Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis
Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 10:02 pm
Politics and pandemic: what the world must learn not to repeat the same mistake
Mission Truth
Apr 8 · 9 min read
In almost four months of development and evolution, the Covid-19 pandemic has represented an entire political earthquake in wide areas of the world.
It is not the first time that liberalism has failed
Certainly, the economic, financial and international system crisis that has been put at the center of the scene already came from before, however, the impact at the health level and the fragility of States to successfully manage the pandemic has compromised the paradigm neoliberal before our eyes in a unique way.
This historical episode marked by the collapse of political and economic structures might seem novel, but in reality it is not if we put memory to work. We have already attended other events close to the apocalypse, only now we have the “privilege” of observing our tragedy live and direct, 24 hours a day, thanks to the wonder of the Internet.
But the reasons and causes that have precipitated this scenario have not changed much either.
The First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression of 1929, Fascism and Nazism, and the wars in retaliation for the Russian Revolution, a combination of events that brought human suffering to unknown limits for forty consecutive years, had been cooking in the short wave of buoyant industrial capitalism that spanned from 1870 to 1914.
In a matter of a few years, the image that the liberal project had solved all the problems of humanity collapsed. His premise that state intervention was negative and his obsessive conception that the free market would effectively regulate world trade and political tensions, ended in the catastrophe of Nazism on the one hand, and in the reordering of the world's political and economic paradigm. , for another.
The fall of liberalism was total and opened the way to Keynesianism (a mix between capitalism and wealth distribution that would accommodate the defects of the system) in the late 30s of the last century.
A caricature of John M. Keynes in TIME magazine and another Keynesian cover in Newsweek. Image: Mises Center
The liberal project left the world table for more than 40 years having lost all its credibility. Meanwhile, Keynesianism maintained its bellows as an ideological instrument to contain the program of the Soviet revolution that was committed to a radical change in capitalist production structures.
The monsters return
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also a decade earlier, the world again embraced the ideas that failed in 1914 as if nothing had been learned from that process. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm assures in his extensive work on the 20th century that humanity had lost all organic connection with its past as a result of a historical change that we did not fully understand.
The fact is that the western elites, without an alternative project at the forefront, resumed their commitment to liberalism but in its most savage and globalizing version: neoliberalism.
Once again, all human affairs were delegated to the market economy within the framework of a cycle of privatizations, deregulation and concentration of the economic apparatus that has left us a social and economic inequality that borders on tragedy.
And to the same project, the same crises. The inclement overdose of neoliberalism in the blood tissue of the economy and culture for more than 30 years has resulted in remastered versions of Hitler and Mussolini, adapting to an ideological world where mediation of social networks dominates.
The faces of our time, Trump, Abascal, Bolsonaro and other unmentionable, sneak out the window, assume positions of power and leadership in countries of international weight and we seem not to find a reliable response to such unpleasant events.
Jair Bolsonaro with Donald Trump in Florida on March 7. Photo: Reuters
But there is and it is very humiliating: we repeat a failure that had already cost us millions of deaths among famines, pandemics and wars in the last century.
A highly contagious flu has revealed that a system designed to turn everything into merchandise and private profits cannot save humanity, cannot provide it with medical assistance, compensate its unemployment or its debts or reduce other pressures associated with the crisis and the uncertainty of this moment.
In this sense, the systemic crisis that Covid-19 has exploded forces us to accumulate the following lessons for the post-pandemic world. Because there may be no other opportunity to correct the failures of a ruthless, self-centered, and asocial Western elite.
The scam market
Blind confidence in the market made it impossible for countries to prepare for the pandemic, precisely because it is unable to foresee these circumstances of such characteristics by its own mechanism.
On this the analyst Richard Wolff warns the following and focuses his consideration on the main focus of the pandemic worldwide:
“The important thing for public health is the preparation of each society: stored tests, masks, ventilators, hospital beds, trained personnel, etc., to handle dangerous viruses. In the United States, such objects are produced by private capitalist companies whose goal is profit. It was not profitable to produce and store such products, that was not and is not yet being done. ”
Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn takes this argument much further by comparing the current crisis with that of 1914 :
“'Lions led by donkeys' was the phrase used to condemn the waste of lives by incompetent World War I generals and their political masters. The same words could be used again today: once the shortage was for machine guns and artillery shells, whereas now they are for ventilators, surgical masks, and test kits. The common feature is that in both cases the shortage will kill or disable a proportion of those who do not receive essential equipment. ”
For his part, Robert Reich indicates that "there are no institutions analogous to the Federal Reserve with the responsibility of supervising and managing public health, capable of taking out a giant checkbook at any time to avoid human, rather than financial, devastation," evidencing the priorities of the main western power and how they have unleashed a crisis that can reach 200 thousand deaths.
