Hello comrades and friends, this is Siegfried speaking for Back in the USSR, and welcome to our first show of 2021. It hurts to admit that I haven’t recorded a new episode for the past four weeks. Like so many people, I was demoralized. I was scared. I was uncertain. I was sleep-deprived. I didn’t know what to say or where to begin. Especially when the new year rang in with increasing COVID fatalities and new lockdowns. And there was no end in sight.
The best-case scenario for Canada is that a vaccine will reach the general public by the fall of this year. That’s going to be too late for a whole lot of people who will get sick and die because of the policies put in place by the federal and provincial governments. Instead of mass COVID testing and quarantining virus outbreaks at their source, the Government of Ontario has put profit first and people second: sending people back to work and school without the virus being contained and often without adequate safety measures. Cargill, a major meatpacking plant in Guelph, remains open despite being the source of a large-scale COVID outbreak that has claimed the lives of at least two people. It’s the same story all over the country, with social assistance drying up and workers compelled to put themselves in harms way for the sake of a paycheque. It should come as no surprise that infections are increasing and that Doug Ford’s “stay-at-home” orders amount to window dressing and nothing more. Quebec’s measure of instituting a dusk to dawn curfew has proven to be equally ineffective at halting the spread of the virus yet very effective at encouraging police harassment.
The international situation is also bleak. Whether its fascists storming the US capitol with the open collaboration of law-enforcement or the outgoing Trump Administration ratcheting up tensions with China, Russia and Iran with aggressive military build-ups and provocative statements, things are not looking good. Nor does Joe Biden appear to offer any solutions.
The American Empire is in a dangerous mood and there’s no telling what it will do next, the only guarantee is that it will be violent. Instead of putting people first and going all out to halt a pandemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives in the US, congress has instead passed a record-breaking military budget and handed literally trillions of dollars to big business. At the same time, it has been bickering over whether the public should get a one-time cheque of $600 or $2000 per person in federal relief, which amounts to next to nothing when rent and other expenses are factored in, nor is debt forgiveness being considered. And, of course, they want to blame China for the catastrophic and systemic problems that the pandemic has exposed for all the world to see. American capitalism, as well as global capitalism, is in a deep crisis.
But this fact only highlights and confirms the very real successes that socialist societies around the world, including socialist countries suffering under sanctions and blockades, have had in combating the pandemic over the past year. In the case of China, they achieved much more than bringing COVID-19 under control, they actually broke the bonds of poverty itself, successfully overcoming one of the cruelest legacies of colonialism. China has entirely eliminated extreme poverty, even in Xinjiang and Tibet. It also landed the Chang’e 5 spacecraft on the moon, dispatched the Tianwen-1 spacecraft to Mars and launched its own GPS-style satellite network. I could also get into China’s recent advances in quantum computing, nuclear fusion, high-speed rail, electric vehicles and semi-conductors but I think you get the picture. China’s total renewable energy capacity reached 840 GW in 2020 (3.5x that of the US), including 240 GW of solar power.
It’s worth recalling the hostile and utterly racist attitude that the Western media displayed toward China from the beginning of the pandemic one year ago. The COVID-19 virus was portrayed as the death-knell for China’s socialist “authoritarian” state, offering final proof of its failure and illegitimacy. The pundits were positively crowing that the end was near for the People’s Republic of China and for the Chinese Communist Party, with the Wall Street Journal proclaiming that “China is the real sick man of Asia” (thus resurrecting a racist stereotype common at the beginning of the 20th Century). Nor did any of them seriously consider that the virus might threaten their own countries. It was a “Chinese Virus”. Smug in their own delusions of superiority, they sat back to watch the presumed death-throes of another “evil empire”, with Donald Trump declaring that the United States was the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic and that no additional measures were needed.
One year later, the world is a very different place. China didn’t collapse. Not only did it successfully contain the pandemic in the winter months of 2020, not only was it was the only major economy to see growth that year, it also fulfilled its goal of eliminating extreme poverty by the end of December. Even in the most remote and isolated regions of the country, people now have adequate shelter, income, healthcare and nutrition.
There was also an extraordinary coming together in the face of the pandemic. Chinese doctors and healthcare workers were given all the tools they needed and put in extraordinary live-saving efforts, often in new hospitals purpose-built and rapidly constructed to deal with the influx of COVID patients, in a nation-wide coordinated campaign. Huge labs were built that were capable of conducting thousands of COVID tests per day along with mobile labs that were able to test whole neighborhoods at a time. Communist Party committees ensured that people were fed and that their needs were met, even in cities under heavy quarantine, sometimes delivering food and necessities via drone. Everyone followed the science and did their part. The response was unified, pro-active and effective. Wuhan, the first city to experience the outbreak, came out of lockdown after 76 days, while most other affected cities were able to safely re-open after two to three weeks.
China’s anti-virus measures extended worldwide. China was the number one supplier of personal protective equipment to the whole world in 2020, and dramatically expanded production capacity to meet rising demand. China supplied no less than 40 billion masks to the US alone over the course of the year, along with 12,000 ventilators – which is not something that the mainstream media likes to talk about. China was also able to deliver desperately needed medical supplies to countries devastated by US sanctions like Venezuela and Iran, much to the Empire’s anger. It also has the greatest number of COVID vaccines in phase 3 trial and will likely become the world’s leading vaccine supplier in 2021. It is noteworthy that Chinese vaccines, the SINOVAC vaccine in particular, have undergone far more rigorous and widespread testing than the candidates put forward by Western corporations like Pfizer and Moderna.
