Pakistan: capitalism is the virus

PAKISTAN—Here, as in any place generally, unemployment and the high cost of living make workers desperate to find jobs.  During the Covid-19 pandemic especially, however, the Pakistani bosses have been playing even deadlier games with the lives of working class people. The bosses here are using the pandemic crisis to boost their regional political power by intensifying working class exploitation and increasing profits.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here have been organizing the working class to fight back and for a world where we produce everything that is essential and vital for life. Only communist revolution can defeat the coronavirus pandemic and the virus of capitalism, as capitalism proves itself again incapable and uninterested in protecting working class life.
Capitalism creates exponential coronavirus growth
Today, Pakistan records  more than 170,000 new Covid-19 patients daily . According to official numbers, every day 2,000 new patients are hospitalized and about 110 people die. The estimates, according to some non-governmental organizations, present an even more dangerous situation, with between two and four million people infected and 800,000 of these in Lahore alone, the second largest city of Pakistan.
The government is not allowing enough people to get tested , showing their careless attitude towards  the working class and leaving them to infect their families and coworkers. But even the testing kits that are available do not give  accurate results; test results on the  same patient taken in private and government labs yield different results. Since the bosses are only interested in increasing production for profit without ensuring test kit quality, they do not ensure that the testing kits produced are accurate. Furthermore, big landlords and factory owners out to make money force workers to come to work even if they will get infected. Bosses know there is no scarcity of workers if some get infected because there are millions of others looking to get a job.
Religion: virus’ vector, bosses’ tool
Capitalist bosses use many different techniques to make money. The best way to make money in Pakistan is to create a disaster-like situation to justify increased racist and sexist exploitation and oppression, and then promote religion. Some of the bosses’ religious propaganda says “there is no coronavirus, it’s just a conspiracy...”. This propaganda affects some among the working-class who believe this, when in reality the capitalist bosses are eager to distract with conspiracy theories rather than providing basic necessities. The medical system is utterly unable to handle more Covid-19 cases, with no hospital beds available even in Islamabad, the capital.
Shia religious ministers were allowed to travel to Pakistan from Iran without staying in quarantine at the Pakistani-Iranian border.  People who came back from Saudi Arabia were also allowed to go home without any testing or isolation. Sunni religious ministers and ruling party leaders influenced the authorities to grant permission to hold “tablighi Ijtimah” (an Islamic congregation organized by Islamic organizations every year) at Raiwind Lahore where people from all over the world participated, spent days together  and then traveled freely  around Pakistan.  
According to the reports about 70-80,000 people participated in this congregation from various parts of Pakistan and 3,000 attendees from 40 countries. 60 percent of the coronavirus cases in Pakistan have been linked to the people who attended this Islamic congregation, and pilgrims returning from the Middle East. Twenty percent out of the remaining 40 percent of cases are linked to  people from Italy, Spain, the UK and other European countries. They were not tested at the airport because they bribed the officers while screening at the airports. The remaining 20 percent were infected by local transmission.
Workers living in abject poverty are more susceptible to Covid-19 because of worse sanitation conditions and higher population density in some places, increasing risk of exposure at the workplace or on the street. Public transport is filled with workers who cannot afford masks or gloves because masks, gloves and hand sanitizers sell for astronomical prices.
Bosses exploit crisis, workers organize and fight
A Pakistani minister told the bosses’ media that he is expecting two million official cases by the middle of July 2020, and that the daily death rate will also be increased to 8-10,000 per day. Despite this prediction, the prime minister is against taking any steps to slow down the spread of disease. Their thinking is that Pakistan needs millions of cases to postpone paying loan installments taken from the IMF, World Bank and other monetary institutions or governments, and to petition for aid from the main imperialist countries.
Meanwhile, the government is rapidly privatizing different government-owned factories and laying off workers in the face of dropping exports and dropping demand for factory production. In Lahore, Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar bosses have fired thousands of workers for this reason. In one steel mill factory alone, 9,350 workers lost their jobs all at once. Demonstrations have erupted at textile factories for Qasim textiles and U.S. Apparel, but so far have been broken by the factory bosses’ private security and private police. PLP is working to organize more demonstrations against the bosses.
Communism is the cure for capitalist virus
Capitalism is spreading death everywhere in this world. The bosses  have no intention of saving working class lives and do not care about us. We communists in the PLP know  that communism can fight against pandemics and disasters, as we communists in Pakistan have taken care of working class people who were in danger during past disasters, and now during this pandemic despite our limited resources. Only with a communist revolution for state power can we organize society and our resources to take care of each other. PLP continues to fight!