When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc. is their first end. But, at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end.

Karl Marx

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

One of the most destructive trends encouraged by capitalism is the ideology of “rugged individualism.” Under the dominion of Capital, each person is forced to act as a discrete economic unit, fighting with other discrete economic units (you know, what we regularly call “people”) for a slice of a pie that isn’t big enough to go around. “It’s us,” says the logic of Capital, “against the world.” This economic war of all-against-all has inspired a whole library of apologetics. Bourgeois philosophers make their excuses for the brutality of the system they support by telling us that if only everyone looked out for themself and pulled hard on their bootstraps, there would be prosperity enough for all. They tell us to look after our neighbors by looking after ourselves. Then, when looking out for number one turns out to be insufficient to overcome the economic walls built up by the owners, when it doesn’t bear fruit, they tell us “It’s because you didn’t work hard enough, it has nothing to do with systemic oppression and marginalization.” 

In reality, it is impossible for a person to live without or “against” society; it is only through our relationship to society that we are able to understand ourselves as individuals at all. Any emancipatory project must encompass the fundamentally social nature of the human person as both the source and culmination of liberation.

But we are entering a period of dawning class consciousness. One of the best ways to feed the hunger for answers that accompanies this new awakening is through the study of historical revolutionaries and revolutionary projects.By studying the words of those who once engaged in the same struggle for liberation, we can root our activity in the rich soil of the historic class struggle.

So, we read, and we learn. Perhaps at first, we do so alone, but at a certain point theory must meet practice. Solidarity — the act of standing up for someone, of standing with someone, not because of any personal relationship but based solely on their need as a person — is the ethos of the revolutionary movement. But solidarity that remains a theoretical ideal is not solidarity at all; it is a kind of mock-solidarity, a cold simulacrum, a lifeless statue. To move from theory, from study, to practice, to action, we must make the intermediary step: theory-as-act. The study group, socialized study, is the next step in that journey. Working together through a dense political or philosophical text strengthens our understanding, and it strengthens the social bonds that capitalist society  attacks through alienation, individuation, and atomization for the purposes of extracting profit.  

In his collection of teachings, Only Don’t Know, Zen Master Seung Sahn speaks of the liberatory power of “together-action”:

Together-action is like washing potatoes. When people wash potatoes in Korea, instead of washing them one at a time, they put them all in a tub full of water. Then someone puts a stick in the tub and pushes it up and down, up and down. This makes the potatoes rub against each other; as they bump into each other, the hard crusty dirt falls off. If you wash potatoes one at a time, it takes a long time to clean each one, and only one potato gets clean at a time. If they are all together, the potatoes clean each other.

In the study group we help each other to shed the hard crusty dirt of capitalist ideology more effectively than any of us could alone. 

The form and structure of the study group provide fertile ground for cultivating the growth of a radical political movement. In a society that is so hostile to revolutionary politics, the study group is a venue for making connections with other people who are working for the same end. The connective power of the internet is fantastic and is particularly important for comrades who have circumstances that preclude them from participating in-person. However, it is also important to physically come together with people in a local community, reaching out to break down the walls of isolation that capital so implacably builds.

Building or finding a study group may seem like an intimidating task. Luckily many radical texts and resources are available online for free. Sites like marxists.org are an excellent resource for accessing classic texts from Marx, Engels, Lenin and more. Additionally, you can use the resources on unity-struggle-unity.com. Your group is welcome to read and discuss the articles posted at the Red Clarion or as a source for material to help with local outreach. Our Guide to Study Groups is a fantastic resource to start out with. You can also correspond with us — many of our Pressworkers have experience forming study groups, and can suggest starting points for delving into these expansive resources. 

It can sometimes feel daunting and isolating living in a society dominated by people who not only don’t care about anyone but themselves, but teach us that we should do the same, that we should shrug off our basic humanity. Worse, they tell us that this cruelty is what makes us human. We cannot give in; we cannot allow ourselves to believe the lie that we are each alone, that we stand against the world on our own two feet. A radical political project must make clear from the start that we are in and for the world. It is only by relying on each other that we have a chance at saving the world. A study group is an excellent place to start. 

Why, then, with a drug so powerful, effective, and cheap to produce, are 90% of cancer treatment centers in the U.S. are facing critical shortages of cisplatin and other common cancer drugs? In some centers oncologists are being forced to triage their patients to save supplies; only those most likely to be fully cured are given these life saving drugs. Those who don’t make it onto the triage list are left with alternative treatments that are either less safe, less effective, or considerably more expensive. 

