Communist Party of the Workers of Spain
Capitalist Crisis in Spain: Accelerated by the Pandemic and Managed by Social Democracy
Spain is living in 2020 the worst capitalist crisis of 121 its history. The economy is shrinking on double-digit figures; there are millions of unemployed workers, and dozens of thousands of victims dead because of the pandemic. A superficial glance could determine that the causes of the current crisis are completely due to the effects of the pandemic and the paralysis of economy during confinement. However, the analysis we had made before the pandemic were already predicting the looming of a capitalist crisis, being the Coronavirus actually a catalyst, rather than the cause of it. One that affects the capitalist relationships worldwide and not only its national expressions. In our 11th Congress, held on November 2017, we stated that “world capitalism is being unable to recover the growth levels that preceded the last crisis, and there are already enough hints on the table to consider that a new overall crisis may break out in the following years”. Indeed, after the 2008-2014 crisis, the economic growth rates only reached minor upturns before falling again into stagnation between 2018 and 2019. In that last year, the Foreign Direct Investment rate fell by 40%. The stoppage of the capitalist cycle had very illustrative examples like oil producers paying to whoever took their stock: without capitalist reproduction, there is no realization of capital gains, and the first link in this chain is in the production and not the sale. This was preceded by a price war between the OPEC and Russia, which ended up in an agreement to decrease production, to which Mexico joined. Overproductionwas a factbefore Coronavirus cameintoplay. In the previous capitalist crisis, between 2008 and 2014, there were those who pointed to the financial sphere as the only accountable for it. The dilemma would then be speculative capitalism against productive capitalism, being the first a negative one and the second a desirable one. Equally, nowadays there are those who are presenting the pandemic as the only origin of the crisis. The false dilemma they are presenting to us is, on one side, a predatory capitalism that wants to restart the economic cycle as soon as possible and turn the page on confinements; and another one that is building a “social shield” against the crisis. We draw from the fact that there are no partial causes that explain by themselves any of both crisis; also that capitalism has crisis – derived from productive anarchy, which is derived from private property of productive means – as a rule that is besides useful to recompose the economic cycle and concentrate
