Every day, capitalism more and more reveals itself as a system that can never serve workers’ needs and must be wiped from the face of the earth. The new coronavirus pandemic, which rulers worldwide could see coming, has temporarily shut down large sectors of their economy. But regardless of when the bosses reopen some or all of their factories and services, it’s clear that their much-touted “boom” has become the biggest catastrophe for workers since the Great Depression, or perhaps ever in modern history. Behind this monumental failure are the economic laws of capitalism (see box) and their cyclical crises. Ultimately, the rulers can survive their self-induced cataclysm only by inciting workers to fight and die by the millions in the coming inter-imperialist world war. As communists in Progressive Labor Party, it’s our job to lead the international working class to turn this murderous conflagration into a fire of revolutionary uprisings. It’s our task to build a world that abolishes production for profit, racism, sexism, and the exploitation of workers.
Big Fascists’ divisions
The Big Fascists of finance capital, who have led U.S. imperialism since World War II, are in a fight to the death with the domestically oriented Small Fascists led by the Koch family and fronted by President Donald Trump. These two factions of bloodsucking parasites have different ideas about getting their profit machine back on track. The Small Fascists are pushing to reopen businesses quickly while passing the buck for Covid-19 testing and ducking any obligation to the cash-hemorrhaging states. The more long-term-thinking Big Fascists, like the Council on Foreign Relations’ Richard Haass, understand that state and local governments and hospitals will need funds to stay afloat and keep workers alive and churning out profits. The ruling class can’t wait until 2021 and a possible vaccine to end mass “safer-at-home” orders and reopen their economy. They need to ramp up surveillance testing and tracking on a mass scale. If they succeed in doing it, it won’t be out of empathy for the workers whose lives hang in the balance. The bosses care only about keeping their assembly lines and supply chains intact and protecting their industries from destruction.
Though they have yet to gather the will to practice what they preach, the Big Fascists know they need to discipline their own class to build all-class unity for world war. They must also co-opt the burgeoning struggles of fast food and other workers and by tenant unions calling for strikes and rent cancellation. But even as liberal Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo feign concern for their residents, it is clear they botched the response to this crisis (see CHALLENGE, 4/29). In fact, both federal and state politicians made severe budget cuts that have led to rationed health care for the working class. Annual reports from U.S. intelligence agencies predicting an inevitable pandemic make a mockery of ruling class claims that they could not prepare for it (The Atlantic, 3/18).      
As the great “progressive” hope Bernie Sanders endorses the racist, sexist bankers’ stooge, Joe Biden, as the Democratic nominee for president, main wing liberals are blaming Trump for the latest economic crisis and mismanaging the Covid-19 response. But communists know that the problem began long before Trump and will be with us long after the racist grifter is gone. It’s capitalism that creates the conditions for the disasters that ravage the working class.
With the seeming success in containing the virus in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in South Korea, “some scientists wonder if eliminating the virus with good management might rebuild some faith not just in democracy, but also in the value of expertise” (New York Times, 4/24).
 The island nations’ bosses swiftly locked down outside travel and controlled their populations with thorough contact tracing through cell phones. Sooner than later, the U.S. rulers will need similar technology to impose open fascism and prepare for war.
Buildup to World War III
Prolonged global economic crises expose the fact that capitalism will never work for the working class. As their rate of profit falls (see box), capitalists have only one option: a massive destruction of productive capacity that allows them to start the next cycle with less competition. The capitalist world escaped the Great Depression only after both sides bombed their rivals’ factories into oblivion in World War II.
Today, as a prelude to the war to come, the rulers’ nationalist propaganda is on the rise in the U.S. and China. Both of these imperialist rivals must win workers to betray their own class interests and fight a duel to the death for world hegemony. China, the rising power, has used the Covid-19 crisis to brandish its world leadership credentials. Since March 1, it has exported millions of masks, testing kits, and pieces of personal protective equipment (New York Post, 4/6), while pointing to high U.S. death rates and blaming the U.S. military for concocting the rus. The U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are promoting anti-China racism by attacking the Chinese bosses’ early cover-up of the extent of the infection and using the CIA to uncover uncounted deaths there (NYT, 4/2). In its latest vain attempt to check China’s expansion, the U.S. Navy has sent warships into the South China Sea (NYT, 4/21).
Only communism can serve the working class
Workers forced to choose between hunger and a deadly virus can see through this racist garbage. Though many mass protests have been curtailed by curfews and bans on gatherings, workers are still letting their voices be heard. Whether with masks and physical distancing, in caravans of cars, or online and on the phone, strikes and protests are inspiring our class worldwide. Let workers led by communists seize these moments of struggle.
Let’s overthrow the bosses and their death-dealing system! With 26 million workers and counting having filed for unemployment benefits in the U.S. alone, and millions of others out of work who don’t qualify, there now hundreds of millions more unemployed workers worldwide. As masses face hunger and homelessness, the working class is growing more restless. Strikes for the most basic protective equipment and healthier workplaces are spreading, led by the same workers who recently were fighting like hell for better wages and benefits.
Tenants in North America, Europe, and elsewhere are organizing for May 1 strikes to demand rent cancellation for the duration of the pandemic crisis. While the U.S. rulers fight among themselves over how to hold on to their dwindling power in the face of severe challenges from Chinese imperialists, we in Progressive Labor Party have a historic opportunity. As we continue to organize on the job and in our mass organizations, we can turn this upsurge in activity and militancy into schools for communism.
The profit-mad capitalists have a warped view of “essential” work during a pandemic. Health care, grocery stores, food service, and public transportation are necessities for workers. But construction crews building multimillion-dollar sports stadiums in gentrifying neighborhoods aren’t essential for the working class. Nor are racist police harassing and killing our class brothers and sisters in the streets.
The most essential work we can do is to build a mass communist organization to smash the bosses and kill the contagion of capitalism. On to May Day! Join PLP!

*****

Karl Marx on Capitalism in Crisis
“Overproduction is specifically conditioned by the general law... to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay.”           
                     -Karl Marx, Crisis Theory
Karl Marx and the early communist movement studied and exposed the inner workings of capitalism. These thinkers found that capitalist economies—based on production for profit—are vulnerable to periodic crises. Two of their most important ideas are the crisis of overproduction, the result of an unplanned, competitive system, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time.
Mature capitalism requires huge corporations to borrow enormous amounts of money to beat out the competition and corner the market. It creates a consumer economy that requires massive amounts of credit and debt. The bosses’ profit imperatives and competitive pressures lead them to ruthlessly cut costs and attack workers’ wages. This in turn leads to overproduction, since workers can’t afford to buy what all the companies produce.
As restaurants close and workers are fired or furloughed and can’t buy as much food, we see farmers destroying livestock and crops simply because they can’t sell them. No matter that children are going hungry and groceries and food banks are battling shortages. If goods can’t generate a profit, the bosses will plow them under. The capitalist ruling class is driven first and last to protect its own economic interests. Workers’ needs are irrelevant.  
The falling rate of profit is most noticeable in advanced capitalist economies like the U.S. Early on, it leads businesses to move their factories to less developed countries, where they can pay workers less and environmental regulations are looser. Then they shift their capital from plants and new technology into paper investments like mortgages and other debt packaged as assets. These asset bubbles eventually burst, as evidenced by the subprime housing market debacle in 2007-8. Because of the global interconnectedness of capitalism, economic downturns in one area soon lead to devastating consequences for workers throughout the world.