“Everything must change, so that everything remains the same.” — one of the most famous sentences in Luchino Visconti’s movie adaptation of the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Pampedusa (p.1)

Notes on the ‘Introduction’

“In a similar way, forced by the Covid-19 crisis, our contemporary ruling class is well aware that a deep transformation is taking place and that the only way for things to remain the same is the emergence of a new social and political arrangement that can keep them in power. What other proof is needed of the deep tensions plaguing capitalism but the spiking of Jeff Bezos’s fortune by 13 billion in a single day in July 2020 ¹, as the Covid-19 crisis prioritizes the free movement of goods even higher than the free movement of people, while, at the same time, Amazon workers have been dying of Covid-19 and protesting their inhuman working conditions? What other proof than Elon Musk, the embodiment of the capitalist expansionist dream, who, when challenged with the claim that the United States coup against Evo Morales occurred to enable hum to obtain Bolivia’s lithium simply answered, ‘We will coup whoever we want ! Deal with it.’ ² […] Remember Warren Buffet, another billionaire, who famously said, ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ ³”

Notes on ‘Cost of Covid-19 Must not Bankrupt the People’

”The capitalist classes have used the concept of the universal basic income, for instance, in a very distored way. Rather than paying social welfare, or spending money on public schools, education, health, parks, and transportation, they propose to give people a cash payment and then privatize all of these services so that people have to pay for them. The universal basic income should not be a substitue for public services, but a supplement.” (p.14)

Can we afford universal basic income on top of providing real public services?

”[As of 2016] there is an estimated $36 trillion ⁴ sitting in tax havens.” In other words, enforcing capital controls with the aim to retain capital within a countries tax jurisdiction is one key part of a solution. ”And [there needs to be] a wealth tax. Rather than thanking Bill Gates for donating money to Covid-19 reserarch, we should be demanding his taxes. It is not the philanthropy of billionaires we need, but their taxation. There are sufficient ressources already existing in our societies: trillions spent on defense, trillions in tax havens. We need to accumulate these to produce a social, decent society […].”