Capitalism Caused the COVID-19 Crisis
We cannot let capitalists absolve themselves of blame for the COVID-19 crisis. Their choices have turned an emergency into a disaster.
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Our Public Health Infrastructure Is Losing a Fight With Capitalism
COVID-19 teaches us why Medicare for All should be the floor of our demands, not the ceiling. As an epidemiologist argues, we need to radically rebuild our entire public health infrastructure.
“To Fight Unemployment, We Have to Fight Capitalism”
The COVID-19 crisis has hit South Africa's poor and working-class majority hard, with the government favoring the rich over the unemployed. Our friends at Africa Is a Country spoke with three South African organizers of the unemployed, who are fighting for decent public services — and a basic income.
How the Global Financial System Is Hobbling South America’s Response to COVID-19
Argentina’s public health response to COVID-19 was far better than Jair Bolsonaro’s disastrous mismanagement in Brazil. Yet as the two countries seek to rebuild, both are enfeebled by their subordinate place in the global financial system, a subordination that is threatening to turn today’s shock into a protracted crisis.
How Capitalist Competition Hobbled the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout
Big pharma firms like Pfizer are marketing COVID-19 vaccines for a profit, yet the research behind them would have been impossible without universities and public funding. The lack of an international public health response has placed capitalist profit over human need — and will leave billions of people unvaccinated.
The Way We Produce and Patent Drugs Will Kill COVID-19 Patients
It’s hard to overstate the wickedness of Big Pharma’s lobbying efforts to ensure patent protection for COVID-19 drugs and potential vaccines. But the real architect of these crimes is not CEOs or shareholders, but the market.
Finland Had a Patent-Free COVID-19 Vaccine Nine Months Ago — But Still Went With Big Pharma
A team of leading Finnish researchers had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready last May, which could have allowed countries all over the world to inoculate their populations without paying top dollar. Yet rather than help the initiative, Finland's government sided with Big Pharma — showing how a patent-based funding model puts profit over public health.
The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable
Commentators like to point to Wuhan’s “wet markets” as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.
David Harvey: We Need a Collective Response to the Collective Dilemma of Coronavirus
The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for us to think again about Marx’s idea of human freedom. As David Harvey writes in Jacobin, emergency steps to get through the crisis also show us how we could build a different society that’s not beholden to capital.
Thank Socialism for the Vaccine. Blame Capitalism for Its Distribution.
The jaw-dropping speed of COVID-19 vaccine development is a glorious marvel of science, cooperation, and economic planning — a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian world could produce and achieve. But the lifeboat ethics of vaccine rollout is a horrifying display of the inefficiency and cruelty of capitalism.
China Is Not the Enemy — Neoliberalism Is
China’s united response to COVID-19 is often painted as a reflection of authoritarian “Asian values.” But the collective mobilization relied on real public support — a temporary social truce that today threatens to fracture.
We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole
We talk to two public health experts about America's COVID-19 response and how poor households have borne a disproportionate share of the pandemic's hardship. We need to urgently fight for a more just society.
COVID-19 Shows Why We Must Socialize the Food System
Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don’t serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs — one that can provide food for all.
Thank Socialism for the Vaccine. Blame Capitalism for Its Distribution.
The jaw-dropping speed of COVID-19 vaccine development is a glorious marvel of science, cooperation, and economic planning. But the lifeboat ethics of vaccine rollout is a horrifying display of the cruelty of capitalism.
Mike Davis Tried to Warn Us About a Virus-Induced Apocalypse
Historian Mike Davis wrote a book fifteen years ago warning of the coming global pandemic. The “monster at our door” has finally stepped through that door in COVID-19, and unfortunately, Davis was proven correct.
The US’s Neglect of the Elderly Has Turned Murderous
The catastrophe that continues to unfold across the US as COVID-19 spreads is disproportionately affecting older people, who are perishing in far greater numbers than any other group. In a pandemic, our routine neglect of the elderly has turned murderous.
The Lockdown Is an Opportunity to Redefine What Our Economy Is For
The COVID-19 crisis has shown that markets alone can’t meet our societies’ fundamental needs. But state measures to ward off economic collapse are just the start of a battle over the future — one where the principles of solidarity must be extended from health care to all aspects of society.
Kinshasa Prepares for the Pandemic to Hit
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the authorities lack the resources, the capacity, and even the public trust needed to respond effectively to COVID-19. Rich countries in the North must not leave its people to face the pandemic without international support.
Pandemics Show How the Free Market Fails Us
The Spanish flu of 1918 infected a quarter of the world population and was decisive to the rise of public health-care systems. Today’s COVID-19 crisis is again showing that collective problems demand collective solutions — and a state that provides for all our essential needs.
Delivering Food in a Pandemic
On Monday, Italy began to ease COVID-19 restrictions, with more than 4 million returning to work. But some, like delivery workers, never stopped working — nor organizing for labor rights in an industry deemed "essential" and putting workers at serious health risk.