What Should the Left Do Now? Study.

By J.E. Karla

Everyone on the left is asking what we should be doing right now, but nobody wants to hear that we ought to be studying more. That’s tough, because strategic collective study is always one of the most valuable things we can do with our time — if it’s done right. It is a clear, concrete project that can generate real victories quicker than you might think. 

Why Study?

Can we discern how and why capitalism is a bad thing, or are its wrongdoings random and mysterious? If it is a mystery, and we can’t understand it or change it — then we can’t be revolutionaries. 

If, on the other hand, capitalism operates in understandable ways, then we could — in theory — disrupt it. In that case we need to know the system’s history, its predictable trajectories, and what has worked — and not worked — in stopping or slowing it down before. Blowing that off in the name of “pragmatism” would be like going to a dentist who thinks their high school shop class taught them everything they need to know about drilling your teeth. 

To put it another way, we can either study theory or continue to be the victim of forces we choose not to understand. 

When Should We Study?

Check out this video about Naxalite guerillas in India. See what happens at 5:30 — these comrades from one of the poorest places on the planet, with very little formal education, find the time to read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. We should fight back against any liberal notion that poor people aren’t smart enough to study theory — workers, peasants, prisoners, and the poor have done this study for centuries now. 

One of the best guidelines revolutionaries have discovered over all those years: prioritize study following any significant defeat. 

Mao developed the theories that led to China’s liberation during and after the Long March, Lenin cracked the code of proletarian revolution while in exile, Marx and Engels spent their lives exploring the failures of the 1848 revolutions and then the Paris Commune. The US left has not had a meaningful victory in decades, and huge swaths of us got hoodwinked by the Democratic Party — again. This is the time to dig in and see what we missed, and to make sure we stop making the same mistakes over and over. 

How to Study 

First, study collectively. Communist study is not an academic exercise, it is a preparation for action. The group you study with is a ready-made nucleus for organizing. Also, studying by yourself makes it more likely that you will persist in error — the more minds you bring together, the less likely you are to end up thinking things that make organizing harder. 

Second, make accountability your highest priority. Collective study makes it easier to get through tough material, but it only works if everyone does their part. The words “I didn’t finish the reading but…” should be anathema in your study group. Help people that start falling behind, but If you don’t have the discipline to read a book, how will you ever make it through a revolution? 

Third, focus on the theorists whose ideas won. Yes, capitalism is back in power pretty much everywhere, but the Russan nobility and bourgeoisie Lenin and Stalin defeated or the Chinese comprador class destroyed by Mao did not come back — they don’t exist anymore. That’s more than any of their anti-communist critics can claim, and if we aim to defeat capitalism we should learn what's worked and what hasn’t. 

All of them were inspired by Engels, so try this. Message five trusted comrades right now and find a night you all have free three weeks from today. Send them this link and congratulations — you’ve organized a communist political project. If you need to break it up into a few sessions, that’s okay. Balancing capacity and the work that needs to be done is called strategy, and it’s how we’ll win.

Finally, remember that our study should never be aimless. Each session needs a facilitator to guide the discussion towards the most important questions of all: how does this help us understand our own conditions, and what does it suggest about possible ways to change them? Follow the study and the discussion into action, then consolidate what you learn in documents the rest of us can read. Repeat until we’ve smashed the state. 

This is How We Win

Bernie Sanders signed up one million volunteers. Imagine if 10 percent of them gave up on bourgeois politics and made revolution a real priority. 100,000 new communists could form 10,000 to 15,000 study circles, each of them sharpening their understanding of capitalism into real political weapons. 

They could go into thousands of communities and use their knowledge to organize the disorganized, to help proletarian people fight for themselves. Imagine if they shared their discoveries with one another, and through collaboration and debate created a growing, thoughtful, strategic communist movement in the heart of imperialism. Imagine if the capitalist state deepens its current crisis at the same time.

The outcomes would be unpredictable, but one becomes a real possibility: revolution. Without study, that is impossible, which is all the reason we need to focus on organized, collective study right now. There’s nothing more pragmatic we could possibly do.

Donald Trump Is Going To Win. Now What?

