Op-ed - May 25th, 2020
For the Democracia Obrera newspaper, 
by Lola Kirvi

While state-subsidized capitalists continue to make juicy profits,

The State has armored itself for making us, the exploited provide the dead

Capitalists tighten quarantine ... but more than a thousand "non-essential" companies have been opened. They say the quarantine is tightening ... but in the neighborhoods without water and without power, the most highly exploited workers in the country have to go out every day to find something to sustain their lives. They tighten up the quarantine ... "to take care of all of us" ... but in the supermarket shelves not even the registered laborers can make ends meet... They fortify the quarantine… allegedly "to take care of all of us"... they say... and while they take the military out on to the streets ... while they surround the working-class neighborhoods so that the virus spreads only in there... they surround entire neighborhoods, so that the laborers they spare of the productive process die like dogs... while the murderous state makes disappear and kills workers with the excuse of breaking the quarantine like they did with Luis Espinoza ...  while the repressive state spies on Andacollo miners in struggle... Now we can understand what it means to say that the quarantine tightens ... it means that either the crisis is paid by us or they kill us with their soldiers, with their police, with their state. Most of the production that was working before the quarantine is producing again... yes, with the workers’ wages at 70%, 60%, 50% less than before the quarantine and all the capitalists subsidized by the state expropriated retirees fund... the same retirees whom the state has also stolen a slice of their monthly allotment. But "the state is taking care of us all"... they say. Capitalists are still quarantined in their luxurious apartments, mansions or closed suburban country-clubs. While the parliamentary left of the FIT demands the IMF commanded government to open the parliament or another sector of the left says that the military in the streets is not a plan of the state of more repression for the workers if they dare not to accept dying locked up in the neighborhoods, but... they are there to take care of all of us, they say... the military take care of all, yes, all the capitalists. And while in the factories the workers do not accept to have their wages or their jobs stolen... they do not accept that they are the ones who pay for the crisis, so they resist the attack... with pickets, taking over factories, with mobilizations, the state-owned enterprises and services workers, health, food, textiles, meat paking workers, the metallurgists, miners, teachers, printers, etc., are fighting... it is only about uniting and coordinating all those forces in struggle. We must coordinate all those who fight! So that the working class does not pay for the crisis, a great fight must be prepared against the capitalists... Let the popular assemblies, the workers' committees in the factories, the piqueteros (unemployed) assemblies return! That is the way. It is them or us. Let them all go for good, let not a single one remain! Lola Kirvi