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It has been instructive to observe events and outcomes as COVID-19 stress tests capitalism. A stress test reveals the weaknesses in a system or structure. Where a system exists in a dynamic relationship with its surrounds or environment, a stress test further reveals problems (dialectical, iterative or feed-back) in the system’s relationship with its containing environment. The course of the pandemic has differed in various jurisdictions according to all of geographical, demographic, wealth distribution and institutional factors. Nevertheless, the course of the pandemic has also revealed the inter-connected aspect, and one could even say the over-inter-connected aspect of the global capitalist system.
I have watched with concern and even deep horror as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the demographic rifts of inequality in capitalism and the “metabolic rift” (Marx’s term) or ecological unsustainability in the relationship between capitalism and the natural systems, biological and physical, of the biosphere. The deep horror goes not just to issues of morbidity and death from COVID-19 but to the revelation of the profoundly maladaptive nature of late stage capitalism as a system of ossified prescribed rules (the prescribed categories and rituals of capitalism and capitalisation as elucidated by CasP). Late stage capitalism is a system which cannot accept real feedback from the real system and adapt its prescribed rules for political economic or socioeconomic behaviour to the actual, emerging and evolving complex reality of its real environment.
Inside Story has an article titled “Organised irresponsibility” by Ryan Cropp, which is a review of “Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy” – By Adam Tooze. I have not acquired or read Tooze’s book yet. Cropp makes the following interesting statement in relation to initial (and then unsustained) reactions of neoliberal governments to the COVID-19 pandemic:
“All of which raises the question: was this (the initial Keynesian-like response) a turning point, the beginning of the end of the neoliberal age? Tooze is sceptical. The radical policy choices of 2020, he writes, were “Janus-faced.” On the one hand, they did reduce inequality, pull people out of poverty and reinvigorate left politics. But the “basic logic” of these fiscal interventions was always conservative. There was no redistributive impulse behind them, no coherent program for societal change. The actions of governments and central banks, he writes, were not Keynesian but Bismarckian: “Everything must change so that everything remains the same.” It was an ad hoc, top-down, crisis-fighting response with the thoroughly unrevolutionary goal of preserving the system.” – Ryan Cropp.
Tooze’s insight seems entirely valid to me. The patrimonial society, as identified by Thomas Piketty and others is not just on its way. It’s here, completely in charge, and it is preserving and intensifying itself, within and via crises as Naomi Klein has highlighted. What becomes clear is that late stage neoliberalism is entirely reactive: to climate and environmental crises and to novel zoonoses. The system must be preserved and indeed intensified. The crises it creates can only be reacted to. To prevent the crises would require changing the system itself. That is not permitted and will not be permitted while the neoliberal power system holds sway.
I could write much more about this COVID-19 stress test issue but I will wait and see what interest this post generates. I admit the above is mainly a thumbnail Marxian analysis but as I have said before I do think CasP has uncovered genuine and absolutely crucial insights. The central achievement of CasP, to my mind, is its solution to the economic “value controversy”. In my interpretation, and maybe not just in my interpretation, “CasP demonstrates irrefutably that capital does not measure value but instantiates power.” That crude Marxists ignore this insight, nay this discovery, says something about crude Marxists and almost nothing about Marx. As Marx himself observed (to paraphrase), “I am not a Marxist”.
But as I note above, I post this not to rescue Marx from the Marxists (which project certainly needs to be undertaken [1]) but to examine what the COVID-19 stress test (or “challenge” to use medical terminology) reveals to us about neoliberal capitalism and what CasP theory might make of these revelations.
Note 1: Marx is a monist materialist and complex systems philosopher, first and foremost. Doctrinaire “Marxists” do not understand the complexity of his thought and the monist empirical ontology which underpins it. But that as I say is another project.
Footnote: I previously posted as Ikonoclast. This iteration has my nickname as Apriori which is a pun and a joke about the necessity to explicitly state the a prioris one uses for deductions. I accidently set up my logon so that it shows my name. I’ve decided to run with this.
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Thank you Rowan for raising this subject, a topic that CasP researchers haven’t examined, certainly not systematically, as far as I know.
