Capital, the destruction of organisms, the emergence of Covid-19 and the emergence of epidemics
Hassan Abbasi
In the introduction to this book, I wrote, “Indian industrial agriculture is waging war on insects and small animals with the ever-increasing use of pesticides, both of which have contributed to the decline in the number of waterfowl and the resurgence and spread of the malaria epidemic in recent years.” This is just one example of the great catastrophe that has been planned and implemented by capital for decades for animals, from the smallest to the largest, throughout this hell. In order to explain the causes of pandemics, we will first explain their foundations.
In the first volume of this series, I said: Today (2015) there are about 10 million known chemicals in the world. Of these, about 50,000 are actively used in various products. If the protests of the 1970s led to the cessation of the use of substances such as DDT and PVC, today tens of thousands of similar substances have taken their place. An October 2018 report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) shows the catastrophic state of wildlife to date. It says that 60 percent of wildlife, from mammals to fish and birds, has disappeared in just over four decades. The WWF report includes data from 1970 to 2014: During this period, the number of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians has decreased by 60%. According to studies conducted by the Zoological Society of London on 4,050 species of vertebrates and the “Biodiversity Index” on which the above report is based between 1970 and 2014, 60% of wild vertebrate species, including fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles, have disappeared. The report says that in the past four decades, vertebrate populations in South and Central America have declined by 89 percent. Freshwater species have declined by 83 percent. The report also identifies 11 hotspots in the forest loss process, where widespread destruction has occurred and is expected to continue in the coming decade. Other hotspots include the Amazon, where Brazil’s newly elected president has spoken of the possibility of her country withdrawing from the climate treaty, the Congo Basin, Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia and Malaysia, where warnings have been made for years about widespread destruction of tropical forests. The content of the report shows that species and wildlife extinctions are occurring at rates 100 to 1,000 times faster than previous rates, before capitalist production relations became the main cause. Golden toads; last seen in 1989. Sudan; last male northern white rhinoceros, who and his descendants did not live to see the spring of this year (2018). Orangutans in Sumatra; Extensive deforestation in Sumatra has been seriously threatening the lives of these animals for years. In November 2018, Australian researchers reported that modern drugs used to treat humans are entering the food chain of animals through sewage, disrupting their biological systems. Scientists studying animals living in six rivers near Melbourne, Australia, found that they had high levels of painkillers, antidepressants and other drugs in their bodies, which had been leached into the water after flowing through municipal sewage systems. The study examined the presence of 98 commonly used drugs in aquatic animals, mammals and insects living in these areas. For example, animals such as trout and platypus, which live in water, were found to have significant amounts of antidepressants: https://www.maff.go.jp/j/syouan/suisan/suisan_yobo/attach/pdf/fishmed-56.pdf). (in Jan-31, 2022) and (in Nov-30, 2022). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166445X23001571. (in July 2023).
In contrast, insects contained large amounts of painkillers, antifungals, antibiotics and antihypertensives. Although the study was conducted in Australia, it is not unlikely that it exists in other countries. In February 2019, new research published in the journal Biological Conservation showed that the increasing decline in the number and variety of insects could have a “catastrophic” impact on the environment and put human life on Earth at risk of extinction. According to existing research, about 40% of insect species have declined, and their decline is eight times faster than the decline of birds, mammals and other species. According to existing estimates, insects may be at risk of complete extinction within the next century. Insects make up two-thirds of all life on Earth and are a key player in the cycle of life. They help pollinate trees, stabilize soil, and provide food for other species. Their extinction would pose irreversible risks to the planet. “If the extinction of insects is not stopped, the consequences will be catastrophic for both the planet’s ecosystems and human survival,” the author of the new study said in an interview. In May 2019, a group of researchers warned in a report prepared for the United Nations that an “unprecedented” one million species of animals and plants on Earth were at risk of extinction (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ipbes-un-biodiversity-report-warns-one-million-species-at-risk).
