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The World Socialist Web Site is publishing today in Chinese 800,000 COVID-19 deaths in Europe: capitalism, social murder and the case for socialism.

Written by Alex Lantier and originally published on February 25 in English, the article reviews how the political representatives of the financial elite have condemned hundreds of thousands to death from COVID-19. Lantier powerfully explains why the fight against the pandemic requires the political mobilization of the working class against capitalism, based on a socialist and international program.

One year of the COVID-19 pandemic: A disaster caused by capitalism

The COVID-19 pandemic is a turning point in world history, an event comparable in scale and impact to the Great Depression and the two world wars.

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WSWS publishes Chinese translation of 800000 COVID-19 deaths in Europe: capitalism, social murder and the case for socialism - WSWS

With Hitler defeated and Western values and institutions seemingly secure, it wasnt long before, left-wing intellectuals in search of big structural change began attacking them. They exploited the hedonism of the swinging Sixties to push a big government, equal outcomes, ideology.

Socialists infiltrated campuses and workplaces pushing their anti-capitalist critiques. Throughout the Vietnam War they ramped up their offensive, preaching that capitalism and injustice were synonymous. They heralded the Soviet Union as the future until it wasnt. Without liberalisation the moribund federation broke apart. Even a desperate coup attempt by hardliners couldnt save it. On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin for the last time.

And so the Peoples Republic of China became the undisputed global power base for Marxist ideology. Unlike the erstwhile Soviet Union, China was enjoying a sudden great leap forward thanks to the reforms of Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping who incorporated capitalism into central planning. However, with the PRCs 70th anniversary in sight, Communist party leaders worried that Dengs liberating reforms were exposing the party to an existential threat. Restoring absolute control became the first priority.

So, in 2012, a princeling, Xi Jinping, was elected president. Xi had never accepted Dengs liberalisations were behind Chinas economic prosperity. To him, empowerment of individuals was a bourgeoise fallacy and free speech, equality under the law and other human rights, had to be controlled or delayed.

Once in office, Xis grip on power tightened. He took control of the party, the government, the military and the armed police. Citing Mao Zedong, he ordered the systematic dismantling of law and order institutions and ended civil service independence. As Core Leader, he secured an unlimited presidential term and had his thoughts incorporated into the preamble of Chinas constitution. Xi conducted a vast and ruthless anti-corruption drive in which more than a million officials were dealt with, some brutally. He also introduced a social credit system where a persons general behaviour determines their eligibility for everyday amenities.

Come July, the Chinese Communist Party will celebrate its centenary. It will coincide with the 14th Five-Year Plan which will be strongly nationalistic and feature the CCP and Xi Jinping, front and centre. Ideals of liberalisation will be officially cancelled so that President Xi can boast he eradicated absolute poverty four months ahead of schedule. Xi will also take credit for another great miracle namely the control of Covid-19. Beijing has only reported 4,636 deaths, ranking China, with a population of 1.4 billion, between tiny Serbia and Ireland.

Notwithstanding these triumphs, Xi warns, The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is at a critical stage. He knows China is no longer the low-cost manufacturing hub it was and that there is dissatisfaction with low pay, underpayment of social security insurance and abusive management. He also knows that plant closures have left growing numbers of jobless workers unhappy and unpaid.

This is the legacy of decades of profligacy and corruption. Previously concealed bad debts now threaten the viability of financial institutions. Some 70,000 heavily subsidised zombie companies sap productivity. Unsurprisingly, Chinas stock market has plunged. Most worrying for Xi is the decline in the birth rate when life expectancy is increasing. It will mean fewer workers supporting a rapidly ageing population. With total debt to GDP at 340 per cent and falling productivity and weak profitability, Chinas options are limited and its future is not what it tells the world.

Politically, attempts to make the bureaucracy more responsive and efficient, are failing. Officials remain steeped in a risk-averse, tick-a-box, please Beijing culture. With a wealth gap wider than Americas and with personally intrusive initiatives like the empty plates food-wastage campaign, its no wonder the 2020 World Happiness Report ranks China 94th in the world. America is 18th.

In this centenary year, President Xi is understandably projecting China as a united, financially strong, militarily powerful and morally superior nation. His mission is to restore China to its rightful place in the world thereby vindicating Chairman Maos adage that The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism.

