Covid and Class Struggle

 "Let me turn now to why the government and the private sector have failed to contain the (Corona) virus. Here in this country (USA - ed.) a struggle developed between the scientific community [and] the health community that wanted to take the usual steps - the masking, the social distancing, all the other requirements of combating a viral pandemic - vs. the capitalist business community. The capitalist business community discovered early on an old lesson of economics. You can have a wonderful factory, or office, or store, equipped with all the latest computers, and full of all the raw materials you need, but nothing will happen and you will earn zero profit. You have to have the one absolutely essential crucial ingredient and that is labor. Human beings using their brains and muscles. And the Covid pandemic deprived businesses of human beings because the shoppers and buyers were afraid to go in to the crowded stores and restaurants and the laborers were afraid to go in to the crowded workspaces. And so the labor wasn't forthcoming. And the business community suffered. Loss of profits. So they put enormous pressure on our political leaders to open the country up, to minimize or avoid lockdowns, to minimize or avoid masks because they interfere. And most of all the mask was a kind of constant reminder to everybody that we were in a dangerous place in relationship to this illness. So the business community wanted not to respond in the ways that other countries did. And the business community made use of the demonization of the government, which is a way that capitalism survives in the United States. It is always the fault of the government - whatever goes wrong. You may be fired by a capitalist, but you're angry at the politician. This is, of course, a wonderful arrangement for capitalists, because it deflects the anger resulting from capitalist decisions onto the politicians who have at best a tangential relationship to those decisions. And so we had - over and over again - starting with Mr. Trump, and particularly from the right wing in America, the Republican Party, opposition to masks, opposition to social distancing, opposition to lockdowns. And so we did not take the steps that were taken in many other countries. Like the People's Republic of China (pre-Omicron), like New Zealand, like South Korea, like Cuba. Countries with very different economic and political systems, but who were able to support a government that mobilized resources, public and private, to deal with this problem. Having the government mobilize resources is not what American capitalism permits. And it is now paying the price. The Covid disaster is worse in the United States than in any other country on this planet, even though we are one of the richest countries, we have one of the most developed medical care systems, but we weren't prepared and our internal contradictions, which is what they are, prevented this disaster from playing itself out as it is doing literally as I speak with you, when we are breaking new records every day in the number of people getting sick with Covid-19, and the number of people dying from Covid-19."

-------Professor Richard Wolff - Crises of U.S. Capitalism, Pandemic, Crash and Secular Decline, 11/23/20, You Tube

Capitalism, Class, Race, Classist Racist Capitalism

and Capitalist Inhuman Nature

 

by Frank Scott

 

There is no god but god: Islamic belief.

 

There is no race but human: scientific fact.

 

The first holds true for many if not all the 1.8 billion Muslims of the world as a foundational belief. The second is true for all Muslims, Jews, Christians, agnostics, atheists, and all the other many belief systems based on creativity, hopes, dreams and strived for explanations of the mysteries of life. But after conjecture on how it all started, which is thus far beyond any of us as fact and available only as belief in legend and myth, once having arrived as our conception of being, our humanity is as scientifically verifiable as anything and more than most. While we can dream, argue, theorize, demand, insist and pray for acceptance of one or another story of how we came to be as a race, originally, it is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not members of anything but a human race, no matter what language we speak or what theories have been driven into our minds by rulers who did and do well to keep us divided into what too many perceive, in total defiance of all logic, as different races.

 

Ethnicities are certainly a fact in that we are born in different parts of earth and have evolved and developed different languages and looks based on geography, weather, genetics and most importantly our parents. Those born to Europeans look like Europeans, to Africans like Africans and to Asians like Asians, and so on. But all are members of the one and only species we label the human race. Being born to African and European parents means we look more African than the European parent and more European than the African parent, but we are no more or less human. The ignorance placed in our minds that strives to separate us as races to explain and exploit political and economic differences are cursed divisions which are created by and have fed into the political economic evils which thrive on such divisions and like so much else need to be confronted and dismissed for the ultimate ignorance and even stupidity they represent.

 

 Is there a tall race composed of only tall humans? A short race composed of only short ones? Are male creatures a separate race from females? Then what is the race they and only they can reproduce? Shemales? Malehers? Boychicks? While present language molesting in search of explanations for a crumbling environment to be found in personal profiles to some of us rather than social endangerment to all of us can make it seem so, they are simply up-to-date devices of separatism that make divide and conquer the not so secret to success for minorities to dominate majorities.

 

Since we moved over millennia from being primitive hunter gatherer communists to allegedly civilized mass murdering democrats our tendencies to slaughter one another have grown even more quickly than material development has enabled many of us to lead more comfortable lives only by reducing much greater numbers to lives of misery and deprivation. Sadly, achieving any material improvement for some of us has brought absolute necessities for religion, therapy, alcohol and drugs to avoid mass hysteria. And the people who can afford to suffer mental illness the most are those who can afford the religion, therapy, alcohol and drugs while most seriously disturbed people suffer physical horrors which are reduced to mental problems only if and when they can afford indoor plumbing.

