1. The Starting Point of Our Analysis, Honed Through Our History of Struggle Intervening in the AIDS Pandemic

We cannot overstate the importance of independent consciousness and action and the fact that it would be an absolutely fatal mistake to rely on, let alone tail, the various bourgeois leaderships which have emerged in the United States in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no particular requirement to emphasize the absurdity of following Trump’s leadership, but there was and is a very real problem of illusions in the various liberal leaderships, especially in a state like California whose governor and overall liberal-Democratic Party establishment have been ludicrously idealized and idolized by liberal news media and politicians. 

Underneath the differences of rhetoric and style, the fundamental method of both the Trump and the liberal authorities has been the same, despite occasional clashes on matters almost always treated by the liberal office holders, but not necessarily liberal journalists, as of secondary importance at most. It is critically important not to be taken in by the posturing of the liberal politicians and the various public health and scientific-institution leaders. A certain method of deception has been developed by both the right and the left and that any new movement was most in danger of being disoriented and derailed by the posturing of the “left-wing” — the liberal politicians and the various “institutional experts.”

The leadership of BAMN developed this method through our earlier discussions and experience the AIDS crisis. From this, we learned profound lessons concerning both the scientific understanding of epidemic disease and pandemics and the response to pandemics and other healthcare crises of global and national capitalist economies and bourgeois states. We made much the same characterization then of the relative positions of the bourgeois right and left as we are making now. In the course of the AIDS crisis and the response of the American public health authorities, we learned, somewhat to our surprise, that the actual response of these institutions was not at all what they and their liberal advocates claimed in words. We learned, in a way that at times was quite frightening, that the rhetoric of these institutions and the liberals who functioned as their political mouthpieces was very different from the objective reality of their policies. At times, to our horrors, in part because of the way some of our comrades were at risk, we learned that the real priorities of these institutions, in particular at the national level and in California, was not to fight to save lives, or even to reduce the actual incidence of infection, but to reduce the pressures on both the private and public healthcare systems in order to minimize pressures to impose higher taxes and costs on corporations and the wealthy elite. 

In other words, we learned that the real policies of the healthcare institutions, specifically including the CDC, and in some ways personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci, was a function of the overall policy of “neoliberalism,” and that the real priority of both Democrats and Republicans was determined by the increasingly fanatical devotion of both political parties to the policies of privatization and minimizing the social safety net.

Then, the differences between the Democrats and Republicans were largely a matter, in practice, of degree, not principles, except in so far as the Republicans tended to take up or indulge the vicious demagogy of the religious right, while the Democrats, while not really strongly criticizing the religious bigots, avoided taking up the vilest elements of the religious and moralistic attacks. 

By the early 1990’s, we were virtually alone in intervening in the AIDS-advocacy movement for maintaining a continued militant fight for a substantial increase in healthcare resources for the fight against AIDS, and if anything, we were even more isolated in insisting on the importance of the issues of race and racism. Our activists were attacked quite viciously at public meetings and conferences of these groups by AIDS-crisis misleaders. The reality was that the petit-bourgeois misleaderships of this movement had made a deal, facilitated by the various liberals, to stop placing meaningful demands on the private or public healthcare institutions, in exchange for token concessions and perhaps some form of remuneration to the leaders. The real policy was one of accepting the death of very large numbers of the first generations of infected victims, in effect in the name of a kind of concept of “herd immunity.” 

The overall policy was, both with regard to the first generations of victims and with regard to the victims to follow, accepting a set of routine measures whose level and quality were determined, not fundamentally by the needs of the victims of the disease but, in the first and last instance, by what was regarded as an acceptable level of commitment that did not call into question the private character of the healthcare system or challenge the inadequacy of the resources devoted to the fight against AIDS. In reality, we were forced to realize that the CDC and other aspects of the public healthcare system saw themselves and absolutely functioned merely as adjuncts to the private healthcare corporations and always worked from the fundamental premise that the most important principle was to protect the private corporations and to treat the private sector and its economic priorities as the dominant factor in dealing with the AIDS crisis.

