COVID-19 and an opportunity for change

Although not by a member of the Socialist Party and the author holds views that we would not entirely agree  with, this article deserves a wider audience.

The panicked response to the COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed social and economic chaos. A global economy that was teetering on the brink of recession is being pushed over the edge. Medical and social services are overwhelmed, entire populations are thrown into distress, and anxious hoarding is making basic necessities scarce.

Even before the virus hit, 59 percent of adult Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, 44 percent were carrying credit card debt, and only 38 percent had any kind of emergency fund. Any loss in pay or a loss of job would upend their lives. When you stand on shaky ground, it doesn’t take much to tip you over.

Is panic justified?

COVID-19 does not appear to be more lethal than seasonal influenza, with about 80 percent of infections being minor. In South Korea, a robust public health system, prior preparation, and early aggressive testing reduced the fatality rate to under 1 percent, similar to seasonal ‘flu. The CDC estimates that between 9 and 45 million people are infected with seasonal ‘flu, and between 12,000 and 61,000 die.

However, unlike seasonal ‘flu, COVID-19 can spread much more rapidly, with up to 40 percent of infected people becoming contagious before they feel ill. When very large numbers of people are infected, even a tiny fatality rate can translate into many more patients needing treatment than can be helped by unprepared, underfunded medical systems. The result is a dramatic increase in preventable deaths.

To make matters worse, the lack of national and international cooperation make it difficult to obtain and share accurate information, to coordinate disease-fighting measures, and to ensure that personnel and supplies are sent where they are most needed.

The contagious nature of the virus and the systemic failure to prevent its spread have led to the need for mass quarantine, travel restrictions, event cancellations, social isolation, job loss, and income loss. The human cost of tearing such giant holes in the social fabric has yet to be calculated.

Hidden truths

This crisis has exposed hidden truths about capitalism that raise the need for fundamental social change.

Diseases flow across political borders. Despite persistent efforts to divide humanity, the global spread of COVID-19 reminds us that we truly live in one world.

A global challenge demands international cooperation. The capitalist class have proved to be too distrustful, too ambitious, and too competitive to cooperate at the level required.

Science does not guide public policy. Epidemics emerge on a regular basis, most recently SARS in 2002-2004 and H1N1 in 2009. After each pandemic, authorities pledge to prepare for the next one. It’s just talk.

The current epidemic was predicted back in 2015, and detailed strategies to reduce its impact were developed. Nevertheless, the 2019 Global Health Security Index found that no country in the world is fully prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic. Prevention costs money, and there is no profit in it. When epidemics emerge, both cash-strapped public medical systems and for-profit ones are reluctant to invest in widespread testing and treatment.

When COVID-19 first appeared, American officials did nothing for almost two months. They rejected an early test kit developed by the World Health Organization in order to privilege American providers who failed to produce an accurate test quickly enough and in sufficient numbers. The result is a colossal system failure and tremendous unnecessary suffering.

When epidemics escape containment, there are two options. One is to allow the infection to spread until herd immunity is achieved. This strategy can be effective when medical systems have the capacity to identify, track, and treat all cases and their contacts. When medical capacity is inadequate, failing to contain the epidemic in its early stages will drive up fatality rates, as increasing numbers of sick people overwhelm the medical system.

Modern medical systems are designed for maximum cost-efficiency (lean production) so they have no margin to manage periodic surges in demand. Under such conditions, the only option is to impose mass quarantine, or social distancing. Such measures do not reduce the total number of infections and may not reduce the number of deaths. However, they do slow the speed of transmission, easing the demand on medical systems, enabling more people to be treated, and buying time to develop a vaccine. However, when the number of seriously ill is exceeds the number of available ICU beds and ventilators, then people who could otherwise survive the illness will die for lack of treatment.

Social crises reveal the extent of social inequality and also deepen it. Travel bans target some nations and not others. While some industries are forced to close, others continue to operate. Some workers are protected, and many more are not. The public are ordered to maintain social distance, yet inmates trapped in overcrowded prisons do not have access to soap and hand sanitizers. Virtual classrooms benefit the few, leaving the rest even further behind. And where testing and treatment cost money, those who are most likely to get sick are least able to pay.

