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Build ICWP to Transform Our Lives ♦ We Want to Care for Our Patients ♦
Build the International Communist Workers’ Party to Transform Our Lives!
EL SALVADOR — The current Coronavirus crisis has shown the weakness of public and private healthcare systems worldwide. It also shows the need for a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist crisis. We need a change— now.
In capitalism the decision is easily made to abandon old people to their fate and let them die. The capitalists show little interest in human life.
In Mexico, El Salvador, and everywhere in the world, business groups and transnational corporations have “voluntarily” furloughed workers—without paying them.
In El Salvador, the health crisis exposes the precarious healthcare system. In 2018, according to official figures, there was only one doctor for every 767 inhabitants. There are not enough ventilators or beds in Intensive Care Units to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude.
Patients will need ventilation and metabolic support. Currently, there are not even 100 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds and they are overcrowded. The government intends to build a provisional hospital with 300 ICU beds, but most of the medical and support personnel don’t have information about where.
The Salvadoran government has issued a plan for response and economic relief in the face of the COVID-19 emergency: “$2 billion will be used to strengthen their Emergency, Recovery and Economic Restructuring Fund; $50 million will go to medium and small businesses and $80 million to the agricultural sector.” But most of it is for refinancing $1,049,856.20 of short and long-term Treasury Bill debt. The capitalists are rubbing their hands with glee, expecting more profits.
The unity of the working class, in all its diversity, is imperative to confront COVID 19 and the crisis of capitalism. This unity is made concrete by building the International Communist Workers’ Party, a permanent organization of the working class.
The situation in El Salvador and Mexico also shows a lack of organization of the working class around communist principles. We need a Communist Party, organized in the main concentrations of capital with a line that overwhelmingly surpasses the bourgeois conception of life. A party that will shake the world and transform life. It will not only overcome COVID 19, but all the economic and cultural structures of capitalism, which have caused crises like the one we are facing today. It will mobilize massively to struggle for Communism.
At this moment, our task is to fight for health through communist solidarity and struggle. The workers must stop production, not because a government says to or not, but because the workers’ position, which is fundamental and revolutionary, allows them to enter fully into changing the reality of the lives of millions of people.
The opportunities to mobilize the masses for communism don’t always present themselves in the same way. Now it’s key to reaffirm what is being demonstrated day by day: Workers’ labor moves everything in the world. A new way of life depends on the working class and its revolutionary tradition.
“This is screwed up. We are just waiting for it to burst,” a fast food worker tells me. It’s true and it’s not true.
We shouldn’t be resigned to expect the worst from COVID-19. It’s possible to face this crisis with strong ties of solidarity and massive political and social organization of the workers. We are fighting for the working class to use its revolutionary experience in the International Communist Workers’ Party.
To those who read this message: Organize and work for a system of health, a different system whose principle and goal is human life of the masses: Communism!
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Spain: Hospital workers strike against new shift Schedule that put them and patients at risk
We Want to Care for Our Patients, But Capitalism Gets in The Way
NEW JERSEY (USA) — Health care workers across the United States are being thrown into this pandemic without adequate training or supplies to take care of patients exposed or infected by the corona virus. I work in a small hospital in New Jersey. Every worker in the hospital is emotionally and physically drained.
There has been no training. Infectious disease protocols are confusing. There is a severely limited supply of N95 masks. Workers are forced to reuse them during the day. Some other hospitals in the area have run out. Everything else we need to care for the patients is lacking.
Workers often have to demand the masks to perform necessary tests on suspected or confirmed patients (results often take up to a week). Workers have taken up the slogan “no mask, no test!”
The bosses answer: no masks then wear bandannas and scarves!
The CDC loosened their guidelines for health care workers. The guidelines used to be that if you were exposed you had to self-quarantine for 14 days. The guidelines now state if health care workers are exposed to the coronavirus, they should continue to work with a face mask. This not only puts their co-workers in danger, but, even more importantly our patients, the majority of whom are elderly with cardiovascular problems.
The communal transmission from health care worker to patient to coworkers and family and community will obviously cause the domino effect they are claiming they want to prevent!
This is how capitalism works. Big business bailouts and profits first, the working class (human lives) way down on the list. This unpreparedness, and lack of supplies is symptomatic of capitalism. The bailouts of airlines and cruise ship companies are a priority over the production of health supplies such as masks and ventilators to save human lives.
In communism this will never happen. We will have no borders. One working class that eliminates racism and xenophobia. If only one worker anywhere in the world got sick the response would be automatic free treatment and immediate prevention for the rest of the working class.
In communism, there would be continual mass production of medical supplies, drugs and treatments. We will have redundant capacity, including training workers how to make necessary medical supplies in all kinds of factories. We will mobilize masses to prepare (and train) for any health crisis.
Nurses at Kaiser in Fremont CA (USA) demand personal protective equipment
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