I’m curious how one can devise an ex-ante stress test for capitalism in general and Covid-19 capitalism in particular. So far, ex-post differential accumulation seems to continue along with the underlying processes of strategic sabotage.
Looking forward to reading your argument.
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I am not sure that I have an argument per se. At this stage, I feel I have a series of observations. These observations seem to confirm to me that looking at COVID-19 responses through the various and rather complementary prisms of Marxian analysis, CasP analysis and a Veblenian view is conducive to understanding the government and elite responses to the pandemic. I speak to the Australian experience. Australia has been and remains considerably “neoliberalised” on the American model during the decades of the 1990s and 2000s. By neoliberalised I refer to the program of privatization and the application of market fundamentalism. The early American (Reaganite) model in turn was influenced by Thatcher or rather by her programmatic theorists, notably Madsen Pirie and his Adam Smith Institute.
First, I will have to do some backgrounding. Australian left-leaning economist, John Quiggin, recently wrote an article titled “Dismembering government – New public management and why the Commonwealth government can’t do anything anymore”. The Commonwealth government in context is Australia’s Federal Government. This article is well worth reading and appears in the “The Monthly”, an Australian on-line magazine. It helps us understand neoliberalism in Australia, and its outcomes.
Dismembering government also means disremembering government. I am sure Professor Quiggin had this play of words in mind. I also am old enough to remember when Australian Federal government actually did things and actually ran things. It was a far better Australia, after adjusting for lesser technology and lesser womens’ and indigenous rights, at that stage of scientific and social history. It was also a better Australia because the environment was less damaged.
It was an ultimate aim of nascent neoliberalism, as early as Thatcher and her guiding Omega File, produced by Madsen Pirie and his Adam Smith Institute, to “restructure the state” so radically (or rather so reactionarily) that the idea of government assisting citizens would no longer by imaginable by the citizens themselves. Citizens would lose the ability to conceive and expect that government (their own democratic government!) would or could help them. Rather, as we have come to see, neoliberal governments would exist solely to help corporations, oligarchs and plutocrats achieve their ends. In Castoriadis’ terms this equates to reducing the socially imaginary possibilities of community, cooperation and collective welfare.
Unfortunately for the neoliberals, part of the populace remained in the conformation of “stubbornly resisting sludge” pitted against this program. Michael Pusey in his 1991 work “Economic Rationalism in Canberra : A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind,” highlighted this very fact that adopting “economic rationalism” or neoliberalism means changing your mind and goal away from being a nation-building state run by and for the people. It means giving all that up. It means becoming a disintegrating state, ruled by corporations and oligarchs, like the UK and the USA. They are further along their path of neoliberal disintegration and catabolic cannibalizing of the legacy infrastructures and values of the Keynesian welfare state. “Economic rationalism” as a term was probably restricted to Australia. It contained a strong pejorative implication centred on the idea that “economic rationalism” was a narrow, so-called rationalism which excluded social concerns. The rationalism was indeed faux or pseudo almost precisely in the sense meant by Ulf Martin in his term “pseudo-rational mastery”.
Part of Pusey’s argument was that economic rationalism recasts “society as the object of politics” and thus as “some sort of stubbornly resisting sludge” (to the goals of corporatism and plutocracy). In a morbid flight of fancy, one can imagine that a naturally arisen zoonotic virus, spread by policies consistent with the entirety of neoliberal logic, will perform the clean up of the stubbornly resisting sludge quite efficiently, like bacteria bred to eat an oil slick. The stubbornly resisting sludge are the poor, the homeless, the brown people, the black people and the old people. How to clean up the stubbornly resisting sludge? The SARSCoV2 virus appears made to order from nature and comes with bonus mutation kit included. I am not suggesting this part of the neoliberal plan was preconceived. I doubt that anyone is clever enough to so utilize emergent and evolutionary phenomena, which are both by definition and in empirical expression, entirely new and unpredictable. (The 600 right-wing policy initiatives of the Omega File show us what was preconceived if we wish to trawl through that document set.) However, I do argue that once the “SARSCoV2″ virus arises with its particular and evolving characteristics, the neoliberal response is internally consistent to neoliberalism and leads inevitably to a Social Darwinist expression. Indeed, part of the early response was already institutionally pre-embedded.