Throughout this institutional and political betrayal in the struggle against AIDS, the liberals, at their different levels, functioned as the more sophisticated and more effective agents of the betrayal, while the right-wing demagogues provided convenient targets as distractions from the struggles that would actually have been needed for an adequate level of health-care mobilization. As for any notion of the liberals defending gay men against the religious right, it was Clinton who introduced “don’t ask don’t tell” into the military and it was Clinton and the Democrats who engineered the passage of the “Defense of Marriage” Act (DOMA).

From early on, we have attempted to apply the lessons learned in those discussions to the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, this is a far more terrible crisis and it has posed many new challenges, but most of the issues are similar, sometimes identical, and the division of labor between the bourgeois right and left fundamentally the same. 

In our international work in dealing with the AIDS crisis, we focused on the importance of a method that begins with science, and accepting the clear findings of scientists and medical experts and practitioners. As leaders trying to intervene in the crisis, we must begin with the best available evidence, however flawed, and develop our theoretical and practical responses on the basis of the understanding and analysis of that scientific evidence. 

However, we had learned from the political history of the AIDS crisis, and even more from our recent discussions of the environmental crisis (“climate change”), that as much as we had to rely on evidence that came from certain official sources, we could not depend on the various pronouncements of either the leading public health or other supposedly scientific institutions, nor, more generally, on similar academic institutions and the leading figures associated with them, nor even on many of the leading figures of various advocacy groups. In effect, from the 1970’s on, through the whole period of “neoliberalism,” there had been a very real long-term trend of corruption of those figures who had become a part of the governmental, academic, and corporate establishment. For the most part, they had, not in all, but with regard to most practical questions, been bought off. They virtually all, specifically, subscribed to the view that in dealing with any issue, one must start from the standpoint of the eternal character of the system of the private ownership of the means of production. In the United States, such people are an important part of a layer of society that can, in general terms, be characterized as the liberal intelligentsia. In other parts of the world, these figures have been part of the pro-capitalist degeneration of the mass, social-democratic and Stalinist parties. All believe in capitalism the way that theists believe in God. 

2. Dispelling Illusions in the Liberal Politicians—The Real Meaning of “Cases” of COVID-19 and “Flattening the Curve”

Today, as with the AIDS crisis, we need fortify against the inevitable illusions in the various liberal establishments and their political, governmental, academic, and private spokespersons. In Britain, we have not had to deal with these dangers to quite the same extent, because of how much more terrible the British Labour Party’s behavior has been in these last months (and for that matter, with regard to Brexit, through the Corbyn period). The greater weakness and self-marginalization of the British Labour Party throughout the COVID-19 crisis, ironically, has made it easier for some public health and science figures to speak out against the Boris Johnson policies, which have essentially been similar to Trump’s (except that the Tory policy seems to have been openly defended on the grounds of “herd immunity,” which made it easier to scandalize the Tories in the UK than the Republicans in the US). Our British comrades in Movement for Justice (MFJ) have had to beware of the same liberal illusions as BAMN in the U.S. 

In our discussions, we have focused on the abuse of two standard terms: “cases” and “flattening the curve.” We have emphasized that the public health officials such as the CDC and Fauci, and specifically the liberal politicians, consistently used these standard terms in a way that was certain to be misleading to most people. The term “cases,” later rendered more precise as “confirmed cases,” was naturally assumed by the general public to be equivalent or roughly equivalent to the number of people infected with the virus. In fact, it referred only to the number of test results in circumstances where, everywhere in the US, as also in Britain and virtually every other country, testing is being conducted at a grotesquely minimal and inadequate level. It would have been easy enough for any of these healthcare officials and politicians, who cannot be let off the hook on the grounds of ignorance, to say “positive test results” rather than “cases” or “confirmed cases.” The most common and fundamental statistics being presented to the American people, including the statistics that were understood to indicate the number of deaths, are, in reality, fictions. This is not to say that the statistics are false, in the sense that they are wrong numbers. They are fictions in the sense that they do not indicate what most people inevitably believed they do. This means that the most common and most fundamental information being presented to the American people is a collection of fictions. To avoid misleading the public, the various spokespersons have had to decide on which model best projects from the available number of positive test results, the actual number of people infected. The same character of fiction applies to the statistics that supposedly keep the public informed of the number of people who are dying from COVID-19, since these statistics are essentially a function of the supposed statistics on “cases.” The only way to determine the number of people who die from COVID-19 requires determining who had been infected from COVID-19 in the first place.

