The new recession is arriving?
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Don’t be put off by the Guardian headline. The article indicates the economics of the cause. For instance:
“Starting in the 1990s, as part of its economic transformation, China ramped up its food production systems to industrial scale. One side effect of this, as anthropologists Lyle Fearnley and Christos Lynteris have documented, was that smallholding farmers were undercut and pushed out of the livestock industry. Searching for a new way to earn a living, some of them turned to farming “wild” species that had previously been eaten for subsistence only. Wild food was formalised as a sector, and was increasingly branded as a luxury product. But the smallholders weren’t only pushed out economically. As industrial farming concerns took up more and more land, these small-scale farmers were pushed out geographically too – closer to uncultivable zones. Closer to the edge of the forest, that is, where bats and the viruses that infect them lurk. The density and frequency of contacts at that first interface increased, and hence, so did the risk of a spillover.”
I am not arguing that the pandemic has nothing to do with capitalism and the factory farming method of production it has adopted as cheaper and more profitable. I am sure a good case for this can be made out.
My point is that this is something outside the system’s internal workings which result in the boom/slump cycle — the pursuit of profits leading to overproduction in a key sector and the consequent cutback in its production having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy resulting in a generalised slump in production (and slump creating the conditions for an eventual resumption of production). Such slumps are caused by the internal workings of capitalism and so are “endogenous”.
A pandemic sparked off by factory farming (or whatever) is not part of the operation of the capitalist economy that leads to regularly occurring falls in production. A slump caused by this has a cause outside this and so will have been caused “exogenously”.
Saying this is not to let capitalism off the hook for causing this external factor but merely to classify a slump it causes as different from “normal” slumps resulting from the way the capitalist economic system works.
Fair enough – this does not conform to the classic Marxian account of crises and recessions. But if it is found that capital accumulation is an important factor in the creation of the Coranavirus, and it is this which has caused the domino effect of a recession, then I don’t think it is accurate to say that this process is exogenous to capitalism.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pipeline-protest-laws-coronavirus_n_5e7e7570c5b6256a7a2aab41?utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=85444028&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–2tdG-SSz6X2kZh8GMKtdxvn3ZAOY2W7mKBkHvK7LlDBc420kFR6R5lI7Ta3dn10_eSrBntTzqyM6koM_K2NHBqcqzVw&_hsmi=85444028. Soon peoples are going to see who the real enemy is, and understand that the poor Mexican and Central American is not the real enemy. The state is going to show its character as an organ of oppression, repression and domination instead of the romantic idea of the institution of the peoples
Hungry peoples in the streets of Bogota Colombia protesting against the government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hgAls2WEnU&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hgAls2WEnU&feature=youtu.be. Protests in Bogota Colombia
https://ktla.com/news/coronavirus/tenants-across-the-u-s-vow-to-go-on-rent-strike-to-get-payments-waived-rather-than-delayed-amid-covid-19-crisis/. Possible rent strike in the whole USA
Sanders: Next relief bill must pay everyone $2,000 per month
Bernie Sanders requests $2,000 per month for USA workers
Indeed because he is still in the Senate (unlike Biden), Sanders is acting “presidential” with definite proposals.
If the time-line had been different, I wonder if those states that voted in the primaries for the very obvious inept Biden would do so again.
The main plank of Sanders’s platform, Medicare For All, is resonating even stronger now.
Predictable I guess. The limits of Sander’s vision is a humanised form of capitalism. Now he is discovering that, to keep capitalism ticking over in any form, certain unpalatable measures have to be taken that favour the interests of the capitalists as against those of the workers
Sanders Voted for the Latest Corporate Bailout: What This Reveals for Socialists
Whoever does not see that Bernie Sanders is just a capitalist reformer and a social democrat does not understand how capitalism operates. The policy of the lesser evil has never worked
The other point is that capitalism can not be reformed, and every reform prepares the condition for the next crisis. Capitalism must be replaced for a society of social production administered by the world working class, there is not a leader able to resolve our problem
Everything that is taking place right now is just a product of several capitalist reforms, and they will try to reverse the course of the situation, but they would be falling back into another crisis.
What Robb203 wrote above is correct, capitalism can not be humanized as we said in this forum to some supporters of Donald Trump, that he would be forced to follow the logic of capitalism, and we were correct because that is what he is doing, and he trying to beat a dead horse, the XXI century is the century of Chinese capitalism
An upbeat optimistic report on the economy
Things ain’t that bad…capitalism can recover
As we all suspected, the recession was arriving before the coronavirus came on the scene.
“The British economy went into reverse in February as GDP growth declined by 0.1%, even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that brought the country to a halt.”
The general secretary of trade union body the TUC, Frances O’Grady, said: “Even before the coronavirus crisis hit, our economy needed a change of direction.”
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