By J.E. Karla

If we have a scientific view of history we can make confident predictions about the world of politics. It was easy to predict that Bernie Sanders would lose, and even an unrivaled crisis of capitalism couldn’t save his “movement.” Here’s another safe bet: Donald Trump is almost certainly going to be re-elected in November. We know this the same way we know how the coronavirus spreads — with a principled observation of material conditions.

This is depressing, but knowing that Trump has a nearly unbeatable edge frees us up to work on something more useful than the same “lesser evil” strategy we’ve been duped into over and over again.

We are prone to getting duped because most political observers in the US are liberals with an idealist outlook as superstitious as a creationist or fortune teller. Many of them suspect the truth about Trump’s impending victory, but they think it’s because Fox News and other right wing media have somehow hypnotized “working class” voters into ignoring their true self-interest.

The truth is actually the complete opposite. Right wing ideology secures political unity among its subjects precisely because Donald Trump best serves their interests. Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest broadcast alibis for his supporters — highlighting the roles played by non-Trump actors in the coronavirus crisis, for example, a disaster caused by every part of the ruling class, including Trump. The alibis, however, are secondary to the material interests at play, and if Fox and their friends didn’t exist, some other voices would step in to justify reactionary rule.

The basic interests at hand are settler colonialism and white supremacy. The liberal system that the elections ratify actually invented the white middle class — small-scale white capitalists and landowners, managers, technicians, professionals, functionaries, and favored workers. Europe industrialized, destroyed its peasantry and found itself with more people than it could feed. Its ruling class armed this excess population, shipped them to the “New World” and empowered them to secure their existence by expropriating Native people and the enslaved. The resulting political surplus granted to even the poorest “white trash” was both the cheapest social program ever launched and a chief obstacle to any mass mobilization against the large bourgeoisie.

But falling rates of profit have eroded the surplus that made the order work, and the white middle class has been in big trouble since at least 2008. Middle-aged white men have experienced an unprecedented increase in mortality since then, driven by drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. They got laid off from managerial positions or bankrupted during the last economic crisis and never got those jobs or businesses back. Where they didn’t swell the growing ranks of the homeless they landed in dead-end service-industry jobs, took up gig economy piecework, or ended up dependent on disability checks and the painkiller prescriptions that come with them.

Donald Trump’s appeal — Make America Great Again — has always been an unsubtle promise to restore that white supremacist premium. As soon as white voters bought into the plan, he had a nearly insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College — an institution explicitly designed to favor white supremacist parties. Only a nominee that swamps him in popular support could overcome this structural advantage.

Instead, the Democrats are going to nominate Joe Biden. It seems like a blunder on their part, but let’s take a materialist look at this decision too. Between tax cuts, canceled environmental protections, attacks on labor, and gutted social programs Donald Trump has done gangbusters for the bourgeoisie. They made trillions before the coronavirus struck, and they know that he’s the guy most likely to let them kill as many people as they need to for the stock market to get going again.

Most of the liberal class shares these interests; they too benefit from a Trump victory. That’s why they have only opposed him with conspiracy theories or West Wing-style bullshit about “America’s place in the world.” They even downplay the very real harms of his racist policies — they don’t want to stir up the people under attack, their class enemies. Fox News gives viewers a reason to stick with Trump, MSNBC gives viewers arguments they know won’t stick. Liberals don’t really mind if he’s in charge, he just embarrasses them.

The best irony of all: they ended up with the one nominee more embarrassing than Trump.

So the system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and its major players are acting like they’ve always acted. We can anticipate that it will keep rolling right along no matter how many doors we knock on or how many of us hold our noses and vote for the other rapist. Biden’s long history of reactionary corruption is the only source of any real uncertainty about November’s outcome, as maybe the ruling class will decide to switch horses — they are both going the same direction, after all.

One thing we do know for sure is that the bleeding won’t stop until we cauterize the wound. We can’t heal our disease until we cut the capitalism out of us once and for all. Anything else is superstition, and we now have experimental proof — again — that electoral politics is the worst kind of faith healing, at best.