It is urgent to reduce the power of the market on health, and furthermore, to take away space in the conduct of the vital affairs of humanity.
Bet on public health
Precisely countries that have not treated health as a lucrative business have been better prepared to face the pandemic.
Countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, among others, which have opted for a universal public health model, have found themselves in better conditions to fight against Covid-19 and are currently positioning themselves internationally as fronts of health support for European countries with uncontrolled contagion and death curves.
National Chemical Physical Control Laboratories of the Center for State Control of Medicines in Havana. Photo: Marcelino Vázquez Hernández / ACN
Contrary to the liberal preaching that enshrines the linking of the market in all spheres of life, in the framework of Covid-19 the nationalization and nationalization of health is the only approach that can protect humanity. It has been shown that countries with robust public health systems can better combat this disease.
Paradoxically, the model of health privatization is showing its inefficiency and lack of solidarity.
Cuts kill
Although the overcoming of the pandemic and the return to a certain normality still seem far away, the capitalists and their political elites are preparing to transfer the cost of the Covid-19 economic crisis to the poor layers of the population.
They appeal to this cruel and ruthless approach under the myth that taxes and other public investments hamper economic development and discourage growth. But it is precisely this vision that has brought us here, since the systematic reduction of taxes and cuts to public services has left countries without defenses against the pandemic.
The looming post-pandemic world will surely be one marked by economic depression, recession in strategic sectors, and a chronic unemployment cycle. The intensity and depth of this panorama has yet to be defined, and the prolongation of this first stage will depend on it.
Faced with this scenario, the wealthy western layers are preparing to capture economic benefits taking advantage of the context of a weakened and desperate society. It is already happening in the United States with a mega “anti-crisis” plan that will benefit Wall Street, in Colombia with tax exemptions for businessmen, and in Brazil and in many other countries where the wealthy receive financial aid lines.
For this reason, this crisis must rethink the place of the State, not as a petty cash fund of the rich but as an instrument to prevent the poor from paying the economic effects of the pandemic.
The United States has made it a policy to save the super-rich and not the poor. Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP
Without a boost in employment, social security and without a widespread economic stimulus plan, the effects of the pandemic are likely to last over time as the wealthy dig in to their tax havens.
Reformat globalization
The pandemic has also been a faithful account of how the virus travels as fast as capitals do in the context of globalization. And it is that a totally open world, hyperconnected digitally and commercially, with diffuse borders and weak governments subject to supranational structures, is fertile ground for the pandemic to spread in a matter of hours.
Politically, globalization is being questioned by a dilemma that the German sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has specified in his notorious work Liquid Modernity . Words more words less, Bauman maintains that while money has been emancipated from any relationship with space, the middle and lower layers are still tied to the ground. This implies that while the government and the population respond to local dynamics, capital is global, moves without restrictions and takes advantage of this condition to squeeze the workforce.
Neoliberal globalization has resulted in growing inequality that has been compromising its credibility. And in a certain sense, the Covid-19 is a disease of money: the large transnational companies with businesses in countless countries have created a massive network of commerce, transport and consumption that weakens the controls of the States and exposes the population not only to miserable wages. , but to aggressive movements in different directions.
The countries of the Global South are compromised in this crisis by decades of blackmail and extortion of global capital, which requires governments to make all kinds of tax reductions and labor guarantees to establish their businesses.
The pandemic must open the way to a globalization reform where capitals begin to operate in an area of less impunity.
Build another international order
Another aspect that the pandemic is revealing is that the current international order, dominated by western countries, is incapable of offering effective responses.
The crisis has reached such a point that the criminal Henry Kissinger recently recognized that the coronavirus can undermine the liberal international order where the United States, since the end of the Second World War, has had a dominant position.
Although Kissinger sweeps home and tries to save America's place, he is correct in claiming that the pandemic is causing liberal institutions in the West to fail in the eyes of citizens.
Interview of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with his ally Augusto Pinochet in 1976. Photo: Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs
With a geopolitics marked by globalization, it is virtually impossible for any country, individually, to face the pandemic without appealing to multilateral cooperation and alliances. However, Western countries are in a defensive and non-dialogical position, prohibiting exports of medical equipment, seizing that of other countries or placing obstacles to benefit in the midst of high demand.
This has caused the drift towards the disintegration of the current international structures to sharpen, while on the other hand the countries that have opted for a cooperative approach such as Venezuela, Cuba, China and several European and Asian countries are strengthened.
