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    Chomsky: Capitalism and Covid-19 (extract from his latest book Consequences of Capitalism) Archived Message

    Posted by Der on January 19, 2021, 5:11 pm

    Important: written April 2020. Hence, written before a vaccine arrived.


    CAPITALISM AND COVID-19
    A Concluding Coda

    As we were wrapping up our most recent offering of the “What is Politics?” course in the first week of March 2020, the contours of the novel coronavirus or Covid-19 (known more technically as SARS-CoV-2) were just becoming more widely known. As we are writing now at the end of April 2020, the extent and implications are considerably clearer and quite alarming. Though even at this point there is still great uncertainty about the ultimate effects, duration, or aftermath of the pandemic.

    In this brief postscript we want to demonstrate that the Covid-19 pandemic currently ravaging the health and economic status of large swaths of the global population emerged predictably (indeed, almost inevitably) out of the kinds of conditions we describe in the rest of the book. Both in terms of the etiology and spread of the pandemic, and in the very uneven response to it, we can see the inexorable workings of the cruel logics of neoliberal, late-stage, globalized capitalism. While much more detail could be included, here we are concerned to highlight those defects in the capitalist political economy that have been most glaringly revealed by the current pandemic.

    ETIOLOGY AND SPREAD—AN ABBREVIATED TIMELINE OF COVID-19

    Health professionals and research scientists have been issuing warnings about the likelihood of new and dangerous pandemics for quite some time hearkening back, for example, to the 1918 Spanish flu (which actually originated in Kansas in the US), but especially since the advent of more recent outbreaks such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, MERS, and Ebola.

    Recognition and identification of the new virus actually dates from December of 2019, when doctors in China noticed emerging cases of an unusual pneumonia in Wuhan (a city in Hubei Province). Scientists in China sequenced the virus’s genome and made it available on January 10, just a month after the December 8 report of the first case of pneumonia-like symptoms from an unknown virus in Wuhan. In contrast, after the SARS outbreak began in late 2002, it took scientists much longer to sequence that coronavirus. It peaked in February 2003—and the complete genome of 29,727 nucleotides wasn’t sequenced until that April.

    Chinese medical teams reported preliminary findings to the World Health Organization (WHO) on December 31, 2019. The WHO indicated on January 4, 2020, that China had notified it of these unusual cases. The WHO first made a public announcement of the virus on January 5; three weeks later, after more knowledge was gathered about the virus and after its spread matched the institutional definition of a public health emergency, the WHO made the appropriate announcement. Further cases were identified in China, Thailand, Japan, and South Korea by January 20, 2020. The actuality of human-to-human transmission was also recognized on January 20, 2020. Wuhan City was shut down by Chinese authorities on January 23, 2020.

    A WHO committee issued the following advice on January 22, 2020, to countries around the world: “It is expected that further international exportation of cases may appear in any country. Thus, all countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread of 2019-nCoV infection, and to share full data with WHO.” The WHO declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.

    Numerous sources have falsely reported that the Chinese government withheld crucial information for six days from January 14 to 20; in fact (and as the above timeline shows), the Chinese government provided crucial information to the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the WHO on January 3, and made multiple public statements of what they knew thereafter. It is clear that this information was emerging even as the epidemic was raging and no one knew precisely what was happening. Doctors were working feverishly to contain it and figure out what it was and what to do. A more accurate portrayal of events, even though it was buried in a typical “China withheld information” story from the Associate Press on April 14, 2020, is: “It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.”

    Despite early approbation of Chinese efforts, President Trump, utilizing these numerous dishonest claims, and in an attempt to scapegoat the organization and shift blame from his own mishandling of the crisis, announced his plan to withdraw US support for the WHO on April 14, 2020. In fact, as the Washington Post reports, Trump wants to destroy the WHO, with dire implications far beyond the current pandemic for unknown numbers of people around the globe who rely on the organization for health services for a wide range of diseases.

    As of late April 2020, the coronavirus has infected more than 2.8 million people worldwide, with more than 200,000 fatalities. Both figures, due to very uneven testing and case reporting, include substantial uncertainties, but are undoubtedly serious underestimates. The eventual toll is impossible to predict. And although statistics in the US are even less reliable than in other major countries (and therefore, per capita death rates are difficult to calculate), what is clear at this point is that with approximately 4.5 percent of the world’s population, the US has over 25 percent of the world’s fatalities.

    THE RESPONSE THUS FAR

    Beginning in January 2020, after the WHO advisory, countries have adopted varying approaches to dealing with the pandemic. Those who have been most successful (e.g., China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand) began comprehensive testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and shutdowns very early. These measures, when combined with adequate economic and social support, have managed to slow the spread of cases in these countries to the point where medical capacities have not been overwhelmed and lower per capita fatality rates have been achieved. In many other countries, including the US, response has been much slower and haphazard, with consequently much higher rates of infection and death.