The report states that only a major change in the global economic and financial system can prevent the threat to the planet’s ecosystem. According to the United Nations report, one million of the world’s eight million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction in the next few decades. Scientists have stated that industrial agriculture and overfishing are the main factors contributing to the extinction of various species. The rate of species extinction is tens of thousands of times faster than the average over the past 10 million years, the researchers say. The destruction ranges from the destruction of coral reefs under the ocean to the drying up of rainforests and their transformation into flat plains. The number of wild mammals has declined by 82 percent, natural ecosystems have lost about half their size, and millions of species are at risk of extinction. In terms of habitats, wetlands have suffered the most destruction. 73% of them have disappeared since 1700, with unintended consequences for water quality and bird life. Forests, especially tropical forests, are disappearing. In the first 13 years of the last century, the area of intact forests decreased by 7% (approximately the area of France and England combined). This trend has intensified since this date:
The area of IFLs remaining in 2025 is 1086.2 Mha, which makes up only 8.4% of the Earth’s ice-free land area and includes 21% of the global tree cover. The largest tracts of intact forests are found in the Amazon and Congo River basins and in the northern boreal forests. Eleven countries (Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela) host more than 90% of the global IFL area. Most other countries that still retain IFL areas have only a small portion of their forests intact. From 2000 to 2025, the global IFL area declined by 194.7 Mha (15.2%), an area nearly equivalent to the land area of Mexico. The largest absolute IFL losses occurred in tropical South America and the boreal regions of Eurasia and North America, which accounted for 34%, 28%, and 18% of the total area reduction, respectively. During this period, Romania lost all its IFLs, while Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Solomon Islands lost >75% of their IFL area. The Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Honduras, Laos, and Liberia lost more than half of their IFL area. (https://intactforests.org/world.map.html)
The oceans are no longer untouched by capital. Only 3 percent of the seas are safe from capital pressure in this reserve. Industrial fishing occurs in more than half of the oceans, and a third of fish populations are overfished. According to a study in California in April 2020, the population of monarch butterflies suffered a sudden 86 percent decline in 2018. Some insects are called harmful because industrial agriculture has long seen them as a major obstacle to increasing the productivity of industrial agriculture. In nature, such a division is fundamentally meaningless because living organisms have lived in a harmonious biological balance for millions, even billions, of years. Now and for a long time, capitalist production relations play the role of ancient gods and justify the use of insecticides and the generality of what is called pest control by justifying the harmfulness and usefulness of animals, especially insects. Calling tiny creatures that existed in nature hundreds of millions of years before the advent of man names like “pest” only became common in the short period of industrial capitalism for the use of poisons in industrial agriculture and animal husbandry. The first and second volumes of this series deal in detail with the destructive and destructive role of animals and plants. The above report explains just one of these tragedies, which is that insect populations are rapidly declining worldwide. Insects play a crucial role in nature and in maintaining habitats for all living things. Insects even break down the biological structures of organisms that die, which causes them to decompose more quickly and preserve nature. This enriches the soil. Insects help keep the earth clean by speeding up the decomposition of biological waste. Without insects, humans would float in their own feces and animal remains! Insects are also food for birds, bats and small mammals. Dr. Francisco Sanchez-Bio from the University of Sydney says: “About 60% of vertebrates require insects for their survival, many species of birds, bats, frogs and freshwater fish would be extinct without them.” The food cycle depends heavily on the activities of millions of insects that live underground and, in the oceans, and seas of the Earth. In addition to being a valuable source of food for other species and saving the planet’s ecosystems through their recycling activities, insects also provide another important free service to industrial agriculture: pollination, which plays a crucial role in food production. One study estimates that capitalist industrial agriculture benefits from insects’ free services by about $350 billion. “Insects are involved in the pollination of most flowering plants, including 75 percent of agricultural crops,” says Dr. Sanchez-Bio. It takes 17 pollinators to make chocolate, 15 of which are tiny creatures. One is a very small ant, and another is a very small moth that humans don’t know much about, but industrial capitalist agriculture will destroy them before they know it. We only know that in many countries, pollinator species such as wild honeybees are in decline. Some of the most famous types of butterflies, including the monarch butterfly, which pollinates many wildflowers, are also disappearing. The insect world is much larger than we humans can fathom. According to the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, the total weight of insects on Earth is 17 times the weight of all humans on Earth. The institute estimates that there are about 10 quintillion insects on Earth at any given time (a quintillion is a billion billion, or 10 times six triples of zeros, or 1019). The number of insect species on Earth is still only estimated at between 2 and 3 million. Unlike mammals, long-term research on insects is limited, and many are extinct before they are identified. According to the Smithsonian Institution, we only know about 900,000 different species of insects, but that’s about 80 percent of all species on Earth. Insects are going extinct before they’re even identified and classified. A report published in the journal Biological Conservation in February 2019 paints a grim picture. The report found that insect biomass in Germany, the United Kingdom and Puerto Rico, three countries where insect numbers have been monitored consistently over the past 30 years, has been declining by 2.5 percent per year (a decline of about 70 percent over that time). Populations of 41 percent of insect species have declined in all locations surveyed so far. US researchers in the Caribbean islands and Puerto Rico have found that insect populations have declined by a massive 98% over the past four decades. At this rate, many species will be wiped out. “If the current trend is not stopped, we will see a high rate of insect species extinction this century (more than the current average of 41%),” says Dr. Sanchez-Bayo. “A similar proportion of species have not changed in number, because a small percentage of species have increased and become more abundant, perhaps filling the gap left by those that have disappeared.” This means that the great balance that has existed for millions, if not billions, of years among animals, and especially insects, is undergoing a huge change, the catastrophic results of which cannot be predicted, but the emergence of various epidemics and pandemics among animals and human societies is becoming more and more likely. Habitat destruction due to industrial agriculture is a major cause of insect extinctions, for example, flies that helped pollinate cocoa trees have gone extinct. “These little flies need these trees to fertilize them as adults,” says Dr McAllister. “Their larvae live in the dry leaves of the tree. With the introduction of monoculture of shade trees, which are the habitat of the adult flies, there has been a huge decline and soon they will be gone, as well as the habitat that their larvae need to grow.” Increased use of chemical pesticides, invasive species and global warming also play a role in this decline. Research by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) says in a report published on September 10, 2020, that the world’s wildlife population has declined by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years. Since 1970, two-thirds of the animal population has decreased.
