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In this classic article from the February 24March 8, 1988 issue of In These Times, Democratic Socialists of America founder Michael Harrington explains why the democratization of both power and economics is critical to human liberation, the importance of combatting runaway corporate capitalism and why leftists should proudly claim the mantle of U.S.socialism.

"There is no question now as to whether there will be radical change in the immediate future. It is already under way. The only issue is how it will be carried out."

Is socialism relevant to the late 20th and 21st centuries? And if so what does one mean by socialism? In any case, why identify as asocialist in the United States where the very word invites misunderstanding, at best, and afrantic, ignorant rejection at worst? Finally, given all of these problems why build asocialist organization in thiscountry?

First, the socialist critique of power under both capitalism and Communism is not only substantial in and of itself; it also makes asignificant contribution to the cause of incremental reform as well as to aradical restructuring ofsociety.

Power, that critique argues, is systemic, North, South, East and West, and reproduces itself along with its mutually reinforcing social evils. In the various systems of power in the world today, the control of investment and basic economic allocations is not the only source of dominationracism and sexism persist in all systemsbut it is its single most important constituent. Those in charge of investment, be they corporate executives or commissars, will claim and get unequal treatment for themselves on the grounds that they act in the interest of the future of the entire society and must therefore have the resources to do their job. And those who are excluded from that function will be forced to pay all the social costs of decisions made onhigh.

In asuperficial analysis, the tremendous growth of homelessness in the late 1970s and 1980s is simply aresult of the deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the 1960s. But that analysis contradicts the data, which increasingly shows that the homeless are families and that two thirds of them do not have histories of mental and emotional problems. It also fails to explain why the deinstitutionalization of the 1960s did not lead to adramatic rise in homelessness until the late1970s.

A more seriousliberalanalysis would recognize that this homelessness is afunction of decreased real income and increased poverty among the wage-earning poor and adecline in the supply of private and government-sponsored affordable housing. From this point of view, one would quite rightly attack New York Mayor Ed Koch for providing tax incentives for the destruction of single-room-occupancy hotels (SROs), while at the same time noting that the SROs themselves were utterly inadequate even if they were better than thestreets.

A socialist analysis would deepen those liberal insights. It would see Kochs action as one more example of the system at work: of government policy subsidizing private, profit-making and often anti-social priorities, usually on the grounds of a trickle-down theory. It would understand the decline in the real wage and the increase in the poverty of working people as astandard systemic response to the crisis of profitability and productivity in the mid-1970s. And it would stress not simply aprogram for decent shelter, but the necessity of democratizing the entire process of investment in this, and other, basic needs of life. It would also show that, had the community health centers projected in the 1960s been builtor more broadly, if America had anational health programthen the problem of the deinstitutionalized mental patients would never have became the outrage it nowis.

That socialist conception of ahousing program would not, however, simply specify so many units. It would urge aplanned development of racially and socially integrated communities with public spaces and facilities for new institutions of neighborhood democracy and control. And it would try to reach out to build political support for such an undertaking by uniting the homeless in acoalition with young families from the working class and middle class as well as with seniors who do not want to be segregated on the basis ofage.

The socialist point is that these various reforms, which many liberals would support on an ad hoc basis, must be as coherent as the structures they oppose. What is needed is not simply anew housing bill but anew way of making and designing social investments in areas of critical need. And even if one has to settle politically for something less than that, aproposal designed on the basis of asocialist analysis will be different than one which is the product of liberal concern with asingle issue. For example, Representative Ronald Dellums (DCA) national health bill gives people at the base asay in non technical medical decisions; it is not just amatter of health insurance. And indeed, every socialist program is about changing the distribution of power in the way decisions aremade.

Similarly, asocialist response to what is happening under Gorbachev in the Soviet Union would not simply stress the importance of pursuing peace negotiations even more vigorously in order to encourage Glasnost and Perestroika. It would put Gorbachevs progressive, but technocratic, reforms in the context of an analysis which would see bureaucratic resistance to change in the Soviet Union as afunction of an anti-democratic system of power in which even positive initiatives are initiated behind the backs of the people. And it would argue that American unilateral peace initiatives toward verifiable Big Power agreements may welland hopefully willcreate the long run conditions for ademocratization of Soviet society which goes beyond anything now on the agenda inMoscow.

