AIDS in America: Racism, Poverty, Bigotry
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 843, 4 March 2005.
We reprint below a slightly edited and abridged presentation by comrade Karen Cole at a Spartacist League forum in New York City on 17 February.
You can't begin to talk about any aspect of AIDS in any country or area of the world without placing it in an international context. For over two decades, this disease has brought massive misery and death to broad sections of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America. Over the last 22 years, over 65 million people have been infected worldwide. The desperate fight to obtain anti-retroviral drugs has become a vehicle for social struggle and has mobilized thousands of youth in South Africa. Nevertheless, at the end of 2003, only about 1 percent of the four million people who need anti-retroviral drugs in Southern Africa get them. No country on any continent has been untouched, and with the continuing spread of AIDS in Russia, China, South Asia and many other countries, much is still unknown, and there is no end in sight.
The possibility of bringing this source of so much misery and death under control, to extend the treatments that are currently available to all those who need it—this essential task is undermined every step of the way by the reactionary capitalist system. In its epoch of imperialist decay, capitalism is a hideous, profit-driven system, propped up by brutal racial and sexual oppression. This is an economic system where those few who own the means of production exploit the masses that produce all the wealth. The only counterweight to the unrestrained greed of the ruling class is the working class fighting in its own interests and the interests of the oppressed. It is our task to build an internationalist, vanguard working-class party that will seize the means of production and make a revolution that will lay the basis for building a society based on human needs and not on private profit—a party like the Bolshevik Party that led the 1917 Russian Revolution.
It's not that elements of the capitalist class are incapable of making decisions that provide benefits for more than themselves, but their actions must always be ultimately consistent with their self-preservation as an exploiting class. So, every step forward is paid for with persistent world poverty and bloody wars. The scientific problems of eliminating HIV are quite staggering. The HIV virus mutates and develops strains that are resistant to every anti-retroviral drug developed. New strategies must be continually coordinated and systematically researched and developed. The most rational and thoroughgoing weapon would be a vaccine, as has been used effectively against smallpox, polio, hepatitis B and other devastating viruses. But as late as 1994, the U.S. government was spending less than $100 million per year on development of a vaccine, and the funding is tightening this year.
Vaccines are long-term, high-risk, low-profit projects. So, much remains unknown about AIDS for reasons that have nothing to do with the complex biological facts of the virus. The advancement of medical science in general is thwarted by the chaos of capitalism and its drive for immediate profits. Compounding these obstacles are the prejudices and bigotry fomented by an irrational, rotting capitalist economic system. For example, the oppression of women that underpins every class society means that women are increasingly bearing the brunt of the pandemic. For instance: an anti-HIV microbicide, an ointment that a woman could apply to herself, with or without the knowledge of her sexual partner, has not yet been developed, and is still years away. Around the world, even treatment with AZT or nevirapine (which have been around for many years) to prevent mother-to-child transmission, is still not readily available. Why? Because in most of the world today, women continue to be the slave of the slave, economically dependent on her spouse, isolated in the home, with lives considered of lesser value.
The U.S., which is among the most advanced, industrialized capitalist countries, with some of the most technologically sophisticated medical research, has not been able to eliminate HIV infections. Every country has its peculiar characteristics shaped by the history of its class society. Effective control of HIV requires great medical resources, not to mention clean running water, which poverty-stricken countries in Asia and Africa lack. But in the vastly wealthy U.S., access to quality health care for the masses of people has been deliberately neglected by the ruling class.
The counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, a historic defeat for the world working class, has emboldened the U.S. capitalist rulers to pursue their goal of worldwide domination through mass murder and torture, from Afghanistan to Iraq. No matter how much they hypocritically yell about "freedom," the U.S. ruling class is the bloodiest ruling class in history and is the main enemy of the workers and oppressed worldwide. The U.S. has the widest gap in the entire world in the standard of living between rich and poor. It's virtually the only developed country that has no universal medical coverage. Its rulers want to throw old people on the garbage heap, with the slashing of Social Security.
You may have read new statistics on the high infant mortality rate in the U.S. By the way, although high infant mortality is largely attributable to the lack of health care available to poor women, it is also partly due to the difficulty of getting an abortion in the U.S., as compared with other industrialized countries. Today, there is one abortion clinic left in the state of Mississippi, and it is under attack.