The failure of the WHO to make an early pandemic call for the SARSCoV2 virus was less due to pressure from China than it was due to earlier pressure on the WHO from neoliberal governments, led by the USA, to not make global pandemic calls in relation to earlier flu pandemics like the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. The neoliberal fear was that shutting down or constricting economic activity would cause economic losses, mainly to the rich of course. The morbidity and death tolls on poorer humans simply were not a concern.
This marks the end of my brief backgrounding. My next post will outline the Australian experience through my eyes. I’m using writable and readable chunks to make this easier on me and the reader.
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Please read my above background post first.
Part 2 – The COVID-19 experience and what it might mean.
Preamble.
It’s interesting that the disease is called COVID-19 and the pathogen that causes it is called SARS-CoV-2. This may simply be an artefact of scientific naming conventions. However, to my mind it bears certain hallmarks of re-badging. Since the species name / variant name are currently “Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus / Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” and since the first species common name example was SARS then the obvious common name, for both new disease and new pathogen, would have been SARS2. The very name SARS2 would have carried certain ominous and appropriately salutary warnings and implications. The “rebadging” of the disease as COVID-19 (used colloquially to mean both disease and pathogen) seems almost made to order to obscure, at least in the public mind, the rather sombre implications of the disease and its family to sub-genus “relatives”.
Imagine if a new variant of Ebola arose. Imagine that like SARS-CoV-2, this new variant of Ebola was more transmissible but less lethal than its original variant. We can note here that the combination of higher transmissibility with lower lethality can still generate equal or even more deaths overall. The outcomes depend on the values of each parameter; even then as modified by social, medical and epidemiological responses. We can also note that very high death rates are terrifying. Nobody wants to risk catching a disease with a 50% death rate even if it is not very contagious. Neither does anybody want to risk catching a disease whose death processes are rapid and florid (a haemorrhagic fever with collapsing organs and bloody fluids issuing copiously from all orifices as in Ebola) or whose death processes are not much slower but agonisingly suffocative instead (SARS1 and SARS 2). This is if they really understand what is happening. Under the Western medical model, for good medical reasons, the death process from SARS2 (COVID-19 ) is sequestered from public view.
If the new hypothetical disease variant of Ebola was called Ebola2, at least colloquially, then the public would form a great, and one would think salutary and very useful, fear of it. Thus, if it still caused equal casualties overall (without medical measures and social control interventions) the public would not need to be aware necessarily of the “contagiousness times lethality” equations for variants but simply to be aware of the close family resemblance of the two diseases. This in order to be suitably cautious about it and to accept medical and social controls. However, if the disease were called EBVID-19 (using the same naming convention and assuming it too arose in 2019) would this evoke associations which perhaps ought to be evoked? Encouraging excessive complacency is surely as dangerous as provoking excessive alarm. I think it was unfortunate that COVID-19 was chosen as the disease name.
The next point of this preamble is to note that SARS-CoV-2 as a pathogen, unfortunately for us, falls into what might be called a socio-evolutionary “sweet spot”; meaning a sweet spot niche for the virus NOT for humans. Our social and economic systems (and even our evo-psyche makeup) seem of natures which confer on us social, economic and even evo-psyche blind spots to the true long term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Central to this is our clear tendency to see a truly new evolutionary entity (a novel zoonosis to give it its technical term) as a static entity. SARS-CoV-2 is an evolving entity, not a static entity. SARS-CoV-2 initially appeared relatively unthreatening, at least to neoliberals and the “neoliberlised” public. Its initial death rate seemed unspectacular, to non-medical people, even though it was at least ten times that of most seasonal flus. Its initial spread rate via its significant transmissibility, seemed concerning but not genuinely dangerous to most observers.
This allowed wishful thinking and a set of ideologically generated myths to take hold. They certainly weren’t medical or scientific ideas, though some were simplistic caricatures of scientific ideas. It was “just a flu”. It didn’t need to be eradicated, only the “curve needed to be flattened”. And “herd immunity” would be achieved and able to see off the challenge of SARS-CoV-2. To any virologist, the virus’ close relation to SARS1, its general relation to all coronaviruses and its nature as an RNA virus ought to have sounded real alarm bells and indeed did sound alarm bells for some. But such “alarmists”, or rather realists, were ridiculed and sidelined. This is how neoliberalism does business with impact science. It sidelines discomfiting research which does not fit the business-above-all narrative. In reality, these myths are now being exploded.
