The outbreak of the latest coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is a health crisis for the working class, a fascist tool for the Chinese bosses, and a racist opportunity for a deteriorating U.S. to attack their top imperialist rival.
What the world’s workers need is a revolutionary communist party. Progressive Labor Party fights to make something unthinkable under capitalism into reality: a system run solely in the interests of the working class. A world where public health will be protected without the barriers of money or profit.
Fascism, the real contagion
Capitalist China has responded to the new coronavirus with intensifying fascism, a form of capitalism in crisis. Under president-for-life Xi Jinping, the Chinese bosses are centralizing their power through their state apparatus: the government, the police, the media. Their goal is to pacify, divide, and terrorize the working class.
In much of China, everyday life has come to a halt. After first downplaying the outbreak and punishing eight doctors who warned about the virus, the rulers quarantined (read: imprisoned) some 50 million in Wuhan and nearby cities. (By comparison, the New York City metropolitan area has about 20 million people). Schools, businesses, theaters, temples, and restaurants are shut down. Supply trucks, with drivers in masks and protective suits, must pass through tightly controlled checkpoints. Police segregate people with fevers. All in all, it’s “the biggest quarantine in history…The impact of such draconian measures has rippled throughout China” (Economist, 1/30).
The Chinese state did what capitalists do best: turn a problem into an Orwellian exercise to ratchet up surveillance of the working class: “Those who have recently been to Wuhan are being tracked, monitored, turned away from hotels and placed into isolation at their homes and in makeshift quarantine facilities” (AP News, 1/30). The government is also publicly urging workers to inform on each other and leak personal data (New York Times, 2/3).
Under the pretext of safety, these tracking and policing measures are in actuality a practice drill for socially controlling the working class and intimidating them into obedience. Similar methods, and the mentality they create, will be useful to the Chinese bosses in a future war against the U.S.
Viral warfare
The world’s driving force today is inter-imperialist rivalry, chiefly between China, Russia, and the U.S. All world problems reflect this contradiction.As national rulers drive to dominate their regions and control
areas of crucial strategic importance, like the Middle East or Africa, the delicate balance of the old liberal world order will inevitably give way to global war.
To distract U.S. workers from obscene capitalist inequality and poverty and the political disorder in their own house (see page 5), bellicose U.S. bosses are taking every opportunity to attack China. U.S.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out China as “the
central threat of our times,” part of a campaign to pressure U.S. allies to stop collaborating with Chinese tech
giant Huawei (NYT, 1/30).
The coronavirus and mass quarantine could not only “spark China’s first recession-like experience” (Reuters, 2/4), but also renew its prolonged trade war with the U.S. As a result of depressed growth, China may be unable to meet its commitment to buy $200 billion in additional U.S. imports over the next two years (South China Morning Post, 1/29).
Meanwhile, U.S. rulers are busy using the outbreak to their competitive advantage. In banning non-U.S. residents who have traveled to China from entering the U.S., the bosses exceeded recommendations by the World Health Organization (U.S. News, 2/3). And leave it to the capitalists to find a bright side to a growing epidemic: U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross predicted that 2019-nCoV “would cause companies to reconsider their global supply chains and ultimately ‘help to accelerate’ the return of jobs to the United States” (NYT, 1/30).
Even as they kick China while it’s down, these bosses have no leg to stand on when it comes to public health. “In 2017-18 a bad flu season saw symptoms in 45 [million] Americans, and 61,000 deaths” (Economist, 1/30). That doesn’t even factor in the death toll of everyday systemic racism. Ask a Black worker or youth about the medical apartheid in this former enslaver state.
The disease of racism
Universities and news media, agents of disinformation for the ruling class, are seizing the opportunity to infect workers with anti-Chinese racism. “Yellow Alert,” read a French newspaper headline. From Australia’s Daily Telegraph: “China kids stay home.” Shops across Southeast Asia barred entry to Chinese tourists. Canadian parents petitioned to keep students who’d recently visited China out of school. At Arizona State University, students left the classroom when an Asian student sat near them (Washington Post, 2/1).
Anti-Asian racism in the U.S. has historically been a tool of division and war. When Chinese migrants were recruited to build the railroads and mine for gold in the late 1800s, they were superexploited and scapegoated. In the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles, a mob mutilated and lynched 18 men and boys, 10 percent of the city’s Chinese immigrant population (Los Angeles Public Library). During World War II, the U.S. funneled more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps.
Workers and youth must fight for multiracial unity in the face of racist ideas wherever they appear.
Communism, the best medicine
All “natural” diseases are in fact caused by capitalism. Communism would eliminate the underlying causes that breed infectious disease, mainly unhealthy working and living conditions. It would use science to handle unforeseen outbreaks in the interest of the masses.
The Chinese Revolution eliminated diseases like syphilis and schistosomiasis. It trained masses of “barefoot doctors” and sent them to the countryside to treat curable illnesses. In just ten years, China doubled workers’ life expectancy and halved infant mortality, the greatest public health gains in history! By organizing the masses, the Chinese Communist Party put an end to famine, female infanticide, foot binding, prostitution, malnutrition, and illiteracy, all previously facts of life for workers and peasants for centuries.
Unfortunately, the Chinese bosses’ abandonment of communist goals and the pursuit of capitalist profit have eroded those landmark advances.
Progressive Labor Party is fighting for a society run by and for the international working class. Freed from profits or bosses, a communist society will organize resources—scientific data, food, water, housing, technology—for the benefit of our class. Join us as we fight to eradicate capitalism, the greatest disease plaguing the working class.
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Facts about 2019-nCoV
The source and severity of 2019-nCoV have yet to be confirmed. The current fatality rate is 2 percent, as compared to more than 9 percent for the SARS virus (Marketwatch, 2/4). Most deaths are in people with weakened immune systems. There is as yet no vaccine.
The World Health Organization, an arm of the U.S. world order, has declared the coronavirus a global health emergency. As we go to press, the official death toll stands at around 500, with tens of thousands of infections confirmed across 27 countries.
Objectively, the common flu is a far greater threat to workers. It “causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness globally and kills up to 650,000 people annually” (The Hill, 1/27)