Five years later (March 2025), similar warnings and discoveries are repeated on a much larger scale.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405665024001112
“This review critically examines the multifaceted impacts of chemical pesticides on environmental ecosystems and human health, highlighting the urgent need for sustainable pest management practices. The widespread use of pesticides, such as organochlorine compounds (e.g., DDT, endrin) known for their persistence and bioaccumulation, poses significant risks to biodiversity, water quality, and food safety. By accumulating in the food chain, these substances threaten higher trophic levels and amplify the potential for adverse health outcomes, including acute poisoning, cancer, and neurological disorders.”
The behaviour and functioning of the dominant world order is the main cause of the extinction of many species and animals. The organization says that over the past 50 years, 68 percent of animal, bird and aquatic populations have decreased. Researchers believe that the most important cause is the destruction of forests and the expansion of agricultural land. Marco Lambertini, director of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, told AFP that the destruction of wildlife has accelerated dramatically in recent years. The worst declines have occurred in Africa (in the case of the Congolese gorilla) and Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2016, the organization recorded the extinction of about 60 percent of the world’s animal world, and now, after just four years, the decline is approaching 70 percent. According to Lambertini, this short time is only “a fleeting moment in the millions of years that countless species have lived on this planet.” Tanya Steele, the UK director of the World Wildlife Fund, said wildlife is in “free fall” as forests are burned, industrial and large-scale fishing and the destruction of natural areas. Until now, it was said that mobile phone waves were dangerous to human health. Now, the results of several studies have shown that these waves could be one of the causes of insect deaths. Cell phone radiation could be the cause of insect deaths in Europe, according to a new study. The findings come from a review of 190 scientific studies from around the world, compiled by the German Environmental Protection Association in collaboration with two other environmental organizations. The research shows that, in addition to pesticides and habitat loss and deforestation, increased electromagnetic radiation is also “probably having a negative impact on insect life.”
Of the 100 studies conducted in the laboratory and in the field, 60 show negative effects of cell phone signals on bees, honeybees and insects. These harms range from loss of the ability to navigate through magnetic fields to damage to the genes and larvae of these insects. According to the journal Environmental Medicine, which published the results of the study, the reason for this is that cell phone waves, as well as Internet and Wi-Fi radiation, expand calcium channels in the cells inside the insects’ bodies, allowing more calcium to flow in. Calcium is an important mineral that triggers a series of biochemical chain reactions in insects.
“ An enormous increase in the application of wireless communication in recent decades has intensified research into consequent increase in human exposure to electromagnetic (EM) radiofrequency (RF) radiation fields and potential health effects, especially in school children and teenagers, and this paper gives a snap overview of current findings and recommendations of international expert bodies, with the emphasis on exposure from Wi-Fi technology indoor devices. Our analysis includes over 100 in vitro, animal, epidemiological, and exposure assessment studies (of which 37 in vivo and 30 covering Wi-Fi technologies). Only a small portion of published research papers refers to the “real” health impact of Wi-Fi technologies on children, because they are simply not available. Results from animal studies are rarely fully transferable to humans. As highly controlled laboratory exposure experiments do not reflect real physical interaction between RF radiation fields with biological tissue, dosimetry methods, protocols, and instrumentation need constant improvement. Several studies repeatedly confirmed thermal effect of RF field interaction with human tissue, but non-thermal effects remain dubious and unconfirmed.” 2022 Jul 7
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9287836/
The impact of mobile phone radiation on the environment is underestimated. This trend will accelerate with the arrival of 5G mobile technology. A year ago, in August 2021, researchers said their study, published in the journal Science Advances, is the strongest evidence yet of the devastating impact of light pollution on native insect populations, with consequences for birds and other wildlife species that rely on silkworms for food. Light pollution may be a factor in the “alarming” decline in insect populations in recent decades. A study in the UK found that streetlights disrupt moth behaviour and halve the number of silkworms. Modern LED lights appear to have the biggest impact on insects. The causes of the dramatic decline in insect populations are complex and diverse, including the destruction of forests, swamps, wetlands and marshes, the use of pesticides in industrial agriculture, pollution of rivers and lakes, electromagnetic waves and the use of artificial light are now being considered as other factors in the decline of insect populations. A scientific study published in April 2022 concluded that insect populations in some parts of the world have been halved due to climate change and industrial agriculture. The researchers in the UK said that warming and industrial agriculture are causing “serious declines” in insect populations worldwide. Dr Charlie Outhwaite of University College London, who led the study, said the destruction of insect populations could be detrimental not only to the natural environment but also to “human health and food security, particularly the loss of pollinators”.