Sanders Supporters: It’s Time to get Disillusioned

By J.E. Karla

The word ‘disillusioned” has a negative connotation in our society, implying that illusions are good for us. In a life-or-death situation, however, illusions are fatal, and the fantasy that capitalism will give us the tools we need to destroy it threatens billions of lives. The oppressed of the world need actually radical Bernie Sanders supporters to snap out of it, right now. The rest of this essay is addressed directly to these earnest, disappointed supporters.

Your greatest illusion is probably the belief that Bernie Sanders somehow advanced the left over the last five years. He did not. Mass political energy rising up in the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and other mass movements got pushed into this campaign, now with nothing to show for it. This is an empirical fact, with vote counts and delegate totals to prove it. Even after tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars raised, Bernie regressed badly since his last failure in 2016. 

Yes, the coronavirus wreaked unforeseen havoc, but why should a crisis of capitalism work against an allegedly anti-capitalist campaign? It’s because Bernie’s style of opportunism is an open compromise between the ruling system and mass demand for change. When this contradiction erupts, the opportunists have to choose between either their imagined aims or their concrete collaborations with the class enemy. 

Bernie chose the latter, standing down in order to protect the system. The ruling class needs immediate unity behind the state in the broadest sense — not just the government, but the entire apparatus of capitalist power — if it is to survive this crisis. Bernie immediately fell in line, just like a US Senator is supposed to. Now his supporters can choose to follow this lead or to denounce this surrender. Which will you choose? 

If you believe that the exploited masses have the power to rise up and set ourselves free — i.e the basic idea of all revolutionary politics — then the question becomes which choice validates that concept: advancing Joe Biden’s ambitions, or refusing to further play the capitalist game? Bernie’s primary political objective is now the election of Joe Biden as president. Sticking with him out of a sense of reflexive loyalty is a clear betrayal of the masses.   

This is also the answer to the “lesser of two evils” logic Bernie and his allies in the Democratic Party are trotting out, now for the umpteenth time. For a child in a Palestinian refugee camp, a woman working in a Sri Lankan sweatshop, someone toiling in a coltan mine in Central Africa, or a Yemeni family praying that the drones miss them again today, the US elections change nothing. Not only is there no difference between Biden and Trump, there was no hope even in Bernie Sanders after all. 

Indeed, when it comes to key questions like the struggle against NATO, the IMF, WTO, and the US dollar, Biden may actually be to the right of Trump. This looks topsy turvy until you get good and disillusioned. Marx and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto that communists “are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only… in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.” We either take this materialist perspective, or fall into the same opportunist trap over and over again. 

If you’ve spent any time over the last five years enthralled by the Bernie campaign, you’ve seen the consequences of this error. All of your work and money has been handed over to a befuddled rapist hack for the credit card companies and military industrial complex. The only way out of this hole is to stop digging. It’s time for you to give up on this illusion, once and for all.

The good news — kinda — is that we’re in great collective shape for a period of study. Start with the great dissector of opportunism — Vladimir Lenin. Read State and Revolution, and then Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. For a great look at how those dynamics have developed into our present age give John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century a read, followed by Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik’s A Theory of Imperialism. Get some disillusioned former Bernie supporters together and study as a group — it will help you stay accountable. 

It may feel less “active” than what you were up to with Bernie, but remember that you would have done much less harm if you’d done nothing at all. If there’s any hope of a silver lining in this experience it will be folks like you turning this heartbreak into a spirit of real resistance. Follow that spirit the next time a mass movement is urged to go electoral, and remind them of your one-time folly.  

We know that this will come up again sooner or later because no one comes out of this system without thinking a lot of very destructive things. Bernie supporters often point out the isolation and self-absorption of much of the left. You’re right; we have our own illusions we need to snap out of too. But the same system that worries about you being “disillusioned” tells you that it’ll help you slit its throat if only you play by its rules. Remember what you’ve learned, and don’t believe it again.

Capitalism Needs Another Bailout. It's Time to Let It Sink.

By J. E. Karla

There’s an old saying that leftists have predicted seven of the last three economic downturns. We know that capitalism is doomed to crisis, but we are often disconnected from how that crisis actually comes to pass. Now that we face a looming depression that’s surprised nearly everyone, it’s a great time to try thinking about production a little like a businessperson. It actually yields some pretty communist results.

