Excerpts from a public statement by the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), 15 March 2020
Read the full statement at: http://communistpartyofireland.ie/r-2020-03-15.html
The CPI expresses its solidarity with all those affected, and who will be affected, by this growing health crisis, and to the health staff and emergency services in the front line...
..We, as a nation, have difficult choices to make over the coming weeks. We either step up our efforts and implement aggressive social distancing and tracking to try to slow the rate of infections and therefore the death rate, though at significant economic cost, or we follow the British lead and accept attrition of the old and the vulnerable but stabilise the economy more quickly.
The question becomes one of people or profit. We cannot allow the interests of those who profit dictate our fate.
The CPI urges all its members, supporters, followers and readers to demand that each one of us implement aggressive social distancing.
We must protect those are most vulnerable. medically and economically, and demand that the Government implement a nationwide mortgage and rent holiday; that it direct funds through social welfare to those affected by loss of jobs or loss of earnings; that it guarantee essential free food supplies to those most in need.
This is the only effective way that citizens will be able to materially withstand the huge strains on their household and livelihood in the coming months.
Many needless deaths will occur without drastic public health action and immediate intervention, which is why we must step up our collective effort to implement aggressive social distancing. The World Health Organisation estimates that 15 per cent of cases will result in “severe infection, requiring oxygen,” while 5 per cent are “critical infections.” Given the most recent projections—conservative when we consider the comparable projection in Britain of an infection rate of 80 per cent, compared with the HSE’s prediction of 40 per cent—we are left with a stark figure of 335,600 people in Ireland as a whole possibly needing critical care. The health services in each part of our partitioned country are incapable of meeting the present demand, much less an increase this severe.
A worrying trend that we are witnessing is the increase in the death rate where the virus has not been contained, because of ineffective action and a shortage of intensive-care beds, which further affects patients, unrelated to the virus. Even if cases were, optimistically, evenly spread out over a period of eighteen 18 months we would still require the capacity to treat more than 18,000 critical-care cases a month—far beyond our existing capacity.
The reality, however, is that those who will be infected will be clustered within the next two to three months, in effect leaving the health service unable to deal with the numbers that need intensive care. We could see as many as 40,000 deaths over the next five months, according to some of the modelling that has been done. This may that mean those in the front line will have to make the individual decision on who should or should not be saved; and the “austerity” budgets over the past ten years have forced their hand to make more of those decisions than necessary...
... There are growing signs of recession in the core capitalist economies, including Germany and the United States. We are witnessing a continued decrease in global trade and manufacturing conditions. Capital’s confidence within the core has been on a downward trend for the past year, while working people are experiencing a growth in extreme social inequality, growing levels of indebtedness (higher than pre-2008 crisis levels), and an increasing tendency towards working poverty and precarious employment—to the extent that some 44 per cent of employees in Ireland are now in this category.
The current pandemic will present an opportunity by the ruling ideological forces to present the deepening economic crisis as a consequence only of the spread of Covid-19. They will use it to confuse and hoodwink workers about the real nature of this growing economic crisis, which has its roots in the very logic of the capitalist mode of production. Signs of economic malaise long preceded the most recent collapse in global stock markets.
Low and even negative government bond yields, anaemic growth, warning signs about unsustainable corporate debt and stalled growth in capital investment have all been signs pointing towards a coming recession over the past year. Like all past crises, the ruling forces will attempt to use this crisis to engage in new attacks on workers, globally and here at home.
Workers need to be alert to the fact, and learn from past lived experience, that crisis presents an opportunity by the ruling class to attack workers and advance the interests of capital. The CPI restates that there is no new phase of capitalism (neo-liberalism): rather what has been and is taking place is a deepening of the structural crisis of the system itself. The solutions that the ruling class impose in the vain hope of overcoming its inherent structural contradictions simply lay the foundations for the next crisis, propelling the system forward to ever more destructive forms.
The ruling class are driven to intensify the exploitation of both labour (workers) and the natural world, to intensify violence, wars, oppression, and environmental destruction. They desire to ruin the earth and to break the growing resistance of workers around the world; yet we see, from Chile to France and India, that there is a growing awakening among workers to the nature of their oppression and the real nature and role of austerity policies.
The goal of austerity was and is to enrich those whose income is largely dependent on the ownership of private property, such as CEOs and the owners of corporations, at the expense and exploitation of the majority, who do the actual work or are forced or struggle to seek work.
The evolving economic crisis can only further exacerbate the deep inequalities experienced by the working class and reinforce the dependence and domination by imperialism.
If we are to end this dependence, inequality, homelessness, poverty, precarious employment, precarious shelter and inadequate health services we must seek a radical departure from this exploitative and oppressive system.
Progressive forces and movements must unite to form a broad, class-conscious, anti-imperialist movement if there is any hope of bringing about this change. Political parties on their own won’t do it. Trade unions on their own can’t do it. Social and cultural movements on their own can’t sustain it. Only by united action will we have any hope of changing the material conditions of our people...
...What the Covid-19 pandemic has clearly shown is that under a socialist system crisis can be contained, controlled and avoided when the people of a country have the ability to employ all the resources available to them, for the benefit of all the people. It has also shown how barbaric a system can be that is based on private ownership and the necessity to seek profits.
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