    Capitalist Common Sense and Covid-19

    “Moments are the elements of profit” —Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 352 [see chapter 2, “Additional Chapter References”]

    To begin, it is crucial to note that much more effective prevention, preparedness, and coping measures have been available or could have been developed in advance of the present pandemic. Because of capitalist logics, and the governance structures they command that prioritize profits over people, such measures have remained out of reach. A recent article in the New York Times magazine, for example, quotes zoologist and disease ecologist Peter Daszak: “The problem isn’t that prevention was impossible…. It was very possible. But we didn’t do it. Governments thought it was too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies operate for profit.” The same article goes on to make clear that contemporary science already has the necessary tools for developing panvirals (which might provide safeguards against a variety of pathogens) or vaccines, but then quotes microbiologist Vincent Racaniello: “The real obstacle to making panviral drugs or vaccines has been that no one was willing to pay for their development. For pharmaceutical companies … panviral vaccines are simply a terrible business proposition: Companies have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a shot that people will get once a year at most—and not at all in years when no particular disease is ascendant. Panviral drug treatments are unprofitable for similar reasons. For one, the course of treatment is short, usually just a few weeks; for chronic diseases (diabetes, high blood pressure), patients take regimens of pills daily, often for years.” This same profits über alles logic, as Racaniello continues, applies to testing: it’s “a chicken-and-egg situation: No one is developing drugs for these viruses because there’s no way to test for them. And no one is developing tests, because there aren’t any drugs to prescribe.”

    It is also then possible to employ this ethos to explain many other elements of the current response. Though there is variation in terms of worldwide reaction, we concentrate here on the US case, as the most extreme version of neoliberal capitalism. It is critical to note, however, that at the moment we are writing the pandemic has yet to manifest its full ferocity on the most vulnerable segments of the planet’s population, especially in Africa and Latin America, areas where lack of preparedness in terms of health care professionals and medical supplies is more pronounced and dire than even in the US. It should also be evident that these problems will be drastically exacerbated if the campaign to destroy the WHO succeeds.

    Over the past forty years, the US health care “system” (along with most other public goods and services) has been under continuous assault. Following Ronald Reagan’s dictum that “government is the problem” (except for coddling those at the top of the private sector, about which more in a moment), massive neoliberal efforts to defund, deregulate, and privatize have produced the most expensive, complicated, and patch-worked health care apparatus in the developed world; one that still leaves 40 million citizens uninsured and an additional 40 million underinsured. It is also an arrangement that, despite its exorbitant costs, produces some of the poorest health outcomes among advanced countries. For many of those “lucky” enough to participate in this scheme, health coverage is tied to employment, a precarity now highlighted vividly by the advent of the pandemic.

    Driven by the same insatiable desire for profit, capital has roamed the globe searching for cheaper labor or raw materials, more lucrative markets, or more desirable (i.e., more lax) regulatory environments. When combined with other neoliberal tenets, such as privatization and “just in time” production regimes (i.e., no more inventory on hand than absolutely necessary), these thousand-mile commodity chains go a long way in explaining the woefully inadequate supplies of masks, test kits, ventilators, hospital beds, and the myriad additional elements necessary for an effective response.

    Finally, this logic also elucidates the nature and content of the US “recovery” packages, and the extreme urgency of “reopening the economy,” no matter the risks to the population. The brief epigram from Marx that opens this section was meant to make clear that sunk costs in means of production (raw materials, tools, buildings, etc.) cannot sit idle for a moment. Any such disruption is not only profit foregone, but also an actual loss. Thus the desperate need for (some) people to get back to work, and to get the gears of the profit machine back up to speed as quickly as possible. Here it is also worth thinking about the very uneven landscape of governmental prescriptions. While all levels (federal, state, and local), though to varying extent, have issued stay-at-home guidelines or mandates for “non-essential” workers, and closures for “non-essential” businesses (most typically small enterprises), there have been no such shut-down orders issued for financial institutions, large landlords, insurance companies, and the like. Likewise, in the rush to “reopen” the economy, we have yet to see government mandates (at any level) requiring employers to provide verifiably safe working conditions for their returning employees. Rather, workers are being asked, as before the pandemic, to risk their own health and safety for the sake of a return to profit making for those above them.

    The lopsided recovery legislation passed thus far (with overwhelming bipartisan support, it must be noted) provides enormous relief for those at the top, and mere crumbs to the public. The first CARES bill allocated $500 billion to large corporations, banks, and other financial institutions, although when leveraged with other resources from the Federal Reserve really amounted to $4.5 trillion at a minimum, and with virtually no oversight or accountability. By contrast workers were promised a one-time payment of $1,200, plus $500 per child. As Treasury Secretary Mnuchin indicated, this payment should provide “bridge liquidity” (terminology always familiar to working men and women!) for ten weeks, which actually works out to $17/day; plenty to get by on. The legislation also expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance, as well as increasing weekly unemployment payments by $600. Of course, all of that assumes that the new 26 million claimants can access those benefits. Thus far, state and local agencies have been overwhelmed by demand. These problems will only worsen as resources for those government sectors dry up, and as the federal response to such resource needs remains anemic. Finally, the legislation has included the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to benefit small businesses (those with fewer than five hundred employees!) to be administered by the Small Business Administration. The PPP was initially funded with $350 billion for forgivable loans (depleted almost immediately, with large chunks going to much-larger businesses and chains), and was augmented by an additional $350 billion on April 24, 2020. One final aspect of the PPP is critical: rather than resources going directly to workers, these funds go to employers, who then retain the discretion of whether to keep workers on the payroll, at what levels of employment, and at what rates of pay. This leaves all power in the hands of capitalists, and makes clear that whatever benefits workers might derive in society (including, at this fraught moment, health care) must come through a relationship of waged labor, if at all.