But none of this is new. This is the latest instance of an ongoing drug shortage crisis that has been happening for decades. 

A report from 2011 detailed the rising number of drug shortages going back to the 1980s and intensifying in the mid-2000s. “The number of drug shortages has been rapidly escalating in recent years; ASHP/UUHC reported 70 in 2006, 129 in 2007, 149 in 2008, and 166 in 2009.” 

In 2018, things had not gotten better. The Drug Shortages Task Force Public Meeting produced a report that year detailing still rampant, life threatening drug shortages: Drug Shortages: Root Causes and Potential Solutions.

In April of this very year shortages included those powerful cancer drugs — and there were other shortages reported for over 300 drugs.

Capital’s explanation of drug shortages: supply chains, lack of incentives and regulatory challenges

In the 2019 report, the FDA’s task force identifies “three root causes for drug shortages:

• Lack of incentives for manufacturers to produce less profitable drugs;
• The market does not recognize and reward manufacturers for “mature quality systems” that focus on continuous improvement and early detection of supply chain issues; and
• Logistical and regulatory challenges make it difficult for the market to recover from a disruption.”

Richard Pazdur, director of the FDA Oncology Center of Excellence and the Office of Oncologic Diseases, gave an interview outlining the causes and the FDA’s potential solutions for this latest shortage in cancer drugs. “Today’s critical shortage of cisplatin and carboplatin occurred because manufacturers failed to invest in enhancing production capacity,” said Pazdur.

He goes on to outline how one of the factories was shut down after a failed FDA inspection. And then, “As a result of the cisplatin shortage, a ripple effect was observed leading to an increased demand for carboplatin and the manufacturing challenges in meeting an increased carboplatin demand… A failure to invest in newer equipment, processes, or management practices that can prevent quality-related manufacturing breakdowns is often a root cause and appears to be tied to the economics of producing low-cost, older sterile injectables where profit margins are increasingly squeezed.”

While this analysis is largely correct, it is incomplete. Yes, the market is the cause, but what about the market? The anarchy of production.

What is this anarchy? Because capitalist production is not keyed to the needs of the people, but only responsive to changes in market conditions — changes in price — the amount of any given commodity needed by society is never precisely known. Instead of calibrating production to meet needs, capitalists (investors, owners of capital) watch the prices in the market. Now, prices trail behind any given social need, but they are the best markers the capitalist has of where to invest his money. When the capitalist sees prices drop, he takes his money out of that kind of production. When he sees prices rise, he puts his money back.

Clearly there is a demand for these drugs. If there is a demand in the market, that means there is profit to be made and a capitalist should step in to capitalize on that demand by increasing supply. 

But, these shortages have been going on for decades! Where is the increase in supply that we should be seeing?

Because the cost of production of, say, cisplatin, is only $10/dose and is sold at roughly $20/dose, the profit from its production is 100% — that is, $10 in profit for every $10 spent. In contrast, the active ingredient of Xanax costs roughly 3 cents per dose, but a single Xanax pill costs roughly $3. That’s a profit of 1,000%. Of course, drug companies guard the active ingredient costs with iron walls to prevent the public from seeing how much we’re being fleeced for necessary medicine. Congress alone is permitted to see the current data.

There simply isn’t enough of a profit motive for companies to prioritize the production of low-cost drugs. Furthermore, drugs are developed at the end of a very tenuous and dysregulated supply chain. They are finished products made from the finished products made from other finished products. A disruption at any point in this chain (such as a shortage of a raw material or a plant being closed for a failed inspection) causes the whole thing to come crashing down. For high-profit commodities, corporations will often spend money to conduct studies, secure supply chains, and make sure they are producing enough to reach market demand. But if the value of a cisplatin pill is a mere 100% while a Xanax pill is 1,000%, they will never spend the money to investigate the cisplatin shortfall.

Worse, when there is a shortfall in production, it suddenly becomes more lucrative to produce the medication. The price increases.  A recent shortage of ADHD medications resulted in a price rise to consumers of nearly 1,000%. Where a drug’s profit ratio is relatively small, it makes more sense (from the point of view of the criminally profiteering Pharma CEO, not from the point of view of the person who needs medication, of course) to simply let the shortages happen. 

