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!
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Haiti: Workers confront politician’s racist disregard
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- 17 April 2020 71 hits
HAITI, April 9—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is at the center of efforts to deal with the coronavirus in general, in the Southern region and one provincial town in particular. We are giving political and tactical leadership.
As of this week, there are 60 officially confirmed cases of coronavirus and two deaths. There is virtually no testing, and little equipment to deal with the eventual surge of the pandemic here. All of the underlying health issues that affect Black workers around the world exist here as well, and we can expect the infection rate and death toll to be catastrophic.
We began on March 1, by calling together the working class population of our town to talk about the coronavirus, what we knew about the disease and methods of protecting ourselves and our friends and families. We discussed some positive steps that we could take, such as having a roving sound-truck that reached out to the rural communities surrounding our town.
The Progressive Labor Party is a principal actor in an ad hoc coronavirus committee in the department. We are able to influence its members, politically and ideologically, so that we can understand why the virus will have such a devastating effect here. It has become increasingly clear to many that the answers given by the rulers both nationally and locally are unequal to the task at hand.
Who organizes society?
The capitalists and their lying politicians are trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, crying all the way to the bank, “Woe, woe, ‘we’ are a poor country, what can we do?” They rely on rumor and lies to say that “we are all in this together,” while they can shelter in mansions with generators and swimming pools, and freezers filled with food.
We point out the difference between the way the capitalist bosses organize society—stealing the value that workers produce so that profits come before people, racism and poverty come before health—and the way that a communist egalitarian society would function—based on the concept of the working class deciding how to share equitably the product of our labor so that all of our needs are met.
Some members of the ad hoc committee are by and large anti-capitalist, but believe that the ills of capitalism can be reformed. But we are willing to engage in ideological struggle while we fight against the rulers’ inability and unwillingness to provide the kind of health care that workers need. We are providing needed information to those who otherwise have no access to sound ideas about how to protect themselves during the pandemic.
Ad hoc committee advocates for workers
The ad hoc committee produced a number of documents and proposals that have been offered to the local administration but to no avail. A delegation confronted the principal mayor of the department, demanding that he do something to protect the population, even threatening to take him to court for his failures and charging him with criminal negligence. The threat forced him to relent a little and he has signed a call—which we had to write for him—for physical distancing and regular hand washing.
The committee is currently organizing a collective fundraising to put public hand-washing stations with clean water and soap. We have reached out to Haitians living abroad and other friends, pointing out that if the government refuses to do what is necessary, we will take care of our class collectively.
We are continuing solidarity outreach to the rural sections with the sound truck. In an effort to broaden out this work, a number of people have pre-recorded comments about the political and social situation to be broadcast, and friends are donating money for gasoline, etc. We are stopping for mini-conferences in each area to engage the workers there, giving them the opportunity to speak their minds about the lack of response of the bosses to the pandemic.
PLP is at the forefront of this struggle against capitalism in general and its murderous healthcare. Our analysis has many people nodding in agreement, with all or with part, and wanting to take part in this struggle on many levels.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our class solidarity with the workers of the world who are facing, and will face, untold suffering and death because of the inability of capitalism to provide decent healthcare for them.
We have an opportunity to sharpen the class struggle and build the Party. We are discussing with our friends what form our May Day activities should take this year. It is imperative that the Party has a presence.
CHICAGO, April 7—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined forces with over one hundred antiracist workers for a caravan protest outside of Cook County Jail. Workers are demanding that the Democrat bosses of Chicago free incarcerated workers who are being exposed to COVID-19 at an alarming rate. The liberal misleadership of Chicago now has the blood of three incarcerated workers who have died from COVID-19 at Cook County Jail on their hands.
The disgusting and racist conditions inside of the jail, where incarcerated workers can’t physically distance themselves in the overcrowded facility, have turned it into the number one hotspot in the country for the spread of Covid-19. The population of the jail, mostly Black and Latin workers—many detained for non-violent offenses or being unable to make bail—is the direct result of decades of racist policy by the city’s liberal bosses, and the racist nature of incarceration and capitalism overall.
