US Govt Prepares Its State-Run Media to Open Up New Propaganda Barrage Blaming China For Collapse Of Privatized Capitalist US Medical “System”

[NOTE: Just as I was writing this it was announced that in the face of the “deadly COVID-19 pandemic” and as it begins to affect the impoverished people of India and Africa and the rest of the southern hemisphere, US War Criminal President Donald Trump has decided to cut off funding to the World Health Organization because it isn’t anti-communist enough! As we have always said: the capitalist class of the United States and its vicious, worker-hating neo-fascist government are the #1 obstacle to the advancement of human progress! The desperate need for workers in the USA to “Dump the Republicrats” and “Build A Workers Party” has never been more obvious!  Join us!  – IWPCHI]

“Better ‘Dead’ than ‘Red'”, you say? “Your” capitalist class stands ready to make your dream come true!

In the face of the near-complete collapse of the US capitalist health care and economic systems the New York Times today strongly hinted that the US Government’s state-run media propaganda networks are about to attempt to cover up their massive incompetence in the face of the minor #COVID-19 epidemic by… blaming “Communist” China!

The #COVID-19 epidemic – a typical global viral epidemic entirely comparable to the annual flu epidemics that hit the world year after year – has been one of the few ways in which the world has had the opportunity to compare the socialist and capitalist systems in a side-by-side comparison in real time. Socialist China’s response to the #COVID-19 was as fast as any massive bureaucracy could have been expected to respond: China’s entire planned socialist national health care network and relevant government agencies harnessed the power of the socialist command economy to slow down the spread of COVID-19 on 30 December when China had around 50 known cases nationwide. Chinese scientists had identified the new virus, isolated it and published the first scientific papers on its genome and case histories of the initial handful of patients within a few weeks.

In stark contrast, the US and European governments, who had almost 2 months to prepare for a wave of COVID-19 patients on top of their already-huge numbers of “common flu” cases – in almost every case did little or nothing at all. While the European death tolls have remained in the range of the annual death tolls from “common flu” thanks to their comprehensive socialized health care systems, the years of budget cuts to health care throughout Europe, imposed by socialism-hating conservative governments, exposed the enormous shortcomings of the capitalist version of “socialized medicine(TM)” compared to the capabilities of China’s ACTUAL socialist system. Shortages of everything – virus testing kits, masks, gloves, face shields, hospital beds, ICU units, ventilators and more – plague ALL of the capitalist “socialized medicine(TM)” systems. While socialist China was able to build enormous “pop-up” hospitals in just two weeks to treat their COVID-19-infected citizens, the capitalist world, always putting profits before human lives, hesitated to do any such thing and in most cases procrastinated for crucial weeks during which the highly-predictable spread of this slightly-nastier-than-normal coronavirus took the lives of thousands of workers. While socialist China – a nation of 1.4 billion – has been able to stop the spread of the virus inside China so well that they have suffered only 3,355 deaths (as of this writing), many nation-states in the “advanced” capitalist world, plagued by critically-needed medical supplies and equipment, are seeing much higher fatality rates.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles: the longer the working classes of the capitalist world allow the capitalist system to exist the more workers are going to die from preventable diseases and lack of proper medical supplies and equipment. Under capitalism, human life is cheap – especially the lives of migrant workers, immigrants and minorities. In the USA, quite predictably, the section of the working class suffering the highest fatality rates are the African-American workers. The deadly combination of capitalist greed, racism and hatred of anything that smacks of “socialism” has led to the deaths of over 20,000 US workers already. COVID-19 is a challenge to those backward workers who still think they’re “better dead than Red”! If you’re a member of the working class in any capitalist nation-state you may soon BE dead if we don’t “go Red”!: if not from the “common flu” or a novel coronavirus then via the capitalists’ endless wars – or the lack of healthcare services millions of workers suffer from here in the arch-capitalist “Land of the Free(TM)”!

Today (14 April 2020) one of the US Government’s key de facto state-run propaganda outlets – the New York Times – published yet another scurrilous piece of anti-communist anti-Chinese propaganda entitled  “China’s ‘Donation Diplomacy’ Raises Tensions With U.S.” in which we are supposed to believe that somehow socialist China’s donations of $1.4 BILLION dollars of life-saving medical supplies to needy countries around the capitalist world suffering from the (including the USA) is somehow nothing but an evil scheme to “help China’s propaganda efforts”! 

You see, under US capitalist propaganda rules every action undertaken by any socialist workers state must be portrayed as something evil. It doesn’t matter if it’s Castroist Cuba sending thousands of doctors all over the world for free or reformist socialist Venezuela massively reducing poverty in that nation or Deng-ist China sending free medical supplies during a “deadly” viral epidemic – EVERYTHING the “communists” do must be portrayed in the WORST POSSIBLE LIGHT! These are the rules handed down from the US capitalist class “intelligence agencies” for all government propaganda and dutifully implemented by EVERY capitalist-owned de facto US Government propaganda outlet, from CNN and Fox to Time and Newsweek, the Washington Post and New York Times, Deutsche Welle and The Guardian. When it comes to “fighting communism” the entire bourgeois press of the world takes its cue from their heroes in the US Government.  US government propaganda messaging is relayed daily by the intelligence agencies to the editors of major bourgeois press outlets and constantly rears its repulsive head in articles like this one. Let’s take a closer look at how this works in practice.  I’m not going to go through the entire piece, just the first few examples, and then you can take it from there.

The authors – Edward Wong and Paul Mozur – have carefully crafted a fine piece of anticommunist propaganda here, using talking points undoubtedly passed along to them by the editors of the New York Times, who get their anti-communist marching orders directly from the CIA.  The long-running links between the owners and editors of US government propaganda outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Time and the major TV news networks and the CIA are so well established it would be a waste of time to repeat them here. Suffice it to say that almost every sentence of this anti-communist propaganda piece contains at least one lie or a major distortion of the facts.

For people who just glance at the headlines the Times makes sure that the subheads convey the gist of the article beneath it. Thus we get this subhead: “New regulations in China are delaying its shipments of medical supplies around the world. And some American officials worry accepting donated gear helps Chinaʼs propaganda efforts.”  Get it? If you don’t bother to read the entire piece and read it carefully between the lines and just glance at the headline you’ll still get the lying message: all those donations of medical supplies and doctors and nurses China has been sending around the world are NOT “good things” they are BAD THINGS!  And even if these donations might save your life you should NOT accept them because if you do you’ll only be “helping the Communists’ propaganda efforts”!  NEVER FORGET THE US NATIONAL MOTTO: “Better dead than Red”!

“When President Trump spoke with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, late last month to reach a truce to the sniping over the coronavirus pandemic, he did so partly to pave the way for steady shipments of much-needed medical supplies from China.”  This is a beauty, completely ignoring that the US government has been launching vicious and deadly attacks against China of all kinds ever since the Chinese Revolution in 1949.  The USA has done all it could do to cripple the development of socialism in China, through everything from trade and technology embargoes to outright war; these attacks have been carried out by successive Democratic and Republican governments since the end of WWII.  The Trump administration unilaterally launched a trade was against China two years ago. That’s an act of war, by the way!  But here the NY Times propagandists want to erase all that history from your memory and only focus on the Trump Administration’s incessant anti-communist attacks on China that occurred in the past 3 months!

“But as the death toll in the United States has surpassed 25,000 and hospitals still struggle with equipment shortages, American officials and executives point to new problems in buying equipment or taking donations from China.

“Shipments have run into unexpected delays as Chinese officials impose new regulations in response to complaints of low-quality products. And some American officials remain reluctant to accept gifts of gear because they fear giving the Chinese Communist Party a propaganda win.”  Amazing how many lies and distortions of truth can be crammed into just two paragraphs!  The reason why there are shortages of medical equipment and supplies in the USA and Europe – in other words in the nations of the so-called “advanced” capitalist world – is NOT because the shitty politicians in these countries have been cutting social spending and in the USA closing down hospitals – or because the capitalist-owned politicians in the “advanced capitalist world” never BOTHERED to order extra supplies in case this entirely predictable situation with COVID-19 arose! No! IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF THE COMMIES!  See how easily all that workers blood just washes off the hands of the corrupt capitalist politicians thanks to the amazing cleaning power of anti-communist propaganda?

…

US Centers for Disease Control estimates of mortality from influenza-like illnesses (common flu) 2010-2019. The death toll from the “deadly” COVID-19 virus is not even as bad as from the “common flu” in many recent years. This is why we call it “The Great Coronavirus Fraud of 2020”. Source: CDC, with editing by IWPCHI.

The Great Coronavirus Fraud of 2020: An Anti-Communist Propaganda Operation Against Socialist China That Backfired… And Keeps On Backfiring

The truth is that the entire “Great Coronavirus Fraud of 2020” was based on a US anticommunist propaganda operation attacking China for its allegedly “bungled” initial response to COVID-19. Starting in late December the US government’s propaganda outlets of the bourgeois press began a campaign of vilification and slander against socialist China over the Chinese Communist Party’s “slow” and “inept” response to the emergence of a new coronavirus there.  Initially, when the Chinese government swung into action, locking down Wuhan the US capitalist press universally attacked the “draconian” “police-state” quarantines that were part of the (in retrospect, massively over-reacting but effective) response of the “evil Communists” to COVID-19.  Everything the Chinese were doing was wrong-headed said the talking head “experts” on US and European capitalist news outlets.

But when China started building two huge new quarantine hospitals to take care of those who had been infected with the virus – IN JUST TWO WEEKS – and the first reports from the World Health Organization on what they termed the “very commendable” and “impressive” response of the Chinese Communist Party government to the epidemic, public opinion in the capitalist world began to swing in favor of the Chinese government’s response.  Seeing the thousands of Chinese doctors and nurses selflessly traveling to Wuhan to participate in the enormous effort to stop the spread of COVID-19 touched the hearts of millions of workers in the capitalist world.  The US was losing the propaganda war!

Ironically, the US propaganda effort to highlight the heavy-handed “evil communism” response to COVID-19 was so successful in drawing the attention of the workers of the capitalist world to what was going on in China, when the virus inevitably began to appear in the West – first in the USA and then in Europe – and the right-wing politicians attempted to downplay the danger of COVID-19 and delay taking action, the response of the working class was furious!  Convinced by the US/European anti-communist propaganda barrage against “Communist China” that COVID-19 was indeed a “deadly virus” – workers in the capitalist world DEMANDED that their governments follow the by that time hugely successful efforts of China TO THE LETTER!  Workers had been so brainwashed by the US propaganda on the “deadly” “bat virus” “from China” that they would not accept anything less than the complete shutdown of the capitalist economies to “flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 epidemic!  What a surprise for the likes of idiots Boris Johnson and Donald Trump!  It’s one of the worst cases of what the so-called “Intelligence Community(TM)” calls “blow-back” of a propaganda operation in world history!  The effectiveness of their propaganda FORCED the capitalists to shut down the entire capitalist world’s economy, precipitating a global depression that will almost certainly kill far more people than this piss-poor COVID-19 will!  Nice job… assholes!

…

The “unexpected delays” of medical shipments from China to the US and Europe were ALSO a result of anti-communist propaganda efforts.  When a small percentage of the FREE supplies shipped from China to European nations were found to have been below the “high standards” of those European government officials, they rejected the shipments and this became yet another source of a round of anti-communist propaganda against China!  Justifiably embarrassed by the screw-up, the Communist Party of China ordered the bureaucrats tasked with inspecting exports for quality to refuse to export “sub-standard” or defective medical supplies and equipment. And NOW they are being attacked by the bourgeois press for being TOO CAREFUL to ensure that everything shipped from China meets the standards of the country it’s being shipped to!  AS I said before: when it comes to socialist countries, they can’t win no matter WHAT they do!

Even the head of the US-China Business Council had to admit that the delays had been made unavoidable by the earlier rejections of “substandard” medical supplies and the anti-communist propaganda barrage against China that followed: “Jacob Parker, the senior vice president at the U.S.-China
Business Council, said [the new Communist Party-imposed inspections of all medical exports] were ‘the top issue for
some of the biggest companies in the world.  It is a good intentioned policy that has a variety of unintended consequences across a variety of areas.'”

The article continues: “In some cases, the Chinese authorities eventually helped
untangle the snarls. But the bureaucratic bungling has
exasperated American officials, who say the red tape has held up
equipment at a desperate moment.”  YES! The red tape DEMANDED BY THE US and Europeans to ensure that all shipments are “up to their high standards” has come at a desperate moment – for the corrupt government officials in the US and Europe whose careers are at stake as the death tolls in their nations steadily mount – because they only ordered these supplies IN THE LAST MONTH!

This is how the capitalist system ALWAYS fails the working class in times of emergency!  They refuse to spend the money necessary to PREPARE AHEAD OF TIME for these predictable natural disasters.  Because of their greed they NEVER maintain the necessary stocks of ANYTHING needed to respond to a hurricane, earthquake or a newly-emerged virus – or even the obscene annual death tolls from the “common flu”!  And yet the US capitalist government is going to spend $500 billion in the next few years TO MODERNIZE THE US NUCLEAR ARSENAL!  Can you IMAGINE how lousy their response would be to a hundred million casualties after a “limited” nuclear war?  

