Home Forum Political Economy COVID-19 and Capitalism Reply To: COVID-19 and Capitalism

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COVID-19 is not to capitalism what the Black Death was to feudalism. Capitalism has survived prior pandemics (see, e.g., the Influenza Pandemic of 1918), and it will survive COVID-19.

The collective action problem that is an existential threat to capitalism, a real stress test, is global warming. Global warming has sparked a civil war within capitalism, with the extractive industries (e.g., mining, oil and gas) on one side, and everybody else on the other. In the U.S., the Republicans generally represent the extractive industries, and the Democrats represent the remaining capitalist industries (including Finance). This division is meaningful because it has shaped, in large part, the American response to COVID-19, which varies greatly depending on which party controls which state.  The nihilism of the extractive industries influences Republican policy-making well beyond global warming, and it has deeply influenced the Republican response to COVID-19.

That said, COVID-19 is a stress test on liberal/neoliberal governments, and it is not clear to me that all of them (including the United States) will survive. But capitalism does not need liberalism or neoliberalism (both are just apologetic propaganda for capitalism) to exist. See, e.g., Pinochet’s Chile and Orban’s Hungary.

There is a reason the Republicans are lauding Orban. And there is a reason they have politicized the COVID-19 pandemic.  To them, COVID-19 is just a tool to prevent the U.S. and the world from addressing global warming because the actions needed to do so would wipe out the ability of the extractive industries to continue accumulating wealth the way they do today.