 The coronavirus is spreading fast going from one country to another and soon it will be in every single country of the world. But until now we've had a bit more than, officially a bit more than 100,000 infected and in the thousands of deaths. But reality is that there's no end in sight for this pandemic and within a very short period of time we will see millions of people affected by this and at the end of his course millions of people will or could have passed away due to this disease. Now this presents for us, the situation presents for us the biggest dislocation in society on a world scale since World War II. And the amazing thing is that the ruling class around the world appears to have no plan whatsoever of how to come out of this crisis. In the U.S. for many weeks now Donald Trump has been minimizing the threat pretending basically saying that this is not going to come to the U.S. There has been zero preparations of the healthcare system, the procedure of developing a test and distributing it throughout the U.S. has been met with a lot of difficulties and furthermore when this thing hits the U.S. which is happening at the moment millions of people are going to be in a very very difficult situation because they don't have health insurance basically and they will be left to fend for themselves. Hundreds of thousand millions of other people could end up in huge deaths and in that sense it's clear that the U.S. ruling class is going to leave the American workers and poor to themselves. Meanwhile at the same time immediately as the stock markets begin to react to this the the Federal Reserve comes out with a 1.5 trillion economic stimulus package basically a package to hold their hands under the rich to support big business big companies the banks and so on. The effects of this the final effects of this results of this we don't know yet but it will definitely have a huge impact on U.S. politics and this thing that has been discussed so much in the past year about free healthcare and a free nationalized healthcare essentially will be put on the agenda as the only way forward as the working class and the masses in a in a larger extent than ever before will be able to see that capitalism is unable to deal with this situation. We have in Britain and not too different situation where basically apart from a few guidelines to for people to keep their distance the government has done nothing to prepare the healthcare system or to avoid the further spread of this disease. In fact Boris Johnson yesterday was out in a very cold and cynical manner explaining that well people have just just have to prepare themselves to lose their loved ones. Of course the the rich are going to have far better conditions and are going to have access to private healthcare and conditions which the vast majority of the people will not. The NHS which has been drained has been cut privatized and outsourced for decades will not be able to deal with the amount of of ill and disease which are going to come in the next period which means that hundreds of thousands of people could stand to lose their lives in Britain all because of the complete incompetence of the ruling class and their in unwillingness in reality to do anything about this fact. In reality the philosophy of the British and the US and also the Swedish ruling class as far as we know until now has been to just let this happen let the disease come kill as many as it can in as short as time as possible in order for these economies to come out of a recession i.e. the economic effects of the disease sooner than other ones and be clear with it and some of them in fact even cynically speculate that this will wipe out a lot of elderly from the population which in their eyes are only nothing but a burden on the economy. This is the true sentiment and the true perspective of the ruling class. In other countries like in Denmark and Italy they've taken other measures the countries are now in a state of complete lockdown but this lockdown is mainly confined to the public sector so the public sector workplaces have been closed down and people are told to stay home small scale businesses are basically being forced to shut down but big big business industries factories and so on most of which are not essential in the sense that they will you know they provide food and basic goods are still running why because the government does not want to touch their profits basically and we see that far from this idea that the governments are now uniting the nation behind them in order to defend the nation and defend the people what is really happening is that different governments in one way or another are merely rushing to protect capitalism capital and private property and this is a in effect already beginning to undermine the legitimacy in the eyes of the people in countries like Iran and China the incompetence of the regime has also been exposed in China where the epidemic actually started out in the city of Wuhan the government denied this existence for weeks and in fact persecuted and jailed whistleblowers people who were talking about this calling for something to be done they were being arrested and put in prison because the government didn't want to disturb the fragile economy of China which was already slowing down but the effect of it as we can see by not acting has been this massive disaster on a world scale in Iran as well the government denied the existence of of corona for almost a month for what on the one hand because they didn't want to disrupt relations with China which is an important economic partner and on the other hand because they wanted a lot of people to go and vote in the parliamentary elections in order to prop up the legitimacy of the regime now millions of people are extremely angry at what at the the irresponsible manner in which the regime has acted up until now and which it continues to do one of the most important developments in Iran has been that this disease was was centered and the source of it in Iran was the holy city of home and the holy shrine of home which is a place where people