Communist and Workers' Parties of Europe have made a statement regarding the ongoing crisis by which the working and living conditions of the working class were worsened. The European Communist Initiative (ECI) calls on the working class to join the struggle for their health and rights. The full statement is as follows:
Against the anti-labor and anti-popular measures that are being imposed to shift the burdens of the capitalist crisis on the workers' shoulders
One year after the first Covid-19 cases in Europe, the working class and the people’s strata are still suffering the devastating outcomes of the capitalist crisis and the pandemic.
If the comparison to one year ago is made, one can easily state how the life and labor conditions of the working class and the people’s strata have remarkably worsened due to the escalation of the capital's offensive and the anti-popular policy of the bourgeois governments. Capitalism could not prevent a new crisis of over-accumulation and – just like in the previous ones – capitalists are trying to shift the burden on the workers’ shoulders.
The current economic crisis has not been caused by the health crisis we are witnessing. The arrival of Covid-19 has been the catalyst of a crisis whose preconditions had already been created within the capitalist system, as shown by the relevant slowdown of the economies in 2019. The decades of privatizations and budget cuts to the public health system, of policies carried out against the working class and the working people, have further sharpened the problems. The bourgeois governments chose to increase the profits of the big companies to the detriment of the life and health of the workers.
The grotesque situation of the last weeks regarding the purchase of vaccines from different multinational companies is evidence of the anti-popular policy of various governments and the European Union’s class nature, as a transnational union of the capital, which serves the interests of the European pharmaceutical companies over their competitors, always at the expense of the interests of the working-class majority.
As this crisis had already manifested itself before the pandemic, the various capitalist countries once again shift its burden on the working class. The bourgeois governments, regardless of their liberal or social democratic management, resort to successive lockdowns against the virus invoking the increase of infections, hospitalizations and deceases, which are the result of their attempts to “save the economy”. Big business groups are receiving financial support and incentives by varius Administrations. On the other hand, they are deepening on the work model of “flexicurity” and work at demand, along with the cuts on labor rights it means, and the generalization of new work modalities – like teleworking – is being rehearsed.
In a context in which life conditions are worsening, the workers' militant mobilizations, despite observing all health protection measures, were answered with banning of strikes and harsh repression of demonstrations, acts and protests due to “health reasons”. On the contrary, we find in several countries of Europe that there are no barriers to the activities organized by the employers, and they are even promoted and whitewashed. Furthermore, the criminalization of leisure time and any other activity regarded as “unnecessary”, especially for the youth, is a way to cover a sad reality: most of the infections happen in the work sphere and are caused by a lack of safety conditions in workplaces as these conditions are incompatible with the profits of capitalists.
The Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Initiative, against the new confirmation of the anti-workers and anti-peoples nature of the European governments, call on the working class and the people’s strata to organize themselves and fight in every neighborhood, every workplace, every school so that the state and the employers pay for the crisis. This crisis is not a crisis created by the working class. It is a crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system unable to meet the needs of the majority of the population and whose interests are totally the opposite to the workers’ ones. We call on the working class to mobilize demanding protection measures for its health and rights, to join the struggle more decisively in order to overcome this obsolete system and build an alternative one, in which the economy will meet the people's needs, the scientific and technological advances are applied to assure the comprehensive welfare of workers – Socialism-Communism.
