

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a direct result of the development of the CMP in China, a monopolist and bureaucratic development, with metropolises established in a short time and engulfing everything around them.

The city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, illustrates this. It had just under 1.5 million inhabitants in 1953, 2.2 million in the early 1970s. Then the restoration of capitalism in China brought about a complete change, transforming it into the megalopolis of central China.

The agglomeration had more than 4 million inhabitants in 1982, more than 8 million in 2000, practically 11 million in 2015. Wuhan integrates eight cities of significant importance in this agglomeration (Huangshi, Erzhou, Huanggang, Xiaogan, Xianning, Xiantao, Tianmen, Qianjiang).

This former French Factory is now even the Chinese model for urban development and is undergoing a massive operation to build road infrastructure (one metro line per year, 400 km high-speed commuter train, etc.).

This urban dimension is, however, only one aspect of the question. A third of the population still lives in the countryside, in an agglomeration where we find Carrefour, Auchan, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, KFC, etc.

Here we have an intermingling of cities, countryside, within the framework of an unbridled capitalist expansion.

The origin of the virus in the strict sense, it’s thus the massive urbanization of the area of Wuhan, with a use, for food, of animals both wild and from breeding, in a kind of general confusion where we no longer know what is cities, what is countryside.

This was the terrain, unnatural, favorable to the mutation of the virus, which passed from one species to another, then finally to the human species.

It is not an encounter with a disease not discovered so far – it is the confrontation of humanity with a disease resulting from a mutation, caused by the action of humanity itself.

The metropolis as the basis of the CMP

There is a Franco-Chinese « sustainable city » of 39 km² in Wuhan, a project set up during the presidency of François Hollande. 2018 was even « the Franco-Chinese year of the environment » and going to China on this occasion, Emmanuel Macron said the following:

« Urbanization is already a challenge for China and will be even more so tomorrow. France wishes to strengthen its partnerships in this area by developing the integrated offer that we have built for the sustainable city. »

This shows the convergence, on a world scale, of all the capitalist forces towards the strengthening of the metropolis. Today, the majority of humanity indeed lives in cities.

We should however more being talking of urban areas, as since the passage of the bourgeoisie in the reaction following its victory over feudalism, it is no longer able to create cities in the historical sense of the term, hence the great cultural interest for real cities in the strict sense (Paris, London, New York, Venice, Bruges, Amsterdam, Prague…), themselves also deeply disfigured by the CMP.

The metropolis with innumerable ramifications, despotic in its anonymity and entirely denatured, becomes the norm. It is the form most suited to the satisfaction of capitalist production and consumption, to the 24 hours a day of capitalism.

For our country, France, we can say that its symbol is the roundabout that dots the roads. We are there in the dynamics of the just-in-time, zero stock massively involving industrial zones in the countryside, in order to have an accelerated circulation and a better rotation of capital.

This leads to the destruction of nature and to the moral, cultural and psychological crushing of the workers. Karl Marx rightly speaks of :

“an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

The historical city, that of the bourgeoisie, involved culture, exchanges, meetings. This is incompatible with the CMP, which is tyrannical and requires everything to be an ever deeper, broader, more perfected, faster trading relationship.

The modern city is now a place to live in isolation, seeking to make the most of its accommodation, if possible by buying a home. Everything is far, farther and farther away, whether it’s leisure, the possibilities of playing sports, shopping, people you can meet.

Everything is subject to a commercial relationship, everything must go through the CMP.

The limited nature of CMP in the face of coronavirus disease 2019

The CMP has only one logic: its own development. It does not proceed by choice, but by necessity, since its very existence depends on an uninterrupted and enlarged development of capital. Its only horizon is himself.

The CMP is the first to “regret” the 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19), but at the same time if the same thing had to be done again, it would do it again. The CMP does not allow itself any retreat, any background analysis; it lives in the immediacy of its self-realization. It has no regard for itelf, being a system which is its own end in itself.

We can clearly see its limited character throughout the health crisis due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is new in its scale, and above all which is shocking because of its qualitative dimension. Researchers are overwhelmed, because the natural relationships between living things are upset and this causes health crises expressing a qualitative leap that exceeds them.

There has already been the emergence of the SARS-CoV virus through the masked palm civet and MERS-CoV through the dromedary. These jumps between species of virus, which are not found in a natural situation, become recurrent due to the situation imposed by the CMP.

For this reason, everyone has heard of HIV, Ebola, avian flu, swine flu. The so-called Spanish flu, which killed between 20 and 100 million people in 1918, is also of this type; cominh from an animal farm in the United States, it reflects the beginning of the generalization of the distorted relationship to life.

The CMP produces, by its action (and its inaction), destructive phenomena, born from the contradiction between it and life on Earth.

None of this, however, can be grasped by the CMP, which only identifies reality by means of statistics, « big data », quantitative data evaluation. The principle of qualitative development is foreign to the CMP.

Capitalism being not simply an « economy », but an unilateral mode of production, it responds to its own logic of accumulation and nothing else. It can only notice things, passively, remaining himself.

The CMP thus has an interest in having what it sees as potential natural resources, and therefore in preserving them – but on the other hand, it is obliged to integrate them, to quickly valorize them, to meet the needs of capital-based production and consumption.

The CMP also has every interest in ensuring that global warming does not cause massive unrest. However, at the same time, the CMP has its own priorities and considers that its own development takes precedence over any other consideration.

This is the reason why supporters of the CMP can indifferently say either that global warming does not count, or that capitalism must develop new markets to adapt. These are two pieces of the same coin consisting of the narrow character of the CMP.

The CMP collides with reality

The CMP has upset the whole natural relationship between life and its surroundings. Human labor had already caused upheavals, from agriculture and animal husbandry. With the development of the productive forces, however, the planet has changed entirely with the CMP.

Life concerned by the CMP was initially restricted, since there were only a handful of capitalist countries originally, along with the Netherlands and England, with underdeveloped productive forces.

Then followed a whole series of countries, like Belgium, France, Germany … and mainly the United States, with a material accumulation starting to be significant, while colonization upset the primitive economies all over the world.

There are economies which are not yet perfectly capitalist in the strict sense, but the CMP has fundamentally modified them in order to subordinate them. The situations of modern feudalism that exist in most countries of the world themselves fall within the framework of the CMP.

It is this modern feudalism that achieves deforestation in the Amazon, the massive use of fossil fuels in the Middle East, the cocoa monoculture in West Africa, that of palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia, etc.

The human way of life within the CMP has not changed qualitatively over the decades. It is quantitatively that it has deepened and generalized.

And the quantitative is transformed, at a moment, into qualitative.

The 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) reflects that the CMP is starting to reach its limit: it is starting to undermine the whole reality, at all levels. It is no longer a realizing force, but a force of destabilization, of disturbances, of destruction.

The CMP is reaching its limit

The more the CMP develops itself, the more it confronts its limit, its inability to bring about the enlarged reproduction of life without entering into an antagonistic contradiction with life itself.

As long as capital is in the hands of particular people, it will irrationally seek its enlarged reproduction and produce a forced systematization of the valuation of capital – that is to say, the use of what exists, as much as possible, to bring about capitalist production, capitalist consumption.

The destruction of all that is natural is inevitable for a mode of production whose function is the dispersed, disorderly, systematic accumulation and by ever more powerful cycles, by an ever more unified and violent capital.

The 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) shows that the transformation of reality by the CMP has reached a global dimension and that the threshold of rupture has been reached.