 

 

It would do us all better to not only learn how capitalism came about and brought about our present condition but what we need to do to transform it into a global system that puts the public good looooooong before any notion of private profit. Whatever is learned, surmised, hoped for, believed in by often well meaning conservatives, liberals, leftists, rightists and extremists of all sexual persuasions, skin tones, cultures, societies, study groups and more, it should be understood that all this intrigue, counter-expertise voiced by highly or lowly educated people - depending on their believers and fans - is easily countered by other alleged experts and might as well be attributed to those behind the 911 attack on America. That was often said to be Jesus, the Bush regime, Russia, Syria, the Zionist cabal and other serious descents into near madness, all such plot revealers neglecting to notice that except for the Jesus/Moses/Allah believers, all such plots would have needed accomplices in the upper hundreds in number if not low thousands and a bit harder to keep secret in a world where all these experts exist who know exactly how a relative handful are running the entire planet and as yet haven’t really accomplished a damned thing proving  they exist as such and we go on seeking, finding, top secret elements in a world where some people can’t break wind without twitter-tweeter-twisters screeching it to the millions of anti-social small media in contrast to the anti-social propaganda from big media  and often correctly identified as hustlers of fake news.

 

We can, in nature, fight fire with fire, but we cannot combat bullshit with greater bullshit, whether it originates from alleged professional experts or amateur liars working to further confuse the people of a dangerously confused race who need to not just end the biological threats of disease to millions but the systemic threat to all of humanity’s billions.

 

That threat is one in which every single thing on the market, which is where all of earth gets everything needed for survival (?) means that guns, lingerie, food, clothing, shelter, homelessness, mass murder, books, TV, computers, slippers, poetry, pet care and alleged expertise in all these marketing areas and far far more, is available only to those with the market forces to afford them. If you cannot afford housing, food, clothing etc. you can ultimately drop dead without suffering the present deadly for some virus of the moment but our infinitely greater problem is the far more deadly virus of the political economics of the private profit dominated global marketing practiced by the USA, Russia, China and everyone else destroying the natural world ecologically in the longer term and more immediately by moving closer to wars which could become nuclear and assure that there wont be anyone left to create wonderful exercises in research to prove who started it or created it or financed it or created profits from it.

For a few minutes at least.

 

Both Russia and especially China are attempting control of the exclusively private profit perversion with Russia assuming a slightly social democratic attempted control while China under a communist party rule has brought more control and progress for its people than has ever been achieved anywhere on earth by capitalists or alleged or real socialists who are usually under almost complete control of capital even while they profess wishes to represent all and not only some of the people.

 

As far as human nature is concerned, we are taught to define it by the same forces that teach us about race, though there is at least the acknowledgment of human as covering all of us and not just some though finding it completely logical and moral to burn hundreds of thousands of people to death in pursuit of market domination so we can sell weapons, cosmetics, pet food, bullets, sex aids and other products that make life better for some and absolutely horrendous for others. Humans are all members of the same race – human – and we are produced by our human parents. Again, if one of them is African and the other European, we will look more African than the Euro and more Euro than the African, but still be members of the same one and only human race. It’s just as silly if not dumb to accept social shaping into “identity group” racially divided humanity as it is to believe in short-tall-fat-skinny races. It is human nature, for sure, to need food, clothing and shelter in order to survive, and that’s true whether one is light or dark skinned, euro or afro or Asian or other human, hetero or homo or tranni-multi-bipolar-indigene-tourist or settler. When survival is available to all the human tribe it gets on quite well without bludgeoning and murdering, etc. but when desperation sets in and survival is threatened, humans react desperately, including killing one another and eating the deceased when no other food is available, so the obvious is to arrange things to avoid desperation by doing what many allegedly primitive people did to survive: share, equally, and not tolerate any member of the tribe going hungry when there was food or being cold and homeless when shelter was available. That rape, murder and theft exist is less a specific of alleged human nature (?) than the fact that the overwhelming majority of humans rarely if ever choose murder in order to get food when food is available or attack people to steal their belongings when there are more than enough belongings available. These acts of anti-human nature can be avoided completely by the tribe seeing to it that 1000 loaves of bread and 1000 people means a loaf of bread to every person and not ten loaves for one and none for 10 people. We need to learn that people of the distant past were communists because it was the only way to survive and we need to become democratic communists of the present and that means ending private profit capitalism, which is hardly the reason for all of our problems but is the reason for most of them.

 

Once we create democratic communism, we will still have illness and we will still have death but it will come from natural causes rather than the rape-war-murder-war-marketplace degeneracy that finds profit in murder, profit in cancer, profit in domestic animals and profit in reducing humans to poverty, homelessness and death by countless un-natural causes. That seems so blatantly obvious it’s another sign not that it is not our nature to be oblivious to the obvious but that minority rule has shut down important aspects of our humanity and capacity to think. Revolutionary change is needed to enable us to see the world as children begin life seeing it . They/we are taught the massive idiocy of separate races and the need for war and such. Culture is all taught and learned and hasn’t a damned thing to do with what is falsely identified as human nature. It is our nature to eat, drink, lust, sing, dance and more but very very very very few humans wake up thinking, hmm, what a nice day to crack thousands of skulls open, pillage and burn cities, destroy nations, slaughter children and burn babies. And the few who do are demented degenerates who need special care or more likely to be thrown out of power by any means necessary and replaced by democracy that is global in nature. That calls for a global revolution by, for and about all of us, not just some of us.