Having reclaimed Hong Kong, Xi is pressing territorial claims over more than 80 per cent of the South China Sea. Of these, Taiwan reunification is a strategic priority, especially given the worlds dependence on Taiwanese semiconductors. Chinas military buildup across the Strait may signal intent. With a deteriorating economic and social outlook at home and the risk of Donald Trump or a similar nationalistically inclined president in 2024, an early military strike on Taiwan could boost Xis standing at home and enhance Chinas superpower credentials abroad. With the 20th National Party Congress in 2022 in mind, it has appeal.

President Xi will be encouraged in this by President Joe Bidens meek response to Chinas genocide of its Uyghur Muslim minority. Biden dispassionately observes that Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow. Perhaps a Taiwan invasion will be seen as a cultural norm?

Xi must also derive confidence from the fifth columnists active inside Hollywood, the mainstream media, Big Tech, government agencies and even the Wests military. These activists are weakening his enemy from within. Indeed, Beijing exploited their woke-washing at the recent Alaska summit. Demonstrating breathtaking chutzpah, laced with contempt, the Chinese delegates lectured America on its many deep seated problems on human rights, pointing to Black Lives Matter.

Whatever Chinas medium-term prospects, Xi Jinping is no fool. As he smugly watches vacuous, Western leaders tearing themselves apart in a puerile, divisive competition for wokeness, he purposefully feeds the socialist weeds rapidly strangling freedoms Western crops. Xi knows well that by the time enough people realise how lethal they are, it will be too late to get rid of them. Xis dream of China as the worlds dominant power can then be realised.

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Woke culture thrives among the weeds of socialism - The Spectator Australia

On this day, 5 March, in 2013, a great revolutionary finally succumbed to cancer and passed away. He was only 58 years old. The socialist world will forever be grateful to the people, government and doctors of Cuba who did all they could to try and defeat the cancer and other opportunistic respiratory infections which finally killed this great revolutionary. Today, we are assembled on this platform to celebrate the life and times of this great socialist revolutionary.

Commandant Raphael Hugo Chvez Frias was born on 28 July 1954 and died on 5 March 2013. Comrade Hugo Chvez was president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, apart from a very short time in April 2002.

Today we will look to five areas of Comrade Chvezs life that demonstrate that he was a true visionary leader of the working class.

Chvez knew that his primary theatre of revolutionary struggles was, of course, Venezuela, but, he was alert always to the fact that Venezuela alone in Latin America and the world could not succeed to establish a sustainable socialist project if the rest of Latin America and the whole world remained chained to capitalism.

Comrade Chvezs internationalism made him instrumental in the setting up of the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Bank of the South and, of course, the regional television network TeleSUR.

It is not true that Chvez did this great international work because he was using oil to achieve narrow Venezuelan interests. Chvez was always aware that the United States imperialist interests and stranglehold on Latin America could not be defeated in one country alone, no matter how revolutionary its people and leaders of such a country could be.

For example, Chvez was well aware how the US economic blockade on Cuba was in fact economic genocide performed on Cuba by the US government and its capitalists. He knew Venezuela would suffer the same fate.

After the collapse of the Union of the Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union in 1991, a fundamental lesson no socialist or communist could ignore was the historic fact that to defeat capitalism, the working class and all oppressed peoples of the world needed to be organised in a world revolutionary movement to overthrow the world capitalist system. No single country on its own could achieve and sustain socialism, let alone advance to communism.

The reason is very simple: capitalism is a world system; to defeat it, it must be fought at a world level. While revolutions against capitalism must and can start in one country, the working class and all oppressed and dominated peoples of the world must also rise up everywhere and fight to destroy the world capitalist system.

Chvez understood this international character of the struggle for socialism very well, and so he moved swiftly to unite the desperate peoples of Latin America, so that together they could defend themselves against the rapacious imperialism of the United States in the region.

This is one powerful lesson we must learn and celebrate about Commandant Hugo Chvez: our struggles for emancipation, while being fought at a local and national level, are bound to fail if we at the same time do not forge a global movement against the world capitalist system!

Even without achieving socialism, it is possible to fight mass poverty, unemployment, extreme inequalities and the indignities these capitalist evils cause millions of human beings to suffer on Earth. We cannot completely win these fights under capitalism, but we can reduce the levels of suffering.

