WITH THE second wave of the coronavirus pandemic ripping through Europe and overwhelming hospitals and health services, EU countries have been forced to implement a raft of new lockdown measures.
The latest came on Wednesday night in France, when in an address to the nation, president Emmanuel Macron announced that Covid-19 is threatening to spiral out of control and that a new nationwide lockdown would take effect from today.
These measures, Macron said, would last until December 1st and will involve people staying in their homes and only allowed out to buy essential goods, seek medical attention or exercise outside for one hour a day.
Macron’s announcement followed a similar announcement by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she is imposing an emergency month-long lockdown that includes closing restaurants, gyms and theatres to prevent German hospitals being overwhelmed.
Merkel said that the goal of the new lockdown measures is to ‘limit the economic impact’ to a bare minimum. In both France and Germany the drive to keep industry and large companies open is paramount for Merkel and Macron.
Schools and day care centres are left open so that workers are not restrained by childcare to keep the factories and industry going through the pandemic.
When the pandemic hit Europe in the spring, Germany won the praise of world capitalism for its policy of keeping factories open while recording lower death rates from Covid-19 than many of its European neighbours, with The Wall Street Journal saying it was a ‘blueprint for other countries’.
In fact, Germany turned out to be a blueprint of how to ensure that coronavirus would emerge in the predicted second wave with even greater deadly intensity. In Germany, infection cases rose by 14,964 to 464,239 in the last 24 hours to Thursday while in Europe as a whole daily deaths from Covid-19 increased by 40% in just the last week.
What is glaringly obvious is that the partial measures introduced across Europe along with the regional lockdowns in the UK are a desperate attempt to try and contain the virus in the face of workers who forced a complete lockdown in March as they were not prepared to sacrifice their lives to keep the bosses in profit.
The premature ending of this lockdown without any vaccine or the measures like those taken in China has led to the latest crisis that is overwhelming Europe and Britain and costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
This month, the International Monetary Fund issued its gloomiest prognosis ever about the state of the world capitalist economy, singling out three of the largest economies in Europe (France, Italy and the UK) as facing the deepest recession, and plunging into complete economic depression on the scale of the 1930s Great Depression.
The partial measures being adopted by the ruling politicians across Europe and in the UK reveal that the working class and the small bourgeois shopkeepers are to be sacrificed to keep the big bourgeois from bankruptcy.
Already, splits within the ruling class are coming into the open between those who are nervous about provoking a revolutionary uprising of workers and youth and the increasingly strident voices calling for a complete ending of all partial measures, full reopening of capitalism and let the old and sick die under the murderous policy of ‘herd immunity’.
With mass unemployment and a coronavirus pandemic gripping Europe, millions of workers are preparing to rise up against a capitalist system that cannot provide anything but poverty and death for workers and young people. The crisis is revolutionising the working class across Europe and in Britain who are determined not to be brought down along with a collapsing capitalist system.
The burning issue of the day is for the working class to unite and put an end to both the EU and British capitalism by seizing power and going forward to socialism and the United Socialist States of Europe.
Only a planned socialist economy, working for the benefit of everyone, and not the profit of a handful of capitalists, can organise all the measures and resources required to eradicate Covid-19.
WITH THE second wave of the coronavirus pandemic ripping through Europe and overwhelming hospitals and health services, EU countries have been forced to implement a raft of new lockdown measures.
The latest came on Wednesday night in France, when in an address to the nation, president Emmanuel Macron announced that Covid-19 is threatening to spiral out of control and that a new nationwide lockdown would take effect from today.
These measures, Macron said, would last until December 1st and will involve people staying in their homes and only allowed out to buy essential goods, seek medical attention or exercise outside for one hour a day.
Macron’s announcement followed a similar announcement by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she is imposing an emergency month-long lockdown that includes closing restaurants, gyms and theatres to prevent German hospitals being overwhelmed.
Merkel said that the goal of the new lockdown measures is to ‘limit the economic impact’ to a bare minimum. In both France and Germany the drive to keep industry and large companies open is paramount for Merkel and Macron.
Schools and day care centres are left open so that workers are not restrained by childcare to keep the factories and industry going through the pandemic.
When the pandemic hit Europe in the spring, Germany won the praise of world capitalism for its policy of keeping factories open while recording lower death rates from Covid-19 than many of its European neighbours, with The Wall Street Journal saying it was a ‘blueprint for other countries’.
In fact, Germany turned out to be a blueprint of how to ensure that coronavirus would emerge in the predicted second wave with even greater deadly intensity. In Germany, infection cases rose by 14,964 to 464,239 in the last 24 hours to Thursday while in Europe as a whole daily deaths from Covid-19 increased by 40% in just the last week.
What is glaringly obvious is that the partial measures introduced across Europe along with the regional lockdowns in the UK are a desperate attempt to try and contain the virus in the face of workers who forced a complete lockdown in March as they were not prepared to sacrifice their lives to keep the bosses in profit.
The premature ending of this lockdown without any vaccine or the measures like those taken in China has led to the latest crisis that is overwhelming Europe and Britain and costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
This month, the International Monetary Fund issued its gloomiest prognosis ever about the state of the world capitalist economy, singling out three of the largest economies in Europe (France, Italy and the UK) as facing the deepest recession, and plunging into complete economic depression on the scale of the 1930s Great Depression.
The partial measures being adopted by the ruling politicians across Europe and in the UK reveal that the working class and the small bourgeois shopkeepers are to be sacrificed to keep the big bourgeois from bankruptcy.
Already, splits within the ruling class are coming into the open between those who are nervous about provoking a revolutionary uprising of workers and youth and the increasingly strident voices calling for a complete ending of all partial measures, full reopening of capitalism and let the old and sick die under the murderous policy of ‘herd immunity’.
With mass unemployment and a coronavirus pandemic gripping Europe, millions of workers are preparing to rise up against a capitalist system that cannot provide anything but poverty and death for workers and young people. The crisis is revolutionising the working class across Europe and in Britain who are determined not to be brought down along with a collapsing capitalist system.
The burning issue of the day is for the working class to unite and put an end to both the EU and British capitalism by seizing power and going forward to socialism and the United Socialist States of Europe.
Only a planned socialist economy, working for the benefit of everyone, and not the profit of a handful of capitalists, can organise all the measures and resources required to eradicate Covid-19.