SARS-CoV-2 is not just a flu. It’s not a flu at all in fact. It’s a coronavirus. It mutates slower than Alphainfluenzavirus flu, however in a large pandemic mutation rates are increased by the sheer volume of infected hosts. Its latest variants are much more contagious than flu. SARS-CoV-2 (Delta variant) is now the second most contagious human pathogen known to man. Its evolution to that point, since its emergence, took only about 12 months, so “mutates slow than flu” is scarcely a consolation. Finally, it causes a vascular disease, attacking blood vessels in organs all over the body, notwithstanding its current pulmonary infection route. The evolution of an enteric route (there are enteric coronaviruses) is also possible and much to be feared, especially but not only if such evolution occurs first in Africa, as is quite possible. We needed to eradicate this virus at the outset, not “flatten the curve”, not least because of its powers of mutation (which reasonably could have been predicted from its coronavirus and RNA nature). “Herd Immunity” was also likely to prove to be a myth as it indeed has been proven to be. Coronaviruses typically reinfect multiple times. Immunity decays for SARS-CoV-2. It is not lasting. We are now seeing immune escape and vaccine escape occur with the twelve-month. The vaccines are already quite “leaky”. Leaky vaccines can lead to the rapid evolution of much more virulent variants.
SARS-CoV-2 is in the process of turning out to be the “perfect” pathogen to take advantage of the circuits of capital, the circuits of people and the circuits of consumption intrinsic to neoliberal capitalism. I refer in the first instance to the continuing encroachment of endless growth on the wilds (see “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital” in the Monthly Review) which has yielded multiple cases in the last few decades of novel zoonoses crossing over to humans. Overall, a system which prescribes endless growth and invariant capitalist and consumerist rituals cannot be anything but a stationary target to an overall system (the biosphere) continually demonstrating emergent and evolutionary capabilities. It was possible, perhaps even highly likely though not inevitable, that a pathogen would evolve to take advantage of the circuits of people and the circuits of consumption in an over-populated, over-connected and inflexibly prescribed global system.
Finally, we ought to note that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 presents us with a contemporary instance of punctuated equilibrium evolution. Even those now cognisant of the mutation powers of SARS-CoV-2 seem not recognise this as the beginning of the exploitation of a wholly new evolutionary space. Humans and SARS-CoV-2 did not exist together, as host and pathogen, before about November 2019. Our co-evolution has just begun, as opposed to say human influenzas where there have been centuries at least of coevolution already. In punctuated equilibrium evolution we will see, very likely, hyper-rapid evolution especially on the RNA virus’ side of the equation. There is even the potential for such rapid evolution to outpace technological innovation or at least the progress of the product via logistics chains out to the population.
The Australian Experience.
I am going to have to post again to cover this.
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Please read my above posts first. I’ve split my loosely linked “arguments” into bite sized chunks.
Part 2 – The COVID-19 experience and what it might mean. (continued)
The Australian Experience.
Australia had been well distanced from the global COVID-19 experience. Australia is an island continent with a “sea moat”. Distance and sea separation conferred real advantages for pandemic control. Benefits included the relative ease of closing borders and the time lag of COVID-19 incursions (plural for variants) into Australia. We could see mistakes being made elsewhere in the world and we had time to think and not make the same mistakes ourselves. The story of how and why Australia started, from about July this year, to throw away these advantages is an interesting and instructive one. The story, in my opinion, says something about neoliberal logic and about legacy institutions which can defend the people against neoliberal logic in surprising and unforeseen ways.
However, we must backtrack to early 2020. The mistake that the US and neoliberal-led world made (apart from a half dozen or so countries including China) was to NOT aim for suppression and indeed eradication of SARS-CoV-2. Eradication was the policy which “dominated”, in economic jargon, all other policies. This was obvious to epidemiological and economic experts at the time. It was also obvious to these experts that there was and would be no trade-off between human health and well-being goals and economic goals: that damaging health goals would damage economic goals and vice versa. There were several experts at that time who made precisely these predictions. On the economics side, Australian Economics Professor John Quiggin was one such who made precisely these predictions. On the opinionated blogger side, yours truly also made substantially the same predictions albeit from a Marxian rather than a Keynesian perspective.
