To hear the politicians and CEOs, you’d think that the only solution to the catastrophic situation today is setting the corporations freer to gouge and loot the country. You’d think that the only solution is to accept the shrugged shoulders and facial expressions of hopelessness from our leaders telling us that “there is only so much,” that we can only “work with what we have” and that the only solution is to stay in, or at least, shut up and stop complaining. Well, that is not a solution for our class. The capitalists tell us we don’t have the infrastructure to take care of us. Well, then create one! Hire people and send out an army of properly protected contact tracers. Set up testing facilities on every corner. Can’t get PPE? Force corporations to make them and the government provide them for every frontline worker and person living in America with whatever they need. People going hungry? Mobilize farms, organize food supplies, and start distributing what we need instead of allowing it to be dumped, like milk and vegetables are right now. People can’t pay their bills? Make basic necessities available to all. Provide direct cash payments to keep us going with no hoops to jump through and no strings attached. The solutions to these problems, and every other problem we face right now, have one thing in common. They call forth a vision of a society based on the needs and welfare of the workers and our families.
Right now, today, we have the technological capability to provide for everyone. There is plenty of money — the capitalists have proven that. There’s plenty of capacity to produce everything we need to fight the virus, whether masks, gowns, or ventilators or tests. There’s plenty of food — it’s going to waste because it can’t be distributed for a profit. There are thousands of people on the front lines who can tell us how to organize ourselves to fight the virus. There are millions now out of work who could be mobilized for what needs to be done to solve this crisis and rebuild our country.
The government actions we do hear about are all from the point of view of what benefits the private economic interests of the capitalist class: prices gouged on ventilators to up to twice the usual cost; masks sold for $5 a piece when they are usually sold for 5 cents; and how the major corporations are slipping through intentional loopholes to garner millions while our little community businesses are shuttered, maybe for good. In April, Forbes reported that an estimated “43,000 taxpayers, who earn more than $1 million annually, are each set to receive a $1.7 million windfall, on average, thanks to a provision buried in the bailout,” as a result of the Trump Administration’s tax cuts. It is estimated that the banks will make $350 billion in administering small business loans. The capitalist class is making a killing off our suffering. Literally. And this is just the beginning as new exposures of corruption are coming to light almost daily.
Our class — no matter how it is lining up behind this or that party — is fighting everywhere for its practical, basic needs. Out of this fight is emerging a vision of society rooted in practical necessity. If we cannot work — either because a robot is eliminating labor or the virus has shut down the workplace — then the wherewithal of survival has to be distributed on the basis of what we need, not what we are able to pay for.
Many of the workers most affected and starting to protest today are the low paid, part-time gig workers who make up almost half of the workforce. The capitalists are offering no other solution than forcing them to work in high risk conditions, where death is an ever-present possibility, or to stay home and lose everything. “I’m personally terrified of going to work each day,” a delivery worker at Papa John’s Pizza told one reporter. “We were deemed essential, but in reality, we are expendable.”
Many of them are front line health care workers who are seeing their patients and their co-workers sicken and die. “I was seeing a lot of people calling nurses and health care workers in general “heroes,” said Jillian, a nurse protesting for more PPE in Harlem. “I think most people do that with good intentions. But the wartime rhetoric allows for things to seem like the deaths of health care workers and the illnesses of health care workers were inevitable, and unavoidable, when really we’re being sacrificed by the refusal of the federal government to up its manufacturing of PPE.”
One worker’s protest sign said it most simply: “Bailout the front line not the bottom line.”
Our class already knows what needs to be done. Every day we see the reality of the capitalist system and the brutal calculations of those who rule over us. The capitalist class and the system of private property is what stands in our way.
There is plenty to provide for everyone — plenty of money, plenty of capacity to produce what we need, plenty of food, and the know-how to fight the virus through testing, contacting tracing, etc. We have the scientific, technological, and social resources to solve every problem this virus is throwing our way and unravel this mess that the capitalists have got us into. Everything is there. The rest depends on us.
The League of Revolutionaries looks to the future with confidence. Our class will prevail. Join us in our fight for a New America!
