How do homeless people “stay home”? How do people in jail practice “social distancing”? How are people vulnerable to domestic violence protected? How do small business owners continue to stay in business? How do poor people survive while public services and spaces are eliminated, while affluent people are stock piling in their generously equipped gated communities. How do people with addiction stay sober? How do people with mental health issues maintain their tentative connection to others?
It is not a speculation that there are people who prosper and even benefit during an economic crisis—as smaller business owners struggle, large corporations and banks benefit from huge government subsidies, giving them more power to buy failing small businesses, for example. And it is a fact that many of those people have enormous economic power to shape the policies that can benefit themselves. It is not a speculation that they would appreciate having strict measures of control against the people by limiting their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to travel, or by installing means of surveillance, check points and official certifications for activities that might give freedom to the people beyond the capitalist framework. It is not a speculation that they would benefit from moving our social interactions to the digital realm, which can commodify our activities as marketable data for the advertising industry, insurance industry and any other moneyed social institutions including education, political institution, legal institution, and financial institution. Such matters should be seen within the context of the western history being shaped by unelected capitalists with their enormous networks of social institutions. In fact, private foundations and NGOs are working with governments and global institutions to implement potentially dangerous policies of draconian measures as well as financialisation of our activities for some time. A society that enforces its imperatives with fear instead of trust in humanity deprives a healthy mechanism to guide itself.
Capitalism was already on the verge of a major recession before COVID-19 hit. All the classic signs were there: absurdly inflated stock market, massively indebted corporations, consumer debt, economic inequality with tens of millions living just one inadequate paycheck away from being unable to meet basic living expenses . If the virus hadn’t been the straw that broke that camel’s back, something else would have done the job, albeit with a less devastating impact than an epic pandemic. In its long quest for cheap labor and lax social and environmental global capital have created vast and complex and competing firm-specific global supply chains that have been badly disturbed by the COVID-19 crisis.
In its relentless quest to force down the broad social wage and the bargaining power of the working-class, capital exerts regular downward pressure on the governmental social safety net. This makes multitudes more vulnerable to harm when mass layoffs and other disasters (e.g., hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and pandemics) occur. Since capital has long moved much of its production to other countries to access cheaper labor and more pliant regulations (to extract more surplus value), consumption makes up 70% of the U.S. economy. The virus has blown up mass social consumption in restaurants, theaters, hotels, stadiums, and shopping centers, thereby slashing profits and hence employment in a vast swath of the U.S. economy. Because of American capitalism’s heavy dependence on mass social consumption for the realization of surplus value (for profits), some capitalists who are invested in social consumption are pressuring the nation’s governors and mayors for a recklessly precipitate “re-opening of America” – a sending back of millions of Americans to unsafe workplaces, shopping centers, theaters, restaurants and the like.
Thanks to its relentless compulsion to sustain profits and capital accumulation (“growth”), spreads crises around the planet. Public health experts have been warning for years about the coming of the next planetary pandemic and the need to prepare for it. A critical problem for capitalism is there’s no short-term profit in storing up unused hospital beds, PPE, respirators, ventilators, and medicine. The for-profit medical industrial complex has been cutting back beds, space, and medical services in the neoliberal name of “streamlining” for decades. It has been woefully under-prepared for the foretold crisis. No surprise: capitalism is about short-term profits, not long-term planning for the common good. Capitalism is so addicted to constant profit-boosting accumulation that it can’t pause its cancerous “growth” in the name of public health without requiring giant taxpayer bailouts for its wealthy investor class’s giant corporations and financial institutions – this while offering a relative pittance to the working majority.
Capitalism throws millions out of jobs when it is no longer profitable to employ them. A vast swath of the populace is seen as disposable by capital when profits collapse. At the same time, when profits are damaged by the removal of too many people from workplaces and consumption zones (shopping malls, restaurants, coffee shops, sports stadiums, theaters, hotels, airports, etc.) to stem a pandemic, capital shows its understanding of working-class people as expendable by pushing for a premature “re-opening of the economy.” Either way, capital’s coronavirus calculation is this: what is the right number and percentage of the population that should die or face serious respiratory decline for profits to stay afloat? Too many deaths are a problem for capitalism but so are too few deaths! We should make no mistake: a rapid re-opening of lockdowns will kill masses of workers Sending millions of people back to work without protection or testing would be a death sentence for thousands.
Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist reflects:
“A staggering 20 million U.S. employees have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment benefits during the month before April 15. This is absurd. The unemployed …would be far better off if they all got socially useful jobs...They might prepare safe workplaces to then produce the tests, masks, ventilators, gloves, etc., needed these days. They might be trained to test; to clean and disinfect workplaces, stores and athletic arenas; to teach using one-on-one social media tutorials; and so on. But no…”
Capitalism hitches the fiscal social services and public health capacities to the functioning of the privately owned, for-profit economy. When that economy tanks, so do public revenues and hence the ability of government to protect people against poverty, pollution, pestilence, and other plagues of the profits system.
Capitalism has states and governments perversely bidding against each other for scarce medical supplies states amidst an epic pandemic. The world capitalist system is characterized by a single world economy and yet a multiplicity of nation states. A global pandemic pits those nation states against each other in the struggle for scarce medical supplies. Humanity is woefully bereft of a single powerful authority to properly coordinate a unified human response to a global crisis. The unequal anarchy of nation states compliments and reinforces the unequal anarchy of the capitalist marketplace. Capitalism, the rule of the possessing class over the rest of humanity, depends on racial and ethnic (and other non-class) division within the working-class majority to stave off popular rebellion and revolution. Those who are multiply oppressed by “intersectional” racial, ethnic, sexual, national, religious, and other non-class oppression structures as well as by foundational class hierarchy are particularly vulnerable to economic misery and illnesses. Pandemics and joblessness concentrate with special intensity and harshness among multiply oppressed and super-exploited people – as in the United States’ Black ghettoes, its disproportionately Black and Latino jails and prisons, and its all- Mexican and Central American migrant detention camps.
The giant medical need and public desperation created by the coronavirus crisis is a profit opportunity for corporations and enterprises. As in every major capitalist recession and depression, the COVID-19 meltdown is wiping out a vast swath of medium- and smaller-sized businesses and helping big firms swallow up and displace their slighter competition.
Capitalism produces a vast array of personal and public health problems – heart disease, obesity, hyper-tension, depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, overcrowding, hunger, malnutrition, poor sanitation. Capitalism is driven to turn much if not most of its populace into clueless, obedient, and one-dimensional workers and consumers devoid of elementary social, historical and natural intelligence. It relentlessly assaults and undermines critical thinking and serious public education, generating mass ignorance and stupidity in ways that turn millions of people into anti-science.
We must not “return to normalcy” in the wake of COVID-19. The “normalcy” for which many naturally and understandably pine for brought us to the current crisis and promises to take us into ever worse catastrophes going forward. As Istvan Meszaros wrote 19 years ago, “it’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.”
Taken and adapted from here
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/29/coronavirus-capitalism-and-exceptional-america/
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/04/lockdown-therapy-for-capitalism/