In the case of the Third World, one can be even more specific. The response to the international debt crisisand the global structure of inequality underlying itby the Socialist International, under the leadership of Michael Manley, former Minister of Jamaica, and Willy Brandt, former Chancellor of West Germany (and, until his death, of Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden), is aperfect example of what is needed. Amajor transfer of funds from North to South, the International has shown, could create jobs in the First World as well as the Third. International justice could be an engine of growth for U.S. workers. It could provide an alternative to chauvinist attitudes, which sometimes accompany the justified anger of people under advanced capitalism with the systemic irresponsibility of multi-nationalcorporations.

All these negatives and criticism are well and good, someone might say. But isnt the socialist movement itself in aprofound crisis even in those countries where it has amass base? What about the spectacular failure of the French Socialists when they had an absolute parliamentary majority and control of the presidency aswell?

There is no doubt that the Keynesian version of social democracya mixed corporate economy in which socialist governments extract asurplus for welfare measures, but leave basic investment decisions in private handswhich dominated the European movement from 1950 to about 1975, is in aprofound crisis. The French socialists were subjected to the brutal discipline of the worlds banks because their socially based Keynesian programs generated more jobs in Japan and Germany than in France. Even as one searches for anew response to this reality, it should be noted that this is one more example of elite corporate powerin this case exercised by multinational banks and corporations. The contemporary challenge to socialism, however, requires new departures, not fatalisticsurrender.

At the very origins of the modern socialist movement in the 19th century, there was abasic insight which will be even truer in the 21st century than when it was first formulated. Capitalism was understood as asystem of private socialization, creating agenuine world market for the first time in human history, applying science to production, and linking people together in an unprecedented interdependence. But because that socialization was private, it was pursued at the expense of society. Socialism was conceived of as aprogram of democratic socialization from below, as amovement to put the people in control of the economic conditions which determine so much about theirlives.

That basic goal has been understood over the past century and ahalf in many, many ways, some of them wrong, some leading to partial victories, none even beginning to achieve the fullness of the original vision. And matters were complicated when, in the Soviet Union, asystem of anti-democratic socialization emerged. There the party-state carried out the brutal process of accumulation which was the work of capitalism in the West, and used the rhetoric of socialism to rationalize new forms of classrule.

Now that the Keynesian version of socialism is in crisis, the mass socialist movements of the world are indeed confused and even bewildered about the next steps toward democratic socialization. This is roughly the third time that this has happened: it occurred right after World War Iwhen the socialists suddenly got political power and did not know what to do with it, and at the time of the Depression when, with the exceptions of the Swedes, there was ageneral programmatic and political failure of themovement.

At the same time, the objective need for socialism has become all the more imperative. The multi-nationalization of the world economy is creating an increasingly interdependent globe, striking at the workers and communities of advanced capitalism as well as at the poor countries. Revolutionary new technologies are undermining even the limited accomplishments of capitalist welfarestates.

There is no question now as to whether there will be radical change in the immediate future. It is already under way. The only issue is how it will be carried out. Will it come from on high, at the social and economic cost of the mass of people in every society and through arepression of freedom? Or can socialists, faced with areality they never imagined, work out effective programs of structural change which move in the direction of atruly democratic socialization of theworld?

There is now too much food in the worldand people starving to death; too much steel capacity and masses desperately in need of housing and transit which use steel. And there will be, within the next year or two, acrisis of the world economy which will not automatically engender aprogressive response, but which will make such apolitical response possible. At that point, some of those who now assume that the determinants of Reagans America (and Thatchers Britain, Kohls Germany, Chiracs France, to cite but afew of the obvious cases) are eternal will look around for asocialist movement with positive answers. These cannot be predicted now, but it is clear that they will be distinctly internationalist, antiracist, feminist and green as well as oriented to the working class, both old andnew.