It wasn’t hard to make these predictions. One simply had to consider the costs of one initial eradication lockdown, possibly of about six weeks duration, compared to multiple, ongoing cycles of lockdowns and relaxations to “flatten the curve” so that the medical system could cope and morbidity and death rates would not become unacceptably and even unsustainably high. Following eradication, the national economy can stay open internally but not quite so open externally. It was and is the notion of closing off the national economy, to some extent, from the global economy which particularly sticks in the neoliberal craw. Note that this closing off refers to mass people movements, like tourism, family, business and elite travel, but not so much to global physical supply chains and surely not at all to virtual commerce. Along with this, the idea of at least semi autarky (self-sufficiency in national production) makes a reappearance. This again is an affront to transnational corporations (TNCs), in particular, who make a living on global labor arbitrage and transfer pricing for tax avoidance purposes. In addition, there are many small and mid-size businesses who benefit from cheap migrant labor (another form of labor arbitrage) to perform onerous and even dangerous jobs which the home population will no longer perform, accustomed as it is to higher expectations and refusing gross levels of exploitation.
Australia was, as I said, well placed to benefit from its natural advantages. In addition to those named above, Australia’s population is spread out with just 25 million people living on a continent little smaller than the “Lower 48” contiguous states of the USA. Admittedly we mostly live around parts of the very long coast and not in the central deserts. Even though Australia is a highly urbanised society with 86% urbanised in 2020, according to the World Bank, a large proportion of these still live in detached houses on their own blocks of land. In Australia, about 70% of all dwellings are separate houses. This makes isolation and distancing easier for COVID-19 prevention. Apartment blocks are now sometimes derided as the equivalent of “vertical cruise ships”: the early spread of COVID-19 on cruise ships having become something of a byword.
After an initial COVID-19 wave, delayed and small by international standards, Australia (except for the state of Victoria) enjoyed long periods of almost COVID-19 free status with life often unimpeded by that disease or any restrictions related to it. Such were and are the benefits of COVID-19 suppression. Nevertheless there were costs and programs to halt the first wave. The two most important initiatives were Jobkeeper and Jobseeker. Jobseeker is simply our unemployment benefit scheme. Its rate was doubled for a period and all job search requirements shelved for a period. Jobkeeper paid employers to keep workers on even if there was no work for them to do or they could not attend work. Conditions were attached but many employers and large companies were able to rort this system for a total in the billions. Many, even though breaking the rules, were not and still are not required to pay it back.
The real reason for these programs was the neoliberal fear of a collapse of the circuits of capital. Keeping worker and unemployed income going during a lock-down is really a way of keeping capitalist and rentier income coming in. The workers and unemployed are “collateral beneficiaries” of the fiscal measures used to keep capitalist and rentier income flowing. The real objective of all neoliberal policy is to keep capitalist and rentier income flowing. As soon as the danger to capitalist and rentier income and the circuits of capital looked past the Jobkeeper and Jobseeker promgrams were abruptly ended despite ongoing worker and unemployed need. To reprise an earlier quote:
“… was this (the initial Keynesian-like response) a turning point, the beginning of the end of the neoliberal age? Tooze is sceptical. The radical policy choices of 2020, he writes, were “Janus-faced.” On the one hand, they did reduce inequality, pull people out of poverty and reinvigorate left politics. But the “basic logic” of these fiscal interventions was always conservative. There was no redistributive impulse behind them, no coherent program for societal change. The actions of governments and central banks, he writes, were not Keynesian but Bismarckian: “Everything must change so that everything remains the same.” It was an ad hoc, top-down, crisis-fighting response with the thoroughly unrevolutionary goal of preserving the system.” – Ryan Cropp.
