The capitalist system treats human life as expendable from birth to death, and the same social relations that produce 54 excess child deaths per day continue to operate throughout workers’ lives.

The death rate for US children has surged by 25 percent over the past decade, according to a study published last month by pediatrician Dr. Christopher Forrest and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even as the child mortality rate has slowly fallen in other developed countries, it has surged in the US, along with every other indicator of chronic illness.