The article contains an implied threat of an upcoming propaganda campaign about to be launched by the US: “’Beijing may come to regret its rapid pivot from domestic crisis to international triumphalism, for there is already a rising tide of
nationalist anger coming its way as citizens from countries around the world face prolonged economic hardship and are in search of culpable parties,’” said Jude Blanchette, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.” [Emphasis added by IWPCHI]

So workers need to be prepared for a new wave of anti-communist propaganda in which the corrupt, lying, political tools of the capitalist classes of the world try to escape the blame for the inexcusably poor state of their medical systems response to COVID-19 with a wall-to-wall “BLAME CHINA FOR EVERYTHING” campaign!  We’re not going to let the capitalist politicians get away with murder again, are we? Socialist China is not to blame for the COVID-19 deaths! US CAPITALISTS AND THEIR BOUGHT-AND-PAID-FOR CORRUPT POLITICIANS ARE GUILTY AS HELL:

“But it is American officials who are responsible for the stalling of
one batch of gear. For weeks, officials in Washington have
debated whether to accept a donation of masks from the Chinese
Foreign Ministry, American officials said. Though medical
workers are desperate for the masks, some officials argue that
taking the donation would aid China’s propaganda campaign.” [Emphasis by IWPCHI]

So there you have it!  In the eyes of the neo-fascist, anti-communist US capitalist class and their corrupt, bought-and-paid-for politicians, if doctors and nurses and their patients must die in order that the capitalist USA may “look good” compared to socialist China, then so be it! “BETTER DEAD THAN RED!” This is why we say: #CAPITALISMKILLS!  #ANTICOMMUNISMKILLS!

A socialist USA – “socialism with American characteristics” – would be a multi-party socialist workers state where all human needs – food, clothing, shelter, health care, education and jobs’ would become “inalienable rights” that could never be denied to anyone because they could not pay for them.  Unemployment benefits would equal 100% of a workers pay and would last until that workers found a new job in her or his old trade or was trained (for free) for a new one.  Emergency medical supplies would be maintained in permanent stockpiles located around the nation and all over the world.  That way, in the event of a natural disaster, supplies could be immediately shipped to where they were needed – and as soon as they were shipped replacements would be immediately ordered. This is what they do in socialist China and what they will never and CAN NEVER DO UNDER CAPITALISM!  Unless the workers of the world overthrow the capitalist system we can expect to be forced to suffer through disaster after disaster until the capitalists finally commit the ultimate “blunder”: World War III!  “Better dead than Red”, you say? Keep on defending the capitalist system and you may get your wish sooner than you think!

#SOCIALISMWORKS!  #CAPITALISMSUCKS! DUMP THE REPUBLICRATS!  BUILD A WORKERS PARTY! FIGHT FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT!  FIGHT FOR A SOCIALIST FUTURE! Because THERE IS LITERALLY NO FUTURE FOR THE WORKING CLASS UNDER THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM!

—- IWPCHI

 

The Great Coronavirus Scare of 2020: The Year the Capitalists Destroyed the World Economy Over Nothing

The “cure” for COVID-19 will prove to be far worse than the disease: the damage that the capitalists have inflicted on the world economy for purely “New Cold War” political reasons may trigger another Great Depression. Source: MarketWatch

Revolutionary socialists like us have long warned the workers of the world that unless the working class overthrows the murderous, exploitative capitalist class and their antiquated economic system and takes state power into the hands of the working class there will be continued, endless misery for the workers all over the world. Capitalism – an economic system based upon less or more brutal exploitation of the working class – is also based upon competition, rather than co-operation, between nation-states and their respective capitalist classes. The struggle between these nation-states over the limited natural resources of the planet lead inevitably to regional and world wars in which tens of millions of workers are slaughtered. And now workers not only face the threat of a nuclear WWIII but also the threat of becoming more and more an economically superfluous population, as artificial intelligence systems coupled with robotics will soon enable the capitalists to permanently replace workers with machines. When we say “there is literally no future for the working class under capitalism” we aren’t just trying to scare you into the ranks of the socialist parties – we’re telling you the truth.

In their endless mad pursuit of profits uber alles the capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for political flunkies in every pro-capitalist political party tend to forget everything else besides conspiring how to grab as much tax money as possible and funnel it into their bank accounts as quickly as possible before they get caught doing it and their scam comes to a temporary end – at which time YOU, the workers in your boundless stupidity kick the bums out of office and elect a competing gang of capitalist criminals from a different pro-capitalist party. So they “game” goes on, until the working class decides, finally, to put an end to all the insanity by taking power in a workers socialist revolution.

Democratic Gov Andrew Cuomo of NY has no testing kits, ICUs, masks or ventilators but the deeply corrupt NY state government now sells hand sanitizer to fight COVID-19. Credit: State of New York

Outside of a handful of their think tanks the capitalists spend their days counting their billions and scheming as to how they can make even more money. The billionaires and their political hired hands never cease to regale the workers with complaints about “the evils of big government” and compete to see how much they can cut social spending so they can steal even more of your hard-earned money. What is politely called “democratic government” – which is supposed to be a means by which the politicians ensure that the national economy is made to provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people – ends up being twisted into a political and economic oligarchy in which the government is made to produce massive profits for about 10% of the population, while we in the “bottom 90%” (this is actually what the Federal Reserve banksters call the rest of the population) are left to fend for ourselves. The proof that the capitalist systems of EVERY capitalist nation-state are not just un-democratic but anti-democratic is found in the distribution of wealth: 75% of the wealth goes to the top 25% of the population and the “bottom 75%” gets to “split” just 25% of the national wealth. And the capitalists and their hired “knights of the pen” wring their hands and pretend to wonder why there is so much violence among the “lower classes”!

Percentage of aggregate wealth by wealth percentile, USA. 50% of US workers do not own ANY appreciable wealth. Top 10% owns 75% of national wealth. The US capitalist class calls this a “democracy”! Did you vote for this distribution of wealth? Source: US Federal Reserve Board

This festival of graft and corruption committed by the capitalists in every capitalist nation-state (known to Marxists as “bourgeois democratic government”) is how the world capitalist system has come to have been basically assassinated this month by the capitalist classes of the world over the emergence of a “novel coronavirus” named COVID-19. The greedheads of the government parties of the capitalist world, were until recently completely focused on the problem of how they could keep the (now-departed) economic boom going through 2020 so they could continue to rake in massive profits squeezed from the bone, sinew and brains of the workers of the world. With the vast majority of the world’s top capitalist leaders having nothing more than business school and – at best – law school backgrounds (in preparation for a lucrative career as a corporate lawyer) they were uniquely unprepared to deal with a global flu pandemic. Expecting these avaricious, thieving, murderous capitalist criminals to have spent any time at all, ever, in their entire lives working on how to respond to a major global health crisis is like expecting any gang of professional thieves to have spent their lives discussing rational economic planning. It was the very last thing that ever crossed their minds – or the minds of their predecessors, either. And that is why, the moment the COVID-19 epidemic hit, the world capitalist classes were caught on TV cameras everywhere with both hands in the cookie jar looking like Bart Simpson saying “I didn’t do it!” There they were, one minute happily stealing as much money as they could get their hands on, and the next minute they suddenly found themselves responsible for the very lives of every single human being they had been pretending to represent all their political careers! It was a shock to every one of them, and it was written plainly on their dumbstruck faces and their “deer-in-the-headlights” stares as waves of reporters shoved microphones in from of them and demanded to know “what are you and your government going to do about COVID-19?”

Government of real-estate swindler US President Donald Trump was caught completely unprepared to handle the COVID-19 epidemic, having spent two months criticizing Chinese Communist Party for *their* alleged lack of preparedness. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

“What’s a COVID-19?” was a fair approximation of the answers we got to that question almost universally – even from the capitalist criminals who had been appointed (for purely political reasons) to lead the human services agencies of the nation. No, that’s not right: in many, many cases these people had been appointed not to lead but to dismantle the agencies they were running! This would have been very funny if it had happened in a Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell comedy; but these capitalist criminals who have been kept in power, elected and re-elected and re-re-elected by an irresponsible working class that cares more about sports than about their families’ futures are not funny at all. They’re deadly serious about robbing us all blind. And they are completely, organically incapable of giving a damn about the lives of workers, in their home countries or anywhere else. And they especially don’t give a damn about workers who they can’t profit off of – like the unemployed and the elderly retired. To the capitalists the poor, unemployed and retired elderly are a surplus population that sucks billions of dollars out of the capitalists’ pockets and gives them little or nothing in return. These are the people YOU, the stupid-ass workers of the world have put in charge of safeguarding YOUR LIVES AND THE LIVES OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN! Admit it now: you have no one to blame for these incompetent governments that now threaten to destroy your lives but your own damned selves!

Being for the most part – like the working class itself – utterly scientifically illiterate, the capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, it turns out, had done absolutely nothing at all to prepare their capitalist nation-states to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic! Having wasted almost two months while the epidemic raged in China ridiculing the Communist Party of China’s leadership over their alleged “bungling” of their response to COVID-19, as soon as the first cases began to appear in the USA it was immediately apparent that, compared to the capitalist world’s response, China’s response was flawless! There weren’t enough hospital beds, intensive care units, face masks; no ventilators! No virus testing kits! In short, even with two whole months advance notice of the arrival of a wave of cases of COVID-19, NO ONE in ANY of the major industrialized capitalist nation-state governments was prepared to deal with the crisis!

So what did they do? What does any idiot do when they are suddenly faced with a crisis? They panicked! In spite of the fact that, by the time that the epidemic reached the shore of the US and European capitalist nation-states, it was obvious that this virus was NOT anything beyond a really nasty flu virus that, unusually, killed mainly the sick and elderly. This was completely obvious to us by mid-January. But because the Chinese “Communists” – who, since they initially didn’t know if they had the common cold or an Ebola outbreak on their hands – spared no expense and vastly over-reacted (as it turned out) in response to the outbreak, the capitalist politicians, anti-communists all, rushed to the judgment that they too had to over-react to the epidemic – for purely political reasons! And so, egged on by glory-seeking heads of national disease control labs like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Neil Ferguson of the UK, who scared the people of the world by predicting absolutely absurd beyond-worst-case-scenario death tolls like over “2 million” in the USA alone – the criminal capitalist heads of state, completely freaked out and caught flat-footed by the outbreak – began to shut down the world economy over this mere flu epidemic!

In spite of the facts that China’s COVID-19 epidemic ended in just 2.5 months – and Italy’s seems to be doing the same – and that both nations have suffered death tolls similar to their annual death tolls from the common flu – the capitalists went and shut down the global economy anyway.  Source: L’epidemiologia per la sanità pubblica
Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy

COVID-19 is a very nasty flu indeed, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the 1918 flu that killed millions. Here’s one example that was obvious weeks ago: unlike the 1918 pandemic flu, COVID-19 kills very few people under the age of 50. Source: Bloomberg News

How stupid was it to do this? All it takes is the math skills of a grade-schooler to figure it out. Right now (2 April 2020) the GLOBAL death toll of the COVID-19 epidemic, according the the World Health Organization, is just 45,526! In the entire world!

To a really stupid person, that might seem like a lot! But to anyone who understands the size of the world population (7.8 BILLION) and the history of flu epidemics, it’s not even a drop in the bucket.  According to the US Centers for Disease Control – the same outfit that idiot Dr. Anthony Fauci works for – this year’s “flu season” in the USA has already resulted in as many as 62,000 deaths – from the “mere” “common flu”!

Most recent US Centers for Disease Control update on mortality figures for the 2019-20 US Flu Season. It is quite probable that far more people will die from “common flu” in US this year than from COVID-19. Source: US Centers for Disease Control

In a “normal” flu season in the USA, for example, somewhere around 40,000 people die – and we never hear a peep from the government or the press until the flu season is OVER, when they give us this year’s total and we shake our heads, say “tsk, tsk!” – and get ready to watch The Big Game, right? Somehow, this annual event in which tens of thousands of us die doesn’t even make front-page headlines in a normal year – and they’re not making headlines this year either!  So what’s different about this COVID-19 epidemic? The difference is that the big death toll happened in Socialist China first; and because the “communists” massively over-reacted to their epidemic, now, for purely political “New Cold War” reasons, the capitalists – in their vast ignorance and their boundless hatred for socialism – feel that they must do the same or they’ll “lose face” in the eyes of the working class. This is nothing but a “New Cold War” political pissing contest!  And it gets even worse:

Because of the vicious anti-communist campaign against the “Communist Chinese” response to the virus – which the propaganda outlets of the US and European governments falsely portrayed as being soooo “deadly” – scared the hell out of the workers in the US and Europe, the workers are DEMANDING that the capitalists do at least as much as the Chinese government did or they’ll be subjected to the same abuse the capitalist propagandists used against the “commies”!  This is a spectacular example of how anti-communist propaganda intended to attack “communist China” has come right back like a boomerang and hit the capitalists smack between the eyes and forced THEM to destroy their own capitalist system!

Let’s put these COVID-19 death-toll numbers into a big-picture perspective. In 2015, 57,000,000 people died from all causes. That’s just how many people die in any given year. That means that about 156,000 people died each and every day that year. That would be 6500 an hour, which means that the grand total of the deaths from COVID-19 so far in the entire world – let’s round it to 45,500 – is equal to just 7 hours of a normal daily global death toll! AND THE CAPITALISTS AND THEIR BOUGHT-AND-PAID-FOR POLITICIANS OF THE WORLD DESTROYED THE WORLD ECONOMY OVER THIS! To cover their asses politically!