Capitalism’s only answer for billions of the world’s workers is to lock us up and let many of us die. The liberal capitalist bosses will never solve the problems they created. As they lie, incarcerate and look after their businesses, it is workers everywhere that are putting their lives at risk for each other. That’s a glimpse of a communist society and workers’ power, the only way we can gain any real safety from racist incarceration and deadly pandemics.
Antiracists in a caravan
An hour before the caravan was scheduled to begin, we met in a nearby grocery store parking lot to prepare. Along with members of a pro-working class organization, we collectively made a plan on the route we would take and who would be contact persons if our vehicles got separated or if the racist cops started to make any arrests.We also decorated our vehicles with antiracist signs and revolutionary messages in English and Spanish, such as “Racism Means Fight Back!” and “Communism is the Cure.” We distributed surgical and N95 masks to those who needed them, while others provided water. Most importantly, we distributed out CHALLENGE to arm our class about the racist nature of the pandemic and the importance of a fighting back.
When we arrived in front of the jail, there were already dozens of vehicles with fighters from other organizations, circling in front of the racist concentration camp. Everyone was blowing their horns, and some were giving speeches from megaphones inside their cars. Others even braved to get on foot to wave antiracist signs to workers and get out fliers.
The cops were caught off guard and unable to stop the flow of workers’ power and block our message. We must keep finding creative ways like this physically distant protest to put the bosses on blast in front of other workers. This makes it harder and harder for them to keep hiding the racist time bomb of infection that exists right now in all jails.
Liberal bosses filled jails, won’t empty them
The racist, unhealthy conditions at Cook County Jail have been long in the making. The jail is the largest single-site jail in the United States, keeping anywhere from 4000 to 5000 workers locked up daily. It is also one of the largest mental health facilities in the country, with at least a third of the incarcerated workers diagnosed with a mental illness (Mother Jones, 1/8/19). Many of these workers were incarcerated after former Mayor Rahm Emanuel (formerly Obama’s Chief of Staff) led the charge to close half the city’s mental health clinics in 2012.
With at least 350 cases of Covid-19 traced back to the jail, it’s the largest known source of infections in the U.S. (NYT, 4/8). Currently at least 300 incarcerated workers and over 200 jail staff have tested positive, with at least three confirmed deaths (NBC Chicago, 4/12). Even worse, the city just filed a suit to actively block steps toward decarceration that would save lives (chicagobond.org).
Many well-intentioned organizers in the city got behind Black State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in her campaign to get elected on a platform of criminal justice reform, but predictably she has done little. She is following new racist Mayor Lori Lightfoot claiming to represent “change” in the city but in fact representing the same liberal status quo that is guaranteeing Black and Latin workers suffer most during this pandemic.
Abolish racist incarceration with communism
Capitalism can never provide for all of the world’s workers, so it has to resort to incarceration for social control and a way to super-exploit workers for labor. These attacks fall hardest on Black and Latin workers, who make up the majority of the two million-plus inmates locked up in this racist country.
As communists, our goal is to smash this profit system and racist incarceration completely. Workers around the world will be rehabilitated, not incarcerated, and we will prioritize the public health of the masses at all costs. A communist future is the healthiest future to fight for! Join PLP!
MEXICO, April 9—Under capitalism, workers’ health is important as long as they can be exploited. “Workers: you are on your own.” That is the bosses’ plan of action during this pandemic. Their actions will lead to many preventable deaths from a disease that they refuse to diagnose or from starvation because of the economic devastation. This capitalist system is unfit for the workers and doesn’t deserve to exist.
Abandoned healthcare system
After the economic crisis in the 80s, because of the depreciation of its currency due to the nationalization of the banks in 1982, the Mexican government, in order to deal with the crisis, acquired loans with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. One of these loans demanded the dismantling of the State’s health services, to implement a system of private health services. Since the 80s, there has been little money put into the healthcare system.
There are 250 abandoned public hospitals. In the last 36 years, deteriorating infrastructure and lack of pro-health policies have lead to an increase in diabetes, heart problems, cancer and more.