Capital’s proposed solution: market based incentives and half-measure reforms

Since there is no way the capitalists can acknowledge that crises arise necessarily in the for-profit mode of production, they can’t offer a solution that will do anything but try to find a way to put more money in the capitalist’s pocket. 

Here is what the FDA’s Drug Shortage Task Force recommends as ”enduring solutions:

• Creating a shared understanding of the impact of drug shortages on patients and the contracting practices that may contribute to shortages;
• Developing a rating system to incentivize drug manufacturers to invest in quality management maturity for their facilities; and
• Promoting sustainable private sector contracts (e.g., with payers, purchasers, and group purchasing organizations) to make sure there is a reliable supply of medically important drugs.”

“Creating a shared understanding of drug impact shortages” is a nonstarter. Companies know what the impact is. They do not care. No amount of “understanding” can impact the need to place profits above all else. It is a company’s fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. 

“Developing a rating system to incentivize… manufacturers” is nonsensical. The report suggests that more stringent scrutiny will somehow right the ship. Any measure to increase oversight and safety, which of course should be a priority, will only tighten the already narrow profit margins these companies are working with. 

What we have left is the real solution for the capitalist class: “Promoting sustainable private sector contracts.” What does this mean? Essentially, raising prices. Their solution to shortages of affordable life saving drugs is to raise the price. 

The real solution: fully socialized healthcare

The only true solution to the problem of drug shortages, one that does not rely on market Band-aids, is to move healthcare from a for-profit system to a for-need system, and the only way to do that is to fully socialize healthcare.

When will enough be enough? People are dying from lack of access to life saving drugs. Over 60% of bankruptcy filings in the U.S. Empire involve medical debt. Yet still, the idea of free healthcare for all is still treated as a radical political position in this country. The capitalists who rule us reject socialized healthcare. Why? Because they are, in turn, ruled by the profit motive. 

We need a system that is ruled not by the needs of the wealthy to produce profits, but the basic needs of all. It is only through a fundamental change to the mode of production that we can ever realize the equality and human dignity that we all deserve.

We can smell the smoke from a world on fire. 

We are being told to stay indoors to avoid the toxic air.

People are scared. Rightfully so.

These severe and “unprecedented” Canadian wildfires are just the latest expression of the runaway train that is climate change. 

With every new season, the immediacy of the changing climate becomes more and more real for people. Every crop failure and natural disaster makes the reality of our situation harder to ignore. Climate change isn’t just a looming specter, it is a monster that lives in our backyard. 

So, what is the capitalist ruling class doing about it? 

The reactionary right does nothing. It buries its head in the sand, “rejects the politicization of weather” (Desantis, 2023), and “encourages innovation in the private sector” while denying the necessity of government intervention. Then they try to change the conversation to be about whatever hateful and chauvinistic fire they are trying to stoke this week.

The Democrats use this fear to beg for votes, promising that they are the only ones that can save us from the climate denying Republicans. Biden made climate change a central tenet in his first round with Trump, and he will 100% be playing this same sad song as the bell rings for round two. The Biden White House is trying to push the narrative that they have made some sort of meaningful progress in the fight on climate change; this is all political posturing and downright dishonesty. His signature Inflation Reduction Act, hailed as “historic climate action,” requires the federal government to lease 62 million acres to fossil fuel companies every year before it is allowed to allocate a single acre for solar or wind. Third party groups such as Earthjustice give Biden abysmal scores on the few minimal programs he has nominally begun work on. 

In the meantime, the owning class tries to push an agenda of personal responsibility in the face of climate change. The owning class is giving us a way to perform agency in the face of a terror they have unleashed upon us. Instead of passing the minimum intensive regulatory measures necessary to even slow climate change, the capitalist class tells us that the way to save the environment is to “vote with your dollar.” Buy local. Buy a Tesla. Buy from “eco-conscious” brands. They have taken our fear and commodified it. Selling us mousetraps to set in the path of a charging T-Rex.

One of their most cynical ploys is the motto of “corporate responsibility,” particularly through carbon offsets. Through this scheme, companies can continue to pollute and degrade our environment, continue to tear down forests and pump out as much carbon as they wish, as long as they also use some of their ill-gotten profits on paying for other forests to not be destroyed. Some of these carbon offsets are located in the very same forests that are smoldering as we speak — where is the accountability for those companies that claimed these trees as their greenwashed indulgences?

There is no amount of personal or corporate responsibility that can put an end to climate change. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t recycle and visit our local farmer’s market. This doesn’t mean that every individual is impotent in the face of climate change. But, we need to understand that neither these individual acts of consumption nor the voting booth are where this fight needs to take place.

