Mass Protests Show Potential to Mobilize for Communism here ♦ Teacher Walkout Sparks Communist Conversations here ♦
Student Walkout, Oakland, January 2022
Capitalism, Covid-19 and the Schools: Mass Protests Show Potential to Mobilize for Communism
“It seems that much that has happened related to the pandemic has to do with money,” said Latricia, a high school student, in a meeting organized by a comrade. We had just read a report correlating the rise of Covid cases and the rise of the stock-market, both to record levels.
In just two years of the pandemic more than 800,000 Americans have died. In those same two years the US billionaires got $2.1 trillion wealthier. Latricia has got it right.
And WHO are the dead? Low paid essential workers (which in the US means a high concentration of Black and Latinx workers) and the old (75% of the dead are over 65). It’s the working class that are dying. The bulk of the deaths are among that population that cost the capitalist state money in Social Services. Oh yes! Latricia’s observation was spot on.
Of course, this is a global pandemic. More than five and a half million people have died of Covid worldwide—always mainly impacting older and poorer workers.
Money might be in control, but it isn’t all powerful. From Oakland (USA) to Paris (France) students and teachers have been striking and rebelling against the billionaires’ thrust to keep schools open throughout the Omicron surge. “They don’t want to close the schools and businesses because it cuts down their profits,” pointed out Henry, another student.
“If they open up our schools, social distancing will not be possible,” said Luisa.
“True,” Alex responded, “but they don’t care about our health and well-being.” These billionaires are willing and deliberate mass murderers.
The ICWP member raised an important question: “The virus and its variants exist, but it was capitalism and its money system that created the pandemic. If capitalism is a society based on money, can we live in a society without money? Why wouldn’t communism work now?”
A lively discussion followed. What to do with people who were not billionaires but who were greedy and selfish like them? What about people who were lazy and didn’t want to contribute? We speculated about a communist future and talked about pre-capitalist societies. Someone said people are too individualistic, but another countered that there were strikes all over the place and that strikes, where you all must stand together, are the opposite of individualism.
And that’s true. There were a record number of official strikes and wildcats (unofficial strikes) in the US and many other places last year. There is a lot of anger about the way the system reacted to the virus. Now those industrial strikes are spilling over into schools. In places like Oakland the students have taken the lead and teachers have followed (with wildcats in support of student demands). The teachers have taken tremendous care to reach out for support from the parents. And they have gotten it.
Times are changing. These are class actions rather than separate union and community struggles and they present the possibility of a stronger class consciousness emerging. In other words, a shift in the way we think of each other. Rather than harboring doubts of greed or individualism, a sense of our commonality, strength and unity will emerge. And this development of class consciousness – born out of all sorts of struggles – is a key mass element we’ll need to build a communist share-and-share alike revolution and society.
Discussions like the one with Latricia, Alex and the other students are a start. We need to invite them to read and discuss Red Flag (including our articles on the pandemic) and to join ICWP. They can be future leaders of communist class struggle, like walkouts in their own school, and in building the revolutionary movement we need.
Teacher Walk-Out Sparks Communist Conversations
January 25— This last week the teachers at the school where I work participated in a one-day strike supporting the students who are striking over safety demands regarding the spread of Covid -19.
The core activist teachers are an impressive bunch who spent much care and energy reaching out to the parents of their students. The crisis, however, opens up wider and wider circles of people to deeper political discussions about capitalism and the need for communism to replace it.
A fellow teacher (a father of young children) was going to support the strike for “opportunistic reasons” (he said he could use the day off).Talking to him, we quickly concluded that, sooner or later, we were all going to get the virus. They want us to live with Covid. Even these student demands, we agreed, were really demands about how safely we could live with Covid. The State was acting as if life (our lives) was cheap. The strike and support action were making a definite statement that it wasn’t!
But why do we have to live with Covid? we asked. As long as it is around it will mutate. Then we began to look at where it mutates. The Delta variant first surfaced in India, we thought. Then the Omicron version was first identified in South Africa. As we were talking a new variant had possibly shown up in Cyprus (this has since turned out not to be so). There are whole areas of the world where billions of people live without any hope of being vaccinated any time soon!
Why? Capitalism can sell 477 million cell phones in sub-Saharan Africa but in two years it can’t vaccinate even a quarter of the population against a killer virus. Why? Patent laws! Big Pharma wants to make a profit.
As the conversation ended, my fellow teacher was furious at putting profits ahead of people but not convinced of communism as the solution. I knew I had opened the door to discussions of communism in the months to come and plan to show him Red Flag.
—Teacher comrade
Front page of this issue
