Covid-19 has laid bare the lethal racist inequalities of the profit system. From the United States to Africa, from Latin America to South Asia, workers everywhere are suffering unnatural deaths from the disease of capitalism. The choice between capitalist decay and an international communist future has never been clearer.
Viruses are a product of nature, but the disaster of Covid-19 is anything but natural. Capitalism depends on the superexploitation of Black, Latin, and undocumented workers as its lifeblood. Those of us who have the least under this system will always endure the harshest attacks. The latest pandemic has made this fact of capitalist life only more obvious.
From refugee camps to tent cities to underfunded housing projects, hundreds of millions work and live without the basics of sanitation or healthcare. We expect that Covid-19 will ultimately pass, but capitalism will remain to sicken us by the billions. Racist inequality is instrumental in cultivating the conditions for spreading disease. Inferior for-profit healthcare, shoddy housing, starvation-level wages—all conspire to put workers, and especially Black and Latin families, in danger.
The capitalist rulers have infected the world with their anarchy, greed, and cold-blooded disregard for human life. The only vaccine is communist revolution! Progressive Labor Party seeks to eradicate the bosses’ contagion for all time. Though small, we still have the power to organize workers to fight for pro-communist ideas and practices through mass organizations. In this challenging, difficult period, we still have the capacity to inspire revolutionary optimism (see page 1 through 6). The health and well-being of our class depends on it.
U.S. capitalism kkkills
Jim Crow racism murders our class—through higher unemployment, police terror, deportations, decrepit housing, food deserts, second-class healthcare, homelessness, and slum living conditions. Capitalist inequalities, poverty, and segregation kill nearly 900,000 workers per year (American Journal of Public Health, August 2011). These are the preexisting conditions, fostered by Democrats and Republicans alike, that pave the way for transmission, infection, and death in a pandemic.
Disproportionate numbers of people dying—in hospitals or at home—are working-class Black, Latin, and undocumented workers. While Black workers make up only 30 percent of Chicago’s population, they total a stark 70 percent of deaths by Covid-19. “Counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority” (Washington Post, 4/7). The bosses’ solution? U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, one of a handful of Black sellouts in the Donald Trump administration, scolded Black, Latin, and other workers to “step up” and “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs” for “your abuela, your Big Mama” (The Root, 4/10). Such racist trash! These shameless hypocrites jumped at their first chance to blame the victims.  
This wouldn’t be the first time that Black workers were left to fend for themselves. During the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed 25 million people worldwide in its first 25 weeks, the racist system refused to report Black workers’ illnesses or even dig their graves. The racist pseudoscience of the day claimed that the lining of Black workers’ noses “made them more resistant to microorganisms” (Washington Post, 4/11). Black and Latin workers were forced to carry the disease to their jobs and on public transportation and back to their families. A century later, little has changed.
Workers are now faced with impossible choices: infections at our workplaces; nightmares that await us at slaughterhouse hospitals; hunger and lonely deaths at our homes. More than 16 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment between March 15 and April 4 (Business Insider, 4/13). Whether or not Black workers are masked for our collective protection, the racist cops have found a new reason to target them in stores, streets, and train stations (New York Times, 4/14).
New York City is the global pandemic epicenter, with an official death toll exceeding 10,000. But that hasn’t stopped liberal racist Governor Andrew Cuomo—who cost thousands of those lives by delaying stay-at-home measures (see page 5)—from congratulating himself for achieving a “possible plateau” (Reuters, 4/7). In reality, any slowing of the official infection rate may reflect a rising threshold for hospital admissions, the widespread unavailability of testing, and workers’ reluctance to trust the Nazi bosses’ rationed health care. The actual caseload may still be on an upward trajectory and out of control.
Yet, we fight. Workers in Chicago are leading the way (see pages 1 and 3).
Still, it is a lot worse for us in Haiti, Brazil, Zambia, or India.
Africa: anarchy of production
The entire nation of South Sudan has four ventilators. This racist system revolves around profit and competition, and the wealthiest imperialist nations are winning. “Scientists in Africa and Latin America have been told by manufacturers that orders for vital testing kits cannot be filled for months, because the supply...is going to America or Europe. [There are] steep price increases, from testing kits to masks” (NYT, 4/9). Racist borders and nationalist ideas have never been more deadly.
