Coronavirus: The end of capitalism as we know it

 
Coronavirus: The end of capitalism as we know it
By Telma Luzzani: It has never happened before that, simultaneously, the entire world was under the real threat of an epidemic and that, in a rare tune made of panic and uncertainty, the only thing that occupied the minds of the entire planet was the virus .

What world can emerge after this catastrophe?
The concern is not frivolous because, as Canadian Canadian Naomi Klein shrewdly analyzed in her book The Shock Doctrine, powerful elites often take advantage of catastrophic events to install unpopular reforms, redesign socio-economic systems, or, directly, plunder public goods and make pass the operation as an "attractive market opportunity".

The book stops at two examples and explains, step by step, the actions of these elites. One is the 2004 Asian tsunami; the other, the genocidal dictatorships of Argentina and Chile in the 1970s.

In the first, after the natural disaster, Sri Lankan fishermen sold their properties for money and today there is one of the most exclusive tourist centers in the world. In the second, “some of the most despicable human rights violations, which appeared to be mere acts of sadism stemming from undemocratic regimes, were in fact a deliberate attempt to terrorize the people and actively articulate to prepare the ground and introduce 'reforms' free market radicals. In the Argentina of the 70s, the systematic policy of "disappearances" that the Junta carried out eliminating more than 30,000 people, most of them left-wing activists, was an essential part of the economic reform that the country suffered, with the imposition of recipes from the Chicago School. The same thing happened in Chile, where terror was complicit in the same type of economic metamorphosis, ”wrote Klein.

It is what she calls "disaster capitalism": when a terrified society only thinks about its survival and is unable to reflect on what is best for it. This situation is used by the richest 1 percent to install policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich the powerful and starve the rest.

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

But all is not lost, Klein, like many other thinkers, believes that this pandemic may also be an opportunity for change.

In fact, one of the most striking and widespread signs is the greening of Keynesian policies and the revaluation of the role of the State that the pandemic produced.

Covid-19 exposed the damage that market policies and privatizations have done to Western health systems. In New York, the richest city in the richest country in the world, hospital workers began protesting, in mid-March, about the lack of basic supplies such as chinstraps and gloves. A few days later, the governor of that state, Andrew Cuomo, sent a desperate message to the White House to send 30,000 respirators, and on March 20, President Donald Trump, who until then had ridiculed the coronavirus, came out to announce –In a very American style– bellicose and spectacular measures. "I am a president in a period of war," he cried, and immediately promised to end the "invisible enemy."

(A very important point is left aside in this analysis: the political exploitation of the pandemic that the White House is making, declaring war on the "Chinese virus" and sending part of the Pentagon air and naval force to the Caribbean in an unacceptably gesture violent against Venezuela and Latin America.)

As of that March 20, Trump did not stop taking Keynesian measures such as applying the Production Law, which enables control of prices and wages; send checks of up to $ 1,200 per person (subsidies?) to all Americans who make less than $ 70,000 a year and order private companies to produce goods for the state.

In the same way, Germany announced an unlimited credit line for SMEs; French President Emmanuel Macron rediscovered that "the protective state does not mean a cost but an indispensable good", and the European Union announced aid of 100 billion euros for Spain and Italy, the EU countries hardest hit by the Covid-19, to stop layoffs.

Others are delighted that this sudden awareness of the effects that the commodification of health and the destruction of the environment have on people is the beginning of the end of neoliberal hegemony. On the contrary, there are those who fear that the current state of emergency is the key that neo-capitalism and neocolonialism were waiting to give an even more extreme twist.

 If there is to be a true transformation - the taking of the Bastille, of the Winter Palace - it must be a change that comes from below and, for the moment, control over the bodies - and most likely over the minds - of the entire globe is total.

What is undeniable is that the coronavirus has introduced new problems and forced us to reflect on behaviors and values.

The risk of a stoppage of the world economy is one of the points of greatest concern. This is how the economist Julio Gambina explains it: “If until now there was talk of a slowdown, now there is fear of a recession or even a depression of the world economy. It is no longer just about problems with banks, stock markets or the valuation of securities but we are talking about the impact on production at the industrial level. Then there is the risk of unemployment. At the moment, there are countries that are adopting creative measures, with increasing state participation. Some European nations are financing a large part of the salary mass of companies in the private sector of the economy, for example ”
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A FALSE DILEMMA
Is there the so-called dichotomy between economy and health? The doctor Jorge Rachid, with the clarity that characterizes him, responds: “There is no contradiction between health and economy. Those who raise it are proposing to bury an essential human right, which is given to us and to which we must care and protect as a community and a productive process that can only be carried out by healthy people, so without the former - health - there is no the second. Presenting the terms ‘health’ and ‘economy’ as dichotomous would be similar to comparing peace or war in terms of humanity. Without a doubt, during wars a few earn a lot and many thousands cry for what the war took from them. If those who presented wars as necessary were the ones who sent their children to die, they would think twice. The same is true of the pandemic and the workers: some entrepreneurs want others to work and they and their families to stay protected, while accumulating profits. ”

There is still a long time to know what consequences the coronavirus has had on the material world and on the subjectivity of humans in this 21st century. For now, it has confronted us with relationships with our children and partners, with leisure, with the futility of consumption, with household chores and new forms of work, with submission to the screens and the media, with the beauty that it is nature without our predatory hand, with how much hugs are missed, with the importance of solidarity and with our own fragility.

With the end of the quarantine we will sweep all that learning under the carpet? Here is the question.

* Originally published in the magazine Caras y Caretas.