COVID-19 Pandemic and Capitalist Economic Crisis: A Class Struggle Workers Action Program
At present the world staggers and muddles on through a pandemic that charts its own course across the oceans and continents. Everyone is exposed and the gross inadequacy of capitalist medicine is as well.
At least the dead and dying have likely realized this, and have despite the booster cheerleading of reformism and reaction alike. Centrism also accommodates the existing system, profferring ‘radical’ action programs that do not call for socialism but suck up to a trade union leadership increasingly integrated into the state. The dialectic of pandemic development in conditions of the social anarchy of capitalist production is known to nature, and nature does not care whether the dialectic is acknowledged or popular; nature just adapts. In this case it makes a more virulent virus to defend itself from the mode of production. The virus’s particular zoonotic path, from animals to humans does not contradict this, much as conspiracy theorists wish you would believe otherwise.
After the virus naturally appeared the first response of the capitalist states was denial. First identified by Dr. Li Wenliang, he got unwanted police attention and was forcibly shut up for “rumor mongering.” He can’t defend himself against this charge now. His only proof in defense of his claim is his death from the virus he described. His experience of state indifference and denial was replicated elsewhere, notably and spectacularly in the U.S.A. of the Trump clique. They had a six week warning from authoritative experts and the Chinese response experience. The Trump clique did nothing to prepare, having previously done worse than nothing, abolishing and defunding such preparedness structures and offices that existed, and telling the credulous rightist political base that the virus was a leftist hoax.
Now the first responders are being worked to death without Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as Trump’s son-in-law manages the speculative market for these supplies. He tells us the national stockpile is not for supplying the states(!), while Trump swells up pronouncing himself a wartime president and in the same breath declares the federal government is only a “backup” for the states and is not a shipping clerk. We have been prepared by television personality government for a best case scenario of up to 240,000 victim fatalities. This sober news moment followed weeks of confusing daily briefings and Congressional wrangling over relief measures the Trumpsters insist upon calling a stimulus program. Refrigerator truck trailers are lined up in counties across New York, with shelves being installed to serve as morgues for the cadavers of the deceased. They died in isolation from their families, who will have to claim them later and pay forty eight to seventy two thousand dollars, i.e., the bill for care received. This will impoverish many. Still others will be unable to pay. Bernie Sanders says no one should have to pay these bills and Trump told the press that no one will have to. When the families get these bills should they bring them to these jokers? We say burn those bills like the draft cards in the Viet Nam anti-war movement days.
Nursing homes have become targets of opportunity for COVID-19 infestation. The bourgeoisie has for decades winked at the inadequate medical staffing of these facilities while gouging the families of the aged who cannot provide adequate care in their homes. Let’s be clear these are not homes full of highly trained and highly paid nurses. No, these are work sites where low paid immigrant workers with little education and little pay work under the direction of at best a few medical professionals. It is no wonder these workers are falling or will fall victim to this pandemic. In this pandemic the nursing home patients fare little better than the incarcerated, but they are another golden goose for capital.
The pandemic is only getting started! Soon the lack of supplies and ventilation equipment will be overwhelming the ‘hot spots” of April. Following the peak of infections in these metropolitan areas will –come the plague-equivalence in the secondary population center cities, and this has already begun.
Less credited is the true likelihood that fatalities will soar in the former confederacy and Florida. There obesity, hypertension and heart disease are commonplace (pre-existing diseases under capitalism are currently being used to alibi COVID-19 as no worse than the flu!) and to this will be added the unwillingness of the authorities to face the changed social situation until too late, which has also already happened. That Trump is politically earmarking scarce supplies for use by the relatively few hospitals serving the folks in these states is just more criminal negligence from the standpoint of the working class, whereas he says he bears no responsibility at all.
Workers need to figure this existing situation out as a total systemic failure. Ten million workers laid off in the last two weeks of March have this time to ponder it and realize that much of the adequate first remedy is already formulated in the historic socialist program of the working class. Now this has been further sharpened for immediate use by the Internationalist Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency in its COVID 19 Action Program. We urge all workers to use their communication tech and media at their disposal to quickly discuss this program and resolve to act. We are all threatened by the open longings of Attorney General Barr for the police state powers already imposed by the “illiberal democracy” regimes in Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Russia and China. Reject chauvinism! Those who prefer a racist blame game to internationalist action are doomed. Even before world war two our Trotskyist forebears recognised that the survival of the productive class in society was posed, and they said so in “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: the Transitional Program.” Now is the recommended time to find this short work on the Marxist Internet Archive and read it. You will feel better about our class and species’ chances when you do.