Large corporate interests, the same interests who donate to the major Australian political parties, have a vested interest in completely reopening the Australian economy to the globalised world economy. These interests include corporations with vested interests in people movements, especially the Airline, Cruise Ship, Tourist, Travel and Immigration Agent industries plus primary (and tertiary) industries whose business models rely on the exploitation of migrant labor and overseas sourced fee-paying students. This list is a roll call of important Australiam industries sans just the coal, gas and iron ore extraction industries. Even these rely to some extent on international worker and management movements. Australia is a branch office nation under globalized neoliberalism. The pressure from the corporations, business in general (big and petty bourgeois), and I am guessing the USA behind the scenes, to “open up” became so great that Veblenian sabotage of Australia’s almost COVID-19 free status become a near certainty.
The Federal Government had been essentially low-key sabotaging Australia’s efforts from the start. The key and relevant constitutional responsibilities of the Federal Government, very much a do-nothing-for-the-people government since the advent of neoliberalism, had been and still are quarantine stations and funds for vaccine acquisition and distribution to state level. It has point-blank refused to build any purpose-built quarantine stations for a long time and has since dragged its feet. Almost two years into the pandemic, Australia still has built no proper quarantine stations at all. Instead, it has relied on a cobbled together and leaky hotel quarantine system. With vaccines, it attempted to penny pinch and left Australia grievously short of vaccines until very recently.
By contrast, our state governments still do real things because they have to. They have responsibility for example, for public hospital systems and public health in general. They knew they would suffer the pain if their hospital systems collapsed. So they implemented state border controls which kept a number of states mostly COVID-19 free. This was even though the Federal Constitution guarantees free trade across state boundaries, more or less. It seems to be a grey area that the Federal Govt was unwilling to test in the Federal Court of Australia. Sometimes a do-nothing Federal Govt is a boon!
But the neoliberal pressures could not permit this situation to continue. Thus began the deliberate sabotage (in my opinion) of our general COVID-19 free status. The business lobby in a public letter demanded Australia “open up for business”. The Premier of New South Wales at or just before that time had conveniently let a Delta variant outbreak spread in NSW with a patently late and inadequate set of local lockdowns. By this time it was known how early and hard lock-downs had to be to supress COVID-19 to get the later benefits of widespread COVID-19 free status. On cue, the NSW state Premier told the people “We have to live with COVID-19”. This is despite the palpable fact that people sicken and die from COVID-19 at unacceptable rates if any pretence of a public preventative health stance is to be maintained. Vaccines were then pushed hard: a good thing in itself as supply became available.
Vulnerable people are now essentially to be sentenced to die from COVID-19, sooner or later, in a straight-out Social Darwinist policy. The truth is not being told about the latest overseas data, quite a bit of it from Israel, but also from the USA and UK, on immune escape, vaccine escape and the ghastly potential for the whole leaky vaccine “paradox” to blow up in our face; namely that the virus could evolve into much more lethal strains from the “forcing” of leaky vaccines. Due to the nature of COVID-19 all extant vaccines are unavoidably leaking. This means fully vaccinated people can still catch and transmit the virus in a significant number of cases. The potential for force evolving more lethal and vaccine resistant strains is clear. What is needed of course is vaccination rates in the 90% to 95% range of the total population PLUS multiple NPIs (non pharmaceutical interventions and public quarantining, isolation and distancing procedures. This is what it would take to push COVID-19 to eradication at this late and dangerous hour.
However, neoliberal capitalism has decided and decreed that even dangerous pandemics cannot get in the way of business as usual. Of course, this is a proximal solution for neoliberal business. Businesses, and more importantly people, will be seriously damaged and decimated in the long run. But somewhere still there will be those who will be differentially advantaged by even this process. However, even differential advantage must ultimately collapse when the entire system collapses. That is the final asymptote. COVID-19 is vastly more dangerous than most realise. It is a wholly new, to current generations, punctuated equilibrium evolutionary event. The outcomes are still completely unknown.
That 0.1 kilograms to 10 kilograms estimated weight (allowing for margins of error) of SARS-CoV-2 virions recently and currently in humans could have the current to-date effects and such dire future-possible effects on global human and economic systems might seem incredible. The vast power of the information encoded in the virions’ RNA strand is indeed astonishing. This amount of virion code plus envelope and spike proteins is confounding a global human system. The neoliberals think they are still in charge. They are not. Nature has executed a coup, the ramifications of which are not even imaginable to the impoverished neoliberal imagination.
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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.