actually go to get healed and in this area people were getting infected with corona and the religious establishment which is a key pillar in the state apparatus refused to acknowledge this was happening because this would undermine their religious position even to this day they're basically minimizing the threat of corona calling for mass gatherings calling for Friday prayers to continue to be held in spite of health health care professionals guidelines in order to protect this and in doing so they're putting millions of of lies at risk already now I mean officially the government of Iran is saying that there's about 10 000 ill and a few hundred dead by this disease but the reality is far far worse that the real figures could already be upwards towards 100 000 infected and thousands of people who who have been killed all of these things serve to undermine the legitimacy of the people that of the sorry of the governments there's enormous amounts of anger amongst the people against the ruling class in fact I would say in a country like Iran there there is a there is a revolutionary mood under the surface the only problem is that people cannot come out because of this because of the disease because of the risk of contagion and a lot of people are too busy mainly trying to keep their lives together trying to find money somehow because the economy is collapsing and trying to stay alive but that doesn't mean that this is forgotten all of this will remain and accumulate on top of years and years of accumulated anger and at a certain stage it will explode in a in a in a revolutionary manner and and and then the days of the regime will be numbered now the effects of the of all of this on the world economy has also been very very important we saw yesterday the the Dow Jones had the worst they had a 10% decline it was the worst day in the in the history of the stock exchange since 1987 this is after a week of of of sharp falls in oil prices and commodity prices in stock prices and and so on the Chinese economy it is believed by many people to already have be in a recession or have be at zero growth for the growth for this quarter at all in order to come out of the the epidemic in order to contain the epidemic basically 1 billion people stayed home from work in China and industry was was not functioning but even now as many industries are beginning to to to to resume work again although it's by far the the majority of the economy yet but even now that they've started resuming work there's not any orders because the rest of the world is going into a recession and there's constant dislocations taking place and disruptions taking place in supply lines and basically there is a there's a collapse of demand coming from from the west which is China's main export partners so we see here that the second biggest economy of the world is now in essentially in declining economic growth and this will this will increase and accelerate in the next period we've already seen Lebanon has defaulted other countries could follow Saudi Arabia and Russia are in a war over oil prices and as oil prices are plummeting along with other commodity prices we're going to see many many governments being in a very tight situation Russia is in serious risk of defaulting many Middle Eastern countries countries which are dependent on oil prices will be in a similar situation in fact Iran had to for the first time in his history asked for a five billion dollar loan from from the world bank and so what we see now is just the first tremors of what is to come of mass recessions defaults and a huge economic crisis and essentially a crash coming out of this and weighing down with the world economy being basically flatlining for for a prolonged period and the point is that whatever they're trying to do is not going to help the effect of the crisis is such the effect of the virus is such that economic stimulus has only limited effect because you cannot stimulate demand you cannot force people to go out to go to the cinemas to go to the cafes to travel and so on because they're afraid of catching the virus and this will continue for a for at least a year if not more hence all of these measures will not really mean anything would not would not really be that effective and the world economy will go into a deep slump of course everyone is saying now politicians at least are blaming all of this on the coronavirus but in reality all of the contradictions which is leading to this crisis was was prepared in the past few decades in fact the contradictions which led to the 2008 crisis as we as Marxists have explained on many occasions were not resolved the only way that the capitalist class overcame that that crisis was by building up huge debt bubbles and basically by debt financing by by public by increasing debt in society in particular public debt but all of that debt has to be paid back and now that debt is is playing the role of of a basically dragging down the world economy as is as spirals down and being and is becoming an obstacle for any serious type of revival in the in the economy so in that sense the the coronavirus was an accident in an economic sense of the word an accident revealing the underlying contradictions in capitalist society but again because of the particular nature of this virus it means that it will play a depressing role on the economy and or any attempts to intervene by the bourgeois to alleviate or to channel and control and manage this this this crisis because because it will continue to haunt societies in the foreseeable future because there's no there's no perspective of any vaccine being developed at least for for a year some people say year and a half it could even be longer than that we can't know that and this means also on a world scale that we're going to see the the rise of mass poverty mass unemployment unseen unprecedented in the post-war period which will again lead on to a mass or be a source of mass radicalization consciousness in reality is an extremely conservative thing ordinary people want to spend the days and their lives just like they