Understanding what you see– the preliminaries
The post-WWII U.S. hegemony of the last 70 years, arising from the redivision of the capitalist world after the devastation of the second inter-imperialist world war and built off of the super-profit accumulation from the exploitation of the semi-colonies/colonies, is coming to an end. American capitalism was sustained by a capitalist ideology rooted in the middle class and infecting large swathes of the working class. In particular, it was the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy who directly benefited from the imperialist profit-grabbing and who in unions such as the UAW, engaged in anti-China chauvinism rather than the international class struggle needed as American plants were closed and jobs moved offshore by Wall Street for cheaper labor. Down with anti-Chinese chauvinism and ‘Buy American’ protectionism!! Anti-Chinese chauvinism dovetails with Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-Latin American prejudice campaigns! These blame games are the harbingers of fascism, the latent political content of the Make America Great (White! ) Again campaign.
The pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy presided over the decimation of the unions as they pushed the team management schemes that tied workers to management on the shop floor. This class collaboration was historically prepared in the political sphere binding the unions to the capitalist Democratic Party, robbing the working class of both its political independence and the ability to use class struggle methods to defend and advance the historic gains and interests of our class. Down with labor/management peace schemes! For class struggle to defeat anti-labor laws such as Taft-Hartley! Defeat the Popular Front with the capitalist parties! We fight for the political independence of the working class.
The U.S. is number one in the number of COVID-19 cases, due to the deliberate criminal neglect of the Trump administration and the Democratic and Republican Congress. And the death rate is rising. It was the pandemic and the economic impact that tipped the world capitalist economy into turmoil, into a crisis that was already brewing as the capitalists have been unable to restore their rate of profit since the economic crisis of 2008, despite the working class being driven yet further into poverty. The dominance of U.S. imperialism on the world stage is faltering, as the U.S. is not able to turn on a dime as it did in WW II to fight the war on COVID-19. This is due to the deindustrialization under the ‘logic of globalization’ (imperialism). The supply chains trace back to areas in China closed by COVID-19. And China itself is a competing, rising imperialist power challenging U.S. hegemony. Only under rational, cooperative, centralized social economic planning on a world scale, a socialist world economy, can pandemics of this magnitude be effectively contained or the looming catastrophe of climate change be halted and reversed. And the working class is the only social class capable of democratically building and managing such an economy. The capitalist ruling classes and governments, the defenders of capitalism, have proven themselves utterly bankrupt as stewards and rulers of society.
Capitalist Healthcare, Medicare for All and Socialized Medicine
The ruling class in the U.S. is staunchly opposed to social medicine. For-profit healthcare has been sustained for decades by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the fusion of academic/bourgeois economists, the medical profession and the mega-corporations and their profit-driven taxpayer subsidized R&D and production. The U.S. is the only economically advanced industrial country without universal healthcare. Millions are overlooked by the failed ACA, and millions who despite having formal insurance, avoid treatment because the co-pay’s break their bank. Medicare for All (M4All) advocated by Sanders and the liberal ‘New New Dealers’ of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on paper ensures universal coverage, creates a buyers edge for medical equipment and medicine, could put a cap on costs and address the administrative overlap of multiple insurance companies, reducing overhead.
But M4All cannot guarantee quality and emergency preparedness as long as the providers, the hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical production corporations, R&D, the equipment production and supplemental insurance is market-driven. Guaranteeing your hospital bill is paid through M4All is small comfort if you end up dead due to deficient healthcare. Even if a Democratic and Republican Congress were pressured to pass an M4All bill, they would gut much of its progressive content and place the burden of supporting it on the working class. Instead we call for free, quality healthcare for all through socialized medicine run under workers control!
The training of the next generation of medical professionals needs to be addressed also. The socialist solution is through free, quality education and job training. This stands directly opposed to the education for profit system maintained under capitalism and promoted as a virtue by the alliance of the Gates and the DeVos families commitments to charter schools for the crushing of public education.
The Public Health Departments, academics, and public health professionals all knew this was coming and how vulnerable the medical system is, but their pleas were ignored by the neo-liberal agenda of the leadership of the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties. Just as they are not addressing the growing social inequality and the accelerating slide into climate catastrophe.
The just in time supply line “emergency planning” has reduced public health to a quip from business school basic logic determined to secure short-term, quarterly profits. The anarchy of capitalist production, the drive for profit and the competing capitalists have failed in providing the necessary PPE, medical equipment, testing and vaccine desperately needed.The lessons of the “Spanish Flu”, SARS and MERS guided Public Health professionals who have been shouting into the void that preparation was required. But there are none so deaf as those whose bottom line is affected by the information. The American mythological identity is tied up with another crumbling institution, the Boy Scouts, whose motto “Be Prepared” was a backbone of American pragmatism and an internalized justification for American exceptionalism. Yet when it was time to Be Prepared America had no Eagle Scouts and the rest of the troop was being sent out to dig mass graves not latrines for the big 2020 Jamboree.
