 I'm Fred Weston, member of the editorial board of the In Defence of Marxism website, which is the website of the international Marxist tendency, which is a Marxist international organisation, which attempts to offer analysis, a programme, perspective on what is happening in the world, why we are living in such times of crisis, and also offer a way out. Now, we're living through dramatic times. We have the outburst of this COVID-19 coronavirus, and I'm going to talk about that, but not just that. I'm going to connect it to the world crisis of capitalism, the period we've been through, and how this new crisis is impacting on the consciousness of millions and billions of people around the world. And I'm going to attempt also to outline what stage we are at in the class struggle on a global scale. Now, the coronavirus is a serious turn of events. It's creating a situation where many people are dying, many have already died, and unfortunately, many more will also die. Lives are also being put at risk, not just by the virus itself, which of course is a mutation which occasionally happens. That's not the fault of any particular individual. But the way you manage the development of such a virus, the impact it has, the number of deaths it can cause, the suffering that it can cause, that is something which falls within the scope of human control. And that depends really on the social economic system that we live in and the caliber of the political leaders that we have. Now, it's quite evident to all, looking at the reaction in practically every country. If you look at the early reaction to this crisis, the first priority was not to take all measures possible to make life safe for human beings, safe for working people, safe for our children, safe for our older generation, safe for the people with already pre-existing illnesses. It's quite clear that the first priority was keep production going, keep the money rolling in, make sure the economy doesn't tip over into a crisis, which will mean many capitalists and investors risk losing a lot of money and profits going down. That was clearly the first reaction that we had. Now, I'll go into that a bit later on. Now, of course, the coronavirus is an accident of history. This could have happened at any time or other accidents could have happened. But the point is it comes at a very critical moment in the world economy and in the development of society as a whole. And it is triggering a major crisis in the system. We have a leaked report from Britain where we have a Prime Minister who says people should just take it on the chin and some of their loved ones will die early, as if that's something that working people should just accept when you can actually take measures to try and at least reduce that effect. A leaked report which talks about the possibility of eight million people being hospitalised just in Britain alone in the next 12 months or so, and up to half a million deaths. Now, I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. It may not turn out to be so bad, but these are some serious calculations which are being made by the people that know. In the United States, one report indicated that over 12 to 18 months, more than 1.5 million people could die of this virus. Now, if we look at the way these leaders have behaved, the way Johnson has behaved, the way Trump has behaved, and others, what comes out is the callousness of these people. What their priorities are very clear, and they're not the lives of ordinary working class people. Now, things are moving very fast. Events are moving at lightning speed. Today it will be almost like a different period of history compared to tomorrow. Last week in Britain was very different to this week, and next week will be dramatically different also. We are facing in effect the most serious crisis that capitalism has ever experienced. This crisis is going to be truly global, and it's going to impact on every country. And as a consequence, consciousness is speeding up very fast. Often there are debates about consciousness, how it develops. It's big events that change the consciousness of people, and it can change very, very suddenly from what can seem to be a very calm, everyday situation with nothing much seems to be happening, a major event can erupt, which can radically change that. Now, China is at the heart of this crisis, both from the development of the virus itself, but also from the point of view of the impact on the economy. Now, China, we explained in the past period, had played the role of kind of buffer for the world economy. It provided a certain outlet for the crisis which was developing elsewhere, and therefore allowed the world system to maintain a certain level of stability. We've had crises in the past 20 years, where China played that role. But we also explained that the contradictions that were piling up in China itself could transform China into its opposite, i.e., from a source of stability, it could actually be the country, the economy, that could trigger a world crisis. We published an article in April of last year, the title of which was China, the Approaching Storm. Now, of course, nobody could predict the development of this particular virus in China, how and when it developed. But that China could be at the heart of a world crisis we analyzed thoroughly, and what a storm is proving to be. Because the effect of the coronavirus on the economy, which has massively slowed down, and I'll give the figures in a minute, is having a huge knock-on effect around the globe, the globalization, the interconnection of all national economies into one world economic system, means that you stop producing parts in one part of the world, you cause shortages in another. So we highlighted the role that China would play. We also highlighted within the crisis of Europe, in particular the European Union, the role that Italy would play. Italy, the sick man of Europe. Italy, the third economy of the eurozone, extremely important therefore for the rest of Europe. Because of the huge accumulation of debt and the slowing of the Italian economy and because of its size and the role that it plays. For example, Germany's exports, China and Italy are the two major export markets for Germany. Therefore a slowdown in both of these is having a massive impact on Germany itself. It's dragging the whole of Europe down. And we wrote articles two years ago and further back, one article which we published on our website in June of 2018, the title was the Italian crisis deepens and threatens to engulf Europe. And that is what is happening now. Of course, the coronavirus is magnifying that, it's multiplying it, but Italy is having that effect. And recently an article published in The Guardian on 10th of March, the title of that article is an Italian financial crisis is certain. The big question is how contagious it is. And it definitely is contagious. It's spreading its effects economically throughout Europe. Now, we are living through a historical moment. This will go down in the history books as the coronavirus that provoked a world crisis in the economy. It reminds me, when I came into politics at the