The United States has a hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry whose commercial interests conflict with the lives of millions of people around the world. In fact, the U.S. government continues to hold hostage funds for AIDS, and keeps a stranglehold on the pittance it divvies out in order to force its reactionary, religious agenda on the world. Funds for AIDS are tied to anti-abortion policies, and condoms are put way down the list after the "A" and "B" in the much-lauded Ugandan campaign against AIDS called "ABC." "A" is for "abstinence," "B" is for "be faithful," and the "C" is for condoms.
In this country, millions of adolescents and children get federally funded abstinence-only sex-miseducation programs. These are not just repressive and totally useless for young people, but they are deadly. Youth are given ignorant, lying, religious propaganda instead of the science-based contraceptive information they need to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases and from getting pregnant. For example, federally funded programs give youth false information, such as that tears and sweat can transmit HIV. Most dangerously, they overstate the failure rate of condoms and discourage their use. Recently, Texas A&M University surveyed 29 high schools regarding Bush's much-vaunted abstinence-only education in his home state and found that these programs had no impact on teen behavior. These teens are left in ignorance when they do have sex, and they do have sex, as teenagers naturally do. It was reported in November that new federal guidelines for treating rape victims omit mentioning the option of the emergency contraceptive pill.
Anti-science, anti-evolution, faith-based programs mean death as well. National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials warn HIV/AIDS researchers to eliminate certain "key words" from funding proposals—including "sex workers," "anal sex," "needle exchange," "abortion," "condom effectiveness," "gay," "homosexual," and "transgender"—to improve their chances of being funded.
Capitalist Rulers Wage War on Working People, Blacks
The fate of specially oppressed sectors of society—black people, immigrants and women—is in large part determined by the course of class and social struggle. Coming out of the struggles of the civil rights movement was a brief moment of the broadening out of public health care, most notably the passage of the Medicaid and Medicare programs, however inferior and substandard. Today, massive cutbacks in Medicaid keep coming down the pike every year. Some 55 percent of people living with AIDS rely on Medicaid. Because of federal cutbacks, nearly every state is cutting back on Medicaid coverage. This will impact HIV-positive people, not to mention poor people in general.
The deindustrialization of the major Northern cities over the last several decades meant that the black population, which had migrated in waves to the North for jobs in the first half of the 20th century, was now left with little in the '80s. Over a million manufacturing jobs were lost during this period and over 2.6 million more have been lost since Bush took office. The capitalist class—which must accumulate profit through the exploitation of working people's labor—ultimately had little use for those at the bottom when they finished looting what they could from them. As the "last hired and first fired," the black population supplied, in the words of Karl Marx, a "reserve army" of unemployed labor for the American capitalists.
The color bar is the fundamental dividing line in American society, a key prop for obscuring the irreconcilable divide between the working class and the capitalist class. White workers and immigrant workers are told that black people are their enemy, not the bosses who exploit them all. Up until the last few decades, although black workers often held the most arduous industrial jobs, such as the coke ovens in steel, at least a layer had jobs with health benefits and a pension. These benefits were won because of decades of union struggle and many of these battles were integrated actions, where black and white workers fought side by side on the picket lines. Such integrated class struggle is the only way forward today.
The mass actions of the civil rights movement broke down Jim Crow in the South, but, when the protests came up against the hard economic reality and dehumanized ghetto conditions in the Northern cities, the movement hit the limit of what could be achieved without overthrowing the entire capitalist system. The pro-capitalist leadership of the civil rights movement channeled the struggles into the dead end of the racist Democratic Party.
We seek to build a multiracial, working-class party that will replace the current pro-capitalist labor leadership that only knows how to organize givebacks today. It will take a proletarian, international socialist revolution to complete the tasks of the Civil War, to extend to all oppressed sectors the fruits of their labor. That means seizing the means of production and taking state power from the capitalist class.
The capitalist class has sought to exploit workers at an ever higher rate by union busting and by moving production to the non-unionized South and out of the country. Today in the U.S., a mere 8 percent of private industry remains unionized. Black workers still play a strategic role in the American economy and are disproportionately in union jobs. However, more and more, the black population has become an excess, surplus population for the ruling class. Just as HIV was beginning to infect the U.S. population, the "war on drugs" was being launched against black people with a brutal vengeance—a war of police repression and imprisonment aimed at the black and minority population. And now, over 20 years later, this has sent much of a generation of black men to prison.
