“An ecological system built on growing money first”
February 18 —The new coronavirus has killed over 2000 people (mostly in China) and still there is no known cure. It is the creation of profit-driven capitalists with a global reach. The temporary defeat of the international communist movement has allowed these capitalists to carry out genocidal policies.
This new “super flu” is the product of animal farms organized to create three things: maximum profits for the banks and agribusiness; chickens and ducks and other animals for sale; and toxic waste, including new deadly viral by-products.
The Western press talks a lot about the Chinese Government silencing Dr. Li, who heroically warned of the danger and then died of it. But the same media have spent years dismissing similar warnings.
Policy-makers ignored books like “Monster at the Door, the Global Threat of Avian Flu” (2005). As far back as 1982, Chinese and world scientists at international meetings in Hong Kong warned of the dangers of new viruses being produced in these farms.
Biologist Rob Wallace describes how huge conglomerates like the Thai-based Charoen Pokphand ignore science in the interest of maximizing profits. CP trades in live animals and “runs poultry facilities in Turkey, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States. It has feed operations across India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam.”
These companies take advantage of cheap labor, cheap land, and subsidized exports. While CP is currently banned from exporting out of China to Japan, it can switch its supply base and export out of Vietnam to Japan. The coronavirus won’t stop it.
The multinationals have benefitted hugely from “Structural Adjustment Programs” imposed by the International Monetary Fund since the 1980s. These programs insisted that governments of countries under the imperialists’ thumbs cut education, health care and industrial safety regulations as conditions for loans they needed. These cuts caused uncounted suffering, death and disease.
Coronavirus sickens world economy, fuels anti-Chinese racism
China is the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. The slowdown there impacts the global economy, especially in auto. Volkswagen, GM, Toyota and Tesla plants have closed in China. Hyundai closed seven plants in South Korea for want of parts from China. The world’s capitalists want to get Chinese workers back to work.
The US press has hypocritically attacked the way the Chinese government has handled the crisis. It builds racist xenophobia and anti-Asian fear-mongering to rally US patriotism against their main imperialist rival. The NY Times also used anti-communism to attack China for using “Mao-era tactics” in quarantining people in the areas where the virus is most severe. This despite the World Health Organization’s admission that the Chinese quarantine protected the rest of the world.
When Chinese masses mobilized for their interests
After the revolution in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party mobilized millions of workers and peasants to tackle major health problems. They relied on the masses to organize mass campaigns against syphilis (a bacterial infection) and against opium addiction.
These successful campaigns won masses of people to take initiative to fight the vestiges of the old system. They eliminated prostitution, brothels and opium dens – and opened clinics. Thousands of rural and urban youth were trained as health care workers. Former patients encouraged others to get treated. Former prostitutes did useful work.
However, these and other gains of the Chinese revolution were reversed when the Cultural Revolution was defeated in 1968. Many of its Red Guards and peasant leaders fought for communism, without money or privilege. But they were defeated by the Party leadership. They didn’t organize their own mass party to fight for communism. Today the masses in capitalist China are wage slaves.
Communism will meet masses’ needs
Today the masses in China and worldwide must renew the fight for communism. Take it to a higher level by building a mass ICWP!
We need to mobilize for a communist revolution to end wage slavery and to build a world motivated by human needs, not profits. Instead of agricultural factories which are breeding grounds for viruses, the communist masses will figure out the safest ways to produce healthy food for use, not sale.
Agribusiness concentrates millions of animals in small areas to maximize profit. Communism will develop small farms where animals can roam and develop immunity to disease.
In communism, everyone will learn about natural science, including the human body. Faced with an epidemic or pandemic like the coronavirus, we’ll give priority to producing the things needed for care and cure.
The communist masses will mobilize millions of collectives worldwide to share and exchange knowledge, creating tests, vaccines and treatment. In this process, masses will develop communist science.
Capitalist wage slavery and production for sale have also made diseases like diabetes and cancer into mass killers. In communism, we will learn to produce only healthy food. Everyone will get the care they need. Only communism can guarantee the health of the masses of workers.
Read our series on the Cultural Revolution in China here
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