CITU May Day Manifesto 2020

We are in the midst of the spread of Covid, one of the greatest disasters of this century, and are heading into the most severe economic crisis since the Second World War. It is amid all this that International Workers' Day 2020 comes.

We express our heartfelt thanks to all the front-line health workers, doctors, nurses, paramedical staff and sanitation workers, and to all the other workers across the world who are risking their own lives to protect the lives of others, for your invaluable service.

We declare our solidarity with the working class that keeps society going, enduring personal hardship to supply water, electricity, communications, financial services, milk, groceries, vegetables and medicines to keep alive the crores of people under lockdown in many countries.

On this day we salute all the farmers and agricultural workers of the world, and the workers and other toiling people who are the real 'creators of wealth' of the world and its unrecognised heroes, the invisible force that moves the world forward.

The CITU expresses its condolences to the families of the lakhs of people who have lost their lives in the Covid pandemic.

On this May Day the CITU declares its solidarity with those suffering from the disease, with the crores of people shut away from society through no fault of their own, with those who have already lost their jobs and livelihoods and are anxious about the future,

and with those who fear they will lose their jobs and livelihoods in the future.

Workers and people of all sections must come together, break down the walls built between us in the name of religion, race, region, caste, ethnicity, language and gender, and protect the earth and the environment that sustain our lives and livelihoods. This is the only way to overcome the present Covid pandemic and the economic crisis now prevailing in the world.

The Covid pandemic has exposed the inhuman and cruel character of the capitalist system of the society we live in and its neoliberal form.

A united fight is needed to meet the challenge humanity faces in the twenty-first century from the coronavirus, an invisible micro-organism. Covid can be defeated only by the human power that arises when all the world's scientific and technological knowledge and wealth come together.

Instead, what we see today is the base and vile face of the capitalist system.

More than 22 lakh people are infected with Covid today, the lives of crores are in danger, and more than one and a half lakh people have died worldwide. Because of the lockdowns in various countries, lakhs have lost their jobs and their incomes have stopped. Many have become homeless, and many people and their families are starving. At this time corporates and big businesses are using the pandemic to destroy workers' rights by dismissing workers, cutting wages and bonuses and increasing working hours. Corporate-friendly or corporate-led governments in many countries are taking advantage of the situation to change labour laws to destroy workers' rights in order to help their corporate owners. To suppress democratic rights, they are legalising employers' violations of labour laws. Pandemic or no pandemic, what interests capitalism and the governments that represent it is not the lives and livelihoods of the toiling people who produce wealth and carry society forward, but only the profit of the capitalist class. Their god is not Rama, Allah or Jesus; theirs is profit alone. They will use people's religious beliefs to divide them and set them against one another. The capitalists are united in exploiting the people and destroying their rights. They will exploit and attack workers.

In that there is no discrimination or partiality.

American imperialism, the most powerful in the world, stands exposed today. Showing its domination in the cruellest way, it continues its economic and political war against Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. Although it is more or less isolated in the community of nations, it continues to back Israel in denying the Palestinians their right to a homeland. America is preventing many countries from accepting medical help from Cuba, which has an extraordinary history of providing health support internationally, and blocks all help to Cuba. Even under the American embargo, socialist Cuba has developed public health services, recognised by all, whose health indicators surpass those of many developed capitalist countries. Many deaths in Iran that could have been prevented are not prevented because of the American ban on help to Iran. Trump used the Korean War-era Defense Production Act to make American companies sell in the American market. Even crueller was the diversion and seizure of goods meant for various countries, including India and America's European partners. Rapid testing kits for India from China were delayed because America diverted them this way. Trump warned India of retaliatory measures if it did not lift the ban on exports of hydroxychloroquine tablets, which Trump believes can be used to treat the coronavirus. Countries such as Germany, France, Canada and Brazil came out saying America was trying to grab the masks, PPE and testing kits meant for them. This is a new-age piracy. America stopped funding the World Health Organisation, which is helping the world in the fight against Covid, accusing it of standing with China.

America, which claims to be the world's leader, is in a thoroughly shameful position today. Despite great advances in science and technology, its policies have made it fail to protect its own people. In America, health care is run by private capitalists for profit, which has proved unable and inadequate to handle a health emergency like Covid. The private corporate health sector is not willing to give up its profits even in this situation. Most workers without health insurance cannot afford the private health system even in normal times. Government hospitals lack beds, ICUs, ventilators and PPE kits for health workers. The rich, who have the money to buy the best health care, survive, and the poor die. Trump also failed to take precautionary measures. Amid the restrictions on the economy, winning the next presidential election matters more to Trump than people's lives. Today America has reported the highest number of cases: patients have passed 7 lakh and deaths are passing 36,000.

It is a country with countless missiles, warplanes, submarines and mercenaries, ready to attack any country to impose its own economic and political terms. It does not care to allocate the resources needed for the health of its own people. It cannot give its own people hospital beds and ventilators, or give its own health workers masks and PPE kits, and it tries to steal cargo of all these meant for other countries. At the same time, Trump announced a package worth 500 billion dollars for the monopolies, 29 billion dollars for airlines and 17 billion dollars for security companies.

