[truthout.org]

"This State in India Shows Us Why Fighting COVID-19 Requires Working-Class Power.

Kerala’s approach to pandemic relief offers valuable lessons not only for India but also — perhaps especially — for advanced capitalist countries which have been hit the hardest by the outbreak.

The Kerala experience offers a valuable lesson to the U.S. left: Medicare for All — let alone a Sanders-type presidency — would be tremendously limited without militant working-class participation at all levels of society. Kerala’s impressive social-democratic achievements including its battle against COVID-19 were undergirded by the robust participation of ordinary people. As we assess the post-Sanders landscape, the correct strategic question is not how to avoid descent into movementism at the expense of electoralism, but how can we build up independent movements which can act as levers for progressive electoral candidates, so that the best of Sanders’s policies may succeed.

In the time of COVID-19, and the much bigger looming threat of climate catastrophe, the survival of humanity depends on the power of the people."