Chvez demonstrated in practice that there is no excuse for allowing the wealth of any country to benefit a tiny minority and their imperialist backers. He embarked upon an ambitious nationalisation project, crucially of the Venezuelan oil resources.

People love ideas, stories, poetry reading and writing books. But people dont eat ideas. They eat food, need houses to live in, must have clothes to wear, their children must go to schools well fed, and everyone needs water and good health. Chvez understood that with or without socialism, the majority of the Venezuelans who are the working class and indigenous people needed these basic things of life.

Chvez did not wait until Venezuela achieved socialism to redistribute wealth. He went ahead and did it inside the Venezuelan capitalist system.

In the shortest time, destitution, illiteracy, hunger, homelessness, access to clinics and hospitals were improved, and he improved the quality of lives for millions of Venezuelans such that even the UN could not pretend not to see that Venezuela was changing for the better.

To struggle every day to improve the quality of life of the working and impoverished masses is the revolutionary responsibility of every socialist activist whatever the ideological and political system of the country in which we live. The masses in fact may only listen to us, and fight with us for socialism because they will know by our example while in a capitalist system what good things we can achieve together with them, when we defeat capitalism and create socialism.

Chvez taught us to dedicate our lives fighting even for the smallest victories for the working masses and the impoverished inside capitalism, without losing sight of our goal for a socialist society through the socialist revolution.

On radio, television and Twitter, Chvez was not afraid to directly speak with and to the people of his country. He was not happy and comfortable to hide behind official press statements and one-way, Address to the Nation or Letter from the President, hide-and-seek tactics.

To learn what was happening in his country, he did not just depend on his intelligence, security and military establishment: he had direct personal conversations with his people.

He enjoyed listening, learning and directly talking with the masses through the mass media means of communication and rallies. This way, he knew exactly what the burning questions of the day among all the classes of the people in his country were.

This is why his election victories saw him successively increase his votes for most of the time he stood as president of Venezuela the masses knew him, and he knew them very well. In fact, this is what annoyed the US and the world capitalist system: here was a socialist and he was winning elections!

To counter the capitalist lies about Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution, Chvez instigated the birth of several newspapers and powerful TV, TeleSUR, a regional Latin American television broadcaster. Without a dedicated revolutionary media and press, it is almost impossible to win the battle for the hearts and minds of the working and impoverished masses capitalism will always reach them first!

Hugo Chvez was a career soldier who, in fact, became a revolutionary while serving in the Venezuelan army and believe it or not hunting down Marxist guerrillas opposed to the government he was serving!

He read everything he could lay his hands on, on the history of Latin America and its revolutionary traditions and the world communist movement including, but not limited to, Simn Bolvar, Simn Rodrguez, Ezequiel Zamora, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and many others.

This rich literature and knowledge armed him with both revolutionary and theoretical strategic tools to navigate the complex political and economic world system in which Venezuela was immersed.

Ultimately he worked hard to unite the disparate Left parties and movements in Venezuela into what later became the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, in short PSUV. This is the party in power in Venezuela today.

Without this self-education and preparation and how Chvez used this to build the PSUV, it is possible that by now the US with its crippling sanctions and sponsorship of sabotage and insurrection would have completely destroyed the revolution in Venezuela.

Without revolutionary theory, it is impossible to have a revolutionary movement. Chvez understood this, and he armed the working class, through his daily contact and mass media, with a thorough knowledge of the capitalist class system in Venezuela and US imperialism and its intentions in Venezuela.

Chvez combined revolutionary theory with revolutionary practice and fought and lived for the success of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

We must learn the obvious fact that without the weapon of revolutionary knowledge, it is impossible to wage a successful revolution. Our first duty, therefore, is to learn, to educate ourselves, through both theory and concrete participation in the daily struggles of the working masses and the impoverished.

Today, we have many socialists in our trade unions and social movements who preach their Marxism at work and in workshops but are patriarchal savages in their homes. We have so-called socialists who steal money from their organisations to enrich themselves. Laziness, hatred of hard work, fear of suffering and hardships these are the most important characteristics of so-called socialists of today. Love of comfort, luxury, a good time, idleness: this is the quality of revolutionary life many so-called socialist revolutionaries live or aspire to live today.

