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Class Struggle
Organ of the Central Committee of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
Editorial-1:
PLANDEMIC
Covid-19 as a Tool to throw the Burden of Economic Crisis on the Backs of Toiling People
The spread of Covid-19 throughout the world,
whether deliberate or accidental, has been utilized
by the reactionary ruling classes to cover up the
already imminent economic crisis and to throw the
burden of crisis on the backs of toiling people and
poor countries. It is obvious that corona virus has
wrought damage to the economies of all the
countries. Yet, Covid-19 is not the cause for
economic crisis on world scale and at the national
level. But, it acted as a catalyst that exacerbated
the crisis in the hands of ruling classes.
As Eric Toussaint pointed out in a recent article
titled "No, the corona virus is not responsible for
the fall of stock prices":
“Over the past two years, there has been a
very significant slowdown in productive sectors. In
several major economies such as Germany,
Japan (last quarter 2019), France (last quarter
2019) and Italy, industrial production has declined
or slowed down sharply (China and the United
States).
“Some industrial sectors that had recovered
after the 2007-09 crisis, such as the automobile
industry, entered into a very strong crisis during
the years 2018-19 with a very significant drop in
sales and production.
“Production in Germany, the world’s largest car
manufacturer, fell by 14 percent between October
2018 and October 2019. Automobile production in
the United States and China also fell in 2019, as it
did in India. Automobile production will fall sharply
in France in 2020.
“The output of another flagship of the German
economy, the machinery and equipment producing
sector, fell by 4.4 percent in October 2019 alone.
This is also the case for the production of machine
tools and other industrial equipment.
“International trade has stagnated. Over a
longer period of time, the rate of profit has
declined or stagnated in material production, and
productivity gains have also declined.” (Monthly
Review, 4 March 2020)
The reason for this economic slowdown is the
crisis of overproduction. There is no point in
producing goods that cannot be sold, because
goods have already been overproduced to such
an extent that the markets are glutted.
In the era of imperialism, when the finance
capital reign over all other sectors of the economy,
the crisis of overproduction expresses itself as a
financial crisis, and we have seen over the last two
years various imperialist governments desperately
trying to control the economic situation by
managing interest levels on government debt.
For the working class, this means
unemployment and misery.s“Given the large fall in
output, unemployment is expected to rise sharply
even though many countries have adopted job
retention programmes to keep employees
attached to their places of work. As a result,
incomes per person are expected to fall in nine in
10 of the IMF’s 189 member countries. “In the US,
unemployment is expected to rise from 3.7 percent
in 2019 to 10.4 percent this year and only dip to
9.1 percent in 2021. There is likely to be a smaller
rise in the eurozone from 7.6 percent last year to
10.4 percent this year and 8.9 percent in 2021”
(World economy set for heaviest blow since Great