Communist Science and Health: “All of us or none!”
Bus drivers are wearing masks these days. But if the driver wears a mask, but the bus riders don’t, the driver is not protected. Her mask protects the bus riders from her, but who’s protecting her?
Similarly with the grocery store clerk, the mail carrier, and the hospital pharmacist.
Masks aren’t to protect the person who wears them, but to protect the rest of us and to help stop the spread of the Coronavirus.
A recent article at thecoversation.com makes it clear. “Numerous studies suggest that if 80% of people wear a mask in public, then COVID-19 transmission could be halted.” Nevertheless, wearing masks in public, which is easy, cheap and without serious potential harmful side-effects, is still controversial.
Capitalist science asks the wrong question.
At first, scientists weren’t recommending the use of masks. That’s because they were asking how well a mask protects the person who wears it from infection. They weren’t looking at how well a mask prevents an infected person from spreading the virus.
It’s not just scientists who are asking the wrong question.
We are all trained by capitalism to think about our health as an individual question. If you’re sick, it must be your lifestyle. To get well, you need to make the right individual choices, especially following the particular instructions of your individual doctor. If you don’t have access to healthcare, that’s your problem.
So we’ve been trained to think about masks in the same way—as an individual. Masks don’t protect me, why should I wear one?
Communists fight for a different way of looking at health—and everything else.
“Everything or nothing! All of us or none!” wrote the German communist poet Bertholt Brecht. “One alone their lot can’t better! Either gun or fetter! Everything or nothing! All of us or none!’
This poem helps us understand that we are not primarily individuals, but members of a society. We wear masks to protect society from us. We may or may not be sick, but surely some of us are sick and don’t know it yet. If we all wear masks, none of us will spread the virus.
As long as we maintain the mistaken illusion that we are all isolated individuals, looking out for #1, we are all sunk. It is only when we see ourselves as part of society, and wear masks as part of that commitment, that any of us is safe from the coronavirus.
But Covid-19 is only the most recent, and sharpest example of the way that capitalism is killing us every day. The global pandemic has revealed the deep crisis of capitalism, and the extremes of rich and poor compounded by institutional racism.
Our response to the capitalist crisis must incorporate the lessons of the masks. As long as we only think about ourselves, we scrape by on our own until we go under. If we think about the entire working class, and join together to overthrow capitalism, we have a communist world to win.
New York City, May 1 2020—Nurses support Amazon, Target & Walmart workers
Profit Is the Pandemic’s Best Friend
My husband and I are avid Red Flag readers. We live in Nepal. We always look forward to new issues of RF. We found some articles on Covid 19 very interesting and useful. But we need to learn and write more about it so the masses know the truth.
Though I am not a virologist, an epidemiologist or a scientist, I consider myself a social thinker influenced by Karl Marx and his dialectical materialist world outlook.
Covid 19, the disease, is not as deadly as the plans by capitalist governments to deal with it. The capitalists’ response to Covid 19 is dripping with blood in every step. Multiple millions will die not from the pandemic but from food shortage, homelessness, mental distress – all caused by lust for profit.
I found that in 2014, several US universities were conducing research on MERS, SARS and other coronaviruses. One epidemiologist, Ralph Babic, warned almost six years ago that “if this virus mutates so that it spreads easily through the air, millions could die. It would go around the globe quickly, and this would result in high morbidity and mortality, disruption of the economy, and, in some cases, the collapse of governments.”
Babic was not the only one. Epidemiologists and virologists around the world knew that the physical conditions created by profit motives can trigger the virus jumping from animals to humans – a process called “zoonotic.” In spite of this knowledge, in 2014 the US government suspended grants to Prof. Babic and others who were involved in coronavirus pandemic prevention.
Now that the pandemic is spreading, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is involved in funding several multinationals trying to create a vaccine. Pharmaceuticals will make profit while the masses die.
The Gates foundation is carrying out deadly initiatives of Monsanto that makes agriculture dependent on the profit needs. And in its wake, it destroys nature and brings cancer to the farmers. Gates is nothing but a modern-day digital pirate, the Columbus of the present times. Just like Columbus, he discovered nothing; rather, as a pirate, he stole everything.
I strongly urge the readers of Red Flag to read the works of Vandana Shiva and watch this video.
There is no escaping from this pandemic under capitalism. Profit is the pandemic’s best friend. We can break the chains! Let us end the system of profit. Pandemics will be history. Communism is the future.
—Readers in Nepal