The much-ballyhooed “disastrous” death toll in Italy from COVID-19 – which today stands at 13,157 (according to WHO) is no different than that from the “common flu” in the 2013-2017 flu seasons in Italy during which over 17,000 people died each year! In two of the four flu seasons examined by researchers in a peer-reviewed journal article published in August of 2019 the death toll in Italy from common flu was far above the death toll reported so far from COVID-19!

Due the the enormous success of Italy’s socialized medical care system, Italians enjoy one of the highest life expectancies in the world – many years higher than in the USA. The downside of this is that Italy has an enormous population of very old and vary frail senior citizens who die every flu season. The death toll from COVID-19 is not unusual for Italy. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31401203

 

The human toll in lost and ruined lives from the capitalist-class-inflicted damage to the global economy will be many times worse than the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic!

Today’s headlines indicate that the global death toll from the major recession that the capitalists and their political flunkies who YOU VOTED INTO OFFICE will be one of the worst of all time. In just two weeks the number of unemployment claims in the USA have reached levels never seen since the Great Depression! These idiots have “cured” a flu epidemic by shooting the world economy to death, just so they can cover their asses politically and “show those commies” how much they care for human lives!

Everything’s phony about the US capitalist state’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Source: New York Times

While the US capitalist class and their political tools pretend to be shining examples of the “superiority” of capitalism over socialism and as the ruling class who puts human lives ahead of profits, in spite of global appeals from the UN and almost all of the US’ allies, they have refused to end their crushing economic sanctions against Iran and Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea so that those countries can purchase the medical supplies they need to fight the COVID-19 epidemic! That’s because when it comes to the lives of workers living under governments who have dared to rebel against US imperialist neo-colonial domination – THEY DON’T GIVE A SHIT! Any worker, any government that dares to rebel against the US capitalist class is mercilessly crushed, by any means necessary – in the name of “Freedom(TM)” and “Democracy(TM)”! They have proven time and time again that when it comes to the lives of workers – especially Black, Hispanic and Asian workers – they are prepared to kill as many as they feel is necessary in order to stop socialists of any kind from overthrowing the capitalist system and putting an end to misery of a life lived in crushing poverty under ruthless exploitation imposed by the capitalist class! And the sickest thing about this is that YOU – US workers – allow the US capitalist class to do this to your working-class and peasant sisters and brothers all over the world!

The tail wags the dog: US capitalist class anticommunist propaganda operation against China ends up forcing them to apply the coup de grace to the world capitalist system. Source: US Department of Labor

The US working class has had it pounded into their heads by the US capitalist class and their bought-and-paid-for bourgeois press that “it’s better to be dead than Red.” Right now, perhaps, you’re finally beginning to wonder if that makes any sense. It’s literally true that, for the working class, if we don’t “go Red” we’ll ALL be dead! It’s obvious even to a dog that it’s not wise for us as workers to just sit back and “let the rich run things” – because they very clearly don’t give a shit about us!

In fact, under a revolutionary socialist government like the one we at IWPCHI propose, first of all, we’d have a socialized medical system that would provide comprehensive health care to everyone from birth to death at no charge. Under socialism, all higher education would also be paid for from the national budget – there’d by no economic obstacle as there is under capitalism for those who have what it takes to be doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

Just by covering all the millions of US citizens who now have no health care, we’d be required to build a lot of hospitals and to train a lot of medical professionals. That means we’d have many more intensive care units than we have right now – and the doctors and nurses to staff them.

Under socialism, defending the interests of the entire working class would be the primary purpose of the government. Instead of reacting to crises, we would prepare for them and maintain stocks of all the necessary medical equipment to overcome challenges like COVID-19 and worse. We’d maintain permanent stocks of equipment strategically located around the country so when an epidemic hits the materials needed to fight it would be on hand and ready to be shipped immediately. This is just a matter of simple logistics under socialism; under capitalism it’s simply not profitable to do all this – so it never gets done. We’ve seen the US Government drop the ball over and over again with crises from earthquakes to hurricanes to epidemic diseases. In their diseased minds, ruined by greed, the capitalists simply can’t make enough money preparing for disasters to make it worth their while to do so.

The good news is that you, the working class, have the power to change all this; in fact if you don’t do it, it will never happen! All it will take to get started building a better future for you and your families is to decide right now that you’re never going to vote for a pro-capitalist politician ever again, and then to build a revolutionary socialist political party and fight to take over every major local, state and national political office. This will not take forever. From the time the Republican Party was first formed to the time it won its first Presidential election took about 12 years – and THEY didn’t have the Internet! We can do it in 8, tops. As soon as we have even a handful of seats in Congress we can start shutting down all the vicious legislation being hurled at us by the Republicrats and can start pushing for a socialist workers government. The longer we wait the more of us will die unnecessarily in natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and this COVID-19 epidemic.

Dump The Republicrats! Build A Workers Party! Fight For A Workers Government! Fight For A Socialist Future! THERE IS LITERALLY NO FUTURE FOR THE WORKING CLASS UNDER CAPITALISM!

— IWPCHI

How A Propaganda War Between the USA and China Precipitated the Great Coronavirus Scare of 2020 and the Worst Economic Crisis in the History of Capitalism

It was every bureaucrat’s nightmare: you are responsible for the well-being of tens of millions of workers in one of the most densely populated major metropolitan areas in the world: Wuhan, China. It’s just weeks before the entire nation goes on its annual New Years Festival holiday: the Chinese equivalent of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year rolled up into one of the world’s great cultural festivals. And now, on 29 December 2019, a small group of scientists is telling you that there is a new virus circulating in the city and unless you shut down the New Years celebrations immediately, and the entire city transportation system – planes, trains and automobiles – perhaps millions of people will die.

Like all bureaucrats everywhere, your immediate first concern is… for your career. Are you being set up by one of your political rivals? Why do YOU have to be the one to make this decision? What if you screw it up? Your career will be ruined and you and your family will be instantly turned into social pariahs. How do you get out from under this monumental responsibility with your career intact? Wait a minute: the scientists are probably wrong! How do they know how many people will die from this new virus?

“How many people have this virus right now?” you ask.

“Forty, maybe fifty people. But we’re still tracing their closest contacts and testing them, too, to see if they have it.”

You want me to shut down this whole city over 50 people sick with the flu? The New Year’s festival is only two weeks from now! You’re crazy! Go back and double check your research and make sure you know what you’re talking about.”

This was the most likely origin of the “cover-up” of the Chinese Communist Party’s early response to the COVID-19 outbreak. As soon as the existence of the “novel coronavirus” was announced to the world, the capitalist world’s anti-communist propaganda operations swung into action, denouncing the Chinese Communist Party for “covering up” knowledge of the virus for weeks and of “silencing critics who tried to warn” the world. Immediately the emergence of the new virus became part of the New Cold War between the USA and China and their respective propaganda operations. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had been down this road before with the SARS virus, in which they had been caught trying to cover up the seriousness of that outbreak. This time they were not going to hand the Americans and the rest of the capitalist world another propaganda coup against them.

Within days, the existence of the virus and of the fact that it was a new coronavirus was confirmed. By December 31 Chinese health authorities began to transfer patients to a special hospital in Wuhan used to treat people with highly contagious diseases. They tracked down all the close social contacts of the 50 or so people who had tested positive for the new virus and had begun to focus on a popular live animal market in Wuhan city where most of the first patients had either worked or shopped frequently.

The Chinese Communist Party decided early on that they were going to be as open as possible in making timely announcements to the world as their knowledge of the seriousness of the outbreak grew. They immediately informed the World Health Organization of the existence of the virus and within two weeks had isolated it and published the first scientific report describing the virus and the early knowledge of its origin and its virulence and dangerousness in detail.

All over the world, from every anti-communist media outlet to propaganda agents working Twitter and Facebook for the US government, brutal criticism of the Chinese response to the virus outbreak was launched in a 24/7 barrage combining some truth with lies, including faked photographs and videos. “China Is the Sick Man in Asia” screamed a headline in the Wall St. Journal; Chinese diplomats and government officials denounced what they called a vicious, racist attack on their country and its people.

Under tremendous pressure from a profoundly negative “world public opinion” which had been orchestrated by US and other western capitalist nations’ propaganda operations, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party decided to throw all caution to the wind and take the most drastic steps possible in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the virus. They shut down the live animal market and its surroundings in Wuhan; and then as the number of people infected continued to climb, and the first deaths began to occur, they steadily expanded the shutdown of Wuhan’s economy to the entire surrounding province of Hubei, comprising some 58 million people. Soon it was announced that all large public gatherings in Hubei province were canceled and the New Years festivities were shut down. Schools and universities were closed and then workplaces. The huge regional airport – a transportation hub comparable in national importance to Atlanta’s or Chicago’s in the USA – was closed, and then the railways and the roads. The entire province was placed under lockdown; no one could enter or leave the area. Workers were told that the nation was “at war” with the COVID-19 virus and that it was a matter of national pride that everyone accede to the strict quarantine rules without fail. People who were caught trying to drive out of town were arrested and their vehicles were impounded. It was one of the most rapid and comprehensive efforts in world history of any government to stop the spread of a contagious disease. And for the people of China it had become a national crusade and a patriotic duty to do all possible to stop the spread of the virus and to help their sisters and brothers in Wuhan. It showed how quickly a socialist planned economy in a one-party state can respond to a national health crisis.

What had started off as a golden opportunity for the US and the rest of the world’s capitalist governments to “prove” the superiority of the capitalist system over socialism was turning into quite the opposite. The stunning, rapid response and the drastic measures immediately taken and imposed with a minimum of opposition from the Chinese workers of the Communist Party’s health initiative was proving the superiority of the socialist system! As the World Health Organization and scientists and politicians around the world praised the Chinese Government’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic, the anti-communist propaganda operations reeled in stunned shock as their initially successful efforts to control the “spin” on the story lost traction and were hurled back by the power of the Chinese response.

Beyond the exchange of heated words between the US Government of Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping, little was being done outside of China to stop the inevitable spread of COVID-19 to the rest of the world. Modern transportation networks accelerate the spread of contagious diseases: what took months to occur during the bubonic plague in the 14th century – a world where the fastest mode of transportation was a sailing ship powered by prevailing winds – now takes only days. It’s quite likely that by the time Chinese doctors had even started to realize what was going on, the virus had already been carried from Wuhan to other countries by infected airline passengers. By the time that western airlines finally stopped all flights to and from China – weeks after the outbreak had been announced – the viral cat was well out of the bag. There was no stopping the global spread of COVID-19 now; and it was just a matter of time before new outbreaks began in major cities all over the world.

In the western capitalist world, anti-communist political leaders chortled at the way the Chinese Communist Party had been forced to shut down the world’s second largest economy because of the falsely-alleged Chinese affinity for exotic foods like “bat wing soup”. They wasted weeks of time in which they could have been preparing their own national response to the inevitable arrival of COVID-19 by spending their days spreading false and malicious rumors as to how the virus originated in wild animal markets in China and from restaurants serving exotic animals for food. Meanwhile, the virus was reaching their own nations – and their national health systems – “socialized” or not – were about to face one of their severest tests in their history.

Instead of using the nearly two months of advance notice of the impending spread of the COVID-19 epidemic from China to the the rest of Asia, then to the USA, Europe and the rest of the world to stockpile the medical equipment that would be necessary in order to slow the spread of the illness in their own nations, the capitalist world’s politicians did… nothing. They ridiculed China for “bungling” the initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak and allowed their national propaganda networks to redouble their efforts to portray the COVID-19 outbreak as a signal “failure” of the “inferior” socialist economic system, and portrayed the very same Chinese police-state actions that the western nations themselves would soon be forced to impose on their workers as “communist totalitarianism”.

This shopworn, lying anti-communist propaganda, disinterred from its “Cold War” “end of history” grave for the purposes of a “New Cold War” had been made necessary by socialist China’s amazing economic performance of the past 40 years, in which it has steadily risen above every capitalist nation on the planet except for the USA (which it is due to surpass within the next 5 years). Increasingly struggling to maintain its “capitalism is better than socialism” narrative in the face of China’s historically unsurpassed economic growth and massive destruction of domestic poverty rates, the US and the rest of the stagnant and even retrograde capitalist world is forced to grasp at ever thinner and thinner straws.

What’s a capitalist politician to do in the face of this challenge from “Communist” China? Well, in the case of the COVID-19 epidemic it appears that their “solution” is to run around like headless chickens for a while, then copy everything China did to bring its COVID-19 epidemic under control. Thanks to events having proven that the initial slant of western propaganda vilifying China’s draconian (perhaps unnecessarily so) but successful efforts to contain the spread of the virus, it has now become politically impossible in the West for politicians to adopt measures any less draconian.

This is particularly ironic since the death toll from China’s and the rest of Asia’s COVID-19 epidemics proved to be comparable to the “mere” common flu, which killed as many or more people in every nation on Earth during the 2019-2020 flu season – as it usually does. “You can’t compare COVID-19 to the ‘common flu’!” screamed the “scientific experts” of the capitalist world, who have spent decades pretending that the annual death toll from the common flu (tens of thousands a year in the USA) was ignorable because it was, apparently, an act of god or something. “COVID-19 is different!” they howled in unison at anyone who dared to point out the obvious contradiction between their perpetually laissez-faire attitude to the massive death toll from the “common flu” compared to their raving lunatic response to this new one. The massive over-reaction was the predictable political response of the rabid anti-communists of the western capitalist bourgeois “democracies” who found themselves compelled, in the wake of “Communist” China’s overwhelming public success at fighting COVID-19, to attempt to “show those commies” up by adopting even more stringent measures that would quickly shut down the world economy – in spite of the daily receipt of data from the global COVID-19 outbreak that clearly showed that it was nothing more than a very nasty flu.