The rate of HIV infection is actually increasing in the most recent period among certain sectors of the population in the U.S. In New York City, the financial center of the world, half of black men are unemployed and HIV infection rates are comparable to the Third World. The rate of HIV infection among women is rising dramatically in the U.S.—as it is everywhere in the world. When AIDS was first identified in the early 1980s in the U.S., religious and social bigotry contributed to AIDS being branded as a "white, gay disease." Now it is branded as a "poor black disease."
Last Tuesday, I heard Jacob Levenson, author of The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America, speak at the Brooklyn Library. First of all, there are virtually no other books that focus exclusively on the history of AIDS among black people in the U.S. Levenson is a young, white journalist who took an interest in why AIDS in the U.S. had become a disease of black poverty. Also speaking was Mindy Fullilove from Columbia University. She was one of the first black health professionals in the mid '80s to try to address the rampant HIV infection which was sweeping the ghettos of the Bay Area, along with crack cocaine. AIDS in this black ghetto was totally ignored, although it is right next door to the gay, white ghetto of the Castro District. Fullilove jumped into the fray because there were virtually no trained black scientists to consult at the time in the U.S. The researchers and community organizers were told patronizingly they were the "Third World component"—the intention was to relegate care for black people to a ghettoized back burner.
Black people's disproportionately high HIV infection rate in the U.S. was not unknown before then. Before the mid '80s, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had published statistics that 74 percent of all female cases were black and Latino and 57 percent of pediatric AIDS cases were black. I looked back at Randy Shilts' excellent 1987 book, And the Band Played On, which recounts the vicious bigotry and government neglect that contributed to the deaths of thousands of gay men in the 1980s. He makes clear that key to dispelling the myth that AIDS was an exclusively "gay plague" was the evidence that intravenous drug users, who were often black and heterosexual, their spouses and children, as well as hemophiliacs, contracted AIDS. While the profit-driven blood bank businesses were trying to suppress the information, people were getting infected through transfusions. In other words, HIV is borne by blood, semen, vaginal secretions and breast milk, not the wrath of God against Sodom and Gomorrah, or, the more "polite," bigoted way to put it, a disease caused by a so-called "lifestyle."
But Shilts never addressed the impact of AIDS on the black inner-city populations. In our review of Shilts' book, we said: "AIDS, which was first recognized as a disease in gays, is being transformed into a disease of the ghetto, among the desperately impoverished and oppressed: the chronically unemployed, sometimes already homeless, often illiterate, already without any insurance for health care" (Women and Revolution No. 35, Summer 1988). The fight for black rights and freedom is central to the American workers revolution, and it's the task of a revolutionary party to be a tribune of the people, as Lenin said, and instill this consciousness into all the struggles of the multiracial working class.
AIDS and Special Oppression
We communists fight against all manifestations of social oppression. Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. Murderous bigotry against homosexuals stems from the oppression of women and the straitjacket of the bourgeois family. The reactionary, religious bourgeoisie says that the only legitimate sexual activity for workers is for reproduction of the next generation of workers. The family as an economic unit arose with the rise of class society, and the capitalist class uses the family to instill obedience to the bourgeoisie from generation to generation. More and more, the mythical icon of the monogamous family, enshrined with something called "family values," is used to club poor people over the head and to remind them that they are inadequate. This model has nothing to do with family life actually experienced by workers.
Let me say a word about the current media coverage of a new resistant HIV strain that rapidly leads to full-blown AIDS. While gay activists have expressed genuine concern about the decreasing use of condoms, the hysterical, not-so-thinly-veiled, anti-gay rhetoric escalated every day in the New York Times to a crescendo of statements by community leaders and commentators who called for vigilantism and criminalizing gay men as "murderers." One psychologist did at least note: first they don't let gays get married, and then they condemn them for having sex outside traditional marriage relationships.
We are for appropriate public health measures being taken that may override personal liberty when necessary, but legitimate fears of victimizing the victims looms, especially in this post-September 11 period, when civil liberties on every front are under attack. What has also been glaringly revealed is that 25 years after having repeatedly predicted that a resistant HIV strain that develops quickly into full-blown AIDS could occur, and was in fact inevitable, the public health agencies don't even have the centralized databases that they need to proceed. Partly this is because of the chaotic patchwork of private doctors, laboratories and hospitals that may hold critical information, and partly because of rampant prejudice and discrimination that has not abated, and has forced gay people to fight for confidentiality.
