On this page: Fighting disease under communism here ♦ Capitalism sacrifices lives here ♦
Factory Workers: “COVID-19 Is a Class Issue”
“Take Up the Red Flag Against Capitalism Fighting for Communism”
EL SALVADOR, August 10—A worker tells us, “I have a fever, but I have to go to the factory like this. So I take a pill and I go inside.”
Some workers from the factory have already died. “There’s a good chance that we will all get Covid-19,” the worker continues.
In the communist system, no worker (man or woman) will work if they are sick. They will not have to depend on a miserable wage. They will produce based on what is needed. When the health of the working class is threatened as it is today, all necessary measures will be taken to avoid putting their health at risk.
“Which working people have the option of staying home and not going to work? It’s clear that the working class doesn’t have that option,” concluded a worker leader of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP).
In the maquilas, there is no opportunity to maintain social distancing. It’s either be there or die of hunger. As a woman garment worker in Los Angeles said in Red Flag, they didn’t stop going to work because they needed the miserable wage that allows us to survive for one more day, to continue being slaves of the boss.
As workers, we consider this to be a class question. Workers see government officials who claim to have the disease isolate themselves. They are treated at home, with expensive medicines and doctors 24 hours a day.
But at the end of the capitalist tunnel is the light of communism. The ICWP is consolidating a base in the center of exploitation where these workers work, for the wellbeing of our working class. Every day they look for the opportunity to speak with their co-workers and tell them that we need to organize new collectives of the party in the factory and the community, and include their families.
Access to all the care needed for our health does not have to be a privilege of a few. This will be possible only in the Communist system.
The virus can reach anyone, but it does not affect everyone equally. The living conditions of workers and bosses are different. The dialectical contradiction between the lives of the bosses and the extremely poor lives of the working class explains this situation. The bosses’ profits and lifestyle come from exploiting the working class.
Generally, when a factory worker gets sick, they are sent home without wages. Their homes don’t have the minimum requirements for them to isolate themselves and not infect the rest of the family. Those in poor neighborhoods have the highest probability of getting sick. Many do not have running water.
The workers don’t have access to Covid-19 tests, much less to medical care.
Yes, we can organize ourselves so that this changes. Not with elections and changing the presidents. But instead by destroying this capitalist system that is the most rotten, cruel, and unjust that humanity has had to endure. We will organize ourselves for a communist system.
Things won’t always be like they are now. The communist system will better manage these health problems. The communist-led masses will work intensely on prevention. The communities will be highly organized in groups that will pay close attention to the wellbeing of all the people. We will take care of each other.
Our newspaper Red Flag is now ready to be distributed to as many workers as we can.
Join ICWP and fight for communism. That is our option!
Capitalism Sacrifices Human Lives
“El Salvador Hospital is a pantomime, a government show. They are not treating serious cases of Covid-19 there, only mild cases. Many of these patients are discharged in a couple days and then they take pictures for the press,” a doctor from a public hospital told me.
“We have to take care of ourselves,” I responded. “If a doctor or nurse dies from Covid-19, there is no investigation of that death. That is, they cannot determine if the cause of death was not using adequate personal protective equipment to treat patients with Covid-19. This should be level 3, given the risk of becoming infected. This has happened in the Regional Hospital of the Institute of Social Security of El Salvador in the eastern part of the country.”
I have already lost track of how many doctors and nurses have died. Here every day people die from Covid-19. Cleaning workers, ambulance drivers and receptionists from the public hospital network have died.
The hospitals have less medicine and fewer medical supplies than before. It is a discouraging reality. There is not adequate equipment to protect all health workers.
There is a huge divide between those who think that President Bukele is fighting for health workers, even against the Legislative Assembly, and those who are disappointed with a bourgeois government, which within a year of coming to power has disillusioned many through its populist and sensationalist tactics.
We are in a health-workers union which is divided between the disillusioned and those who still trust the government that sentenced us to death in the middle of their improvisation to face a pandemic of this proportion. They did not designate a referral hospital to attend to serious cases of Covid-19. This has overwhelmed the network of hospitals and health units. The CIFCO Pavilion in San Salvador is anything but a hospital while the Rosales Hospital and the ISSS hospitals in San Salvador are on the brink of collapse.
What should we do? Certainly, our enemy has us disconnected. Our first step as communists of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) is to reach out to our colleagues at work in the health unit or hospital and speak up so that there will be political discussions. Give our Red Flag newspaper to those who are now ready to receive it and follow up with them, be it one or ten health workers. By maintaining contact with our ICWP communist cells, we avoid only consuming ourselves in the endless activities that we are condemned to do to survive day by day.
Every day more workers’ lives are endangered by a system that doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice human lives. We will learn from our practice and mistakes, but we need to keep moving towards communist revolution.
—Comrade Health Worker in El Salvador
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