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Scot, I basically accept your points, albeit with significant caveats. COVID-19 is probably not going to be to capitalism what the Black Death was to feudalism. That is if we hold that the Black Death brought down Feudalism. In other words, COVID-19 looks unlikely to bring down capitalism, on its own. It might or might not modify (neoliberal) capitalism longer term. It certainly makes capitalism even more unviable for the poor and vulnerable. There are historians who argue, with backing research, that the Black Death made the rich richer. If this happens again, if we see COVID-19 directly operating to make the rich richer (and I think there is already data for this conclusion), then in that sense COVID-19 is going to be to capitalism what the Black Death was to feudalism.
As I wrote in my above posts, I would be careful about equating COVID-19 in ANY way to influenza. People naturally look for analogies but the pathogens and diseases are scarcely analogous at all except for the pulmonary infection route and the fact of being RNA viruses. They are not even in the same phylum (of Realm: Riboviria, Kingdom: Orthornavirae). That is a long way back up the classification tree and I argue that that matters. Genetics, epigenetics and phenotype matter. Code and conformation matter. I argue we should be aware of this and expect, albeit not with absolute certainty of course, the SARS-CoV-2 virus to interact very differently with humans than do the Influenza A virus and Influenza B virus, for examples.
It is possible that influenza, of some variety at least, has existed as infecting and transmitting between humans for about 8,000 years. Perhaps we could put a plus or minus of 2,000 years on that. That is a lot of coevolution of humans and influenza viruses. Some examples of coronaviruses, namely some cold coronaviruses have also existed and co-evolved with humans. These may have been around for up to 18,000 years plus or minus several thousand. In classification terms this gets us down three steps to Family: Coronaviridae. This means something for sure but how much it means is still uncertain. Maybe we should look to coronavirus cold behaviour for some indicators but not those already refuted. SARS-CoV-2 is not benign like the cornoavirus cold. But SARS-CoV-2 appears capable of multiple infections within a year in the same person, just like the coronavirus cold, and even against immunisation in a significant number of cases. SARS-CoV-2 appears to be showing a considerably greater ability than does influenza to execute immune escape and vaccine escape and without so much relying on rapid mutation to achieve this as does influenza. SARS-CoV-2 also causes more death and morbidity than standard seasonal flus though perhaps not more than 1 in 100 year flu pandemic mutations.
SARS-CoV-2 is a very different “beast” from the influenza viruses. This suggests we should not automatically expect its progress to be the same as influenza pandemic(s). It could be the same, better or worse than flus over the long term. We just don’t have enough data yet. The other point I made was that this was a novel zoonosis, a pathogen brand new to humans in terms of infecting and being directly transmitted between humans. We have not co-evolved with SARS-CoV-2 except since about November 2019. This matters as this becomes and is a punctuated equilibrium evolution event. The salient point about punctuated equilibrium evolution is that evolution is vastly more rapid than in the long equilibrium periods in between. This is especially the case on the side of a mutating virus rapidly colonising huge numbers of immune-naïve humans numbering in the billions. This rapid evolution event is potentially very dangerous as it does, as the name suggests, carry the real possibility of puncturing an equilibrium; namely the recent and current equilibrium we have lived in, as a modern, industrialised, globalised and over-populated civilization. I don’t think the potential dangers of this can be over-emphasised. Eradication was in order initially. Since we have failed that test, extreme caution and strong suppression (global 95% vaccination, plus treatments and NPIs) are in order. Since we are still failing all of these for at least 2/3 rds of the world population, I can only state again I don’t think the potential dangers of this situation can be over-emphasised.
Global warming is much more clearly an existential threat to our system and even species than is SARS-CoV-2. However, I don’t think that we can rule SARS-CoV-2 out as a possible real threat to our system though not to our species. We will very likely co-evolve and co-exist with SARS-CoV-2 eventually but it could look like co-existence with flu-size epidemics which are more frequent than flu epidemics tend to be. One issue that exercises me is the multiplicative nature of these threats. Dealing with climate change is and will be bad enough; touch and go in fact. Dealing with climate change times SARS-CoV-2 looks even worse. That is a real worry.