We have socialists who, with just a little money, all the socialism evaporates from their heads and they start singing from the capitalist bible. We have so-called socialists who hate working-class democracy and worker control. We have so-called socialists who are such hopeless cowards they hate any talk of the idea of the dictatorship of the working class as the most complete and thorough democracy. We have so-called socialists who think that capitalism can be destroyed through elections!

Chvez was the opposite of this. He was a fearless, principled, consistent and courageous revolutionary. He was prepared at all times to lay down his life for the struggle for a full life for the working class, the indigenous people and all the people of Venezuela, and therefore, for the working class of the world. He was never afraid to pick up arms against the capitalist system. He was not a thief. He was always ready to make the highest sacrifice, including sacrificing his own life.

He understood that to defeat the ruling class he had to set up working-class and popular-power structures among and for the masses. Through a referendum, he had the old Constitution amended to allow for the birth of the Constituent Assembly, which became the centre of power. Together with a loyal army, it is this assembly today that holds Venezuela together. Chvez was a democrat.

The Venezuelan revolution cannot be defended just via conference and congress resolutions of solidarity. We need to fight capitalism directly in our countries this is the best way to increase the world socialist forces against capitalism.

This is a lightly edited speech delivered by Andrew Chirwa on 5 March 2021.

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Hugo Chvez united the workers of the world - newframe.com

The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates used the terms endemic and epidemic to distinguish between diseases that were always present in a population and diseases that only occurred during certain parts of a year or at yearly or even greater intervals.

In epidemiological terms, endemic means the constant presence and prevalence of a disease within a population in a certain geographic area. It refers to a state when a disease reaches a level that most of the population has developed immunity. They can develop secondary infections though these are often mild. Children usually become the primary cases because they are nave (not previously exposed) to the virus.

Certain influenzas and viruses that cause the common cold are thought to be endemic. Some endemic viruses have been eradicated by vaccines and public health measures. Two historical examples are smallpox and rinderpest.

However, the recent use of the term endemicity by the ruling class and bourgeois scientists has little to do with its epidemiological understanding and everything to do with a fatalistic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In much the same way that repeated lockdowns and reopenings have inured some people to accept the permanence of the virus, the talk of the virus becoming endemic is employed against any further mitigation efforts which impinge on profit accumulation.

Regardless of such defeatist conceptions, the pandemic remains in its early and acute phase, with significant potential to infect a vast portion of the globes population that has not yet been exposed to the coronavirus. A cohesive international strategy employing the public health tools that are within our grasp could bring the contagion under control before it becomes endemic, at the cost of millions of lives.

These nihilistic conceptions being promoted by the bourgeois press and some scientists to justify dispensing with all mitigation efforts and allowing the pandemic free rein are dangerous to the working class. They would use the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines to anaesthetize the public against the impending catastrophe, although this is only possible in a handful of wealthy countries where vaccine supplies are ample.

At the World Health Organizations March 22 COVID-19 press briefing, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned, The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage, its also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating. Some countries are racing to vaccinate their entire populations while other countries have nothing. This may buy short-term security, but it is a false sense of security.

Executive Director of WHOs Health Emergencies Programme Dr. Mike Ryan reaffirmed the director-generals warnings, stating, The formula for this may be boring, it may not be attractive; there are no silver bullets, but we have got to get back to strong, comprehensive, strategic approaches to the control of COVID that include vaccination as one of those strategies. Im afraid were all trying to grasp at straws. Were trying to find the golden solutions and we just get enough vaccine, and we push enough vaccine into people and thats going to take care of it. Im sorry: its not! There arent enough vaccines in the world, and theyre distributed terribly iniquitously. In fact, we have missed a huge opportunity to bring vaccines on board as a comprehensive measure. Its not being implemented in a systematic way. Its a failed opportunity and, as the D-G says, is not only a catastrophic moral failure, but its an epidemiologic failure and its a failure in public health practice.

The lack of any significant measures to eradicate the virus, combined with the economic devastation for much of the working class, encourages a pessimistic outlook to which even principled scientists are not immune. As the virus ravages the world population, with its seven-day infection rates increasing by 400 percent from February 28 through March 5, the ruling class utilizes the fatigue felt by the population through repeated shutdowns and reopenings to establish a rationale for living with the virus. This has been willful.