Marxists have always pointed out that one of the greatest areas of superiority of revolutionary Marxist philosophy is our adherence to the “dialectical method” of reasoning, a comprehensive way of looking at every phenomenon in its ever-changing totality rather than using the antique preferred bourgeois methodology of Aristotelian logic, which sees everything as a series of static episodes which can be extracted from an ongoing event and looked at as something finite rather than as a mere snapshot of a dynamic and evolving process of evolution. This narrow-minded approach was evident in almost every “scientific expert”’s wild and crazy public pronouncements on the subject of COVID-19. People who spend their entire professional lives examining life processes through a microscope should not be expected to take the lead on issues involving public policy, where macroeconomic effects of public policy have the potential to kill not just tens of thousands but tens or even hundreds of millions. But they irresponsibly rushed to the forefront of the COVID-19 crisis, brandishing their unpublished theses on the virus, terrifying the world with Cassandra-like predictions of millions of deaths if the global economy was not shut down immediately.

In the USA, scientific cretins like Dr. Anthony Fauci, “a consummate politician” as the New York Times described him, who, as arch-anti-communist US President Ronald Reagan’s point man on AIDS stayed infamously asleep while the “gay plague” raged through the gay communities of the USA in the early ‘80s, was placed in charge of the US Government response to COVID-19. He and his colleagues, apparently utterly blind and ignorant of any subject outside of their chosen specialties of virology and epidemiology, but rising to the occasion of the propaganda imperatives of the “New Cold War” went before the news cameras and breathlessly informed the scientifically illiterate US public that, unless the US economy was shut down immediately, perhaps millions of US workers would die from the “deadly” COVID-19 virus. “Only if these measures – far more outrageous than anything done by those commies in China are taken and taken right away without any hesitation or even a pause for thoughtful consideration” their message seemed to say, “will we avoid a death toll comparable to that of the 1918 flu pandemic”.

That flu pandemic, which occurred in the wake of what was at that time the bloodiest world war in human history, killed “anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million” people. In other words we have no idea how many people it actually killed. If it killed “17 million” out of an “estimated 500 millions” who were infected with it globally, then the case-fatality rate would only be around 3.4% If it killed 100 millions, then the CFR would be 20%. That’s quite an error bar, indicative of the fact that no one knows how many people actually died from it. But it doesn’t take a genius of the level of an Einstein to notice that medical science has come quite a long way in the past 102 years. Virology was in its infancy back then; and the terrible trauma of WWI to millions of people all over Europe – trauma that simply DOES NOT EXIST in the USA or Europe or in China in 2020 – must have increased that death toll tremendously.

It is indeed depressing to see the “scientific experts” of the capitalist world brandishing their vapid non-dialectical Aristotelian reasoning, vituperatively screaming at us in one breath that “you can’t compare the ‘common flu’ to COVID-19!” and then in their very next breath to hear them blithely compare the COVID-19 virus to the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic! And yet they did this and continue to do it to this day, despite the fact that the epidemic in China has apparently ended with a death toll of merely 3200 people and that it has signs of having reached its peak in Italy, where 95% of the approximately 8000 deaths so far were of people over 65 and in extremely poor health! That 8,000 figure is also important to remember, by the way: it’s the number of deaths that occur on average every flu season in Italy from… you guessed it! The “common flu”!

In the UK another scientific cretin named Dr. Neil Ferguson and a team of thick-headed microscope-gazers were able to bum’s rush the British Government into abandoning their very reasonable limited quarantine proposals in favor of shutting down the entire UK economy by pushing their non-peer-reviewed study of the possible death toll from COVID-19 rising to 510,000 in the UK and over 2,000,000 in the USA if their complete shutdown of the UK economy was not immediately adopted without any public discussion at all – AFTER it had become apparent that the death tolls in the densely-populated area around the megametropolis of Wuhan, China were not even going to reach 5,000! Yet somehow these scientific cretins – who, if they could only pry their eyes away from their calculators and microscopes long enough, might see that the real-world COVID-19 pandemic was shaping up to be far less apocalyptic than their “calculations” had predicted! So we had yet another example of why “scientific experts” should remain in an “advisory” capacity as part of a governmental panel studying the effectiveness of various options to be taken in response to an epidemic rather than the ONLY VOICE THAT IS HEARD when these situations arise!

This is because shutting down the world economy has the potential to lead to the deaths of many millions of workers all over the world. It is inexcusable to allow the virologists and epidemiologists to take the lead in the response to an epidemic for the sole reason that their proposals will be narrowly tailored to the end result of the stopping of the spread of the virus – and that’s all! The knock-on human impact of the “side effects” of a global economic shutdown are entirely invisible to these people as it is completely outside of their narrow focus of their studies! They literally can’t see the human race for all the virus particles! They are utterly blind to the macroeconomic impact of their proposals. To them, “stopping the virus” is the be-all and end-all of their work. If the virus is stopped before it infects “x” number of people then it will save “x” number of lives, period! They will declare victory and return to their microscopes! But outside their labs in the ivory towers in which they reside, there will be massive human suffering caused not by COVID-19 but by the draconian and absolutely UN-NECESSARY response to what has turned out to be “just a nasty flu virus” with a case-fatality rate comparable to that of the “common flu”!

But it’s almost too late to turn back now. All the anti-communist politicians, most of whom are themselves nothing but Wall St. crooks and swindlers or the partners of such are THEMSELVES scientifically illiterate and completely happy to pass on the responsibility for the response to the COVID-19 epidemic to the scientists! If they turn out to be wrong, these bureaucrats – capitalist “kleptocrats” is a better description of them – can wash their hands of the whole disaster and say “we were grievously misinformed by the scientific community as to how we should have responded”. In the meantime, they have “shown the commies” how tough they are by… launching torpedo after torpedo into the world economy. Thus the propaganda war between the capitalist world and the “Communist” Chinese has completely made it impossible for the politicians of the capitalist west to do anything other than to destroy the world economy in order to “win” what has become a “New Cold War” political pissing contest – from which “Communist China” will almost certainly emerge victorious because socialism works!

The Real Disaster in the Capitalist World Begins Now

As the Chinese economy quickly returns to normal – something that can be done quickly in a socialist “command economy” run by the Communist Party of China, which has finally, after decades of bumbling, stumbled onto a successful method of organizing and running a mixed socialist planned economy – the economies of the capitalist world are in complete crisis mode. The idiotic wholesale shutting down of the capitalist world economy (merely to prolong for a few months the end-of-lives of a few thousand very ill octogenarians) has already led to unemployment levels far higher than were seen in the Great Depression. The longer the global capitalist economy is shut down, the more massive and lasting damage will be done to the working class and the small businesspeople. A one-month shutdown of the US economy will lead to the wiping out of hundreds of thousands of marginal small business operations, in turn leading to the permanent elimination of a couple of million jobs. Larger retail operations like Sears and so many others which had been hanging on by a thread will likely also receive their death-blow, wiping out hundreds of thousands of more jobs. Long-term unemployment and the suffering caused by it in terms of lives and marriages ruined, people made homeless, suicides and domestic violence will take a massive toll not just in the US but throughout the capitalist world. Tens of millions of workers are suffering already due to unemployment and the sudden elimination of their incomes. This economic crisis is going to kill far more people than COVID-19 did.

The economists seem to have lost their minds as well. They seem to believe that they can simply print trillions of dollars and distribute them to the businesses and workers without harming the value of the dollar. The extremely experimental “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) is leaping from the printed page to reality with no drug test and no background check involved! These crazy bastards are launching a macroeconomic experiment the likes of which has never been seen before. Where it will lead is anyone’s guess: but I’m guessing that, as with many “new paradigms” we’ve seen since the dot-com-bust where it was asserted that the alarms rung by “old school” economists could be safely ignored – this time around as well, the “old school” economic “dogma” of what happens when you print dollars by the trillions and dump them into the money supply all at once will reassert themselves with a quickness. And all this wild-eyed economic and social experimentation is being done over a virus which as we see with every new report of the mortality statistics right up to the moment I’m writing this – appears to be literally “nothing more than a nasty flu”!

The revolutionary socialists of the world have been warning workers since the 1840s that there is no future for the working class under the capitalist system, and that continuing to support capitalist politicians and the rotten capitalist economic system will cost the working classes their lives. Since that time we have seen two world wars in which tens of millions of workers were butchered, and still the working classes of most countries have resumed their places as exploited cogs in the capitalist machine. Instead of building revolutionary socialist workers parties to lead us out of the dead end of late capitalism and into a promising socialist future, the working class has, time and again, returned to the voting booths to pull the lever for the lying capitalist politicians. In the 2020 elections in the USA we see the workers doing it yet again. Stupid is as stupid does, as the saying goes. The longer you allow the capitalists to remain in power the closer you are bringing yourselves and all those you love to the brink of total destruction. Either the working class will rise up and fight for its rightful place as the organizers of a new socialist world or we will be annihilated in yet another World War. The decision rests in the hands of each and every worker on this planet. We hope you’ll join us in building an egalitarian socialist world where the endless crises and wars of the late capitalist period will be brought to a permanent end.

Dump the Republicrats! Build A Workers Party! Fight For A Workers Government! Fight For A Socialist Future!

—IWPCHI

Socialist Planning vs Capitalist Anarchy: COVID-19 Epidemic Proves Again that Socialism Works

Socialist China’s Communist Party had two temporary hospitals constructed in just two weeks to handle the massive numbers of COVID-19 coronavirus patients. This photo shows the initial construction stage of Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, China. Capitalism simply can’t do this. Socialism Works!  SOURCE: China News Service

US President Donald ‘Nero’ Trump fiddles while US panics over COVID-19 epidemic.  SOURCE: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1236778368533700609

This past two months we have seen an epic battle being played out between socialist planning and capitalist anarchy as the COVID-19 virus swept first through socialist China and then was quickly spread around the globe thanks to our modern mass transportation systems.

The virus was unknown to science until it was identified about a month after the first known cases occurred in the major urban center of Wuhan, China. As will always be the case with new diseases, it takes more than just one case to trigger the warning systems in our modern governmental health care apparatus. By the time doctors realized it was happening, this new coronavirus had already infected hundreds or even thousands of people in Wuhan; and as these folks went about their daily lives, thinking they had the flu again, they were unknowingly spreading the new virus far and wide. Since Wuhan is a major transportation center in China similar to the cities of Chicago or Atlanta in the USA, it was quickly carried via land, sea and air to places all over the world.

Once China’s medical authorities and scientific community realized what was going on – about 3 weeks after the first cases occurred, their centrally-planned socialist economic system began to swing into action. Within a week they had begun to launch one of the most comprehensive governmental responses to an epidemic ever seen in world history. Scientists isolated the virus and immediately published scientific papers on it and on the first 44 patients who had been identified as having the virus. The Communist Party of China’s leadership began discussions about how they should respond, as the nation was just about to begin its New Year festivals with mass gatherings all over the country and families traveling to visit their relatives – a mass movement of people similar to that which takes place during our Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. After some hesitation they decided that they had to shut down all major public gatherings and begin mass quarantines of those who had been in contact with the first victims of the new virus. How could they do it? Because their nation is united by a collectivist socialist consciousness of the workers who understood that this was not some bullshit concocted by the government but a very real and potentially deadly health crisis. Police-state measures were not necessary, as the well-educated and scientific-minded working class of China understood that this was a national crisis and that personal sacrifices were going to have to be made in order to stop the spread of the disease.

The quarantines and travel restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of China were among the most far-reaching and comprehensive in world history. Travel to and from Wuhan – a supercity whose metropolitan area is home to 58 million people – was completely shut down by order of the government. Workplaces, schools, mass transit systems, every public gathering place was shut down and workers were told to stay in their homes. Food distribution was continued, with one member of each household allowed to shop for necessities once a day. Medicines were delivered to peoples’ homes. Take out food was brought to people by delivery workers. Medical personnel from all over the nation were recruited to go to Wuhan and help stop the spread of the epidemic. Military forces were mobilized to enforce the quarantine and to prevent people from traveling from city to city. Tens of thousands of workers were mobilized and trained to carry out spot checks for flu symptoms and to construct – not ONE but TWO  temporary hospitals with a combined capacity of over 2500 beds to quarantine the thousands of workers who had come into contact with those who had tested positive for the new virus. Thousands of workers, working 3 shifts around the clock for two weeks turned two empty lots into temporary hospitals wit a capacity of  The entire enterprise was absolute proof that socialist planning not only works, but that it works far better than anything that any capitalist nation-stat has ever attempted, never mind achieved.

One of the world’s largest metropolitan areas was shut down with a minimum of panic and a maximum of collective amity between members of the community. Under socialism, of course, no one will be thrown out of their homes because they can’t pay rent; no one will lose their jobs at state enterprises due to the national emergency (although there have been some rumored job losses apparently in China’s capitalist private sector). But by and large this enormous logistical effort was successfully implemented with almost no social upheaval! Now, about 3 months after the very first case was found, the epidemic appears to be subsiding in China; about 3,000 people – mostly over 50 and many with serious pre-existing conditions including cancer – have died, almost all of them in the Wuhan metropolitan area itself.

