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A comrade who understands Chinese has said that this is what the link says:
”It’s about the hospitals that were built in double-quick time to cope with coronavirus victims: apparently many of the migrant workers employed to build them haven’t been paid.”
We hadn’t thought of that but, this being capitalism, perhaps we should have taken into account who the workers who actually built that hospital were and their terms and conditions.
I must admit that I was wrong to be sceptical about factories switching to producing ventilators. It’s not turned out to be just another of Boris’s publicity stunts.
Building a factory in ten days shows what can be done in an emergency and how quickly socialist society will be able to clear up the mess inherited from capitalism. And it’s good to have examples from other than the military, though in the early days of socialism the disarmed forces could have a useful role in quickly building airfields and using their drones to drop medical supplies instead of bombs.
It seems that Trump is veering away from the policy of putting the health of the people even if only temporarily ahead of the health of the capitalist economy towards frankly putting the health of the economy first. From today’s Times:
“President Trump has declared the response to coronavirus must not be worse than the pandemic itself as he hinted he would lift social distancing rules in an attempt to salvage the economy.
More than a week after he banned almost all travel from Europe and with many states imposing severe restrictions on their residents, Mr Trump signalled a sudden change of tack in a tweet late on Sunday night.
Shortly before midnight, writing in block capital letters, he said: “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. At the end of the 15-day period, we will make a decision as to which way we want to go!”
(…)
The White House’s medical advisers have suggested that the restrictions will have to be extended for much longer, but the president appears amenable to a rival camp who believe that the economy should be prioritised and some people allowed to go back to work.”We will see if he dares. After all, people have votes and this is an election year.
Headline in business section of yesterday’s Times;
Get used to more state intervention, it looks like it’s here to stay.
So it looks as if the leftists are going to get their way and “neo-liberalism” is being abandoned. They will soon find that it’s still capitalism and maybe realise that the problem was not the policy called “neo-liberalism” but the capitalist system as such. And that what had always been required was a change of system not a change of policy.
One thing is clear: any society where there is “commodity production” ie the production of goods and services to be sold on a market cannot be socialist or communist (the same thing). This is because buying and selling is an exchange of ownership between separate owners whereas socialism is based on the common ownership of productive resources and of what is produced.
Where there is common ownership the question is not to sell what has been produced but to distribute it, so in socialism goods and services are distributed or made available to people directly to use. Goods and services are produced and distributed directly for use, not for sale; there are no markets and no money.
So whatever it was the old USSR wasn’t socialist. So what was it? In theory it could have been some new non-capitalist exploitative society and this view has been argued for as “bureaucratic collectivism”, “oriental despotism”, “state feudalism”, etc. These theories at least recognise that it wasn’t socialism and had nothing to do with socialism. But they are still not adequate.
What justifies saying it was a form of capitalism rather than a new kind of class society was the existence of the wages system there, with the producers excluded from ownership and control of productive resources and so forced to sell their working skills for a wage to an employer, just as in classical capitalism. In the USSR the main employer was the state; hence the description “state capitalism”. But this is just a variety of capitalism, the system of capital accumulation out of surplus value produced by wage-labour.
There are also those who argue that the USSR was a society in transition from capitalism to socialism where the government was pursuing a policy of gradually abolishing commodity production and wage-labour. This was factually incorrect but also theoretically impossible, as argued in the section of this book on “The impossibility of gradualism”, basically that if you have a section of the economy producing commodities this affects the whole system.
Diehard supporters of capitalism are beginning to fight back against the government’s apparent decision to put people or at least the health service before the health of the capitalist economy.
Sparked off by an article in Saturday’s Times by Matthew Paris entitled “Crashing the economy will also cost lives”, a debate is raging on “crashing the economy versus sacrificing lives” with some actually arguing that minimising deaths today should not be the objective.
It is true that crashing the capitalist economy, ie provoking a slump, will also cost lives, as always does happen in a slump through increased ill health and suicides of those who lose their jobs and so their previous level of income.
So that’s all capitalism has to offer: less deaths today and more tomorrow or more deaths today and less deaths tomorrow. We can let the sick supporters of this sick system argue which of these is the lesser evil.
The very fact that this is the choice under capitalism is itself an indictment of the profit-driven system. And another good reason why it has to go.
In socialism if a pandemic breaks out ( as it might) this wouldn’t be the choice as minimising deaths today could be the objective without endangering future production as this would be directly for use and not for sale and profit as now under capitalism. Some adjustments would have to be made but nobody would need to be denied access to what they needed to live and enjoy life as the direct link between taking part in production and what you get will have been broken.
Here is Boris reported as saying (19 March) that, unlike in the last crisis in 2008, this time the government is putting people first :
“Unlike during the financial crisis, Britain will put its people first in the fight against the coronavirus and more measures will be announced by the government on Friday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said..”This time it is going to be different,” Johnson said at a news conference. “(Remember) what happened in 2008, everybody said we bailed out the banks and we didn’t look after the people who really suffered – this time we are going to make sure that we look after the people who really suffer from the economic consequences.”
Of course he is a politician and so we don’t need to take anything he says at face value. Even so the government does seem to be putting people first, even if compelled to by the particular circumstances of this crisis as a public health one.
So I wonder if we shouldn’t change what we are saying from “they are putting the health of the economy before the health of the people” to “circumstances are compelling them to put the health of people first but this is being made difficult by capitalism as this is against its nature and can only be temporary.”
