A Monstrous Alien Force

«According to the British National Cyber Security Centre, hackers linked to the Russian government have attacked British, American and Canadian organizations to steal information about the testing of a vaccine against the coronavirus» – ANSA.

«The State Department has announced that it has obtained the indictment of two alleged Chinese hackers accused of stealing information about the research for the coronavirus vaccine» – The Washington Post.

When the whole of humanity is in distress and suffering from the spread of an epidemic whose development is impossible to predict and whose consequences could prove catastrophic, capitalism finds it entirely right and legitimate that the protection of business secrets should hinder and delay the preparation of a vaccine.

Every discovery, even if partial, every result of difficult experiments and data collection and analysis, the result of the work of an army of technicians and scientists engaged in difficult study, is not the property of the workers, but of the capitalist masters. And if the workers dare to talk about it outside the corporate environment, they are liable to criminal charges, according to the law, and for damages, like thieves, like the worker who pockets one pair of socks out of the thousands she makes every day.

The clinical trials are also kept secret, multiplying infinitely the number of poor people who must be subjected to the test of effectiveness and tolerability. Each “firm” proceeds against the others, does everything in its power to damage them, divert them, delay them.

Its hurry is not to get there first to save lives from a horrible death by asphyxiation, but to win contracts. The vaccine must not be the most effective and the safest, but the one that arrives on the market before the others. And they speak of prices from $40 (Reuters) to $210 (Bloomberg) per dose!

Of course, we do not confuse Russian and Chinese hackers for a new Robin Hood, as they also steal secrets to sell them.

Humanity, now fully international, needs to free science and technology from the anguish, arbitrariness, and demented selfishness of capital, which now tyrannizes the world of the living as a monstrous alien force.

Free it, yes, but not to decamp from materialism and the scientific method, to fall back on ignorance, irrationalism, the rejection of the unity of knowledge and the experimental method. No, not to go back from bourgeois science, but to go further, to overcome it in diligent study, towards a knowledge and practice for the first time truly disinterested, open, and, simply, human.