The sharp decline in insect populations around the world – the so-called “insect apocalypse” – has caused widespread concern. The concern expressed in this regard is not at all about human health or the future of nature, but rather about the potential for increased production costs from the perspective of reduced capital gains. However, scientific data presents a mixed picture, with some insect species seeing dramatic population declines, while others remain stable. In the new study, researchers collected data on the range and numbers of nearly 20,000 insect species, including bees, ants, butterflies, grasshoppers, and dragonflies, at about 6,000 locations. The study, published in Nature, found that in areas where labour-intensive industrial farming techniques were used and warming was noticeable, insect numbers had fallen by 49 percent. This compares with relatively pristine locations that have so far avoided the most severe effects of warming. This research once again shows that the various factors resulting from capitalist production relations have a very dangerous and disruptive effect on the balance and harmony of life of insects with other animals and even plants, the results of which only suddenly become apparent with the emergence of diseases and epidemics. Capital dominates and owns all of nature, from inanimate to living.
Nowhere on this planet is any animal safe from the bite of this terrible monster. If it has not directly acquired and legally owned living beings, it has turned them into traps for tourist capital, huge zoos, and new areas of capital advance by creating fences and specific habitats. The field of tourism capital is expanding and accumulating enormously year after year, the result of which is nothing but the destruction of animals outside the fence and the entrapment of the rest. Such changes that have occurred in the last few decades are the main source of the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the epidemics that are coming. The conversion of natural resources, plants, animals in the air, on the land and in the waters into capital is a requirement of these production relations. To find the root of environmental problems, we have to refer to the history of capitalism, especially industrial capitalism, every time and in every context. The hunting and killing of wild animals, not for the purpose of obtaining meat and skins, but simply as a form of entertainment and a show of appreciation, began in Africa and India by European, especially British, capitalism. This process spread in the areas of industrial capital expansion and mass production of agriculture and livestock and took on global dimensions. This was the beginning of the great invasion of capital on nature and the earth’s resources, but by no means the end. From the very beginning, capitalism sought to control natural factors and the conditions of agricultural production, including changes in the seasons, the quality and content of the land, plant pests, and the type of seed. The importance of the issue reached its peak in the years following the Second Imperialist War. The remarkable technical advances of these times also provided the necessary tools for achieving this goal to the owners of capital. The long cycle of planting, tending, and harvesting, the difficulties of predicting the yield, the danger of plant pests, and the loss of produce, both during fertilization and after harvest and sometimes during storage, are all factors that distinguish this sphere of capital accumulation from other realms and affect the level of productivity of labour. However, one thing is a vital and inherent condition for this system. The achievement of maximum surplus value requires the development of accumulation accompanied by the uncontrolled increase of surplus labour of the working masses at the expense of necessary labour, that is, their wages. In this process, the mechanization of planting, harvesting, storage, and transportation certainly play a very decisive role and contribute significantly to raising the rate of profit. In this transition, capital, like all other realms of advance and by its institutional nature, takes the path of excessive production, seeing the acquisition of golden items of profit as everything and the destruction of humans or their unlimited misery in this regard as the simplest and most unsparing tasks. Capital’s invasion of nature in the agricultural sector is tied to the widespread use of pesticides and poisons. In capitalist agriculture, maintaining the consumer value of the product in the production and management process is subject to many risks. Plant pests constitute the most important and influential part of these risks. In order to avoid bearing the costs of reproducing a product infested with pests, the capitalist farmer takes the path of using pesticides. By doing so, he not only avoids the costs of reproducing but also minimizes the amount of waste and damage. In short, the uncontrolled use of pesticides is an integral part of the process of capital appreciation in the agricultural sector and a necessary condition for achieving the maximum desired surplus value or profit. The foundation of capital’s work is based on the production of maximum goods with the minimum labour force, the extreme reduction of the cost of the various components of the fixed capital sector, the highest possible quality of goods, and maximum competitiveness in the capitalist market. Ensuring all of this in capitalist industrial agriculture is tied to the widespread use of pesticides. The consequences of this onslaught have been the beginning of the destruction of living things, including plants, creatures on land, in the air, and in water. Insects, rodents, weeds, fungi, bacteria, worms, parasites, spiders, and birds are all creatures that are attacked by the toxins produced by agricultural and chemical companies. Another major onslaught has been the transformation of forests and pastures into areas for the advance of capital and the destruction of animal and plant habitats, which has no end. Let us continue with the latest research in these fields.