Worker safety is not prioritized. Epidemics place unbearable pressure on front-line workers, and a planned shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) puts them in danger. Yet these workers have no say in how public services are funded, equipped, staffed, or organized.

While sick workers should isolate themselves to protect others, 24 percent of all American workers and 69 percent of low-paid ones (making less than $10.80 an hour) have no paid sick leave, and recent US legislation will not help them. Without sick benefits, workers will stay on the job because being broke is worse than being sick.

The ruling class panic when disease threatens them or their bottom line. Nevertheless, they refuse to eliminate the environmental degradation and impoverished conditions that breed disease.

Globally, more than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, 4.5 billion lack basic sanitation services, and close to a billion people do not get enough food. Deadly yet treatable diseases such as TB and HIV/AIDs continue to spread. In 2017, 1.7 million people were newly infected with HIV and 770,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses. When the means exist for everyone to be well, the acceptance of poverty-bred disease can only be understood as a means for eugenically reducing the numbers of destitute people.

The capitalist class respond to every crisis as if it were a war they must fight with weapons of social control. Ordinary people are not treated as valued problem-solvers, but as victims needing saving or as potential troublemakers who must be isolated, kept fearful, and coerced into obedience.

Opportunities

Is it possible to prevent epidemics? What is the best way to contain them? What must we do differently?

COVID-19 has caused enough panic to put seemingly radical reforms on the agenda, including: universal access to medical care; fully funded social services; sick leave benefits for all workers; housing the homeless; and ensuring that everyone is well nourished. Such measures would require a massive transfer of wealth from the capitalist class to the working class. However, the purpose of capitalism is to transfer wealth in the opposite direction, from the many to the few. This is why billions of people are exposed to preventable distress, disease, disability, and premature death, why capitalists fail to act responsibly in response to crises, and why they exploit every crisis as an opportunity to increase their wealth and tighten their grip on society.

The only way that anyone can be truly safe is if everyone is safe. That can happen only when the majority step up and organize themselves to make it so.

Unions around the world are pushing for more effective measures to contain the epidemic and to protect front-line workers. However, the capitalist class resist implementing such measures. That leaves two options: mount enough public pressure to compel authorities to do the right thing (reform); or remove the capitalist class from power so the rest of us can do what needs to be done (revolution). What might that second, revolutionary, option look like?

Where the capitalists stoke fear of others as a source of contagion, we would mobilize the well to care for the unwell.

With the working class in power, we could open the banks and release enough money to massively expand medical and social services. People could organize themselves in every workplace, school, and neighborhood, forming democratic councils to share information, conduct free testing, and ensure free treatment for all who fall ill, financial support for the sick, social support for the quarantined, food for the hungry, and housing for the homeless.

We would give full amnesty to all undocumented persons so they can be tested and treated and join the collective effort to test and treat others.

Overcrowded, unsanitary conditions breed disease, so we would immediately release all immigrants in detention, along with all prisoners being held for non-violent offenses. Once their medical and social needs are met, they could join the social mobilization.

We would eliminate all political borders in order to coordinate local, regional, and global efforts and to enable personnel and equipment to travel where needed.

Wars breed disease and devastation. Ending them would enable us to vastly improve the health of the planet and everyone on it.

In short, we would completely transform our relationships with each other, from divided consumers to united producers. We would also change our relationship with the non-human world, nurturing it so that it can nurture us in return.

If you think such measures are impossible, pie in the sky, a pipe dream, consider this: When all ‘reasonable’ solutions have proved inadequate to the task, then the only road left, however improbable, is the one we must travel.

https://susanrosenthal.com/labor/a-socialist-response-to-covid-19/

The Ripple Effect?

Fiat Chrysler is cutting the third shift at its Windsor Assembly Plant on June 29 as it ends production on the Dodge Grand Caravan, owing to lack of demand. This will mean unemployment for 1,500 workers. 

