Communist Workers' Organisation

By any rational measure you might assume that a dominant sentient species when faced with global threats would pull together, pool resources and information and search for a mutual solution to the problem. But the coronavirus pandemic has confirmed what the climate change crisis already told us: that capitalism, even in its “globalised” form, is fundamentally unsuited to producing a coordinated response to tackle anything.

For many people, lockdown has exacerbated an already deadly domestic situation, or, as one sufferer put it, it’s a pandemic on top of an epidemic.

Contradictions at the heart of the capitalist mode of production affect human relations at the level of the superstructure. The ideological, cultural, linguistic, and organisational forms prevalent in contemporary society are not independent of the social and economic structure of our society, and are bequeathed to us from previous modes of production. Sexuality, like other spheres of human activity, is not exempt from this.

The realities of life under Covid-19 lockdown, whatever the specifics, are strange. Over the last two months or so, many of us will have seen empty shelves in supermarkets where once-familiar products like flour, eggs, soap and toilet roll are seemingly in short supply. Is this because there are not enough of these products being produced? Have the supply lines broken down, so that existing products aren’t reaching the shelves? Are customers buying these things in a panic, leading to temporary shortages? Are speculators buying them, to sell at a profit later?