age of 17, 1970, in the 1970s, there was the increase in the price of oil, the Middle East crisis. They said that was what caused the recession of 1974. There's always a tendency on the part of capitalists or bourgeois economists to present history in such a way. The fact is, all the elements for that crisis have been prepared and the same applies today. The crisis was already being prepared by the contradictions within the system itself. The coronavirus in effect is, to use a famous phrase, necessity expressing itself through accident. This crisis would have come possibly a bit later, but it would have come because of the accumulated contradictions. I compare it to, if a man is standing right on the edge of a cliff, you push him with your little finger, he will very easily fall off that cliff. If the man had been standing 50 yards or 50 meters from that cliff on more solid ground, you could have pushed him with all your strength and he would have fallen, but he would have gotten up again, not fallen over the cliff. The point is, the problem was he was standing on the edge of that cliff and the system was on a cliff's edge before this crisis hit. The world economy was already slowing down. I'm not going to give all the figures, but I have a pile of articles here which give indications of what was happening. For instance, Britain in the three months to January this year was at zero growth of its GDP. Australia last year, this was in the middle of last year, articles reporting that it was having its slowest growth in 10 years. Japan, the economy was shrinking at the fastest rate since 2014 and there are many, many other articles which indicate that three months ago, six months ago, a year ago, many national economies were slowing down, stagnating and some were already in recession. The big crisis was being prepared. Now we have this crisis accelerating the process and we saw that with the crash of the stock markets just over a week ago with a meltdown of the system. The capitalists pulling their money out. The stock market is not the real economy. The real economy is clearly the production of goods, the production of food, of clothes, etc. But the stock market is where the capitalists invest their money in companies and when they see the storm coming they rush to try and get their money out, desperate to save their investment or the money they've made in the previous period. Stocks are falling, they're crashing, there's gyrations on the stock markets all over the world. This is simply an expression of the crisis of overproduction which we had been analysing for some years. The fact is that the system recovered from the crisis in the 70s mainly not only but one of the main factors was a huge accumulation of credit which played the role of stimulation of the market. But credit eventually becomes a mountain of debt and that debt becomes unsustainable. Now we have the financial times talking about the ongoing crisis, talking about not just a recession but this could actually become a depression like that of the 1930s. That is what they are talking about. This is the vindication of Marxist analysis with a bang. This is a confirmation of everything that Marxists have been saying for decades. For decades we said this was being prepared. Of course when the economy seems to be doing well, when there's a boom, when there are jobs, when there's easy credit etc and when it lasts for a reasonable amount of time of years or even decades the illusion can appear, can be created but the system has solved its internal contradictions. That what the Marxists say was false, we were just harking back to the old days of the class struggle. But the fact is this, we went through a massive boom after the Second World War. Those from my generation remember the full employment, the free education, the healthcare and let's not forget that the healthcare that we do have was fought for and won by the working class of Britain, by the working class of Italy, of France, of Germany. None of this was given free on a plate by the capitalist class. The crisis of 1974 really put an end to that period and the new period opened up of austerity, privatisation etc. But they managed to keep the system going as I said with a massive credit bubble. Now I've shown this before. This is the accumulation of debt in ratio to GDP between 1950 and 2016. I think you can see there what a huge explosion of debt takes place roughly from the beginning of the 1980s. That was the period in which the class struggle of the 70s went down to defeat in many countries and the capitalist class went on a huge offensive against the working class, slashing real wages, putting pressure on by through speed-ups in production etc. But the way that could work was only by having the credit, the pumping of credit into the economy to provide the cash to buy the goods the capitalist needed to sell. This has grown and grown and grown. 2019, growable debt stood at $250 trillion. That's something like $90,000 per capita. Every baby that is born is born with that debt hanging over its head. The capitalist system was sitting on a mountain of debt, private debt, corporate debt, public debt etc. But that could not go on forever and what happened was once it reached a certain level then the system started to break down. It started with a subprime, people couldn't afford to pay their mortgages, banks were facing a major crisis and in 2007-2008 we had the crash and the banking crisis. How did the system survive that? Governments everywhere massively bailed out the banks. I'm not going to give the figures here, but it was hundreds of billions of dollars of pounds of euros that were handed over to the banks to save them, to keep them on their feet. If you're a poor person begging for a few pennies, if you're hungry, you ask for a little amount of money from the state in the form of some kind of benefit, universal credit or whatever, unemployment benefit. They will tell you you've got to go to work, you've got to earn your living etc. If you're a billionaire that has provoked major crisis of the banking system and you go cap in hand begging to the government, they hand over more billions to you, billions of state money, public money, and then they turn around and they say to the working people, we can't afford your pensions anymore, we can't afford your healthcare anymore, we can't afford the education anymore, we have to cut. That's the answer they gave to that crisis. They made the people who were not responsible for this crisis, they made them pay in a big way through austerity. And for example, everywhere you look, Italy, France, Britain, Spain, everywhere, you see years of constant systematic chipping away at the rights that workers had gained in the past and the services they'd gained, in particular the health service, which was a huge conquest for working class people, not like the days of my grandparents, I remember talking to them, no pensions, no healthcare, if you were sick you would die. That's where they're pushing us back to. Now we're seeing in a massive way what it means to have cut back on the national health service for so long. They've cut