In stark contrast to the orderly and rational, scientific response of the Chinese Communist Party to the epidemic, as the virus began to spread out to the capitalist world we saw the wanton spreading of panic and disinformation by the global capitalist press. Crises like this sell newspapers and TV advertising, and the more scary the headlines the more papers are sold. All kinds of unfounded rumors were spread about the “deadly flu virus” from China. Passengers on cruise ships that had visited China or that had taken on sick passengers from China became the setting for outrageous scenes as once the news that a ship had passengers who had become infected with the virus, countries began to refuse to allow the ships to dock in their ports. Thousands of people became trapped on cruise ships for days and even weeks as their idyllic cruises became horrific. The cruise lines, worried about their profit margins uber alles, attempted to continue to operate as if nothing had happened, refusing to refund people’s deposits and continuing to make stops and pick up passengers from China.

Capitalists all over the world began to take an inordinate amount of concern for the lives of Chinese people for the first time ever, spreading slander against the Chinese Government’s response to the epidemic and shedding crocodile tears over every new death being reported in Wuhan. These same capitalists were strangely silent about the fact that in the USA, for example, some 20,000 US citizens had already died from the flu in the 2019-2020 flu season. No tears were shed for tens of thousands of their countrymen, but copious crocodile tears flowed for the poor workers of Wuhan! In fact all these people really cared about was trying to spread anticommunist lies about China, pretending that the Chinese gov. had somehow allowed the epidemic to occur. What the capitalists were REALLY concerned about was, of course their profits, which have become heavily dependent on Socialist China’s booming economy. When the Communist Party of China, desperately trying to limit the spread of COVID-19 around the world, shut down all the factories in China’s virus-affected cities, the US and world capitalists really started howling about not the human death toll in Wuhan but the decline in the value of their stock market portfolios! All the capitalists care about in the final analysis is of course their own money.

As if to prove this is a fact, now that the COVID-19 epidemic has spread into the USA and Europe the US and European capitalist governments are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling to cover their asses and the declining value of their assets as the shutdown of the Chinese socialist economy starts to affect the entire world’s capitalist economies. Instead of copying China’s very effective methodology for dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic, every capitalist nation, even every separate state in every nation, is frantically improvising its own half-assed response to the crisis. Of course in the capitalist world, where profits are everything and human life is cheap, the capitalist states can’t figure out whether to protect their populations or their pocketbooks first. The workers of course can’t possibly lose as much as a whole month’s pay! How will they pay their rents and mortgages? Many will be evicted of foreclosed upon! The capitalists will never intervene to protect the workers from the greedy banksters and landlords who will take the opportunity to improve their bottom lines by evicting those who are already behind on their rent!

And what if workers get sick? In the USA, there is no law that requires that companies give workers even ONE DAY of paid sick time! If these workers call in sick for too many days, they will simply be let go by their capitalist bosses and replaced by “someone who wants to work”! In this way, sick people will be forced to continue to go to work, spreading the disease all the more effectively. Capitalism digs its own and the workers graves in this way year in and year out!

Already we are hearing about shortages of medicines, face masks, and virus testing kits. Workers, panicking thanks to an utter lack of leadership by the capitalist governments are hoarding items like… toilet paper, of all things! How can toilet paper help stop the spread of a virus? This panic is a direct result of the frightening headlines & nonsense being spread far and wide by the for-profit bourgeois press & broadcast media just to sell more newspapers and advertising! The capitalist world in a time of crisis is truly a pathetic spectacle compared to the calm and scientifically rational response of Socialist China!

As US workers began to panic over COVID-19 outbreak in USA, US Health and Human Services Secretary Azar went before the national press – to reassure stock market speculators. SOURCE: https://twitter.com/MichaelCBender/status/1237038864419762176

In the USA, the Trump Administration – like the Obama and all other administrations before it, Republican and Democrats – is made up primarily of former Wall St. swindlers. They are more concerned about the effect any quarantines in the USA will have on their stock portfolios than about how many US workers will die. Today, as if to underscore that fact, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter a photograph of himself playing a violin as if he was a modern-day Emperor Nero, fiddling while the USA loses its mind over the coronavirus! His “health care Czar” went on Twitter not to reassure the citizens that their LIVES would be protected but to reassure stock market speculators that “the economy is strong”! THIS is the kind of “leadership” the US capitalist class provides the workers in the midst of an epidemic!

Who do we workers have to blame for this sorry spectacle except ourselves? You can’t have an incompetent and immature government without incompetent and immature citizens. We vote these assholes into office and now we must pay the price for the fact that, instead of building a workers party of competent worker-leaders who can responsibly represent the interests of our class – the working class – we have abdicated our responsibility to ourselves and our families and have decided to “let the rich folks run things”. Well now we will see just how the capitalists – who do not care at all about the lives of workers in the USA or anywhere else – will protect us from this COVID-19 epidemic. If history is any indication – from the US Govt’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to their absolutely inadequate response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico – we can be certain that many workers lives will be needlessly sacrificed once again on the altar of Mammon! Let’s face it: this US Government of Nero-mimicking greedheads SUCKS!

If we as workers want to have a government that places the protection of human lives above all else we need to stop “letting the rich capitalists run things”! We don’t need to create a carbon copy of the Communist Party of China or the USSR; we can build “socialism with American characteristics”! We can build a better socialist country than has ever been built before! But in order to do that we need to build ourselves a revolutionary socialist workers party to represent us in our State Houses and Congress that will fight for a workers’ socialist government that PUTS human lives above all else! Capitalism has never and WILL never do that. Dump the Republicrats and Build A Workers Party before the NEXT major crisis kills even MORE of our family members and friends!

— IWPCHI

Why Socialism? Didn’t the Collapse of the USSR “Prove” that Socialism Can’t Work?

Why socialism? Didn’t the collapse of the Soviet Union prove that “socialism doesn’t work”?

Lots of people ask us “why socialism”? Haven’t the idea and the ideals of socialism been so corrupted by the crimes of Stalin and Mao and by the sterility and oppression of workers lives under the Stalinist or Maoist or the Juche-inspired North Korean regime as to be utterly discredited and useless as a practical and desirable political programme for any future society?

We’ve discussed this in bits and pieces on Twitter with a handful of individuals and groups of people but have never written anything that explains why we are for socialism and why we are so opposed to capitalism. This essay will attempt to explain where we’re coming from in a more comprehensive way.

We do not want to re-create the horrors of Stalinist Russia or Mao’s China!

First of all we want to make it completely clear that we do not worship or seek to reproduce the horrors of the Stalinist or Maoist or Kim Il-Sung-ist versions of “socialism” at all. This is not only because history shows that those regimes have been led by extremely repressive bureaucratic dictatorships but also because they have proven to lead not to the development of socialism but to a return to capitalism and the brutal capitalist exploitation of the working class. Stalinism and Maoism brutalize the working class into submission to the will of the bureaucracy and betray the workers by ultimately leading them inexorably backwards to the status of capitalist wage-slaves, which is the opposite of what they are supposed to do.

There is also no way that we can deny that – to say the least – the development of post-revolution socialist societies have not “gone according to plan” in the classical Marxist sense. However: it is clear to us that there are pretty obvious and compelling reasons why the Stalinist and Maoist-led revolutionary governments developed in the way that they did; reasons that we trace back to the incredibly oppressive regimes that they emerged from and from the fact that they had no ready-made template of how a socialist society must be built. The Stalinist and Maoist workers states were the first socialist governments that came into being, and they came into being under very difficult circumstances, emerging as they did from the horrible political and economic societies that preceded them. This does not absolve them of their crimes against the working class but it does place their development back into the historical context which pro-capitalist historians like to censor completely from their analysis of the development of the socialist movement. The reason why the pro-capitalist historians do this is obvious: their intention is not to simply tell the truth about how and why these regimes developed in the way that they did; their intention is to convince workers that socialism is a bad idea and that anyone who proposes a socialist alternative to the capitalist system must want to reproduce the horrors of the Stalinist gulags or the Maoist disaster of the Cultural Revolution. The capitalists want their historians to teach you that you live in “the best of all possible worlds” and that if workers try to overthrow the capitalist system you will wind up inevitably worse off than you are now. Basically they want you to believe that the human race has reached the highest possible stage of development possible and that the horrors of human misery we see all over the capitalist world are regrettable but, sadly, unavoidable. This is true: the horrors you see human beings suffering are unavoidable – so long as we stick with the capitalist system. This is the best they can do. We know – and the history of even the bureaucratically deformed workers states created by Mao and Stalin prove to us that socialism does work and it can be made to work way better once it is freed from the straitjacket of repressive and stifling Stalinist/Maoist leadership through a socialist workers political revolution.

Why did the revolutions in Russia and China turn out the way they did?

None of the revolutionary Marxists prior to 1917 expected that a revolutionary socialist workers state would emerge first in the most backward countries; they all believed that they would emerge first in the most advanced capitalist states like Great Britain, Germany or the USA. Instead, the chain of oppressive capitalist regimes broke at its weakest links – Russia and China. This now surprises no one in retrospect, but in 1917 it was quite a shock that the first successful workers revolution occurred not in a modern proletarian capitalist state with long traditions of relatively democratic rule but in Russia, of all places: a hideously backward country with absolutely no history of democratic rule, where the economy was about 80% peasant-based agriculture that functioned at the technical level of the 18^th century. If it was possible for the revolutionary Marxists of the time to have been able to select a nation in which to attempt to create the first revolutionary socialist workers state, no one – and we mean absolutely no one! – would have selected Tsarist Russia as their first choice or even as one of their top ten choices. But that is what happened; and if we are to be honest in our analysis of any revolution we must analyze its development as it actually happened and not as we wish it had happened. This requires a lot of specialized study of original historical documents and periodicals that were produced by the leading revolutionaries and their political parties rather than the typically superficial survey of anti-communist “histories” written by pro-capitalist historians which you get if you study these revolutionary movements in pro-capitalist universities. Written history is not politically neutral at all; every historian of the socialist movement (including ourselves) has their own political bias for or against the ideals of the revolutionary socialist movement and the revolutions that were led by revolutionary socialist leaders and their parties. As workers you must decide if you think that it is better for 5% of the world’s population to own all the wealth and run the planet or if it would be better for the future of the world to be determined democratically by the vast majority of the world’s population: you, the workers. There is no tenable position to take in some imaginary middle ground between these two options.

We do not believe that there is any divine metaphysical force directing human destiny; but it is difficult not to get the feeling when studying the history of the Russian Revolution that in 1917 fate dealt the revolutionary socialist movement an extremely tough hand to play when it arranged that the most optimal conditions for the first socialist workers revolution in history would occur, of all places, in the ruins of Tsarist Russia. In our opinion it is proof of the incredible bravery and daring of what stands to this day as the greatest revolutionary socialist party that has yet existed – the Bolshevik Party, led by one of the most honest and brilliant men in human history, Lenin – that they dared to make the attempt to build socialism under what almost all historians agree were the most adverse conditions imaginable. That the Bolsheviks managed to succeed in so many ways despite having made some very serious and costly mistakes – especially in terms of human lives lost – is an enduring testimony to their determination to succeed in building socialism at any cost and to prove that firm foundations for a socialist society could be laid down even under the most adverse conditions. Lenin’s Bolsheviks achieved great successes at the cost of tremendous self-sacrifice among the Bolsheviks and their supporters: thousands of young and idealistic communist workers were slaughtered by the counterrevolutionary Tsarist armies that attempted to restore the monarchy after the revolution. On top of that, the birth pangs of this life-or-death struggle between the remnants of the overthrown Tsarist regime and the peasants and workers government led by the Bolsheviks led to the deaths of several million people. Just as in the American and French revolutions, millions of revolutionary workers and peasants were killed in the fighting to bring a new type of government into existence. And as in the American and French revolutions, the new Bolshevik revolutionary government made some serious errors that added to the human cost; there is no denying this fact. So if in spite of this we still honor and defend the Russian Revolution to this day it is not out of ignorance or because we deny that millions of human beings suffered and died perhaps needlessly due to the inevitable difficulties and struggles that always occur in every revolution – whether it is a bourgeois capitalist revolution like the American and French revolutions or a communist-led one like the Bolshevik revolution – what we must do – and what we as Trotskyists have been doing since the founding of our movement in the late 1920s – is to make a cold, hard, pro-working-class analysis of the reality of what was and was not achieved and what was and was not avoidable during this heroic attempt of the Bolsheviks to create a completely new, modern, democratic socialist workers government under extremely difficult conditions. We study the history of the development of the USSR in all its many-sided aspects both good and bad and draw our honest conclusions from there, regardless of whether or not it “makes the Bolsheviks look bad”. Only through hard work and truthful analysis made always with the historical interests of the working class in mind can we create an intelligent revolutionary socialist programme to create a much better development of human civilization than is possible under the present capitalist system. That is our one and only goal.

Trotskyists defended and still defend the gains of the Russian, Chinese and all the other socialist revolutions; we did not and do not defend everything done by Stalin, Mao, their ideological heirs or their respective repressive regimes.

In spite of the oppressive nature and pro-capitalist betrayals of the Maoist “capitalist roaders” in the so-called “Communist Party” of China, these numbers prove that planned socialist economies can work quite well compared to capitalist economies.