The term “flattening the curve” is even more revealing. Here, on reflection, it is perfectly clear that this term would be and has been understood to mean DECREASING THE NUMBER OF INFECTIONS, that is to say, actually fighting the disease. The reality is that “flattening the curve” doesn’t mean that at all, although, “flattening the curve” would of course be accompanied in some sense by an immediate reduction in the number of CASES in a certain period of time. The aim of “flattening the curve,” in other words, has never been to defeat the epidemic, to reduce the number of people who would ultimately be infected, to reduce the death rate. Rather, a concept like “flattening the curve,” as we had learned under similar circumstances in the AIDS struggle, refers to the necessity of attempting to manage the rate at which cases are placing pressures on the existing healthcare system. 

The aim of “flattening the curve” is to prevent pressures for substantially more resources for healthcare and to minimize the tendencies toward mass radicalization over the private character of the healthcare system. In nations with substantial public healthcare systems, where politicians and healthcare officials alike embraces the “flattening the curve” concept, the aim is to undercut pressures for more resources for those systems after decades of “neoliberal” and “austerity” attacks. Fundamentally, these figures, typically reformists, are defending the same private corporate priorities as in the United States. 

It is, of course, true that it is not desirable, especially in the face of such a crisis, to force the collapse of a national healthcare system. And indeed, most Americans dutifully understand that “flattening the curve” means both defeating the epidemic through reducing the number of people that are infected and trying to make sure that victims of the disease who need medical care can receive it. But the only way that the American or any healthcare system can actually meet the needs of the people affected by this pandemic and the inevitable future pandemics to come, is through the victory of struggles for the vast increase in healthcare resources around the world and the reversal of the entire “neoliberal” regimes of austerity and private property. This pressure and these struggles have, thus far, been effectively mitigated or prevented by the LIBERALS’ use of these carefully chosen and misleading terms. 

Neither Trump nor his party could possibly have prevented the mass radicalization of consciousness and the growth of mass struggle in the face of so vastly revealing a crisis. But that is precisely what Pelosi, Cuomo, Newson, their liberal kindred, and their kissing cousins at the head of the American scientific institutions aided by a whole bevy of charismatic liberal journalists, have succeeded in doing. It is the fake-left misleaders who are more dangerous to the masses. 

There has not been ANY major Democratic politician (including Sanders) who has “repeatedly” called for mass testing. THIS SIMPLY IS NOT TRUE. The mantra “testing testing testing” derives from an early World Health Organization (WHO) statement. It has been the meaningless babble of every social democratic faker for months. It is apparently obligatory for whoever is conjuring with this magic phrase to mutter “testing” three times — apparently because that is the quote from the original WHO source. Yes indeed, Pelosi says that every time she turns around. IT HAS MEANT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. In Pelosi’s California, the supposedly ideal and heroic Governor Newsom has had an especially disgraceful record on testing. In the past couple of weeks he was forced to declare that he “owned” the disgraceful record on testing in his state. This was not, however, because Newsom had realized that he needed to vastly increase the amount of testing in order to escalate a real struggle against the disease. Quite the contrary. For Newsom, in a state with as high a degree of progressive consciousness as California, it was necessary to shift from this disgraceful policy that he had maintained week after week, to some significant increase in testing, because he had made the decision to embark on his own version for California of Trump’s “reopening the economy.” 

While we have watch in horror as forces are being moved into place for a large-scale reopening of the capitalist economy, long before the conditions actually exist to do so from the standpoint of saving and preserving human life, we know better than to expect the liberal politicians to launch any real attack on Trump’s aims. Indeed, they are merely taking up the same aims in their own ways. It might even be true that there’s been a certain increase in references to testing on the part of certain liberal leaders in this recent period, for the reasons that we have already explained earlier in commenting on Newsom’s “ownership” of the scandalous testing problems in California. Trump has, in his usual stupid and vacillating way, gone back and forth between rejecting science altogether in the name of protecting his and his capitalist cronies’ accumulation of wealth, and accepting certain public-health conceptions for a limited period, presumably in part out of stupidity and weakness, and in part to cover his ass politically. 