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Rowan,
While I don’t think COVID-19 is an existential threat to capitalism, I am concerned it could become one to humanity itself. The politicization of the pandemic in the United States has led to a death cult consisting of 25-30% of the country who insist on being human petri dishes to develop a super mutant variant.
What I don’t see is Americans blaming capitalism or capitalists for whatever harm COVID-19 wreaks. The hard core of the death cult has been conditioned to believe that their prosperity was given to the undeserving (who, mysteriously, never actually received it), and so the death cult will focus its ire on those less fortunate than they are while the rest of us have to defend ourselves and others from the death cult. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve will continue pumping liquidity into the U.S. stock and markets, further increasing wealth and income inequality.
I know things are different in other countries, but that is how I see things in the U.S. right now.
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Truly, as they say, it is harder to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world. As far as the “death cult” charge goes, I agree that some of it is a death wish or a “rapture” wish. However, I think it is more of an “ignorance and self-entitlement cult” based on self-justification, selfishness, post-truthism and denialism.
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Truly, as they say, it is harder to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world. As far as the “death cult” charge goes, I agree that some of it is a death wish or a “rapture” wish. However, I think it is more of an “ignorance and self-entitlement cult” based on self-justification, selfishness, post-truthism and denialism.
Actually, with global warming it is easy to imagine the end of capitalism (and perhaps humanity) without the end of the world.
When I talk about the “death cult,” I am more focused on the cynicism and nihilism of the leaders than the attitudes and beliefs of the followers. We have had twenty years of relentless propaganda of despair from the far right (especially Rupert Murdoch outlets) that argues certain people are being victimized while other, undeserving people are being given handouts. If that is all you hear for most of your life, you will likely come to believe it. So, I sympathize with the followers. It reminds me of the book They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer.
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Dear Rowan,
Thank you for your fruitful insights on this topic. I personally have come up with similar questions about the relation between Covid-19 and capitalism and I keep asking my self: did covid-19 just forced a jump-start-like passage from a breadth phase to a depth one?
I’m asking this from my local perspective, that is, from the perspective of an Italian citizen. Here in my country, and in less than a few months a lot of firms are relocating, cutting costs anywhere (even when production is proceeding apace!), menacing massive firings, and so on.
Perhaps my claim is empirically too farfetched, since we have no knowledge of the future and I’m speaking from a viewpoint which is tantamount to a “day-to-day” observation of the events unfolding; nonetheless it looks to me like the whole pandemic is just serving as a temporal “accelerator” of the breadth-depth oscillation.
What do you think about this possibility?
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Dear YuriDl,
I am not qualified to answer your question. While I remember and understand some concepts from the CasP book by Bichler and Nitzan, I do not remember and understand all the concepts from that book. Breadth and depth is one of those concepts I would have to re-read about and even then I might not make the correct interpretation, nor answer your question correctly. I may try to re-read the chapter in question and hazard a (poorly) educated guess at the answer to your question but you could not take my answer as definitive. An answer from one of the lead theorists of CasP would be much better and more reliable.
From my perspective (Marxian autonomist, a bit Veblenian), I would simply note that neoliberal capitalism looks entirely reactive to me. It has its ideology and its rituals of capital which it won’t change for nature or humans other than for humans owning and managing dominant capital. When it generates a crisis by its modes of production, it then seeks to ignore the crisis where it can (forcing nature and non-rich humans to accept the negative externalities) or it seeks to band-aid the crisis while concomitantly making money (especially as differential profits) out of the crisis. It attempts to monetize crises during the band-aiding process.
So, while capitalism is interested is high “valued-added” processes, so-called, and really high differential profit process, like copyrighted vaccines, it is not interested in early disease circumvention measures (like preventing novel zoonoses emergences and their initial pandemic spread) nor in making vaccines cheap or free for the third world, nor in relatively cheap preventative health measures like masks, distancing and other NPIs (non pharmaceutical interventions).
Neither the good of nature as a balanced biosphere and ecological system, nor the good of most humans are taken into account in the calculations and commands of capitalism. Whether that causes a change in the breadth-depth space, using those terms in the CasP manner, maybe we could wait for an expert answer or else assay our own attempt following their schema. Might take me a few days and I would prefer an expert answer, not least because I am somewhat lazy at times. 😉
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