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Sunday, April 19, 2020

Can Covid-19 Change Society?

COVID-19 is revealing and exacerbating pre-existing social and racial inequalities, and laying bare the inadequacies of capitalism’s welfare states safety nets.

It was not profitable for capitalists within the medical-industrial complexes of modern capitalism to produce or stockpile the medical supplies needed to properly manage a viral pandemic.

We are living through a failure of capitalism. It failed to prepare adequately for the coronavirus pandemic (delayed and insufficient production, stockpiling, and distribution of vital medical supplies and services). We live on a crisis-prone planet where we are struggling to survive.

The legitimacy of capitalism is in doubt. We cannot rely on capitalism and its profit motive to serve our most basic social needs. Capitalists prioritise profits as their bottom line.

Governments defer to the pursuit of profit in markets as if that guaranteed meeting basic social needs. It does not; it never did. Many social needs fail to be met when and because they get subordinated to the profit goals of capitalists. It was not profitable for capitalists within the medical-industrial complexes of capitalism to produce or stockpile the medical supplies needed to properly manage a viral pandemic. Because they depend heavily on the support and donations of capitalists, most governments are enthusiastically complicit with their leading capitalists.

The cracks in the capitalism system should present socialists opportunities to pose a threat to the status quo and demand no return to normal. Why should we try to resuscitate the capitalist system that constantly produces poverty. Only two or three paycheques separates us from becoming paupers. Capitalism is built upon inequities, contradictions and crises. Billions live under the most depressing and violent of systems, where the line between wage-slavery, and survival blurs. 

Capitalism presents “more capitalism” as a solution. The ruling classes are simply unable to accommodate any change or offer political solutions that only deepen our misery. Under capitalism, and in the current pandemic most of us deprived of property, deprived of liberty and deprived of a livelihood, we are at the mercy of the very system responsible for our pain. Our wages are little reward for the denial of our humanity.


The pandemic has spread in more than 210 countries and disrupted social and economic life across the globe. It has changed the way we live and our working lives. Lockdown has been imposed on more than 3.5 billion people around the world.The human cost of Coronavirus pandemic immeasurable but it offers us an opportunity to completely destroy capitalism as a system. Let this pandemic be a catalyst for human emancipation from all forms of illness promoted by capitalism as a social, economic and political system. We should talk about solutions beyond wage labour, beyond more of the same.

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