back the intensive care units, they've cut back hospital beds, they've closed hospitals, they've privatised. This has been going on for years. And now we enter a major crisis and the system is unprepared. It cannot deal with this growing crisis which we have around us. Now they say that there's not enough money, there's not enough wealth to pay for the health services that we require. But that's completely false. There are trillions of dollars sitting in the accounts of big capitalists. There has been a massive polarization of wealth. What I mean by that is at one end of society the 1% or the 0.1% have accumulated immense wealth. That is at the expense of somebody else. When there's a shift of wealth between the classes if the rich are getting richer it must mean somebody else is getting poorer. And at the other end of society you have growing poverty and the level of polarization of wealth, i.e. the inequality in society is at historical levels. This graph shows two peaks. One here, one here. This is 1928, this is 2010. If you see that since the 80s the process of growing inequality and accumulation of wealth at one end and poverty that has grown reaching the same level of disparity as in 1928. I don't think I need to give a history lesson when I refer to 1928 and what it means. Now in the recent period in the last 10 or so years we have seen an onslaught on the conquest of the working class. Greece was like a laboratory test for the Carapace class. After 2008 they massively, they butchered the Greek economy and attacked all the gains of the Greek workers. The Greek workers responded with 40 general strikes, 40 general strikes, some of them 48 hour general strikes. They elected a left-wing government, Syriza, in the hope that this would be a government that would help the working class get over this crisis. Instead the leaders of Syriza succumbed to the pressures of the capitalist class and carried out the very same austerity which the working class had voted against. In Spain we've had massive movements, the indignados, in France the gilets jaunes and other big movements around the globe. We've seen in the recent couple of years a massive wave of revolutionary upheaval around the globe. We've seen the scenes in Sudan of the masses coming out on the streets overthrowing a 30 year dictatorship. The same in Algeria, movements all across Africa, Zimbabwe to Morocco, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Togo, one after another, movements of peoples against the governments that were imposing austerity. In India massive general strikes, we saw the big protests in Hong Kong. We saw movements of the workers in China prior to this crisis, big movements of the working class, a huge increase in protests. We saw Lebanon, the huge revolutionary upheaval there, followed recently by a default of the Lebanese government, the huge movements in Iraq, the movement in Iran, the insurrectionary mood in Haiti, the massive revolutionary wave across Latin America, the inspiring movement of the Ecuadorian masses, of the Chilean masses, the movements in Colombia and other countries. What we have been witnessing is in effect a worldwide process of revolutionary upheaval, with dozens of countries affected. Now, this period we are entering can be compared to previous periods in history. For Marxist, studying history is not an academic question. A chemist can carry out an experiment in a laboratory. He puts in the same ingredients at the same temperature, at the same pressure, repeats the experiment over and over again, observes the consequences and the effects and then starts to draw lessons and develops laws that govern the processes. Marxist cannot repeat a revolution inside a laboratory, obviously. It's a living process of millions of human beings. But we have historical examples. We have many revolutions throughout history, starting from the French Revolution, from the English Revolution, Cromwell onwards. But in particular, the 20th century is full of moments of revolution. And revolutions occur in particular periods of time. They're not haphazardly happening all the time. There are periods of relative stability, such as the post-war period. But if you look at the period between the two wars, starting with 1917, you have the revolution in Russia, which sparks a worldwide process. The German Revolution of 1918, the Hungarian 1919, the occupation of the factories, the Italian Revolution of 1920, the Chinese Revolution of 1926, the general strike in Britain of 1926, the Spanish Civil War, which was the Spanish Revolution, the massive sit-down strikes in France in the same period, all sparked off by the crisis, which was really embodied in the First World War itself, which was an indication that the system had reached its limits and had entered into crisis. The solution to the crisis of the 30s was the Second World War. We had a massive boom after the war, but the price humanity paid for that was the 55 million dead during the Second World War. That war also unleashed class struggle on a global scale, the Civil War in Greece, the resistance movement and the big movement in Italy in France, the Indian movement to get for independence, the Chinese Revolution of 1949. But in the West in particular, that movement came to an end. I'm not going to go into the details of that, there's plenty of articles that explain that. That prepared the conditions for the post-war boom, but that 20 years later produced another period of revolutionary upheaval, May 68 in France, but it wasn't just France. It was a general movement that involved the Italian working class, the Mexican, the Pakistani, everywhere there were movements, and there was a radicalization throughout the 1970s of movement after movement after movement. There was the Vietnamese who defeated the United States, Zimbabwe, which overthrew the hated racist white regime. Even Britain was affected, being on the edge of a general strike in 1972. Now, we are once again entering a period which can be compared to those periods I referred to in the sense that it's a global crisis of the system. There is a global radicalization taking place everywhere. Even before the outbreak of this coronavirus, we saw the growing radical mood amongst the youth, the movement on climate change, movements of the workers, a revolutionary overthrow of regime after regime, and the system moving towards crisis. Now, it's in this context of a deepening economic crisis and a growing radicalization of the workers and the youth around the globe that the coronavirus has its impact in a huge way. As I said at the beginning, the priority of governments initially was basically to defend profits, to defend the markets, to keep production going, to keep GDP figures growing. And it explains the slow response everywhere, even in China, where later they had to rush to make up for lost time. The initial reaction of the Chinese regime when that famous doctor was explaining what was happening was to send the police around and warn him to stop rumour-mongering because you're creating trouble. He was just an ordinary doctor trying to warn people of what was happening. Then, of