Then there is Trump's Democratic predecessor. Former President Barack Obama gave well-publicized remarks to two groups of students Saturday: seniors graduating from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and seniors graduating from an array of American high schools.
Obama's comments were unserious, perfunctory and banal, delivered in Obama's fake-populist persona. He referred to the Trump administration only indirectly, when he declared, "This pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they're doing."
In fact, the Trump administration, the Democratic and Republican parties, and Wall Street know exactly what they are doing. They are compelling millions of workers to go back to their jobs, knowing full well that many of them will contract coronavirus and die. They are doing this to restart the extraction of profit from workers in order to pay for the trillions handed out to Wall Street, approved unanimously by both parties.
The Socialist Equality Party condemns the back-to-work campaign. We reject the false choice between impoverishment and death. The economic crisis facing tens of millions of people is not the consequence of the pandemic, but of the policies of the ruling class and the capitalist system.
Every measure taken by the Trump administration, along with governments throughout the world, has been based on the interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy. In opposition to this criminal policy, the SEP insists that the interests and needs of working people and society as a whole must take unconditional priority over all considerations of profit and private wealth.
The implementation of measures to stop the spread of the pandemic and secure the interests of the working class -- including the continued shutdown of non-essential production, a massive program of universal testing and contact tracing, the reallocation of society's resources to ensure high quality health care for all, and the provision of full income to all workers whose jobs are affected by the pandemic -- is incompatible with the continued domination of society by the corporate and financial oligarchy.
Everything happening demonstrates one inescapable fact: The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic is at the same time a fight to organize the working class independently and in opposition to capitalism. Only in this way can a way out of the crisis in the interests of the working class be forged.
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