Issued May 11, 2024
Approved by steering committee vote.
We are alarmed at the erasure of the lives and contributions of people with disabilities from the CPUSA's main discussion document of the 2024 CPUSA Convention. This document summarizes the last 12 months of leftist organizing throughout the US in response to fascist policies; however, it's difficult to tell which country this discussion paper is referring to, since the USA has not "recovered from COVID" as it expresses. Actually, the ruling class of America has demonstrated clear support in blatant denial of COVID, and CPUSA leadership is following suit.
Despite active obfuscation and undercounting, COVID remains the fourth leading cause of death in the United States and directly contributes to the top three leading causes of death: heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, dementia, even possibly cancer. The working class particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color bear the greatest share of the mortality and disease burden of COVID. This is in addition to the ongoing and significant increase in disability rates attributable to long COVID (i.e., PASC). Four years of trying to "live with" COVID has resulted in over 13 million Americans having their lives changed forever due to disability from SARS-CoV-2. At the January Senate committee hearing on long COVID, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly testified that "the best way to prevent Long Covid is to prevent COVID in the first place." The path forward is clear: all organizers seeking to mobilize the proletariat must keep the disabled at the center of praxis, and work with organizations like ours to mitigate the risk of COVID infection.
The focus on disabled persons is important. As a key component of the reserve army of labor, [1] disabled persons are very deliberately positioned as a threat (implicit and explicit) to the working class. One of the key actions we need our comrades to do is make the connections that the destruction of public health and consequent ongoing and increasing rates of disability due to COVID are a means for the ruling class to weaken our capacity to fight back against accelerating fascism.
Disabled persons have noted from the beginning of the present pandemic that past pandemics have led to increases in fascism. That is the pattern we are repeating here. The 1918 flu, combined with the many disabled soldiers after WWI, led to an increase in need for public assistance for disabled persons. [2] This led directly to the eugenics movement in the Nazi party that was enthusiastically taken up by doctors in Germany leading to the extermination of hundreds of thousands of disabled persons. [3] Disabled persons are framed as a burden to the public and then disposed of under fascism. We will not allow this historic pattern to continue repeating itself. Disability Liberation is key to fighting fascism.
Communists in the US need to see clearly how the abandonment of public health by the ruling class benefits the rich and powerful today, just as it did in Marx's time for the factory owners to ignore tuberculosis precautions. [3] To the capitalist, the worker is disposable; there is no care for their safety or health except how they intersect with profit. Communists must not allow that same apathy towards the needs and dangers faced by our comrades. We can follow the clear science that has stated: repeated COVID infection leads to increased rates/risks of disability. COVID dysregulates the immune system leading to more susceptibility to future opportunistic illnesses, in addition to the impacts on brain function, cardiovascular health, and other vascular impacts.
According to the CPUSA pre-convention discussion document the statement: "the country recovered from COVID" is, unfortunately, bourgeois propaganda, a return back to consumer capitalism, a bitter Invented Reality. The only sense in which we "recovered from COVID" is from an anti-human, anti-communist perspective that centers bourgeois economic recovery. The present circumstances evidence a new era of the disciplining of labor by the capitalist class. CPUSA has a coherent analysis of these impacts, while neglecting the cause and its interconnections.
The bourgeoisie have successfully pressed America's politics toward fascism. And yet, the CPUSA neglects to recognize that a key pillar of fascist policy is the dismantling of public health. This is seen in the "ending" of the COVID pandemic. The repressive power of fascist policies is felt in the social exclusion of anyone who does not have the health privilege to engage in a broader community. With this in mind, any organization that obeys the bourgeoisie propaganda, despite learning the truth about COVID, is complicit not only in disability erasure, but in the active maiming and killing of their communities and organizers. The unconscious capitulation to social pressures allows the reproduction of the fascist policies that CPUSA decries. If CPUSA continues to organize the way the bourgeoisie wants them to, then it is clear why we continue to lose. We also know who we lose: COVID overwhelmingly continues to impact people of color, the working class, and disabled people the hardest. The imperialist system does not value the lives of the proletariat; it consumes them through overwork and exposure to disease. This is no revolution, it is Capitalism. It is critical that the CPUSA, and the broader left, prioritize the safety of our organizers and our communities so that we can continue to build the revolution we desperately need.
Just like in Marx's time, public health is key to effective organizing. This is a call to action. Securing clean air is as critical as securing bread—Capital needs us to have neither to maintain its power. From Marx himself in reference to the Factory Act of 1864:
"It has been stated over and over again that the English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the work is continuous, 8 feet apart is the very least space that should be allowed for each person. […] the very root of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the self-expansion of all capital, large or small, by means of the "free" purchase and consumption of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought to a deadlock before these 8 feet of breathing space. The sanitary officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity for those 8 feet, and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus, in fact, declare that tuberculosis and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary conditions to the existence of capital." — Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I [4]
Capital has deemed COVID a necessary condition to maintain its existence. Therefore, taking COVID seriously directly attacks Capital. Further evidence is in the recent actions of Capital. It was the CEO of Delta who dictated we should decrease isolation times in a December 2021 letter to the CDC. A capitalist changed public health policy, not professional analysis of research. The CDC has removed COVID protections altogether, relegating it to the status of other common respiratory illnesses. National precedent has now been set by the California Supreme Court that no employer is responsible for COVID spread at their businesses solely to avoid a "never-ending chain of liability" for those businesses. Capital will never protect the interests of workers or communities because the conditions of capital's profits are the conditions of our death.
This is a critique towards the Communist Party USA. The Party can only fulfill its mandate by acknowledging COVID, mitigating its spread, and organizing to bring that safety to all. If "the role of the Communist Party is to bring [issues of the oppressed] forward and organize around them" then we must adapt the party to the present. One of the main sources of strength in the labor movements of the past was sharing a common vision, not just for the future but for our present moment. Our present is characterized by COVID, and no amount of wishful thinking, neglectful politics, or elite pandering will change it; a party that acts otherwise only contributes to the continued oppression of the proletariat.
When we ignore COVID protections in organizing spaces, the very air itself will keep people who know the consequences of COVID away. We do not make a space safe by "requesting" safe behaviors, we mandate the behavior and enforce compliance. It may sound absurd to the reader to mandate masks to keep people safe from COVID rather than "advising" that people mask, but consider how we treat racist or sexually violent conduct. We do not "request" that members avoid being racist, we do not "advise" that members refrain from sexually harassing one another; these are requirements to be in our spaces to make them safe for everyone. Spreading disease to our comrades can only harm our movements, enforcing COVID protections makes spaces safer for everyone, including immunocompromised, vulnerable, and disabled people.
The path forward is clear: any movement or group that seeks to uplift the oppressed needs to center the disabled and mitigate the risk of COVID infection. We agitate for mitigations such as mandating masking, free distribution of disposable respirators, improved ventilation, subsidized upgraded air filtration systems, and free, widespread testing; we must continue to educate on the pandemic as an ongoing, mass-disabling event; and, we must organize together to achieve all our goals. This path forward is at the center of our organization. For more information, or if you would like to work with us, please visit: https://socialist-core.org.