There were already many telltale signs. The CMP seeks to force the course of things, to ensure that everything fits perfectly into it, even if it means being violently distorted, crushed, reshaped.

The CMP already literally dynamites the natural functioning of things. It distorts everything that exists to insert it into the capitalist market. This is true for animals used in industry, which are genetically modified for food and the pet industry.

This is true for vegetation and wild life in general, whose richness, multiplicity, abundance… are considered hostile by the CMP, because they are carriers of quality, irreducible to a simple quantitative reading.

This is true for the human way of life; there is just the need to think of the consumption of meat, the massive use of sugar and stimulating products (caffeine, theine), the generalization of processed products, the proliferation of specific markets (halal, kosher, gluten-free, meat-like products, etc.).

And even if working conditions have improved, they involve a far greater human tension, as well as a profound deformation of the personality. Night work alone has expanded considerably, affecting more than 15% of workers in France, with dire consequences for health.

The CMP concretely tries to modify its own material base, in order to avoid reaching its own historical limit, and by doing so it reaches it.

Because the CMP thus comes into contradiction with its own material base to force its own development – reality becomes antagonistic to the CMP.

World health crisis and communist affirmation

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global crisis that does not come from outside of the CMP, but from it, and at the same time it expresses itself in it. Capitalist accumulation takes place in a concrete way and it is this process of accumulation which itself brings the crisis, produces the crisis, is the crisis itself.

The CMP sees reality here lurching under its feet. It is forced to back off.

And the CMP backing off is humanity backing off – placing itself at the heart of historical contradiction, as source and resolution.

It is indeed humanity that carries the CMP. What the CMP is going through, humanity is going through, just like what humanity is going through, the CMP is going through.

Humanity, prisoner of the CMP, of its mechanisms, of the ideology which ensues from it, is confronted with a brutal awareness: reality rebels against it.

The onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a crisis shaking the very foundations of human participation in the activities of the CMP.

Humanity, which is a part from nature, is forced to drop out of the CMP which becomes an obstacle to life itself.

It’s the end of a whole movement. Humanity has come out of nature to assert itself as a species, but it must return to it by bringing the achievements of its own journey. This corresponds to the principle of uneven development.

What is called History is human history in its separate course from the Biosphere, that is, from all of life on Earth as a unified system.

The end of History, the passage to Communism, is his return to the History of the Biosphere, bringing to it what was acquired during its uneven development.

Communist transformation affects the human being at its very bottom. It brings it back to nature, as a complex social being.

It is both a tearing, but also a reintegration into the general process of the Biosphere.

Communist objectives

Produced by the CMP, the health crisis will have repercussions in it, causing disorganization, slowdowns, inevitable bankruptcies. This reveals all this fragility of the CMP construction, which comes to its term.

The CMP will obviously desperately seek to get out of there, at the expense of the masses, who will be further exploited and alienated. It will also mean stepping up the march to war for the distribution of the world, with at its heart the confrontation between the hegemonic American imperialist superpower and China wishing to divide the world in its favor.

However, this will not be enough, the limit being reached, the tilting threshold being reached.

What matters substantially is that the limit of the CMP is capital itself, always more incapable of valuing itself in reality, all the more if it rebels openly.

The CMP finds itself in the impossible situation to perpetually seek to circumvent the downward trend of the rate of profit. It tries to escape an overproduction of goods by the lack of continuity in the consumption cycle, to avoid the overproduction of capital, in the absence of field to develop itself.

The health crisis precipitates it all the more in the failure of its self-enlargement.

The CMP is effectively disappearing in front of the historic qualitative leap: the transition to world unification of humanity under the aegis of the working class, the adoption of the communist position in relation to nature.

It clearly follows from this revolutionary reading of the 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) that the following tasks are on the agenda, falling under the general communist program for our entire era:

1. Replacement of state apparatus by the democratic power of the people;

2. Dismantling of metropolises;

3. Cessation as far as possible of any destructive relationship with life on Earth;

4. Socialization without compensation of all monopolies;

5. Establishment of a world socialist republic;

6. Conquest of space in order to spread there life, from the Biosphere.

We are entering the decisive era, that of the second wave of the world revolution. We will be on the front line to make our country the example to follow to meet the challenges of our time!

This task is inevitable historically, the communist victory is assured by definition.

Long live Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

People’s War for Communism!

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

March 2020

Since some years, Ajith is put forward as an intellectual by the Indian Maoists and the Maoist Communist Party of Italy. It is therefore very interesting to see what he has to say about the Covid-19 crisis, as its postmodern conception of the world can only appear in a more frankly manner. What we can see in its article Covid-19, its social roots are as important as the virus itself is indeed the expression of the negation of Dialectical Materialism.

Ajith doesn’t understand nothing about the principle of mode of production. So, he criticizes Capitalism under only one aspect, the one of health. Understanding that it’s not enough to appear as a Communist, he then salutes the article COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital published by Monthly Review.

This review is edited by a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and was co-founded b Paul M. Sweezy by Paul M. Sweezy, a professor of economics at Harvard acquiring a certain fame for Monopoly Capital (1966) written with Paul A. Baran. We are in the intellectual bourgeois environement of the universities.

Ajith belongs exactly to this approach and this is why he hails the article of Monthly review, which would “ scientifically” analyze the imperialist relations giving birth to the Corona pandemic. Ajith shows that he’s a total failure.

The article of Monthly review is typically petty bourgeois. We would need rules and regulations in the world, good rules and regulations, which capitalism is not able to obey. Ajith agrees. Both Monthly Review and Ajith are, because of this approach, unable to understand both the mutation of the virus and the animal question.

Monthly Review says the following, which is completely wrong:

“We need to retain the shock we received when we learned another SARS virus emerged out of its wildlife refugia and in a matter of eight weeks splattered itself across humanity (…).

Ecosystems in which such “wild” viruses were in part controlled by the complexities of the tropical forest are being drastically streamlined by capital-led deforestation and, at the other end of periurban development, by deficits in public health and environmental sanitation (…).

What were once local spillovers are now epidemics trawling their way through global webs of travel and trade. By this parallax effect—by a change in the environmental background alone—old standards such as Ebola, Zika, malaria, and yellow fever, evolving comparatively little, have all made sharp turns into regional threats. They have suddenly moved from spilling over into remote villagers now and again to infecting thousands in capital cities.”

Ajith agrees totally and says:

“The crux of this essay may be summarised thus: Viruses that had been largely contained through the complexities of the tropical forests have entered the mainstream through the deforestation caused by capital, and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation.

In short, the changes in livelihood conditions and environmental conditions of the vast majority, caused by globalisation and neo-liberal policies, lie at the root of the present tragedy. Its primary solution is the destruction of the imperialist system and the success of the Communist project.”

Let’s put aside the fact that for Ajith Communism is a “project” and that evil consists in “globalisation and neo-liberal policies”. This is even too petty-bourgeois to be mentioned and it shows a clear problem about the level of political economy in some part of the world.

Let’s see here a new thing, very important: the fact that the Covid-19 virus is not seen as a mutation. There would be a reservoir of pathogen viruses and the deforestation would bring them in contact to us. The industrial farms are the intermediary for the spread.

This is totally wrong. The virus didn’t come from the wildlife. It knew a mutation. It was in the wildlife but then it changed. And it changed through the animal farms. This is why Dialectical Materialism can only have the conclusion that we need a leap in agriculture and this means the dismissal of the animal farms.

