March 31—Comrades in Los Angeles take communism to car caravan at immigration jail demanding that all detainees be released
COVID-19 and Capitalist Contradictions: Racism, Xenophobia, Islamophobia Won’t Stop Rising Communist Surge
“I feel like I’m being invaded by this [anti-Chinese] hatred,” said a Chinese-American videographer in Syracuse, New York. “It’s everywhere…It’s worse than this disease.”
Trump’s racist ranting about the so-called “Chinese virus” builds this xenophobic hatred. Racist attacks—insults and physical assaults —are on the rise in the US, directed at people of Chinese or other Asian descent.
But it’s not just Trump. The US capitalist class has to deflect responsibility away from itself for the COVID-19 pandemic, for its inability to respond, and for its collapsing economy. Faced with increasingly angry and hostile masses, it needs to divide the working class with racism and distract us with anti-communism.
And it’s not just the US capitalists. The Chinese rulers (“communist” only in name) pushed the story that the US military had created the virus to spread in China. The US/China propaganda war reflects their fierce competition for world domination. It signals their preparations to fight it out—over the dead bodies of the international working class.
Covid-19: Pinprick That Burst Capitalism’s Bubble
The world’s rulers are blaming COVID-19 for the collapse of their global economy. But this pandemic was only the pin that burst their overblown bubble. Their system was rife with overproduction and debt.
Auto production was projected last year to decline in 2020 even as more plants came on line. Last October, a global conference of steel industry associations called for “urgent action on steel excess capacity crisis.” In both cases, US-China competition was critical.
As the oil market struggled with “too much supply,” the US was “about to flood the world with a lot more.” Financial analysts expected lower returns on investments, due in part to huge debt burdens.
So Covid-19 did not create the economic crisis. But the way the capitalists-imperialists of the world have reacted to it has accelerated its timing and deepened its effects. It has brought us closer to World War III.
Pandemic Expands Basis for Worldwide Communist Revolution
Workers worldwide, and others, are suffering and dying from the same capitalist crisis and the same disease. Both crises expose systemic racism at the same time that they cut across all the divisions the rulers use against us.
Those who sicken and die in the greatest numbers are poor, immigrants, and refugees who are often crammed into overcrowded slum housing or camps. Industrial workers whose jobs expose them to respiratory diseases are also at high risk.
In the US, Brazil and South Africa, black workers are especially vulnerable. Because of racism, they suffer more from underlying conditions, like diabetes and hypertension, that make coronavirus more fatal.
Today, billions of workers worldwide are questioning capitalism and looking for radical alternatives. Often the most oppressed give the sharpest leadership. Many are responding to ICWP’s call to mobilize the masses for communism as the only way to end the horrors of capitalism-imperialism. As we grow and intensify our efforts, many more will rise to the occasion.
The capitalist rulers need xenophobia, racism and nationalism to divide and divert us from putting the blame squarely on their deadly profit system! They are trying desperately to prevent the rise of a worldwide revolutionary communist movement that will end their bloodthirsty rule forever.
But they are doomed to fail. Instead their crises are creating the basis for unity of the international working class. This is our experience from El Salvador to the US to South Africa to India.
In India, the Modi government has blamed the virus on Muslim worshippers to divide these workers from the majority-Hindu Indian working class. Modi has mobilized the police and fascists goons to viciously attack them.
But also, Modi’s lockdown has forced millions of hungry, moneyless Muslim and Hindu workers to walk hundreds of miles back to their villages. This creates the material basis to unite them against the very system that wants to divide them. ICWP comrades are there fighting shoulder to shoulder with these masses, spreading and organizing the fight for communism.
We Need Communism!
The profit system stands in direct contradiction to meeting the needs of the masses. No reform can fix it. Our response to xenophobia, racism, economic collapse and the coronavirus crisis must be to mobilize the masses everywhere to fight for and build communism, nothing less.
In communism, nothing will be bought or sold. Communism will abolish nations, borders and money. No more racism or xenophobia!
The communist masses will mobilize to prevent or prepare for future epidemics. During an epidemic, nothing will be produced except what is needed to care for and protect the masses. Millions will mobilize to find cures and to treat the sick. In the process millions more communist organizers will be created.
Rather than compete for masks, vaccines, ventilators, we will produce plenty for all and share our knowledge for the benefit and future of humanity.
US Bosses’ Attacks on Capitalist China Push Anti-Communism
When the COVID-19 epidemic began in China, the US rulers said it was China’s problem. They attacked the way China, their main imperialist rival, handled the crisis.
China is not a communist country. It is a capitalist imperialist country which exploits the Chinese masses. China is sending research, medicine and materials to many countries confronting the virus—to build support and infrastructure for Chinese imperialist dominance.
This capitalist-imperialist competition prevents any cooperation for the benefit of the masses. In fact, a researcher who developed a quick test for coronavirus in China had been a professor in Florida until the US government fired him for sharing research with colleagues in China.
At first, the Chinese government quashed news of the novel coronavirus. But soon they organized an aggressive response, including mass quarantining and testing. The US media said this was horrible. Actually, in the quarantine areas, food was guaranteed. Disinfectant was at the door of every apartment building. These measures, although started too late, contained the virus.
Those now “sheltering in place” in the US are left to scramble for food and scrounge for disinfectant.
The US rulers know China isn’t communist, but they are using anti-communism to build US patriotism against their imperialist rivals. More importantly, they fear that masses of youth and workers who are fed up with capitalism will turn to communism as the solution.
Front page of this issue
