Coronavirus and capitalism
Correspondent | Monday April 13, 2020 11:02
The local newspaper Patriot on Sunday quoted the Directorate of Public Service Management (DPSM) on April 5, 2020 informing Botswana unions that local insurance companies are rejecting requests to insure frontline workers against the risk of COVID-19 by arguing that the disease ‘is an act of God’. This is a lame and immoral excuse by insurance companies meant to justify maintenance of their profits.
In reality, the emergence of the virus has little to do with God. Novel viruses, such as the coronavirus, developed mainly through two pathways both driven by capitalist accumulation of profits. Firstly, the industrialisation of agriculture, more specifically, the mass production of animals in limited space, promoted selection and spread of viruses and their host-to-host transmission to humans.
The flu-viruses H1N1 and H5N1 came from industrial pig and chicken farming, respectively, and MERS emerged from industrial camel trade. Secondly, the commodification of nature and wilderness also gave rise to viruses. The Ebola outbreak in West-Africa was driven substantially by a land-grab of big companies for the production of palm oil. The loss of natural habitat forced bats to seek shelter in palm plantations and brought their Ebola-virus hosting reservoirs into contact with humans.
Similar scenarios are discussed for the coronavirus. The commodification of wildlife, such as pangolins, crammed in thousands of small cages on a ‘Wet Market’ in Wuhan, China might have brought the viral reservoir into contact with humans. It is the capitalist mode of production that gives rise to novel viruses. This tendency and pattern of accumulation is not confined to China only, it is a global phenomenon.
Capitalism has profoundly shaped all spheres of society from economy, employment, agriculture, health, education, media and transport. Some Batswana might have thought that they will be spared from the virus, but this was shattered as Botswana joined the rest of the world announcing COVID-19 cases. We are part of the global world and depend on the capitalist economic system based on circuits and relations. Capitalism has wide networks and well established supply chains spanning the whole globe and the virus follows the exchange of commodities and labour.
Capitalist economic relations have not just contributed to the spread of the virus, but they also essentially shaped the response to the outbreak. For weeks and months, complacency was the order of the day to keep the profits flowing. Businesses were not shut down, workers were not told to stay home. Even in Italy, the epidemic center of Europe, non-essential businesses were kept running. When it became more obvious that hundreds of thousands of people might be infected and many are going to die, only then did governments gave the order that people should ‘wash their hands’.
In Botswana, only after repeated public appeals from the side of teachers’ trade unions, Botswana Secondary Education Teacher’s Union (BOSETU) and Botswana Teachers Union (BTU), complaining about the ‘lackluster government response’, government was dragged to close schools on March 24, 2020. A full three weeks after neighbouring South-Africa announced their first COVID-19 case. Even the government-friendly Botswana Public Employees Union, (BOPEU), issued a strong statement in Sunday Standard on March 22, 2020, demanding clear measures to protect workers who commute by public transport, free roll-out of hand sanitisers, cooperation between health and transport ministries and a fiscal stimulus package to support SMMEs.
In all these weeks of complacency, government could have come up with clear plans on how to deal with the deplorable situation, where people are crammed in combis, we call public transport. Following concrete examples around the world, measures, such as how to acquire and roll out testing, how to increase hospital capacity and the number of ventilators and respirators for severely ill patients could have well been thought through before the actual outbreak.
Days into the Botswana lockdown-declared public emergency, Botswana government has failed to develop a clear strategy with engagement of all stakeholders. Samples from COVID-19 suspected cases are still tested in South-Africa, which leads to major delays, and there is no indication how government intends to increase the number of 70 ventilators, tracing teams and mobile testing units for the whole of Botswana. Why are we testing a little under 500 people a week when we got 20 000 testing kits from Chinese Jack Ma Foundation?
In his address to the nation on April 5, 2020, Health Minister, Lemogang Kwape, still only offers that ‘We learn as we go’ and that ‘People should stay at home and wash their hands’. In the meantime, again, the two main trade union federations, Botswana Federation of Trade Unions (BFTU) and Botswana Federation of Public Sector Unions (BOFEPUSU), came together in a great show of solidarity and did the thinking for government. In a joint statement on the same day (Patriot on Sunday, 5th April) they outlined clear interventions. They suggested who should implement what and demanded full transparency in relation to the handling of all relief and fiscal packages to avoid corruption and mismanagement.
The coronavirus crisis has shown clearly that it is labor that creates value. If lockdowns prevent workers to come to work, no profit is generated. No boss, no computer network can do anything about that. Businesses go bust, workers will be dismissed. In US alone, 10 million workers filed for unemployment as a consequence of COVID-19. Botswana will not be spared. Already, diamond sales/sightings have been cancelled and the tourism sector has been heavily affected.
Furthermore, socialists have always argued that it is the senseless competition that makes capitalism an irrational and cruel system. Even non-leftists, such as the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, came involuntarily to that conclusion, when he stated in one of his daily press conferences, that he can’t understand why fifty states in US are bidding against each other for a shipment of face masks, when the order of the day should be cooperation.
Even Covid-19 philanthropy raises questions. How can it be that whole countries have to rely on handouts by billionaires, such as Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma or Microsoft’s Bill Gates? The ‘generosity’ of providing 1.1 million test kits, 6 million masks and 60 000 protective suits to 54 African countries by Jack Ma clouds the fact that it is capitalism itself which promotes absurd wealth for a few, while undermining services to extract even more profit. Botswana’s health care system is chronically overwhelmed even in good times, as continuously nurses and doctors left for greener pastures in other countries. We now pay the price for an eroded health system, and we will desperately need the gifts by capitalist philantropists.
