Lessons from a lowly virus

https://fighting-words.net/

By David Sole, May 23, 2020

Severe stress on an individual organism will often expose weaknesses in its physiology. But that same stress may often also bring out hidden strengths. What is true of the individual is also true of a social organism or society. The coronavirus, small as it may be, is teaching many lessons to the people of the United States.

Labor Creates All Wealth

Trade unionists for decades sung the labor movement anthem “Solidarity Forever” (by Ralph Chaplin, 1915). Most vocalists may not have gotten as far as verses 3 and 5, or paid much mind to the words if they did sing them. But the current pandemic, unprecedented in modern history, with the mass shutdowns and stay at home orders has given real meaning to the traditional song. It reads

“It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade, dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid. Now we stand outcast and starving ‘midst the wonders we have made, But the union makes us strong.”

A bit later in the song,

“They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn, That the union makes us strong.”

This song summarizes the Labor Theory of Value, discovered by the bourgeois economist (when these were still honest investigators) David Ricardo and made famous by the great socialist thinker Karl Marx. One can see the panic among the corporate/banking elite and their paid politicians who, with the pandemic still in full swing, are stampeding workers back to unsafe jobs. Every worker can clearly see that it is our class that does the work, it is our class that makes profits for the “idle drones” (another term from Solidarity Forever) and it is our class that makes every wheel turn. The mass media, for a moment, is describing “essential workers” and “heroes” those very workers who previously got no attention and miserable wages and working conditions.

Bailouts for Whom?

The rapid onset of the pandemic and the shutdown of massive sections of the economy quickly caused a crisis for the two main classes in this capitalist society. Workers either lost their jobs or were laid off in the millions, losing their income. Most working class families have very little economic cushion to fall back upon in such a situation. The capitalist class – the so-called 1% (more properly 0.1% or 0.01% of the population) – found that they were no longer extracting “surplus value” (in Marxist terms) from the labor of their workers and faced catastrophic decline of their profits….

Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Mural – North Wall. | Detroit Institute of Arts