As bodies wash up on the banks of the Ganges river, mass cremation pyres light the sky, and Covid-19 patients die by the thousands for lack of simple oxygen, we need look no further than India to see the sickness of capitalism. Though India is the world’s leading maker of Covid-19 vaccines, less than three percent of its population is fully vaccinated. With 17 percent of the world’s population, the country “accounts for half of Covid-19 cases and 30 percent of deaths worldwide” (reuters.com, 5/12). As inter-imperialist rivals U.S. and China seesaw between vaccine nationalism and vaccine geopolitics, the profit system’s callous indifference to workers’ lives has been exposed as rarely before.
Whether they’re running so-called liberal “democracies” in the U.S., Europe, and India, or more openly fascist states like China and Russia, the capitalist rulers are showing their willingness to sacrifice millions of workers in their drive for maximum profits. Only with communist revolution, and by organizing society under the leadership of the international working class, can national borders be smashed—and the capitalist bosses along with them! Only then will life-saving oxygen, vaccines, and technical know-how be shared for our collective benefit. Only then can we have a truly healthy world.
Modi’s Covid massacre
As the pandemic’s current wave spreads from India’s overwhelmed cities to its countryside, where medical resources are almost nonexistent, the situation is getting steadily worse. On May 12 alone, Covid-19 deaths in India “swelled by a record 4,205 while infections rose 348,421 … carrying the tally past 23 million, health ministry data showed. Experts believe the actual numbers could be five to 10 times higher, however” (reuters.com, 5/12).
While India’s bosses blame the country’s plight on a lack of supplies from the U.S. and the European Union, this Covid-19 disaster is rooted in capitalism, the brutal racism of India’s centuries-old caste system (intensified and codified under British imperialist rule), and a blatant disregard for workers’ lives. Pre-pandemic, public health spending stood at a dismal one percent of gross domestic product (Bloomberg News, 4/22).
Covid-19’s latest rampage in India is due in large part to the desperation and hubris of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the anti-Muslim racist who in January declared victory over the coronavirus. Facing rising opposition from within the Indian ruling class, Modi took a page from Donald Trump and Jim Crow Joe Biden and prioritized election campaigning over workers’ well-being. He encouraged religious ceremonies and sporting events that drew millions of closely packed people, most of them unmasked. In a few short months, India went from reporting 10,000 new cases per day to 400,000 (CNBC, 5/3), a number widely believed to be a huge undercount.
We can’t breathe
Though India supplied much of the world with oxygen over the first year of the pandemic (Economic Times, 4/21), it can’t supply its own hospitals for lack of infrastructure, from roads and train systems to essential storage capacity. Patients are being told to bring their own oxygen cylinders with them to the hospital (NPR, 5/5).
From Minnesota and New York City to New Delhi and Mumbai, hundreds of thousands of workers cannot breathe under the bosses’ brutal knees. Like human labor, the most basic and abundant elements of life—oxygen and water—are commodified by the imperialists in their vicious competition for maximum profit. And like every process under capitalism, vaccine distribution is defined by racist inequalities. To date, 83 percent of the world’s vaccinations have been given in the wealthiest countries—and only 0.2 percent in the poorest ones. In the U.S., nearly half of all adults have received at least one shot. In Africa, only 1.3 percent have any protection (New York Times, 5/6).
U.S. bosses outflanked by China
The deep split in the U.S. ruling class has hampered efforts by the main-wing finance capitalists to use vaccine diplomacy to reassert the U.S. onto the world stage after Trump’s “America First” isolationism struck a chord with tens of millions of U.S. voters. With the 2022 midterm elections just a year and a half away, President Joe Biden only recently—and over the strenuous objections of the big pharmaceutical companies—waived intellectual property protections on vaccine patents, allowing the recipes to be shared with India and Africa (NYT, 5/8).
But without substantial help with vaccine production, quality control, and distribution, the waiver will be meaningless. As one legal expert noted, “We’re not talking about any immediate help for India or Latin America or other countries going through an enormous spread of the virus.” While U.S. officials are negotiating the text of the waiver, “the virus will be mutating” (statnews.com, 5/6).
Meanwhile, the more unified Chinese ruling class is filling the void. By the end of April, China had already sent 800 oxygen concentrators to India and was set to send 10,000 more (The Guardian, 4/29). China’s bosses recently scored a big win when the World Health Organization (WHO)  approved the Chinese-owned SinoPharm vaccine for inclusion in WHO’s global initiative to vaccinate low-income countries (NYT, 5/7).
China is using its wealth “to broaden its global political influence” as part of its new “Health Silk Road,” a core component of its imperialist Belt and Road Initiative. (Foreign Affairs, 3/11). A year ago, the U.S. thought it had won a victory over China’s bosses when a former Indian health minister was elected to chair WHO’s executive board. The board “promptly supported calls to investigate the origins of the coronavirus,” which was widely seen as an attack on China (NYT, 12/24). But when the report was released in March, it failed to call out China’s early suppression of critical data on the pandemic, a measure of the Chinese rulers’ rising global influence (NYT, 4/7).
China and India are longtime regional competitors with an ongoing history of bloody border clashes. China recently moved to redirect rivers to generate vast amounts of power at India’s environmental expense. Even so, China’s vaccine diplomacy could expand its regional influence and possibly disrupt—or at least complicate—the U.S.-India alliance.
Fight for communism!
The Covid-19 pandemic has put a magnifying glass on the crimes of capitalism. It has never been clearer that the profit system stands for racism, sexism, disease, and needless death—and for a future of fascism and war.
Under communism, a system with no money, profits would never drive decisions on public health.  Vaccines and medical and production expertise would be shared equally by all workers of the world. So while the bosses use oxygen, water, and vaccines as pieces in their inter-imperialist chess game, Progressive Labor Party fights for a communist world. We fight for a world where exploitation is abolished and decisions are made by and for the international working class—the class that creates all value. Join us!