Billions of birds have disappeared from the scene in North America and Europe in recent years. The situation is worse in the tropics, with more populations at risk of extinction. The number of birds in the world is declining dramatically. There are about 11,000 species of birds in the world, but half of them is declining in population and only 6% are increasing in population. One of the main reasons for the decline in bird populations is the damage caused to bird habitats by targeted capital activities; climate change, pesticides, disease, and air, water, and soil pollution all contribute to the decline in bird populations. Billions of birds have disappeared from the scene in North America and Europe in recent years. The situation is worse in the tropics, with more populations at risk of extinction. Researchers who prepared a recent report on bird population declines, published on May 5, 2022, say that changing bird populations are a good indicator of how the world is changing and the health of the planet. Birds are highly sensitive to changes in their natural habitats and are present all over the planet, so “listening to what they are telling us” Can alert us to the severity of nature’s degradation, the researchers said. A recent study of bird populations, published in the journal Annual Resources and Environment, found that 48 percent of bird species are declining.
Bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 3 billion since 1970, and 600 million birds have disappeared in Europe since 1980. Birds are affected by all aspects of human activity. For example, 2.7 million birds die each year in Canada alone from pesticide poisoning. Those birds that are larger and have a longer breeding season are more at risk than others. Parrots, sea pigeons, cranes and storks are among these birds. Every country in the world has at least one endangered bird, and ten countries have more than 75 species at risk.
The emergence and spread of epidemics
Disruption of symmetry, harmony, and balance among animals, the extinction of many species and the survival of others due to environmental destruction, fires, deforestation, and the like, is one of the important reasons for the emergence of epidemics in human societies. Another important reason is the ever-closer proximity of human societies to the living environment of animals due to the ever-increasing transformation of nature into more and more areas of capital advance. Hunting animals for their use in zoos or for the conversion of their meat, skin, and other body parts into capital circulation is one of the factors that causes and spreads epidemics. Examples of this claim were the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The live and present case of monkeypox among humans in May 2022 are both very telling evidence of such cases. If such viruses do not cause disease or epidemics in the bodies of these animals because their relationship with their host is a peaceful one, in the biological sense of symbiosis, then these same viruses can be deadly and dangerous to humans and human societies, either through mutation or even without any biological change. This mortality is being carried out in astronomical conditions and in such a way that capital and capital governments, during dozens of capitalist crises and the process of falling capital profit rates, have reduced the health and treatment costs of the working masses and channelled them into the capital circulation cycle. Let us examine this issue by reviewing the recent period. The Covid-19 pandemic is a serious reminder of the tense relationship between humans and nature. Factors that are thought to lead to the emergence of pandemics are mentioned above, including the destruction of natural habitats, wildlife trade, and other factors that contribute to the decline in wildlife. A little over two years have passed since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak. At the moment, the moment of these two years, entire governments, the World Health Organization, thousands of institutes and research centers of the world of capital, are talking about their round-the-clock efforts and huge progress in the field of the challenge of this disease. Giant pharmaceutical trusts have seized the most galactic profits by producing and distributing vaccines and raising the flag of pioneering in these developments and have drowned the world in the dust of the miraculous power of their discoveries. All of these and all the media and capital’s platforms are saying that although Covid-19 exists, it is under control, deaths have decreased and the number of infected people has become relatively less!
This is just a distortion, a falsification and a distortion of the nature of capitalism and the institutions of the capitalist order that arise from the nature of capital. The same role has been played and is being played every day in relation to Covid-19 and what it has brought upon humanity. Let us look at the history of the last few years to see what has happened to the global working class. The capitalist system, 14 years ago, turned its explosive global crisis into a mechanism for further slaughter of food, clothing, housing, medicine, education, or basic livelihoods of the working masses. It made every possible plan to perhaps usher in a new round of prosperity for a part of global capital. This struggle failed under the pressure of the inherent contradictions of capital and its tsunami-like rebellion. The number of hospital beds per thousand people decreased during and after each crisis (1990, 2000 and 2008). An example is the number of hospital beds in Italy, Spain and all the countries of the European Community over the course of eighteen years, and especially after the 2008-2009 crisis.