So what are our conclusions? First of all as Trotskyists we know as well as any of Stalin’s many victims what life was like under Stalinism. Members of Trotsky’s Left Opposition were among the first to stand up and vehemently oppose and then to be brutally crushed by the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus; we have no illusions in respect to the true, monstrous nature of the Stalin regime. The development of Stalinist ideology has at its very foundations the abandonment of the fundamental revolutionary Marxist principle of adherence to revolutionary internationalism. The Stalinists, after having proven conclusively that they were incapable of leading the revolutionary Communist International (“Comintern”) which they inherited, to any successes (due to their undemocratic, bureaucratic schematism which they attempted with massive failure to apply in Germany, China and Spain) concluded, erroneously, that since the workers in other countries were incapable of overthrowing their respective capitalist states, they should abandon the Marxist/Leninist programme of revolutionary internationalism entirely. Instead, the Stalinists decided that the task ahead for the USSR was not to fight for workers revolutions worldwide but to retreat inside the borders of the USSR and to build “socialism in one country” – Russia. They set about to degrade the role of the Comintern from being a powerful engine of world-wide workers revolution to that of forcibly subordinating the communist parties all over the world to defend the right of the USSR to exist in its own limited political and economic sphere independent of the capitalist world. This thoroughly counterrevolutionary about-face led to a series of moves being taken by the Stalinists which ultimately led to the complete dismantling of the Comintern as a “peace offering” to the capitalist world. The Stalinists abandoned that prospect in favor of feathering their own nests and making “peace” with the capitalist world. They sought peace with the Nazis, and when that, too failed, the Stalinists sought to make peace with the “democratic West”: Communist parties around the world subordinated themselves to the “democratic” or “progressive” bourgeoisies of their respective capitalist nation-states and sought to become a nationalistic, reformist political parties just a shade to the left of the parties of the Second International. The Stalinists, in a manner very similar to that of the Second Internationalist political parties who abandoned Marxism to defend “their own” bourgeoisies in WWI, ordered the communist parties of the world to defend “their own” bourgeoisies in the global war to re-divide the world amongst the competing capitalist nation-states in WWII. After the war ended this series of betrayals of the Stalinists led ultimately to the “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude of the late-Stalinist regimes under Gorbachev (a parallel development can be seen in China under Mao with his disgusting rapprochement with the Nixon regime even as US bombs were raining down on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). The Maoists, who were nothing more than a Chinese version of the Stalinists have followed a similar path, with Mao first drinking toasts to the health of Richard Nixon and US imperialism to his cretinous follower Deng Xiaoping’s declaration that “to be rich is glorious”, which is the motto of today’s thoroughly reactionary and increasingly pro-capitalist Chinese Communist Party. The “Juche Ideal”, promoted by the Stalinists of the DPRK, is just a North Korean version of “building socialism in one country”, only made even more utopian and unattainable due to the tiny size and political and economic isolation of the DPRK from the rest of the world.

What “failed” in the USSR was not the revolutionary socialism of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky but its degenerated, bureaucratized and ultimately counterrevolutionary antipode: Stalinism.

Our analysis of the development and degeneration of the Russian Revolution – from its promising revolutionary Marxist beginnings under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky to its slow and brutal destruction first under Stalin and then under his ideological heirs all the way to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR without so much as a shot being fired by the working class in its defense – is that what we saw with the collapse of the USSR was the complete and total failure – not of socialism – but of Stalinism, which revealed itself to be utterly counterrevolutionary in the final analysis – precisely as Trotsky had analyzed it way back in the 1930s.

The very last thing we intend to do is to follow the paths laid out by Stalin, Mao or any of their epigones: we seek to learn all of the hard-fought and won lessons of all of these revolutions and to incorporate all of the best elements of them into our political program to bring modern socialist workers democracies into being throughout the world that are far more democratic than any bourgeois democracy could ever be. We repudiate and condemn the disgusting show trials conducted by the Stalinists in which innocent people were forced to “confess” to monstrous crimes and were then either executed or sent to a Siberian exile just as brutal as that suffered by the revolutionary workers under the Tsar’s regime. We completely oppose and denounce any attempt to reproduce today the hideous and anti-Marxist Stalinist and Maoist police-state bureaucracies as they existed in the USSR and in China under Mao, for example. We have seen absolute proof of the fundamentally reactionary nature of Stalinist and Maoist political ideology: the Stalinist and Maoist political roads lead, ultimately, back to capitalism.

What about Cuba, Vietnam and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK aka North Korea)?

All of the regimes leading most of the “communist” states in the world: Castroist Cuba, Maoist China, Stalinist Vietnam and (to a lesser extent so far) the Kim Il Sung-ist DPRK– are essentially Stalinist regimes in which the leading “Communist Parties” are thoroughly nationalist and reactionary and are moving the country away from the ideals of socialism and towards the restoration of capitalism. This is a monstrous betrayal of the workers of those countries and a betrayal of the workers of the entire world. Still, we defend the gains of these workers socialist revolutions; and in any war between the capitalist, imperialist powers and these bureaucratically deformed workers states we will defend the workers states and intransigently oppose the imperialist capitalist powers – including the greatest enemy of the US working class, the US capitalist class and their imperialist government. We call on the workers of Cuba, China, Vietnam and the DPRK to begin organizing revolutionary Trotskyist parties so that they can prepare to lead a political revolution that overthrows the Stalinist/Maoist betrayers and places the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat in power. We call on them to simultaneously defend what is left of the socialist economic foundations of those countries and to honor the heroic, revolutionary socialist roots of their respective revolutions. If Stalinism is not overthrown and replaced by a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat then capitalism will be eventually restored in every one of these countries by the counterrevolutionary and corrupt Stalinist/Maoist communist party bureaucrats; it is just a matter of time before they consummate their betrayals of the workers.

North Korea presents a somewhat different case: it alone in the world continues to fight to defend the socialist property forms created as a result of the Korean workers socialist revolution and has also refused to allow any major incursion of capitalism into the DPRK (though even there the leadership has allowed the capitalists of South Korea to make their first tentative inroads towards capitalist development). Only the murderous belligerence of the US Government, which seeks to place the DPRK on the capitalist road a la China and Vietnam, keeps the North Korean Stalinists from consummating a Gorbachevite betrayal of the workers of the DPRK. By abandoning revolutionary Marxist/Leninist internationalism in favor of the nationalist “Juche Ideals” of Kim Il Sung, the bureaucrats of the DPRK are clearly, if only semi-consciously, laying the groundwork for eventual capitalist restoration in the DPRK.

The capitalist system has long outlived its usefulness and has become the primary obstacle to the future progress of the human race.

We believe that the capitalist system has long outlived its usefulness and can now only lead the world through an endless series of boom-and-bust cycles punctuated by small and large wars, culminating most likely in another global conflagration: a nuclear world war. Preventing the capitalist system’s wanton destruction of hundreds of millions of workers’ lives and the global environment is impossible under a capitalist system that is based on competing capitalist nation-states. So long as the capitalist system exists there will continue to be racism, environmental destruction, poverty, starvation, unemployment, religious bigotry, the oppression of women, discrimination against national minorities and war. Only the organization of the entire world into co-operative socialist workers states can begin to unite the workers of the entire world in the global efforts that are absolutely necessary if we are to stop the destruction of the lives of our working-class brothers and sisters all over the world and the continued destruction of the planet’s environmental treasures. Only under a rationally planned global socialist economic system can we undertake the enormously expensive necessary steps to reverse the ravages our planet has suffered under the destructive anarchy of capitalist exploitation of the world’s natural resources.

The capitalists care about one thing and one thing only: money. Human beings are worth nothing to them; in their money-mad minds the natural resources of our planet exist simply to enable them to get even more money. They pursue the acquisition of wealth with a vicious, pathological persistence that places their own selfish personal interests above that of the entire population of the world and even above what is necessary to maintain the continued existence of human beings on this planet. We are not exaggerating one bit when we say: “Capitalism must die so that the planet and the working class may live”.

Fortunately we do not have to invent an entirely new political philosophy to find our way forward in this critically important juncture of the development of human civilization; the program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky will serve us well as the basis of our own modern revolutionary socialist programme. We base our party on our firm belief that all workers all over the world are our sisters and brothers; we want to unite all workers to work together internationally to make life easier for human beings to live and thrive while we simultaneously protect our shared planet, its environment and all our fellow creatures who live on it. All the capitalists are promising us today is that our lives are going to get harder and harder; there is literally no future worth living for the working class under the capitalist system.

The main problem with capitalism is that it is fundamentally anarchic and purely profit-driven: there is no way under capitalism to develop a rational plan for the protection and restoration of the global environment, for example, because it is more profitable for the capitalists to invest in projects that exploit natural resources by destroying the environment than it is to develop them while simultaneously protecting the environment. Only after the insane supremacy of the profit motive is overthrown once and for all can we even begin to undertake scientific studies to determine how bad the damage has been which the capitalists have done to our planet: their pathological love for money over all else drives them to poison the scientific wells with bogus scientific studies that make science-based inquiry practically impossible. We have seen this with their creation of the global-warming-denialist movement. The human race can not move forward an inch until we rid ourselves of these noxious, murderous capitalist pests who subordinate the interests of the entire planet to their own personal lust for more and more money!

How would life under socialism be better for the workers?

A socialist world would make possible for the first time the ability of the human race to seize control of human destiny by overthrowing the lust for profits and replacing it with a rationally planned economic system in which all production is subordinated to the needs of the entire human race as well as the environment which sustains us. Under socialism we would be able to do something the capitalist world has never been able to do and which it is impossible to do under capitalism: to not just merely reduce but to eliminate the scourges of starvation, homelessness and disease that are crippling the creative potential of the entire human race. In socialist countries they have always been able to begin to end homelessness on the very first day after the overthrow of capitalism simply by making it illegal to deny people the right to housing. They did this by immediately placing homeless people in unoccupied apartments, houses and hotel rooms! That is impossible under capitalism, where housing is not a right but a privilege granted (or denied) to workers at the whim of the capitalist landlords and bankers. In the “democratic” USA, we have the “right to the pursuit of happiness” – but we do not have the right to actually achieve it by guaranteeing to everyone access to all the things that enable a person to be happy, regardless of race, creed, color, sex, sexuality or ability to pay… “little things” like jobs, food, clothing, shelter and health care! Under socialism all those things that are necessary to create human happiness will be guaranteed to all.

We can free the working people from the debasing need to endlessly pursue money for basic survival and to guarantee all the necessities of life to each and every human being on this planet, so that every human being on Earth can enjoy their lives to the fullest, not just the wealthiest 10%. Under capitalism, workers are forced to endlessly chase after dollar bills, like a horde of desperate idiots. The constant struggle for basic human needs which workers are faced to suffer through is an enormous waste of human creative potential. Instead of “pursuing happiness” we must pursue the money for food, clothing, shelter and medical care, competing like animals against all the other workers for jobs while the capitalist class sits there in luxury, laughing at us all the way to the bank. Under socialism we can put an end to the struggle for survival for the first time for the entire human race through a rationally planned economy.

What would rational planning be? For example: a socialist workers government would guarantee all able-bodied workers a job so they could contribute to the building of a prosperous society for everyone. If, for some reason you were laid off, you would receive 100% of the pay you received while you were working, so your standard of living would not suffer. Since housing and health care would be guaranteed as a fundamental right, the loss of your job would not mean the loss of health care for you and your family; nor would it mean that you would be facing eviction from your home! This is impossible to do under the capitalist system! These goals are not utopian, they are eminently reasonable and realizable with the technology and the productive capacity we have at hand today.

Capitalism IS the problem!

The only thing stopping us from achieving these goals is the capitalist system that will not and can not end the scourges of unemployment, homelessness, starvation and disease because – it is not “profitable” for the capitalists to do so! Every day we continue to allow the numerically tiny, greed-maddened capitalist class to dominate our lives is another day in which thousands of workers will be thrown out of their jobs for no fault of their own; it is another day in which thousands of children will suffer hunger and chronic illness and die of starvation and preventable disease; it is another day where tens of thousands of our sisters and brothers will die for lack of basic medical services; it is another day in which millions of our children will not have the opportunity to attend a school, see a doctor, or get anything to eat at all. As workers of the world we have it in our power right now to put an end to all this needless suffering endemic to the capitalist system!

What can we as workers do to put an end to the misery we suffer under capitalism and start fighting for socialism?

We can put an end to it only by organizing revolutionary socialist workers parties dedicated to the overthrowing of the capitalist system and to replacing it with egalitarian democratic socialist workers governments. Every day we wait brings us one day closer to environmental catastrophe and very likely it brings us one day closer to the next global world war. We must snap ourselves out of the dull-minded, passive stupor we’ve had drilled into our minds by the capitalist entertainment and infotainment propaganda that has convinced too many of us that the capitalist world is “the best of all possible worlds”! If we want our children to live better, more fulfilling lives we must fight for that future, because it will not be given to us by a capitalist class that seeks only to figure out how they can put more of our hard-earned money into their bank accounts! The working class makes up the vast majority of the world’s population and has the right to determine how and by whom this planet will be governed. Why do we allow the top 5% of the world’s population to run the planet and to seize more than half of the world’s wealth? Workers of the world, it is time to wake up and unite to fight for your rights and to shatter the chains that bind us to a system that robs us blind, destroys the planet we live on and promises our children a future of wars over water, land and natural resources! The revolution will not happen on the Internet; it must be brought into existence by organizing revolutionary socialist workers parties to fight to bring a much better future into existence. It is time to shake off your passivity and join in this work before it is too late, for the sake of your own and your children’s and grand-children’s futures! We can’t do it for you or without you!