Still, the response of some cities and nations in the course of the pandemic has proven that the SARS-CoV-2 can be eradicated. When the contagion first struck Italy in February of 2020, causing a massive health care crisis and inundating their health systems, the town of Vo, a commune in the Province of Padua in the Italian Veneto region, an hour west of Venice, was placed in a strict 14-day lockdown, with all 3,270 people being tested for the virus multiple times. Positive cases were quarantined and treated. In a matter of a few weeks the virus was eradicated from the town.

Testing, contact tracing and quarantiningprecisely the methods used in Vowere employed in all nations that have managed to rein in the virus. As of March 22, 2021, Taiwan, a country of 24 million people, has had 1,006 reported infections and 10 deaths. In Singapore, home to five million people, new cases have remained in the single or low double digits since October 2020.

The science of public health and the tools for eradicating the virus have always been available, but the decision to allow the virus to spread unchecked with nothing more than vaccines made available to a tiny percentage of the developed world is part of a conscious decision which, without the revolutionary intervention by the international working class, can lead to the virus becoming endemic.

However, this is not merely rhetorical. There is a sea of death between the two terms, eradication and endemicity. Reaching endemicity means that the majority of the worlds population will contract the virus, which at its present lethality means tens of millions more lives lost. The arithmetic is inexorable: If billions contract COVID-19, with a death rate approximating two percent, then 20 million people will die for every billion people infected.

This does not even begin to take into consideration the numerous and more deadly variants. The present horrors in Brazil are demonstrating that prior infections with previous strains of SARS-COV-2 do not necessarily protect the population from the new and more virulent variants.

The drive to label the pandemic as inevitable has been a bipartisan effort. The media is flooded with articles to misguide readers that public health and science itself are helpless to prevent the disease. A few examples include a February 17 piece in USA Today, which utilized model data from Emory University and Penn State University scientists to suggest that if the novel coronavirus continues to circulate in the general population and most people are exposed to it from childhood, it could be added to the list of common colds.

The researchers who completed the Emory/Penn State study lament: One year after its emergence, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become so widespread that there is little hope of elimination.

On February 16, Nature printed a survey it conducted, where 89 percent of scientists polled expressed their concerns that COVID-19 is likely to be endemic in pockets of the global population. Disregarding the persistent efforts of Dr. Michael Osterholm to inform the Biden administration on a correct policy to eradicate COVID-19, the magazine highlighted one of Osterholms quotes: Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon. Its unrealistic.

It should be of no surprise to anyone that a significant section of scientists has become resigned to accepting COVID-19 as an ineradicable disease. It points to nothing more than their disillusion with the inaction of world governments, as schools and businesses throughout the world have essentially opened their doors.

Fundamentally, it expresses the inevitability of the virus reaching a state of endemicity under capitalism and rules out the possibility of a working class movement and socialist revolution that could halt the virus in a matter of weeks with coordinated global action, as part of a larger struggle in the fight for socialism, where the lives and interests of the working masses around the globe are prioritized.

One year of the COVID-19 pandemic: A disaster caused by capitalism

The COVID-19 pandemic is a turning point in world history, an event comparable in scale and impact to the Great Depression and the two world wars.

What is invariably left out of these press releases is the criminal policy of the ruling class across the globe, that has ignored the warnings of epidemiologists and scientists as it interfered with their priority for profit accumulation.

With remarkable foresight, in late spring of last year, as countries were prematurely reopening commerce, Dr. Mike Ryan lambasted the world governments for lifting restrictions under conditions of persistent and rampant transmission of the virus, without systems in place to even detect it, let alone trace and quarantine the infected, warning this would produce a vicious cycle of public health disaster followed by economic disaster followed by public health disaster.

There is, however, a growing chorus of scientists who are putting forward a call to eradicate the coronavirus. The Zero COVID policy, first articulated by Independent SAGE, a group that rivals the British governments official Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE), argues for the proven public health measures that can halt the spread of COVID-19. They call for lockdowns, with compensation for those economically affected, improved testing and contact tracing, and argue that the pandemic can be suppressed with public health measures.