Chart 17
Decades of Tight Fiscal Policy Have Left the Health Care System in Italy Ill-Prepared to Fight the COVID-19 Outbreak Volume 55, 2020 · Number 3 · pp. 147–152
In recent years, Sweden has been one of the ten countries with the lowest number of intensive care beds per 1,000 people in the Organization of American States (OAS) of 34 powerful countries. In the latest Health at a Glance report, which presents figures for 2015, Sweden’s hospital beds have fallen even further. Compared to other EU countries, Sweden has the fewest available intensive care beds; among the 34 countries, only Mexico and Chile have fewer hospital beds. The number of available intensive care beds has decreased in most countries, with the exception of Korea and Turkey. The average across the 34 major economies is 4.7 intensive care beds per 1,000 people. The number of available hospital beds in Sweden has been declining since the mid-1990s. Swedish capitalism, slightly later than Britain, began its all-out assault on the gains of the labour movement precisely at the beginning of the 1980s. The Swedish bourgeoisie and its representatives on the left and right, from moderates to social democrats, all joined together with one voice in organizing a lightning assault on all the existing welfare, social, educational, and medical facilities that were the product of the long struggles of the working class. Between 1989 and 1994 alone, some 68,000 relief workers and more than 5,000 nurses were laid off from various hospitals. The health budget was largely cut, with vital and essential activities such as care for the elderly and even some necessary surgeries on the elderly either suspended or reduced to a minimum. Every relief worker was forced to work several times more than before, and every sick worker who visited hospitals was forced to pay several times the cost of treatment and receive minimal medical and treatment services. During this period and after that, a large number of workers in the healthcare sector of the Swedish capital emigrated to other countries for work. One of the fields of work where the most labour migration occurs is the healthcare sector, where nurses leave their country due to low wages, hard work, and long shifts. The European Union’s Job Markets Agency compares 300 professions, with nurses being the most in demand abroad. On average, around 10,000 nurses move each year. In 2013, nurses were the largest group of workers to move within Europe. The main reason for this is the reduction in healthcare budgets and the layoffs of workers in these capital-intensive sectors. Statistics compiled by the European Commission show that Romania has lost 7,120 nurses in five years, and Sweden has actually lost a lot of nurses, with 6,585 applying for jobs in other countries in the same year. In total, 23,715 Swedish nurses with work permits are working in Norway. Britain has also been a target for Swedish nurses. There is no exact data on this, but it is likely due to both salaries, as a nurse in Norway earns almost twice as much as in Sweden. The Swedish Council of County Councils wrote in December 2018: More than 2,600 care homes in the country have closed in the autumn weeks, mainly due to a shortage of nurses. The capitalist mode of production has brought all these disasters and calamities upon humanity in order to reduce its relentless descent into the quagmire of crises. There is no accurate information about the number of hospital beds in Iran. But even if there were, considering the tens of millions of poor and marginalized working masses who are unable to even provide for themselves and their families, apportioning the number of hospital beds among the population would seem very strange and ridiculous.
But according to Iranian government officials last year, we should have two and a half nurses for every bed, but the actual figure is only 0.7 nurses, while if we are to provide proper services to the people, it is necessary to have 9 to 10 nurses for every thousand people! The situation of American capitalism has not been and is not better. Despite the multitude of colourful health and medical institutes and the astronomical accumulation of capital in this field every year, the huge pharmaceutical giants and the pride of the largest market in the field of capital advance in this field, the vast mass of tens of millions of poor workers in this country are deprived of minimum medical coverage. It was precisely in this situation that no government in the world and no part of the capitalist world had any level of preparation necessary to deal with this Covid-19 invasion. This very naked and blatant lack of preparation, contrary to all the capitalist-oriented ideas of the right or the left, had nothing to do with the type of management, “democratic”, dictatorial, fascist, or being in the shadow of the galaxy of technological and industrial growth, or any such issues. The root of this complete lack of preparation, as shown above with the figures, lies in the depths of the existence of capital, in the depths of the existence of relations in which everything, the entire fabric of its existence, including all its knowledge, discoveries, inventions, research and training in all areas, including health, medicine, pharmaceutical sciences, as well as in the case of the environment or any other field, is solely in the service of increasing profits and increasing the self-aggrandizement of capital. Relations in which man is the most vulgar being and his entire prestige does not exceed the limit of an active cog in the profit-making machine and a passive cog in the machine of the capitalist political and social order. In a system and method of production with such a background, why should any scientific orientation or research be relevant to understanding the self-created dangers to human lives. When the entire daily functioning of capital works towards creating deadly environmental tsunamis, antagonism to nature, and the extinction of living beings, why should its doctors, researchers, and scientific, medical, and pharmaceutical institutes take the direction and direction of discovering these dangers?