“Capitalism must die so that the planet and the working class may live!”

IWPCHI

DEFEND NORTH KOREA! Congratulations to North Korea On Its First Successful Launch of an ICBM

We extend our sincere congratulations to North Korea for its first successful launch of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.  This is an important step forward in defending the North Korean workers state from constant threats against the existence of North Korea issued incessantly by the world’s #1 terrorist state: the United States of America.  We also condemn China’s slavish acquiescence to the anti-North Korea campaign being conducted by the United States – a nation that slaughtered as many as 3 million Koreans during the Korean War.  Maoist China owes its existence in large measure to the selfless work done by Korean communist exiles who helped lead the Chinese workers revolution.  For China to betray North Korea now when the United States is threatening to launch a massive military assault on North Korea is an act of treason to the workers of China, North Korea and the entire world. China: DEFEND NORTH KOREA!

The global propaganda barrage launched by the world’s #1 terrorist state – the United States – in the wake of the successful ICBM launch of North Korea reeks of hypocrisy and much worse.  The United States has never been threatened by North Korea; in fact it has always been North Korea that has been threatened by the imperialist murderers of the United States since North Korea was first created.  North Korea never had, and it does not now possess any military forces that even approximate the massive military strength possessed by the USA.  The claim that the tiny North Korean nuclear arsenal and military – which can only be described as “defensive” – threaten the massively armed US military Goliath is absurd on its face!  Anyone who believes that tiny North Korea (which possesses no military force capable of undertaking offensive operations on any large scale regionally or internationally) is capable of launching a serious attack on the continental United States – is an imbecile who knows absolutely nothing about military science.

The handful of nukes possessed by North Korea comprise a very rationally designed nuclear strike force that is capable only of effectively defending North Korea from an attack launched from South Korea or Japan.  The overwhelming imbalance of military forces on the Korean peninsula is tilted entirely on the side of the United States.

We are witnessing the degree to which the entire capitalist news media is nothing but the propaganda arm of the US capitalist class and their war machine.  Every bourgeois newspaper on Earth has retailed the “big lie” that the existence of North Korea’s tiny ICBM force – dwarfed by the US’ enormous nuclear arsenal – poses an existential threat to the US!  Lies do not come any bigger than this!  This lie is designed to bludgeon the workers of the world into acquiescence if the Goliath of the United States launches a savage attack on the “David” North Korea.  The US’ propaganda machine’s big lie is an attempt to make “David” appear to be “Goliath”.  Only those people who refuse to open their eyes and to examine the evidence before them could swallow such a whale of a lie!

One of the purposes of this “big lie” campaign being launched by the US right now is to cover up a major international diplomatic incident that was perpetrated by the US against North Korea back in June of this year.

” On 16th of June over 20 agents of the Department of Homeland Security (according to their introduction) and policemen committed a criminal act of moving in on the diplomats of the DPRK who were en route home after attending the tenth session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and took away the diplomatic package from them.

“The extortion of the diplomatic package made by the U.S. is an unpardonable act of infringement on the sovereignty of DPRK as a member state of the United Nations and a criminal offence of grave violation of the international law.

“Inviolability and protection of the diplomatic bag is clearly stipulated in the Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

“Department of State of the U.S. made official apology for the incident but still delays the return of the diplomatic package.

“All these actions show the extreme insolence and impudence of the U.S. which acts rudely in total disregard to the international law, out of inveterate refusal of the DPRK.

“The extortion of the diplomatic package of a sovereign state in the heart of New York where the UN Headquarters is located and international conferences including the UN General Assembly are held clearly proves that the U.S. is an unlawful and lawless rogue state.”

[Source: Korean Central News Agency, “DPRK Permanent Representative’s Letter to UN Secretary General” 4 July, 2017]

This incident was hardly even acknowledged by the US capitalist press.  They truly are the bought-and-paid-for propagandists of US imperialism!

This provocation – along with the endless numbers of military “war games” being launched in cooperation with South Korean, Australian and other US allies from South Korea – and the fact that the Korean War has actually never ended – are the real reasons why North Korea is compelled to pursue the acquisition of nuclear weapons – to defend itself from another savage unprovoked military invasion like what took place during the initial years of the Korean War.

Though we do not politically defend the Stalinist regime in North Korea that has usurped political power from the North Korean working class in order to create a bizarre hereditary socialist monarchy in North Korea, we do recognize that the heroic Korean workers revolution that opposed and ousted the Japanese imperialists and then successfully fought off the unprovoked invasion of Korea by the US after WWII and which overthrew capitalism and established the North Korean workers state was an enormous victory for the workers of Korea and of the entire world.  As revolutionary Trotskyists we understand that it is the duty of every revolutionary worker to defend every gain made by the working class internationally, because, as Trotsky said, those who cannot defend old conquests will never achieve new ones.

The Chinese Maoists of the “Communist Party of China” – renegades from Marxism hell-bent on gradually restoring capitalism in China – are more interested in lining their pockets with dollars and Euros than in defending socialism in China, North Korea or anywhere else.  They are more than willing to throw North Korea “under the bus” in order to suck up to their rich “friends” in Washington, Berlin, Brussels and London.  They must be kicked out of power by the Chinese working class in a political revolution to defend socialism and to bring about a true revolutionary socialist workers democracy in China.  Every attack against North Korea is a thinly veiled attack on China as well.  China is, after all, the ultimate target of the US war machine’s operations in Asia.

By their victory against US imperialism in the Korean War, the North Korean workers earned the undying hatred of the US capitalist class, which has tried every dirty trick in the book to restore capitalism to North Korea – to no avail.  The North Korean workers state has heroically held out against every form of blackmail, extortion and military threat and actual slaughter launched by US imperialism – and North Korea stands today proudly defiant in defense of socialism against US and world imperialism.  North Korea is one of the very few places on Earth where the US capitalist class can not exploit workers for profit-making – and this drives the US capitalist class batshit crazy! And there is no small amount of “good old American racism” behind the US capitalist class’ hatred for the North Koreans.  It is the duty of every class-conscious worker on the planet to defend the right of the existence of the North Korean workers state against every attempt by “our own” ruling classes to overthrow that workers state!

US Workers: don’t believe the lies of the US capitalist class and their press! DEFEND NORTH KOREA!  US/UN/NATO Hands off North Korea!  China, Vietnam, Cuba: DEFEND NORTH KOREA!

 

IWPCHI

DEFEND NORTH KOREA! DPRK Slams U.S. Human Rights Record, Citing Racism, Slavery, Child Abuse

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, known in the US as simply “North Korea”) slammed the US’ human rights record recently, calling out the US Government for its blatant hypocrisy regarding human rights in the US and wherever the US military has launched attacks against countries around the world.

Writing back on 28 February, the Korean Central News Agency (the official DPRK news website) accused the US of being the “world’s worst human rights abuser”, citing the US’ long record of racism and traffic in human flesh which “began with black slave trade”.

“Last year the U.S. released a ‘report on world’s human traffic in 2016’ in which it slandered 188 countries and regions, blaming them for failing to combat flesh traffic. Not content with this, the U.S. went the lengths of mapping out a list of such countries.
“There is no such country as the U.S. where human existence and security are not guaranteed and even the elementary rights of human beings are being violated blatantly.
“The U.S. is a cesspool of crimes and a veritable hell where grisly human rights abuses and bloody man-killing are rampant. It came into being through bloody man-killing and exists by dint of human rights abuses.

“The U.S. is only the country where children without their protectors are thrown behind bars for an indefinite period. About 70 000 children met such fate in 2014 only.
“It is shameless for such country to talk about international law and standards and pull up most of the countries in the world over their ‘human rights situation.'”

The full text of the KCNA article is reprinted below.

The complete political disorientation of the Kim Jong-Il-led DPRK leadership is shown in this article by their uncritical citation of a statement from the viciously anti-woman, anticommunist and antigay Iranian government regarding the US human rights record.  For alleged communists to needlessly make common cause with one of the most hideously backward and anti-worker regimes on the face of the planet merely in order to “buttress” a political attack against the USA’s human rights record is absurd.  It is a fine example of how once a “revolutionary socialist” leadership abandons the fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist internationalism in favor of the utopian programme of “building socialism in one country” their ability to even distinguish friend from foe is completely lost.

While we do not agree with the Stalinist politics of the North Korean DPRK leadership, which long ago abandoned the fundamental tenets of Marxism/Leninism by repudiating the idea of building  revolutionary socialist political parties around the world dedicated to the global overthrow of the capitalist system in favor the utopian idea of building socialism in half a country, we defend the Stalinized North Korean workers state – despite its obvious and major flaws – as an important and historic conquest of the workers of Korea and of the world.  As Trotsky pointed out: if revolutionary socialist and anarchist workers refuse to defend existing victories of the working class they will never be able to conquer new ones.  Heroic North Korea stands today as the last nation in the world where the capitalist classes have been completely kicked out and are unable to exploit a single North Korean worker!  This is precisely why the United States and its capitalist allies in the UN hate North Korea and want to see it destroyed.  We desire to help build the political leadership necessary to launch a Trotskyist workers socialist political revolution inside the DPRK to replace the hereditary Kim Il Sungist/Stalinist bureaucracy with a true proletarian democracy that fights to defend socialism in North Korea, while simultaneously fighting against capitalist restoration in all the other Maoist/Stalinist degenerated workers states, from China to Cuba.

There has historically always been a strong internationalist current in the Korean communist movement, which was fully expressed by the heroic exiled Korean communist worker-leaders of the 1930s who provided crucial leadership for the Chinese working class in the workers movement of China back when Korea was occupied by the Japanese.  Today as the disgusting fake-communist Chinese “Communist Party” leadership slowly restores capitalism to China, stuffing its leaders’ pockets with money and sending the children of the fake-Communist Party leaders to study capitalist business practices in places like Harvard Business School, they stoop so low as to threaten to refuse to defend their brave sisters and brothers in North Korea from US attacks!  Overthrowing what is left of the gains of the Chinese Revolution is the Number One priority of US imperialism; the US seeks to split China away from North Korea by bribing the top Chinese “Communist Party” leaders with cold, hard cash.  The workers of China must oust the betrayers in the fake-“Chinese Communist Party” leadership and replace these cat’s paws of world capitalism with a revolutionary socialist leadership dedicated to defending and extending the historic gains of the Chinese workers and peasants socialist revolution! The restoration of capitalism in China – like the restoration of capitalism in the countries of the former USSR – will be a huge disaster for the workers and peasants of China and of the whole world! The capitalist world has barely recovered from its last great global crisis and is now staggering towards its next great economic collapse.  There is no future for the workers of the world under capitalism other than a future of endless wars, more poverty and more environmental and human degradation!  Every TRUE communist knows this fact down to the marrow of their bones!  A “communist party” that seeks “peaceful coexistence” with a capitalist world that must overthrow every gain of the working class in order to survive is not a “communist party” at all but is in fact a nest of conspiring counterrevolutionaries poised to betray the working class in exchange for the biggest bribes they can get from the capitalists!  The pro-capitalist leadership of the Chinese “Communist Party” must be arrested and thrown in jail – overthrown – by the workers of China in a pro-socialist Trotskyist political revolution before those fake-Communists sell China to the highest bidder!  China must DEFEND THE DPRK FROM EVERY ATTACK LAUNCHED AGAINST IT BY US IMPERIALISM!  The US and its capitalist allies are not potential “friends” of the Chinese working class but are their mortal enemies and future hangmen!

Likewise, we call for the DPRK to return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky and away from the death trap of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist and Maoist programme of abandoning internationalist Marxism in favor of building socialism in one country.  The Korean workers revolution led by the great revolutionary leader Kim Il-Sung has sacrificed to much in the cause of the workers and peasants of the world to be sqandered away by the politically disoriented Stalinist epigones of the “Juche Idea” – which is nothing but a Korean version of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist doctrine of “building socialism in one country” that led directly to the Stalinists’ betrayal of the workers of the USSR. DPRK workers: return to the road of revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist internationalism!

The workers of the US and the entire capitalist world must defend our sister and brother workers in North Korea from the continuous death threats issued by US imperialism and its UN/EU/NATO allies.  US: Hands Off North Korea and China!  US OUT OF THE KOREAN PENINSULA NOW!