Covid-19 unmasks capitalist disregard
Like in other parts of the world, Covid-19 has unmasked the abandonment and inequality of healthcare. While public health care for the masses is nonexistent, healthcare is plenty for who can afford it. The places with the highest number of registered infections are Mexico city, the state of Mexico, Baja California, Sinaloa, Quintana Roo, Puebla and Jalisco.
The health authorities reported 3,181 registered cases of coronavirus and 174 deaths in the first weeks of April, but this is only a representative sample. For each case, there could be eight to 12 more people infected, which means 26,000 cases with Covid-19 (El Universal, 4/8).
Many hospitals are living in this emergency due to the chronic underfunding. In cities like Tijuana and Mexicali in Baja California, the rate of infection and deaths has grown immensely. Doctors are warning in the next weeks, with the increase in infections, the hospitals will collapse. Note that these two cities have the highest concentration of migrants waiting to cross the border.
Healthcare workers protest for protection
The protests of doctors and nurses throughout the country have not stopped. From Baja California to Chiapas, they are demanding protective equipment so they can treat patients. Scores have rallied in Mexico City.
The Mexican Association of Doctors and Residents of April said that 8 of 10 doctors do not have N95 masks, more than half did not have protective goggles and around 30 percent did not have acrylic masks (El Pais, 4/8). There is also the lack of trained staff to face this emergency. The collapse of hospitals and an increase in deaths was preventable.
With a precarious economy where 54 percent of the working population are in the informal sector and don’t have access to social security, the only alternative will be broken public health infrastructure (El Pais, 4/8).
In Mexico City, before the declaration of a national emergency, we had lost 64,000 jobs. and between March 13 and April 6, 346,800 jobs were lost. Also, many workers were forced to accept lower salaries in order to keep their jobs. Many workers who lost their jobs in the formal sector took jobs in supermarkets and delivery services.
AMLO serves big business
If we can see that the working class has been affected the most by this pandemic, so can the labor department. The business coordinating council has requested that the president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) cut their taxes and add money for their sector, so businesses don’t go under. AMLO refused, saying that his government prioritizes the needs of the poorest population, and a “rescue” of that magnitude will lead to more loans from the IMF. This liberal misleader’s lies knows no bounds. This is the same president that underplayed the pandemic in the first place.
But to be honest, AMLO’s strategy is to rely on the businesses that have always supported him: Carlos Slim from Grupo Carso; Alberto Bailleres, BAL; and Germán Larrea, Grupo México, who have gotten land and projects throughout the country (El Pais, 4/8).
PLP serves workers
The PLP here continues to function. We read and share DESAFIO with co-workers online while maintaining relationships with our base. Our strategy to combat this crisis, we must talk to our base, friends, family, co-workers, developing a communist conscience by sharing real information to create our own analysis. CHALLENGE is the tool that help us see experiences from workers around the world and know that we are all living the same experience; that we are one international working class; that the only way we can change the world is building a revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism and build a dictatorship of the working class.
After a month of school closures due to Covid-19, capitalist education is increasingly exposed as an exercise in racist neglect, where sowing obedience and using grades to sort our children into ‘winners and losers’ are the goals, not learning.
Students, parents and education workers today must reject this regime of schooling. Now is the time to provide the youth of the working class with an emancipatory and class-conscious education. Communist teachers in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are fighting to be at the forefront of such an effort.
Across all subject areas let’s fight for an understanding of this crisis through a more class-conscious program of science, math, history and language so that our young people and their families can see by our example that only we, the working class, hold the key to a healthier future – communism.
The response of the bosses’ school systems to Covid-19 is a mounting racist disaster. Segregation and imperialism funnel the worst attacks toward the most exploited members of our class. By March 4, schools in 188 countries were closed, impacting 1.5 billion students (Washington Post, 4/6), over 90 percent of the world’s students.
The lost time and learning that working class youth are suffering will never be made up. Like those uncounted dying at home in NYC (NYT, 4/10), the losses suffered by the children of our class will never be fully accounted for. Worldwide, many of our class brothers and sisters who are refugees and internally displaced persons (especially teenage girls who attend school at lower rates than boys) will never return to school (UNESCO.org, 4/10).