The terrain is served for an international turn or for a drift that further polarizes the challenging positions of the Western powers.
https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/po ... 6e18d61d71
Google Translator
Mission Truth
Apr 8 · 9 min read
In almost four months of development and evolution, the Covid-19 pandemic has represented an entire political earthquake in wide areas of the world.
It is not the first time that liberalism has failed
Certainly, the economic, financial and international system crisis that has been put at the center of the scene already came from before, however, the impact at the health level and the fragility of States to successfully manage the pandemic has compromised the paradigm neoliberal before our eyes in a unique way.
This historical episode marked by the collapse of political and economic structures might seem novel, but in reality it is not if we put memory to work. We have already attended other events close to the apocalypse, only now we have the “privilege” of observing our tragedy live and direct, 24 hours a day, thanks to the wonder of the Internet.
But the reasons and causes that have precipitated this scenario have not changed much either.
The First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression of 1929, Fascism and Nazism, and the wars in retaliation for the Russian Revolution, a combination of events that brought human suffering to unknown limits for forty consecutive years, had been cooking in the short wave of buoyant industrial capitalism that spanned from 1870 to 1914.
In a matter of a few years, the image that the liberal project had solved all the problems of humanity collapsed. His premise that state intervention was negative and his obsessive conception that the free market would effectively regulate world trade and political tensions, ended in the catastrophe of Nazism on the one hand, and in the reordering of the world's political and economic paradigm. , for another.
The fall of liberalism was total and opened the way to Keynesianism (a mix between capitalism and wealth distribution that would accommodate the defects of the system) in the late 30s of the last century.
A caricature of John M. Keynes in TIME magazine and another Keynesian cover in Newsweek. Image: Mises Center
The liberal project left the world table for more than 40 years having lost all its credibility. Meanwhile, Keynesianism maintained its bellows as an ideological instrument to contain the program of the Soviet revolution that was committed to a radical change in capitalist production structures.
The monsters return
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also a decade earlier, the world again embraced the ideas that failed in 1914 as if nothing had been learned from that process. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm assures in his extensive work on the 20th century that humanity had lost all organic connection with its past as a result of a historical change that we did not fully understand.
The fact is that the western elites, without an alternative project at the forefront, resumed their commitment to liberalism but in its most savage and globalizing version: neoliberalism.
Once again, all human affairs were delegated to the market economy within the framework of a cycle of privatizations, deregulation and concentration of the economic apparatus that has left us a social and economic inequality that borders on tragedy.
And to the same project, the same crises. The inclement overdose of neoliberalism in the blood tissue of the economy and culture for more than 30 years has resulted in remastered versions of Hitler and Mussolini, adapting to an ideological world where mediation of social networks dominates.
The faces of our time, Trump, Abascal, Bolsonaro and other unmentionable, sneak out the window, assume positions of power and leadership in countries of international weight and we seem not to find a reliable response to such unpleasant events.
Jair Bolsonaro with Donald Trump in Florida on March 7. Photo: Reuters
But there is and it is very humiliating: we repeat a failure that had already cost us millions of deaths among famines, pandemics and wars in the last century.
A highly contagious flu has revealed that a system designed to turn everything into merchandise and private profits cannot save humanity, cannot provide it with medical assistance, compensate its unemployment or its debts or reduce other pressures associated with the crisis and the uncertainty of this moment.
In this sense, the systemic crisis that Covid-19 has exploded forces us to accumulate the following lessons for the post-pandemic world. Because there may be no other opportunity to correct the failures of a ruthless, self-centered, and asocial Western elite.
The scam market
Blind confidence in the market made it impossible for countries to prepare for the pandemic, precisely because it is unable to foresee these circumstances of such characteristics by its own mechanism.
On this the analyst Richard Wolff warns the following and focuses his consideration on the main focus of the pandemic worldwide:
“The important thing for public health is the preparation of each society: stored tests, masks, ventilators, hospital beds, trained personnel, etc., to handle dangerous viruses. In the United States, such objects are produced by private capitalist companies whose goal is profit. It was not profitable to produce and store such products, that was not and is not yet being done. ”
Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn takes this argument much further by comparing the current crisis with that of 1914 :
“'Lions led by donkeys' was the phrase used to condemn the waste of lives by incompetent World War I generals and their political masters. The same words could be used again today: once the shortage was for machine guns and artillery shells, whereas now they are for ventilators, surgical masks, and test kits. The common feature is that in both cases the shortage will kill or disable a proportion of those who do not receive essential equipment. ”
For his part, Robert Reich indicates that "there are no institutions analogous to the Federal Reserve with the responsibility of supervising and managing public health, capable of taking out a giant checkbook at any time to avoid human, rather than financial, devastation," evidencing the priorities of the main western power and how they have unleashed a crisis that can reach 200 thousand deaths.
