Covid-19 accelerates bosses’ drive towards fascism and war

Even with social distancing, we can see all too clearly the horrors created by the disease of capitalism. In a matter of weeks, Covid-19 has taken down the bosses’ economies and exposed their health care system for the racist travesty it is. The pandemic has revealed—once again—the capitalists’ criminal negligence and total incompetence. In a moment where workers are most vulnerable, they have perverted the practice of medicine into a rationed commodity. They have nothing to offer us but death panels and euthanasia.  
Only the international working class has the capacity and humanity to rebuild a decent world out of this cataclysm. Only communism, a society run by and for workers, can meet the vital needs of our class.
As workers fight for their lives and their families and their safety and their jobs, the capitalist rulers are speeding their plans for fascism and inter-imperialist war. More openly fascist states like China and Russia are seizing the opportunity to line up new allies and possibly supplant the U.S. as the world’s number-one superpower. Meanwhile, U.S. and European Union (EU) bosses are plagued by infighting and division. Regardless of which group of these blood-sucking monsters prevail, and no matter when the pandemic subsides, workers will still be sickened by the contagion of capitalist exploitation. Our class will still be plagued by racist and sexist inequality, by poverty and homelessness. The most deadly infection by far is the profit system itself.
But the bosses aren’t the only ones who can advance in this period. So can the working class. Progressive Labor Party, though small and limited today, will continue to organize and grow until we are leading millions to turn the bosses’ wars into communist revolution.
Bosses’ crumbs won’t cut it
As the virus exposes the fragility of life under capitalism, U.S. bosses are trying to mask the horror. Frozen student loans, expanded unemployment insurance, suspended evictions, and $1,200 checks are so many crumbs to keep the rulers’ consumer economy limping along—and to stave off rebellions in the streets. Soon enough, when the worst of this latest crisis has passed, the crushing debt payments and evictions will resume. Under capitalism, the law of the land is maximum profit—no matter how many are suffering in their homes or hospital death camps.
The rulers’ response to Covid-19 has been muddled by internal divisions, a lack of discipline, and the anarchy of their system. In the U.S., the main split is between the imperialist Big Fascists of finance capital, represented by the Democratic Party, and the isolationist Small Fascists led by the Koch family and fronted by President Donald Trump. The Big Fascists, though struggling with their own disunity, are focused on building a broad, patriotic movement for their coming war with China—and demanding “sacrifice” from capitalists and workers alike. Behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they are pressing Trump to use the Defense Production Act to compel private-sector production of millions of respirator masks and tens of thousands of ventilators, the equipment needed to save Coronavius patients with life-threatening lung injuries.
It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism
Trump reluctantly backed off his deranged plan to “get America back to work” by Easter Sunday, which would have guaranteed the slaughter of additional millions and hurt his chances for reelection in November. But he is following the Small Fascists’ playbook to limit the federal government’s role and protect “free enterprise”—the bosses’ freedom to steal all the short-term profits they can, and workers’ lives be damned. After attacking state-imposed shelter-in-place restrictions, the Koch-controlled Americans for Prosperity urged Pelosi and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to “avoid approving measures that inappropriately usurp the roles that can be more effectively played by state and local governments, the private sector, and our communities” (americansforprosperity.org, 3/17).
Trump has complied by refusing to centralize purchasing and distribution of medical equipment, and by allowing six states—including Florida and Texas—to defy the urgent recommendations of every honest scientist to shut down public gatherings. Untold thousands of workers will die as a result.
But make no mistake. The Big Fascists and their political stooges, from Barack Obama to Joe Biden to Andrew Cuomo, are the mass murderers who placed workers at such grave risk in the first place.  For decades, finance capitalists worldwide have gutted the health care infrastructure, a disinvestment that accelerated after the financial crisis of 2008. These main-wing liberals have closed unprofitable hospitals, slashed Medicaid, and purposely plotted the “triaging” of critical care—to enable the state to pull the plug on workers deemed expendable. Several besieged hospitals in New York City have already “taken the unprecedented step of allowing doctors not to resuscitate people with covid-19 to avoid exposing health-care workers to the highly contagious virus” (Washington Post, 3/31).  
U.S. and EU in retreat
The U.S. bosses’ are no longer able to lead on the international stage. They couldn’t convince their Saudi allies to end an oil war with Russia that has devastated prices and threatened the U.S. fracking industry (CNBC, 3/25). At the recent G7 Summit, after the U.S. State Department crafted a joint statement calling Covid-19 the “Wuhan virus,” European leaders refused to sign off—a reflection of China’s growing influence.
Meanwhile, the EU is fracturing internally. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hesitance in helping poorer European countries was slammed by French President Emmanuel Macron (Reuters, 3/27). Italy, a country that last year defied the European Union by joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, received thousands of masks and the services of nine Chinese doctors (FP, 3/31). After getting its own pandemic aid package from China, Serbia claimed that “European Solidarity does not exist. It was a fairy tale” (Wall Street Journal, 3/18).
China’s bosses move in
For the last half of the 20th century, U.S. imperialism dominated the globe and controlled world events. But after defeats in Vietnam and more recently the Middle East, and now hobbled by Trump and his Fortress America disengagement, its alpha dog status is in jeopardy. China’s more unified ruling class enabled its bosses to contain Covid-19 with a brutal lockdown of 60 million workers. As a result, they’ve gotten a jump in restarting their own struggling economy.
China has exported thousands of ventilators to Europe (South China Morning Post, 3/31). It produces half of the world’s face masks; billionaire Jack Ma sent testing kits and masks to over 50 African countries, and 50,000 testing kits to Mexico alone (El Universal, 3/31). The Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. finance capital’s leading think tank, sounded the alarm: “As Washington falters, Beijing is moving quickly and adeptly to [fill] the vacuum to position itself as the global leader in pandemic response” (3/18).
Workers’ fightback rising
The pandemic has both widened the inequalities of capitalism and awakened working-class consciousness. Workers are fighting back! In Italy, they effectively shut down the country with a call for a national strike of non-essential workers (Politico, 3/15). In the U.S., Instacart and Whole Foods workers have struck against deadly working conditions. Auto workers in Michigan, bus drivers in Alabama, sanitation workers in Pittsburgh, chicken factory workers in Georgia, Amazon workers in New York—all have walked off the job to protest the bosses’ callous disregard for their health and safety.
Mutual aid organizations have spontaneously sprung up in solidarity with workers whom the bosses have left to starve or die. In Paterson, New Jersey, activists delivered meals to more than 100 older people. Tenant rent strikes are brewing. PLP members are active in these groups, which evoke the old Communist Party’s monumental mass work during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These actions give workers both confidence in our class and tangible support as the bosses’ infrastructure crumbles around us.
There is no higher duty or privilege than serving fellow workers in need. But we must also advance politically beyond the old CP by winning masses of workers all the way to communism. In a communist society, workers will take collective responsibility for our class—out of commitment, not threats or coercion. Fight for communism! Smash the bosses! Join PLP!