Strategic reserves are not sufficient
The CDC is telling people to make masks out of cotton shirts and rubber bands. Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC Democrat talking head highlights mask sewing by a 4th grade Boston girl! This is what was the world’s manufacturing powerhouse!
With millions sitting at home and factories sitting idle a socialist economy under democratic workers control would safely open the factories and produce the needed medical equipment, PPE, test kits and send teams of social service workers into every home to find and serve the sick and dying. We call on the unions to seize the shuttered economy, to open supply chains, to initiate safe work protocols and put an end to the lack of equipment needed to defeat this pandemic! The capitalist economy administered by Trump or Biden and Cuomo promise you more of the same: subordination of adequate preparation, production and delivery of medical equipment to the for-profit supply line dictates.
Racist American Capitalism
The public health crisis in Michigan/Detroit is the tip of what is devloping into a racist genocide-Trump’s ‘Final Solution’. Black workers were needed in the late 50’s throughout the 60’s and the early 70’s to build up the Big Three Auto companies. When the downturn came in 1974 they began to be turned into a reserve army of labor with the highest intergenerational unemployment rates decimating the Black family and filling the prisons. The Rockefeller drug war against the Black community was followed by the Reagan-run, CIA Contra-brand crack-cocaine importation scourge, which was then topped off by the Clinton/Biden Omnibus Crime bill of 1994, filling the prisons to breaking point. The offshoring policy of abandoning the home of production of Automobiles and the UAW took place without any significant cleanup of the mess the Big Three left behind. This was the deliberate policy of the corporate bean counters and this mentality presaged the lead (Pb) in Flint’s water supply. Black children were lead poisoned and brain damaged en masse in the Detroit suburb! Now Trump attacks the Governor of Michigan (“that woman”) for stating what is, that the states are not prepared (the outcome of for profit health care and deindustrialization)!
While homelessness is an interracial class condition the state policy toward unhoused persons is institutional racism. The homeless encampments–populations in all major cities and suburban areas are without resources to keep clean, keep social distance, and recieve or contact for medical assistance. Fill the vacated properties! Hotels are empty! Fill them up and turn them into housing for all until adequate homes are provided.
While the political tops strut in photo ops with black pop culture luminaries and the Trump administration transparently involves them in his national chauvinism (America first) project, the U.S. police forces continue to gun down black youth in every state. Expect National Guard infantry deployments for “public order maintenance” to increase the racist state murder tally. These deployments are as predictable as the sunrise as the pandemic death toll mounts and food insecurity increases to a panic level. We call for Labor-Black-and-Brown Defense Guards organized in Union Halls and community centers of the oppressed neighborhoods to ensure equal distribution of resources, food, water, power and medical care to all in need. For Labor-Black-and-Brown Defense Guards to also defend against state repression, racist cops, fascists and to defend picket lines and protect strikers!
News and history combine to drive transitional demands! Retail distribution centers, sanitation and other workers taking strike action.
Nurses and medical workers are overwhelmed, exposed and dying for lack of PPE and because the CDC denies them testing. Instead of PPE nurses are wearing Ball Park rain ponchos and plastic garbage bags. The nurses in NYC never won safe staffing levels in their last contract negotiations and alongside them the EMTs they are working for 12 hour shifts for peanut pays months without a contract! When we negotiate they say it is not essential to pay us; when the shit hits the fan they say we are essential and must put our lives on the line for their lack of preparation.
California nurses union, the California Nurses Association (CNA,) conducts informational protests over the lack of PPE, yet all the while members continue to work, reusing contaminated PPE. Labor action to save nurses’ lives is not on the leadership’s agenda. Wildcat! Use Wildcat actions to defeat the union leadership and take control away from the Democratic Party hacks and put action under the control of the members committed to class struggle and a transitional program.
Successful transit workers’ strike actions in Detroit won PPE! This is the way to go! Stand with the striking Pittsburgh sanitation workers fighting for PPE!
Construction workers in Boston plan a walk out on April 5th because the government is not enforcing its own Public Health orders to shut construction. OSHA is not enforcing Public Health orders; they are the Sheriff’s jurisdiction; police, sheriff and penal officers are a highly infected demographic, where not simply panicked into “blue flu” stayouts. Employers are rushing to exploit the pandemic for private profits as PPE prices zoom in state-vs-state-vs FEMA bidding wars. Price gouging flourishes. Governor Murphy of New Jersey reported 14,000 complaints and there is clearly no fear of prosecutions by (AG) Barr, whose promise to do so is just his cover-of-the-moment for his campaign for suspension of civil liberties and habeas corpus.These conditions warrant a general strike and a workers’ contest for political power. For this contest we need class struggle unionism and a fighting workers’ labor party!
Hard hit are the Gig workers who are denied status as workers and do not receive guaranteed minimum wages, unemployment insurance and their employers do not contribute their share of income taxes or social security. Make the Gig Apps pay their workers unemployment insurance and provide PPE for those who are still employed!
