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Monday, May 11, 2020

Forward to a New Normal

Capitalist relationships permeate the world. We cannot avoid them, we cannot run away from them. We cannot self-isolate from them. Capitalism turning everything possible into commodities, including people and nature. The profit motive directly the demonic hidden hand of the market threatens to degrade our planet. The Earth is sick and capitalism is to blame. People pay the price with lives. The current COVID-19 pandemic the world is facing now is without any precedent and its full implication is yet to be understood. It is not clear what society in the future will look like, whether the system’s indifference to the death of the weak and vulnerable will continue. 
Can ther be a return to “normal” when what was normal for many was never ever a good life. Sure there are grand rhetoric pronouncements from politicians that the world is united against the pandemic and the race to discover the vaccine to defeat this virus is not a competition but a collaboration between countries. Yet for the pharmaceutical industry there is a lucrative prize for the first at the finishing line. There is little cooperation or sharing between the rival corporations. The lawyers specialised in global patents and intellectual property have not been furloughed.
Socialists opt for hoperather than succumb to cynical pessimism fed by dystopian scenarios. capitalism expresses itself with its ceaseless destructive expansion, its endless profit and capital accumulation which blights our planet like a cancer. Socialists do not let this drop us into a state of despair and despondency. Socialists have pinpointed the problem – capitalism. We propose fixing what capitalism has created, providing the necessities of life for everyone and not just the few.

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