China is now pretty much back to normal; millions of people traveled around the country during the National Day holiday at the beginning of last October. Christmas and New Years were marked with large-scale parties. Chinese New Year 2021, which is coming up in February, will likely be just as busy as it was in 2019 when I was over there teaching.
The United States, by contrast, has been tearing itself apart, as have other Western countries, but none so spectacularly as this supposedly “indispensable nation”. Warnings were ignored, three months worth of precious time was wasted, the healthcare system (such as it existed) rapidly broke down, and all efforts were made to reopen the economy as fast as possible, even as the death count mounted, while attempts to educate the public were half-assed at best. The result of these anti-human policies is a country that has over 1000 COVID deaths per million among its citizens, compared with just 3 per million in China.
Consider that when California first imposed a lockdown in March 2020, the state ordered all non-essential businesses to remain closed. However, when it re-imposed the lockdown in December, at the peak of the holiday shopping season, all retail stores were allowed to remain open, even as outdoor parks were closed and COVID deaths were spiking. That’s what capitalism looks like. Profit comes first, public health a distant second.
In addition to exposing the tyranny of the profit motive, the pandemic also exposed the tyranny of racism in American society. America is a white supremacist nation that also relies on a multi-ethnic and multi-national workforce, a contradiction that it tries to literally paper over with a highly flawed and woefully out of date constitution that it still promotes as being “divinely inspired”. Of course, Asian Americans were widely scapegoated for the pandemic and faced a wave of racist violence in which they were yelled at, spit on and physically assaulted. University students and professors of a Chinese background faced a virtual inquisition at the hands of academia and the FBI, with some being deported or railroaded into prison on trumped up espionage-related charges. Of course, the killing George Floyd and numerous other Black Americans by racist cops only further confirmed the criminal nature of an American system built upon slavery and genocide and resulted in mass protests that were met with savage repression by the authorities.
The storming of the capitol on January 6th by thousands of outright fascists is only the latest confirmation that the American Empire has hit a proverbial brick wall and that its many, many, many chickens are coming home to roost. It’s no wonder that some Chinese social media commentators, including some who attended university in America, have started referring to the US system and American politics as a “black hole” that is impervious to change from within and will require immense external pressure if it is to adopt a saner and more humane policy stance.
Similar remarks could be made about the UK, which had a similar botched response to the pandemic and has lost more than 100,000 people. The only thing that has made things a little more bearable in England is the presence of the NHS public healthcare system, which, although badly defunded and riddled with cutbacks, is still better than anything the Americans have.
You could say the same thing about Canada, although Ontario in particular is looking pretty shabby right now with its overflowing hospitals and morgues, after enduring decades of budget cuts and downsizing under Tory and Liberal governments alike. Neoliberal policies facilitated this disaster and that should never be lost sight of. Cutbacks cost lives, big time in the case of a pandemic.
The American Empire, not surprisingly, has lashed out amid its suffering. Illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba, Syria and Venezuela were tightened to unheard of levels at the height of the pandemic and all diplomatic protests were ignored. The Empire wanted to impose as much suffering as it could, cutting off supplies of life-saving medicines to numerous countries, resulting in many needless deaths and untold suffering. Yet none of these sanctioned countries succumbed and all preserved their independence.
Socialist Cuba now has four indigenously produced vaccine candidates for COVID 19. Venezuela has developed its own highly effectively treatment for the disease. And Iran has been working closely with China and Venezuela alike to develop its own effective response to the pandemic.
Venezuela and Cuba, both socialist countries, have weathered the storm far better than neoliberal American client states like Ecuador and Brazil, which have been devastated. Both have seen their socialist systems further entrenched in the collective effort of fighting the disease while resisting an ever more aggressive American blockade. Even Iran has lost fewer people than either the UK or US, both of which may ultimately need those Cuban vaccines when corporate giants like Pfizer fail to deliver…as they already have in some cases.
Overall, it has been the capitalist heartland of North America and Western Europe that has been exposed for all its lies and deception over the course of 2020. While socialist states keep advancing, aiding all those countries that seek their assistance, nature has dealt the capitalist world a blow from which it will never recover. As hard as it might be for many people to admit, the evidence is clear: China works, Cuba works, socialism works, but capitalism doesn’t work and neither do the countries that fanatically embrace it.
We saw the future in how China handled the crisis, putting people before profit. We saw the future in how the Bolivian people took back their country from a brutal right-wing coup regime backed by the United States. We saw the future in how tens of millions of workers and farmers rose up across India, challenging a government dominated by open fascists that had thrown them to the wolves. We saw the future in how countless thousands of people rose up and defied the police across North America, rejecting systemic racism and the efforts of pro-capitalist politicians to silence or co-opt them. Working class and oppressed people were making history around the world in 2020. The world did not stand still. And the same will be true in 2021.
The great Rosa Luxembourg, whose assassination at the hands of a right-wing death squad in the streets of Weimar Berlin was memorialized last week, stated that the world is faced with a stark choice: socialism or barbarism. The death of Patrice Lumumba, a dear comrade who met a similar fate on January 17 1961, also stood for socialism and against barbarism. The pandemic has brought this fundamental choice into the limelight and made it inescapable. Everyone must now ask themselves whether they want to build socialism in 2021 or contribute to barbarism in 2021. There is no middle ground and we are at a crossroads.
One of these two directions has a future, the other does not. Socialists fight for life. Capitalists embrace death. Which side are you on?
