Mexico: pandemic exposes chaos of capitalism

MEXICO, December 16—In Mexico, like the rest of the world, the coronavirus has exposed the weakness and chaos of capitalism. Officially 1.3 million people have been infected and 130,000 have died. Unofficial reporting has the numbers up to three times higher.  This health crisis shows the inability of the capitalist system to meet the needs of the working class. The wealthy have been weathering the storm in relative security while the working class has been dying. Clearly it is not Covid-19, but capitalism that is the biggest threat. The government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), like the rest of the capitalists, are paralyzed by the system they rule over. Only a communist society will provide the kind of care the working-class needs. Simply feeding people so they could stay home instead of working would have saved countless lives and stopped the spread of the disease. Instead paralysis and confusion has been the response of the ruling class.
The Mexican ruling class has followed the pattern of the rest of capitalism by putting business first and having the poorest go to work. As Covid-19 inevitably spread, the AMLO government has been reduced to placing all the blame on previous governments for dismantling the healthcare system. While healthcare has been devastated over the last 20 years, the current government has failed to take any forceful action to contain the disease and protect the working class. Instead it has preferred to allocate resources to megaprojects around the country while blaming people who “leave their homes” for the spread of the virus, knowing full well that 50 percent of the population lives in the informal economy and has no choice but to leave their homes to work.
Liberal Mexican bosses leave working class to die
AMLO's response is indistinguishable from the conservative governments he claims to fight. The AMLO government's health cabinet committed criminal negligence by not providing sufficient and adequate quality protective equipment on time to health workers fighting the pandemic. Protests and complaints have not stopped since the first cases. Millions of workers in Mexico live day to day; if they do not work, they do not eat and for them there is no support. The factories, maquilas and small workshops continued their activities and in those places there were outbreaks and deaths of many workers. All the industrial zones of the country continue as hot spots of infection and deaths.
The development of a vaccine is further exposing the chaos of capitalism. While the wealthy imperialist countries are struggling to build the infrastructure to get the vaccine produced, distributed and given to the population, Mexico, like most of the countries that have been gutted by the big imperialists over the last century, are struggling to buy just a minimal amount of the vaccine (Aristegui 12/11). The government announced the pre-purchase of enough to vaccinate at most 17.2 million people, between December 2020 and December 2021 in a country of 130 million.
Health under the capitalist system is a commodity. The competition to have a vaccine for Covid-19 will translate into huge profits for pharmaceutical companies and geopolitical rearrangements for the imperialist countries they represent. Technological advances in medicine are focused on obtaining maximum profits, which is why thousands of workers still die from diseases for which there is treatment, but that they cannot buy. The working class has many of the underlying conditions that make them vulnerable to coronavirus, such as poor diet, unhealthy conditions, the lack of recreation or physical activity and of course, the lack of preventive health. All this is due to the need for capital to exploit the workforce to the maximum.
The epidemic is capitalism
Economically, the loss of almost a million jobs in the last nine months (elfinanciero.com), exacerbates the economic crisis. The most affected have been the 60 million workers who live off the informal trade, who lack social security and for whom staying home is unthinkable. Others seriously affected have been flexible or outsourcing workers who do not have regulated working conditions. This includes many health care workers, who face strenuous hours of work every day,and who  lack the materials and resources to attend to their patients. On the other hand, the workers who have been able to protect themselves by working from home, either virtually or by bringing home the materials for product assembly, are living in a hell of overexploitation. Many have tripled their work hours. They are pressured by their employers to be available at all times and to carry out many more tasks, under the assumption that they don’t have to travel to work. They are also continually attacked by their employers and accused of not working hard enough (Forbes, 6/30).
As a comrade teacher summed up well in one of the Progressive Labor Party's study circles in Mexico, two epidemics actually occur, one for the poor and one for the rich, one for the workers and one for the capitalists. Mexico is one of the countries with the greatest inequality in the world, so this difference cannot be hidden. In private hospitals between 5 and 15 percent of patients who are intubated die, but in a public hospital half or up to 8 of every 10 die. That criminal panorama cannot be changed by any politician like Lopez Obrador or the rightists of other parties like the PRI, PAN or PRD. It can only be achieved with a communist revolution that establishes a society with a health system based on the needs of the working class.