Monthly Review has a “logical” conclusion and not a “dialectical”: we must go back in the past. It doesn’t see the leap of the virus, sop it can not see the leap necessary in agriculture. We read in the article of Monthly Review a typical peasant-populist argumentation:

“If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population center (…).

We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent. We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time.”

This means only going backward in capitalism: as capitalism, when developed, comes to interference with nature, then we should go in the past, when production didn’t not have this level of development at a planetary scale. This is totally reactionary.

What we see here is typically petty-bourgeois. Neither Monthly Review nor Ajith understand that it is the animal question which has been raised. Living at the expense of living beings is not only morally wrong, but practically a suicide. In the past, using meat has a sense as a local source of protein. But with an agriculture at the planetary scale, it is nonsense.

So,we don’t need to look at the past and try to make again a “local” production, an autonomous consumption, which is a reactionary dream, an anti-capitalist Romanticism. We need to look at the future and accept the leap which consists in the planetary agriculture, abolishing animal farms.

I The particular situation of North America in its relation to England

a) North America posed an historical problem to England, who had at first under-estimated the importance of the modernisations required to maintain its colonial and imperial domination on qualitatively more advanced economies than, for example, India’s. England’s failure led to the thirteen colonies’ independence and the formation of the United States. 61 years later, democratic-patriot rebellions almost costed England a second independence, on its Canadian territory this time.

b) England could relatively maintain its historical domination on Canada with an historical compromise due to the particular configuration of the property right, literally cutting the country in half. Canada didn’t exist in a unified way during the colonization process and the historical conditions of the part colonized by France were backward in comparison to England’s part. Thus, it is an unequal development that will shape Canada.

II The particular situation of French Canada

a) The french part of Canada, colonised under the aegis of the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France (also named Compagnie des Cent-Associés) has known the establishment of a feudal type regime. The lords had immediately put in place their parasite type domination, sitting down their monopolistic-bureaucratic position, with the help of the profits extracted from fur trade which the king of France gave them the monopoly of.

b) Serfdom and the seigniorial system were abolished in 1854, in words only because peasants had to buy back their liberty at a high price, which the majority couldn’t afford to, instead they started paying a regular rent. This situation lasted until 1935 and the Syndicat National du Rachat des Rentes Seigneuriales (National Syndicat for the Buying Back of Seignorial Rents).

III The dual development of English Canada

a) The English part of Canada has seen a large settlement colonization, on the basis of a qualified immigrated peasantry establishing farms. English capitalism, already strongly running, made Upper Canada its trade hub. What will become Ontario formed the starting point for the general development of the capitalist mode of production in Canada, formed by the reunion of Upper and Lower Canada with the other British colonies in North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

b) Capitalism which developed itself in the English part under English imperialism contained an essential contradiction: a contradiction between a free peasantry by definition producing a free capitalism and a bureaucratically formed bourgeoisie with the role of intermediate for English imperialism exporting its capital.

IV The establishment of Canada under the aegis of English Canada itself integrated in the device of English imperialism

a) Upper Canada’s preponderance rests uppon the fact that it forms the English stronghold, as opposed to a french Lower Canada, France having lost this zone after the seven years war (1756-1763). After that, there’s the fact that it forms the fallback base of the British loyalists fleeing the United-States who conquered its independence. Finally, its the material base of the victory over the American invasion of 1812.

b) The Canadian regime developed itself in multiple constitutions. The Act of Union (1840) served as a basis for the development of the Canadian ideology, because it seeks to “unite” “both” Canada in a Province of Canada, both having to equally share an unequal debt and a parliamentarian representation. It’s in 1867 that the Dominion of Canada came into existence as a confederation, with the British North America Act, which will little by little result in today’s Canada, with its actual sharing of provincial-federal powers, new provinces coming into existence overtime. It’s only in 1982, with the repatriation of the constitution, that the judicial sovereignty of Canada is fully recognized in its relation to the England and that its English-Canada national bourgeoisie has sort of “acquired” its political independence to the United Kingdom, however accompanying an ever increasing capital influx from the United-States.

V French Canada’s dialectical relation to English Canada

a) The national English Canadian bourgeoisie didn’t revolt against England’s comprador bourgeoisie. There has been a double development, principal aspect being the domination of the comprador bourgeoisie, in alliance with the national bourgeoisie placed in a subordinated role.

b) Canada isn’t born out of a bourgeois democratic regime. It is born out of the domination of an oligarchy itslef born out of the top-bottom capitalist contributions from English imperialism. However, this aspect is somewhat balanced by a strong bottom-up capitalism produced by the historically free English peasantry. This historical compromise was only possible due to the looting of Québec.

VI French Canada’s own contradictions

a) The feudal class in Lower Canada (Québec) was integrated, not toppled. Therefore there was no immediate democratic outcome in its countryside, only a gradual transfer of land monopoly from feudal lords to the big bureaucratic-capitalist land owners.

b) Lower Canada’s feudal class became totally useless because capitalism was impulse by the Anglo-Saxons and could detach from it. Therefore, the feudal class diluted itself inside Québec’s bourgeois factions, mainly real estate developers, a new monopolistic layer.

VII The origins of French Canada’s own contradictions

a) English Canada’s capitalism didn’t systematize itself because it came by the top for a large part, hence some monopolistic aspects. Has it not happened, if capitalism really developed itself freely in Canada, then Québec, having backward productive forces and being held back by its feudal forms, would have been completely integrated, loosing all its characteristics.

b) The preservation of a feudal French Canadian infrastructure finds itself in the monopolistic character of English-Canadian capitalism. The consequence is the incapacity to get to a republican form and the preservation of the dominant classes by the means of four provincial framing, allowing an alliance between the English elite directly linked to English capitalism as well as the local capitalists and the French elite forming an aristocracy edifying top-bottom capitalism.

VIII Québec as a nation in formation

a) Québec’s existence despite English Canadian capitalism’s development only reflects its weaknesses. It inevitably leads, because of capitalist penetration into the feudal countryside, to the emergence of the national sentiment. Forming Québec national identity, there is its language, an established market, a particular economic life and a psychic situation born out of the French origins and Catholicism.

b) Because of the external capitalist penetration, Québec’s national affirmation only could emerge as deformed by religion and the peasantry, producing an idealistic romanticism. The feudal class was able to make profit out of it by using demagoguery, thus maintaining its position while accompanying capitalist development.

IX Positions in front of Québec as a nation in formation

a) English Canada tried to solve the French Canadian question from above, with the help of measures such as the interdiction for French people to buy land in the west of the country, the massive immigration used to recolonize Québec as an English-speaking territory, the integration of French-speaking « house negroes », an extreme provincialization, etc.

b) Because of the historically stuck up situation of French Canada, an uncommunist view of things could only lead to two things:

– a romantic dreaming of the past, wanting to go back or;

– a liberal dream of a cosmopolitan-stateless escape in the Canadian ideology and even American.

X The modernist crisis of Canada at the beginning second half of the 20th

a) The elevation of the productive forces broke the feudal domination. Quebec’s society was cut in half during the administrative period of Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis (1944-1959), an epoch known as “The Great Darkness”. The liberal-democratic faction rose to power and lead Québec to a “Quiet Revolution” (1960-1966). National sentiment rose, although romantic it nonetheless abandoned its feudal clothing. As a consequence there was massive excitation in the years 1960-1970, primarily worn by the petite-

b)  The total reconsideration of the balance of power between the United States and England since 1918 brought the generalisation of American imperialism in Canada. The pro-American faction of the Canadian oligarchy defeated the one aligned on England, as the nation bourgeoisie was weakened.