In Kenya and Mozambique, police beat, whipped, humiliated, and even killed workers, including a 13-year-old boy, in attempts to enforce lockdowns (Foreign Policy, 4/2). In a panicked stampede for food, two women died on a distribution line (Citizen Digital, 4/11).
African migrant workers in China are targets of eviction, street harassment, and refusal of service (Quartz, 3/11). Anti-Black racism is a global disease.
Whether we are fighting the sickness of capitalism or a coronavirus, our principle is the same: An injury to one is an injury to all. It is in the interest of the whole working class for treatment and supplies to be channeled to the most vulnerable areas. But under the profit system, only the wealthy and connected are guaranteed to be tested and to receive timely care.
Yet, we must fight back. Now more than ever, we need the leadership of Black workers.
Latin America: cardboard coffins and refugees
In Ecuador, where bodies are being left in the street or deposited in cardboard coffins (Guardian, 4/5), desperate conditions are a harbinger for Latin America and the Caribbean: an austerity budget, dependence on a failing U.S. economy, a skeletal healthcare system, gross income inequalities. The situation is even worse for malnourished and devastated Venezuelan immigrants, on the run from the atrocity of Trump’s sanctions.  
In the Corridor of Violence (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala), “These violent cartels and their private armies, which in many places exercise more power than national governments, may now fall into anarchic and murderous competition over dwindling resources” (Wall Street Journal, 4/6). Our class will soon see a wave of Covid-19 refugees. It will be up to us to respond with international solidarity.
As of April 13, more than 300 workers in Mexico have officially died due to Covid-19, though testing is so limited that the real count may be five times as many or more (U.S. News & World Report, 4/13). In Mexico City alone, two million street vendor workers are abandoned to fend for themselves. As the virus was spreading, liberal president López Obrador showed his loyalty to the bosses’ and their businesses by advising workers to “live life as usual” (Guardian, 3/25). Yet, we must fight back. Workers in Haiti and Mexico are leading the way (see page 4 and 5).
South Asia: criminal neglect of public health
For at least a quarter of the world’s population, some two2 billion people, physical distancing is a sick joke. In South Asia, there is one nurse for every 10,000 workers. The health infrastructure, however decrepit, is concentrated in cities, yet 66 percent of the region’s population lives in rural areas (World Bank).
In India, bosses imposed a lockdown of 1.3 billion people, the largest in history. But they cannot prevent the coming cataclysm created by their blatant neglect of workers’ health. They’ve invested in only 40,000 ventilators, or about 6 percent as many per capita as in the U.S. (Aljazeera.com, 4/2). In a country where caste-based and anti-Muslim violence is routine, there’s no escaping racism for Muslim and Dalit workers. Meanwhile, fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that Covid-19 was not a health emergency while spreading the myth that “the virus was going to be vaporized by the ‘reverberations’ of mass clapping” (Foreign Policy, 4/10).
In Bangladesh, over 90 percent of workers are in the informal sector. Most families' ability to eat depends on these workers’ now evaporated daily wages. Scarce water sources are shared across densely packed households, an ideal environment for a virus.
In Afghanistan, government-distributed hand sanitizers in hospitals “have zero alcohol content.” The imperialist-run World Health Organization gave the country 1,500 testing kits, “but only two laboratories…[have] machines that can process the test samples” (The Intercept, 4/2).
Covid-19 will result in worldwide genocide of Black and brown workers. Of all the plagues of capitalism, racism is the most fatal.
Yet, we must fight back.  
Kill capitalism or be killed
Capitalism means the racist genocide of our class: rising fascism, liberal misleaders disguised as saviors, and inter-imperialist wars for limited resources (see box). The bosses will respond to this crisis the only way they know: with murderous nationalist competition.
The other choice—for workers, the only choice—is communism. Wherever we are, we must battle the disease of the profit system. Whenever we fight back, we contribute to our international mission of equality everywhere.
Capitalism cannot protect the working class from disease and inequality. Workers need a society run by workers for the health of all, not the profits and power of a few. Only communism, organized by a mass working class led by Progressive Labor Party, could humanely contain a pandemic and ensure survival for the greatest possible number of workers. The international working class needs to build a border-free world. We need a society predicated on science to protect our class, the environment, and the planet that sustains us. Only then will humanity flourish.
Getting rid of capitalism is a matter of life or death! Which side are you on? Join the PLP and fight for workers’ power!