Will COVID-19 Change the World?

CAPITALISM'S CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

How is it possible that countries with the largest economies in the world can’t even organise enough protection to safeguard their nurses and doctors in the frontline? How have food manufacturers and retailers build food supply chains that are so fragile and inadequate that the slightest hint of panic-buying leaves supermarket shelves empty or diminished for weeks or months? How have we allowed ourselves to become so detached from reality and addicted to all sorts of superficial distractions such as Netflix?

Without transformative change humanity is at risk. Let's rebuild the new society that we need. Let us construct a fairer and less destructive world. We can build better and stronger. After coronavirus, there should be no return to ‘normal’. When we say no going back to business-as-usual this time, we must really mean it. Whatever happens, our future world must be profoundly different. Communities are helping each other out in this pandemic. At every level, neighbourhood and city, let's encourage and support this powerful spirit and create funding for communities to rebuild together. A plethora of hard-working community project groups have been created, unlocking stimulus and energy. Greedy capitalists and sociopathic politicians have all the power in the modern world. We can do more to publicise the capitalist and market-driven roots of these issues.Instead we can make life the central raison d’être. Socialists speak of the reinvention of society. Socialists want more equitable future to arrive and a more humane world for ourselves and for others.

It would be simplistic to assume that an outbreak of a pandemic in itself could automatically could propel and produce change but there is no denying that the current crisis has laid bare the numerous fault-lines within the capitalist system. The COVID crisis has magnified a reality of capitalism’s failures. For example, one of many examples of the failure of the profit driven system is health care.  COVID-19 exposes the fact that essential workers who provide food, healthcare, and deliveries to our homes are mistreated and underappreciated. Workers are underpaid and are not being provided with protective equipment or allowed sick leave. The COVID-19 rescue laws have given trillions in funding to investors and Big Business.

We must help mobilise people. When people are in the movement, a union, or an organisation, they are ready to be part of a mass action in achieving change. It’s a stupidity and arrogance that allows us to believe that we can continue to plunder our environment and devour non-renewable resources.

Workers are thrown to the wolves by politicians and an economic system. For those people who live in countries where there is no social security system whatever, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens consequences infinitely worse and condemns a whole families to deprivation, because wages are so low, that daily life is a relentless struggle to survive as it is without the added complications of COVID-19.