The Class Reality of COVID-19

2008 Great Recession should have been a wake-up call but it wasn't. Casino capitalism resurfaced very quickly.

It is suggested that there will be an increased concentration of capital due to the COVID-19 pandemic as those who have weathered the storm, pick up the wrecked businesses in take-overs and mergers at rock-bottom prices and capture the vacant markets that bankrupt companies have provided the “Big Boys” room to expand at low cost. 

This news report reinforces what I posted earlier that the pandemic offers opportunities for some capitalists to profit from:

“…assets in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia were cheap following the recent heavy falls in global stock markets….”

But unlike 2008, we now know who the essential key workers are that keeps society running. It ain’t those in the stock-exchange but those stocking the shelves in the supermarket. We have discovered the frailty of the capitalist supply chain and the weaknesses of globalisation. 

We have also re-discovered our sense of community and cooperation. Social solidarity and mutual aid has sprung up everywhere. Despite social distancing, we have grown so much closer, understanding the bonds we share with one another.

These must be the lessons workers should all be learning and it is what we must be explaining in our politics. 

Of course, it is okay for the Queen safely ensconced behind the thick walls of Windsor Castle, to bring back the Blitz Spirit and that is the desperate message of the politicians are presenting to us - even the Prince and Prime Minister were equally victims of the pandemic. 

The virus does not discriminate,” suggested Michael Gove after both Boris Johnson and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, were struck down by Covid-19. But capitalism does

But they suffered only the health aspects not the economic meltdown of livelihoods being taken away and the empty fridges and larders, even some of the “well-to-do” have now suffered.

We can see this in the way that the low paid both disproportionately have to continue to work and are more likely to be laid off. It is the rich having access to coronavirus tests denied to even most NHS workers.

That is the stark inequality fact they cannot disguise any longer but it will be the focus of their future class camouflage, trying to hide it from us. They may well succeed if it is not challenged. 

In the developing world “social distancing” means something very different than it does to Europeans or Americans. It is less about the physical space between people than the social space between the rich and poor that means only the privileged can maintain any kind of social isolation.

 In the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, somewhere between 180,000 and 750,000 people live in an estimated 20,000 shacks. Through it runs South Africa’s most polluted river, the Jukskei, whose water has tested positive for cholera and has run black from sewage. Makoko is often called Lagos’s “floating slum” because a third of the shacks are built on stilts over a fetid lagoon. No one is sure how many people live there, but it could be up to 300,000. Dharavi, in Mumbai, is the word’s largest slum. Like Makoko and Alexandra, it nestles next to fabulously rich areas, but the million people estimated to live there are crowded into less than a square mile of land that was once a garbage dump.

 What can social distancing mean In such neighbourhoods? 

Extended families often live in one- or two-room shacks. The houses may be scrubbed and well kept but many don’t have lavatories, electricity or running water. Communal latrines and water points are often shared by thousands. Diseases from diarrhoea to typhoid stalked such neighbourhoods well before coronavirus. The idea of protecting oneself from coronavirus must seem as miraculous as clean water.

Last week, tens of thousands of Indian workers, suddenly deprived of the possibility of pay, and with most public transport having been shut down, decided to walk back to their home villages, often hundreds of miles away, in the greatest mass exodus since partition. Four out of five Indians work in the informal sector. Almost 140 million, more than a quarter of India’s working population, are migrants from elsewhere in the country. Yet their needs had barely figured in the thinking of policymakers, who seemed shocked by the actions of the workers. India’s great exodus shows that “migration” is not, as we imagine in the west, merely external migration, but internal migration, too. Internal migrants, whether in India, Nigeria or South Africa, are often treated as poorly as external ones and often for the same reason – they are not seen as “one of us” and so denied basic rights and dignities. In one  incident, hundreds of migrants in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, were hosed down by officials with chemicals usually used to sanitise buses. They might as well have been vermin, not just metaphorically but physically, too.

Trump reportedly offers billions of dollars to a German company to create a vaccine to be used exclusively for Americans, when Germany blocks the export of medical equipment to Italy, when Britain, unlike Portugal, refuses to extend to asylum seekers the right to access benefits and healthcare during the coronavirus crisis, each does so in the name of protecting a particular community or nation. It’s a nationalism and class that excludes many groups, from Muslims to the poor.

 In Dharavi and Alexandra and Makoko, and many similar places, it will not simply be coronavirus but also the willingness of the rich, both in poor countries and in wealthier nations, to ignore gross inequalities that will kill. Capitalist society, both nationally and globally, are structured in ways that ensure that some face far more risk than others

All this should make us think harder about what we mean by “community”. In Britain, the pandemic has led to a flowering of social-mindedness and community solidarity. We have an opportunity, and it has been long time in coming, to directly relate the benefits of socialism to the realities that working people are experiencing right now.

 People are feeling the pain of capitalism but are also discovering what unites us as human beings, the relationships of family, friends, neighbours and co-workers. Some may not like the terminology and reject its use - but our class identity has been getting expressed more and more.

Socialists are looking for the silver lining in this crisis.

adapted from here
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/whether-in-the-uk-or-the-developing-world-were-not-all-in-coronavirus-together