The trick to thinking this way is pretty simple: businesses exist to make money, and the finer points of Marxist political economy notwithstanding, they make money by bringing in more revenues than expenses. These expenses can be broken down into the costs of goods and services, costs of revenue, operating costs, taxes and interest.

The costs of goods and services were the very things Marx focused on in his critiques of political economy – the costs of raw materials supplied by nature and the human labor-power used to transform them. This is the source of all value, and even capitalists understand that the surplus here pays for everything else. That’s why “gross profit,” total sales minus these costs, is their primary measure of profit. Even service businesses – airline, hotels, lawyers, etc. – have to make their money from gross profits generated by a commodity manufacturer somewhere else in the system.

With production gutted right now, this surplus isn’t getting generated, and that’s why the entire system is in big trouble. Demand-side problems caused by everybody isolating are bad enough, but Marxists know it’s the production side that runs the whole thing. On a micro level it’s true that their costs of goods and services aren’t being accrued right now, but debts on materials already purchased and perishable materials rotting in warehouses threaten to sink enterprises, nonetheless. Add in their other costs, and their options without a bailout are to dig into savings, sell off assets, or go bankrupt – an option with cascading consequences throughout the supply chain.

These other costs include “costs of revenue,” including salaries for managers, payments on long-term purchase agreements for raw materials, and – crucially – all of the income for service businesses. They also include operating expenses such as the costs of making sales and the overhead for the business. If businesses are renting space, paying mortgages on idle facilities, on the hook for service contracts or supply arrangements, having to ship mostly empty trucks, or still getting utility bills without the sales to cover them they either have to default and go bankrupt, or get outside help. As for taxes and interest, the government is going to want their money sooner or later, and not paying the bank now means the debtor can’t borrow after the pandemic, when credit will be more necessary than ever.

The system as a whole definitely does not have the reserves to cover all of these costs for very long, and they can’t sell assets for enough money to cover them either. They’re still trying, of course, which is why pretty much all asset prices dropped in recent weeks. Capitalists have been trying to get whatever they can to pay as many bills as possible, and their slide has only been halted by the promise of incoming bailout funds.

So, the only alternatives the businesspeople of the world can see are either a global decimation of production with no real prospect of restarting in the foreseeable future – an economic depression – or bailouts. The word “bailout” refers to the process of rescuing a sinking ship by dumping water from a leak overboard, a process that only works if you can collect and dump water at a faster rate than the ship takes on.

Central banks and governments are – as a result – furiously printing money in the hopes that it will be enough to keep the system afloat. At the same time they are also hoping that the consequences of uncharted economic policy won’t make things worse in ways they haven’t anticipated. Will it work? Nobody knows, but it’s a good time for one of our customary predictions of doom.

A much surer alternative would be to simply use state power to suspend contractual obligations, debts, rents, utility charges, and taxes – plugging the hole instead of bailing out the ship. They could then provide a universal basic income and guarantee delivery of necessary services without payment. They could compel the continued delivery of vital goods through government order and compensate all the necessary workers at a level commensurate to the benefit they are providing to society. They could further streamline things by eliminating unnecessary marketing and management positions.

At most a much smaller bailout might be needed to pay for ramping up operations after the pandemic has passed. In return, the government could claim an equity stake in all of these enterprises, using their ownership to serve the public interest.

Some caveats aside, the name for such a system is socialism, and the businesspeople of the capitalist class would rather endure a depression or kill millions of people than tolerate even a limited experience of socialism. Even the plausibility of such an arrangement – virtually every element of that description has been officially proposed or adopted somewhere in the last few weeks – terrifies them, because it makes it clear how close a socialist society really is. We could, conceivably, have it tomorrow.

The biggest caveat, of course, is that the existing bourgeois state will never do this. And smashing it while building a new one makes the task much harder. But the state’s legitimacy is eroding more and more every day, and a protracted depression is sure to swell the ranks of the proletariat, creating the very solution to our primary problem. Even if they pull off the bailout, they’ll only leave the system as a whole less prepared for the next crisis.

