#PublicHealthNotPrivateProfit

April 15th was declared the Global Day of Solidarity for Public Health Not Private Profit by the International League of People’s Struggle, of which our formation is proudly a member organization.

The Maoist Communist Party – Organizing Committee (MCP-OC) unites with the call from our comrades in the International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS) for the construction of a global response to the COVID-19 pandemic! Worldwide, ILPS has been in the forefront of the struggle for new democracy, socialism, and international solidarity against imperialism, principally Yankee imperialism.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the accumulation of crises has demonstrated the deadly inadequacy of the capitalist world-system for the needs of the toiling masses. In the so-called united states, the working class – by and large, the colonized black, brown and indigenous working class – labeled “essential,” and forced to struggle for starvation wages, risk their lives every day so that the ruling classes – principally, the colonizer caste – might continue to enjoy comfort unknown to citizens of any previous empire.

This essential status is simply a continuation and development of slavery in a new form – wage slavery. New Afrikan workers, first brought to the colonies to toil in the cotton fields, are now left to die so that the perpetual accumulation of capital can continue. Our Indigenous and migrant worker comrades continue to labor in fields all across the South and Southwest to feed amerika’s ceaseless hunger; once their usefulness is outlived, they are thrown into “immigration detention centers,” really concentration camps, left to starve, freeze, and now, fall ill and die from COVID-19. These are not accidents but the deliberate products of a social system built on the corpses of the masses – our labor power has always been “essential” to the growth of their profits, but in moments of crisis this parasitic relationship becomes abundantly clear.

This pandemic is political! It has done nothing but expose class and national contradictions all around the country.

In Saint Louis, 100% of the deaths from the virus have been New Afrikan people; in cities like Detroit and New York, black and brown bodies are stacked in empty hospital rooms and mass graves. Meanwhile, citing violations of social distancing, colonizers have deputized themselves to assault and batter young black workers, while the uniformed thugs of their class dictatorship continue to abuse and incarcerate in defense of the capitalist-imperialist social order. In Philadelphia, a black man was dragged off of a bus for not wearing a mask; in Kentucky, a latinx woman was strangled by a doctor for “failing to properly engage in social distancing.” Is it our lives they care about or their own? We’re asked to return to work, like Leilana Jordan, who died from the virus after being exposed while working at a grocery store, receiving a final paycheck which barely exceeded $20 – meanwhile, retailers like Target and Amazon rake in unprecedented profits.

Now look to the enemy, to the bosses, like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose hoarded fortune has increased by $24 billion during this time of crisis. They refuse to part with even a fraction of their limitless capital – wrenched from the toiling masses worldwide – in order to provide basic sanitary measures to those who continue to cause his personal wealth to shoot beyond the wildest dreams of the old bourgeois. Look to the landlords, big and small, who continue to hound for rent and threaten eviction, only now beginning to hear the sounds of sharpening blades behind the doors of their units.

Already, they deploy their police and national guard to “maintain order,” preparing their drones and rolling armored vehicles through our city streets. A show of force or a show of fear?

They should tremble before the coming storm; we know that their order is built on sand.

As Huey said, the spirit of the people is greater than all the man’s technology. Mao taught us that people are primary, not new types of weapons or laws. The people will inevitably be victorious, and have already begun to rise like a tidal wave. News of each new strike and occupation builds on the last, as across the country the workers have begun to organize and rediscover the principle that everything reactionary is the same – if we do not hit it, it will not fall! In the prisons, the masses, forced to work for free or near free, have also begun to rebel. The guards don’t know what to do in the face of the real dragons, who have been backed into a corner and are now forced to breathe cleansing fire to build new worlds in miniature.

It is in these times, when the contradictions are at their sharpest, when the objective factors are falling into place, that the necessity of a revolutionary party of a new type is most clear. Only the working class – principally the colonized working class – can hold the leading role in the revolution to defeat Yankee imperialism from within. Only under the vanguard leadership of the proletariat and its party can the broad masses, including the main force of the semi- and lumpenproletariat, sweep away the enemy through people’s war!

It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to unite with the broad masses and draw them under proletarian command. Our response to the COVID 19 pandemic cannot simply settle for “mutual aid,” devoid of political line – struggle actively against economism and build revolutionary power!

Popularize and spread the slogans of the revolutionary movement growing up around the pandemic response. Mobilize the masses to fight for their demands!

Demand a Cancellation of All Evictions, Rent Collection, & Mortgage Payments! Demand a Moratorium on All Utility Shutoffs! Demand Universal Paid Sick Leave For All! Demand Free Testing and Treatment For All! Demand Free Food and Necessities For All! Demand the Immediate Release of All Prisoners Held on Cash Bond and Closure of the Courts! Demand the Immediate Compassionate Release For All Elderly & Immunocompromised Prisoners!

These are a summation of the most advanced calls produced by those on the front lines – the houseless, the nurses and other healthcare workers worldwide, essential workers, and those organizing rent strikes and bringing the class struggle directly to the enemy.

Across the country, MCPOC cadre and FTP organizations led by them have been instructed to engage in propaganda activity for this day of solidarity. We continue to grow our ranks, develop our mass organizations and other instruments of struggle, and sharpen our political line through criticism/self-criticism, practice and summation, and development of tactical unity and the united front with all genuinely revolutionary organizations.

We know that only protracted people’s war can topple the political dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeois. In the meantime, our task is to build a genuinely revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vanguard party worthy of the name. The people demand cry out for their party, and we seek to unite with them to make this a material reality in fact.

– Central Committee of the Maoist Communist Party – OC