But why not just insist on the socialist specifics and omit any mention of the socialist name itself? Why not, as Tom Haydens original Campaign for Economic Democracy of the 1970s proposed, socialism without the Sword?

It is not just that the right wing will not let you get away with it, although that is true (they routinely denounce liberalism as socialist). It is not even primarily because the historic function of American anti-socialism is to fight liberal reforms, not anon-existent socialist threat, and that an attack on that anti-socialism will broaden the political spectrum in acountry which has aright and acenter but no real left. Even more important, if one pretends that one is not asocialist, or speaks in euphemisms, all that is lost is the basic clarity of analysis and program. You cannot talk, or think, about the present crisis without understanding its roots in the systemic complex of corporate capitalist power. We can try to communicate that fact in the most effective possible rhetoricand many socialists do wrongly think that it is radical to talk in such away as to infuriate the average Americanbut we cannot conceal the basic reality from others and, above all, fromourselves.

Secondly, socialists have had asignificant impact upon power in America even if, for complex historic reasons, they have never come close to achieving power. The role of the 1912 Debsian immediate program in introducing the concepts of the welfare state of the New Deal is well known (though it is often not recognized that the 1912 program is still to the left of what has been achieved). So is the critical importance of socialists, Communists, Trotskyists and anarchists in struggling for the theory and practice of industrial unionism, which led to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. More recently, David Garrow has documented how Martin Luther King, Jr. saw himself apart of that socialist tradition (a fact that Iknew from my own work with Dr. King). And the feminist, anti-interventionist and Citizens Action movements clearly built upon the radical tradition of the1960s.

I also think of the generation of economists now in their late thirties and early forties, the men and women who will provide many of the practical ideas of the next mass left. Every one of them comes out of the New Left and the socialist tradition. However they now define themselves, they are apart of that ongoing socialist contribution to practicalpolitics.

But why, then, asocialist organization? Why the backbreaking, frustrating work of building DSA against the tremendous odds of corporate America? Simply put, because there is no individualistic way of showing people that democratic and communitarian action is critical to the future. More broadly, the times are already achanging. The moral and intellectual fatigue which so many veterans of the past twenty years feel blinds them to the fact that, within ayear or two or three, there is going to be anew generation of change inAmerica.

I remember the Eisenhowerand Joe McCarthy1950s. They were worse than anything that happened in the Reagan 1980s. And when the moment of change camenone of us who had been waiting for years for that blessed break understood that it actually happened on aday in February 1960 when four black students in North Carolina decided to have an integrated cup of coffeea decimated left was utterly incapable of rising to the enormous newopportunities.

I do not think that the 1960s would have been totally different had there been acontinuity with the radicalism of the 1930s, 40s, and 50shad there been the equivalent of aDSA in February 1960. Ido think that there would have been adifference. Perhaps people would not have had to spend so much time reinventing the wheel, sometimes badly, and maybe the histories of Students for aDemocratic Society and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee would havebenefited.

Right now, the difficult and laborious work of DSAthe struggle to make the anti intervention movement as broad as possible and to involve the unions and the churches in it; the campaign to make disarmament the beginning of the work of international economic and social justice; the attempt to define the issue of poverty and racism and sexism as problems of economic and social structures rather than discrete evils; the coalition meetings with activists from the unions, the new social strata, the minority movements and all the restis going to make aprofound contribution to the 1990sleft.

We are not going to lead the nation and, thank God, have abandoned any Messianic pretense of being the anointed vanguard of history. But when the moment comes, when that pilgrimage of women and men toward the realization of their own humanity begins again, as it will, we will be there. DSA itself may well be transformed at that moment, its cadres and energy and ideas being absorbed into new organizational forms that we cannot now even imagine. And yet it will bethere.

Those who lose heart on the very eve of anew generation of change should remember the profound truth Antonio Gramsci articulated from an Italian jail cell in adecade that saw the triumph of fascismand, with an exception or two, the spectacular failure of socialism, and the destruction of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism. Socialism, Gramsci said, was not amatter of apolitical victory on this or that day, or even this or that decade. It was not an economic program, arecipe. It was a moral and intellectual reformation, afight to transform the very culture and will of those who had, since time immemorial, been made subordinate, the epochal work of the creation of anew civilization.