That's why the same business guys so enamored of up-by-the-bootstraps tales of rugged settler individualism are so desperate for government checks right now. We may have called more shots than we’ve made, but that’s only because we have always known one thing they are just now learning: capitalists are trapped on the high seas of crisis, surrounded by a world ready to throw them overboard, soon.

Time, Money, and Lives: The Simple Math of Viral Mass Murder

By J.E. Karla

The masses make history, and the mass pushback against a premature end for social distancing efforts has compelled Donald Trump and his allies to relent. Yet for a brief, shining moment markets soared at the mere suggestion of an early end to anti-virus hygiene measures. For the most reactionary leaders -- those like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- the tradeoff of lives for money is ongoing.

How does this calculation work? To understand, just look at the famous chart going around to demonstrate the need to “flatten the curve” of virus cases.

There are three significant numbers represented by this image: the area under each curve, the threshold extending from the y-axis (number of cases), and the x-axis (time). They are each most significant to a different audience.

The public at large cares most about the areas under the curves: how many people are going to get this disease? Am I going to get it, or will someone I care about get it? The bigger the area, the more likely you are to be touched by the virus. Related to this, of course, is a number not represented in the graph: how many will die from it. 

The second number -- the threshold -- is relevant to that question, and most significant to public officials and health professionals. This is the number of cases that the health care system can safely handle at any one time. The area bounded by it and the top of the curve has a dramatically higher mortality rate than the area below it.

The third number is most relevant to the capitalist class -- how long the plague lasts. Capital is bound up with time, as it represents surplus production, the amount of time the capitalists can make workers produce beyond the point at which our labor power has been paid for. The longer the shutdowns last, the less capital is generated. Furthermore, capital not invested in the persistent circulation of goods and labor is not capital at all -- a pause in production poses an existential threat to the system as a whole.

So there is a contradiction at hand between earnest policymakers and the capitalist class. Public health experts and the officials listening to them are desperate to keep the curve as low as possible. This means saving lives (the priority of the public at large) at the expense of a longer duration for the crisis; social distancing reduces the reproduction rate of the virus until it runs out of steam. Capitalists are just as desperate to shorten the duration by simply exhausting the supply of uninfected people as quickly as possible, even if it means many more deaths -- perhaps into the millions.

For them there is really no downside. A disproportionate number of those who die will be old or poor, meaning that a mass die off would likely entail an increase in productivity and a reduction in social support costs. Any bottom line impacts will get covered by a bailout of one sort or another.

The capitalists also own the media so they can control the narrative -- “this is not a time for politics, it’s a time for charity” -- and they have very conveniently placed a hated buffoon as the figurehead of the enterprise so they can blame him and pretend they never liked the idea all along if they need to. They’ll swap him out for another stooge that will kill for them when the time comes, granting symbolic catharsis to outraged liberals happy to see their 401(k)s back in the black.

Worst-case scenario, they can push towards a new world war with China and hide their culpability under a blanket of jingoism. They’ve already begun that play, and it’s worked many times before.

Only a mass revolt would upend their calculations, and history has shown that at crucial moments they have underestimated that risk. This has a strong possibility of being one of those times, but they prepared for this long ago, using a combination of state violence and philanthropic assimilation to suppress and NGO-ify popular movements. The best-case scenario: near-spontaneous and ad hoc mass formations like the Occupy movement. Look for bourgeois openness to social distancing to reawaken at that time.

Until then let’s be as calculating as the enemy. Let’s maximize our creativity and flexibility. Let’s match their disregard with compassion, and their chauvinism with a global perspective. Let’s trust the masses as much as they fear them. Most of all let’s realize that we actually share one thing with them, namely the thing we lack the most: time.

The Wall Street Journal's Pitch for Mass Murder is Catching on in Capitalist Circles

By J.E. Karla

Not even two weeks into an extraordinary response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the upper echelons of capital are wondering whether saving millions of lives is really worth the damage being done to their investment portfolios. According to reports, the debate among the ruling class is over whether or not to walk back some of the measures taken to slow the spread of the virus -- efforts already considered tardy and inadequate by public health experts -- in order to minimize business losses. 