XI Québec in front of the historical challenge

a) French Canada is probably the most developed example of a bureaucratic capitalism, allowing exceptionally good standards of living and a powerful petite-bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy. Because of the high level of its productive forces, Québec also knows the same typical problems of advanced capitalist countries (24/7 capitalist corruption, strong petite-bourgeoisie in the cultural realm, labour aristocracy linked to trade-unions, etc.). It also suffers from a situation that puts it on a secondary and provincial level in the Canadian system.

b) The historical problem of Québec is that it’s always been lagging behind Canada’s modifications because of its historically backward situation. This situation is now however only there as a background to an advanced capitalism. Québec appears as the weak link not only in the Canadian device but also practically for the United States.

XII Québec’s national-democratic tasks: a historical significance

a) The only basis allowing equality between peoples of North America is socialism, itself coming from the popular-democratic effort. Because it is marginalised from Canada, itself being an annex of American imperialism, Québec represents the detonator for a Canadian and even American Popular Republican Union.

b) In Québec’s specific framework, the historical contradiction arises from the national-democratic affirmation, then generalises itself to the rest of Canada (even possibly the rest of North America and its other specific frameworks). Thus, the first task of democrats and revolutionaries from Québec is to display and pass on the national-democratic legacy, to keep it alive, study and defend its historical, social and cultural actors and to begging a historical-materialist study of the North-American situation, as to give birth to the popular and democratic movement able to strike a blow to North American imperialism. This leads either to a Democratic Union or to Québec’s independence.

First of May, 2020 Declaration
MLM Center Belgium, CPF (mlm)

We are entering the new era, one where everything will change in the most profound way, at all levels, in all areas. The strategic offensive of the world revolution has now its material basis to carry itself out in the fullest way.

This perfectly confirms the assertion of Mao Zedong, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched in 1966, that humanity will experience upheavals like it has never known in the next fifty, hundred years. This confirms the assertion of the glorious Communist Party of Peru, led by Gonzalo, that the victory of the proletariat « will require, approximately, 200 years counting from the Paris Commune in 1871 ».

This is what has momentarily allowed the capitalist mode of production to relatively save itself which turns around in its opposite and comes to stab it.

Because this general crisis appears with covid-19, a disease in which the virus which produces it comes from a mutation directly resulting from contradictions developed by the capitalist mode of production: the contradiction between humans and animals on the one hand, the contradiction between town and countryside on the other.

Covid-19 is the product of a mutation made possible by the destruction of wildlife, its use by the capitalist market, as well as the formation of a livestock industry taking ever more horrible proportions on the scale world.

The capitalist mode of production has installed a so unnatural agro-industrial device that it causes disruption on the scale of life itself, on a planetary level.

The fact that the crisis started in China owes nothing to chance: this country has played a key role in the capitalist mode of production since its total integration into it under the aegis of the revisionist Deng Xiao Ping. Social-fascist China has helped to revive the capitalist mode of production, but its own development brings new contradictions, which are all the more explosive.

We affirm, on the First of May, 2020, that the capitalist mode of production is a complete obstacle to the development of humanity and to the enhancement of life itself. All the states which are at the service of the capitalist mode of production must be overthrown, so that humanity is able to establish socialist, dialectical and non-destructive relationships with all that forms the planetary Biosphere!

Strictly speaking, this problem has already appeared in a perfectly legible way with climate change. We even find it before with the animal question in parallel with the development of industrial farming and widespread animal testing. It is also the basis of the aggression against the human condition itself, since human beings are alienated and exploited, subjected to psychological and physiological pressures distorting them in the sense of capitalist utility.

If the capitalist mode of production developed the productive forces, which has been its historically positive role, it has now passed into the camp of destruction. It demolishes what the evolution of life has taken an immense time to develop, it distorts everything in order to integrate it into its own modalities.

It demolishes humanity, it demolishes animal life, it demolishes plant life, it demolishes the Biosphere. It advocates escapism into virtuality, into the futile consumer ego, into cynicism and selfishness, into abstractions no longer linked to reality. It produces decadence.

The concern is indeed that, at the same time as its negative aspect, it is the capitalist mode of production which ensures the reproduction of the life of humanity and the latter is therefore trapped in it in terms of values, mentalities, world view.

The cultural battle against the values carried by the capitalist mode of production is therefore essential.

In imperialist metropolises, where triumphs the 24 hours a day of capitalism, there must be a spirit of rupture at the height, an ability to be consistent to the end in the affirmation of communism. We underline thegrowing weight of subjectivity in imperialist metropolises and recall that revolutionary consciousness never emerges mechanically, but as a fracture with dominant values.

This aspect is also present in semi-colonial semi-feudal countries, although to a lesser extent, because instability takes precedence by definition in most of the countries of the world, which are experiencing a situation of dependence on the hard core of the mode of capitalist production which are the imperialist countries.

However, given the magnitude of the general crisis of capitalism that is opening up, the return of instability in the latter is inevitable and already appears. The global confinement has deeply shaken minds, it has broken many certainties, it has challenged many routines, it has devalued a whole series of traditions.

This is also true at the world scale. Humanity, of course, fluctuates between the idealistic hope of a hypothetical return to normal and the materialist understanding that the capitalist mode of production is at an impasse.

The higher the level of consciousness, the more there is the grasp that the current situation is the result of an evasive rush forward of the capitalist mode of production, which seeks to escape the tendency of the profit rate to fall by always finding more spaces to develop.

The covid-19 crisis then appears as a natural bulwark against the hallucinatory development of a capitalist mode of production which is global and destructive.

We affirm here that only a correct dialectical materialist understanding of the crisis can bring about a correct political and cultural orientation, naturally also of the ideological, scientific dimension.

Who does not use the concepts of Biosphere, who does not want to understand the dignity of the reality of the animal question, who has never grasped the scope of global warming, who does not use the contradiction between cities and countryside in his approach… can absolutely not capture our time.

We wish to emphasize that this is in no way a modification, a revision or a contribution to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It is a use of existing concepts, a deeper understanding of them due to our times.

We note with sadness, moreover, that all of this is completely cleared out by the organizations claiming to be Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, when they should come to this by their very approach. It is true that, unfortunately, in recent years, two trends have dominated, leading straight into the wall.

The first trend, mainly grouping together all the organizations in America (North and South), wanted in an abstract-formal approach to make Gonzalo a classic of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, with a deny of the principle of guiding thought. A stereotypical style has led this tendency to negate the covid-19 crisis, to see it as a sort of bourgeois conspiracy to mask the crisis and strengthen political and police grip. Such a vision leads to total bankruptcy.

The second trend brings together organizations with a syndicalist-populist approach stemming from their “Marxist-Leninist” origin of the 1970s. It is always strange to see the Maoist Communist Party of Italy talking about people’s war when it already existed when the armed struggle was general in Italy, which seemed to it a simple anarchism. As for the other organization forming the core of this approach, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada, it openly assumes to consider that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a completely secondary fact, much less important for example than the Chinese revolution culminating in 1949.

It is hardly surprising that this trend has a lot to say, but that it is part of a syndicalist-populist approach, without any depth, without any scale. The emptiness of this approach is all the more obvious now.

We affirm that there are three lines in the movements claiming to be Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. There is the opportunist left line, which offers a turnkey ideology where Gonzalo would be the universal key to do anything one wants in its own way, which is leftism. There is the right opportunist line who wants to unite all the Maoists without any regard for ideological content. Finally, there is the correct line which makes the teachings of Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru the correct interpretation of Maoism and advocates the formation of guiding thoughts to go to people’s war.

