Coronavirus or Communism

The coronavirus has officially been declared a global pandemic and I think for many Americans the real possibility of it affecting their lives is just now happening. The NBA suspended their season following a player being tested positive for the virus and several other sports leagues quickly followed suit. This is following much more serious outbreaks in the rest of the world, most serious in China, Iran, and now Italy which as the country on full lockdown. While it is still yet to be seen how devastating this virus is and whether the crisis will end anytime soon, I do think we must consider that this event will have global repercussions to the political economy. Most major changes in the global status quo follow some major event, usually a war. After the American Revolution we saw a succession of successful bourgeois revolutions which threw off most of the shackles of feudalism. Probably the most important however is that his would eventually spark the Haitian Revolution which would be the first successful slave revolt. This one is particularly relevant as Yellow Fever ultimately played a crucial role in defeating the French forces and allowing the victory. Will the coronavirus help cause similar political change? Is the question potentially “Coronavirus or Communism”?

Capitalism and reliance on market forces is ultimately inadequate to handle this crisis. This is being proven in front of our eyes in the beginning of this pandemic. Shortages of medical supplies, lack of medical facilities, and hoarding of mostly toilet paper and other things is creating shortages. The government is failing to provide adequate solutions, and they are mostly leaving it to civilians to take precautions themselves. President Trump did set a ban of travel from Europe for 30 days, but he hasn’t done much to suggest he will drastically change our healthcare system to handle the crisis. Democratic Presidential Primary favorite, Joe Biden, has only suggested that he will do better than Trump and that the virus doesn’t discriminate based on race, gender, religion, etc. Only longshot Bernie Sanders that has been running on the legacy of the New Deal has suggested anywhere near the kind of mobilization efforts necessary to handle this crisis. The problem with all of this being that most people refuse to look outside of the market to solve the crisis. Only Bernie Sanders has promised that any vaccine and medical treatments for the virus will be free and paid for by the government. Trump and Biden both will not do so.

Many people thought that the crisis of climate change would be enough to move people to adopt more bold economic change, but it seems that climate change seems too distant in the future to truly scare people enough for that. They are instead perfectly happy with maintaining the status quo with marginal incremental progress here and there. The coronavirus however brings us an entirely different scenario as it will likely affect everyone’s life to one degree or another which will force people to consider calling for real change. We do however know that such a crisis can bring mobilization of people for change. This happened during WWII, and it is one of the primary factors that brought America out of the great depression. If we were to mobilize the economy to combat the coronavirus pandemic, we could see how the political economy must be changed for the better across the board. We can see why single payer healthcare is no longer an option, but a necessity and why allowing the markets to control our economy is maybe not the most efficient means of distributing goods.

In their book, The People’s Republic of Walmart, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski discuss the problems with markets solving such crises as this. The pharmaceutical industry is still primarily driven by market forces and only truly seeks to develop new drugs when it becomes marketable to do so. This prioritizes investment in research for specific drugs while ignoring others. It also discourages investment in research of prevention of future diseases as well as preparation for such pandemics as we are seeing today. This problem is something that makes capitalism completely inadequate for the crisis at hand and we need an alternative solution. Leigh Phillips wrote an excellent article on this for Jacobin you can read here. In their book they outline how democratic planning can be used much more efficiently to effectively address the issue. In a democratically planned economy resources could be put aside to develop the necessary drugs and resources to handle a crisis of the sort.

However, globally if this pandemic continues to get worse it may spark a sea of change in how the global political economy functions. It will hit the countries with the least stable governments first and force them to completely overhaul their systems or even fall. Maybe the best example of this is the Islamic Republic of Iran which may be experiencing the worst mismanagement of the pandemic of any country on Earth. After murdering 1500 protesters in protests in November and accidentally shooting down a civilian passenger jet the Iranian regime is continuing to cover up its faults in being able to handle the spread of coronavirus. Even worse some of the more disgusting of religious fanatics in the country have even suggested Allah can protect them and that the people shouldn’t worry about it. This cover up operation however has been failing as news has been leaking and people have been demanding them to quit covering it up. Most disturbingly there have been reports of mass graves of victims of the virus which can be viewed from space via satellites. With this level of unrest in Iran I think it is inevitable that the system will have to change. Vladimir Lenin once described the conditions for a revolutionary situation as “When the old order cannot go on in the old way and the people don’t wish to go on in the old way.” This seems to be the case in Iran, and I suspect that if the pandemic gets worse it will ultimately bring down the regime. Will it spark further overhauls of the global capitalist system and eventually reach the more developed capitalist nations? Only time will tell.

Truth is that this crisis should push global capitalism to the brink. A virus has a few amazing attributes which require a change. It does not discriminate based on any race, gender, or nationality. It doesn’t know national borders. It only spreads as far as it can find receptors for it. This should remind us as humans that we are ultimately interconnected and that despite our current political systems suggesting that we aren’t we must overcome this. This is why I think this can be summed up as “Coronavirus or Communism?” The coronavirus could possibly be the spark necessary to mobilize the effort to transition away from capitalism and the nation state to an international socialist world which will be far better capable of handling this crisis and more in the future. We have everything to lose by not making this transition, and we have a world to win by doing it.