The company said they will make every effort to place the laid off in any new positions that become available, though I'm sure they won’t hold their breaths on that promise. A union spokesman said, ''This decision will lead to a significant job loss in the parts supply chain and inflict damage to both the local and the national economy.''

 In other words the ripple effect -- but that's simply life  as usual for workers under capitalism.

 S. P. C Members.

A Great Place To Live If You Can Afford It.

On March 10, T.V. Ontario presented the documentary, ''Vancouver-No Fixed Address'', an expose of the housing crisis in that city, Canada's most expensive to live in. It should have been sub-titled, ''A great place to live if you can afford it.'' Real estate prices have and are continuing to outstrip wages by leaps and bounds, so that many can’t live there and consequently move out of town.

 One senior said, ''I live in my van, because my pension is $14,000 a year.” Another interviewee said he bought a rust-bucket of a boat and fixed it up, which is now his residence. A woman said she dreamed of living near Stanley Park which became a reality when she married and had two salaries coming in. Her husband died and now she struggles to make ends meet. Obviously some folks must be doing well. They fall into two categories: a) the real estate developers, who are the biggest donors to the local politicians campaign funds; and b) offshore investors. The latter are mostly wealthy Chinese, some of whom live in Vancouver and some who only use their property as an investment to be sold later for a big profit. Here we have one of capitalism's contradictions - people are homeless, like those who sleep on downtown streets, while houses are empty. Most people don't think of Vancouver as a manufacturing city, but as one real estate agent put it: ''Vancouver is a manufacturing centre, we manufacture and sell condo's, 90% are bought by investors who have no thought of living here permanently, but to rent or sell later.'' 

As Socialists, we have no resentment to the Chinese as immigrants, whether they be workers or capitalists, or offshore investors. Our argument is with the stupid economic system which makes the above situation possible.

S.P.C Members

Learn a Lesson While In Lockdown

The work of the Socialist Party requires active participation from our fellow-workers who agree with the urgent need for a socialist society. It’s no good sitting back and complaining that too few agree with us; the only solution is to carry out a campaign to tell them what is in their political interest. We need to put across our ideas to fellow-workers. The Socialist Party is only as strong as its support for it. You can agree with what we say and ignore us if you like. But can you ignore capitalism? The wages system with production for profit is the root cause of all our social ills. Reforms of the law can do next to nothing. To end exploitation we must abolish the wages system. There is no other way.

Let us make clear why it is the Socialist Party opposes the profit system. It is based upon the minority ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. It is a class society in which a minority own the means of life and the majority—the working class— own nothing and therefore have to sell their labour power to an employer in return for a wage or salary. So the profit system is socially unequal. The capitalist class needs to employ the working class as the labour of the latter is the source of the profit of the former. The profit consists of the difference between the capital expenditure of the employer and the values created by the employee. Labour creates values over and above the value of labour-power. Because wages represent the price of labour power and not the value of the commodities produced by labour, the workers always receive less than they have produced. In short, they are exploited. The profit system is exploitative and unequal and the consequence is an unending conflict of interests between wage labour and capital. The capitalist needs profits. It is in the interest of workers not simply to increase wages, but to abolish the wages system. And the only way to get rid of the wages system is to abolish the profit system. the Left encourage the workers to go for higher wages and urge them to go for better conditions under capitalism. Only the Socialist Party opposes the profit system as such.

Socialism is a system of society that is designed to accommodate rational human beings. State interference in terms of taxation and welfare reform is not the aim of the Socialist Party. We do no advocate state-capitalism, although both Labour and Tory Governments have gone in for nationalisation. The State is the coercive organ of the capitalist class.

 The Socialist Party looks forward to an age when there will be no class divisions and therefore no State. 

Socialist ideas and organisation are crucial at this moment. We have to find ways of reaching out and involving millions of people who are starting to question the way our society operates. As we now witness no social crisis unfolds in just one sector of society. Workers have discovered not only are we the source of the corporations’ profits but are responsible for the smooth running of society. We have learned that work is organised on the collective basis of social co-operation and a division of labour.