As vilified as gay white men were and are for being "deviant" from the precious norms of bourgeois society, their relatively greater resources allowed them to fight for attention to the AIDS epidemic, especially when the spectre of infection in the larger population was posed. But black gay and bisexual men, IV drug users and their partners, enmeshed in hopelessly impoverished lives in disintegrating neighborhoods, were beneath vilification and faced death on the streets or death in prison.
The Secret Epidemic contrasts the gay, white San Francisco Castro District to the black areas of the San Francisco Bay Area in the early '80s. Black men were dying silently in the ghettos of San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond. Black and Latino community activists were isolated and had fewer connections to get money. There were few statistics on sexual behavior or drug use in the Latino Mission, black Western Addition or Bayview/ Hunters Point that could inform an epidemiologically coordinated plan of attack. There had been virtually no serious scientific studies of black male/female sexuality in the U.S.—ever—because American medical "science" is often a reflection of the racist belief that black people are inferior, and "natural rapists" to be castrated and lynched. Such views reflect the origins of American capitalism, built on the backs of black chattel slaves.
Black women have been stereotyped as either asexual, selfless "mammies" of white children or sexually insatiable Jezebels, fair game for white men. In fact, as the revelation of Strom Thurmond's secret black daughter showed, from slavery until today, it has been a rite of passage for white men to treat black women as sexual property. When the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher Alfred Kinsey carried out his extensive field interviews back in the late 1940s, he told his co-researchers that he had to withhold his findings about black men because he recognized that publishing anything about their sexuality was too explosive; there was no way to address this issue without stoking a violent, racist reaction in America. Slaveowners penned the American Constitution, which lauded liberty and the equal rights of all mankind, and the only way to reconcile such a contradiction was to deem black people less than human. Racism is the bedrock of American capitalism, along with the anti-poor, Puritan work ethic and fundamentalist, anti-sex religious reaction.
In the early '80s as the breadth of the AIDS epidemic began to be known, the black population was so beneath interest to the medical establishment, which was also so blinded by anti-homosexual prejudice, that, in 1981, when Dr. Arye Rubinstein wrote a paper for the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine documenting cases of AIDS in black children in the Bronx, his paper was rejected because the editors deemed it impossible that children could have a "homosexual disease." And they certainly weren't concerned that black children had any new, mysterious illness.
According to the CDC, the overall rate of HIV infection has slowed from 150,000 new cases a year in the mid '80s to the current estimate of 40,000 annually. Anti-retroviral drugs, if you can afford them, have changed HIV infection into a chronic condition, rather than death, for many. The absolute number of new infections has stubbornly stayed the same for the last decade, but what has been changing is the percentage of black people infected. HIV infection has been decreasing overall in the white population in the U.S., but it is increasing among black people.
As of 2002, black people were half of the new HIV diagnoses reported. Blacks are over half of those tested late and diagnosed HIV-positive and thus will have a shorter life span, even if treated. The leading cause of HIV infection among black men is sexual contact with other men, followed by injection drug use. The leading cause for black women is heterosexual contact, followed by injection drug use. Black and Hispanic women represent less than 25 percent of U.S. women, but account for 82 percent of female AIDS cases. The majority of black women with AIDS live in the Northeast and the South.
AIDS and the Incarceration of Black America
We had an article in Workers Vanguard almost exactly ten years ago called "Lockdown U.S.A." (WV No. 618, 10 March 1995). In that article we said that 1.5 million were behind bars. Currently it's nearly 2.1 million. Today, nearly seven million people in the U.S. are in jail or are on probation or parole, and that's more than the population of the eight least populated states in the U.S. combined. There has been an explosive growth of prisons over the last three decades in the name of the "war on drugs." Escalating cop terror against the black masses is a social necessity when decent, livable jobs are removed.
These prisons, with their high-tech, security units, are the torture training grounds for the likes of Army Specialist Charles A. Graner, who used his years as a prison guard in the U.S. to train for Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Graner is being sued by an inmate of the State Correctional Institution-Greene in Pennsylvania for putting a razor in his mashed potatoes, and, with other guards, beating him up and yelling "Shut up, n----r, before we kill you." This is the prison that holds today's foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row, because he is the voice of the voiceless, a fighter for black freedom.
It's important to state here that we consider drug use, prostitution, gambling and age of consent laws (as a few examples, there are others), all as "crimes without victims." In other words, the capitalist state's criminalization of these activities has nothing to do with the welfare of society and everything to do with regimentation and repression. The government should stay out of the bedroom. And drug use or addiction, depending on the circumstances, may be a health concern, but not a crime. Drug addiction, especially among ghetto youth, is fundamentally a reflection of hopelessness and a response to brutal oppression. As Marxists we know that this will not change until social reality changes. The road to a truly egalitarian society is through a socialist revolution.