course, they turned around and apologized and removed a few local bureaucrats, trying to pass the blame on to others, and then took the steps which they took. When it hit Italy, the same kind of thing, dithering, vacillation. It wasn't as if they didn't have, sorry, the Chinese example as a warning, but they diverted. They held back from taking the necessary measures in the first stages. And then, step by step, they were forced to lock down towns, take severe measures, close the universities, the schools, etc., introduce the social distancing, advising people, etc. And now the whole country is in lockdown. And what effect is this having on the both the ruling class and also the mass of ordinary working people? To begin with, the reaction of the ruling classes everywhere was to take their time, dither, take half measures, say one thing one day, then another another day. They were not convinced of the need to take the strong measures necessary to halt the spread of this virus. The extreme example is Boris Johnson, who I think he dreamed, he dreamt of being the man who would go down in history as having done Brexit. Already the shine on this man had started to be lost when we had the flooding, where people were saying, where's Boris? Now he comes out with interviews on television saying that people should just take it on the chin and families are going to lose their loved ones early. And you just got to accept that, raising this idea of the herd immunity, i.e., let everybody get it, and some will die. Those that don't will develop immunity, although the latest news is that there are reports in China and other parts where people who have had it once have got it a second time. So there's no sure guarantee that even Boris's idea would work. But it shows you the kind of person that he is, an eaten educated, I don't know what words to find, I can't find the word, but I prefer to keep it as polite as possible and say an eaten educated buffoon who plays with the lives of ordinary working people. But it reflects their way of thinking, how they see the working class, how they see working people. They consider them to be pack animals, people who are there just to keep production going, just to make the profits for the people at the top. And they treat human beings like animals, you have a herd, you haven't got the resources to vaccinate them, you haven't got the vaccination. The cost would be too high, well just let the whole herd get infected, some will die, the others will survive and then will carry on with business as usual. So you let the weak die, you let the old people die, you let the people with pre-existing conditions die. He is in effect also undermining the efforts of other countries to apply a different kind of policy like what the Chinese have done, like the Italians are doing, now the Spanish are starting to do, the French etc, the Danish. Where they have taken strict measures we will see, nobody really knows how this is going to pan out. But the reports I've seen, for example in Italy, in the first town that was hit by this virus where they locked down, two weeks later there have been no new cases. In China it also seems to be, if we can believe the news that it slowed down in South Korea because of the measures of mass testing compared to Britain and taking much stricter measures, they've slowed, either slowed it down or even brought it to a halt, there are still plenty of people infected, but it's not spreading as it was. It seems to be the case. I mean I'm not a doctor, even the doctors themselves don't have enough data to draw all the necessary conclusions, but it seems to be the case. Boris on the other hand, people are horrified in other countries what he is proposing. It shows you how far away he is from the lives of ordinary working-class people. There's even a title in The New York Times from the 11th of March which says the UK shields its economy from the virus, but not yet its people. And that's The New York Times, which as far as I was aware is not a communist journal. The Guardian of yesterday, I think it was the 15th, the title Health Experts Fear the Epidemic Will Let Rip Through the UK, and the government in Britain has stopped testing. Unless you have severe symptoms, which means you need hospitalisation, they've stopped the testing, which is crazy. It means no knowledge at all of where the virus has spread, through which channels etc etc. What determines this is clearly a question of cost, it's money. It's how much do we invest in this and how much do we get back? I would imagine there's actually an article that appeared in the Telegraph that's where one commentator raised the idea that, you know, in passing there might be some beneficial effects from this outbreak. Lots of pensioners die. Pensioners use healthcare services. They take a pension from the state. If a significant number of them die off, the state makes a saving. This is the cynicism, the callousness of the leaders that we have today. If we look at the healthcare system, Britain's healthcare system is actually less ready than France's and even from figures that I've seen even less ready than Italy's health service, which is not exactly in the best of shapes. So bad is the situation that we have even people inside the Tory party itself saying things like, and I will quote, this is a local Tory councillor in a village in the north of England who said, who compared the government's strategy of tackling with disease as quote, a crime against humanity. This councillor said, and she's a member of the Conservative Party, she said that you judge a society by how they treat their vulnerable people and you judge leadership by how it treats its most vulnerable people. That is the criteria which millions of British people are going to use to judge what Boris Johnson has done and what he has not done. And they will forget, a lot of them will forget what he did on Brexit. They will remember how callous he was towards his own people. I would bet that a lot of the people who voted for him who lent him their votes over the question of Brexit will be regretting big time. They voted for this guy. But it's an indication of the quality of the leaders that we have today. Part of the crisis of capitalism that we're living through is also reflected in the calibre of the politicians that are getting elected, politicians of the right, the Conservative right etc. People like Trump, people like Boris Johnson, people like Bolsonaro in Brazil, people like Morrison in Australia who stands up in his parliament with a piece of coal boasting about the production of coal. When the country was hit by fires, massive destruction of fires and deaths that went with it, or people like Salvini in Italy, they all have something very common to them which is extremely crude. Racists, misogynists, sexists, these are the people that are deciding the destiny of our lives, of your lives, of the lives of millions of working people. But they are going to provoke an opposite and equal reaction at a certain point. Just to give you an example of the way Trump behaves. First he was saying that it was a hoax. First he was playing down the