This is imperialism, which Lenin called the highest stage of capitalism.

As the crisis deepens, the gangsterism of imperialism rises, and its most degenerate and dangerous side is exposed.

Countries such as the UK and Italy, which had somewhat better public health systems, cut social welfare spending on public health, education and so on and promoted privatisation once they came under neoliberal capitalism. This got worse after the austerity measures taken after the global economic crisis of 2008. The failure to meet demand in places such as Italy, Spain and France in the present crisis reflects these measures. Spain had to nationalise private hospitals to face the crisis.

Even when the Covid pandemic arrived, the world had not recovered from the economic crisis of 2007-2008. The forecast is that the world is heading into the worst economic crisis yet seen. This too will lead to rivalry among the imperialist countries. There are reports that Trump offered funding to CureVac, a German company trying to develop a vaccine for Covid, to come to America and work for America alone, and reports that Germany too made an offer for it to stay in Germany. Meanwhile Germany refused to send medical equipment to Italy. Italy and Spain banned exports to Greece. Germany and the Netherlands refused to help Spain, Italy and France, the countries with the most Covid deaths.

But the capitalists are united in seizing the rights, wages and benefits workers have won through struggle in order to protect their profits.

For countries ruled by capitalism or its people, the slogan 'all unite to get out of the crisis' is meaningless. It is only workers, working-class governments and socialist countries that have declared support for the toiling people. Unity is needed at this time, when the coronavirus is at its most intense: the unity of the toiling class fighting those who destroy human lives and livelihoods out of greed for profit. That is what the present world situation demands.

Small socialist Cuba heroically sent 60 doctors to Italy, which has the most Covid cases after America. When passengers on a British ship tested positive for Covid and many countries, including America, refused to let the ship dock at their ports, it was Cuba that allowed it. Following the WHO's norms, more than a thousand passengers and crew were taken by bus to the airport with a special police escort, and from there flown safely to Britain on chartered planes.

This is the real difference between the socialism of humanity and the capitalism of plundering cruelty.

Despite all the hardships caused by decades of American embargo, Cuba has developed a public health care system that provides free health care for a small registration fee, and has developed a state-of-the-art pharmaceutical industry. Cuba constantly sends expert doctors to countries in need in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Besides Italy, it has sent medical teams to Venezuela and four Caribbean countries to face the pandemic. The socialist system in Cuba also provides free public education, food and housing.

China, where Covid was first reported, mobilised all its resources to fight the virus. The WHO called it perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. This was possible because of China's public health system. To create, by 2020, an affordable health system available to all without discrimination, China raised health spending from 5 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 6.4 per cent in 2017. Out-of-pocket expenditure (the amount a patient must spend on treatment) fell to 29 per cent, and by 2017, 82 per cent of patients received treatment in government hospitals. This is the result of planning by a socialist system that keeps people, not profit, in view.

It should also be noted that in every crisis and emergency it is the much-maligned public sector that has risen to the occasion and come forward to save the country and the people. That is what was seen in the global economic crisis of 2008, when public sector banks and financial institutions came to the rescue. Public sector companies and institutions sustained the national economy through continued capital spending. It was public sector pharmaceutical companies that resisted corporate domination in this field and made medicines available to our people at reasonable prices for a long time after independence. But neoliberal policy, against the interests of the people and the country, sought to destroy the self-reliance or the capacity of public sector drug makers such as IDPL, Hindustan Antibiotics and Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals. Even now we can see that it is government hospitals, government doctors, nurses, paramedical staff and sanitation workers who are working round the clock to fight the virus and save lives.

In capitalist countries, including India, all of them are like soldiers in a war, risking their own lives and those of their families without enough protective equipment, without even masks and gloves. Doctors and nurses have lost their lives. In many places large hospitals had to close when doctors and nurses fell ill, leaving thousands more without treatment. At the same time, private corporate hospitals are exploiting this situation by charging exorbitant rates for tests, treatment and beds, while exploiting their own staff with small wages and denying them even the right to organise. This is the capitalist system. Not only in health but in education, housing, social security, the workplace and labour rights, everywhere capitalism's goal is profit. Governments work mostly for corporates and big businesses, so workers and the toiling people live in misery and poverty.

It is the same in India. Only one per cent of GDP is spent on public health. Health is the sector where privatisation has been carried furthest in the neoliberal period. Seventy per cent of health spending is out-of-pocket, and only 44 per cent of those admitted to hospital are treated in government hospitals. India is one of the countries that promotes medical tourism, meaning that people from abroad who can afford the cost can seek treatment in India's corporate hospitals, while thousands of poor people in our country die of preventable and curable diseases such as diarrhoea and tuberculosis for want of proper health care. As part of neoliberal schemes, government hospitals are being neglected, and in some states even primary health centres are being privatised. As a result, the public health system has lost the capacity to face Covid. Our doctors, nurses, paramedical staff, ASHA workers and sanitation workers have had to work at the risk of their lives without enough protective equipment, and many doctors and nurses have died of Covid.

