From Global Farm To Global Table: The Capitalist Pandemic
Whether believed the subject of hysterical conjecture or
conspiratorial creation, the fact is that we face a new and different virus that
may threaten life more than previous forms. It is also true that up to the
moment that includes more than a quarter million victims, most who suffer the
illness survive and they represent the overwhelming majority. Nevertheless, the
threat is to all humanity and must be treated as such and that will call for transformative
changes of a nature previously unimagined by most though strongly suggested by
many going back to the beginning of the present problem. That problem is not
the current pandemic but its origin in the form of a political economic system
which began in its industrial form in the late eighteenth century and was
presently tending toward one of its regular crises called a recession. That was
before this viral attack provoked a greater crisis dubbed by many a return to
conditions of what was called a “Great Depression”, and this not referring to
presently profitable forms of individual therapy but to the breakdown of an
entire global system.
America survived that past collapse by instituting a social
democratic form of capitalism at odds with the fascist form which at the same
time “saved” Germany, both forms later getting into a war that saw tens of
millions killed and the victory, for a while, of the social democratic, liberal
welfare style of capital. That prevented blatant starvation and mass death in
the streets by instituting social policies to help much but not all of the
local working class while ultimately slaughtering that same class in Korea,
Vietnam and other places representing conflict with the market system of
private profit for some, only available at deadly loss to many.
America and the West’s return to the more blatant
fundamentalist worship of the deity of unimpeded market forces which hold
society in total contempt began back in the 1970s but it should be understood
that the system did not change at all, in its essence. Whether run by fascists
or social democrats only the way it manifested its profits and its manner of
forcing the loss were different in style. If some populations were rewarded
with steady diets, decent jobs and comfortable housing, others suffered
malnutrition, wretched poverty, and mass murder under military assaults that
went beyond the incredible slaughters of world war two, at least in per capita
numbers. While some 60 million are said to have perished in that war, mostly
among victorious Russians and the losers, Germany and Japan, the death tolls
and wreckage later inflicted on Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were much
greater and might have approached 100 million if the population base had been
the same.
Under the market forces of private profit and public loss, the
good life for some necessitates absolute misery for others. The problem is not
simply reducible to greedy or murderous people but the organizational
components of society which reduce them to support of a greedy murderous system
that can have no other outcome, no matter how much rhetoric is expanded nor however
sincerely about striving for democracy and a better life for all. Continuing to
organize society on the basis of capitalist market forces rewarding private
profits to investors by robbing the workers who create its largesse and then consume
it, mostly by becoming debtors, will not only prolong but greatly increase the
scandalous evidence of human and environmental destruction all around us, including
the present virus.
While ideas run rampant, many thoughtful, many more
bordering on insanity, of a plague created and arranged by a criminal lab in China,
but somehow run by Americans, the same lab but this time run by the Chinese,
somehow ignorant that it would kill their own people, or simply a plot by evil
mysterians setting about to destroy civilization in favor of the Elders of Gay
Latino Mormons of Color, reality is as usual far more complex and much less
subject to fantasy. The international system that industrial capitalism brought
into being and that was wisely criticized at its inception by Marx and Engels
has become more globally dominant and in its modern form features a relatively
tiny group of fantastically rich and powerful individuals and their corporate
entities which dominate the production and procurement of food, clothing,
shelter and everything else almost everywhere on earth, and this only by
treating them as commodities for purchase at a market and unavailable to any
without the money or credit line enabling them to make those purchases.
While individual possession of wealth and power has advanced
far beyond any ancient imperial kingdom governed by alleged earthly gods and
now allows staggering riches to be held by a nearly microscopic in size
“identity group”, it keeps hundreds of millions sinking into debt, poverty and
wars. We of the majority are being kept divided into other “identity groups” in
battle with one another for a small part of what we greatly produce while
minority rulers enjoy a form of perverted socialism in which the many support
the few in ways that would have made past bloody emperors envious.
That global rule now means that Chinese capital owns land
and manufacturing facilities in the USA while American capital does the same in
China. National competition still seems the order of the day but its form is
not what it was in past ages, since financial wars now loom as large though not
quite as obviously deadly as the military form. If Chinese investments are taken
out of America, or vice versa, each nation would suffer greatly, until and
unless its people democratically took over the economies and saw to it that the
wealth of the nation went to the people of the nation, the actual creators of
that wealth, and not a bunch of investors most of whom whose only job was to be
born to rich parents. For every tale of a poor person from the ghetto becoming
rich, the Horatio Alger fictions that work as a drug for so many, there are a
hundred thousand realities of trust fund babies, infants born with tens of
thousands when not millions of dollars already waiting for their signature upon
achieving legal age. And even if and when they turn out to be decent, loving,
caring human beings, the system guarantees that their efforts to make life
better will only work for some and never for all. The present pandemic is only
the latest evidence of what we need to confront and change, radically, not just
for a pandemic of the moment but the disease humanity has suffered for much too
long.
The wet markets in China, said to be the possible source of
the virus, are in essence no different than the dry markets in China or anywhere
else. They exist to return private profit to investors, and those may well be
Americans in the global economic environment. It is a fact that Wall Street and
its Beijing equivalent are partners in that marketplace, no matter the radical difference
in their governments, and American financial firms, Goldman Sachs for one, own farmland
in the very vicinity of whatever bat cave or wet market where this virus may
have started. But rather than the virus being dealt with locally by Darwinian
natural selection and with modern technology’s help, where possible, it took on
the global status of capitalism’s unnatural selection. Under those market
rules, forests do not create trees but produce profitable lumber and farms do
not create crops but profitable food, and whether wet, dry, cooked or raw, kale,
bacon, dog food or organic soup, the product is a commodity to be consumed at
the market and turn a profit in the process or it will not originate in the
first place.
21st century globalized capital has assumed a
pace that involves finance, profits, losses, war, peace and tourism to advance
at electronic speeds previously unimagined and turn up all over the world in a
matter of not just days but often seconds. It can no longer be dealt with only by
national organizations but must finally be confronted by international action
which may originate nationally but will have no meaning unless democratically
undertaken internationally. And this will mean the direct opposite of imperial
national powers of the past, like the old British and the more recent USA, and
even the newly emerging China-Russia more humane based market ideologies; they
cannot be allowed to dominate the global population.
It may be
necessary to radically change not only commercial but individual travel habits
but if these help achieve a cleaner air quality while allowing people to remain
closer to home even while doing their jobs, this is only one of the many
possible positive outcomes of this crisis. The fact that a new generation of
social critics has formed and is unhesitant to challenge the system of capital
is another hopeful sign that unity among generations may bring about more
substantial change than ever achievable before. We may not have to return to
family farming exclusively but larger entities that grow our food need to be,
like larger entities that manufacture our products, owned and run by their
workers, in true democratic form, to benefit all the people, and this crisis is
also making that fact far more clear to far more people.
Democracy is hardly what will be achieved this November in
the American election when the usual minority will select a president in the
lesser evil billion-dollar sham that passes for electoral freedom, but it must
and will be achieved in the immediate future for all humanity or there will be
further pandemic hell to pay for civilization. Capitalism, like slavery and
feudalism before, has outlived whatever benefits it brought to some. Its individual
benefits have gone far beyond humanity’s ability to bear the costs and we, the
majority, must see to its end before it brings about ours.
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