They do seem to be trying to put people’s health first in the sense of spending “what it takes” to enable the health services to cope and so minimise the number of deaths. And the measures they have taken have adversely affected the profits of most businesses, not to mention that the bill will have to be paid later out of future profits. You could argue that what they are doing is in the longer term interests of business but I don’t think we could sustain the argument that this is their main motivation.
It is not unprecedented for capitalism to give priority to something other than profit-making. They don’t in major wars when their priority is to win and they spend “what it takes” to achieve this. But the war over, whether won or lost, it’s a return to prioritising profit as usual. Which is what will happen after this public health crisis is over.
Also sanctions in place against countries like Iran, Venezuela and Syria have not only weakened the general health of the people there but also the health service and access to medicines, drugs and medical equipment. It is therefore not surprising that Iran is being particularly hit by the virus.
It looks as if the Governor of California has some bad advisers too. According to this, they have calculated that 56% of the state’s population of some 40 million could get the virus. That’s 22.5 million. Chose your own death rate and “do the math” as he says: at 1% it’s 225,000, which is indeed “a particularly large number.”
When the UK Government’s advisers put out a similar calculation this backfired and they dropped it on the pretext of new medical advice. Now they are talking about keeping deaths down to 20,000 or so.
Of course it could be that the Governor is deliberately exaggerating to try to impress on people the need to stay at home (which is good advice). And the report does say that the figure of 22.5 million probably does not take into account any effect from mitigation measures. But at least he isn’t talking about aiming at herd immunity.
Putting this out doesn’t seem politically astute as he too might have to backtrack. On the other hand, he is a politician and could be calculating that when the figure of deaths doesn’t reach anyway near that figure he can claim the credit for this as a result of the bold mitigation measures he took.
Here from today’s Times, for what they’re worth, are the guesses, more or less informed, of economists employed investment banks and advisers (and so not entirely independent and objective):
“The coronavirus outbreak could knock Britain’s GDP by 15 per cent in the second quarter of the year and plunge the global economy into its worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, economists have warned.
Shutting down parts of the economy to fight the pandemic will make businesses go bust and bring widespread job losses, analysts at Jefferies, the investment bank, said. At its worst, GDP in Britain and the eurozone could contract by 15 per cent before a recovery begins in the second half of the year. David Owen and Marchel Alexandrovic, European economists at Jefferies, said: “Such quarterly declines in GDP are unprecedented, certainly in living. memory, and will lead to further corporate failures and economic hardship.”
The impact of Covid-19 on the world economy was more pronounced “than anything the world has seen since the 1930s”, Erik Britton, economist at Fathom Consulting, said. Global GDP fell by about 15 per cent between 1929 and 1932 during the Great Depression.
Mr Britton added: “The recession should be short-lived, with a strong recovery in prospect towards the end of 2020 and into 2021. But that recovery is far from certain and a more protracted depression cannot be ruled out.””If there is another prolonged depression, it will not have been caused by the internal workings of the capitalist economy but by a factor outside the capitalist economy itself, i.e. the coronavirus epidemic and the measures governments took to deal with it. A reminder that crises can also be caused by such outside factors.
Imposs1904 has drawn attention to this amusing headline in an Australian newspaper:
“Conventional capitalism is dying: Macquarie warns
Macquarie analysts say the world could be tilting back toward an economic system that’s more like communism”
Mind you, as Marcos has pointed out, this does seem to be the end of so-called “neo-liberalism”.
Anti-climate-change activists should be careful about pointing to the fall in greenhouse gas emissions because of the decline in economic activity brought about by measures to defeat the coronavirus as confirmation of their case.
It’s, rather, a reason why, as long as people support capitalism, the drastic measures that they call for to stave off too rapid global warming will not be taken.
The ILO is warning that up to 25 million workers worldwide could lose their jobs as a result of these measures. No government nor the population of any country is going to accept this or that these measures should be made permanent. But under capitalism that would be the only way to stop economic growth fuelling global warming. It’s not going to happen politically as long as people see no other way of organising production and distribution than capitalism and its production for profit.
This reinforces our view that the only framework within which the problem can be rationally tackled is the common ownership and democratic control of means of living and the production directly for us it will make possible.
If Biden, Bernie and Trump were here in England they wouldn’t be allowed out for 12 weeks. Mind you Bernie is taking a big risk as if he catches it, with his heart condition we may as well prepare his obituary. We probably should anyway. Already got an idea for the theme: the reformist who never got a chance to try to reform capitalism but if he had he would have failed anyway.
Continuing on this morbid theme, I think there was a US president in the 19th century who caught pneumonia the day of his inauguration and died. Can’t remember his name and when.
Yes, we mentioned this in the Socialist Standard a couple of years ago, perhaps you saw it:
Actually it is so-called “helicopter money” defined by Oliver Kamm in his column in the Times last week entitled “To rescue the economy, summon the helicopter and do a money drop” (13 March) as:
”The Bank of England could in effect create money and then distribute it direct to consumers. It’s known as helicopter money, on the model of a helicopter drop of banknotes to anyone underneath who’s lucky enough to pick them up.”
The idea is to increase aggregate demand and get the faltering economy expanding again. It’s been tried in Japan and Taiwan with the same trivial amount per person. But didn’t work because the capitalist economy isn’t driven by consumer (or for that matter government) demand. It’s driven by profitable capital investment. Without that, you can put as much water in front the capitalist horse as you like, but it won’t drink.
It’s not really got anything to do with helping people survive the loss of income many are suffering through the Coronavirus virus and the effect on the economy of the measures the US government has taken to combat it. But it’s useful to give this impression especially in a presidential election year.