It is urgent to reduce the power of the market on health, and furthermore, to take away space in the conduct of the vital affairs of humanity.
Bet on public health
Precisely countries that have not treated health as a lucrative business have been better prepared to face the pandemic.
Countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, among others, which have opted for a universal public health model, have found themselves in better conditions to fight against Covid-19 and are currently positioning themselves internationally as fronts of health support for European countries with uncontrolled contagion and death curves.
National Chemical Physical Control Laboratories of the Center for State Control of Medicines in Havana. Photo: Marcelino Vázquez Hernández / ACN
Contrary to the liberal preaching that enshrines the linking of the market in all spheres of life, in the framework of Covid-19 the nationalization and nationalization of health is the only approach that can protect humanity. It has been shown that countries with robust public health systems can better combat this disease.
Paradoxically, the model of health privatization is showing its inefficiency and lack of solidarity.
Cuts kill
Although the overcoming of the pandemic and the return to a certain normality still seem far away, the capitalists and their political elites are preparing to transfer the cost of the Covid-19 economic crisis to the poor layers of the population.
They appeal to this cruel and ruthless approach under the myth that taxes and other public investments hamper economic development and discourage growth. But it is precisely this vision that has brought us here, since the systematic reduction of taxes and cuts to public services has left countries without defenses against the pandemic.
The looming post-pandemic world will surely be one marked by economic depression, recession in strategic sectors, and a chronic unemployment cycle. The intensity and depth of this panorama has yet to be defined, and the prolongation of this first stage will depend on it.
Faced with this scenario, the wealthy western layers are preparing to capture economic benefits taking advantage of the context of a weakened and desperate society. It is already happening in the United States with a mega “anti-crisis” plan that will benefit Wall Street, in Colombia with tax exemptions for businessmen, and in Brazil and in many other countries where the wealthy receive financial aid lines.
For this reason, this crisis must rethink the place of the State, not as a petty cash fund of the rich but as an instrument to prevent the poor from paying the economic effects of the pandemic.
The United States has made it a policy to save the super-rich and not the poor. Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP
Without a boost in employment, social security and without a widespread economic stimulus plan, the effects of the pandemic are likely to last over time as the wealthy dig in to their tax havens.
Reformat globalization
The pandemic has also been a faithful account of how the virus travels as fast as capitals do in the context of globalization. And it is that a totally open world, hyperconnected digitally and commercially, with diffuse borders and weak governments subject to supranational structures, is fertile ground for the pandemic to spread in a matter of hours.
Politically, globalization is being questioned by a dilemma that the German sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has specified in his notorious work Liquid Modernity . Words more words less, Bauman maintains that while money has been emancipated from any relationship with space, the middle and lower layers are still tied to the ground. This implies that while the government and the population respond to local dynamics, capital is global, moves without restrictions and takes advantage of this condition to squeeze the workforce.
Neoliberal globalization has resulted in growing inequality that has been compromising its credibility. And in a certain sense, the Covid-19 is a disease of money: the large transnational companies with businesses in countless countries have created a massive network of commerce, transport and consumption that weakens the controls of the States and exposes the population not only to miserable wages. , but to aggressive movements in different directions.
The countries of the Global South are compromised in this crisis by decades of blackmail and extortion of global capital, which requires governments to make all kinds of tax reductions and labor guarantees to establish their businesses.
The pandemic must open the way to a globalization reform where capitals begin to operate in an area of less impunity.
Build another international order
Another aspect that the pandemic is revealing is that the current international order, dominated by western countries, is incapable of offering effective responses.
The crisis has reached such a point that the criminal Henry Kissinger recently recognized that the coronavirus can undermine the liberal international order where the United States, since the end of the Second World War, has had a dominant position.
Although Kissinger sweeps home and tries to save America's place, he is correct in claiming that the pandemic is causing liberal institutions in the West to fail in the eyes of citizens.
Interview of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with his ally Augusto Pinochet in 1976. Photo: Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs
With a geopolitics marked by globalization, it is virtually impossible for any country, individually, to face the pandemic without appealing to multilateral cooperation and alliances. However, Western countries are in a defensive and non-dialogical position, prohibiting exports of medical equipment, seizing that of other countries or placing obstacles to benefit in the midst of high demand.
This has caused the drift towards the disintegration of the current international structures to sharpen, while on the other hand the countries that have opted for a cooperative approach such as Venezuela, Cuba, China and several European and Asian countries are strengthened.
The terrain is served for an international turn or for a drift that further polarizes the challenging positions of the Western powers.
https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/po ... 6e18d61d71
Google Translator