A leading advocate is Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist who is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She has spoken out scathingly on the UK plans to come out of lockdown so quickly. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, after implementing the strictest lockdown measures on January 4 to stem the disastrous tide of infections and deaths during the winter surge, was in no time demanding again for school reopenings by early March. Dr. Gurdasani called it a shockingly negligent strategy and very clearly a policy of tolerable deaths, while speaking to Channel 5 News on February 22.

Gurdasani cited predictions forecasted by the Imperial College that even under the best conditions of three to four million doses of the vaccine rolled out a week, opening schools on March 4 would increase the Effective Reproduction Rate (Rt) to above 1, resulting in 30,000 to 60,000 more deaths. She warned of the dangers of the virus mutating to threaten vaccine effectiveness, under a high rate of transmission, as has already happened with the South African variant.

Aoife McLysaght, of the Molecular Evolution Lab in Dublin, Ireland, spoke on a pinned Tweet, of the need to fight for Zero COVID, which would allow us to go about our lives in a normal way. Commenting on the danger of relying solely on vaccines as new variants emerge, McLysaght warned of a whole new pandemic arriving at our shores.

The science put forward is an indictment of world governments inaction, including the Johnson administration in Britain, which allowed the unchecked spread of the emergence in southeast England of a more virulent form of the virus, lineage B.1.1.7 which spreads 30-80 percent faster than the wild strain. In Brazil, the policies of the fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro have allowed the dominance of the P.1 strain of the coronavirus, which is up to 2.5 times more transmissible and has a potential to reinfect up to 63 percent. The health care systems in Brazil are buckling under the gravity of so much severe disease and death. Already, spillovers into neighboring countries like Peru, Chile and Uruguay are causing new surges in these regions.

While the growing group of principled scientists who call for the Zero COVID strategy have laid out the salient policies and make a case for mitigation efforts, what is lacking entirely is a socialist perspective. Fundamentally, Zero COVID accepts the current mode of production. It argues for a more humane capitalism, for improved public health measures under the current framework of a system which itself has produced the pandemic. The profit motive has reigned supreme and the indifference to human lives is the logical outcome of a class policy in the interests of the worlds elite. The Zero COVID policy is correct on a scientific basis but lacks a political strategy to achieve these necessary aims. Inevitably, these scientists have become auxiliary consultants to capitalist agencies.

The only social force that is capable of preventing SARS-CoV-2 from becoming endemic is the international working class, which must organize itself and build its leadership in order to carry out a fight for socialism and against the homicidal policies carried out by the ruling elites around the globe. Armed with a socialist perspective and program, the global working class can not only eradicate SARS-CoV-2 but many more viruses and horrors which have been allowed by the ruling class to persistfrom measles to hepatitis, to hunger and homelessness.

Saturday, April 3

150 years since the Paris Commune

Join us for a discussion of the first time in history that the working class took power. Streamed at wsws.org/live.

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The antiscientific campaign to promote living with the virus - WSWS

The colossal implications of one of the largest container ships in the world, the Ever Given, running aground and blocking Egypts Suez Canal have been felt internationally.

The huge container ship, wedged across the canal since last Tuesday during a seasonal sandstorm, was finally freed from the shoreline in the early hours of this morning by tugboats. Efforts to fully refloat it are ongoing at the time of writing.

The blockage of a vital artery of the world economy by a single shipan accident waiting to happenreveals fundamental aspects of modern society.

The ship is owned by the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, operated by the Taiwanese company Evergreen Marine Corporation, flagged in Panama and carrying goods worth $89 million.

Production and economic activity have become internationally integrated to an unprecedented extent, linking the working class in every country into a powerful interconnected network, such that the disruption of a single major transit hub quickly makes itself felt throughout the globe.

Almost 50 percent of the vessels that transit the Suez Canal are container ships carrying car components, appliances, apparel and consumer electronics to and from continents. Goods heading for Europe will themselves be integrated into components to be shipped to the Americas and the rest of the world, often for final assembly elsewhere.

However, under the irrational, anarchic capitalist social order, with the world divided into rival nation states, there has been virtually no serious preparations for an event like the Suez Canal jam, which has long been predicted, given the huge expansion in the number and size of container mega-ships.

With more than 450 vessels now waiting at either end of the canal, analysts believe that the insurance industry could be facing claims in excess of $100 million. However, the final bill, including compensation for delays, loss of revenue for the Suez Canal Authority (SCA), potential damage to cargo and the cost of refloating the ship, could include sums even higher.