To this day in the U.S., federal funds are banned for needle exchange programs, which are used all over the world to save lives. And of course, both needle exchange and condoms are banned or unavailable in almost all prisons, although the use of drugs and sexual activity are well known by all.
The state of Ohio, with its miles of empty shells of former steel mills and auto plants, announced they were opening their fourth women's prison in January because of rising drug convictions, reduced probation options and longer sentences. Nationally, women are imprisoned mainly for drugs, prostitution, burglary, fraud and larceny. In 1970 there were 5,600 women in prison; now there are some 100,000 and almost half are black. About one million women are under the control of the criminal justice system. Besides inadequate education, health care and drug treatment, probably the meanest aspect is the seizure of these women's children and restrictions against visitation. Most women in prison are mothers. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners with certain drug infractions could be denied any family visits. And for the sizable number of inmates who are functionally illiterate, this means they cannot even correspond with their family.
There is a growing ex-felon population and drug felons are banned for life from receiving welfare, that is, any cash assistance, and food stamps. Among other states, California, Illinois and Georgia enforce these lifetime bans. Forty-eight percent of women affected are black or Latina. Anyone with a drug conviction cannot get financial aid for any post-secondary education and is barred from public housing. Ex-felons, many of whom went to prison homeless, cannot even stay with relatives in public housing for fear of causing them to lose their homes, are barred from all sorts of job licensing—such as nursing attendant and childcare—are tracked by authorities, virtually unemployable, stigmatized, and the family traumatized and destroyed.
Read the compelling book, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, by Jennifer Gonnerman. Elaine Bartlett is on a speaking tour around the city right now. She spent 16 years in prison in upstate New York, on a 20-to-life sentence, for delivering four ounces of cocaine in a sting operation—her first offense—and became an activist protesting the Rockefeller drug laws while still in prison. The book recounts the impossible barriers she faced when she finally managed to get out of prison. The fabric of her entire family had been irremediably ripped apart by her prison years. The New York State laws are still the harshest in the country, and the recent reforms that shorten the longest sentences only affect the smallest percentage of the incarcerated.
Regarding the rate of HIV infection in black women, I want to mention the "down low" media frenzy which has been hyped everywhere, from a titillating New York Times magazine cover story to the Oprah Winfrey show. The "down low" frenzy was provoked by J.L. King's book, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of "Straight" Black Men Who Sleep with Men. The book purports to expose the phenomenon of HIV-positive, black, bisexual men who "cheat" on their wives. In fact, it is a backward religious piece, which reinforces bigoted stereotypes of so-called amoral gay men. For example, it purports to give women advice on how to detect if your partner is secretly on the "down low." Such a book, and the publicity around it, reflects the racist and anti-gay hysteria which portrays sinister, predatory and deceitful black men whose alleged uncontrollable sexuality leads them to prey on innocent women and their children.
Certainly, every variety of so-called "infidelity" in marriage is as old as marriage itself. Certainly, black gay and bisexual men face many reasons not to come out, and, on the other hand, nobody is going to oppose honesty in personal relationships. This sensationalized racist stereotype only serves to divert attention from the deep-rooted bigotry that prevents desperately needed AIDS funding for research, health care and education from being available. There is absolutely no evidence that the rate of homosexuality is any higher or lower in the black population than the white. Phill Wilson, of the Black AIDS Institute, points out that the single biggest driver of the heterosexual spread of HIV to black women is the massive incarceration of black men. He perceptively compares the U.S. prison system to the migrant worker mining industry in South Africa in the role it has played in fueling the AIDS epidemic, "where you take large groups of men and move them from their families for an extended period of time."
In America, as in South Africa, as everywhere, men who are forced to leave their homes for an extended period of time have new sexual partners, as do the women they leave behind. This serves to spread HIV among both the migrants in South Africa and men cycling in and out of American prisons, along with their partners. Particularly characteristic of American racism is the fact that the rigid racial segregation of black people magnifies the opportunities for infection within this besieged minority population.
