The virus is running wild through our country. Two hundred thousand new cases every day, 1,500 deaths every day. Two hundred sixty-six thousand deaths with hundreds of thousands more expected. Twelve million have been or are currently sick. The extent of grief and loss that is washing over our country is unprecedented as we lose our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our friends, loved ones and co-workers.
Our class is fighting on all fronts for the basic needs of our people — health care, education, housing, food, decent work, racial justice and a decent future our children — and in so doing we are putting forth a vision of a society free from want and where no one goes without. This work of building and forming up our forces, opening our minds to the vision of a new society, and shaping our struggle along that line, has never been more urgent.
“We have 880,000 people in my state and 683 deaths right now. We have a 50 percent + positivity rate, so that shows you how many of us are sick,” South Dakota nurse Jodi Doering shared in a tweet that went viral last week. “The town where I live has 650 people. So to put it in perspective, that’s as if my entire little town was wiped out.”
Study after study makes it clear that the brunt of the crisis is falling on our class. This is especially true for the poorest in our class. We are getting sick in greater numbers, dying in greater numbers, and if we survive, millions of us will be faced with debilitating conditions for the rest of our lives. Within our class, Black workers suffer disproportionately from the legacies of slavery, racism and discrimination, along with other workers of color. The ruling class has abundant resources and access to the best of everything — health insurance, medications, and top flight doctors and hospitals. Lawanna Rivers, a traveling nurse working at the University Medical Center in El Paso Texas, went viral with her exposé of “the pit” —the room where hospital patients were sent to die — while she was pressured to prioritize a “VIP patient.”
Tens of millions of people are without work, but America’s 664 billionaires are doing just fine. As of October of this year, they gained almost $1 trillion in total net worth. While many hospitals are struggling for resources and even closing down, especially in rural areas leaving people with no health care for miles, the big health care conglomerates are cashing in on bailout funds. While workers are laid off but still hoping to get their jobs back, corporations are using the pandemic as an opportunity to lay off more workers and automate their jobs. The big banks and financial institutions stand to make billions off of the debt states and municipalities are being forced to take on. The hope is these local governments will default, leaving these capitalists to buy up assets cheap or to privatize wherever they can, as they did in Detroit.
The reality is that as long as the whole mess is privately owned and controlled we are captives to the drive for profit. The government protects the capitalist system and those who own the means of life. Under this system private interests of the ruling class take precedence over the well-being of our class.
Without rooting out this system once and for all, we cannot solve the crisis in our society. To keep us healthy, we need the conditions that make it possible to live healthy lives — housing, food, decent and safe work conditions, a future for our children. Imagine such a society! Where the well-being of its people is the organizing and defining principle.
There are millions across this country who are already fighting for and speaking about such a society.
Despite all our adversities we have made many advances in our fight. The most important thing is that our class is learning from our struggles and beginning to recognize the need for real change in our country. We are not only learning to organize better. We are expanding our minds about what we want and what’s possible, necessary ingredients to guide our fight. We are coming to see that the common sense birthright that in America everyone has the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” means that the government is obligated to provide not simply the basic necessities of life, but all that will allow us to live out that creed.
Our emerging class leaders who worked to get rid of Trump and the dangerous forces using his administration have no illusions that his defeat will slow the accelerating drive toward a fascist society that the ruling class has been building for the past decades. A recent meeting of women in some of the key battle fronts found these leaders unanimous in their understanding that without the provision of our people’s basic needs, without the power to create the conditions for our people to lead decent lives, we will continue to be thrown out of the economy and driven down to the lowest level of existence.
The message is coming through loud and clear. While our class fights for every demand we have, we must organize and conduct that fight with a vision of what we are fighting for and how to get there. Our path is clear. We must disentangle ourselves from the ideas and solutions of the ruling class, unite our class — our forces — on the basis of our class interests, and chart our own independent course toward the solution that can end our peoples’ suffering once and for all.
The private production, allocation and distribution of the wherewithal of society has to be in public hands. Those public hands have to be a government guided by the long held values and morality of our class — from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
Published: November 30, 2020
This article published by Rally, Comrades!
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