Voice of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

Uniting struggles for human needs and the planet with a vision of revolutionary change!

THE LEAGUE on Social Media

Available in the following language/s:

Enough with the Excuses about Coronavirus: Solutions for a New Society

SHARE or PRINT

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!

Featured

Fight MAGA for Soul of Public Education!

Trump’s MAGA plan replaces teaching about equality and social justice with “patriotic education -- white supremacy, Christian Nationalism, and anti-migrant and LGBTQIA+ ideas.

United Class Struggle will Determine Our Future

Open class struggle is emerging in U.S. politics for the first time since the Great Depression. Based in the struggle for common needs, revolutionaries can develop fighters’ class consciousness.

After the Election – Block Project 2025

Trump fascists divided by nationality, gender, etc. Corporate Democrats ignored common class interests. Revolutionaries fight for social equality AND for basic needs.

The value of voting within a revolution

The 2024 elections are unleashing storms of controversy around who to vote for and why, around the role of third parties and even whether people should vote at all. In 1971, Black Panther Party leader George Jackson wrote that participation in ruling-class electoral politics is the opposite of revolution.

Stop Prop 36, the new prison-industrial scam

The fight against Prop 36 is gathering strength. Recently, grassroots organizations across the state came together, from Humboldt County down to San Diego, to get out the vote against Prop 36 and let the public know of the danger.

THE LEAGUE on Social Media

Read More from Rally!

Beyond the Elections: The Political Revolution Continues

People need networks to secure their basic needs, paired with a revolutionary political program of economic rights for all.

Fight MAGA for Soul of Public Education!

Trump’s MAGA plan replaces teaching about equality and social justice with “patriotic education -- white supremacy, Christian Nationalism, and anti-migrant and LGBTQIA+ ideas.

United Class Struggle will Determine Our Future

Open class struggle is emerging in U.S. politics for the first time since the Great Depression. Based in the struggle for common needs, revolutionaries can develop fighters’ class consciousness.

After the Election – Block Project 2025

Trump fascists divided by nationality, gender, etc. Corporate Democrats ignored common class interests. Revolutionaries fight for social equality AND for basic needs.

The value of voting within a revolution

The 2024 elections are unleashing storms of controversy around who to vote for and why, around the role of third parties and even whether people should vote at all. In 1971, Black Panther Party leader George Jackson wrote that participation in ruling-class electoral politics is the opposite of revolution.

Stop Prop 36, the new prison-industrial scam

The fight against Prop 36 is gathering strength. Recently, grassroots organizations across the state came together, from Humboldt County down to San Diego, to get out the vote against Prop 36 and let the public know of the danger.

End Military Aid to Israel! Stop the Genocides!

A year and 45,000+ Palestinian deaths after October 7, 2023, it is past time for the people of the United States to halt their ruling class complicity in genocide.  Demand that the US war-makers stop arming Israel!

PRIVATIZATION IN MICHIGAN, A PROJECT 2025 WARNING

In 2010, then-governor Rick Snyder of Michigan signed a new, more authoritarian version of that state’s Emergency Manager law, dispatching appointees to selected cities and school districts throughout the state, where local government and school boards would be replaced.

Project 2025: Scapegoating immigrants

Immigration, asylees, and the border wall are front and center in the national spotlight. With cries of an “invasion by criminals, murderers and rapists” from “sh*t hole countries,” former president Trump is using immigration as a political football to score points with his political base and as a battering ram to drive his Democratic opponents further to the right.

The meaning of the Harris housing plan

Some of the cruelest and most painful attacks on the working class are happening on the housing front. As Will Suphon of Tucson, Arizona explained, “The housing market, the job market, the price of food ... it’s all become rather insane and so many people are being thrown to the wayside. You can do everything right and still end up living in your car.”

Fighting for basic needs in the fall campaign

Something is happening here. What is the significance of the rise of the Kamala Harris campaign? For the workers, it is a dramatic opportunity not only to resist fascism, but to advance the movements for the basic necessities they need to survive.

Defeat the Newsom attack: Housing is a human right

On July 25, California governor Gavin Newsom declared war on unhoused people statewide. First, he ordered encampments removed from state land, with no regard for whether displaced people have somewhere else to go. Then on August 9, he doubled down and threatened to cut housing funding to any city or county that failed to sweep away its unhoused people.
Verified by MonsterInsights