Pandemic: a mirror of the human condition
COVID- 19 pandemic is not simply a medical problem
At heart, it is about the way we
organize society. This crisis is a mirror of society, and our reflection on the
human condition will help us establish the hierarchy of values and objectives
that guide our future.
The colossal
mobilization of manpower and materials to overcome this pandemic resembles the
actions of a world at war. And war is the mother of revolution: it draws
nations into collective struggle; strains the sinews and minds of the people;
and tests out the strengths and weaknesses of the entire social system. Just as
military victory is the organizing principle of war, the health of humanity is
the primary organizing principle of our battle with the pandemic. As we seek to
minimize its impact, collective action fundamentally transforms everyday
normality and encroaches on the private sphere.
In the three
decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalist individualism flourished
and became anchored in mass psychology. But the Great Recession of 2008-9
brought sluggish growth and a series of economic shocks, which hit the living
standards and future prospects of the middle classes and the workers in many of
the most developed capitalist countries. Spain, Iceland, Ireland, Greece and
Portugal were battered. In other advanced economies this entailed increasing
hardship and uncertainty for the middle classes, the workers and the youth.
This
all-pervasive sense of economic insecurity stood in stark contrast to a
hitherto unimaginable concentration of individual wealth, acquired through
capitalist accumulation - a process accelerated by the ubiquitous expansion of
Internet connectivity. In turn, this gave birth to a geeky breed of
billionaires and a mass global culture revolving around dreams and spectacles
of celebrity, personal identity and individual enrichment.
Networked
interconnectivity transformed mass psychology, as well as the character of
production processes in manufacturing and services of all kinds. The boundaries
between people, technology, ideas, traditions, cultures, nations, work and
leisure, acquired a new plasticity and diffuseness that simultaneously gave
rise to a reaction against this very ‘globalization’ process. This appeared as
sharp and sudden clashes, conflicts, and upheavals. Thus, new forms of
isolationism, nationalism, and religious fanaticism, gelled into reactionary
political movements. These forces gained political power in diverse settings,
e.g. the USA, Brazil, and India.
The rise of
the New Right cannot be attributed to the invention of a coherent ideology;
rather this ideology expresses the incoherent and contradictory nature of the
dynamics of capitalism. Today, everyone is linked together with all of
humanity, and thereby to the total knowledge, technology, production,
consumption and distribution capacity, and also to common disasters. Yet this
objective trend conflicts with the dominance of the nation state, in which the
pressure to pacify the anger of those who want to conserve, preserve or
reestablish ‘national sovereignty’ inevitably produces “anti-globalist”
nationalism in all its forms.
Under
capitalism, economic activity interlinks the workers of all countries through
social production, organized through the world division of labor. But the
objective of production remains individual consumption, i.e., profit
maximization designed to serve a tiny minority. Thus, the mass of capital
available for investment is constrained by the driving force of capitalist
production itself.
Capitalism
remains a system in which dynamic progress in technology, production and
innovation is driven by the competition between private enterprises in pursuit
of profit. This competition forces them to invest ever more of their capital in
machinery and technology (which Karl Marx called dead labor) viz-a-viz living
labor. This reduces the proportion of living labor in total investment.
As Marx explained, this inevitably produces
investment cycles driven by increasing profits, followed by cycles of economic
contraction and retrenchment driven by falling profits. He called this “the
long term tendency for the rate of profit to fall’.
It was the
acclaimed Hungarian economist Janos Kornai who developed the most important and
influential critiques of socialism in his 1992 book “The Socialist System”. His
basic argument is that socialism inevitably produces a sclerotic bureaucratic
machine that stifles innovation and gives rise to a shortage economy.
However, China’s experience, reiterated during
the Covid-19 pandemic, reveals why this theory is flawed. Rather, the pandemic
exposes how the healthcare systems in many of the richest capitalist countries
can break down because of shortages of intensive care capacity, ventilators,
masks etc. And then, as a result, the interconnected socio-economic system may
simultaneously experience a meltdown.
Capitalist
states are generally subservient to powerful private interests. This leaves
wider society exposed at times of real crisis. And now, when the state
bureaucracy tries to intervene decisively to overcome the crisis, its means and
mechanisms to attain social objectives in health care are exposed as tenuous.
This problem is amplified because health provision has been systematically run
down and undermined by the doctrine promoted by capitalist ideologues: “private
good, public bad!”
Necessity
expresses itself through accidents. In the past week many capitalist countries
have adopted colossal Keynesian fiscal stimulus measures. They are designed to
overcome the crisis and revive their economies - these measures institute a
kind of “war capitalism” - including temporary socialist policies. It seems
that the battle to contain the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the need for a
social system based on public ownership of the decisive sectors of the economy,
scientific planning, and international cooperation.
Heiko Khoo
(Heiko is a leading progressive political and economic analysts-he writes for different international media outlets)
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