Democrats, Republicans Guilty as Hell!

Capitalist Anarchy Fuels COVID-19 Pandemic

For a Planned Economy Under Workers Rule!

MARCH 16—The COVID-19 pandemic starkly exposes the pathology of U.S. capitalism. Some 30 million workers get no sick pay. One-third of the population is uninsured or underinsured. Hospitals already have no spare ICU beds and ventilators to handle this epidemic, and medical staff have been refused basic protective gear because keeping inventory isn’t profitable. Only a tiny fraction of those exposed to the virus have been able to get tested, speeding its spread in the population. American medicine-for-profit provides top care to the wealthy while consigning millions of workers, the ghetto and barrio masses and the rural poor to preventable disease and death. It epitomizes an economic system based on the exploitation of labor and racial oppression.

For the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties, the people afflicted with coronavirus are a political football in the election season. The Democrats and their backers in the labor bureaucracy would have you believe that the spread of the disease is entirely due to the lying incompetence of the Trump White House. But the Democrats are just as guilty. The two parties alternate in running the government, the executive committee of the capitalist ruling class. Both have waged war on workers’ livelihoods, attacking unions and health benefits won through hard struggle. Both have overseen the rotting-out of the hospitals and public health apparatus to serve a system that has always shelled out just enough to have an adequate supply of workers to exploit. The capitalist parties have their priorities, and those are counterposed to the health and welfare of working people.

Early on, when quarantines and similar measures based on adequate testing might have contained the coronavirus, government authorities put up one obstacle after another. Now they’re seizing on the situation to step up state repression. With Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the lead, seven states to date have mobilized the National Guard in the guise of cleaning public spaces and delivering food. In 2005, the National Guard was sent to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, supposedly to rescue people. In fact, what they did alongside local and state cops was repress the thousands of desperate, mainly black residents, with the Guard ready to “shoot and kill,” in the words of Democratic Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. Yesterday, Cuomo demanded that Trump mobilize the military nationwide. The aim is to inure the population to a military presence in anticipation of social unrest. We say: National Guard out now! (read on)