We live today in the most radical of times; humanity is fighting at this very moment over the content of that new civilizationof anew planet, if you willand that struggle will go on beyond the lifetime of every one of us. There is no guarantee that the vision of ademocratic and communitarian socialization will prevail over the bureaucrats and the technocrats who abound in this period. All socialism isallis the theory and practice which seeks to empower the people of the North, South, East and West to take control of their destiny for the firsttime.

Those who join the movement for the immediate rewards of power are advised to apply elsewhere. Those who are willing to wager their lives on the possibility of freedom and justice and solidarity should pay theirdues.

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Socialism Informs the Best of Our Politics - In These Times

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was a popular Democratic candidate in the past two presidential elections, as he grappled the frontrunner spot at one point in the 2020 race against now President-elect Joe Biden, despite touting the label of being a Democratic Socialist.

Sanders has guided a modern American socialism movement, as dozens of members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were elected into state and local government positions in the 2018 midterm elections, along with Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). Although Sanders doesnt represent DSA, he has embraced democratic socialism ideals that back widespread, taxpayer-funded government programs like Medicare For All.

During President Donald Trumps White House term, he and other GOP lawmakers have promised to halt any democratic socialism from punching American politics. At Trumps State of the Union address earlier this year, he said socialism destroys nations, pointing fingers at lawmakers like Sanders and congressional members of the progressive Squad on Capitol Hill who impose a socialist takeover of our health care system.

But its not like the United States hasnt experienced a wave of socialist politicians before, considering one lawmakerEugene V. Debswho ran in the 1912 presidential election for the Socialist Party and received nearly one million votes, illuminating a strong presence of socialism within Americas borders.

In fact, dozens of socialists were elected to local offices across the country between 1910 and 1912, The Washington Posts Gillian Brockell wrote.

In the early years of the 20th century, Americans grew shocked at concentrated corporate wealth controlled by relatively few people, men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Sr. And so a massive labor movement emerged, with Debs propped up as a leader for the nations working class. Debs appealed to Americans in labor industries, encouraging them to advocate for eight hour work days, sustainable wages and other day-to-day improvements.

Debs also immediately cracked down on the corruption among Democratic and Republican leaders, becoming the great era socialist of American history and one of the most important American socialists of all time.

Newspapers across the country exposed the corruption and dishonestly from leaders on both sides of the aisle, adding to the extensive development and wins for the Socialist Party in the United States, a group that elected more than 1,000 candidates to public office, including mayors, congressmen and legislators in over 350 cities and towns. Milwaukee became the first major city to elect a socialist, as Emil Seidel, a prominent German-American politician, took the reigns as mayor from 1910 to 1912. After his term, Seidel acted as Debss running mate in the 1912 presidential election.

Other leaders of the movement who have faded from the American lefts memory, according to Dissents Harold Meyerson, are Oscar Ameringer, the leader of the Oklahoma wing of the party; Victor Berger and Meyer London, the two Debs-era congressmen; Morris Hillquit, an Eastern European immigrant who served as a labor lawyer in New York and ran as a socialist candidate for mayor of New York City; and Kate Richards OHare, a leading figure for the party who was imprisoned during World War I.

But once the United States joined WWI, the federal government set rules to basically police and try to drum socialists out of American society, as the partys leaders became anti-war advocates and opposed President Woodrow Wilsonthe Democratic candidate who secured a win over Debs in the 1912 race for the White House. The strict guidelines prohibited anti-war sentiment and protests, jailing those who didnt listen, including Debs. Historian Nathan Connolly dubbed this era as a time when the government treated socialists as anarchists and general terrorists, noting that one attorney general actually formed a division within the Justice Department to weed out any socialist ideas within the U.S., ultimately killing the party for almost a century.

The failure of both American socialism and the larger American left is the product of all of the above, a tale of missed opportunities abetted by a lethal dose of government suppression in the years during and after the First World War, Meyerson wrote.