This amounts to a two-line struggle, because the opportunist line on the right and the opportunist line on the left have the same anti-historical materialist and anti-dialectical materialist approach, as evidenced by the many noisy and picturesque, often ephemeral groups, oscillating between both, such as those structures that have already disappeared, like Jugendwiderstand in Germany, or also in the United States the Tampa Maoist Collective, the Red Guards Kansas City, the Red Guards Charlotte, the Red Guards Los Angeles, the Red Guards Austin, etc.

We for our part, with different forces, sought to develop another tendency, going in the direction of a real level in the field historical materialism, of a real ideological clarity, which goes hand in hand with the acceptance of the teachings of Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru. We consider that our 2013 joint document on the guiding thought is a very rich source of information. The refutation of Prachanda’s revisionism was carried out first by the CPF (mlm) and it is also a totally correct contribution.

It is very harmful that the international refutation of Prachanda did not continue politically until it was achieved in international unity. Here we must underline the harmful role of the Colombian UOC (MLM), which yesterday denounced the Maoist Communist Party of Italy as centrist and ultimately became one of its vassals.

It must be seen that the failure of the UOC (MLM) is all the more damaging since this organization had the qualities of its faults. It did not understand the concept of semi-colonial semi-feudalism and mistakenly considered its country, Colombia, as capitalist. This however reflected a very fine observation of the development of agro-industrial (bureaucratic) capitalism in its own country. The UOC (MLM) should have played a key ideological role in the current crisis, by the nature of it. But as it was haughty with the animal question and climate change,it did not grasp the contradiction between town and country adequately, it failed to make a qualitative leap which would have been of great value.

It is possible to think that the Communist Party of India (Maoist) could also have played here a very important role, because of the situation of India within the framework of the contradiction between town and countryside, of the historical culture existing in this country in relation to the animal condition. This Party, however, preserves its tradition of non-interference in the International Communist Movement, just like the Communist Party of the Philippines. These two parties have by the way always refuted Gonzalo’s teachings, like the TKP / ML of Turkey.

In any case, the problem of the assertion of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism can only have a concrete and not syndicalist, populist, semi-anarchist, etc. basis : this must be a concrete historical basis.

The basic problem in each country is the question of assimilating the principles of dialectical materialism and the concrete study of reality from revolutionary subjectivity recognizing the dignity of reality. This forms the basis for the generation of a guiding thought, orientation for the communist engagement in class struggles having, by definition, a national framework.

This movement of generation of guiding thoughts will experience a powerful development with the crisis. The bourgeoisie has no choice but to seek to make pay for it the oppressed countries, but also the proletariat of the imperialist countries. In the same way, the massive indebtedness of the States following the pandemic of covid-19 does not consist in any way of an accounting abstraction on the part of the central banks realizing a “creation” of money, but simply in a credit to the detriment of the proletariat .

The pressure is going to be enormous, dynamiting the neutralized relations between the classes due to the great wave of capitalist accumulation which started in the 1950s and was reinforced by the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism and the triumph of revisionism in China.

The class struggle will therefore not be limited to a conflict for a better distribution of wealth, as it was mainly the case for fifty years in the most advanced capitalist countries because of the relative nature only of the pauperization of the proletariat, allowing the formation of a powerful working class aristocracy. This process was relatively true in the oppressed countries as well.

The reason for this change is that the class struggle now knows the contribution of the contradiction between town and country, which gives it an explosive dimension. It reflects the planetary dimension of the revolutionary question, it plunges the capitalist mode of production into a contradiction with life itself, it reveals to the world its tendency to destructive absolutism.

And, since it is triumphant, the capitalist mode of production will storm the broad masses to try to get out of this general crisis.

It means the materialization of the most bitter class struggle due to an immense polarization within the framework of the class struggle whose framework is planetary both in form and in content of the crisis. The proletarian fabric will recompose, the confrontation between the classes will resume its authentic character, its substance being war, the battle for power.

This is an essential aspect to grasp the new period which is coming, and whose understanding will distinguish more than ever the authentic revolutionaries from the usurpers and this throughout the revolutionary process. This is the meaning of the MLM slogan: PEOPLE’S WAR UNTIL COMMUNISM!

The question is that of power. We need a state that is that of the masses, under the leadership of the working class. This state can only be born in war, in the overthrow of the old state and we see with the crisis of covid-19 how decadent, bureaucratic it is, ever more disconnected from reality and the masses.

The contradiction between State and society has been flagrant since the start of the health crisis, in all countries of the world. It is a constitutive aspect of the crisis as a product of the capitalist mode of production and its concrete embodiment. The decadence of the bourgeoisie, at the helm of the States, is as much the product of this crisis as its political and cultural, ideological manifestation.

The most fragile imperialist powers like France, Italy or Belgium have particularly marked the international opinion by their great weakness, leaving no more no less than the health crisis to settle in their country by taking measures only very late and in a largely insufficient way. The same is true in many countries of the world, whether in India where the government has literally given up confining the population due to the total disorganization of the country or even in most African countries, terrorized by the observation of their powerlessness.

This decline of the state apparatus also largely concerns the two superpowers of today, China and the United States. In China, where the covid-19 pandemic started, the state was particularly shaken in its expansionary impulse, despite an apparent capacity to manage in terms of health, which was actually of the police-military type. The United States finds itself deeply upset by a confrontation between federal authorities and state governors, recalling the situation of the 19th century, bringing the state back to instability in its very original foundations.

We affirm that the state question is central. The people must become the new state and that requires a very high level of organization and awareness. Whoever does not work in this sense has an anarchist approach, totally foreign to the principles of Bolshevism. Not a populist activity, but a basic work must be to carried, at the same time organizational and programmatic, so that a new State is constituted, violently breaking the old State, crushing it in all the fields, therefore also culturally and ideologically.

This poses, once again, the need for a guiding thought, for a correct understanding of national culture, popular mentalities, the historical course specific to a country. It is not a question of stopping, slowing down, framing, making regress the mode of capitalist production in each country, but to overpass it.

We insist on this principle of overpassing. Historical materialism, providing the concept of mode of production, underlines that History has a meaning and this meaning is integrated, in fact, in the universal movement of matter towards more complexity, more connections, more interpenetration .

A mode of production concerns the social life of Humanity and this social life always takes place in a concrete situation. This is why we cannot understand the covid-19 crisis without seeing that it is an aspect of the destructive development of the capitalist mode of production… Just as we cannot understand the covid-19 crisis without considering life on Earth as a Biosphere, an organized, moving, evolving whole.

This cannot be understood without the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, which seeks to escape the downward trend in the rate of profit by the pressurization of wage labor, by the widening of its fields of intervention, by the imperialist war with here the background of the inevitable Sino-American conflict. This cannot be understood without grasping the nature of the overproduction of goods and the overproduction of capital, the dialectical relationship of which forms the hard core of the general crisis of capitalism.

And all this is expressed concretely, in each country, as a revolutionary contradiction with very specific aspects.

The unity of the authentic international communist movement, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, can only go through scientific exchanges on the concrete character of these aspects. We affirm the need for an international platform allowing access to each other’s perspectives on these concrete aspects.

This process is in any case inevitable, because revolutionary subjectivity breaks with the dominant ideology, inevitably tends to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, seizing the universal to return to the particular and develop the people’s war in the country having been the breeding ground for this subjectivity.

There can be no formal spread of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, this only produces an opportunism all the more folkloric in the trying to mask its real nature.

