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We, the Workers’ Solidarity Network, Sosialis Alternatif, and AKSI (Socialist Student Alliance), believe that the employer’s continued betrayal of existing agreements reflects the management’s utter disregard for the workers’ basic demands. The company is driven purely by profit, willing to act arbitrarily and exploit workers who are fighting for their rights. Likewise, the government must take firmer and more transparent action in fulfilling its responsibility — especially in defending the dignity of the working class struggling for justice.

We, Workers’ Solidarity Network, AKSI and Sekolah Merdeka, fully stand in solidarity with the striking workers at Mediceram in their struggle for justice. After all, a tree does not sway without the wind. The continued strike by workers at Mediceram is a direct response to the oppression they face from their bosses. The fight of migrant workers in Malaysia must be supported and strengthened by local worker organizations — particularly principled and militant trade unions.

On this day 155 years ago, Lenin was born in Tsarist Russia. An unapologetic Marxist and brilliant revolutionary strategist, he lived much of his life as the leader of the Bolshevik Party, which led the Russian working class and peasantry toward the triumphant conclusion of the socialist revolution of October 1917, and the building of the first ever democratic workers’ state in the world. Lenin’s contribution to history cannot be overstated.

“In a planned economy that serves the needs of human beings, there would be no need for such moralistic alternatives to racist quotas as merit, which presupposes in the first place a competitive economy that ultimately serves the needs of the wealthy and powerful. At best it is a coping mechanism on the part of the petty bourgeois who have had trouble dealing with the myth of upward mobility all crumbling down on him at once; at worst it is a cruel insult callously thrown at the workers of the world who feed, clothe, and shelter all of us, and who have brought us all the technological wonders of the world not because, but in spite, of their exploitation.”

The Madani state’s reform agenda has since its rise to power in 2022 turned out to include not only intensifying the exploitation of public health workers via its brutal imposition of one austerity policy after another, but also its continued push for privatization. The lesson could not be any clearer: once the profit motive enters the equation, healthcare ceases to prioritize human need. If the mantle is not taken up by the working class to organize collectively and resist these neoliberal policies, the complete collapse of our public healthcare system becomes not a question of if, but when.

Because PSM does not recognize, as we do, the material fact that the state is nothing more than an instrument of the ruling class—that is, a tool for domination of one class over another—thus it is at best reluctant, and at worst unwilling, to challenge the capitalist state at its core. Instead, its strategy revolves around operating within the constraints of the existing system, lobbying for reforms and seeking the support of progressive liberal allies along the way, promising to curb the excesses of capitalism.

The government can never, and will never, treat our nurses and doctors fairly, so long as it remains pro-capitalist, not pro-worker. This was the case in the BN-UMNO era, and so is it now with this “progressive” Madani state. So long as the capitalist economic system of general labor exploitation remains unchallenged, and so long as capitalist politics remains the order of the day, all public services, healthcare included, can never truly serve the public — laborers and consumers alike.

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