The pandemic revealed the bankruptcy of capitalism

On 15/6, the Health–Welfare Section of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) presented its new publication under the title “COVID-19 pandemic: Capitalism in its twilight”. Workers in the Health–Welfare and other sectors, young people, and students flooded the park next to the largest hospital in the country, “Evangelismos”, where the book presentation took place. Among them were many vanguard trade unionists who work in public hospitals and who, for the past two years, under the extremely difficult conditions of the pandemic, have been at the forefront of the struggle to defend people’s health. 

 
The GS of the CC of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, delivered a speech and noted among other things that “The greatest and most dangerous virus is capitalism itself. And this of course does not only apply to the pandemic but everything that our people are facing, from high prices, which did not come as a bolt from the blue but are a consequence of the capitalist path of development, to the imperialist war in Ukraine and our country’s involvement (...)

Of course, when we refer to ‘capitalism in its twilight’ we have in mind a socio-economic system that has decayed and whose development presupposes the intensification of the exploitation of the modern working class, and in fact in all the aspects that determine the conditions for the reproduction of labour power, of its own life. That was expressed during the pandemic with the tragic shortages of staff, infrastructure, technical means, and medical equipment in the public health units (...) 

 

The government and all the other bourgeois parties, with insignificant individual differences, propose as a solution the strengthening of the market rules in the health system. In other words, they refer to all those ‘tools’ that on the one hand shaped this miserable public health system and on the other hand formed a robust private business health sector. The only thing they demonstrate is the magnitude of the decay of the capitalist path of development (...)

In our opinion, on the occasion of this publication, the healthcare workers first and foremost but also the people who are concerned about their health and life should take a step further in their thinking, stance, and daily activity.

The KKE wages a daily struggle for staff recruitment, the expansion of benefits to the people, and the increase of the funding from the state budget. It is also charting a path of development that will treat public health as a universal and free right safeguarded by a workers’–people’s government and its state. It calls upon the people to rally with the KKE, for the protection of health; for a system without any business activity, where the people will be able to meet their basic and urgent needs with all available means. (...) In the final analysis, science can defeat all this irrationality and obscurantism overwhelming us and  its source, that is, capitalist exploitation and barbarism.” 

inter.kke.gr