whole thing. Now he's had to take the test himself. I haven't seen the results yet, but even forced to take the results. The latest news is that he was trying to buy out a German company that is doing research into a Covid-19 vaccine. And the incredible thing is he wanted it so that they could have the vaccine for the United States only. Again, the callousness of these people taking away when it eventually will be produced the vaccine for the millions of people all over the world who desperately need it. This is a measure of the man. The truth is this, it shouldn't even belong to a German private company, that research. Really, the situation is so dramatic that the research and the vaccine should be publicly owned. It should be controlled for general need. This is not something we can allow the capitalists to use to profit from. The demand to nationalise the pharmaceutical companies is a very relevant demand today. And the private healthcare industry, which has been created, should be nationalised and used. Sorry, my throat is drying up. But it's provoked, it's bringing out other contradictions. Today the scenes on public transport in London were empty trains. Not because people have been ordered, people are taking their destiny into their own hands. They're deciding to stay at home. Boris has said if you can stay, stay at home, but he doesn't take any any any severe measures. In some parts of the country there are reports of parents and children planning a stay at home protest, taking their destiny into their own hands, not waiting for the people like Boris Johnson to do something for them. And this is resulting in the in the railway companies, all those different regional railway companies that were privatised years ago, they're under enormous stress now because they're not making the money they were making. A lot of them were very close to bankruptcy even before this happened. And they are now demanding help from the government. This is a resource which used to belong to the to the public through the state. It was British Rail and it would have been a coordinated national railway system. And the demand there should be clearly, no, we're not going to hand over more billions to these private companies, we're going to nationalise them and reintegrate them into one nationalised railway company, bring back British Rail and then use it according to need, not on the on the basis of the private profit. Another scandalous item of news which has just been published is that private hospitals are going to rent beds to the national health service. 8,000 beds rented to the NHS at the cost of £2.8 million per day. They're making a killing, excuse, it's not a pun, they're making money from this tragic situation. What the government should do is requisition those beds, take them over and use them. Why pay public money when there's such a crisis? It should be based on need, not on profit. The fact is we have a situation where people have lost confidence in the public services. They know the health service cannot meet the needs that are being created by this crisis. People have a sense that the priorities of these politicians is to defend the interests of big business. Now, they were terrified when this crisis erupted because they know that the crisis is so deep, it's so serious. You see, when most families in normal times, they don't want to think of politics. I was speaking to my electrician, he said on Saturday, ah, what am I going to do this afternoon? There's no football. I want to hear the football results. That's his passion. Passionate football fan can't do it. Ordinary people in ordinary times want to just get on with their lives and enjoy their life. They're suddenly waking up to the fact that life cannot be enjoyed in this moment. In fact, life itself is at risk. This is immensely destabilising for any social economic system and the people sitting at the top realise that initially, they felt the need to try and maintain social cohesion and stability by keeping the economy going and playing down the impact of this of this crisis. But what happened more or less in all countries, what we're seeing is this. Once the people realise how serious this thing is, how contagious this virus is, how horrible it is in its symptoms. I've been watching Italian TV, some of the people with it talking, saying how it affects them. When people are dying such huge numbers, just yesterday, 250 people died in the Lombardy region alone. The number of deaths in Italy is close to 2000 and it still hasn't peaked. It continues to grow and it's spreading from town to town. In conditions like this, people's consciousness changes very, very quickly. They no longer accept the arguments of the previous period. They don't accept the arguments based on economic criteria, production, GDP and all the rest of it. Their main concern is their lives, their lives are their loved ones, their children, their parents, their pensioners, etc. They're not going to listen to Boris Johnson who tells them to take it on the chin. This explains a sudden turn in the way the ruling class has been behaving over this and it reflects the fear of the bosses faced with this crisis. For example, in Britain, PCS Union, in dealing with this question, the authorities, the government, basically said that anybody who has to self-isolate, stay at home because of they have a cough or the symptoms that might be coronavirus, their days off will not be counted as sick leave, which in the beginning that was what they were pushing for. You just take your sick leave for the year. In Spain, any worker who has to self-isolate, they've declared that that will be considered the same as a workplace accident. Now that's significant because if you have a workplace accident and you are sick and have to stay at home, you're at home on maximum pay, so they're making that concession. Now, the dangerous thing, of course, for the ruling class on this is if you can make this kind of concession now, well, tomorrow, when the crisis is over and people get sick, the demand will be, well, if it could be done then, why don't I have a right to be paid my wages now that I'm sick? Even here they said that it would no longer be you have to be sick three days before you get any pay. They'll be from day one. The German Finance Minister, for instance, has actually said that if it's necessary to combat this crisis, they would nationalise certain companies. That's not a classic bourgeois policy. In Spain, in Madrid, the right-wing regional government has commandeered all private health facilities. That's how big the crisis is expected to be. In Ireland, the government has been taking over buildings to set up new intensive care units. What we're seeing here is that the famous invisible hand doesn't work. According to bourgeois economists, you should just let the market function. The weak go under and the strong survive. It doesn't work here. The market cannot solve this problem. And now we have a severe crisis being prepared, a much deeper crisis. There are lots of small bars, restaurants, small businesses, small companies. Millions of people forced to declare themselves as