Karl Marx distinguished capitalism from all other previous economic systems as progressive and yet wasteful due its mode of production, which is based on production for profit, not for people needs. Capitalism has harnessed the power of innovative technology and is characterised by mass production. This makes the neo-classical economics notion of scarcity nonsensical. For the first time in history there is abundance, not scarcity.
Indeed, we have seen that during the last four months of the coronavirus crisis, hospitals for thousands of patients can be built in no time. Shelter for the homeless can be found within days, 3D printers can manufacture face shields for health workers, face masks are produced in millions by textile and fashion companies and General Motors switched its production to ventilators. However, who will obtain these resources is a different question.
The crisis has clearly exposed that under capitalism we live in a class society. Already before COVID-19, your health was shaped by which class you belong to. If you are working class or poor, you are most likely to eat unhealthy, stay in unsuitable housing, have no health insurance, nor the money to have access to timely health care or specialist services. The crisis has sharpened these class contradictions.
If you look to the African continent, for most, even the most basic prevention measures are difficult to follow. ‘Social distancing is for the rich,’ commented a community volunteer his efforts assisting commuters with hand sanitisers at the bus rank in Johannesburg, South-Africa. Capitalism has relied even more than 25 years after Apartheid on cheap transport, cramming workers daily in combis and trains like sardines. Profits are maintained by leaving huge townships intact without proper access to water and sanitation, to have a workforce at capitalist’s disposal without having to invest in workers welfare.
Now, even the simplest advise on ‘Wash your hands’ becomes difficult in the absence of soap and clean water. In Botswana, public water pipes were cut off a few years back, forcing poor people to buy water so that Water Utilities Corporation makes profits. Just before the Botswana lockdown, Botswana Power Corporation, had the audacity to increase electricity tariffs by 22% to bolster their profits. Health is a question of class. It is capitalist conditions that makes us sick, not the ‘irresponsibility’ of the township population and the poor. Unfortunately, it does not end here. If we look at the larger picture, there is a fundamental contradiction between generating profits and worker’s welfare.
Tragically, though ‘Flattening the curve’ is crucial not to overburden the health system, the more spread out the infections become timewise, the longer lasts the economic paralysis. This is why Trump wanted everyone ‘back to work by Easter’ to save his profits and South-Africa’s President and billionaire, Cyril Ramaphosa, thinks of loosening the lockdown measures to keep the mines open. For the working class and the poor the picture looks grim. For example, 18 million out of the total 59 million South Africans are living in 20% of the poorest households. Only 45% of these have an employed member.
The Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit calculated that the poorest 10% of households will lose 45% of their income during the lockdown. Informal workers have no protection whatsoever and risk to lose their livelihoods completely. In contrast 7 million live in the richest 20% of households. Most of these household members are employed and able to continue to work and earn from home. It becomes clear, who pays for this crisis: the poor and the workers. The case for re-distribution from rich to poor has never been that obvious.
In his analysis and characterisation of how the capitalist system works, Karl Marx has consistently emphasised the unique feature and position of the working class. Though oppressed and exploited by capitalist relations, workers form a strongly collective force, which in the end can direct its strength against the system itself, hence Marx rightly characterised the working class as the ‘gravedigger of capitalism’. Workers of all countries experience the health crisis in a similar manner. A health worker, overwhelmed in US, faces pretty much the same scenario as a health worker in Johannesburg, Milan, New York or Italy. They unite in their efforts to be protected and be safe from infections. We have seen - though often very desperate – their pleas for personal protective equipment (PPE) in the form of public protests and threats to strike, like doctors in Zimbabwe and nurses in Botswana.
Daily common experiences and a shared uncertainty can lead to powerful solidarity networks. In Brazil, large parts of the population simply don’t listen to their denialist President Bolsonaro, and follow advice of fellow workers in the rest of the world. As often in crises, it brings the best out of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers helped with distribution of soap and hand sanitisers in Diepsloot, a big township in Johannesburg, South-Africa. The taxi association in Bara, Johannesburg, has organised machines to sanitise their cars, and are distributing gloves and masks.
In UK, coronavirus help committees have sprang up, interlinked themselves on online platforms, and organised the distribution of food parcels, information leaflets and assist with shopping for the elderly. In Botswana, rural villagers, who don’t have access to water taps, used rows of hanged plastic water bottles to conform with ‘Regular Handwashing’. All these networks will become extremely important also for the post-coronavirus period, when the capitalists will want to make the working class pay heavily for the loss of their profits. The more organisation occurs at the grassroot level, the more resistant we will become against capitalist attacks, particularly when unions might become weakened due to rising unemployment.
Lastly, socialists always emphasised the rationale for planning. Critics of socialism, therefore, often associated us with the Stalinist command economy in Eastern Europe. However, we always argued that planning is, in fact, a central feature of the modern economy. In a big factory or a major shopping street you will see products and input from many different countries. This requires planning and coordination.
The COVID-19 crisis has sharpened our sense for the need of planning. When do we reach the peak of infections? Can we expand hospital capacity in time? How many beds do we need tomorrow and how many ventilators next week? How many nurses need to come out of retirement to help? The old notion that ‘the market’ is the best way to organise the economy simply does not hold.
A planned economy would mean a broad outline of what needs to be produced would be set without having ‘profitability’ dominate our decisions. But that would mean that the means of production would need to be placed into public property – belonging to and under control of those who do the work and produce the goods and services for a common good. We hope that the current crisis will help us to see that another system has to be put in place - one that genuinely puts people before profit. The coronavirus epidemic has shown us that we can’t risk to put our health and lives in the hands of capitalists. We have to organise and take control ourselves. We have a socialist world to win.
MOTSOMI MAROBELA*
*Motsomi Marobela is the leader International Socialists Botswana.