Other factors that contributed to the partys collapse were the unpleasant images and reputations the socialist revolutionaries received during the vexed era, as well as the rise of Communism.

Although socialism eventually faded from the Hill, candidates from the party slightly sprouted after WWI. One politician, A. Philip Randolph, an African American labor organizer, rejected capitalism, as he believed it deepened the racial divide between white and black workers. Randolph essentially established a socialist position that fought for racial equality during the early Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement.

But Sanders and Ocasio-Cortezs version of democratic socialism is the most powerful revival of the movement, yet, as the two have a huge, young support base who are energized by their contentious rhetoric.

Rachel Bucchino is a reporter at the National Interest. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and The Hill.

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Before Bernie or AOC: Socialism is Not New to America - The National Interest

China

Britain has a population 21 times smaller than China, yet it has seen 20 times as many cases of Covid-19and almost 13 times as many deaths.

The World Health Organisation called Chinas efforts perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. Strict lockdowns and social media apps restricted peoples movements, thousands of military doctors and nurses were sent to the Wuhan epicentre, medical supplies, food and fuel were delivered on a massive scale.

The speed of Chinas response was the crucial factor, explains Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota. Other countries delayed their response and that meant they lost control.

Vietnam

The country has a population of 97 million and at the time of writing has recorded around 35 deaths. With fewer than 1,000 ICU beds for its more than 97 million people, Vietnam simply had to act.

The military was mobilised and their bases converted to mandatory quarantine sites. The largest manufacturing companies were converted to producing PPE and test kits, which they are now exporting to the US. A mobile app was created locate Covid-19 hot spots.

Matt Moore, the US Centre for Disease Controls representative in Hanoi, says:The public here in Vietnam has really bought into this. They really feel shared ownership... and I think, again, its because of those early successes (with strong measures that might be considered draconian). But they were really effective.

It wasnt just about authoritarianism. There was complexity behind the government messaging that accompanied the strict lockdown and tracing measures. According to The Diplomat on October 19 2020, Vietnams government, in fact, crafted narratives rooted in the intricate history and recent cultural memory of the country in order to encourage solidarity and collective action.

The government employed a widespread information campaign, much of the messaging evoking Vietnams past military conflicts; that connected with many Vietnamese proud of their ability to stand together in a crisis.

Vietnam is one of the few countries in the world currently experiencing positive GDP growth.The supposed trade-off between the economy and public health, which countries around the world are negotiating, looks to be something of a false choice, writes Tran Le Thuy, director of Centre for the Media and Development Initiatives in Hanoi.

Cuba

The Caribbean island has recorded 136 deaths at the time of writing against a population of 11.3 million Britains death rate is about 76 times worse.

Cubas universal healthcare system has allowed the government to direct a unified rather than a fragmented strategy with tracing and isolation made possible by human resources.

Cuba has thehighest doctor-to-patient ratio in the worldand the island spends a higherproportion of its GDP on healthcarethan any other country in the region. While 30 per cent of the 630 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean have no access to healthcare for financial reasons according to the Pan American Health Organisation, everybody in Cuba is covered.

Cuba has also made an extraordinary and well-documented effort in extending aid to other countries in their fight against the virus which has led to calls for the country to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Kerala

The south Indian state, whose Communist-led Left Front government was re-elected this month,was considered ripe for the spread of the virus with its dense population and high levels of regular immigration. But despite a recent surge in cases, now under control, it has succeeded in maintaining a death rate of 0.37 per cent, far less than the Indian national average of 1.37 per cent.

Primary healthcare services and active community participation have been paramount. Local self-governance is a form of democratic decentralisation and transfers power to those that can make a difference.

Kudumbashree units, womens self-help groups under local leadership, form one of the largest women-empowering projects in Kerala; they reach the family through women and the larger community through these families. These groups and others were crucial in furthering the thrust of the campaign on community education and basic prevention.

The British Medical Journal summed up Keralas efforts as a proactive and timely approach within the basics of quarantine, infection prevention and control with the highest political and administrative commitment. The strong public health system and the empowered and literate community has helped the state to combat the pandemic as a joint effort.