-IWPCHI

*****************************

True Colors of U.S. as World’s Worst Human Rights Abuser

Pyongyang, February 28 (KCNA) — The U.S. has come under fire by the international community for its human rights abuses revealed one after another.
Quoting the results of the recent survey made by Polaris, the national human traffic survey institution, UPI disclosed that the flesh traffic increased 35.7 percent in the U.S. last year over that in the previous year.
It said that more than 7 572 cases of flesh traffic were reported in California, Texas, Florida, etc., terming them “a form of modern-day slave system.”
Seyed Ali Khamenei, leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, referred to the fact that a five-year-old boy was detained with his hands manacled in the U.S. some time ago, saying that this shows the present “human rights situation in the U.S.”
All facts go to clearly show before the world once again the true colors of the U.S. as the worst human rights abuser.
Last year the U.S. released a “report on world’s human traffic in 2016” in which it slandered 188 countries and regions, blaming them for failing to combat flesh traffic. Not content with this, the U.S. went the lengths of mapping out a list of such countries.
There is no such country as the U.S. where human existence and security are not guaranteed and even the elementary rights of human beings are being violated blatantly.
The U.S. is a cesspool of crimes and a veritable hell where grisly human rights abuses and bloody man-killing are rampant. It came into being through bloody man-killing and exists by dint of human rights abuses.
It has a history of the most cursed and disgraceful flesh traffic in the world.
Its history began with black slave trade and is still known as the world’s worst country in flesh traffic. 100 000 to 500 000 fall victim to the flesh traffic for slave labor every year and 100 000 children are forced into prostitution annually.
The U.S. is only the country where children without their protectors are thrown behind bars for an indefinite period. About 70 000 children met such fate in 2014 only.
It is shameless for such country to talk about international law and standards and pull up most of the countries in the world over their “human rights situation.”
The U.S. is loudmouthed about “defence of human rights” and “equality for all” world-wide but it can never cover up its true colors as the world’s worst human rights abuser.
The U.S. “human rights” campaign will never work on any country. -0-

DEFEND NORTH KOREA! In Racist Provocation by U.S., Navy Frigate “Chancellorsville” Sent to Japan to Threaten N. Korea, China

Once again, the United States, through its endless military provocations against the embattled workers state of North Korea, has raised the threat of war in the Pacific – and has been called out on it by North Korea.

And once again, the bourgeois press of the USA dutifully snaps to attention and spreads pro-US propaganda in the service of its owners, the numerically tiny US capitalist class, distorting the protests of the North Koreans into irrational-sounding declamations coming out of left field somewhere.

Completely lost in the propaganda of the US-capitalist-class-owned news media is the obvious racist message being sent to the Korean, Japanese and Chinese people: the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser being sent there is named… the U.S.S. Chancellorsville!

Does that name ring a bell? It should; the name of the vessel is a”tribute” to the US Civil War battle fought in 1863 – and WON by the slavery-defending Confederate military forces! It is, in fact, quite appropriate that the US Navy would send a death-dealing warship so named to Asia – a continent where the US military has long played out its racist strategy to reconquer the workers states of China, North Korea and Vietnam, in an attempt to return these heroic workers states to the status of brutally exploited colonial possessions they were – before the workers successfully overthrew capitalism in their respective countries, after decades of bloody struggle.

Originally ordered in 1984 under the administration of racist, anticommunist pig Ronald Reagan, the naming of the “Chancellorsville” was no accident – and neither is the fact that it retains this repulsive name in the face of widespread opposition being organized by decent human beings of  all races, creeds and colors to monuments “in honor of” the Confederacy that exist all over the United States (principally in the states that made up the Confederate States of America).  It is long past the time that the workers of the United States rose up against the racist US capitalist class and their KKK friends and removed every last monument to the Confederate slaveocracy that stands in this country!  But that glorious day will not come until the workers overthrow the US capitalist class in a workers socialist revolution – only then can we finally FINISH THE CIVIL WAR!

So, why would those wacky North Koreans get all upset about one little ship being sent out to patrol in their home waters?  Take a peek at the armament the “Chancellorsville” carries and try to imagine how the US Government would react if the Chinese or North Koreans  sent ships like this to patrol inside the US’ self-declared 200-mile limit of its territorial waters:

Armament:

2 × 61 cell Mk 41 vertical launch systems containing 122 × mix of: RIM-66M-5 Standard SM-2MR Block IIIB RIM-156A SM-2ER Block IV RIM-161 SM-3 RIM-162A ESSM RIM-174A Standard ERAM BGM-109 Tomahawk RUM-139A VL-ASROC 8 × RGM-84 Harpoon missiles 2 × Mk 45 Mod 2 5-in/54-cal lightweight gun 2 × 25 mm Mk 38 gun 2–4 × .50 cal (12.7 mm) gun 2 × Phalanx CIWS Block 1B 2 × Mk 32 12.75-in (324 mm) triple torpedo tubes for lightweight torpedoes

Aircraft carried:

2 × Sikorsky SH-60B or MH-60R Seahawk LAMPS III helicopters.

[Source: Wikipedia, “USS Chancellorsville (CG-62)”]

Moreove, as the North Korean Central News Agency points out in their article: “Military experts are unanimous in commenting that it is the first time for the U.S. to deploy overseas the warship with such striking-capability… If the [total currently-anticipated number] of US warships are deployed [to Japan], the number of the warships in the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka will reach 14 including

the [nuclear-powered supercarrier U.S.S.] Ronald Reagan to be deployed at the end of this year, the appearance of the largest-ever warship fleet in Japan since World War II, foreign press reports said.” [phrases in brackets added by IWPCHI]

The North Koreans go on to state that their concerns about the growth of the US Naval flotilla are not the product of their own imaginations but that in fact “the U.S. Navy base command in Yokosuka claimed it is part of the U.S. ‘strategy for making a switchover to Asia-Pacific’ in a bid to ‘contain’ the DPRK and China”.

The insatiable greed of the US capitalist class leads it – like the capitalist classes of all major industrialized states – to seek endlessly to expand its access to raw materials and markets of every foreign nation-state on Earth.  They seek to drive hard bargains with “Third World” countries like North Korea, ruthlessly exploiting their national resources and squeezing profits from their workers.  The reason the US is so maniacally intent on attacking North Korea is that N. Korea is the ONLY country left in the world that absolutely refuses to allow the capitalists to operate inside their borders!  The world’s capitalist classes are not allowed to extract ANY profits from North Korea – which is intolerable to the greed-addled imperialists!  And so the US capitalist class spends billions of US dollars annually to isolate, threaten and – they hope – ultimately to conquer North Korea and crush its heroic working class!  The workers of the United States must defend North Korea’s right to exist and demand that the United States military be withdrawn from Asia immediately.  These US capitalist greedheads will launch WWIII out of sheer lust for profits if they can ever delude themselves into believing that it can be done “profitably” – i.e. with “acceptable” numbers of US citizens annihilated in a Chinese/N. Korean counterattack.  We must not let this happen!

The North Korean workers state is NOT our idea of an “ideal” workers state – far from it.  There is much to admire about the heroic internationalist history of the Korean working class.  It could well be argued that there would never have been a Chinese Revolution if not for the major contributions of exiled Korean communist workers – who provided vitally important revolutionary communist leadership in China while Korea and China were under brutal Japanese occupation. Having helped lead the Chinese working class to power in 1949, the Koreans launched their own revolution, this time against the savage military assaults of the US imperialist war machine.  In spite of the butchery of 3 million Koreans and the near-complete destruction of North Korea (it is said that no building above two stories was left standing between Seoul and the Chinese border after the US bombing campaigns) the North Koreans, with the assistance of the USSR and China emerged victorious.  The victory won at such a tremendous cost by our North Korean working class sisters and brothers and their heroic leaders (there is nothing phony about the achievements of the great revolutionary leader Kim Il Sung) stands to this day as a victory for every worker on Earth! We must defend North Korea against any attempt by the capitalists to overthrow socialism in North Korea and to return it to the status of a vassal state of US or EU imperialism!

The North Korean workers state, is, like the USSR (formerly) and China, led by a bureaucratic caste that has usurped political power from the N. Korean workers and rules over the nation with an iron fist.  The North Korean government is fundamentally nationalist – which in itself is a complete abandonment of the principles of revolutionary Marxism, which is thoroughly internationalist.  In pursuit of something called “the Juche Idea” –  a quasi-religious and mystical philosophy that claims, among other things, that mountains possess magical powers and that genuine revolutionary hero Kim Il Sung was some kind of god – the North Koreans seek to achieve the impossible: complete economic self-sufficiency in a nation-state the size of West Virginia!  Thanks to their planned socialist economy (and the massive assistance from China and, previously, the USSR) until recently the North Koreans have been able to do quite well.  A series of severe droughts that hit that tiny country hard caused the collapse of North Korean food production and reportedly caused famine in the country – not at all surprisingly – which was undoubtedly exacerbated by the mismanagement of available resources by North Korea’s  autocratic Kim Il Sung-ist bureaucracy.  Back in the ’70s compared to capitalist South Korea  (which has of course  been massively subsidized by the West), the standard of living in North Korea was actually HIGHER than in the South.  Even today, the planned economy of North Korea holds up well against that of South Korea:

GDPs of North Korea and South Korea, 1960-2015. Source: Trading Economics

But with the collapse of the USSR and the continuing degeneration of the Chinese Communist Party into an emerging capitalist class sucking up to US imperialism – both of which threaten the subsidies necessary to keep this tiny nation-state afloat – the North Korean workers state is doomed economically.  If China was to cut off all subsidies to North Korea (a situation which the United States is trying desperately to bring about, and which the continued degeneration of the Chinese Communist Party into a gang of capitalist swindlers threatens with every passing day), then the economic pressure on North Korea could become so great that they would have to make major concessions to the imperialists just in order to survive as an independent state.   The situation can ONLY be resolved in North Korea’s favor if capitalism is overthrown throughout Asia and eventually around the world.  This alone will provide North Korea with the socialist trading partners it needs to prosper.  Unless the North Korean working class can organize itself to depose the ruling Kim Il Sung hereditary “communist monarchy” in a pro-socialist political revolution and return to the road of revolutionary Marxist internationalism, the days of North Korea will be numbered.  This, if it were to occur – just as with the collapse of the USSR – would represent a major defeat for the working class of the world.  This is why we say: DEFEND NORTH KOREA!  US IMPERIALISM: KEEP YOUR BLOOD-STAINED HANDS OFF THE WORLD!  US workers must fight to force the US Government to withdraw its military forces from Japan and from all territories outside the US mainland.  The US capitalist class does not have the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries.  The workers of the US must overthrow the US capitalist class before these greed-infected capitalists launch World War Three, killing perhaps hundreds of millions of workers all over the globe and maybe even wiping out the human race – to say nothing of what such a war would do to the ecosystem of this planet which any “lucky” survivors would be left with!

We republish below the complete text of the North Korean statement on the deployment of the “Chancellorsville” and the larger, ominous threat of a regional war posed by the US’ war moves in their racist “pivot to Asia”.

The statement is in the inimitable butchered English translation sadly common in all official Korean-English translations produced by the North Korean government.  The bourgeois press can snicker all they want at the bad translations; the message is very serious, and the threat so keenly felt by the North Koreans is not a joke at all.  After all, in the US thoroughly racist Korean War, launched just after the equally racist nuclear war crimes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 3 million Korean workers were butchered by the US military.  The North Koreans have every right to protest vigorously every time the US imperialist war machine appears on the horizon.

– IWPCHI

http://www.kcna.kp/kcna.user.article.retrieveNewsViewInfoList.kcmsf

KCNA Commentary Accuses U.S. of Its Moves to Launch Nuclear War

Korean / English / Chinese / Spanish / Japanese

Pyongyang, June 29 (KCNA) — The U.S. military moves to launch a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula at any cost have reached an ever more undisguised and full-fledged phase.
Recently, latest missile cruiser Chancellorsville of the U.S. Navy equipped with Aegis system anchored at the U.S. military base in Yokosuka, Japan.
Belonging to carrier flotilla, it has the mission to strike naval and underwater targets while performing missile defense and anti-air defense duties. Military experts are unanimous in commenting that it is the first time for the U.S. to deploy overseas the warship with such striking-capability.
Two cruisers equipped with similar missile defense system will be deployed in Yokosuka late in 2017.
If the above-said warships are deployed, the number of the warships in the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka will reach 14 including the U.S. nuclear carrier Ronald Reagan to be deployed at the end of this year, the appearance of the largest-ever warship fleet in Japan since World War II, foreign press reports said.
As regards the deployment of three warships equipped with Aegis system, the U.S. Navy base command in Yokosuka claimed it is part of the U.S. “strategy for making a switchover to Asia-Pacific” in a bid to “contain” the DPRK and China.
It was also reported that the U.S. is mulling temporarily deploying four Global Hawks at the Misawa airfield of Japan from July.
All these military moves under the pretext of “containing the DPRK and China” are aimed to kick up an overall nuclear war racket against the DPRK in the ground, air and seas.
This fully revealed once again the aggressive nature of the U.S. imperialists who are making no scruple of periodically disturbing peace and stability in the region to attain their strategic and avaricious purposes.
Through a statement of the National Defence Commission the DPRK declared before the whole world that its army and people would launch a nationwide action of a new high level against the robber-like U.S. imperialists.
As clarified in the statement, the frantic moves the U.S. has stepped up for a nuclear war by introducing Chancellorsville, Global Hawk and the like would face stronger counter-actions of the DPRK.
The U.S. would be well advised to bear in mind that the DPRK has already put in place powerful strike group equipped with strategic and tactical rockets to cope with its missile threat.
The U.S. is required to pay heed to the DPRK’s warning that it is ready for conventional or nuclear or cyber wars.
The world people still remember and will never forget such crime committed by the U.S. against humanity 70 years ago as dropping atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to achieve its strategic aim.
It is a serious miscalculation and daydream for the U.S. to think it can employ the same method on the Korean peninsula as what it did to attain its purpose.
It is as clear as a pikestaff that if the U.S. nuclear maniacs ignite a nuclear war on the peninsula at any cost, they will perish in the flames kindled by themselves.
After all, the U.S. styling itself “the world’s only superpower” will precipitate its final ruin. -0-