The U.S. has a massive service sector economy, and this requires face to face and hand to hand contact, turning urban centers into petri dishes. Mass transit was unsanitary even before COVID! Our program calls for JOBS FOR ALL! There is no excuse for transit systems to lack adequately protected cleaner crews! Hire cleaners immediately for 30-hour weeks at 40-hours pay!
A workers action program:
Down with anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant racism!
Public utilities and communications are privatized under neoliberalism. Make power, water, and the internet a social right. Nationalize all utilities and run them under working class control!
Turn on water and power to occupied residential housing regardless of ability to pay!
End housing insecurity! Protect the homeless and the vulnerable populations! House the unhoused! Seize vacant real estate to house the homeless! Abolish eviction law. Seize all , real property from large landlords and multinational realty firms! For immediate rent forgiveness! For immediate rent/lease suspensions for small businesses! For mortgage abolition! Homes for all!
Feed the food insecure! Support small farmers to provide local produce at subsidized prices! For workers price committees to set prices! For workers committees and committees of bank employees to provide free credit from the financial institutions to re-open and aid small businesses! For workers control of transport, credit and mercantile operations!
The criminal justice system is designed to incarcerate a population that has been institutionally cut out of the economy by slavery, debt peonage, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, ineffective Affirmative Action Programs, and ongoing institutional racism! Close the petri dishes called prisons and detention centers! Protect the incarcerated population during the transition to liberation, homes and jobs!
Close down the detention centers! Free all migrants! ICE out of the communities! ABOLISH ICE!
Down with all anti-abortion measures during and after the pandemic! For free abortion on demand! Open clinics in every state and every county over 10,000 residents. For free 24 hour child care centers when work resumes.
Full wages and full benefits for all workers laid off or fired! Jobs for all by spreading around the available work! For 30 hours workweek or less for 40 hours pay! Living wages, full employer-paid benefits, PPE and safe working conditions for all workers!
Provide proper amounts of PPE for all health care workers (as per OSHA)! Enforce Aerosolized Transmissible Disease, Zoonotic Disease, Respiratory Protection regulations and social distancing in all work environments! For worker actions to seize and retool factories for production of medical equipment and PPE! This is the latest 21st century pandemic, not the last! Produce COVID tests and provide access for all without charge! For free vaccinations for all once tested and approved!
Build rank and file action committees to support and build strikes of Amazon warehouse workers and Pittsburgh sanitation workers! Expand action committees to factory and job site committees that build workers councils and worker self-defense guards!
We need a 1937 type sit-down strike wave today that seizes workplaces and enforces workers demands; that enforces safety conditions and PPE, determines what should be produced, where goods should be distributed and which businesses are essential! International workers’ actions to win aid for the colonies and semi-colonies of needed funds, food, PPE, test kits, medical professionals and medical equipment! Survival of our class is an international existential question. Expropriate the private expropriators of the surplus value we produce and dedicate it to the survival of our social class worldwide! No worker is illegal or your enemy!
Down with repressive state and anti-worker national emergency measures! For democratic worker committees and labor-black-brown self-defense guards in the communities, not the cops or National Guard, to determine and enforce the isolation level required and to shut down non-essential businesses!
For protective healthcare measures for the military ranks! For enlisted personnel unions and elected officers!
For fast-track training for 3rd year medical students (doctors and nurses)! For free quality education for all! Build hospital pandemic wings, not student indenture to banks! Forgive student loans!
Provide immediate free universal health care regardless of income and citizenship status! Provide PPE & training and create safe and healthy work conditions for all capable of conducting essential work at prevailing wages! Build hospitals, clinics and organize delivery of food, medicine and other essential supplies!
Provide free home care for those quarantined! Increase staffing at medical facilities until 30 hour weeks at 40 hours pay become the new social norm! Union skilled pay to become the new norm, replacing 60 hour death sentence weeks for substandard pay!
For free, quality healthcare for all through socialized medicine! Nationalize under workers control the hospitals, clinics and the insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries with zero compensation to the major stakeholders!
No bailout for the big capitalists who used the 2009 bailouts to buy back shares and inflate the market, filling your retirement accounts with shares of fictitious value! Open the books to workers committees so an accurate accounting can be made! Nationalize under democratic workers control the commanding heights of the economy with not one penny of compensation to the major stakeholders! For a rational, collectivized, centrally-planned socialist economy based on social needs, not profit, managed under democratic workers control!
Build a fighting Workers/Labor Party to fight for workers rule! For a Workers Government based on democratic Workers Councils and a Workers Militia to carry out the socialist tasks!
For a Socialist America as part of a Socialist Federation of the Caribbean and the Americas!
Build a new revolutionary Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
For World Socialist Revolution!
