New Yorkers on rent strike in 1919 during the Spanish influenza pandemic https://i.imgur.com/X8FlV5S.png

With each passing day it becomes increasingly clear that capitalism is incapable of handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Shockingly inadequate safety standards for workers, a refusal to provide paid sick leave for employees by some of America’s largest and most profitable corporations, and mass lay-offs leading to an unprecedented spike in unemployment applications — 3.28 million as of Thursday, to be exact. All of this as we plunge deeper into what may well end up being the most devastating economic depression in American history. Oh, and rent is due in a few days. Despite this staggering situation, capitalism’s most ardent advocates have insisted that financially incentivized free-market ingenuity can dig us out of this mess. Well, we’re waiting.

To many on the left, the issues exposed by COVID-19 are not merely issues brought on by this pandemic. In fact, they’re issues that existed long before the outbreak, and will continue to exist long after it. A profit-driven healthcare system that has left 84.2 million people uninsured or underinsured, a federal government that diverts money away from public health funding at the behest of private industry, and a housing crisis that has left more than half-a-million people homeless — a statistic that has become even more grotesque in the wake of stay-at-home quarantine measures enforced by the state. Two days ago, a teenager in L.A. died from COVID-19 complications because lack of insurance delayed his treatment, and still the political establishment would have you believe this crisis isn’t an issue of Medicare for All. New York hospitals are currently being described as ‘apocalyptic’ by healthcare workers on the front lines in the wake of a massive ventilator shortage, and still the political establishment will insist this is merely an issue of the Trump administration’s incompetence, not an indictment of a system that allows special interests to pressure the federal government into defunding public health agencies and rely on the charity of private companies to produce life-saving technology instead.

The issues exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic are issues inherent to a capitalist system that prioritizes the profitable growth of shareholder investments over the well-being of the workers who create all of the value. Capitalists exploit the labor of the working-class by funneling the majority of the value created by their labor to the very top of the totem pole — to the owners of the means of production. Exorbitant bonuses for executive leadership, steady growth in the value of stock shares, and very little investment back into the work-force whose wage labor is essential to making the gears of capital turn. Without workers having an ownership stake in the enterprises they sell their labor to, those enterprises are under no legal or contractual obligation to protect them from the extremities of the ‘free-market’ — even during a viral pandemic. Too sick to come to work? Too bad, you need this job. For millions of Americans, a minimum wage paycheck is virtually the only thing standing between them and destitute poverty.

What this pandemic teaches us is just how heavily dependent the American economy is on the working-class. Grocery store workers, warehouse workers, healthcare workers, USPS workers, gig-economy workers for food delivery and ride-share apps — these people are some of the most underpaid and most vulnerable to economic and health crises of this magnitude, and yet their role in the midst of this pandemic has proven to be fundamentally crucial. Without them, the machine of American capitalism comes grinding to a halt.

Why then, are 33.6 million workers left without any paid sick leave? Why did Nancy Pelosi, in a predictable concession to Republicans, exclude companies with over 500 workers from a bill that would require them to provide paid sick leave to employees, effectively excluding half of America’s work-force from these protections? Why are the ten Amazon warehouse facilities across the U.S. that have had workers test positive for COVID-19 still open, with workers being forced to choose between coming in and getting sick or staying home and not being able to pay their bills? And can we really say that employer-based health insurance is adequate enough to handle this crisis, when Amazon-owned Whole Foods cut healthcare benefits for nearly 2,000 part-time workers this year, and millions more Americans are about to lose their employer coverage in the coming lay-offs?

The response to this pandemic from the private sector has been woefully insufficient. And the neoliberal think-tanks, media personalities, and politicians on both sides of the electoral aisle, who attempt to obfuscate this crisis as an outlier to an otherwise functional system, are lying to the American public. This pandemic, and the subsequent economic fallout that has ensued, is a manifestation of the class-conflict that has always been present under American capitalism. A class-conflict between the working-class and the ruling-class; between labor and capital. The priorities of America’s ruling-class are grossly on display in the wake of COVID-19, and you can bet your bottom dollar those priorities don’t lay with their workers. The harm being done to workers as a result of this outbreak is being exacerbated by the overt failures of neoliberal capitalist bureaucracy; by a government completely stripped of the legislative power necessary to bring corporate profiteering to heel. The private sector, fundamentally, only has a vested interest in keeping its workers safe in-so-far as they remain profitable, and even then their commitment to worker safety is questionable.

Flattening the curve will require a complete overhaul of the system as we know it — one that gives power back to workers in an unprecedented way. We need a system that ensures healthcare as a human right to every American, employed or not. We need a housing guarantee, a jobs guarantee, and a universal childcare guarantee. We need rent control in places where tenants’ rights are being eroded by huge property management companies. We need a system that acknowledges that, like COVID-19, climate change will continue to disproportionally damage low-income communities. We need a system in which a person’s basic needs are not tied to the precariousness of a minimum-wage job. And, in an economy where supply-chain monopolization is becoming the norm, we need a system that reevaluates its standards for what sorts of companies ought to be privately versus publicly owned. The issues that we now face are not merely the result of a pandemic. They’ve always been an inevitable part of a system that puts profits over people.

Time’s up.