We’d like to think that this will all be over relatively soon, that the perils from the pandemic will recede by the end of this year or by the end of the next. And right-wing politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro are glad to foster an illusion of safety so that they can justify trying to send people back to work for the benefit of the capitalist class. But these efforts by the reactionary political factions to downplay the crisis will only further seal the neoliberal world’s dark fate.
In contrast to the efficient and well calculated approaches to fighting the pandemic that socialist countries like China have carried out, the response from the capitalist countries has been hindered by numerous systemic obstacles towards effectively combating an outbreak.
In the United States, which is where the most Covid-19 deaths have happened, these detrimental factors within capitalism have been the most obvious: lack of an adequate healthcare system amid decades of austerity, lack of a social safety net strong enough to maintain people’s livelihoods during quarantine, a federal government that’s been unwilling to seriously address the virus for fear of losing too many corporate profits, a reactionary population which is so fixated on “liberty” that they start calling Covid-19 a hoax, political polarization that makes it a partisan issue to take the pandemic seriously.
This situation is paralleled in Brazil, whose president has largely destroyed the social safety net and then implored people to ignore the movement restrictions put in place by the country’s governors. This has caused Brazil to have the most Covid-19 deaths apart from the U.S. It’s no wonder why the next two most affected countries are Russia and India, or that Chile and the U.K. also rank within the top ten countries with the most deaths from the pandemic. All of these places have been deeply influenced by neoliberal policies, which has made them especially susceptible to the virus.
While most of them don’t have openly denialistic leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro, their very economic systems are incompatible with the China-style measures that have been shown to defeat a pandemic. Under neoliberalism, people’s ability to stay at home is limited by how much their bosses and their plutocrat-controlled governments are willing to let them shelter from the virus. Unlike in China, where millions of people were very effectively quarantined while the police did their shopping, the U.S. has undergone haphazard movement restrictions that the president tried to undermine long before they could have had a meaningful impact.
People have also been largely forced to violate the lockdown restrictions and the safety advice, because going back to work has often been their only way to keep access to housing, food, and healthcare. In the neoliberal world, the infrastructure and resources simply haven’t been available to bring about a Covid-19 response which matches that of China, Vietnam, the DPRK, and other socialist nations.
The capitalist class within these neoliberal countries has even been able to use this cruel reality to make a case for forcing people back to work. The financial ruin, stress, and suicidal depression that poor people in neoliberal countries have experienced as a result of being in quarantine is portrayed as evidence that lifting the movement restrictions will cause more good than harm. Effectively fighting the pandemic, they’ve argued, would be too costly for our capitalist society.
Fitting the social Darwinist nature of the system we live in, sacrificing the lives of those most vulnerable to the virus has been implicitly viewed as necessary for the wellbeing of the people who can afford a botched pandemic response. If the rich will be alright, the resolution is seen as good enough.
While Bill Gates would never admit that class is the source of these systemic obstacles towards fighting the pandemic, he’s been forced to acknowledge them, having stated recently that the U.S. “isn’t even close” to doing enough to fight Covid-19. “The U.S. in particular hasn’t had the leadership messages or coordination that you would have expected,” he said. “The range of behaviors in the U.S. right now, some people being very conservative in what they do, and some people ignoring the epidemic, is huge. Some people almost feel like it’s a political thing which is unfortunate. The governor of North Dakota, a friend of mine, had to say ‘please don’t be mean to people wearing a mask’ which kind of blows the mind.”
The solution that plutocrats like Gates are pushing forth is one of high-tech surveillance, police repression, and selective distributions of medical care from billionaire philanthropists like himself. Big tech is working with the national security state to plan “smart cities” where everyone is tracked by AI-driven mass surveillance. The U.S. military and its partnered police forces are prepared to employ increasingly warlike tactics as the economic meltdown produces more social unrest. And Gates, who won’t challenge these measures of class repression or try to reverse the inequality they perpetuate, aims to partner with other elites in advancing technocratic solutions which function within the neoliberal paradigm.
Poor people and colonized people, who have been dying the most from the virus, won’t be saved by whatever the system does. Until they overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a proletarian democracy, they’ll be stuck in a situation where their communities are under a perpetual public health crisis. Covid-19 has become just another mundane hardship that the poor inevitably face under late-stage capitalism, like homelessness or food insecurity.
So will be the case for the future pandemics that appear in this decade and beyond. The warming of the climate and the destruction of biodiversity have made the planet far more susceptible to viruses than it was in earlier decades, and Covid-19 is just the first hint of how these factors will worsen outbreaks. David Wallace-Wells has written that “The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history.”
Global capitalism, which created the ecological catastrophe behind this new era of virus dangers, won’t protect those most vulnerable to the outbreaks. When a society is systemically incapable of prioritizing public safety over profits, in a situation like ours it will find itself trapped in a long-term vicious cycle. Neoliberalism will only ever allow for half-measures to be put in place in response to pandemics, which means the health crisis won’t have a chance to really be fought until neoliberalism ends.
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