Even as their education system, like their health care system has collapsed, the bosses still seek to sort children into categories that will shape their lives. In a survey of education bosses from 84 countries, 22 replied that their educational systems were moving forward with high-stakes exams as planned, while 11 canceled them and 23 moved forward with modified/online versions. Population sorting remains an essential function of capitalist schooling.
Bosses abandon working class children
In the Los Angeles Unified School District schools were closed with no provision made for any type of distance learning to be put in place, and PLP is organizing teachers to serve the working class in the face of the bosses’ racist neglect.
Instead of figuring out how to give each student a chance to learn, the ruling class in Philadelphia cynically cancelled distance learning citing ‘equity concerns’ (Philadelphia Tribune, 3/18). Posing as anti-racists, liberal school bosses in Boston and the Seattle area have made similar racist decisions (Time, 3/15), cutting off access which disproportionately affect working class youth.
In New York City, the viral epicenter of decaying U.S. capitalism, the ruling class has adopted a program of laptop distribution and shipment of iPads by mail but only AFTER leaving the schools open so long that known viral hotspots developed in school buildings across the city (Gothamist.com, 3/29). A determined cover-up of the spread of Covid-19 in schools is underway. Meanwhile, the technology shipment has failed to reach some 240,000 students (DeBlasio press conference, 4/11). Since closure we have seen anti-student principals pressure teachers to simply pump out assignments, while making ZERO effort to see how students are actually doing during this crisis. All teachers, especially newer teachers with fewer job protections, must turn to the working class by reaching out to students and parents to ensure that schoolwork does not become a new source of oppression and stress.
The bosses failed system tries to shift blame to parents
The vast majority of our students are Black and Latin youth. A survey generated by PLP teachers shows that their obligations to care for younger siblings have grown, that many live-in cramped apartments and take turns on a single laptop over weak internet service with no good quiet place to work. A provider’s job loss haunts nearly half our students, while the other half with a parent still working endure the stress of seeing their mother or father leave home and risk exposure daily in order to earn their pay.
Assignments related to what is happening all around us and which point to ways students, parents and teachers can fight our way through this crisis together will help all of us.
High school student engagement with distance learning in NYC has declined every week, reflecting mass discontent with canned lessons not relevant to the urgent problems of the present. For younger students stuck at home, the situation is no better. Workers must reject hollow calls for ‘parent accountability’ for distance learning which is divorced from reality as millions of jobs evaporate and the remaining ones become virus-plagued death traps.
The working class can educate our children
Class-conscious education workers and parents must fight for the attention of every young mind and focus youth inquiry on using language, science, history and math to discover the truth about how capitalism brought the Covid-19 crisis into being and how ruling classes will resort to intensified fascism in the response they cobble together, while loved ones grow sick and die all around us.
As ruling classes squabble over which working class lives matter and which do not, students, parents and teachers must hold fast to the only political program which makes the survival of the international working class the only priority – communist revolution. “Red Medicine: Socialized Health Care in Soviet Russia” is available online and provides a glimpse of the kinds of advances in health care and education that are possible when the working class holds power. We see health care and education being organized in an anti-sexist way where the well-being of every single worker and child comes first. Readings from this 1933 book and discussion questions for distance learning and study group use will be posted on the PLP website in the coming period.
We call on education workers and parents drafted into the work of educating their children at home to send to Challenge all lessons that build a materialist understanding of Covid-19. The bosses' media reeks of the stench of the profit system and many workers have the good sense to keep it at arms-length. Yet our class cannot be left at the mercy of superstition and rumor which fill the gap in the search for answers. J
Every class-conscious worker must become knowledgeable about health care, and more concerned than ever with the ideas our children absorb. With the cancellation of state exams in New York and elsewhere, education workers have an increased opportunity to teach what really matters. The latest NYC decision to leave schools closed through the end of the year in June is a challenge and an opportunity to build multi-racial unity with our students and their families on the basis of class struggle for a decent education and a communist future.
