Capitalism and the New Coronavirus Pandemic: State Policy and Possible Workers' Resistance to the Iron Heel

Capitalism and the New Coronavirus Pandemic: State Policy and Possible Workers’ Resistance to the Iron Heel

The article “The pandemic of the new coronavirus and the workers’ struggle” by Eduardo Stotz is a Marxist reflection on the sanitary calamity that claimed millions of lives, affecting mainly the working class, and even increased the degree of exploitation of surplus value. The intervention of national states has the role of “save” capitalist economies and keep as many workers active as possible.

In the context of global capitalism, the pandemic may be the “new normal” in which the possible resistance of workers as a class is placed in order to overcome the deep, prolonged and broad defensiveness in which the labour forces against capital find themselves. The workers’ mobilizations and organizations endowed with political class independence will have to be reconstructed, a possibility present in the conjunctures since the workers never stopped defending their specific demands and the contradictions of capitalism continue to develop.