People over Profit statement on the occasion of its re-launching on International Workers’Day 2020
The international network of People Over Profit (POP) expresses its warmest solidarity with all working peoples of the world this Labor Day. We are one with the toiling masses struggling amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the deepening crisis of the world monopoly capitalist system aggravated by the health crisis.
As a broad network, the POP brings together workers’ organizations and social movements across the globe to assert the primacy of people’s interests and well-being over that of capitalist private profits extracted from the exploitation of human labor and natural resources.
We have voiced out our resolute resistance against neoliberal economic policies of imperialism, including those which have irreversibly eroded the national public health systems and hence are overwhelmed now by the rising cases and deaths. We rely on the grassroots mass movements to assert our demands as we engage governments and intergovernmental bodies to address this crisis.
Instead of providing guaranteed incomes to working peoples and immediate economic relief to the mass of the unemployed, governments have resorted to fascist lockdown measures. More unemployment, poverty, inequality, and injustice are in the offing post-COVID-19. The world is in for a greater Depression worse than ever experienced by humankind in history.
Today, International Financial Institutions (IFIs), so-called “free trade agreements” (FTAs), and Transnational Corporations (TNCs), representing imperialist interests over subjugated peoples especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are straining to preserve the global system of labor exploitation, the plunder of resources, and instigation of social conflicts, wars, civil strife, and militarism.
The U.S. pulled out funding for the World Health Organization while continuing its sanctions and war provocations against China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as well as against Cuba and Venezuela. Meanwhile, the working people are compelled to stay at home, banned from mass gatherings, fed with all sorts of populist demagoguery, and wait for aid, stimulus, and recovery.
With the workers and all those who live by the sweat of their brow, we value labor more than ever. We want a social system that is people-driven and not profit-driven, one that relies on local, national, and international collective efforts, not on social divides and power hegemony.
The imperialist powers and their client states want the world to be the same again after COVID-19. The people want a fresh new social system. The world will never be the same again.
We must assert basic income guarantees for all and end unemployment, guaranteed livelihood, and work, and end labor oppression of all forms by reason of class, gender, race, caste, etc. We must fight for workers’ unions and associations and state social protection.
We must hold governments, no matter how rich and powerful they may be, to be fully accountable for the crisis and the intolerable sufferings it has brought upon the toiling masses, peoples, and poorer nations.
Long live international solidarity!
Assert people over profit!
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