Like many elite notions, this idea was first launched in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. An unsigned editorial there is the most visible the vanguard of the bourgeoisie ever really make their deliberations, and this one last week (behind a paywall, of course) was especially candid.

After opening paragraphs congratulating the response to date, hoping that “with any luck” the nation’s health care system won’t collapse, they lay out their basic thesis:

“Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.”

After some attempts at pulling heart strings over the entrepreneurs that will eat the most shit in the months to come -- using the petit bourgeoisie as human shields for big business, as is custom -- and some other telling admissions we’ll return to, they end with this:

“Dr. (Anthony) Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has explained this severe lockdown policy as lasting 14 days in its initial term. The national guidance would then be reconsidered depending on the spread of the disease. That should be the moment, if not sooner, to offer new guidance on what might be called phase two of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.” 

They do not have the guts to explicitly state that this “phase two” would mean allowing most normal activity -- the contact the virus needs to continue its spread -- to return, but their weasel word description of “substantial social distancing… in some form” (emphasis mine) says it all. “This should not become a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate… But no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health.”

They don’t want to debate how many lives to sacrifice in the name of saving “jobs,” -- a euphemism for the fortunes of employers, the bourgeoisie -- but that’s a great way to describe dialing back the only measures so far demonstrated to work against this plague in the name of economic “health.” 

How many lives are we talking about? As I write, 565 people have died of the disease in the United States, with fatalities doubling every 2-3 days. The experience in Europe and China indicates that response measures take roughly a week to slow the virus down. That means that we should see 2-3 more doublings before last week’s actions finally take effect, 2260 to 4520 dead people this week. The Journal and their allies are suggesting that we should let those effects last a week, and then ratchet up the spread of the virus again. 

Even assuming a very optimistic scenario where the doubling drops by half -- i.e. to once every 4-6 days -- and then lands somewhere in the middle -- say 3-5 days -- that would mean somewhere between 72,000 and nearly 600,000 dead people just a month from now. 

But it’s worse than that, because there are about 5 times as many critical cases as there are fatalities. The absolute best case scenario puts us at more than 360,000 critical cases in a country with less than 100,000 intensive care beds. The worst case puts us at 3,000,000. 

You can then add thousands of deaths from non-coronavirus causes that could not get adequate treatment -- car accidents, allergic reactions, heart attacks, etc. And that month cut off is arbitrary; the deaths would continue after that. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof quoted a British epidemiologist as estimating a best case of 1.1 million. That best case involves much more distancing than what the Journal and company are proposing. They are calling for hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, to be sacrificed for the sake of “economic health.” 

This blood thirsty logic is precisely the sort of thing capitalists project onto communists. This, however, brings us to the admission I alluded to above, buried in the middle of the editorial:

“Some in the media who don’t understand American business say that China managed a comparable shock to its economy and is now beginning to emerge on the other side. Why can’t the U.S. do it too? This ignores that the Chinese state owns an enormous stake in that economy and chose to absorb the losses. In the U.S. those losses will be borne by private owners and workers who rely on a functioning private economy. They have no state balance sheet to fall back on.”

We don’t need to debate the class character of the Chinese state -- even the Communist Party of China will admit that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” accommodates global capital. Regardless, the Wall Street Journal openly admits that the options at hand are a state-controlled economy capable of stemming the plague’s advance or letting potentially millions of people die for the sake of sustaining a privately-owned one. 

The US government could easily freeze all debts, rents, and other contractual payments, guarantee a short-term income for all families, and take all necessary measures to maintain provision of food, medicine, utilities, and vital services until the virus has run out of steam. But even a momentary economy run on the basis of human need and not the accumulation of profit poses the threat of a good example. It’s bad enough that China does it incompletely, hence official bellicosity against them even in this hour of mutual need. 

There is no amount of human lives the ruling class wouldn’t trade to prevent that risk, especially when they know they are the least likely to die.  

The only silver lining is that one way or the other most of us will come out on the other end of this nightmare, and when we do the argument we must make is clear: capitalism will continue to kill us by the millions and billions until it is stopped. You don’t even have to take our word for it -- you can read it in the paper.