The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has plunged the capitalist system into a deep crisis. Forty years of neoliberalism has left the public totally exposed and ill prepared to face a public health crisis on the scale of coronavirus.
When trying to interpret, understand, and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works. The first level is a mapping of the internal contradictions of the circulation and accumulation of capital as money value flows in search of profit through the different “moments” (as Marx calls them) of production, realization (consumption), distribution, and reinvestment. This is a model of the capitalist economy as a spiral of endless expansion and growth. It gets pretty complicated as it gets elaborated through, for example, the lenses of geopolitical rivalries, uneven geographical developments, financial institutions, state policies, technological reconfigurations and the ever-changing web of divisions of labor and of social relations.
I envision this model as embedded, however, in a broader context of social reproduction (in households and communities), in an ongoing and ever-evolving metabolic relation to nature (including the “second nature” of urbanization and the built environment) and all manner of cultural, scientific (knowledge-based), religious, and contingent social formations that human populations typically create across space and time. These latter “moments” incorporate the active expression of human wants, needs, and desires, the lust for knowledge and meaning and the evolving quest for fulfillment against a background of changing institutional arrangements, political contestations, ideological confrontations, losses, defeats, frustrations, and alienations, all worked out in a world of marked geographical, cultural, social, and political diversity. This second model constitutes, as it were, my working understanding of global capitalism as a distinctive social formation, whereas the first is about the contradictions within the economic engine that powers this social formation along certain pathways of its historical and geographical evolution.
So how might the dominant economic model, with its sagging legitimacy and delicate health, absorb and survive the inevitable impacts of what might become a pandemic? The answer depended heavily on how long the disruption might last and spread, for as Marx pointed out, devaluation does not occur because commodities cannot be sold but because they cannot be sold in time.
I had long refused the idea of “nature” as outside of and separate from culture, economy, and daily life. I take a more dialectical and relational view of the metabolic relation to nature. Capital modifies the environmental conditions of its own reproduction but does so in a context of unintended consequences (like climate change) and against the background of autonomous and independent evolutionary forces that are perpetually reshaping environmental conditions. There is, from this standpoint, no such thing as a truly natural disaster. Viruses mutate all the time to be sure. But the circumstances in which a mutation becomes life-threatening depend on human actions.
How human beings interact with each other, move around, discipline themselves, or forget to wash their hands affects how diseases get transmitted.the economic and demographic impacts of the spread of the virus depend upon preexisting cracks and vulnerabilities in the hegemonic economic model.
The exponential escalation of the infections elicited a range of often incoherent and sometimes panic-stricken responses. President Trump performed an imitation of King Canute in the face of a potential rising tide of illnesses and deaths. Some of the responses have been passing strange. Having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates in the face of a virus seemed weird, even when it was recognized that the move was meant to alleviate market impacts rather than to stem the progress of the virus.
The exponential escalation of the infections elicited a range of often incoherent and sometimes panic-stricken responses. President Trump performed an imitation of King Canute in the face of a potential rising tide of illnesses and deaths. Some of the responses have been passing strange. Having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates in the face of a virus seemed weird, even when it was recognized that the move was meant to alleviate market impacts rather than to stem the progress of the virus.
Big Pharma rarely invests in prevention. It has little interest in investing in preparedness for a public health crisis. It loves to design cures. The sicker we are, the more they earn. Prevention does not contribute to shareholder value. The business model applied to public health provision eliminated the surplus coping capacities that would be required in an emergency. Prevention was not even an enticing enough field of work to warrant public-private partnerships. President Trump had cut the budget of the Center for Disease Control and disbanded the working group on pandemics in the National Security Council in the same spirit as he cut all research funding, including on climate change. If I wanted to be anthropomorphic and metaphorical about this, I would conclude that COVID-19 is nature’s revenge for over forty years of nature’s gross and abusive mistreatment at the hands of a violent and unregulated neoliberal extractivism.
COVID-19 is underpinning not a wild fluctuation but an almighty crash in the heart of the form of consumerism that dominates in the most affluent countries. The spiral form of endless capital accumulation is collapsing inward from one part of the world to every other. The only thing that can save it is a government funded and inspired mass consumerism conjured out of nothing. This will require socializing the whole of the economy in the United States, for example, without calling it socialism.
So how might the dominant economic model, with its sagging legitimacy and delicate health, absorb and survive the inevitable impacts of what might become a pandemic? The answer depended heavily on how long the disruption might last and spread, for as Marx pointed out, devaluation does not occur because commodities cannot be sold but because they cannot be sold in time.
I had long refused the idea of “nature” as outside of and separate from culture, economy, and daily life. I take a more dialectical and relational view of the metabolic relation to nature. Capital modifies the environmental conditions of its own reproduction but does so in a context of unintended consequences (like climate change) and against the background of autonomous and independent evolutionary forces that are perpetually reshaping environmental conditions. There is, from this standpoint, no such thing as a truly natural disaster. Viruses mutate all the time to be sure. But the circumstances in which a mutation becomes life-threatening depend on human actions.
How human beings interact with each other, move around, discipline themselves, or forget to wash their hands affects how diseases get transmitted.the economic and demographic impacts of the spread of the virus depend upon preexisting cracks and vulnerabilities in the hegemonic economic model.
The exponential escalation of the infections elicited a range of often incoherent and sometimes panic-stricken responses. President Trump performed an imitation of King Canute in the face of a potential rising tide of illnesses and deaths. Some of the responses have been passing strange. Having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates in the face of a virus seemed weird, even when it was recognized that the move was meant to alleviate market impacts rather than to stem the progress of the virus.
The exponential escalation of the infections elicited a range of often incoherent and sometimes panic-stricken responses. President Trump performed an imitation of King Canute in the face of a potential rising tide of illnesses and deaths. Some of the responses have been passing strange. Having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates in the face of a virus seemed weird, even when it was recognized that the move was meant to alleviate market impacts rather than to stem the progress of the virus.
Big Pharma rarely invests in prevention. It has little interest in investing in preparedness for a public health crisis. It loves to design cures. The sicker we are, the more they earn. Prevention does not contribute to shareholder value. The business model applied to public health provision eliminated the surplus coping capacities that would be required in an emergency. Prevention was not even an enticing enough field of work to warrant public-private partnerships. President Trump had cut the budget of the Center for Disease Control and disbanded the working group on pandemics in the National Security Council in the same spirit as he cut all research funding, including on climate change. If I wanted to be anthropomorphic and metaphorical about this, I would conclude that COVID-19 is nature’s revenge for over forty years of nature’s gross and abusive mistreatment at the hands of a violent and unregulated neoliberal extractivism.
COVID-19 is underpinning not a wild fluctuation but an almighty crash in the heart of the form of consumerism that dominates in the most affluent countries. The spiral form of endless capital accumulation is collapsing inward from one part of the world to every other. The only thing that can save it is a government funded and inspired mass consumerism conjured out of nothing. This will require socializing the whole of the economy in the United States, for example, without calling it socialism.
If China cannot repeat its 2007–8 role, then the burden of exiting from the current economic crisis now shifts to the United States and here is the ultimate irony: the only policies that will work, both economically and politically, are far more socialistic than anything that Bernie Sanders might propose and these rescue programs will have to be initiated under the aegis of Donald Trump, presumably under the mask of Making America Great Again.
All those Republicans who so viscerally opposed the 2008 bailout will have to eat crow or defy Donald Trump. The latter, if he is wise, will cancel the elections on an emergency basis and declare the origin of an imperial presidency to save capital and the world from “riot and revolution.”
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