“The activity of the Communist and Workers’ Parties under the conditions of the pandemic and the capitalist crisis, for safeguarding the health and the rights of the popular strata, in the struggle to change society, for socialism. ”
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Party of Labour of Austria (PdA)
Capitalist disease, socialist cure
The year 2020 is widely perceived by the public as being marked by the Sars-CoV-2 or CoViD-19 pandemic. It will have a significant impact on people’s lives, work and social conditions worldwide, and is also accompanied by the most massive capitalist crisis since the Second World War. The crisis phenomena clearly show the inability of capitalism to ensure the needs and survival of humanity, which is underlined by the policies of bourgeois governments. The Party of Labour of Austria as the Marxist-Leninist party of the Austrian working class has the task of analysing the situation, educating the working people about it and the mechanisms of the capitalist economic system and the bourgeois system of rule, mobilising and organising them for the revolutionary class struggle in order to overthrow the system and build the new society of socialism and communism.
Crisis of the health system The corona virus may be of natural origin and a zoonosis is nothing unusual, but the handling of the pandemic situation is man-made. In this respect, it is also evident in Austria that the bourgeois government consisting of conservative People’s Party and the Greens is neither able nor willing to effectively protect the health of the people. It shifts responsibility to the private sphere of people’s lives and neglects appropriate and effective measures at the workplace for economic reasons: production must continue, while workers remain exposed to the full risk. Moreover, it is a payback for the fact that all governments of the last decades - whether conservative or social democratic led - have ruined the health system in many areas, even though the situation in Austria is still relatively better than in many other countries. There have been staff cuts, wards and entire hospitals have been closed, the number of beds has been reduced again and again, the state health insurance has been starved of funds. All this was done in order to consolidate the state budget on the one hand and to open up the health sector to profiteering on the other: private capitalist companies were given access to the public health system, private supplementary insurance and deductibles became necessary, so that medicine also revealed itself as a class system. The rich can afford expensive treatments, the working class and the poorer social classes are only second-class patients. The ruling parties apparently believe that a hospital must function like a capitalist enterprise that must make a profit - but people’s health is not a commodity. The Party of Labour demands a universal, free and efficient health care system for all, with sufficient state IB Special Edition
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