Capitalism makes pandemics inevitable. Only the alt can solve.

Ghebreyesus’ remarks, the stagnation of the negotiations on the pandemic agreement, and the corporate interests causing that stagnation all serve as a stinging indictment of the failures of the capitalist system to meet global challenges. The resistance of the IFPMA and the German government exemplify the subordination of public health to private profit. Of course, the entire history of the capitalist system’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic calls out in stark terms its massive failures and crimes. Corporations dictated prices, forced the inequitable distribution of supplies including medicines and vaccines, influenced public health policy against scientifically-based measures, demanded the ending of zero-COVID policies in China and other nations, and induced governments to return spending on public health systems to pre-pandemic levels or lower. The end result has been the needless deaths of nearly 30 million people and the debilitation of hundreds of millions more throughout the world. These travesties have been accompanied and compounded by a dramatic increase in social inequality. Oxfam recently released a new report documenting this phenomenon, noting that 5 billion people have become poorer since 2020 while the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth at a staggering rate of $14 million per hour. Billionaires collectively have gained $3.3 trillion of wealth in the same time period. The richest one percent of individuals globally now control 43 percent of the world’s wealth. Capitalism’s response to the pandemic both in terms of death and illness and this massive rise in social inequality, as documented extensively by the World Socialist Web Site, is a great social crime. Turning to the institutions of capitalism and demanding that they change course is an exercise in folly. They have proven impervious as they stoke the fires of World War III and enable a deadly virus to tear through vulnerable populations ad infinitum. The international working class must assimilate the lessons of the pandemic, above all the inability of capitalism to organize on a global scale to address the current pandemic and prevent future ones. Indeed, these immense global tasks fall to the working class itself, which must reorganize the world economy on its own terms to prioritize social needs, including public health, over corporate profits. This can only be achieved through an international socialist program, with the goal of ending capitalism and its contradictions and building a new society that protects and promotes health, resolves climate change, and ensures social equality.