Kerala is different from all this. Foreseeing that many Keralites were students in China, the LDF government took the necessary precautions as soon as the disease was confirmed there, and made all arrangements for testing, tracking, surveillance and quarantine. Inspired by socialist goals, LDF governments have developed a public health care system in the state, and whenever the LDF is in power it takes steps to strengthen it.

It is shameful that, at a time when the working class, especially unorganised workers, has lost work, wages and income, the BJP government is trying to change labour laws quickly to turn them into slaves. Workers today face three blows at once: the prevailing economic crisis, Covid, and a lockdown imposed without any planning. The Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry has already demanded that the provision to form trade unions be suspended for a year, that the deadline for paying PF and ESI dues be extended by 90 days, and that contract workers' wages be cut to Rs 202 a day, on a par with MGNREGS workers. The Employers' Federation of Southern India has demanded that daily working hours be raised to 12, that DA revision be suspended, and that employers be exempted even from the minimum penalties for labour law violations. The central government is preparing to amend the Factories Act to raise working hours to 12 a day and 72 a week, and the BJP governments of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have already issued orders on this. There are reports that the BJP government led by Modi is going to push through the labour code bills, bypassing the parliamentary standing committee on labour, through an ordinance or an executive order. This is nothing but a shameless attempt to satisfy their corporate masters and donors by destroying workers' basic right to organise and act collectively and reducing them to slaves. These measures amount to turning the Covid situation into a tool to further promote the interests of their corporate masters.

Although a disaster like Covid has no religion or caste, the RSS tried to create discrimination even in this and attack Muslims. In this way, even amid a human tragedy, the RSS revealed its communal face, spread across the country.

The RSS and its various organisations are constantly devising plans to keep injecting communal poison into society by aggressively misusing the media, including social media, with the silent support of the state. Apart from ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) in London, many politicians, including BJP leaders, held birthday parties, weddings and shraddha ceremonies. In all of these, hundreds took part in violation of lockdown directions, endangering their own health and that of others.

Covid has shown the primitive nature of the capitalist system. The economic crisis that existed before it had already exposed its inability to provide ordinary people's basic needs, jobs, decent and dignified living conditions, education and health, and its inability to achieve sustainable economic growth. Everyone can see the inherent exploitation and its divisive and destructive poisonous character.

At the same time, the solidarity the working class is capable of in times of hardship is also evident. At the crucial time of the lockdown, workers, toiling people, poor farmers, agricultural workers and progressive sections are working tirelessly to stand with and give every support to suffering workers and migrant workers who have lost their jobs and incomes and are stranded in various places far from home. They are able to reach lakhs of such helpless, jobless and shelterless workers and their families in every state across the country, providing every kind of support, including food, relief and moral support. The CITU is proud of the committees, cadres and activists who have shown class solidarity by doing extensive work beyond their capacity, even in places where the organisation is weak, to support brothers and sisters suffering during the lockdown.

Everyone can now clearly see the difference between capitalist greed and exploitation and the solidarity and sacrifice of the working class. This is a time for the working class to compare words and deeds. It is also a time for the toiling class to compare the words and deeds of its leaders, to understand that its problems are bound up with policies and that these policies are governed by the politics of the exploiting class.

With Covid worsening the crisis of the neoliberal capitalist order, the ruling class is attacking the rights, the right to life and the livelihoods of the toiling people more aggressively and cruelly. In the profit greed of the capitalist rulers, human life has very little value. The continuing crisis is making the exploiting class and its brokers in power more arrogant and authoritarian, with a clear fascist intent to destroy people's rights. This will create more destructive and aggressive divisions.

In the name of bringing the economy out of the crisis and managing it, the capitalist class will take various anti-people measures, and through the corporate media and government agencies will try to justify them and convince people they are necessary. In this way it will fool people and exploit them further. It will rebuild and rearrange the world of work and the relation between worker and employer to make more exploitation possible, so that capitalism can make more profit. The 16th conference of the CITU made clear that the working-class movement is entering a new phase of defiance and resistance. This confirms the accuracy of that understanding.

Let us observe May Day 2020 with the pledge to unite the whole working class and prepare ourselves organisationally and ideologically for this struggle.

This is the time for the working class to expose the vile and destructive agenda of capitalism through its representatives in power. It is the time for us to recognise who stands for whom and for what, and with whose support we must act against what. This is what is needed most today.

'Our struggle against daily problems is just. The struggle for the social liberation of the working class is necessary. All workers together, we can do it.'

This was said by George Mavrikos, General Secretary of the world trade union movement.

To carry the inhuman conspiracy of a cruel system, and the dubious politics that promotes it, to all sections of the toiling people, the working class and the working-class movement…