The extent to which the labour movement has been able to force governments to accept costs in this regard, whether the working class must exert the greatest possible pressure on the bourgeoisie for this purpose, is another matter; the debate is about the nature and scope of capitalist existence. The global labour movement, over the past several decades, under the rubble of right-wing and left-wing reformism and destructive deviations on the one hand and the violent repression of the fascist, police, and bourgeois military on the other, has not only not exerted any pressure on the capitalist system, but has also retreated moment by moment in the face of this system’s horrific attacks. Let us return to the discussion on the crisis-ridden state of global capital. The volume of foreign accumulation of the 10 major industrial countries, consisting of the United States and its allies, which, thanks to the reduction of all the needs of the working masses of the world, limped, limped in 2011, finally reached $1,700 billion, began to decline in 2012, and in 2015 and 2016, it went to life, but it decreased again and fell to $1,100 billion by 2018. China’s social capital situation worsened, before it could recover and grow, it fell into a crisis, and in 2016 it experienced its lowest economic growth in 26 years. During the same period, the debt of the governments of the ten largest industrialized countries rose from $35 trillion to $51 trillion. Everything screamed loudly that a new round of crisis explosion was coming.
Global capital was in such a state that suddenly Corona arrived with a terrible bang. Corona had a tremendous capacity to deepen the crisis. The exploited labour force paralyzed international capital and surrendered a significant percentage to death. Capital is the product of the exploitation of the worker or dead labour, and while Covid-19 prevented millions and millions of workers from working, being exploited, and producing profits for capital, it is clear that it would also make the unruly crisis of capitalism even more stormy. It was here that capital entered the fray with all its might. The only way to challenge the falling rate of profit and deal with the crisis was a pandemic assault on the minimum livelihoods and living conditions of the global working class. A terrifying assault that took many forms and with many different strategies. It is the custom of capital to proceed directly and crudely, by lengthening the working day, by mass unemployment, by direct reduction of wages, by a destructive increase in the intensity of work, by the swallowing up of small capitals by more powerful competitors, and the like. Capital has long been doing these things on a very large scale and with octopus-like mechanisms. Here the capitalist states resorted to an old trick, but on a scale that had never been so large and shameless.
The coronavirus outbreak in Europe has hit Italy and Spain, which were already struggling with economic problems, harder than other European countries. At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, European finance ministers are considering a €500 billion support plan to overcome the coronavirus crisis. This was the beginning, because by March 2021, $30,146 billion (35% of the 2019 global GDP, 84,991 (at constant 2010 prices)) of capital had been pumped into the world’s social capital. The US’s share of this amount was $16,704 billion, and the European Union’s 6,642 billion GEL. The Chinese capital government had also injected tens of billions of dollars into the financial system by February 2020 to combat the effects of the coronavirus on the economic cycle. Talk of injecting more than a trillion yuan into China’s banking and financial system, an amount equivalent to 150 billion euros or more than 160 billion dollars. The Swedish government will contribute up to 3,000 billion kronor to the capitalist production cycle in a series of shock measures, first 500 billion kronor, then 300 billion kronor, and finally under various names, including reducing employers’ costs by 50 percent, completely eliminating the capitalists’ share of workers’ sick leave insurance, drastically reducing the so-called “employer’s tax” and a list of these measures will help the capitalist production cycle by up to 3,000 billion kronor. Many may think that governments resorted to drastic handouts to perhaps prevent the dismissal of a number of workers! If anyone thinks so, it is a delusion and a loss of consciousness. At the very moment when these aids were flowing into the bank accounts of the capitalists, the working masses were dismissed in droves, thousands, and thousands. In Sweden, with a population of 10 million, more than 13,000 restaurant workers lost their jobs in a matter of days. Just one hotel company has laid off 2,000 workers in the past few days. A global storm of layoffs has begun. The Travel and Tourism Trust alone has reported 50 million workers being laid off. The list is terrifyingly long. Thus, the most galactic budgets have been approved to prevent the decline in capital gains and have been given to the giant financial and industrial trusts. In addition, stock markets around the world lost a significant amount of their value. Here, governments, along with the stock market, used a cunning trick. Early in the pandemic, the New York Stock Exchange announced that it had lost about $4 trillion in value. An event that also happened to all the major stock exchanges in the world, including the UK, Germany, and Japan. Twenty days later, the drama was repeated on a larger scale, this time the New York Stock Exchange fell by 10 percent, France by 9 percent, Germany by 8 percent, and the rest by the same amount or more. Something like $15 trillion in total stock markets. Capitalism suggests that a $15 trillion drop in stock values is synonymous with a reduction of this amount in the value of total international capital!! The surface of the story is true, but in the meantime, very crucial fundamental issues are being concealed and falsified. A significant portion of this $15 trillion is in stocks