In all his vile machinations, he has been aided at every turn by the top health officials’ willingness to stand next to him and appear to cover for and sanction his crimes. Birx is little more than a Trump marionette who can spout certain medical and public-health clichés without stumbling over the words, unlike her Fearless Leader. Fauci, as in the course of the AIDS crisis and every other health crisis he has presided over, explicitly begins and ends with the priority of “the private sector” and has disgraced himself over and over in covering for even the most inane and outrageous of Trump’s pronouncements. It is true that Fauci has, from time to time, in the most pathetic way imaginable, “disassociated” himself ever-so-slightly from the Trump line. For this cowardly record Fauci has been hailed repeatedly by the liberal journalists and politicians as their hero. This is not a misunderstanding on the part of the liberals, but rather a shared interest with Trump in avoiding the plain speaking of truths. 

The reasons should be obvious. The Democrats and Republicans are defending the same system, albeit necessarily in somewhat different ways. (Herbert Hoover defended the system in his way, FDR defended the system in his way–but they were defending the same system. To avoid confusion, yes, Trump is much worse than Hoover.) That system is always their priority, not the public welfare, not any particular crisis, and certainly not any progressive principle. As Leon Trotsky puts it in the Transitional Program, the opportunists cling to the capitalist system in its death throes. There exist no QUALITATIVE differences between the conservative and liberal capitalists or their parties in dealing with this crisis. Rather, there is a division of labor between the two sides, in some ways typical of American political history since the Great Depression, in other and important ways intensified by the fascist leanings of Trump and his most fervent capitalist and plebeian supporters. 

On the right, Trump’s Republican Party represents, in certain respects, a qualitatively new development–again, a development in the direction of American fascism, taking place in the context of a growing development of fascist movements and bourgeois authoritarianism internationally. But the liberals, on the other hand, along with the European and other social democrats and erstwhile Stalinists, are essentially playing their usual role. Of course, from time to time, one liberal or another manages to mount a stage and put on some costume and play at being a heroic champion against the Trump Evil Dragon. But there are no liberal heroes.

3. Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the Rachel Maddow Show

Over these past four years of the rise of Trump, it has sometimes been necessary to recognize a certain distinction, a certain division of labor, between, so to speak, two departments of the liberals: the politicians and the journalists. At times, such as the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the liberal journalists have played the role of political leadership of the movement against Trump (the Resistance). At points where the Democratic Party politicians have been especially or more pervasively than usual, in hiding from waging any necessary struggle against Trump, certain liberal journalists and the whole liberal news media have filled the vacuum. This seems to be an entirely natural and rather spontaneous development, likely with no particular discussion among the relevant figures–no conspiracy required. MSNBC has been one of the points of concentration of such journalistic leadership. 

Over the past week or two, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC‘s shining star, has been carrying out a rather impassioned mission, attacking Trump’s plans to open the economy prematurely. It is wrong to confuse such occasional displays of fight on the part of certain liberal journalists with the actions, the positions, the statements, or the method of the Democratic party or any of its leading politicians. What has been striking about Maddow’s struggle is how lonely it has been. MSNBC is virtually in every respect merely an outgrowth and companion piece to the Democratic Party, particularly its liberal and progressive wings. But since we don’t really expect journalists to DO anything in particular about the problems they preach over, it is relatively safe for a Rachel Maddow to venture beyond the essential cowardice of the Cuomos and Pelosis. She herself is not about to criticize her own party. It has been notable that she has not been able to find a single actual politician, public-health figure, or scientist to share her passion or echo the admirable straightforwardness of her truth-telling. She and other liberal journalists who understand how dangerous the Trump policy is and want to get out the truth must, at best, over interpret the statements of politicians or experts, read between their lines, or simply pretend they are saying things they are not really saying. 

