The betrayal of the poor couldn’t be more obvious. The U.S. ruling class has sacrificed more than 750,000 Americans, paying lip service to “essential workers,” while doling out the bare minimum unemployment assistance necessary to stem social unrest. Now, with unemployment benefits extensions and eviction moratoriums ended, millions of Americans will be thrown into a struggle like nothing this country has ever seen before. A year and a half of our online article series, “Ray of Light in the Pandemic,” allows us now to sum up this stage of our class’s struggle against the ruthless ruling class that’s taken advantage of the situation.
We must also keep in mind the international scale of this crisis. Though America has the greatest number of dead, the death toll worldwide is nearly five million people. The global unevenness of health care, economic support, and vaccine distribution demand a tremendous shift in consciousness to collectively fight the fascism accelerating against the world’s people and threatening to destroy our planet.
America’s struggle is an extreme example of the global pandemic. As we enter flu season, the delta variant of COVID-19 has raced through rural populations in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, these states reported having less than 10 percent of their ICU beds available at the end of summer. By Labor Day, USA Today reported 1,000 schools in 35 states closed because of the surge in the delta variant, but most schools remained open in those same states.
Meanwhile, states with the highest populations ravaged by the delta variant, such as Texas and Florida, face the highest increases in evictions. A nurse stationed in Mississippi by the international disaster relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, Kelly Sites, told the Los Angeles Times, “To respond to the United States is quite surreal for us…It’s a challenge because, usually, home is stable. And so when we deploy, we’re just going to the disaster. This is the first time where home is a disaster.”
While the United States remains deeply divided on the science of coronavirus and vaccinations, our class has fought forward on various fronts throughout the pandemic. We have seen a rise in social awareness and political organizing, fighting for unions and against voter suppression. Workers across America have been confronting this ruling class with calls for government accountability — for increased health care availability in the face of such a crisis, safety and access regarding education, and nationwide protection against evictions. Workers in each of these struggles fight each day valiantly, in every state of the union, but these fronts must ultimately unite to stop a ruling class working to keep us divided.
After all, the ruling class has done well in this pandemic. While the U.S. government spent nearly 3 trillion dollars on the crisis, by privatizing the medical response and developing more automation in all industries, billionaires alone made nearly 2 trillion dollars from the pandemic. While the U.S. Department of Labor reports 36 million Americans lost their jobs during the pandemic, the progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies reports that “the $1.8 trillion increase in American billionaire wealth over the last 17 months could pay the entire 10-year cost of making healthcare more affordable for 9 million people more than 10 times over.” In other words, our ruling class’s profits could make health care affordable for 90 million people, twice those who have been infected with the virus worldwide.
Based upon pandemic gains, a June Forbes article estimates global wealth will grow by $65 trillion in the next five years. Those who own more than $100 million, called “ultras,” will get richer faster than any other group, especially in Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their callousness is clear since “With a sluggish vaccination rollout in most developing countries and coronavirus still rife in others, poorer nations are likely to be left out of this pandemic recovery.”
Today is the first time on record that inequality increased in virtually every country on Earth simultaneously, according to the Oxfam report “The Inequality Virus”. While the world’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly 4 trillion dollars during the pandemic, 500 million more people have been added to the ranks of those living in poverty.
We know why this is happening, because the abandonment of our class began long before the pandemic. Though new technologies could be used to heal the world’s sick, restore our environment, and liberate humanity, in the hands of our ruling class, the technological leap drives down the value of our labor by automating away more and more jobs every day. When labor loses value in this economic system, people’s lives also lose their value. The pandemic has vividly illustrated the ways our current economy strategically upholds the goal of making money over saving lives.
Our class needs a shared global and scientific understanding of health, the environment, and politics to defeat this fascist strategy of the ruling class. Global pandemics are defeated by protecting the global population, not just its most affluent sector. Leaving billions of the world’s poorest people unvaccinated only creates a breeding ground for virulent new strains of COVID-19 or other diseases.
Though the current spread of the pandemic is often referred to as “the pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the delta variant has also infected and endangered the lives of many already vaccinated. We now know that yet another variant is developing, and these will continue to develop if the disease continues to spread. Teams of medical scientists who understand the situation are uniting across national borders to expand access to vaccinations, but that alone will not stop the threat of future variants and future diseases.
What we learn from this pandemic must not be limited to this pandemic. In a global economic system that places wealth and the security of those who control it above everything else, even the global environment that sustains our lives, we will face other diseases in the future. Or, the Earth’s billions can take control of this planet and liberate ourselves from the rulers who have treated us so irresponsibly. We face an urgent, practical need for a new system that works to benefit everyone. However, to make these necessary changes, we must struggle for class consciousness and a scientific understanding of the world around us. This perspective is essential to our fight, and it is why we study and share these rays of light. https://rallycomrades.org/ray-of-light-inside-the-pandemic/ RC
November.December 2021 Vol31.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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