self-employed, etc. A lot of people who have been casualised, there are hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their jobs in this process. In Italy, the situation is dramatic. And that is going to happen here in Spain, in France, in Ireland, in the United States. In Spain, they've even gotten to the point of suspending evictions and repossessions. And on top of that, they are throwing billions of dollars, euros, pounds at the economy in an attempt to shore it up. The point is this. This will further increase public debt. Now they're having to do it for political reasons, for fear of a revolt from below. And they are applying this policy. But they've already said in more than one country that later this will have to be paid for. And you know who's going to pay. It's going to be the very same people who are suffering the consequences of this crisis. The pensioners, the workers, etc. The capitalists on a global scale are pulling their money out of the stock market, as we've seen. They're also pulling their money out from the investments they made in countries like Brazil, Argentina, and many other former colonial countries. That means defaults are being prepared. Lebanon has already defaulted. In the next period we can expect one default after another with the consequences for the people that that will bring. As I said, they delayed in the early stages. Then they suddenly realized that something had to be done. But in spite of all the money they've thrown at the economy, in America 1.5 trillion dollars. Then on top of that, a further 700 billion dollars of state money to buy up stocks, to try and sustain the market. And it's not working. China continues to be in a deep crisis. The latest figures show this. Retail spending is down 20%. GDP in the months of January, February, down by 15%. Investment down by 24%. Unemployment is starting to rise and it's now at 6.2%. Factory production, that is industrial production, down 13%. And news item I saw today, only 60% of businesses are open. Almost half of them are closed. Latest news from Ireland. 140,000 workers have been laid off due to coronavirus and unemployment is now 10%. It's dawning on them that this is preparing a major economic crisis. An article from The Guardian yesterday. Prepare for the coronavirus global recession. That highlights that even when they recover from this crisis, it's not going to be a quick recovery. The reason for that is not just the coronavirus, which is having a big impact, but it's the accumulated contradictions of the previous period, or the debt. They've taken interest rates down to practically 0%. 0.1%. How low can you go? And the conclusions they're drawing is that instrument is no longer usable. You can't go much lower than that, and it's still not having the effect of stimulating the economy. When people are not going to bars, they're not buying beer, they're not buying clothes, they're not going on holiday, they're not booking the tickets. Companies are going bust. For example, airline companies are on, one has collapsed already in Britain, but others will collapse. They're expecting a 5% fall in GDP in Britain in the second quarter, a similar figure in the United States. The optimists are saying, oh, but we'll recover that in the second half of the year. The point is, now the reports say this crisis could drag on for at least 12 months. So we are facing a huge crisis. And then there's the longer term effect. China has started to reopen some of its factories. It's slowly coming out of the quarantine. But the point is this, you start to lift the measures, the virus hasn't disappeared. It's still there. It can come back. But the problem is this, China's markets are now crashing. Europe and America are falling. And now there's discussion about all that. Now they've suddenly realized that we can't concentrate all the production of our parts in China. We're going to have to relocate away from China. So it's going to have a huge impact on the Chinese economy as well. It's also accelerating something we've been highlighting for some time. And again, it's not the coronavirus that provokes it, the crisis of the European Union. Where is Schengen now, where all the borders are being closed tight? And also, where's the solidarity? Germany blocking the exports of face masks to Italy. Italy which doesn't produce its own. Italy needs like 90 million a day and has, I think the figure was 20 million at most, having to import them. The European Union is being seen in Italy as being another callous body, which only has an interest in statistics in economic terms, profits, debt, etc. So the crisis is being accelerated. Now this comes on top of another element which I think needs to be highlighted. We enter this crisis with many of the pillars of the establishment, discredited. In Britain in the recent years, we've had the MP's expenses scandals, which showed what most of them are, just grabbing the money for expenses. When they already have high income, scandals that hit newspapers, scandals that hit the police force, scandals that hit the church, which was exposed. The royal family in Britain is in a crisis. You can see that. Charles's idea is a slim lined royal family, i.e. just a few, and removes some of the more awkward ones, such as his brother, who's proving to be not an asset at all for the royal family. These were all institutions which were there as a means of maintaining control over society, maintaining a grip on the consciousness of millions of people. They enter this crisis with all these institutions exposed, or at least partially exposed. By the way, just a little parenthesis, Corbyn unfortunately is now going to be removed as leader of the Labour Party. But in a situation like what we face now, his demand on the NHS, his highlighting the need to invest in the NHS, would have been a huge factor in favour of the Labour Party. This shows that in this situation of very sudden changes and sharp turns, you can also see very sudden changes in the political setup of countries. You will see parties collapse. You will see parties with major leaders who had a lot of authority in the previous period collapsing under the mass hatred of the people. We have the question of the climate change, which is an ongoing issue, the question of the way women are treated globally. We have the makings of a worldwide revolt of working people, women, youth. And we're seeing also in Britain, we're seeing the development of a radical mood. For instance, in a hospital, I think it was Lewisham Hospital, the cleaners went on strike, affected by the coronavirus, in Bexley Heath GMB workers voting to go on strike. But I'd like to dedicate the last few minutes of my talk on what we've seen in Italy, which is now becoming not just Italian, but it's becoming Spanish. You can see it in Britain as well. In Italy, a decree was passed by the government, locking down the whole country, closing bars, restaurants, schools, universities. It's actually illegal to be out on the streets. It's basically a curfew, unless you're going shopping for food, for health reasons, or if you're going to work. Now, this has provoked a huge