ALB
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“ i am still weighing up as the most likely such as the self-interest of the capitalist class to protect itself from a public health risk.”
I don’t think this works either though this will be a consequence of what they are doing. I know I keep harping on about this but I think that our late comrade Pieter Lawrence got it right in his novel about how capitalist governments would react to some asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth. This would be an existential threat not just to capitalist society but to human society. As the class that happened to be in charge of society’s central administrative organ (in class society taking the form of the state) at the time their political representatives were in charge of dealing with it. In his novel they take measures pragmatically to deal with the threat. The ruling class and their political representatives are in the same position today.
Of course the threat from the current pandemic is not of the same magnitude as an asteroid collision but it is the same sort of thing. Those in charge of society’s central administrative organ are behaving pragmatically. Their main concern is to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. Of course they are operating within the context of a society with a capitalist economy and a ruling class and so protecting human society means protecting society in that form. Nevertheless they are still compelled to protect human society as such. If they refused to, they would be faced with social breakdown and revolts which could endanger their personal position as members of a ruling class. Of course social breakdown is something they want to avoid but avoiding it isn’t an unreasonable aim.
After all, socialist society could face a pandemic (and probably will at some point, also in fact from an object from Space) and would want to avoid this too. Clearly it would be in a better position to deal with one but one of the measures that would have to be taken would probably be social distancing and what that involves.
The pandemic of an infectious disease for which there is as yet no cure or antidote is real. The “threat” is that millions throughout the world will die from it.
Governments throughout the world are trying to minimise this, essentially by limiting physical contact between people so that they don’t infect each other. This has an economic effect in that, with people not going to work, production falls. This would happen anyway even if governments did nothing but in a completely uncontrolled and chaotic way; which is why doing nothing was not an option for governments.
To get people to isolate themselves governments have three ways: persuasion, legal enforcement , and paying people to.
Persuasion is the only one that will work in the end. Most people probably don’t need persuading as they understand the need to reduce social contact and will comply voluntarily. But not all. To persuade the others it does appear (as contributors have been pointing out here) that the government could be exaggerating how severe the pandemic could be and how severe the illness will be for most people who get it, so as to frighten them into complying. No doubt they calculate that the end justifies the means and maybe it does.
As the pandemic is happening under capitalism, where people have to have money to survive and for most people this involves going to work for an employer, if they are prevented from this they still need money. So compensating people for their lack of earnings has to be part of the policy of reducing social contact — in effect paying people to stay away from work and the social contact that involves. Hence, in Britain, paying 80% of the employer’s wage bill if their workers can’t work because of government policy. Sick pay has also been increased. Businesses that are losing income because of government policy need to be compensated too.
All this is costing large amounts of money, leading to a huge increase in government borrowing to a level only found in wartime. This is in fact the nearest parallel as, like in war, the government is spending “what it takes” to achieve the aim, in this case minimising the effect of a pandemic. The government is hoping that this will only be temporary (months rather than years) and that the normal business of capital accumulation will soon resume. It might well but governments will have acquired enormous debts which will weigh on any other spending plans they might have had.
Just heard that “reptile” Gove, who thanks to both Boris and the Health Secretary Hancock (another self-publicist) catching the virus has been able to step into the limelight, interpret the volunteers who have come forward to help the NHS (now 700,000) as being an expression of patriotic “national solidarity” rather than of simple human solidarity. But that’s par for the course from a rabid nationalist like him as well as being what the ruling class would like to turn it into.
”I know David Icke might be a loon”
You can say that again.
In fact can’t we delete that video of his from this site. It’s a disgrace.
This can’t be. It’s against human nature !
I see that Prince Charles has caught it and he’s over 70. Let’s hope he survives if only to show that if you are over 70 and get it you’re not done for.
Another example of the elite getting it and why they might take more seriously establishing procedures and facilities to deal with the next pandemic. Though, to tell the truth, shorter term profit considerations are more likely to prevail as they generally do.
Talking of members of the elite, it’s them who seem to have brought the virus to Brazil where, unlike their wealth, it will trickle down to the rest of the population.
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.