Interdepartmental coordination from the highest administrative levels to the village level was visible The lessons from Kerala underline the importance of a strong public health system with active community participation.

Common factors behind the success of the socialists

The states covered above have performed much better than the developed West. Although eastern capitalist nations performed better than the west, Vietnams death rate is 50 times less than Japans and 30 times less than that of South Korea and Chinas is six times less and three times less respectively. Cuba also compares well to both these countries despite being significantly poorer.

Nye Bevan believed the language of priorities is the religion of socialism and Covid-19 quickly became the number one priority, with no delays to action nor equivocation over the appropriate measures due to concern over the potential loss of income to corporates or the property sector. This swift and decisive action actually allowed a quicker and less lethal return to normality and regular economic activity than has been the case in most capitalist countries.

A mass, popular mobilisation of resources and people to fight the virus with an appeal to a sense of collective responsibility has contrasted with a developed world in which a selfish individualist ethos has coloured both public and private responses. The public in many developed countries have resisted the wearing of masks in public and other precautions; many workplaces have not adapted to the needs of the situation and have become centres for the spread of the disease, egconstruction sites and meat-packing factories.

All experiencein Britain and overseas shows that local test and trace works better. While, according to the latest government figures, the centralised system currently reaches just 63 per cent of contacts, local authorities are reaching 97 per cent of contacts.

This is despite the fact that they have been denied access to government data and were given just 300m in contrast with the 12bn for national test and trace. Centralisations only advantage lies in the fact that itmakes it easier to award lucrative contracts tomultinational corporations.

A public-sector-led response with public priorities is paramount. Good healthcare infrastructure is important but so is management, political responsibility and public will. The USs expenditure on healthcare is significantly greater by any measure than that of the socialist countries but its response to the virus has not been governed by the same priorities and the resultant outcomes have been disastrous.

In the socialist countries the virus response has not been about increasing the profitability of the governments network of private-sector contacts. Britain governments commitment to a private-sector led solution has led to money that could have saved lives and fed hungry children being diverted into corporate profits, inexperienced consultants, executives being appointed over the heads of qualified public servants and the creation of a centralised unaccountable bureaucracy.

Maybe some of the restrictions and controls imposed by the fourstates would have been difficult to enforce in the West but their overall response has been characterised by much more than authoritarian fiat. It can be summarised as the collective harnessing of resources in a coherent manner aimed at achieving outcomes that maximised the common good with the priority of protecting the most vulnerable, in short: socialism.

A longer version of this article with further sources and research is available here.

See the rest here:
Covid-19 and the socialist states - Morning Star Online

In many countries around the world, socialism is used as a derogatory term by right-wing politicians. For example, US President Donald Trump and his supporters attacked his predecessor Barrack Obama for socialism for trying to get the government involved in ensuring access to healthcare for all its citizens. Rather than challenge it, academia and media generally tend to propagate a bleak view of socialism.

This unjustified negativity is due in no small part to the use of the word by Communist dictatorships such as the old USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

Even today there is a wide range of ideologically differing political parties on the broad left spectrum, many of them using the term socialism. On one extreme you have the closed despotic regimes like North Korea and one-party states like China and Vietnam, which talk socialism but are currently engaging in rapid development and consumerism that is extremely capitalist in nature.

On the other hand, there was a wave of Latin American left-wing governments in the early 2000s while old school social democracy is enjoying a renaissance exemplified by progressive, young, female prime ministers like New Zealands Jacinda Ardern, Finlands Sanna Marin and Denmarks Mette Frederiksen.

In Malaysia, however, the ideology has been on the fringes ever since the main opposition Barisan Socialis Rakyat Malaysia was decimated by the widespread use of the Internal Security Act to arrest and detain its elected officials in the early 1960s.

In the present day, despite having a well-developed ideological platform and programme of struggle, Parti Socialis Malaysia (PSM) supporters and members are often treated as labour activists and NGOs, rather than as representatives of a fully-fledged national party...