Every person can make a difference: as a part of an organized mass movement. We must come together, organize and make our voices heard. We must reject the tepid promises of a “Democratic” party that has continuously failed to do anything meaningful in the face of the literal end of the world. We can’t be hoodwinked into casting a vote for the “lesser evil.” 

Instead of making cynical comments to our family, friends and coworkers about how fucked we are, we need to start having real conversations about why the people in power are not doing what clearly needs to be done. We need to reckon with the unbreakable link between capitalism and environmental destruction.

Even while we watch the world burn around us, the ruling class begs us to maintain civility in the face of the devastation they bring down on us every day. They shed crocodile tears and assure us that reasoned debate, civil procedure, and compromise will eventually start working. Well, we can clearly see how far that has gotten us. The smoke in our eyes cannot blind us from their sleight-of-hand. They cannot absolve themselves with words and false promises. The only path forward for this planet is to divest the capitalists of their power and get to work undoing the damage they have done.

Speakers from teachers’ unions, faith organizations, and care-workers’ unions took the podium to air their frustrations with a government that refuses to hear the cries of a suffering public. This was the “Rally for a Moral Budget,” called by Recovery for All, a statewide coalition of liberal organizations pleading for the lives of working people in Connecticut.

Right now, even after the devastation of a global pandemic, Connecticut has an unprecedented 3 billion dollar surplus. Instead of investing this surplus into much needed social programs, Millionaire Governor Ned Lamont is absolutely giddy with his plan to start cutting taxes across the board. The state government claims that the tax cut will “provide tax relief to working men and women and families across the state.”

It won’t.

Any money going back into the pockets of working people will come right back out again as payments to the wealthy ruling classes. Tax cuts are fantastic propaganda. Yes, the government is going to take less of your money! But that’s all we heard from Lamont. What didn’t we hear?

There is no talk from the state house about the housing crisis. Not a word about the sudden and ignominious discharge of a huge number of the state educational workforce. Lamont has nothing to say about families who can’t afford food or the fact that Connecticut is the state with the highest income gap between the poor working class and the rich ruling class in the entire United States Empire.

As the rally began, each speaker rose to vent their suffering. They shouted the frustration of the working people at the uncaring marble edifices of Connecticut’s halls of government. It wrenched the heart to hear the cries of the working masses, thundering to their supposed representative that they were not only forgotten, but drowning. Even more heartbreaking, however, was the fact that not one of those speakers recognized why their cries fell only on deaf stone walls, on ears that will never hear them. The cause of their sorrows, the origin of their misery, is, of course: Capital.

As long as the working class is forced to sell its labor to the capitalist class in order to survive, we will be reduced to begging them on hands and knees for our survival while they grow rich from the fruits of our labor. They will continue to string us along by occasionally instituting reforms (that will be quietly rolled back) and convincing us that we have a say in this farce of a democracy. 

In order to make real, lasting change, there needs to be an understanding that the liberal strategy of reform can only ever take us so far. 

One of the primary flaws of liberal ideology is the inability to understand that the purpose of the state, i.e., the government, is to advance the interests of the capitalist ruling class. The plea to inject “morality” into a budget fundamentally misunderstands the nature and function of a system that can only ever work for the benefit of the wealthy and the powerful. 

Capitalism is not an apolitical, amoral tool. It is a system driven by the need to maximize profit above all else: above justice, above freedom, above life itself. The capitalist is driven to expand profits, to accumulate and hoard more and more of the wealth of the earth. It reduces all things to commodities — products to be bought and sold at a profit. It transforms every relationship into a profit-generating opportunity. Policies for the safety of the working class, social safety nets, are temporarily won by the victories of an organized working class — or they are implemented as a stopgap to delay social revolution for another week, another month, another year.

These social safety nets cut into the profits of the big capitalists. They will never voluntarily reduce their own income without something in return, so instead they siphon off the wealth of the entire world to make sure the U.S., their “home base,” the central bastion and bulwark of the world-imperialist order, is safe. They send the military to bomb and destroy other countries and raid them of their wealth, to force them into economic subjugation so cheap goods can flow back to the U.S. working classes. But this devil’s bargain can only work for so long. Eventually, even those benefits will be sacrificed on the altar of profit. There is no way to satisfy the insatiable hunger of Capital.

