As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads to hundreds of thousands of workers in more than 160 countries or territories and counting, the world seems filled with uncertainty. But one thing is for sure: This crisis dramatically exposes the utter inability of capitalism to meet the needs of the international working class. In their callous negligence in mishandling Covid-19, the rulers are telling us—again—how little they value workers’ lives under the profit system.
For the capitalist bosses, Covid-19 is both a challenge to their system and an opportunity to experiment and impose more intensive fascism. For the working class and Progressive Labor Party, it is also a challenge and opportunity. We will need to learn how to operate in new ways, and it won’t be easy. But if we succeed, we can show workers how a healthier society could be run in the interests of our class. Only a communist revolution can stamp out capitalism, the deadliest pandemic of all time.
The China model: open fascism
In Wuhan, China, the early epicenter of the crisis, the Chinese ruling class responded at first with denial and repression. Their openly fascist state muzzled doctors who tried to warn the world of what was coming. Then it put 45 million people on lockdown, turned countless Chinese workers away from over-burdened, under-supplied hospitals, and left them to die at home without care (Reuters.com, 2/13).
When you contrast the policies of today’s Chinese bosses with the communist health care system built by Chinese workers after the 1949 revolution, the choice is clear. The Chinese communists’ monumental public health campaigns, led by the revolutionary “barefoot doctors,” treated curable diseases and eliminated others entirely. In just ten years, they doubled workers’ life expectancy and halved infant mortality, the greatest public health gains in the history of humanity!
As the Covid-19 spreads around the globe, other countries are following in China’s fascist footsteps. South Korea, with the second most confirmed cases in Asia, instituted a massive testing program—by itself an essential tool for containing an epidemic. But as people tested positive, the government used a new law allowing it to track “CCTV footage, GPS tracking data from phones and cars, credit card transactions, immigration entry information, and other personal details” of anyone infected (Reuters.com). The South Korean bosses are exploiting Covid-19 to escalate surveillance and tighten control over workers, measures that will outlive the pandemic.
In New Rochelle, NY, Governor Andrew Cuomo, a liberal Democrat, created a one-mile-radius “containment zone” and deployed the National Guard to police it (NPR.org, 3/10). On March 13, President Donald Trump declared a “national emergency” under federal laws that allow him to “seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens” (Congressional Research Service Report). This is the beating heart of fascism.
The Italy model: infrastructure collapse
As Italy has gone from a few hundred confirmed cases of Covid-19 to more than 30,000 in barely three weeks, its healthcare system is overwhelmed. The Italian bosses have responded with new guidelines for triage, “The criteria for access to intensive therapy in cases of emergency must include age of less than 80 or a score on the Charlson comorbidity Index of less than 5” (The Telegraph, 3/14). In other words, doctors will determine who deserves a life-saving ventilator and who does not. (The Atlantic, 3/11). The Nazis’ Third Reich had a similar stance on health care.
The worldwide scarcity of intensive care beds and resources is no surprise. In 2015, a New York State Health Department task force estimated that “a severe 6-week outbreak” would result in 89,610 patients in acute respiratory distress “and there will not be enough ventilators in the State to meet the demand” (health.ny.gov). The bosses knew the next pandemic was coming, but spare inventory is a drain on profits. Hospital “efficiency” is profitable; excess capacity is not. In the U.S., the richest nation in the world, there are only 2.8 hospital beds per thousand people—fewer than in South Korea (12.3), China (4.3), or Italy (3.2) (NYT, 3/14). In New York City, home to Wall Street and its tens of billions of dollars in annual profits, more than 20 hospitals have closed since 2000 because of “financial pressures” (nbcnewyork.com, 8/6/13). Some have been replaced by luxury condo buildings. As always, the bosses put money over people.
In the absence of adequate health care, or even minimal numbers of tests, the capitalists are promoting “social distancing,” shutting down public spaces (including schools), and self-quarantining at the first sign of sickness. While these may be sound recommendations from a public health perspective, they make survival nearly impossible for workers who don’t have paid sick leave or options for child care. Those hit hardest by capitalism’s racist inequalities—Black, Latin, immigrant, the homeless and the uninsured workers—are also the most vulnerable to the coronavirus and the least equipped to adjust to the “new normal.” We must continue to wage struggles to help these workers and their families stay safe, healthy, and fed.