 We are encouraged to believe that capitalism is the natural and only way for people to live. But there are alternative, more equitable ways of running society. Capitalism has given working people tremendous power, power which runs factories, hospitals, schools, transport systems. This power creates all the things that we need as human beings – and often things which we do not need, such as armamnets, but because they hold the political power, the capitalist class controls and uses this power for its own ends and its own profit. But the collective power that is used to run a factory can also be used to stop that factory, so it can be used to run it in the interests of the workers themselves. This social cooperation is on a huge scale, is precisely how capitalism is organised. How is it then, we may ask, that the people simply take over running it?

 One reason, of course, is that we are constantly told we are not capable of running things – in school, in the press, on television. The whole current of ideas in society tells us that workers work, following orders handed down from above, and that this is the natural order of things. Slaves used to believe that slavery was natural too. Many dismiss socialist ideas as Utopian. It’s a good idea, they say, but people are too greedy and selfish for it to work in practice. If they look around, they will see that each and every day we work together co-operatively on a massive scale and we can watch the living experience of co-operation and solidarity being displayed. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic we have now learned how society is run and also learned that collective organisation and action can challenge capitalist society, And how we gain confidence in ourselves by our mutual aid and self-help initiatives. Collaborating and cooperating in a consensus is central working people.

Socialist knowledge and understanding

Poverty in the midst of plenty and endless disputes over the distribution of wealth  threatens to plunge all human society into chaos and anarchy.

A system of society in which wealth does not belong to those who produce it may for a long time be borne with patience by the producers, if it does not impose any great hardships on the majority. The fact that with increased powers of production and a greater expenditure of energy poverty becomes more acute, is excused and partly hidden by the current belief that wealth cannot be produced except for markets. The imperative necessity—from the capitalist standpoint—for ever cheaper methods of production, coupled with the insatiable greed of the master class, breeds antagonism everywhere between the two classes in society. The competition between combines and groups of capitalists wipes out large numbers of smaller capitalists and leaves the bulk of wealth-producing concerns in the possession of a dwindling number of financiers.

Whether the means of wealth-production are owned and controlled by a capitalist class large or small in numbers, the interests of that class are always opposed to socialism. It is even possible that, as the capitalist class grows smaller in numbers they may be able to combat socialism more successfully because of the greater ease with which they could agree upon, and set in motion, antagonistic forces.

The growing antagonism between capitalists and workers centres largely around the question of wages and conditions of employment. The workers in the main are thus expending their energy in the struggle over hand to mouth conditions, and neglecting any study of the root causes of their poverty. The longer they pursue this short-sighted policy, which at the best can only slightly retard their downward progress into depths of poverty, the more permanent and fixed does the capitalist system appear to them, and the more hopeless does their struggle seem.

It does not follow that their hopelessness will cause them to accept socialism, which has to be understood first, and which therefore requires a certain amount of study. Until the workers are prepared to give the necessary time to its study the question of economic development is a secondary matter, and small progress is being made toward socialism. Those who pretend that anything else but the propaganda of socialist knowledge makes for socialism are only spreading confusion among the workers and encouraging them in the belief that economic forces of themselves will work out their emancipation for them.

It is no satisfaction to the socialist that the development of capitalism causes greater suffering for the workers. Suffering alone does not make socialists : it is more likely to result in desperate actions or futile attempts at reform, generally followed by apathy and inaction. Socialism must be established by the working class, therefore, until the working class perceives in these economic factors the necessity for revolution and understand how to carry it through, we are not ready for socialism. The economic factors wait on the knowledge of the workers. Without socialist knowledge, no matter how these factors intensify, socialism cannot be established. With socialist knowledge the workers can take possession and control at any stage in capitalist development.