Long live proletarian Internationalism!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

People’s War until Communism!

The health crisis, which is at the same time an ecological crisis, cannot be separated from the general crisis of capitalism; everything actually comes together in a bundle of contradictions. The capitalist mode of production (CMP) has reached its limit and its crisis comes by itself, condemning it to death.

The termss of this new general crisis of capitalism are different from country to country, in accordance with the principle of unequal development. However, it leaves no other choice apart from imperialist war or revolution.

The birth of the concept of general crisis of capitalism

The concept of general crisis of capitalism was put in place by the Communist International from its foundation, in order to describe the decline of capitalism as the wave of the world revolution develops.

The assessment of this crisis was of course considered to be decisive in defining the tactics of each Communist Party, since the social changes, rapid and brutal, brought political turning points which had to be understood.

We find here anew the principle of uneven development. The Communist International had seen that the rising powers of the United States and Japan were spared the general crisis of capitalism, but that this could not last because Europe had collapsed. And if the Western European countries managed at first to neutralize the effects of the crisis by pressurizing workers as much as possible, in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, it was a collapse.

The Communist International had thus analyzed the situation well, especially since it announced from the start that we were going to a new world war between imperialists. On the other hand, it showed that it was very difficult to manage very different national situations in a centralized manner.

The situation after 1945

American capitalism had, in 1918, taken the place of Great Britain as the spearhead of the CMP. Taking advantage of its relative isolation, of its large territory, of constant immigration, of capitalism from below always renewed but already also of powerful monopolies, American capitalism succeeds in crossing a milestone in its development of accumulation.

American capitalism had in fact systematized approaches greatly improving productivity and consumption, notably with the large-scale industrial use of animals in food. It had widened the fields of consumption and production and this process managed to deepen more and more.

By exporting itself after 1945, this American capitalist model modernized capitalism and allowed a whole wave of capitalist growth in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. The decolonization process was also misused by the CMP in establishing semi-feudal semi-feudal forms colonial in the majority of the countries of the planet, fully integrated in the CMP.

The USSR, which had become social-imperialist after 1953, integrated itself into the CMP, and the collapse of 1989 brought about an even more advanced capitalist modernization. The addition of Deng Xiaoping’s social-fascist China then greatly benefited the CMP.

Assessment of the situation after 1945

In the immediate post-war period, it was considered by the International Communist Movement that the situation was only an extension of the past. The needs of reconstruction were underestimated, but especially the leaps in the development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a new communist generation, uncorrupted by the previous capitalist development, was at the level of the deepening of the CMP. In semi-colonial semi-feudal countries, this was carried by a whole generation of leaders who understood how the CMP had used neo-feudalism to form bureaucratic capitalism from above maintaining a strong colonial dimension. These were the Siraj Sikder, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, Akra Yari, Charu Mazumdar.

In the capitalist countries, it was the Red Army Fraction that inaugurated the 24-hour understanding of capitalism, the Italian Red Brigades following in its footsteps from the Metropolitan Political Collective who had similarly grasped the nature of this process .

The three interpretations of the general crisis of capitalism

There are three options for interpreting the general crisis of capitalism. The first is to say that the crisis began in 1917-1918 and has continued since. This option is unlikely, and Trotsky claimed that the productive forces had not grown since that date, what the Trotskyists still assume today. Bordigist leftist currents hold a similar discourse.

This is anti-dialectical and indeed does not even conform to what the Communist International said, which never raised unilaterally the question of the decline of capitalism. A development of a particular branch may very well exist in the midst of a general crisis. However, it is clear after 1945 that this is indeed a broad development and not at all a general crisis.

The second option is to suppress or neutralize the concept of the general crisis of capitalism. This is what most organizations have done, removing it in most cases, maintaining it formally, simply as a very rare rhetoric for example in basic texts.

The third option is to understand that the CMP developed well after 1945, but reached the limit. This is what is correct.

The invasion of covid-19 and the second general crisis of capitalism

The crisis of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) was expressed by the crisis provoked by the covid-19, because it was by a frenzied accumulation that the CMP was brought to reinforce its extreme pressure on the natural environments. The contradiction between natural reality and the CMP has been explosive. The consequence has been that the CMP, a reproduction of social life, is a partly stopped machine.

The economic crisis is therefore not added to the health crisis, as the ecological crisis is not parallel to the economic crisis. All of this is one and the same thing, a bundle of contradictions that can only be grasped concretely in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, naturally when one has understood its real substance.

If the CMP was not decadent, it could face the health crisis – but it cannot, and in fact the health crisis would not have occurred dialectically if it was not decadent.

It is wrong to seek a source of the crisis in “the economy” before the health crisis or to summarize the crisis in covid-19. There is dialectically no cause and consequence, nor even before or after: there is a multifaceted unified phenomenon, the CMP.

The second general crisis of capitalism is a whole and one cannot abstractly separate the overproduction of goods from the industrial production of farm animals in the 1960s or the destruction of natural conditions in the 2000s.

The first moment: the petty bourgeoisie takes the blow

It is of course necessary to analyze in detail the modalities of the crisis, but we can see that with the outbreak of the health crisis and the ensuing containment, the CMP immediately faced a crisis of overproduction of goods. The distribution circuits being partially stopped, we have too much oil, too much electricity, too many flowers, too much bread. The baker can close his shop and hope to pass the storm. But flower producers have carried out destruction by the millions. Atomic power stations can be restricted in France, other means of electricity production slow down. But US oil stocks have gone so far as to be sold with a deficit.

These are only examples, of course, to indicate that depending on the sector, the break has not been the same. But it hurts very much in some fields. This is the reason for the ideology of rapid deconfinement. The bourgeoisie linked to the broken sectors is ultra-demanding, its pressure is enormous.

All sectors operating on a just-in-time basis due to a petty-bourgeois dynamic, such as the hotel industry, small businesses, small crafts, or even the industry of many sports such as football or hockey… have been stabbed by the health crisis.

The second moment: the tendency to deconfinement

The petty bourgeoisie is not a class, but a layer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is logical that it was the first to know the initial blow. However, as the health crisis was severe, the changeover at the expense of one of the two classes was inevitable. This is the reason why the bourgeoisie as a whole tends to agree to the deconfinement.

It is afraid that social relations, so well framed, so well stabilized, could be affected, that this could lead to demands at its expense. It wants at all costs to avoid the recomposition of the proletarian fabric.

ir also considers that the breakage has been limited, that it’s possible to try to revive the “frozen” movements as quickly as possible. It is also very worried about the “abnormal” conditions of production and enlarged reproduction of capital. To this must be added the idea that a rapid upgrading would strengthen national capitalism in the context of global competition.

This conception of a confinement then of a deconfinement, possibly of a new confinement, then of a deconfinement, etc. comes up nevertheless against a whole series of obstacles.

And the problem is also that it’s necessary to have the means to do so. Then, there are also alliances requiring internal solidarity. Finally, there is the world market which is independent from the national market.

The third moment: the state infusion

The bourgeoisies quickly understood that the nationalist logic placed them before a possible catastrophic scenario: success could be achieved in parallel with a general collapse. This is especially true in Europe, where Germany with its Austrian satellite would gladly have sailed alone, with the Netherlands in particular, before realizing that its status as the main European power required it to maintain the European framework.

An Italian, Spanish, and even worse French collapse would plunge it into crisis itself. Hence the trend towards a state infusion in the economy. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of billions here. All economic commentators have rightly spoken of “magic money” coming from the states to secure credits and infuse the economy.