While the precise causes of the Ever Given accident have yet to be determined, it points to the incompetence and corruption endemic in the Egyptian state apparatus. The SCA, the state-owned and largely military-run corporation responsible for the operation and maintenance of the Suez Canal, including its computerized traffic management system, pilots and dredging, has sought to downplay the severity of the incident and is unable to say how long it will take to unblock the canal. The chief of the SCA, Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, has already announced that the agency is discussing compensation for the waiting ships, implying negligence on the SCAs part.

But the global implications are far greater. Analysts are warning that the blockage threatens a severe disruption to global trade supplies, with massive repercussions on global supply chains that now rely on minimal levels of stocks commensurate with just-in-time production techniques, and consequences for workers jobs and consumer prices. It is likely to further fuel national antagonisms.

The Suez Canal is one of the worlds busiest waterways, linking the Indian Ocean, the Red and Mediterranean Seas. The canal is traversed by 19,000 vessels a year, carrying $10 billion of goods every day, or an estimated 13 percent of global trade by volume, and around 10 percent of the worlds oil, mostly between Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

As sea trade has grown, the size of container ships has also grown, driven by the need to lower shipping costs and achieve economies of scale. The average size of container ships is now five times larger than just 20 years ago, paving the way for both fewer ships and enormous cost reductions, to the extent vessels capable of carrying 20,000 20-foot equivalent containers are operated with a crew of just 20. But such ships are too deep and large to transit some shipping routes, such as the Panama Canal, or dock at some port quays, requiring significant investment to accommodate the ships, handle their loading and unloading and manage the scheduling to avoid port congestion.

With the Suez Canal blocked, some ships began to divert around the southern tip of Africa, a much more hazardous route, adding up to two weeks to the journey and with higher labour and fuel costs. This in turn will exacerbate the shortage of containers and container ships and create delays, shortages of goods and higher prices, with oil prices rising 7 percent in response to the news of the blockage. A report published by the German insurer Allianz Global estimated the bottleneck could cost global trade $6 billion to $10 billion a week.

Smaller tankers and oil products, like naphtha (a liquid fuel) and fuel oil exports from Europe to Asiaabout 20 percent of Asias naphtha is supplied by the Mediterranean and Black Sea via the Suez Canalwill also be affected if the canal remains blocked for several weeks.

The traffic jam in the Suez, when eventually freed up, will in turn lead to further congestion and disorganization as ships flood into ports which are already overstretched due to the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Suez Canal event also emerges amid severely hampered supply chains, including widespread shortages of semiconductors, a key component in cars, smartphones, PCs, tablets and TVs, the brutal winter storm in Texas last month, slowing production of plastic goods, and a major backlog of container ships in Southern California ports.

The blockage of the Suez Canal threatens a further intensification of geopolitical tensions under conditions in which numerous flashpoints exist and have been multiplying. Ships forced to reroute from the Red Sea towards South Africas Cape of Good Hope face the threat of piracy off the coasts of East Africa and West Africa, which have seen an increase in pirate kidnappings in recent months, leading several shipping companies to call on the US Navy to provide escorts.

Russian Foreign Ministry official Nikolai Korchunov argued the need for the development of new shipping routes, including a northern sea route through the Arctic Ocean, which has itself become the focus of increasing geopolitical conflicts as the adjacent countries seek to assert their territorial claims to secure access to the vast energy reserves and rare materials that are believed to be in the Arctic region.

Today, the global nature of capitalism is beyond dispute, as is the reactionary nation-state system that is driving the worlds major capitalist powers ever closer to global war and increasing social inequality at home, while preparing dictatorial forms of rule.

Capitalism has demonstrated over and over again that it is impervious to science and reason, criminally irrational and utterly opposed to addressing any social problems even as it demands ever fatter profits. Coming amid the pandemic, which has already killed 2.7 million people worldwide, it only confirms the necessity of abolishing the capitalist system and replacing it with an internationally coordinated, rationally and scientifically directed system of economic planning, based on equality and the satisfaction of human need: socialism.

Saturday, April 3

150 years since the Paris Commune

Join us for a discussion of the first time in history that the working class took power. Streamed at wsws.org/live.

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The Suez Canal blockage and the globalization of production - WSWS