Nassau County in New York, the state of North Carolina, and the University of California campuses have been the first in the U.S. to pass laws outlawing the wearing of masks in public. Other jurisdictions have proposals for such laws, including one in the legislature in New Jersey (northjersey.com, 09/12). This new fascist offensive attacks both political marches and people who wear masks for medical reasons. Bringing both groups together in the fight against racism and capitalism is an opportunity to broaden the revolutionary communist movement. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been engaged in the fight for safer working conditions, disability justice, and COVID-19 safety as well as the fight against the genocide in Gaza and the long-term struggle for communist revolution. Resisting mask bans is a newer fight.
The push for mask bans started as a way to intimidate anti-genocide protestors. It makes it easier to identify them with facial recognition and to target them for suspension, firing, and harassment for opposing U.S. imperialism.
The disability justice community has called for masking in medical facilities and other public places as a public health issue and is also under attack. At the Nassau hearing, Zionists berated disability organizers who called out mask bans as an attack on immunocompromised individuals. At the same time, many disability justice groups have also opposed the genocide of Palestinians.
Communists in the disability justice struggle
PLP members have joined with disability justice organizers who have waged campaigns for universal masking with N95 masks in health care settings and for stricter isolation procedures when workers and students have a COVID-19 infection. At the Long COVID Awareness protest in DC in March, 2024, a PLP member spoke about capitalism’s drive for profit at the expense of workers’ lives. We have worked with Mask Blocs in our cities and distributed free test kits to our schools and neighborhood groups.
As communists we believe in contributive justice, the idea that all workers should have the opportunity to contribute to society as much as possible. This means practicing good public health measures like air filtration, mask wearing, and testing to find out if your symptoms are from COVID-19 and if you have fully recovered with negative testing. Tests are not perfect but combined with other measures help decrease risks. This summer’s surge has shown that the virus is not seasonal like the flu but is airborne year round and constantly changing. Death and the development of Long COVID are reasons we need to protect ourselves.
Racism and eugenics
Disregarding the risks of COVID-19 to disabled workers is a form of eugenics in which some people are viewed as less valuable than others. Placing the current mask bans in this context reveals another fascist aspect of these policies. Discouraging mask wearing increases the risk to everyone but especially people who are immunocompromised. Further, letting the police stop people who wear masks to find out if the masks are for a health reason gives the police another racist excuse to harass Black and Latin workers --another version of “stop and frisk.” Black and Latin workers have suffered more from COVID-19 than others (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10147367/). Discouraging mask wearing for fear of police interaction will increase the risk of infections.
These steps toward fascism: increased surveillance, harsher intimidation, and racist eugenics mean that students and workers must unite the disability justice, antiracist, anti-genocide, and communist movements. Capitalism is the enemy of all these movements and building PLP is critical to destroy this system.