The discovery by the workers that one reform is useless, or even harmful to them does not help them to see that all reforms are equally helpless to release them from the results of capitalist domination. Because one reform has failed them, they do not necessarily examine other reforms critically; on the contrary, they either swing back to the methods that captivated them before, or follow new will-o’-the-wisps invented by labour mis-leaders. They swing backwards and forwards like the pendulum, first putting their faith in the promises of their masters, and then just as blindly following the lead of labour confusionists. Every capitalist party deceives them in turn, and after each experiment, or reform, they find themselves no better off. With strikes, however, the workers have the satisfaction of knowing that they have at least put up a fight, tried to do something but simply to wait.

Conditions are ripe now for the establishment of socialism, without any further amalgamation of capital or nationalisation of industries. The only thing now wanting is the acquisition of socialist knowledge by the working class, and the organisation of the toilers for the accomplishment of their mission. The bigger the organisation spreading this knowledge, and the more rapidly and perfectly this other condition is achieved, the sooner shall we be ready. The obvious course for every worker, therefore, is to study socialism, push socialism, organise for socialism.

The Failure of Reformism

The Socialist Party has no connection with any other political party or group and cannot be held responsible for wrong theories and incorrect ideas held by them. In this category we include the major parties, the left-wing and the nationalists, etc. The socialist system we advocate has never been tried. It is not based on leadership, nationalization, state control or the systems operating in China, Cuba, or in the former Soviet Union, etc. The description of “socialist” as applied to these countries is a distortion of the word and arises through ignorance or a deliberate attempt to discredit socialism.

Election after election has been fought over issues which were held to be in the interest of the working class. The promises made by Tory, LibDems, Labour, and Scot Nats in the past if carried out, they say, would have removed poverty, established security of jobs and solved the housing problem. As you are aware, none of this has happened, nor could have happened. This does not prevent them again making the same promises which they will be unable to keep.

Despite their excuses, you must judge them on their record. You should enquire into the reason why these political parties cannot run capitalism in the interest of the working class. Most of you accept the world of capitalism with its wages system, price structure and private property in the means of production as a permanent condition of human existence. You take for granted that you will sell your mental and physical energy, your brain, muscle and nerve to an employer for wages. You accept the fact that you have to pay for permission to inhabit the globe through rent and mortgages. You never challenge the ridiculous claim made by politicians that poverty and bad housing and insecurity are due to circumstances outside the control of men and women.

The Socialist Party is asking you to question the whole basis of your life under capitalism. Acceptance of the wages system means submission to the perpetual robbery practised on you by a small group of international parasites who own the means of wealth production and in whose interest wealth is produced. We realize how difficult it may be for you to break with ideas held for most of your lives, but break with them you must if the problems of poverty, starvation, disease, war and unemployment are to be abolished.

There is no shortage of natural wealth in the world and no shortage of people capable of transforming that wealth into useful articles we can enjoy and freely consume. Capitalism has created a shortage because the productive powers of society can produce more wealth than the market economy can cope with. Access to the factories, workshops, mills, mines and land can only be obtained through wage labour. Goods can only be produced provided that they can be sold. These conditions are rigidly enforced and periodically, as you are well aware, millions of workers are removed from production in every field because they would produce too much. 

Consider the position in the world today where each year millions children die of diseases caused through lack of proper food and where millions more are underfed and underhoused. No sane society would tolerate these crimes against its members. Capitalism produces wealth but it produces poverty at the same time.

It is because of this contradiction that society must be reorganised on an entirely different basis. Men and women everywhere must have direct control over their means of production.

The only obstacle to the introduction of a socialist world is the lack of socialist understanding. This means that the majority of workers at the moment are unaware that socialism can be introduced simply by voting for it, based on this understanding. Capitalism rests on the political support given to it by the working class through the ballot box. Take that away and capitalism is finished. But until such times as you are convinced that socialism presents an immediate solution to working-class problems you will continue to vote for capitalist candidates.

We ask you to examine the case of the Socialist Party before you once again commit yourself and your children to yet another spell of unnecessary misery, frustration and poverty.

SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE.