“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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Communist Party (Italy)
In Italy, the health emergency following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has put the contradictions and limits of monopolistic capitalism before the eyes of all. Already other catastrophic events, such as the collapse of the Genoa bridge, had displaced common sensitivity, dispelling the myth of the goodness of privatizations compared to public management. The pandemic crisis has definitively demolished this myth. The destruction of public health service is now being impeached by many, even by some who until yesterday were on the side of the private vision/ privatisation. In particular, it is now clear that a system cannot be based only on the concentration of resources and capital, which the private system produces precisely to maximize profits; on the other hand, the public system, based on the massive contribution of motivated and well-educated operators spread throughout the national territory, is the best weapon not only against emergencies, but also in the daily prevention of disasters. This general debacle of bourgeois ideology – as opposed to the sympathy aroused by the examples of support offered, for instance, by the Cuban Medical Brigades and other countries– opens up great spaces for us to resume our ideological battle from more favourable positions. The post-Covid crisis is acting like a war without bombs, which destroys productive forces, annihilates small activities and favours large monopolistic concentrations. Those who are paying the price for it are, as usual, the lower classes. Employees are either out of work with a promised layoff that most of the time is in guilty delay or forced to work in conditions of serious danger to their health. Not to mention the whole vast sector of small undeclared work that was eliminated at once, ruining financially millions of workers, already forced to suffer the oppression of this system. The queues at the pawn shops are testimony to this and we can imagine how profiteers of all kinds are preying on these poor people. The extreme point of this exploitation has been in health care. The massacre of inpatients and workers in retirement homes, the recruitment of doctors and paramedics with the promise of a stabilization that has not yet been seen and will probably not be seen. People betrayed after being sent into the trenches with the rhetoric of “heroes”, while being treated instead as modern cannon fodder. IB Special Edition
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