It goes without saying here that it is the proletariat which will have to provide this magic money. In the first time the petty bourgeoisie took the shock, in the second the bourgeoisie wanted to revive directly, in the third it noticed the difficulties and intends to make the proletariat pay.

Overproduction of capital and overproduction of goods

The general crisis of capitalism is based on a dialectic between an overproduction of capital and an overproduction of goods. The latter has taken place and continues to take place. With a good part of the distribution channels blocked, with the impediment to leave home to go to consume conventionally, the goods accumulate without being sold.

By prolonging itself, the crisis acts so that the cycles of capitalist consumption were powerfully broken in places. It’s simply not possible to restart it by relying directly on day-1. Powerful imbalances will appear according to the sectors, with massive bankruptcies, and this will echo between sectors.

De facto, there is also a crisis of overproduction of underlying capital, because part of the economy being at a standstill, capital can no longer place itself, it is “in excess”. The idea of the states is to keep as much capital as possible where it is, coming to the rescue of big business. It is a question of maintaining the traditional poles of attraction of capital.

Maintaining the main activities and reviving them must prevent a freeze and scattering of capital. Here we can take advantage of the example of the first general crisis of capitalism to find out how it unfolds.

The uneven development of the general crisis of capitalism

During the general crisis of capitalism after 1917, some countries succeeded in making workers pay for the crisis in order to restart relatively, in the context of the decline of capitalism on a world scale. This was particularly the case in France and Great Britain, where the revolutionary momentum was quickly broken. The Communist Parties of these two countries have an isolated journey. On the other hand, this did not succeed in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, provoking deep crises and the assertion of truly massive and combative Communist Parties.

We now have practically the opposite pattern. The countries of Eastern and Central Europe are experiencing great stability, either because of a strong CMP as in Germany and Austria, or because of a deep-rooted bureaucratic capitalism as in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, etc.

On the other hand, countries like Italy, Spain, France and England are hit hard. Their capitalism was already experiencing too many internal problems and the expression of the general crisis is directly linked to these. Concretely, a real push by the masses is enough for these countries to experience a crisis of the greatest magnitude.

France, the weak link

With Brexit, nationalism in Britain has a head start on the communist strategic proposal. Spain is experiencing massive internal dissensions where the national bourgeoisie, particularly the Catalan one, can pull the chestnuts out of the fire. Italy and France appear all the more as the weak link in the imperialist chain.

Italy is, however, trapped in a multitude of structural problems paralyzing any capacity for centralized political projection. There has been no real revolutionary base since the 1990s, whereas the far right has grown massively.

France, on the other hand, is experiencing a centralized crisis. The reactionary wave of “yellow vests”, an ultra-minority but very noisy movement reflecting the panic of the petty bourgeoisie, had already shaken social reality. The wave of strikes against the reform of pensions, with especially the rail workers, from the beginning of December 2019 to the end of February 2020, was a complete failure, but similarly destabilized social relations.

Here we find the situation after 1918, but this time with no possibility of exit. The Communist International was already seeing the contrast between the extremely ambitious objectives of French imperialism and its sinking base, with a largely parasitic capital already noted by Lenin. France then came out of it by its agrarian base and its immense petty bourgeoisie. This will not be possible this time.

It is just necessary to see the do i yourself of French capitalism. France has thus benefited greatly from the formation of a department, the Seine Saint-Denis, serving as an immigrant lever for the Paris base, causing a situation of massive third worldization. The presence of immigrant children sleeping in the streets of Paris, of drug addicts in the Paris metro, of bands of pickpockets on the Champs-Elysées … testify that the state is overwhelmed. The failure to have even masks for the population and even for health workers is the direct expression of a large-scale crisis.

Belgium in a bundle of contradictions

The situation in Belgium is both very similar and particularly different from that in France, with contradictions going mainly in the same explosive direction. The Belgian state has literally resigned from its responsibilities with regard to the application of confinement in certain districts, testifying to its decline as well as its contempt for the health of the population.

The state is in fact increasingly out of step with the broad masses. A very significant example is the pedestrianization of the historic center of Brussels, commendable in the abstract, but which in fact has proved to be a concrete basis for the increased development of anti-social behavior, from delinquency to drug trafficking, with groups of pickpockets or drug addicts going so far as to harass passers-by.

However, this example is placed in the midst of the North / South contradictions, Wallonia / Flanders, masses / State, proletariat / bourgeoisie, which intertwine and do not cease, in the absence of revolutionary solution, to cause a political collapse.

The necessary study of the general crisis of capitalism

There is a need to study the second general crisis of capitalism. It is necessary to study the aspects, the interrelations. It is a contribution that is inevitably necessary to find one’s bearings in an entirely new period, a revolutionary period.

We are entering the era of the masses and their journey follows dialectically the development of the general crisis of capitalism. Who is unable to understand the CMP, to grasp the modalities of its crisis, will be unable to lead the revolution.

The covid-19 crisis does not come from outside of humanity, of its social organization, of its environment. It comes from capitalism itself, because it is a mode of production that encompasses all aspects of human life and the reproduction of it, on a planetary scale now.

The contradiction between town and country, which widens with the deepening of the capitalist mode of production, leads to situations where qualitative breaks are made in the natural domain, as here with the covid-19, mutation of a virus, not “bursting” of virus from previously isolated animals.

In the same way, the health crisis in the strict sense does not take place alongside the capitalist mode of production. It is one aspect of it. Indeed, the health crisis depends on the state, which itself is the condensation of the balance of forces between the classes within a given society. And this state is more or less bankrupt, depending on the extent of the crisis in the capitalist mode of production in the country concerned.

This is why we want to underline here the bankruptcy of the Belgian and French states inf facing the crisis, a failure parallel to that of the American state, as opposed to the management of the German, Chinese, South Korean states. Not that these states are of a different nature, because this is not the case: the point here is to underline the scale of the general crisis in Belgium and in France, as well as to see clearly that the crisis obeys worldwide to uneven development.

The question of means, anticipation and organization

In relation to a health crisis, there are three fundamental aspects: that of the material means of the hospital sector, that of anticipating the crisis by means of response plans, that of the organization of the sectors making the decisions.

We absolutely do not want to fall into the trap of a criticism that boils down to the question of organization, even if it is important. It would be a mechanical-formal approach that would not go to the heart of the matter. By this we do not mean to say that socialist organization would not be superior to capitalist organization – we mean to say that organization stems from the content of political orientations, from ideological choices.

To focus on the question of organization is to look at the form of the response to the health crisis and not its content. The same goes for anticipation, although this is obviously essential too. That capitalism is not far-sighted is a thing to criticize, but it would be wrong to regard this as the main aspect.

The main aspect of a health crisis is always above all that of the means – if by means are meant not only the material capacities of health structures, but also human beings and their choices, their decisions, their orientations.

This is why the health crisis is, by definition, political. Beyond knowing how things are done, or even planned, it is necessary to determine precisely what is done.

The health crisis reflects a state crisis

Since the bourgeoisie is the dominant class in Belgian and French capitalism, it rules the state, not mechanically, but as it is a condensation of the class struggle. We are terribly shocked to see how there have been, on different sides in the movement of opposition to capitalism, anarchist reactions making the State a simple monster which would be mechanically at the service of a manipulative bourgeoisie.

Capitalism is not a tyranny, unless it finds itself in the case of fascism in an ultra-aggressive and ultra-monopoly situation. The proof that this is by no means the case is that the states were obliged in each country to move in the protection of health in general, and not only for the bourgeoisie. It was a real attempt to protect the population, not a masked operation of of masses repression.