    Militarism and Covid-19

    The connections between militarism, capitalism, and the pandemic are extensive. The most obvious and immediate are the opportunity costs connected with the bloated US military budget, now topping $750 billion per year (outspending the next ten national “competitors” combined). Current expenditures on the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation combined are under $50 billion, approximately 6 percent of the military budget. As disease ecologist and zoologist Peter Daszak has put it: “We don’t think twice about the cost of protecting against terrorism. We go out there, we listen to the whispers, we send out the drones—we have a whole array of approaches. We need to start thinking about pandemics the same way.”

    Another important link between militarism and the pandemic works through neo-imperialism and globalized neoliberalism. The US utilizes military means to secure access to strategic and necessary resources, and to deny that access to economic, near-peer competitors (to use the military argot), as well as to open markets and provide protection for US firms operating internationally. A concomitant consequence of this far-flung, globalized system is the spread of infection from country to country through traveler contact. In fact, one of the characteristics that distinguishes Covid-19 from its most recent predecessors (SARS, MERS, and Ebola) is just that rapid and extensive geographic spread.

    Environmental Catastrophe and Covid-19

    Again, the connections here are numerous, but we highlight only two. The first pertains to the increasing likelihood of pandemics like Covid-19 occurring as mounting appetites for resources push development further and further into previously wild lands. As experts like Daszak have warned, “as populations and global travel continued to grow and development increasingly pushed into wild areas, it was almost inevitable that once-containable local outbreaks, like SARS or Ebola, could become global disasters.” Here Daszak is pointing to the potential calamities awaiting humanity through zoonotic vectors of animal-to-human infection. More frequent and extensive contact between people and wild animals (and the myriad viruses they carry), which has also been put in motion as global warming and the climate crisis put animal populations on the move, set the stage for yet more Covid-19s.

    The second connection comes through the neoliberal waves of environmental deregulation that have made air, water, and land much more toxic, and have thereby significantly increased susceptibility to effects of coronavirus infections by inducing debilitating preexisting conditions. These effects (as well as correlated socioeconomic characteristics), of course, are distributed very unevenly through the population; a fact which helps to explain the substantial and disproportionate rates of infection and fatality in US communities of color.

    Social Movements (Regressive and Progressive) and Covid-19

    Finally, we want to note some of the important linkages between the pandemic and social reactions. On the right, predictably, we see numerous examples of authoritarian regimes around the globe utilizing the pandemic as a cover for repression, added surveillance, and curtailing of civil liberties. In the US, as we write, those most anxious to open up the country and get back to business as usual are stirring up combinations of financial insecurity, boredom, impatience, and distrust of government to provoke flouting of stay-at-home orders, thereby putting the protesters themselves and others at increased risk. Politicians in several US states are both responding to these demands and encouraging them, and are either contemplating or actually opening their states back up prematurely before necessary conditions and safeguards are in place.

    On the other hand, some very significant social movements, both established and emerging are working toward positive change. On an international scale, it is possible to identify a number of country-to-country assistance programs (some occurring even in defiance of heavy US sanction regimes). Most notably, Cuba, as has happened many times during past crises, has been sending medical teams and equipment to places that have been hardest hit. China, despite all of the usual US scapegoating and blaming the “yellow peril,” got a relatively early handle on its own outbreak (as we note above), and has now been assisting others with personnel and materials, and most crucially, with knowledge gained from its own experience with the pandemic. Similar mutual aid activities are rising spontaneously at smaller scales planet wide.

    Additionally, and hopefully of lasting significance beyond the immediate crisis, we see previously powerless segments of the population, now recognized as essential heroes (and perhaps taking those epithets more seriously than those who deploy them), rising up to demand rights and benefits commensurate with that putative status. Whether from frontline medical workers, people who keep the lights on, the water flowing, the grocery shelves stocked, the buses running, and the garbage collected, demands are emerging for decent pay, safe working conditions, health care, sick and parental leave, and debt relief (for mortgages or rent, utilities, credit cards, etc.). Whether and how these demands register in the political system will help shape the post-pandemic landscape.

    Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents both a crisis and an opportunity. Contests for controlling the narratives around the meaning of this pandemic will be the terrain of struggle for either a new, more humane common sense and society or a return to the status quo ante. The outcome of those contests is uncertain; everything depends on the actions that people take into their own hands.

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