The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto and the discovery of “Mad Cow Disease” (BSE) in a slaughtered cow in Alberta have created crises that point to the threat to food and health systems caused by capitalism’s growing world disorder.
While natural organisms are involved, these crises are not natural disasters. They are social crises that reflect the inevitable priorities and policies of the capitalist governments that defend the class interests of the billionaire families that own the mines, mills, land, factories, and banks at the heights of the Canadian economy. The crisis is also heightened by Washington’s trade offensive against its competitors to the north on the justification of the BSE outbreak.
The billionaire owners of industry demand their governments cut public spending and safeguard their profits and profit rates as the capitalist system worldwide sinks deeper into depression. The capitalists use the reality of the intensifying competition produced by this crisis to justify cutting social programs and throwing workers into the pit of long-term unemployment. For them, the health, safety, and jobs of workers and farmers are not a priority, whether in imperialist countries like Canada, workers states like China, or semicolonial countries.
It is certainly not a day too soon to blame the Klein government in Alberta. Before it was tested, the head of the cow with BSE sat in a private lab four months after the animal was slaughtered. The testing backlog in Alberta was due to the decision of the provincial government to close three of the four animal pathology-testing labs as part of its cutbacks program.
Working people cannot rely on the employing class or their governments to protect our health. Nor can we accept the view that workers, farmers, and other exploited producers—who, along with nature, create all wealth—should not expect safe food, water, and clean air, and good health care as a right.
In that context we should especially reject the anti-working-class chauvinist rants by some right-wing columnists that working people here should be grateful that we don’t live in Africa and other countries oppressed by imperialism, where millions die of diseases like malaria, AIDS, and infant diarrhea every year. These unnecessary deaths also reflect the brutality of the international capitalist system in its death agony.
Throughout the SARS and Mad Cow crises, capitalist governments in Alberta, Ontario, and elsewhere in this country have focused their energies on getting tourists back to Toronto and convincing Washington and other governments to lift the ban on beef produced in Canada.
These efforts contrast unfavorably with the over 40-year-long record of the workers’ and farmers’ government in revolutionary Cuba, which has organized and mobilized the population to build and maintain a health system organized around the needs of the overwhelming majority of the population—not profits—and which is completely free of charge to the Cuban people. At the same time, the Cuban government has organized internationalist aid, including through doctors and other medical personnel, in Africa, Latin America and around the world, despite an unrelenting economic war by Washington, Ottawa, and other imperialist governments.
The unfolding capitalist depression will produce more and more social disasters for working people in Canada and around the world—whether it is more wars of conquest like the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or more frequent breakdowns in the systems that provide us with the necessities of life.
Trade unions, the basic defensive organizations of the working class, have the potential to play a key role in organizing and uniting working people against the effects of these crises by advancing demands on the government such as the following to deal with the current SARS/BSE crises.