Democrats Paved the Way for Bush Reaction
Bush recently motivated the wholesale elimination of Social Security, in favor of a Wall Street crap shoot, by remarking that the current Social Security system is "unfair" to black people because they die before they can get the benefits. Wretched health care, in contrast to the privileged commodity set aside for the rich, along with early deaths by homicide and coyly named "police interventions" (this is what government statisticians call cops gunning down black people in the streets), has produced a system that condemns poor and black people across the income spectrum to shorter life spans. This life and death statistic is one of the most devastating indictments of the racial oppression of black people as a race-color caste in American society.
But two major attacks on poor women that marked the reactionary, post-civil rights movement period were overseen by the Democrats and showed the cruelest contempt for black and poor women and children. The first was Jimmy Carter's overseeing of the 1977 denial of Medicaid to poor women for abortions, proclaimed to all with his cruel "life is not fair" speech. And, on the other end, it was Clinton in 1996 who led the charge, along with the Republicans, to ax, as he put it, "welfare as we know it."
Improvements in water quality and hygiene, from the early to late 20th century, narrowed the gap between black and white people's health status. But, beginning in the 1980s, the health gap has been widening, and black life expectancy went down between 1984 and 1990. Black people get less care, inferior care and at a later point in illness across the board.
In an extensive history of racism and health care in the U.S., An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, the authors, two black physicians, W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, refer to the "slave health deficit" which has characterized the class nature of the medicine-for-profit health system in the U.S. I want to also refer you to "Wealth Care USA" in the Spartacist League's journal Women and Revolution (No. 39, Summer 1991). The Slave Codes declared that slaves were subhuman, they were chattel, property like a mule. Women in particular were treated like breeding animals and marriages were arranged and torn apart to fit the needs of the white owners. Since pseudoscientific rationalizations had to prop up slavery by "proving" that blacks in general were inferior, the health status of free blacks was as bad as that of slaves.
Mistrust of mainstream medicine among the black population is not a small factor in treatment. Conspiracy theories for AIDS abound. The Rand Corporation and Oregon State University just released a survey that found that 16 percent of black Americans think that government scientists created the disease, and slightly more than half say they believe a cure is being withheld from the poor.
For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service withheld treatment from black men with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, who were told they were being treated for "bad blood" in the infamous "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." This so-called study continued until 1972. But it's not just Tuskegee; the "Father of Gynecology," J. Marion Sims, portrayed as an icon in every medical school, performed gynecological experiments on slave women between 1845 and 1852. He bought a slave woman for the purpose of experimenting on her, and he used no anesthesia with the racist justification that black people feel pain less. But the special oppression of the black masses is not a conspiracy; in fact, conspiracy theories tend to disarm one from taking any action at all. Racism is necessary to the American capitalist economic system, which must be replaced by socialism.
For a Socialist Future to Combat Poverty, Ignorance and Disease!
I mentioned early on in the talk that the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union was a historic defeat for the world working class. The planned economy, albeit degenerated, was overthrown, after having been undermined for generations by the Stalinist bureaucracy. However, the Bolshevik Revolution was the only successful workers revolution, and the vision and program of the Bolsheviks who made that revolution are models for anyone who wants to end this miserable capitalist system. You really need an international, planned economy to deal with poverty and disease, as well as all the myriad problems of this society. Then, for the first time, the modern gains of science can be put fully at the service of humanity.
Microbes are living organisms, and despite the creationists' babbling, they will continue to evolve, and we will have to continue to live with them. Access to quality health care should be a simple democratic right. It is a basic necessity like education, housing and a job. A planned, socialist economy, under the rule of the working class, would have one purpose—to provide for all in the best way possible. This degenerate, capitalist ruling class kills. It kills masses of people internationally through wars and starvation, and all in the service of maintaining its ruthless profit-driven economic system. It killed over a million and a half people in Iraq through a starvation blockade, and its neocolonial occupation force continues to kill thousands of people. Here in New York, its cops gun down black youth in the streets and on the housetops of New York like Timothy Stansbury Jr., and in their own apartments like Alberta Spruill, and while they are struggling to make a living like Ousmane Zongo. It kills because this is a desperate ruling class which has become a bar to human progress for over a century now.
Union struggle in this country in the recent period has centered around fighting for decent health care, as the behemoth "wealth care" industry attempts to shake more money out of the pockets of sick people. Free, quality health care for all is within the bounds of material possibility, but not under capitalism where profit rules. If there are no jobs, why educate people, why even keep people alive? We aim to build a revolutionary vanguard party that will sweep away capitalist rule and open the road for a decent world for all. Join us.