that workers have bought, or in fact, have turned their paid labour into the “virtual capital” of giant financial and industrial trusts. In effect, this reduction means shifting this money from the pockets of workers to other owners of capital. A fairly large number of workers see themselves and their children’s futures secured by paying a portion of their wages to buy shares in large trusts. They gain nothing by doing so, but the giants of finance, by increasing the price of these bonds, increase the amount of capital available to them for advance- ment in more profitable fields. The capitalists make huge profits in this way and as soon as signs of crisis appear, they confiscate all these items in the blink of an eye and take them away from the workers. Another part of this $15 trillion belongs to small capitalists, whose ownership is cancelled by the world stock exchange by applying the capital purification mechanism and given to the owners of larger capital. The stock market does several important things in this regard in order to address the crisis. First, it converts trillions of dollars of paid labour of the working class into unpaid labour or into profits and capital of trusts. Second, it allows large capital to bankrupt its smaller competitors, thereby achieving the process of capital purification. If we add up all these figures, they had offered the capitalist class something like $50 trillion by March 2021 to slaughter the working class in terms of food, clothing, education, and medical care. As the crisis rages, this figure will multiply. A figure that will be taken from the workers, their breadless table, their lack of education, and their future generations, to the last krona. Wages will be subjected to the most brutal attacks. Unemployment will soar; hunger and poverty will reach volcanic proportions. Schools will be dismantled with greater speed than before, hospitals will be closed one after another. The retirement age will be raised again. Unemployment and sickness insurance will be slaughtered, capital will begin a global and strategic massacre against the existing livelihoods of the world’s workers, it will recognize no boundaries for this massacre and will continue it until the working-class retreats to a 19th century level of livelihood. All that has been said so far has prepared the ground for the hound of Covid-19 to slaughter and massacre the working masses under the auspices of capital. Something that is clear within a year of this long period in the World Health Organization report on May 5, 2022.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said in a report that nearly 15 million people worldwide died in 2020 and 2021 from the coronavirus or its impact on health systems. The WHO estimate is almost three times the official figures announced by various governments. According to the WHO, the highest number of deaths was in Southeast Asia (mainly India), the Americas and Europe. According to research conducted by scientists at the World Health Organization, the true number of deaths from Covid-19 from January 2020 to the end of 2021 was around 13.3 million to 16.6 million. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that an additional seven to 10 million deaths are due to weak health systems in countries. The WHO figures are based on the method of calculating excess mortality. This method compares the number of deaths recorded in a year with the average number of deaths in previous years. According to this statistic, the highest number of deaths, 84 percent, occurred in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas. Experts from this organization have stated that due to corona restrictions in many countries, some of the usual deaths have not occurred. For example, road accidents and workplace accidents can be mentioned. Because many people have been working from home and remotely, and in some areas, curfews have been in place. In the past, other institutions have also provided similar statistics on deaths from Corona. For example, the US Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) announced the death toll related to the pandemic at 15.4 million people. The figures announced by the World Health Organization have been released in the media at a time when the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates that more than 18 million people have died from Covid-19. On the other hand, some countries, including India, have disputed the WHO’s method of calculating the number of deaths from Covid and have opposed the idea that the actual number of deaths is much higher than the official figures. World Health Organization estimates show that India had more than 4.7 million deaths from 2020 to the end of 2021, while the official Covid-19 death toll in the country was 481,000 for the same period. The long-term effects of Covid-19, which include dozens of complications, must also be added to the scale of this disaster, which involves hundreds of millions of people, mostly workers. According to various estimates from various institutes, about 25% of those who have experienced the coronavirus have developed what is called post-COVID. If we take the data from the World Health Organization as a basis for calculation, in the same two-year period, about one billion people were infected with this virus, of which a quarter, or at least two hundred million people, generally workers without the slightest health care, suffer from incurable post-COVID complications.
The most crucial question is what the labour movement will do in the face of this criminal war of capitalism. The answer to this question is unclear, but one thing is clear. The capitalist nightmare will have no end, and this is while the international working class has no place to retreat. The evidence shows that the workers have no other choice but to raise the banner of a real war against capitalism, to erect the barricade of radical class struggle. We do not know what will happen, but we know this well, we will rush forward determinedly and steadfastly to play a radical role in the war ahead of our class.