By Comrade Sabine

So many green streams and blue hills, but to what avail ?
This tiny creature left even Hua To powerless!
Hundreds of villages choked with weeds, men wasted away;
Thousands of homes deserted, ghosts chanted mournfully.
Motionless, by earth I travel eighty thousand li a day,
Surveying the sky I see a myriad Milky Ways from afar.
Should the Cowherd ask tidings of the God of Plague,
Say the same griefs flow down the stream of time.

The spring wind blows amid profuse willow wands,
Six hundred million in this land all equal Yao and Shun.
Crimson rain swirls in waves under our will,
Green mountains turn to bridges at our wish.
Gleaming mattocks fall on the Five Ridges heaven-high;
Mighty arms move to rock the earth round the Triple River.
We ask the God of Plague: “Where are you bound ?”
Paper barges aflame and candle-light illuminate the sky.

-Mao Zedong

Pandemic is not neutral – while infection and transmission are natural occurrences (of course), pandemic is very much a social phenomenon, which, despite some high profile cases involving bourgeois victims, has a class character.

When the enemy can simply decide to stay home without risking eviction or loss of income (at least in any significant or meaningful sense), when they can afford to stockpile goods, can afford treatment, while we’re forced to go to work every day to make sure we can pay rent (or worse, we lose our jobs because of emergency measures taken in response to the virus), it’s class war.

And despite the chaos and fear taking hold in the metropole, don’t fucking forget that it’s the deliberately underdeveloped colonized world which, lacking healthcare infrastructure because of lingering and ongoing imperialist policy, will still take the majority of the damage this pandemic has to offer.

We aren’t dealing with a broken system: the material damage caused by and lives destroyed by the coronavirus pandemic are the product of the class dictatorship of the bourgeois working exactly as intended.

Our response to this crisis should have a class character of its own: let’s work together to build an emergency infrastructure run by and for the oppressed masses. Let’s secure necessities and distribute them to those who are purposefully forgotten, while conducting political education and demonstrating concrete people’s power!

Build revolutionary power for and with the masses!

Serve the people!