Written by
Daniel Tanuro and first published at International
Journal of Socialist Renewal
1. The fact
that the economic slowdown preceded Covid-19 should not lead to denying either
the economic impact of the epidemic (interruption of some production processes,
disruption of supply chains, sectoral impacts on air transport and tourism,
etc.) or the seriousness of the threat it poses as such. A disruptive
phenomenon with exponential dynamics, this epidemic is a specific amplifier of
the economic and social crisis. It also reveals the fragility of the capitalist
system and the dangers it poses for the working classes, in particular through
its congenital fossil-based productivism, the fundamental cause of the
ecological and climate crisis.
2. Controlling
the epidemic would have required prompt action and strict measures to monitor
the health of travellers from contaminated areas, identify and isolate infected
people, limit transport and strengthen health services. Stuck in the neoliberal
policies with which they tried to counter the economic slowdown, the capitalist
governments were slow to take these measures, then took them insufficiently,
which forced them to then take more severe measures, while always chasing
behind the spread of the virus. Zero stocks, cuts in the fields of health and
research and flexiprecarity of work must be blamed in the crisis.
3. Scientists
sounded the alarm during the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2002. Basic research
programmes were proposed in Europe and the USA which would have made it
possible to better understand and prevent this category of virus reappearing in
new forms. Governments refused to fund them. An absurd policy, but tailor-made
for leaving research in these fields to the pharmaceutical industry, whose goal
is not public health but profits from the sale of drugs on the market for
solvent patients.
4. Like any
disruptive phenomenon, the epidemic first elicits reactions of denial. These
can then give way to panic and panic can be exploited by demagogues to play the
game of authoritarian strategies of technological control of populations and
limitation of democratic rights, as in China and Russia. There is also a
serious risk that the Covid-19 will be used by the fascists as a pretext to
justify and intensify the racist policies of refoulement of migrants.
5. The left
cannot be content with reducing the exogenous factor of the health crisis to
the endogenous capitalist economic crisis. It must take into account the health
crisis as such and develop proposals to combat it in a social, democratic,
anti-racist, feminist and internationalist way. Against individualism, it must
also adopt for itself and advocate in social movements responsible collective
behaviours from the point of view of non-propagation of the virus.
Unlike the
measures to limit car use taken by certain governments in response to the “oil
shock”, for example, no one can avoid their responsibility for health: their
own, that of their loved ones and public health, without forgetting responsibility
for the global South. Either the social movements take this issue in their own
hands, democratically and from the social realities of the dominated, or else
the dominant ones will impose their liberticide solutions.
6. The major
danger of the epidemic is the possible saturation of hospital systems. This
would inevitably lead to a worsening of the price paid by the poorest and the
weakest, in particular among the elderly, as well as a further shift of care
tasks into the domestic sphere, that is to say generally onto women. The
saturation threshold obviously depends on the countries, the health systems and
the austerity policies that have been imposed there. It will be reached all the
more quickly insofar as the governments are running behind the epidemic instead
of preventing it.
The fight against the epidemic therefore requires a break
with austerity policies, a redistribution of wealth, refinancing and
de-liberalization of the health sector, the suppression of patents in the
medical field, North-South justice and a clear priority given to social needs.
This implies in particular: banning dismissals of infected workers, the
maintenance of wages in the event of partial unemployment, stopping checks,
"activation" and sanctions against social security recipients, etc.
It is mainly on these questions that we must intervene to counter irrational
responses and their potential for racist-authoritarian slippage.
7. There are
many commonalities between the Covid-19 crisis and the climate crisis. In both
cases, the capitalist system’s logic of accumulation for profit makes it
incapable of preventing a danger of which it is nevertheless aware. In both
cases, governments oscillate between denial and the inadequacy of policies
designed primarily according to the needs of capital, not the needs of
populations.
In both cases, the poorest, racialized and weakest, especially in
the countries of the global south, are in sights, while the rich say that they
will always get by. In both cases, governments are using the threat to advance
toward a strong state while far-right forces are trying to take advantage of
fear to out forward foul Malthusian and racist responses. In both cases,
finally, the social law of capitalist value comes into direct contradiction
with laws of nature with exponential dynamics (the multiplication of viral
infections in one case, warming and its positive feedbacks in the other).
8. The climatic
danger is however infinitely more global and more serious than that of the
virus. The same will obviously apply to its consequences if the exploited and
the oppressed do not unite to bring down this absurd and criminal mode of
production. The Covid-19 is yet another warning: capitalism, which leads
humanity to barbarism, must be ended.
Daniel Tanuro
is an ecosocialist writer from Belgium
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