India- "Your social roots are more dangerous than the virus itself" - Comrade Ajith

From Communist Blog Network:

By Comrade Ajith

The Communist Blog Network (RBC) has translated the article published by Comrade Ajith, from the Communist Party of India (Maoist), pointing out the social causes of the coronavirus pandemic that has taken place since the beginning of last year, 2019, and which are more serious, according to the author, by far, than the disease itself caused by the virus. The real pandemic is capitalist neoliberalism and its commodification of health, Azith concludes, and only Socialism will be able to put an end to capitalist barbarism.

-------- 

Its social roots are more dangerous than the virus itself

 

The highest incidence of deaths from Covid is found in developed countries, which are thought to have better facilities and infrastructure to treat it. The main cause is neoliberal policies that have reduced public health services.

Lack of immediate care is one of the leading causes of death in the United States and Italy, among others. Many people have not received any treatment. For the vast majority of poor uninsured people in the United States (most African Americans and Hispanics), even primary care is impossible. 

 

The same is true for the unemployed middle class. Therefore, they will not go to the doctor as soon as they get sick. By the time they are forced to go, the disease will be out of control. Lack of adequate equipment or personnel makes things worse. Trump and other imperialist rulers initially displayed great irresponsibility and selfishness. Instead of taking care of people's health, his concern was to maintain ordinary economic activities and continue to seek profit. This also contributed to the gallop in the mortality rate suffered there. Such a large mortality caused by a disease that it has a mortality rate of only two percent. This highlights the utter incompetence and anti-popular character of neoliberalism and the countries that perpetrate it,

The role of these criminals does not end there. There are those who claim that the arrival of these pathogens is accidental, that it could not be stopped. Then there are those who think that, at most, deficiencies can be identified in the measures taken to address them. There are those who describe it as a punishment of nature and those who oppose this. Nature certainly did not act as some kind of transcendental power to punish us. Nor will it in the future. However, something like this did happen, in the sense of Engels's words.

Engels wrote that although man can boast of having conquered nature, nature will hit him hard, reminding him who the real boss really is. What he wanted to emphasize were the consequences of human actions. These words, which highlighted the emptiness of capitalist claims, also suggested the danger of a destructive approach to development.

This is clearly seen in the origins and spread of the current Coronavirus pandemic. Some have narrowed the problem down to viral causes only. In this way they hide the role played by the imperialist relations that unite the world. This paper is scientifically discussed and commented on in the next major article in the May issue of Monthly Review (co-authored by Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Louis Fernando Shaw, and Roderick Wallace), Part of the Fresh Meat Market in Wuhan . But they do not get bogged down in the eating habits of the Chinese, strangers to the Eurocentric gaze of the imperialist world. Rather, his essay focuses on the social and economic relationships that this market reveals. "

 

"Beyond fishing, wild food around the world is an increasingly formalized sector, increasingly capitalized by the same sources to support industrial production," they say. A chain stretches from the Wuhan market to the interior, where exotic and traditional foods are grown from operators bordering an increasingly narrow desert. And then a series of commercial transport chains connect these centers with different countries and big cities. The virus arrived, traveling through them, as did the SARS that preceded it.

Some multinationals, such as Johnson & Johnson, have developed a viability map in which new outbreaks may appear in the future. The geographical vision they have adopted points to third world countries. The Monthly Review essay criticizes this approach. Rather, it is emphasized that "Focusing on epidemic zones ignores the relationships shared by global economic actors that shape epidemics." When these relationships are taken into consideration, not the third world countries, but the main centers of world capital (New York, London and Hong Kong) turn out to be the most critical points. These new viruses, harmful to humans, spread from the wild. Much of this is happening today on the frontiers of capitalism. That is, in the rest of the forest areas. Deforestation destroys the habitats of disease-carrying wildlife, thus creating the conditions for their spread. In a matter of days, new pathogens that began their journey from sparsely populated forests spread across the world, protected by a globalization that spans time and space.

The core of this essay can be summed up as follows: Viruses that had largely contained themselves through the dense tropical forests have entered the mainstream through capital-induced deforestation and deficits of environmental care and public health.

In short, the changes in livelihoods and environmental conditions for the vast majority brought about by globalization and neoliberal policies are at the root of the current tragedy. Its main solution is the destruction of the imperialist system and the success of the communist project. This is the only way to achieve a humanity that values ​​human life and redeems nature, of which people are also part.

In fact, both Cuba and Vietnam point to this possibility. Today they are not socialist countries. They are countries that have been intertwined by imperialist relations in one way or another, by the restoration of capitalism. When China increased its wages, the global monopolies moved to Vietnam. However, there are still some vestiges of the socialist era. The health sector remains largely in the public sector. There are organizations that can contribute to volunteering on a large scale. 

These countries have been helped by these factors in the fight against the pandemic. It can be seen that the achievements of the old socialist era also benefited China, now an imperialist country. Kerala, where the public health sector has been largely defended by mass fighting, has been able to fight [the virus] better than other states in India. Meanwhile, large private-sector hospitals inhumanely despise people who approach them with a simple cold or fever.

It remains to be seen how long the crisis will last. The impact that [the virus] has created will certainly bring a recovery in public health. However, its subordination to the dynamics of capital will impose barriers. The memory of capital is quite weak. It is very likely that the demands for benefits will once again force the public sector to give in to privatization. Even if the public health system is maintained, it could be used as a great source of data in the service of capital. This is what was seen in the Springler agreement *, which allowed data collection with no regard to individual privacy.

Data collected under the pretext of serving the public health service could become raw material for pharmaceuticals, insurance companies and others. This is a new and more dangerous level of privatization. Capital can benefit by hiding behind public sector structures. The same goes for the health monitoring app that Modi is promoting in India.

In reality, it is clear that it is not enough to have a public sector, but it must be oriented to what people really need. This will only be possible when it becomes part of a transition to a society that bridges the gap between public and private in the economy and infrastructure. If this is going to revive in any country in the world, it cannot be as a shadow of socialism, but as a transition to communism, as a continuous revolution, guided by the current development of communist theory.