We can all appreciate that vaccines will slow the number of new COVID-19 infections and deaths without ignoring the 14,000 Americans still getting sick each week. Nor can vaccines prevent new technology from continuing to displace millions of jobs, causing more poverty and homelessness. Those social conditions, combined with the lingering effects of coronavirus, will cause the deaths of many of its survivors.
“Once the acute phase of this crisis is past, we will face an enormous wave of death and disability due to common chronic diseases,” Dr. Robert M. Califf told Cardiology Today recently. This nationally recognized expert expects U.S. life expectancy to decline by as much as 3 percent, especially for “people with low incomes, low education levels, and rural residence.” Since the capitalist system produces profits by withholding wealth and resources from its workers, it’s incapable of guaranteeing their health and safety.
That’s even more true for the huge amount of people pushed out of the regular jobs economy and into the new social class of the dispossessed. So their fight for housing, health care, or food is essentially a revolutionary one, because the only way to win is by taking social wealth out of the hands of the ruling class and developing a system that distributes it based on people’s needs.
One way the owners of corporate private property try to prevent that consciousness is by encouraging conflicts over policies about issues like social distancing and masks instead of about adequate health care for all. However, when top officials disagree about issues like masks, it’s not that some favor “the government” and others “the people.” It’s that they are serving the interests of varying sectors of America’s ruling class. The outcomes of these and other federal disputes can produce millions of dollars for companies and the politicians who represent them under the guise of battles over personal freedom.
Similar fights are underway within the states. In March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott lifted the statewide mask mandate and pandemic restrictions on businesses in defiance of CDC recommendations, provoking criticism from some city governments suffering high infection rates. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg told the Texas Tribune it was a “huge mistake,” adding, “You don’t cut off your parachute just as you’ve slowed your descent.” In Harris County, Judge Lina Hidalgo said Abbott was diverting attention from deaths caused by his incompetence last winter, “a cynical attempt to distract Texans from the failures of state oversight of our power grid … With the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines, we’re inching closer to the finish line of this pandemic — now is not the time to reverse the gains we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
Abbott’s order also aimed at weakening officials like Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, the first county judge to force businesses to mandate masks after finding a legal loophole in Abbott’s previous effort to eliminate local mask orders. After Abbott’s second order, Wolff told the Texas Tribune, “He’s plugged that hole. He allows businesses to do what they want to do.”
Masks and vaccines have become symbols of “which side you’re on,” but only in symbolic battles that obscure the class essence of today’s intensifying economic polarization. The real choice is either to stand with the class fighting to get what it needs to have safe and healthy lives or with the class whose control of private corporate property keeps it all from them. The new class’s only hope of protection for itself will be through struggles led by itself.
Though each struggle will be over issues of health practices or individual rights, they will actually be resisting the step-by-step consolidation of the new American fascism that is integrating capitalist corporations into the operations of government. It’s behind the deaths from freezing, from coronavirus, and from the attacks on the public’s remaining legal protections.
Republican governors played a part in this, but so did Joe Biden when he announced looser rules on masks and social distancing, undercutting the protections local communities had put in place.
Publicity and funding are gravitating towards forces that promote a fascist ideology that justifies these actions and promotes support for the leaders behind them. Fueled by this fascist propaganda, groups and individuals across the country are aggressively challenging those who disagree with them, as when armed groupings positioned themselves along the route of marches protesting police murders of Blacks. And this isn’t just happening on the ground. In May, the Federal Aviation Agency proposed $64,500 in fines against unruly airline passengers in five incidents, three of which involved threat-filled refusals to wear masks.
Slowing the rate of coronavirus infections and deaths is possible if society follows the practices that health science has found necessary. That will also require defending the American people from the growing infection of fascist ideology by building unity around practical problems of public health and poverty instead of symbolic conflicts about masks or other diversions. Permanent solutions will require something else.
Unity in the immediate struggles needs to become linked to a revolutionary vision of replacing the system of private ruling class ownership with one in which our class owns the means for producing what we need. We may identify that as a system of economic communism, or as a cooperative society. Ultimately, such a system is the only way to ensure the people’s health and well-being in the face of future pandemics.
Published: June 18, 2021
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