backlash of the Italian working class. It started at factories like Pomiliano, the Fiat Plant, the Naples. Workers coming out on strike saying, just a minute, you have a decree which says that this is a very dangerous virus. It's very contagious. We should avoid close contact with other people. Unless, of course, you're a worker in a factory. And it's quite clear that the decree passed by the Italian government was passed under the pressure of the bosses union, the Confindustria, the Italian capitalists, insisting that production in the factories must continue. Now, you had spontaneous strikes. The union leaders entered this situation basically in collaboration with the bosses and the government, saying you must enclose the factories, you must keep production going, otherwise there'll be no jobs, there'll be a collapse in the economy. And the unions were basically pushing for production to continue. The point is, in the factories, workers are shoulder to shoulder. They can't keep the meter, minimum meter social distancing. In the changing rooms, they're crowded together. They have no masks, no gloves, no security measures. They have to get on the bus, they have to get on the metro, they have to mix with people, and they've been told, that's not what you're supposed to do. Now, this suddenly changes everything, because those workers are being asked to go to work, risk getting the virus, taking it home to the rest of the family, to their children, to their parents, infecting their family. So basically, the industrial workers are being told, you are expendable. You can die. Production, GDP, profit comes first. The workers are not having any of it. Strike after strike after strike, strikes in Naples, strikes in January, the dock workers coming out, the metal workers, a strike wave across the Veneta, one of the most badly hit areas in Milan, strikes taking place. I don't want to go into all the details here, but there's one example I want to quote. A worker at a factory in Cormano in Milan, 61 year old woman, is a video doing the rounds of social media, a 61 year old worker, a woman standing at the gates of a factory. This is on a TV show, where you have all the studio guests, amongst which were some important Italian politicians, I think Fornero was there, the woman who was responsible for increasing people's age of retirement. And this worker, 61 year old female worker, she says, I've been working 41 years. I can't retire for another three years, thanks to the Fornero, to the minister who's sitting there, a very glum face, not expressing anything. All of them in silence while she's talking on the big screen in the studio. And she says, we can't, I can't do this anymore. I physically can't do it. My body is broken. I cannot continue like this. We have children at home to look after. We have aged, the elderly who are sick, we need to look after them. We're asked to do this on 1200 euros a month. She says, it cannot be the workers on 1200 euros a month who have to take the burden of the national economy. A very powerful speech, if you listen to it, and it resonates with the workers of Italy, that kind of speech. The people in the studio were silent. Not one of them spoke. At the end of the speech, the host, she said, what you say is sacrosanct to this worker. They couldn't deny what she was saying. But the workers have been going on strike in factory after factory. And demanding, what were they demanding? It's important that we highlight what this means. There's an element of the workers actually demanding workers control. What are they saying? What do the Italian workers say? Now, get this, get this right. They were not going on strike against the government as such, or against its decree. They were going on strike because they wanted that decree to be applied to them, i.e., we are in dangerous conditions, we risk getting the virus. This should apply to us too. So they were demanding such things as, close the factories that produce non-essential goods. Two, close the factories for several days to allow for a restructuring and a reorganization of the productive process. Send home all the non-essential workers, increase the social distancing, provide the gloves, the masks, etc. Everything necessary to make the work safer. They were demanding this, and the bosses initially didn't want to accept. In actual fact, some of those strikes were provoked by the workers first posing the demands, which for the workers were reasonable demands, and the bosses rejecting them. Then they went on spontaneous strike. The trade union leaders faced with this, what do they do? Faced with such a revolt from below, they also start to ask for factories to be closed. They issued a statement calling on the factories to be closed until the 22nd of March to allow for this restructuring. Then of course, they went into a tripartite negotiation, the unions, the government, and the bosses, and they came out of it saying, we will take the measures, we will provide the masks, the thing is, there are not enough masks in Italy. Italy doesn't have them. So it's another, basically spitting in the face of the working class by doing this. And not to mention the healthcare workers. I've shown this before. This is a famous picture which is doing the rounds. It's a nurse who has collapsed through fatigue at her desk after long hours of work. But I want to show you this other picture on the front of this article. Here is an Italian nurse. If you can see it, you can see that she's bruised on her forehead, on her cheeks, and the bruising is because of wearing the mask for so long. And you listen to the interviews of these nurses and doctors, and they are at breaking point. They are absolutely exhausted. Apart from the fact, they are also the section of society that has received the highest rate of contagion of this disease because they're in constant contact with the sick. Doctors are literally having to decide who lives and who dies. The reports were that anybody over the age of 80 will not be treated, and anybody who is in a physical condition that would not benefit according to their criteria from the care will not be cared for. And the argument is that this is like a war. We are at war. Trump has used it as well. Everybody's using it. We're at war. This is a war-like situation. In war, obviously, you save the soldiers that have a chance of survival. Those who are too severely injured, you just leave them to die. And doctors are being forced to take these decisions. The truth is this, had they not cut back on the health service all these years, if they had made contingency plans for such a situation, which would have involved, yes, spending money, money. They have the money to bomb Libya, to bomb Iraq. They have the money to mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers to destroy. They don't have the money for this. These are the criteria of this rotten system that we live in. And it's time to put an end to this system. It has long, it went past its sell by date long ago. This is a system which is rotting on its feet, and it's affecting the lives of millions of ordinary people. Now, this phenomenon that