FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the Zika virus an international health emergency. The last time they did that was for Ebola.
In communism, masses led by the International Communist Workers’ Party will make short work of Zika, not to mention Ebola and lead-poisoned water. Capitalism can’t do that.
The immediate cause for concern is Brazil, where thousands of babies have been born with unusually small brains. This condition is called “microcephaly” and can lead to severe health problems and even death.
Microcephaly is likely caused by the mother contracting Zika during early pregnancy. The WHO Director General says the virus is spreading “explosively” through Latin America and beyond. The emergency is real enough.
And how does Zika spread? It is carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also spreads the dengue fever and chikungunya viruses, two more serious diseases that are also rampant.
This is where the bosses step in. Their solution is to kill the mosquitos, and they’ve mobilized their armies to spread out and fumigate houses and breeding grounds.
Under communism, we’d do a lot more. Why are there so many mosquitoes in the first place? You don’t have to fly to Brazil and hire an investigator to find out. It’s obvious: lack of public sanitation services and squalid living conditions. As the Wall Street Journal (1/29) reported (from Recife):
The metropolis of about 3.7 million had all the ingredients to hatch an epidemic. Recife’s sodden topography is interlaced with canals filled with raw sewage. Flooded streets and mounds of rain-soaked garbage are common during the rainy season … Recife’s poorest residents, lacking reliable water, have taken to building cisterns and hoarding supplies in swimming pools and other containers where mosquitoes breed.
In other words, the lack of basic public services: sewage and clean drinking water. This will not happen under communism.
Capitalists’ number-one concern is to compete with their rivals. If clean water and sewers don’t help them compete, they don’t happen. In fact the main reason the Brazilian bosses are worried about Zika may be because it might affect the hundred million or so dollars they’ve invested in their Olympics.
Communists’ number-one concern is the health and well-being of the masses of workers. Once we come to power, basic health services will be a priority. We’ll mobilize the masses to replace or install thousands of miles of pipes for sewage and clean water. And while the pipe is being installed, we’ll drain the canals and puddles and wipe out the mosquitoes. As the Flint water article explains, this sort of mobilization is possible only with a communist party – the ICWP.
Of course we will not stop at sewage and clean water. We will build housing fit for workers and move millions out of the worst favelas. Everyone will have the best possible medical care – free, like everything else, because we’ll abolish money.
The babies already born with microcephaly will have special needs throughout their lives and we will meet these needs. This will not be the parents’ responsibility. Under communism, society is responsible for the needs of family members, not the parents.
Communism can put an end to Zika, Ebola, dengue, chikungunya, malaria and whatever else is in store by wiping out the real parasites, namely the bosses. But only a mass party can do this. Join the ICWP and ensure the health of the working class.
Zika: The Root of the Problem is Capitalism
In Recife, it’s capitalist development, the explosive growth of cities and racist super-exploitation. By the 1970s, public health campaigns had wiped out the vast majority of mosquito breeding grounds in the Americas. Meanwhile the world’s capitalists had seen the potential for moving major industrial production to Latin America. There the legacy of racist imperialism and rural poverty allowed imperialists to reap super-profits. The industrialization of Brazil, Mexico and Central America took off.
Brazil pursued a policy of industrialization and port development in Penambuco, where Recife is. Recife, with two ports on the Atlantic, is today the industrial powerhouse of northeast Brazil. Textile, chemical, food and mineral processing are the most important industries.
Like the enclosure movement that was part of the development of early capitalism in England, this led to the explosive growth of cities. Landless farmers flowed into the city looking for jobs. Informal settlements, shanty towns or favelas without clean water, sewers or other public services, grow up in the surrounding hillsides to house them. Now the level of mosquito infestation is back to the 1930 levels.
When capitalists concentrated industrial workers in the cities, they created the class that will become their gravediggers. When communists take state power, we will mobilize the masses for emergency campaigns to clean up the cities and wipe out the sources of disease.
But the communist society we envision is not one of a cleaned-up Recife with adequate public services and new apartment complexes for industrial workers.
We will produce for need and not for profit. So, over time, the masses will mobilize to move production and housing out of mega-cities. We will build new towns where people can live and work in a more human way.
Over 8 million babies are born each year with serious birth defects. They are about 6% of all births. Globally, 3.3 million children under the age of 5 die from them each year. The March of Dimes has estimated that up to 70% of the disabilities and deaths from birth defects can be prevented. That wouldn’t even cost very much.
But capitalism doesn’t value the lives of these poor and working-class babies. Profits come first.
Communism will mobilize the love of our class for our children to guarantee that everything possible is done to prevent or mitigate birth defects.
The fundamental communist principle is: From each according to ability and commitment, to each according to need. Obviously that means that our whole society will be responsible for meeting every child’s special needs instead of leaving the parents to fend for themselves.
We recognize that every individual has the potential to contribute to the common good in some way. Communism will help every person realize that potential, whatever his or her abilities or disabilities.
The root of the Zika crisis is racist capitalism. Why are there no vaccines for Zika or many other diseases that are common in Asia, Africa and Latin America? Because pharmaceutical companies won’t develop them unless they smell profits. They won’t even produce medications used in imperialist countries if the rate of profit isn’t high enough to suit the stockholders.
Communism will abolish money and the profit motive. That will create the possibility of mobilizing many hands and minds to create and produce vaccines and medications as they are needed. It will enable us to make all our neighborhoods healthy and sanitary.
Capitalism has proved that it can eradicate diseases like polio and smallpox. But when it comes to diseases with an environmental component like clean water and adequate drainage, they cannot. In fact, capitalism makes superprofits by forcing workers to compete with class brothers and sisters elsewhere in a “race to the bottom.”
Look at rubella which—like Zika—is relatively mild but can cause birth defects (CRS). A mass vaccination campaign virtually wiped out rubella in the US by 1988. But there are still over 100,000 cases of CRS globally each year.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is responding to the Zika crisis, now that it threatens to spread to the US. That same WHO tried to cover up the massive epidemic of birth defects in Iraq (likely due to depleted-uranium weapons) after the US invasion and occupation.
Communism in contrast needs to destroy racism and nationalism to build the class unity required to end exploitation and wage slavery. Communism insists that nobody anywhere should live better or worse than anyone else. With your help, we will make that a reality. All our lives will be better for it.