Richard Burr, Senator from North Carolina (R).

A report today has confirmed that Richard Burr (R), Dianne Feinstein (D),  James Inhofe (R), and Kelly Loeffler (R) all dumped millions of dollars in stock assets, using exclusive information from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the potential of the COVID-19 pandemic to devastate the economy, a committee headed by Burr.  All of these senators sold their stocks weeks before the stock market crashed, devastating retirement funds and seeing thousands laid off, relying solely on unemployment insurance. Burr sold his stocks just days after telling the public that the US was the most prepared it could be and would not suffer as European countries had.

It is but the latest example brought forth by the coronavirus pandemic that the ruling class, in moments of crisis, will protect itself with the economic and physical suffering of the working class. The choice between socialist collective action and barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg famously wrote, has never been more evident. But this particular case, amongst the countless examples of capitalist barbarity we are exposed to on a daily basis, demonstrates with precision the unity of the ruling class and bourgeois republican government, as Marx and Engels described. Government officials and the capitalist elite are so intertwined that a representative from a state like Oklahoma, the 44th poorest state in the union, can sell off millions of dollars of stock with inside information as his constituents spend long nights worrying about lack of health insurance and shortages in food and basic household goods.

Our conclusion must be the same as Marx and Engels’ to this demonstration of the unity between ruling class and bourgeois democratic government—revolution is the only way. We cannot reform a government that would trade monetary gain for the lives of thousands of Americans. 5,600 Americans were infected today (the number is likely much higher, given the shortage of testing equipment), and 49 died. The suffering of the former, and the blood of the latter, is on the hands of the self-protecting capitalist elite who, for centuries, have traded lives for small upticks on profit graphs.

The pulse of the nation quickens with every day it strains under the COVID-19 pandemic, and as it becomes clearer each day that our leaders favor publicity and profit over our very lives, and the lives of our friends, comrades, and loved-ones. It falls to socialists to build a movement with a collective working-class identity, that openly opposes the separatist rhetoric of Trump and his anti-Chinese racist attacks and a check for one months’ rent (if you’re lucky).  As more workers are laid off, the homeless are thrown onto the street, people receive bills exceeding $34,000 for their COVID-19 treatment, and self-serving capitalists protect their own at our expense, the choice between socialism and barbarism casts a long shadow into mainstream american political discourse.

Categories: U.S. News