we had in Italy, if you want to have more details, there is a video on our site with an interview with Claudio Bellotti, a leading comrade of the IMT in Italy, who explains more in detail this question. But I'm highlighting it because it is going to happen everywhere. In Spain, it has already happened. All the major car factories today, the first day back at work after this weekend, came out spontaneously on strike, Airbus on strike, truck company Iveco on strike, spontaneous downing of tools. Often, it's the local shop stewards. Sometimes it's just the massive workers, those massive ordinary workers who, in normal times, just get on with their work and try and earn their wages to keep their family going, came out spontaneously saying, we've had enough of this. In Britain, there are the beginnings of signs that this is also going to take place. There's talk of a COVID-19 walkout being organised by parents and students. I have other things I would like to highlight, but I don't want to go into every detail. What I would like to highlight is this. If it was not for the market economy, and if it was not for the profit motive, if we had a planned economy, if everything was under the control of the people that produce the wealth of each country. In a planned economy, you can close factories without the problem of, oh dear, the boss is going to lose profit. You can stop planes flying. We've had the crazy thing of some planes flying to keep the lines open, the routes open, with no passengers, so much for combating climate change, of course. But you could just stop them temporarily because it would be part of an integrated global plan of the economy. You could redirect production, not like Boris, who writes a letter and says, is anybody you can produce masks? Could you help us? Or anybody who can produce respirators? You would take the industrial resources and you would have a rapid change, like those workers in Italy demanding, close the factories for a few days, and reorganize production. That could be done on a grand scale, and we start to produce the intensive care unit facilities, the machines, the respirators, etc., which would literally mean the difference between living and dying for millions of people. The world is in turmoil. It's literally a world entering into a worldwide revolutionary process. And it's not just us, the Marxists, who say this. I'll just quote a couple of articles, one from the 16th of January, before all this started. It says, a quarter of all countries experienced a dramatic surge in civil unrest last year in a worrying trend that is likely to continue into 2020. Then it talks about 47 countries that experienced a significant rise, and it lists the countries. Another article talking about the fact that in many countries there is such a huge youth population. 41% of the global population are under the age of 24. This generation is the generation which is going to transform this world. This generation has everything to win by fighting and everything to lose if they sit at home and do nothing. The fact is they are moving in big numbers, protesting. And this article actually says in the first paragraph, are we entering a new age of global revolution? I'm not quoting the marxist.com website. I'm quoting that well-known revolutionary magazine called The Guardian. These are bourgeois commentators who are really concerned that this is happening because they see the threats posed to their system. They say we're in a war situation. Well, let's remind them World War One produced the Russian Revolution and all the revolutions that I listed earlier on. World War Two produced a wave of revolution. Well, if this is a warlike situation, it's going to produce warlike results. Initially, there can be some confusion. Initially, there can even be sometimes support for what governments do in a desperate attempt to have national unity, everybody together. But it seems to be breaking down very, very quickly. The workers are not taking it because they're not all in the same boat as they often say to us. We're in different boats. The working class has been put in the boat that is being sunk by the capitalists and they're not having it. History confirms that revolution is possible. We've seen many. In fact, it's inevitable. These conditions will produce a revolt. The question is this. The working class on a global scale historically has moved many times in different waves. We have to study those events. We don't study them because we're academic historians. We study it to learn the lessons. What was missing in those movements? The answer to that is a party of the working class willing and able to stand up to the capitalists, to unite the workers around a programme and to explain to them the wealth exists. It's not true that we don't have the resources. We have the biggest accumulation of wealth ever seen in the history of humanity. That wealth could be used to overcome this crisis and put an end to all crises and create a society where finally we will produce not for profit but for need. We've reached the point where the economy, the means of production, the science is there that would allow that to happen. What we need is to build a political force which connects with the existing trade unions and workers organisations and patiently explains all of this, offers an alternative and prepares a tendency which I'm convinced will grow massively in the coming period because the ideas which seemed extreme when the conditions become extreme become the ideas which are the most logical. What seemed crazy yesterday now is perfectly logical. We have to shout that from the rooftops and we have to go out there and build a Marxist tendency in every country, rooted in the labour movement, rooted in the youth and build the force that humanity needs. We can do it but it depends on people like you fighting with us, joining us. So I would invite you, if you like what you've heard, go to our website www.Marxist.com. Look at the articles, look at the analysis. We published an article the other day precisely on this question. We're publishing material from Italy. We will produce more material in this period on this question that will help people to understand, to unravel the contradictions that exist within the situation. Educate yourselves, join us and the last thing I'll ask you is this. We need money. We need money to pay for the running of websites, publishing newspapers, renting offices, making trips. At the moment we may be having to reduce that somewhat because of the conditions. Organising conferences, meetings, leaflets. We don't have rich backers. I can tell you one thing. Those people in the stock market, there's one thing they're never going to invest their money in. They're not going to invest their money in this effort to build something. So it's going to have to be the workers, the youth, the students who don't have huge amounts of money but can make small or not some more contributions and give us the resources, both financial but mostly most important is we need you to join the IMT and help us build the force that will finally put an end to this rotten system once and for all.