Liberal idealism imagines a world in which the lofty goals of justice, equality, and freedom are the driving force behind legislation and enforcement. This is not how the world works.

Historical materialism, in contrast to liberal idealism, analyzes the world on the basis of what actually happens in material reality. By studying history, even the recent past, we can understand that the wealthy capitalists make and enforce laws that maintain their power over us and make them even wealthier. 

For too long, the ruling class in the U.S. Empire has successfully suppressed the ideas of socialism and communism. They rightfully fear what will happen if these ideas proliferate. They rightfully fear what will happen if the masses look to the material reality of the world we live in, and understand the power of the people to take control of the means of production. They rightfully fear the truth that a Historical Materialist analysis reveals: we neither need nor want their chains.

The power of ideology is strong. The media, educational system, and legal system only speak the language of liberal idealism. It’s no wonder that the language of socialism and communism has been absent from popular discourse for so long. 

This is starting to change. Polling shows that, especially among the youth, capitalism is losing people’s approval while socialism is being seen in an increasingly positive light.

As the horror show of neoliberal capitalism spirals into greater and greater contradiction, the drive towards freedom and equality must take a path of freedom and equality. This path can only be tread by a united working class that stands guided by the roadsigns of historical materialism, scientific socialism, and Communism. Even now, that path is being paved by the workers who refuse to be hoodwinked by liberal reformism — our class is uniting. 

In Connecticut, the misery of the working people has a voice. Soon, it will have a name.

Well, not over over… they just aren’t going to be helping the workers of Connecticut deal with it anymore. That’s on us now!

Yesterday, Lamont announced that the services and programs put into place to support the residents of Connecticut during the state of emergency are being canceled as of May 11, 2023. 

He makes it very clear that this does not mean that the danger has passed, “I continue to urge Connecticut residents to take actions to protect themselves from the spread of COVID-19 and all respiratory viruses – stay home when you’re sick, get vaccinated and boosted to limit your risk of contracting viruses, and listen to the advice of medical experts on ways to stay healthy.”

Hey, Ned? How are working people expected to “stay home when sick” when they can barely afford to put food on the table as it is? Especially when emergency SNAP benefits are being canceled along with every other program! We have no sick leave, no medical coverage, and no way to provide for ourselves when we get infected. We are being set up for economic disaster for the sin of protecting our fellow workers.

Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani adds, “Residents still should get vaccinated, get the updated vaccine, use at-home tests, stay home when they’re sick, and based on your own medical conditions, consider wearing a high-quality mask when respiratory viruses are circulating at high levels in their community.”

Unfortunately, in addition to eliminating the emergency food relief, the state is also transitioning all vaccination, testing and therapeutics to the broken for-profit insurance system. Even the most “up-to-date” vaccines are obsolete, and much less effective against the viral strains currently circulating; if more effective updates ever get released, how will we afford them? The available tests are expensive, and fail to detect new variants with increasing frequency; what worker can afford to take them over and over as a precautionary measure?

Also, if you are amongst the nearly ONE MILLION Connecticut residents covered by Medicaid, you will need to pay extra close attention to your insurance because continuous enrollment is being canceled as well. 

KFF, an independent health policy research organization, has outlined the devastating effects that the abandonment of the continuous enrollment program could have. Especially vulnerable are “…immigrants and people with limited English proficiency (LEP), and people with disabilities.” 

This entire process of rolling back programs and services highlights a few important facts:

1. The government is run by and for the wealthy capitalist class.
2. They do not care about the working class, especially the most vulnerable and least empowered sections of the working class.
3. Any reforms that the government is forced to put in place to respond to the inevitable crises caused by capitalism can and will be taken away as soon as these monsters have the slightest excuse.

The ultra-wealthy elite that run this country did not face this pandemic the way that the working public was forced to. They have always been able to protect themselves, with round-the-clock testing, the ability to stay home whenever they wish, unmitigated access to effective treatments, and comprehensive protection measures at their events. While workers continued to put their lives on the line, the corporate vampires that run this country funneled more profit than ever into their greedy maws, all on the backs of a working class who is still struggling to survive.

Today, as Lamont rips away the meager concessions that were put in place for workers’ safety in the face of a continuing global pandemic, we are reminded who we can rely on: each other. The ruling class is not going to protect us. It is up to us to come together to protect each other from the deadly virus that still rages around us. It is up to us to come together to protect ourselves from the tyranny of these capitalist exploiters. It is up to us to come together to create a world where people come before profits.