This protection of the masses, and this is precisely the questionable aspect, was not up to par in Belgium and France, when it was much more so in an imperialist country like Germany. These three countries nevertheless experience relatively similar social and political situations, at least in their general features. It is there that one reads a state crisis and, in its core, a crisis of the capitalist mode of production in its national aspect, here Belgian on one side, French on the other.

The health crisis in Belgium and in France is a state crisis in Belgium and in France, and expresses, reinforces the crisis of the capitalist mode of production in Belgium and in France.

This is, in our view, the real revolutionary analysis which is necessary.

The health crisis and the failure of the French state

On March 7, 2020, the conservative-populist media BFMTV could still give one of its articles the title « Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron at the theater to encourage the French to go out despite the coronavirus ». The French State has actually literally fallen over in its response to the health crisis and it is all the more striking that France is a very powerful country in the field of health, whether with infrastructure or with research, pharmaceutical monopolies or even open and effective state support.

It has become clear that the capitalist mode of production in France has so pressurized and fragmented this area of health that it has been unable to react in a determined and structured manner to the challenge of the health crisis. Despite the number of scholars, researchers, engineers, collective entities, both academic and directly capitalist, no warning has been produced. We must use the term product because it is a product of the production forces.

One of the most terrible examples is that of Agnes Buzyn, doctor, teacher and researcher in medicine, Minister of Solidarity and Health since May 2017. She resigned from her position in order to be appointed candidate on February 16, 2020 at the mayor of Paris, the initial candidate of the presidential party having resigned following an equally revealing scandal, since it involves the sending of videos of a sexual nature in an extra-marital relationship.

Agnes Buzyn had previously explained on January 24, 2020 that « the risk of importing [covid-19] from Wuhan is practically zero », that « the risk of spread is very low » – all to explain after her electoral defeat that the elections had been a « masquerade » and that she has allegedly warned the government about the health crisis, the risk of a « tsunami » epidemic from January 11, 2020.

This is obviously rambling and, therefore, fundamentally untrue. This reflects a whole inconsistent and parasitic state of mind predominant at the head of the health field, having fully integrated its integration into the capitalist mode of production and incapable of any step back from its own activities.

It is in fact a failure in the field of health, but therefore a failure of the State since it is up to the State that the responsibility for it falls.

The health crisis and the failure of the Belgian state

The Belgian state also found itself in an overhang with the needs necessary to deal with the health crisis. This was inevitable at the structural level, since there are eight ministers in Belgium in the health field, overlapping at federal, regional and community levels. University hospitals have a separation between French and Dutch speakers, as well as between those belonging to the State and those belonging to the Catholic Church.

It is therefore not surprising that Sciensano, the Scientific Institute of Public Health, therefore had no plan to respond to a possible pandemic. The difference with the French situation is that the French state, centralized and having immense and coordinated means in health, could have had such a plan, while on the Belgian side, the dispersion prevented it by definition.

This results in denial and Steven Van Gucht, president of the Scientific Committee and head of the Sciensano Viral Diseases service, said in the Chamber on March 3, 2020: « We are well prepared, » In the worst case scenario, and all things considered, ( …) in nine weeks (…) we are in the same order of magnitude as a big flu epidemic” (in five weeks the figures were already double this forecast).

This is the background leading Minister of Public Health Maggie De Block to denounce the alerts of doctors on February 28, 2020, defining them as “dramaqueens (tragedians)” which have to stop “whining”. In the House, she explained on March 5 that “this is a new type of flu, but mild (“milde griep”), which will continue on our planet before becoming a seasonal flu.” On March 9, she announced her first death from coronavirus, only to deny it a few minutes later.

And it is of course the background of the great disturbance on March 23 as for the shares in the distribution of masks for Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels… while it was learned on the same day that several million FFP2 protective masks had been destroyed in 2017 as considered obsolete, and five days later, that an order for three million of these masks had been canceled for reasons of bureaucracy.

Two failures showing that the state is out of step with society

The health crisis reflects in substance the society / state contradiction, due to the nature of the present state as a condensation of the class struggle with the domination of the bourgeoisie in both Belgium and France.

We want to emphasize the importance of considering this contradiction. There was indeed a primary anti-state reaction from the ultra-left, from both anarchists and “Marxist-Leninists”, even people claiming to be Maoist. Not mastering the teachings of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, they did not understand the nature of the state which has a double character: as an organ of repression and as a social body.

They believed that containment was a low-cost control operation, even a conspiracy. They considered that all the positions of the Belgian state and the French state were by definition reactionary, which is anti-dialectical. This is the expression of a petty bourgeois fear of the state monster.

In reality, the state manages the health system both to maintain the functioning of the capitalist mode of production by treating people so that they work, and because it only has legitimacy as a vehicle for some historic progress. The workers of a capitalist country of the 21st century are acutely aware of the achievements in the field of medicine and no bourgeois regime could hold if it was not up to this task, which means that imperialism American faced a major political challenge that shook it in its foundations.

Many people around the world have seen the contradiction between the means of medicine and the inability to have a unified global mobilization taking full advantage of science. This raises the question of the general orientation of society, and therefore of the state, of humanity and therefore of a world state. Current states are unable to provide what is a universal health requirement – a need for communism.

Belgian and French states bankrupt before a new phenomenon

It should be emphasized that the crisis in the Belgian and French states is of a new type, since no state has ever had to deal with a phenomenon like covid-19. It is a new phenomenon responding to new conditions: those resulting from an explosive contradiction between humanity and wilderness.

It is a contradiction that takes place within the capitalist mode of production, the state itself being a contradiction within the capitalist mode of production by its social role on the one hand, anti-social of the other. It is therefore entirely false to say, as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada does, that « there is nothing fundamentally new and surprising in what the pandemic tells us about capitalism » (COVID-19: International competition at the heart of the current crisis).

We recognize here that this organization, which claims to be Maoist, rejects dialectical materialism, Stalin, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. On the contrary, everything is fundamentally new. This is a global crisis, with global consequences, appearing clearly for the masses of the world. This is a new phenomenon historically, heralding the period of great upheaval on a global scale.

It is precisely this aspect that makes states waver.

The states facing the challenge of a global contradiction

The health crisis was born as the result of an activity of planetary dimension and consequently it raises a question whose answer can be itself only an activity of planetary dimension.

States cannot, by definition, be able to respond adequately to the health crisis, by their very definition. Even if we admit that China has responded effectively on its territory – which remains to be proven – we can see that this country was unable to prevent the spread of covid-19. Humanity appears here as part of a single global process and no country is independent of this planetary chain.

There is an explosive contradiction here, because the states have only been able to respond to the crisis by closing the borders, which is the opposite of their approach so far, approach which opens them to allow strengthening in all areas of the capitalist mode of production.

The covid-19, the result of the capitalist mode of production reigning in a planetary manner in a unified manner, provokes a backward movement of it. And national divisions within the capitalist mode of production, within the framework of the tendency to war, push each country to return to efficiency as quickly as possible, to turn in on itself, reinforcing the crisis.

We do not pretend here to list all the contradictions that have emerged or have been reinforced with the covid-19 crisis. We say however: understanding the planetary nature of this crisis is the key to having a revolutionary understanding of it.

There will be no “next day” or a return to normality. We are dealing here with a dialectical leap in the crisis – a leap which corresponds to the need for communism on a world scale.

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

April 2020