Many of us have seen the heart-rending images of patients critically ill from Coronavirus lying in hospital corridors waiting to die in Italy. The number of patients far outweighs the amount of equipment and medicines available to treat them and medical staff have been forced into the agonising situation of having to decide who will be treated. Meanwhile in Spain and France the health services are overloaded and very soon it will be the same situation in North America and throughout much of Europe, including in Britain.
For the last four decades health services have been under attack as a result of austerity measures and increasing privatisation. The results of these vicious measures are now blatantly apparent. Whether it is the Democrats and the Republicans in the USA, Gaullist, Socialist or Macron governments in France, both Labour and Conservative governments in Britain, etc, it is all these administrations which have decimated health services at the whim of the ruling class’s desire for neo-liberal policies which entails huge attacks on public services and the social wage.
It is the ruling class as a whole that has been responsible and will continue to be responsible for many deaths as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.
A pandemic of this nature has been predicted for some time and was foreseeable. Yet the Trump regime closed down a special pandemic unit, and cuts have continued in health services throughout the world. Patients with other critical illnesses are desperately worried that they will suffer from a prioritisation of Coronavirus victims, due to the overloading of health services.
Meanwhile the rich scuttle to their second homes in the countryside, in the process increasing the possibility of the spread of the virus.
Capitalism has been shown as not being capable of dealing with Coronavirus. Against their bleak world of greed and selfishness, we need to advance social demands, for the requisitioning of private healthcare into public health services, for the requisitioning and socialisation of the pharmaceutical industries, for the requisitioning of the supermarkets and internet supply services, for decisive measures to control the virus, with the right of all to self-isolate with full pay. This has to be carried out by the working class itself, who have the know-how to run all these industries and services.
We have to advance the concepts of a collective approach to the crisis, for a social revolution to move to a new world based on mutual aid, community and solidarity.
Many deaths on their hands! The guilt of the ruling class