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Sick of the system, young Malaysians turn to socialism - Malaysiakini

On January 3, 2020, in its first edition of the new year, the World Socialist Web Site posted a statement titled The decade of socialist revolution begins. With a speed and to a degree that not even the WSWS could have predicted, the statements title has been vindicated. We are coming to the end of the most significant year of the still young twenty-first century. The Pandemic of 2020 will prove to be as great a historical turning point for this century as the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was for the twentieth. The First World War exposed in all their brutality the contradictions of the capitalist system and triggered the eruption of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheavals that defined the twentieth century.

The Pandemic of 2020 has revealed before the entire world the irreconcilable economic, social and moral chasm that divides the capitalist drive for profit from the most essential needs of the overwhelming majority of mankind. Since the beginning of the year, more than 1.5 million people have died after being infected with COVID-19.

Within the United States, the death toll has now passed 300,000. In the center of world capitalism, approximately 3,000 people are dying every day. The intensive care units of hospitals are being overwhelmed with patients, and in many parts of the country there is a real danger that fragile health care systems will break down beneath the strain.

Vaccines are now being produced and distributed that will protect those who are inoculated against infection. However, this protracted process will require months before it has any significant impact upon the rate of death. It is now predicted that within the United States at least another quarter million people will die of COVID-19 between now and April 1. But absolutely no serious emergency measures are being proposed to stop the spread of the pandemic.

The government, the corporations, the pandemic profiteers of Wall Street, and the Democrats and Republicansmaintaining their policy of malign neglectstill refuse to take the measures that are necessary to save livesthe shutdown of all non-essential workplaces, the closure of schools, and emergency financial aid to all working people and small businesses whose income has been impacted by the pandemicbecause the capitalist system prioritizes profits over lives. The financial and corporate oligarchs, whose vast fortunes have grown massively due to the rise of share values, oppose all life-saving policies that would impact negatively on the stock market, corporate profits and, above all, their personal wealth.

And while the pandemic has exacted its terrible toll, American democracy is breaking down beneath the pressure and strains created by massive social inequality. With substantial support within the corporate-financial oligarchy, Donald Trump has utilized the presidency to suppress the Bill of Rights and set up a fascistic dictatorship.

During this year of unprecedented social and political crisis, the World Socialist Web Site has demonstrated its critical and indispensable role in providing the working class with unequaled coverage of global events. But it not only reports on events; it analyzes them and explains their significance. The WSWS provides a perspective and a program of action.

There is not a single publication in the world that can compare its coverage of the pandemic to that of the World Socialist Web Site. Its first substantial report on the outbreak of the pandemic was posted on January 24, 2020.

On January 25, it warned, The Coronavirus emergency places in focus a health crisis which is the expression of the failure of the capitalist system to provide solutions to the most basic needs of the population.

The Trump administration and the media have claimed, in justification of their failure to respond quickly and effectively to the pandemic, that the scope and lethality of the pandemic could not have been foreseen.

But this outrageous lie is exposed by the numerous warnings and calls for emergency action posted on the World Socialist Web Site in the earliest days of the crisis:

On March 6, 2020when the total number of deaths in the entire United States was only 15the WSWS already recognized both the disastrous potential of the pandemic and the criminal inadequacy of the governments response. We wrote:

The indifference of the Trump administration to the health of the population is no better, and perhaps worse, than the attitude of the pharaohs to their slaves. The media has spent far more time bemoaning the fall in share values on Wall Street than the loss of human life.

On March 13, 2020when the total number of deaths in the US due to COVID-19 was just 47the WSWS posted a statement, titled Capitalism is at war with society, in which we warned: The coronavirus pandemic is developing into a social, economic and political crisis on a scale that is without precedent.

On March 17, 2020when the total number of deaths in the United States had just passed 100the WSWS published a Program of Action for the Working Class issued by the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party, which stated:

For the past two months, all of the White Houses actions in response to the pandemic have been aimed solely at propping up the financial markets.

An enormous amount of time has been lost, but the impact and extent of the pandemic depends on urgent responses that can be taken now.

