March 19, 2020

Coronavirus is an illness spread by our failing political systems

topic:	Health and Sanitation
located:	United Kingdom, USA, Germany, China, Brazil
editor:	Gurmeet Singh

Somewhere in the world, right now, there is news happening, but you don’t know about it, and neither do I. A government is hiding something. A murder has been committed. Algorithms are sneaking around.

But all news pales in comparison to the coronavirus. infection rates, death tolls, testing failures, the lack of competence and seriousness of governments, the good and bad practices of populations; we’re seeing it all in real-time. Of course other news gets buried.

Public discourse about the virus has focused on two things:

• How our current systems of government and business have been 'exposed' as fragile, self-serving and doggedly neo-liberal.
• With the shrinking of economies and the expansion of government powers, what will our future look like?

The first concern seems to be true: ‘neoliberalism’, a contested term, I understand to be simply government-for-business: the state protects business interests, and in some form ‘run’ by business interests (whether in the form of major influence from lobbies, or donors etc.), while placing worker and citizen interests lower. The virus has shown that many governments, such as the U.K.’s and the U.S.’ are willing to send people to work, though it might endanger them, and expose vulnerable people to the virus. What’s more, the assault on the health services of these countries has severely limited their capacities to respond to the crisis.

Secondly, the open-question of the future. Will the virus cause an irrevocable collapse in our capitalist system, so that we will all live in fear until a Sun-King arises and unites us all? Or will there be a slow but definite return-to-normal, once the infection rates have stabilised somewhat?

Personally, I can see both eventualities. The strain on global capitalism is too much, the entire system collapses, and there will be a free-for-all once this is over. Or, alternatively, there will be a major but temporary recession, after which jobs will grow, particularly those with short-term-contracts, as employers will find a way to exploit the hordes of unemployed people.

There are far too many possibilities at the moment, which may in itself be one definition of ‘crisis’.

I will try to limit my analysis to a few simple points:

• The crisis has shown what it means to live in a globalised world. We already understood that food and goods come from ‘elsewhere’, but now we see exactly what it means to be people in this world. We are all connected, and the concepts of ‘foreigners’, ‘outsiders’ and borders simply make very little sense. You may argue that the virus shows our need for strict borders - but I ask, how are they workable in an age when a few people contract a virus on one side of the world and in turn the virus spreads all over the world? We have to reimagine border regimes to fit our globalised world.
• Refugees, the impoverished, migrants and developing countries' residents are often othered as vectors of disease. Yet the Coronavirus has been spread, mainly, by the middle and business-classes. Ski resorts have acted as hot spots of the virus in Europe, business people brought it over to the Global North. This should change our perception of the kinds of illnesses we will face in the future.
• Employee protections. The gig-economy and freelancers are going to suffer the most from the changes in the economy. With no sick-pay and no guaranteed income people will lose their livelihoods as projects and commissions evaporate. Right now is the moment for people to unite to push for a universal basic income.
• Countries in the Global North will most likely be able to weather this storm. Countries in South America, Asia and Africa will be hit most hard in the long-term, as their health service capacities will be overstretched.

Maybe when all this is over, we will see the need for greater community building, the importance of eating and shopping locally, and be able to imagine new forms of solidarity. And in the meantime, stay safe, stay indoors as much as possible.

Image:  PIRO4D