Fight the bosses, not each other
One historical aspect of fascism and the drive toward inter-imperialist war is the pitting of workers against each other. With Covid-19, egged on by racist talk of “the Chinese virus” by Trump and his flunkies, some workers have been led to look suspiciously at anyone who sneezes, especially if they appear to be of Asian descent. In addition, short-term shortages of supplies have created frenzies of unnecessary hoarding. When workers are isolated and afraid, they are more susceptible to the contagion of the bosses’ rotten ideas: selfishness, individualism, competition.
But let’s be clear: Our real enemy is capitalism. In every disaster, “natural” or otherwise, from Haiti to New Orleans to Puerto Rico, workers have chosen the right side and defended their class. In this urgent time, PLP will continue to work within our mass organizations and stand for worker unity and class consciousness over fear and hysteria. Where public schools are closed, we can run Freedom Schools. We can organize food drives and fight for the homeless and undocumented. We can show the working class that we can run society!
As the U.S. ruling class tries to infect us with racist fear-mongering, communists in PLP must respond to fight the root causes of this pandemic: the blood-sucking bosses and their diseased system. Today we have an opportunity to demonstrate how communism is the only solution for our class. Make the fight against the coronavirus a fight against capitalism! Join Progressive Labor Party!

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Fascists divided in crisis: Trump vs. Biden

As the Covid-19 crisis intensifies, the capitalist ruling class has been rocked by division and instability. Worldwide oil prices and demand are at record lows (NYT, 3/4). The world’s stock markets, from New York to London to Shanghai, are crashing as well. In the U.S., the Donald Trump administration has been a disaster of anti-scientific incompetence. Two years ago, it dismantled the federal pandemic response team. More recently, by failing to make widespread coronavirus testing quickly available, the government has been instrumental in causing a broader outbreak.
Rulers not immune to splits
It’s clear by now that an isolationist, Fortress America approach—the agenda favored by the domestic Small Fascists behind Trump—doesn’t work against a virus. But it’s also important to point out that today’s public health crisis was created by the liberal finance capitalists, the same Big Fascists who are hoping to capitalize on the pandemic to win back the presidency and their control over the state apparatus in November.
It’s no accident that the U.S. government’s first significant action on Covid-19 was to pump 1.5 trillion into short-term lending markets, to keep finance capital afloat. That figure dwarfed the initial emergency “relief” bill rammed through by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an insulting measure that offered paid sick leave to only 20 percent of workers (New York Times, 3/14). The bosses will put the greed of capitalism before the needs of the working class every time—even more so when their profits are threatened.
The liberal Democrats’ pathetic response to the Covid-19 echoes their decades of criminal disinvestment in workers’ health. Consider the record of Joe Biden the bank and credit card industry stooge who is now the heavy frontrunner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination. Beginning in the 1980s, whenever he wasn’t pushing for racist mass incarceration, then-Senator Biden led the charge for cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (theintercept.com, 1/13). He consistently endangered the same groups now most at risk in the current pandemic: the elderly, the disabled, and low-income families and individuals. He backed the Ronald Reagan budget cuts that “cut federal medical aid to more than a fifth of the American population” and gave states the freedom to eliminate medical care entirely for the working class(Washington Post, 8/21/81).
In 1987, in the runup to his first presidential campaign, Biden supported an amendment to list HIV among “the list of dangerous infectious diseases that would prevent immigration to this country” (thedailybeast.com, 3/13).
Obama and Biden, a toxic duo
In his current cynical campaign for Black votes, Biden’s main claim to credibility is his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. But when it comes to public health, Obama’s legacy is an anti-worker debacle. In 2015, the “change we need” president called for an 8 percent, $50 million cut to the program that “helps uninsured families receive vaccines and funds the government’s response to disease outbreaks that stem from lack of immunizations”(theatlantic.com, 2/2/15).In total, Obama proposed $399 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs, including home health services. As the New York Times (2/2/15) noted:
In addition, Mr. Obama’s budget would reduce scheduled Medicare payments to teaching hospitals, hundreds of small rural hospitals, nursing homes and health maintenance organizations that care for older Americans and people with disabilities.
The Obama-Biden centerpiece legislation, the Affordable Care Act, left more than 25 million people uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured, with high premiums and prohibitively high co-payments and deductibles: “Of the 194 million U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 in 2018, an estimated 87 million, or 45 percent, were inadequately insured” (commonwealthfund.org, 2/7/19). Even with a free Covid-19 test, a hospital stay for pneumonia can cost an uninsured worker “between $75,000 and $100,000 for 10 days” (cnbc.com, 3/10). When adequate care equates to bankruptcy, is it any wonder that many workers are reluctant to get treatment?
As Biden’s record shows, the liberal bosses are indeed the main danger.