did before they want a continuity and they they stick to routines and try as much as possible not to part ways with them but under the impact of great events such as wars revolutions and crises the they are thrown in out of this the state of routineism and they're forced to take to restock or reevaluate the the the views on the on the world once again and that's exactly what this will this this new situation in this new period in world history will mean that you're going to see that everything that people took for granted from the smallest everyday habits to national traditions all of that is going to be shaken up and it's going to be disturbed and people have to reevaluate their views of them and in doing so the the consciences will develop of course while at the same time the contradictions between the interests of the ruling class and the masses will become clearer by the day as I said in Iran already you have a you have a revolutionary mood developing in society the anger against the whole of the regime and in particular I would probably say against the clergy is is is enormous this clergy who is supposed to defend the people and so on are coming out basically acting being complicit in what's seen as criminal behavior by the ruling class which is risking the lives of ordinary human beings people are forced to to to choose between working or catching a disease there was a there was a there was a man recently there was a story on on twitter about a guy who was a taxi driver he couldn't give up his job because otherwise he couldn't feed his family but at the same time he couldn't go home either in the evenings because he was afraid of infecting them so therefore he was driving his taxi during the day and sleeping in it during the night in Italy we already also see a be a be a very very angry mood developing especially amongst nurses and doctors who are the front lines who see the incompetence the greed and the the the unwillingness to actually do anything to help of the ruling class of the establishment and on the other hand also in the private sector where people are basically forced to work without any without proper safety equipment without proper safety measures and there's in fact there's a wave of strikes demanding that the the the authorities and the and the owners of the of the factories and so on implement proper safety measures now all of these things are anticipations of what we're going to see in the the future you see the the the the process we're going to experience is probably going to be very similar to a war-like situations like in the like the first world war as Lenin once said all wars start with a wave of patriotism and end with a wave of of revolution and then we're going to see a similar situation now people are going to people are going to come together and the the ruling class the politicians are going to be largely successful in creating a feeling of national unity that everyone is just going to help out do their part take what's coming to them because it's necessary and because it's temporary but gradually people will begin to to realize that it's not it's not that's not true in fact a lot of these things is not to defend and protect the the the masses but is to defend and protect private property and at that point you begin to see that this this inertia and this relative passivity that we see is going to turn into to anger and revolutionary explosions will be on the on the agenda we shouldn't forget that at the end of world war too we had a whole series of revolutions sweeping throughout the world and that's the and the same was at the end of world war one of course natural disasters such as the coronavirus or the the climate changes that we see and the disasters related to that happen but the but the problem is that the system of capitalism is organically incapable of dealing dealing with these things as we see at every single step of the way the authorities have been incapable of dealing with the with the coronavirus because that's not in their interest capitalism is not a how do you say a democratic system organized for the benefit of society as a whole the main driving force of capitalism is the drive for profit of the tiny group of parasites who own the means of production and if you look at it everywhere all governments essentially have had two aims or one aim is to to protect private property in this crisis but which is reflected itself in a twofold manner on the one hand they want to appear to be doing something in order to stop mass radicalization and social unrest and on the other hand they will do everything they can to protect their own national capitalist classes basically and in doing so they have they have at every single turn of events failed to stop this epidemic like in in China where it was it was left to fester for almost a month in Iran and in Britain and the US where the same thing is basically happening the government is just allowing it to happen in order to safeguard the interests of big business a big capital in that sense the coronavirus is again an accident but an accident which is bringing out all of the contradictions in the whole of the of the capitalist system and that's what we're going to witness in the next period we're going to see crises on economic level on a social level on a political level on a diplomatic level the tensions between nations are going to increase but it's not going to be due to the coronavirus itself but it's going to be due to the to to the underlying contradictions of the system as a whole which are which are crashing on to the surface so to say sparked by the virus itself I think the choice before before humanity is is clearer than ever today is socialism or barbarism this system is not capable of guaranteeing anything but horror without end for the millions and millions of of workers and poor in the in the world and as the movement as the as a crisis drags on they will come to realize this and we will witness great revolutionary battles to overthrow the system once and for all and all of the the ills and the scourges that come with it