The essential principle that must guide the response to the crisis is that the needs of working people must take absolute and unconditional priority over all considerations of corporate profit and private wealth. It is not a matter of what the ruling class claims it can afford, but what the masses need.

These statements, and dozens more that have been posted in the course of the past year, demonstrate a level of social and political insight that is not to be found in any other publication. They testify to the extraordinary power of the Marxist method that is employed by the World Socialist Web Site. If the warnings of the WSWS had been heeded, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. But far from heeding our warnings, the corporate media continued to censor the World Socialist Web Site.

The response of the WSWS to the political crisis in the United States has been no less perspicacious than its coverage of the pandemic. In the beginning of June 2020, the WSWS correctly assessed the significance of Trumps threat to invoke the Insurrection Act and his mobilization of military police to violently suppress citizens protests. In a statement posted June 4, 2020, the World Socialist Web Site declared:

The White House is now the political nerve center of a conspiracy to establish a military dictatorship, overthrow the Constitution, abolish democratic rights and violently suppress the protests against police brutality that have swept across the United States.

And, further, in a warning that appears, in light of subsequent events, extraordinarily prescient: Nothing could be more dangerous than to think that the crisis has passed. It has, rather, just begun.

The pandemic is not only a tragedy. It is a warning. The subordination of the planet to the pursuit of profit and personal wealth leads to fascism and the ultimate cataclysm of nuclear war. But a mood of resistance is developing throughout the world. The criminal response of the ruling elites to the global pandemic is evoking ever greater anger within the international working class. The year 2021 will be marked by the intensification of political crisis and the escalation of class struggle.

Every great historical crisis tests political movements and their programs. The World Socialist Web Site, the voice of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality parties throughout the world, can justifiably state that it met the many challenges of 2020.

The correctness and clarity of its political analysis and program, combined with its growing involvement in the daily struggles of the working class, has leddespite the persistent efforts of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to suppress access to the WSWSto a substantial growth in the readership of the World Socialist Web Site. There has been an enthusiastic response to the October 2 relaunch of the WSWS.

In 2019, the WSWS recorded 17 million page views. In 2020with nearly two weeks remaining until the turn of the new yearthe WSWS has recorded 21.7 million page views, an increase of 28 percent.

The total number of readers of the WSWS increased by 41.7 percent. We are especially gratified by the substantial growth recorded by the WSWS throughout the world. In Britain, the readership of the site has more than doubled. In Australia, there has been a 93 percent increase in readership. In India, a 67 percent increase. In Sri Lanka, a 235 percent increase. In Brazil, a 103 percent increase. In Turkey, the number of WSWS users has increased 152 percent.

The growth of our readership and the total number of page views is a significant achievement of which the editorial board and our many comrades throughout the world who write for and contribute to the production and posting of the site can be justifiably proud.

But we also recognize that the increase in readership reflects a growing militancy in the working class, which, in turn, will confront the World Socialist Web Site with new and even more daunting political, technological and organizational challenges.

The WSWS is determined to meet these challenges. But we need your support. As the production, technological maintenance, and global coverage of the WSWS grow more complex, the scale of the financial resources required to sustain and develop the site grows as well.

That is why I am asking you, on behalf of the editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, to make the largest donation possible to the 2021 New Years fund. This fund drive, which begins today, will continue until February 15, 2021. You can make your donation now or make a pledge payable by February 15.

The money we receive will be used to enlarge our staff, expand the range of our coverage and to keep pace with the rapidly developing technology of the internet.

You can also contribute to the success of the fund drive and the growth of the readership of the web site by circulating this video and material posted on the WSWS to your friends and co-workers. We do not expect that the corporate media platforms will give up their efforts to censor and suppress access to the WSWS. But your efforts to win new readers to the site can counteract these measures.

And, finally, as you make your financial contribution to the World Socialist Web Site, I urge you to take the most important step of all. Apply for membership in the Socialist Equality Party. Take up the fight for the unity of the international working class and a world without inequality, political oppression and war. Join the struggle for socialism in 2021.

Your support is essential to help build a revolutionary leadership of the working class in 2021!

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The World Socialist Web Site and the crises of 2020 - WSWS