In one recent Maddow-Pelosi interview, a somber and determined Rachel Maddow is trying to get a disoriented Speaker Pelosi to stop smiling inappropriately and presenting the Democrats’ actually defensive and feeble reactions to Republican initiatives (the three bills passed so far, according to the NY Times) as courageous solutions to the crisis. Pelosi’s millionth chant of “testing testing testing” was accompanied by yet another inappropriate smile as if she did not know that neither nationally, nor particularly in her home state of California, had testing been done on anything remotely resembling an adequate scale. In other words, Pelosi was engaged in her own version of Trump’s deception. Her utterance of the mantra was a false triumphant assertion that the Democrats had done something of vast importance to solve the testing crisis because of certain money they had gotten into the three bills. It certainly was not a criticism of her governor’s failure, nor even was it a demand on Trump. Pelosi seemed so disoriented during that interview that the sympathetic viewer might easily have feared she was having a stroke. She was not fighting for anything. There may be evidence of the occasional integrity and seriousness of a journalist like Maddow, or the genuinely informative character of one article or another in a liberal newspaper, that is one thing. But to imagine we have seen anything like a brave struggle by any of the liberal political leaders on behalf of what both science or the great majority of the science and public health establishment have made clear needs to be done, whether in the US or around the world…this simply has not happened. 

4. Healthcare Workers, Patients, Loved Ones, and Communities Must Fight to Win

This crisis presents, with global and historic clarity, the failure of capitalism and its fundamental incapacity to meet the urgent healthcare needs of the entire population of the planet. 

At this time, we must begin any set of demands with a focus on the struggle against the premature opening of the American capitalist economy. The demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) and safe working conditions for healthcare workers, as well as demands by healthcare workers for the resources and conditions actually needed for the care of COVID-19 patients are immediate demands around which mass struggles desperately need to be and can be built. If rightly led, workers in these struggles can go beyond the telling of horror stories without any real element of struggle of what’s needed and make the argument, on the basis of publicly available evidence, that it has all along been possible to provide PPE, a greatly increased number of tests, and other essential resources. What has been lacking is the capacity of politicians of either party to force the “private sector” to replace their greed and profit-driven business models with a human model of saving human lives. 

Armed with this information, with the truths of their own day to day ordeals and heroism, with the indefensible failures and refusals of both managements and government to provide what is so urgently needed, workers’ struggle will need to fight not only to demand fully adequate mass testing, PPE, and other resources, but also the opening of the books, the revelation of the closely held secret accounts, of the businesses and the governments that have been claiming not to have the funds to provide what was needed. The failure of both private management and government is now so well-established and so beyond human toleration, that it should be made clear by workers’ struggles that only empowering healthcare workers themselves and their patient and community supporters, can actually resolve the crisis in anything like a timely fashion and actually save the lives of thousands of patients and workers bound together in the deepest of ways by this mass threat of death. 

The only way the intolerable crisis of our healthcare system will be solved in any reasonable time period, is if healthcare workers’ struggles, supported by patients, loved ones, and communities, fight to win, among others, three sets of demands. 1) It is obvious that workers’ collective struggles are needed to demand and obtain the necessary resources and create the necessary conditions. 2) To do this, healthcare workers must demand that managements and government administrations open all their books, make public to workers and the American people, all information relevant to solving the crisis of testing, PPE, and other urgently needed resources. Those who have utterly failed for so long at such a terrible human cost can no longer be trusted. 3) Healthcare workers must also demand the power to distribute these resources and to take over the administration of the work which has been so badly led by both corporate and government establishments. Healthcare workers in hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes, the patients, and their supporters are the only ones who have consistently told the truth and the only ones who will fight consistently to solve these problems that have already cost far too much in human life. 

5. Base Our Struggle on the Truth

The opportunists are, as usual, failing the challenge of history. It is for this very reason that what BAMN and the Movement for Justice have to say and do in the immediate period ahead is so important. We must speak the plain truth and present the necessary program of action about the Coronavirus crisis and what needs to be done to save the human population threatened by it, just as throughout our history we have spoken the plain truth about racism, sexism, anti-lesbian/gay bigotry, all forms of oppression, and the environmental crisis. We are, of course, a rather small group of people. But the importance of the task we can and must perform is by no means small. There are no miracles, and we cannot ask more of ourselves than we can give. But the cadres of BAMN and MFJ have shown, time and time again, that they are capable of giving a great deal. While the opportunist politicians and “experts” start from the standpoint of the eternal dominion of exploiters and oppressors, we have the advantage that we can start from the standpoint of the unequivocal truth, no matter how painful it may be. This truth and our courage to base our struggle on it, is the basis of our hope to change a world of fear and death into a world of hope and life. It is obvious that we must be in a fight to prepare ourselves for challenges we have never had to deal with before. The challenges we have already met, however, should tell us that we can wage that fight and win. 

Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)

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