WASHINGTON, DC, April 1— The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a globally racist attack on already super-exploited workers. Members of PLP and George Washington University public health students joined the demonstration today to lower the cost of medicines that can cure Hepatitis C, and treat HIV and cancer.
Global Day of Action Against Imperialist TPP
Twenty-five people rallied outside the headquarters of PhRMA, the trade association of the major pharmaceutical companies. Students hailed from Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), and interns at Public Citizen and Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFR). Protests occurred in other cities including Sydney, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Delhi, Ahmedabad, New York City, Boston, and San Francisco.
President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership is a major trade deal between U.S. and major countries in the Asia-Pacific region. It is an essential step toward squaring off with China. Framed as a regulatory and investment treaty, it projects an anti-China trading and military bloc consisting of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, and, prospectively, South Korea and Taiwan.
But the TPP also allows drug companies to maintain their patents for their drugs. This means there are fewer generic alternatives and higher prices. The new Hepatitis C medicine costs $84,000 to cure most people, meaning that most will suffer or die because they cannot afford it.
Gotta Name It to Fight It
These prices have a racist impact in the U.S. since Black and Latin workers have disproportionate levels of poverty and lack access to medical care. Some of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that organized the rally hesitated to include anti-racist statements in the press release, claiming it would “alienate people.”
There is no principled struggle without naming the tool with which the bosses maims the working class—the tool of racism. The NGOs effectively exposed themselves to be servants of capitalists, as they undermine and manage working-class outrage, politics, and organizing. The role of NGOs and the watering down of politics are important issues to confront as communists work within different mass groups.
As the TPP restricts access to medication to mainly Black, Latin and immigrant workers in the United States, it also severely cuts access to medicines for millions of people in countries (e.g., Yemen, Haiti, Eritrea) where exploitation and oppression of workers are in their more naked forms. The TPP—from Sudan to Bangladesh—not only exacerbate the racist attack on the working class in the form of medical access but also will be using NGOs are their tool of imperialism. Making the struggle against TPP international in scope is essential.
Need Mass Organizing, Not Media Hype
The rally featured a puppet of Uncle Sam (the patriotic personification of the U.S. government) dressed in red, white and blue tied with ropes to the drug companies to demonstrate the power these companies have over politicians and the government. Public tax dollars support much of the drug research and development work but drug companies scarf up the profits. These companies fund all sides of the political spectrum and thus exert enormous pressure on politicians to keep prices high and unregulated, and workers desperate.
PLP members invited the crowd to march on May Day and called to eradicate capitalism, not just these trade agreements. One poster showed the worldwide distribution of people with Hepatitis C and said “Workers of the World Unite.” Most people responded with interest, including a group of middle school students.
Unfortunately, the demonstration played more to the press than the public. There were no fliers to distribute in advance or on the street to explain the issues. The organizing misleaders believed the media could influence policy, rather than build a mass working-class movement. These “community organizations” and the like support capitalism by disabling or neutralizing working-class struggle. A Counterpunch essay explains, “Channeling the fight against the worst effects of capitalism through NGOs hides the central contradiction of capitalism, namely that between capital and labor. The horrific effects of capitalism—oppression, ecocide, wars of conquest, exploitation, poverty—cannot be eliminated without eliminating their cause” (10/20/15). Don’t count of capitalist-funded organizations to topple capitalism. Only a united working class of women and men with an organized party like PLP can do that.
PL’ers in this rally are hopeful that some of these fighters will learn from communists and the working class that the solution must be a revolutionary movement to abolish capitalism, the breeder of illnesses and oppression. Under communism, competition, profit, and even the concept of “payment” will cease to exist. Our health will be in the hands of the people who research, make, distribute, and use the medications—the working class. The socials and environmental conditions will be controlled by those who live in it—the working class. Every aspect of society will run by and for the working class.