[[covid-19]] [[capitalism]]
This article, broadly, sums up the economic situation going into the COVID-19 pandemic, the problems the pandemic is making worse, and gives an idea1 of just how bad things could get.
The COVID pandemic sits at the confluence of a number of terrifying contributing factors: the commoditification and valorization of healthcare, the undermining of social welfare, and, most importantly, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
The pandemic is likely to cause a reconfiguration of capital, much like it does after world-historic events, and likely not for the better. It’s important that the left organize itself now more than ever.
The pandemic has revealed a “deep necrosis” in the US economy, resulting in what appears to be a collapse
It’s important to keep in mind that the economic crisis that the pandemic is causing is only accelerating issues that were already just beneath the surface
Problems involved with the current crisis:
The Fed hired BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, to act as the investment manager for three newly-created lending facilities
Japan and the European Central Bank both, unsuccessfully, experimented with negative interest rates to combat slowing economic activity
The [[Volcker Shock]] and the consideration of negative interest rates goes to show that the Federal Reserve have a limited range of options when it comes to handling crises
In recent decades we’ve actually seen a privatization of the state
We also see a growing centralization and concentration in the finance and banking sectors, along with manufacturing overcapacity and declining output
Since the Great Recession there has been a massive growth of corporate debt, and the IMF is worried that it could cause yet unknown problems down the road
In April the US unemployment rate reached an all-time high since World War II
The tribulations of “wageless life” can be seen as a consequence of the rising [[organic composition of capital]]
the inability for youth to transition to stable jobs as they get older
Between 1980 and 2000, the workforce doubled in size, and most of that came from China and the USSR
Since 2008, labor force participation has declined, causing unemployment to increase
Mortgage crisis 2 might just be around the corner: mortgage delinquencies were incredibly high in April
As Marx says in Capital, wages are depressed by reducing the cost of necessary labor
At the end of the day, putting money into the social wage fund, (healthcare, etc.) would only further depress the [[rate of profit]]
Some of the earliest costs of the social wage fund in the US were over how health care would be paid for
Employer-based health care emerged out of the Second World War
Healthcare in the US was patchwork until about the 70s, when it underwent commodification
Obamacare, emerging out of the RAND Corporation, was “managed competition”
Healthcare spending can be broken down as such:
Like any corporation, hospitals seek to reduce operational cost
Adjusted for inflation, healthcare spending increased by an average of 9.9% every year between 1960 and 2006
All of the above has caused an incredible unpreparedness in healthcare for the pandemic
Medical care workers have been the hardest hit by the pandemic
There is overconfidence in investors that the market will return to normal after the pandemic, as evidenced by their confidence in a “V-shaped recovery” (don’t laugh!)
We aren’t looking at a boom coming, we’re looking at cataclysm
The fact that there’s no active left fighting capitalism right now is a bad sign: capitalism can reconfigure itself until every human on the planet dies. We must actively reconfigure society to be rationally planned.
One way in which capitalism could get out of this crisis is through war
These whole paragraphs:
The synchronization of interests with armed right-wing militants and the Trump administration still appears one of mutual convenience, as the character of this intra-class fraction is one of opposing visions for the future of anti-social organization, but both converge on the maintenance of the reproduction of capitalist social relations at their respective levers of exploitation. While Trump remains inextricably bound by a reproduction of US capital that is reliant on global-integration and maintaining the US’s particular hierarchical position atop the organization of global value chains and trade arrangements, the militia movement is a product of the immiserating hinterland regions of systemic deindustrialization and exurbanizing poverty, led primarily by the petty-capitalist and wealthier landowners emerging above the overall historical trajectory of abjection. There is in these groups a defense of capitalist relations founded through an anti-globalization bent, placed at the forefront of their political commitments. A demonstration of this in the present instance can be seen in the voluntary protection of businesses opening in violation of state orders by armed militia groups, the more militant of them placing themselves “beyond left and right,” in an ultimate goal of autonomous territorialism founded on various forms of ethnic homogeneity or kinship in survivalism. The alliance with Trump in these instances are pragmatic maneuvers from groups that have a well-incorporated theoretical grounding in the exploitation of crisis to advance their particular interests by destabilizing state institutions in certain regions. The reaction in these incarnations of the right is such that these are ultimately movements that realize their ends through exclusionary methods backed by force, the vocal disdain for infection containment in the protests itself a manifestation of this anti-politics, where obfuscation and conspiracy cloud the terrain for the opposition, a phenomenon akin to a smoke grenade in combat.
A crisis of state legitimacy is not merely the terrain of reaction here. The unemployment wave and subsequent hit to the maintenance of relations of exploitation that keep economic activity moving has produced the discursive turn to the desperate and hollow celebration of the heroism of those workers endangering their lives, through the “essential worker” classification. For every instance that the “essential” distinction appears to outline the actual contours of necessary reproductive labor in society, such as nurses, even more are plainly obvious to be merely necessary for the functions of realizing exchange values and preventing total economic collapse. For those attaching hope to the apparent sacrifices made of the so-called “essential worker,” are they not buying the boss’ propaganda? It is entirely questionable which of these labor tasks would even remain in a social reproduction that becomes emancipated from its subsumption by capital. The cyclical employment of surplus populations into an industrialized consumer and service-heavy economy is revealing of the crisis of surplus capital today. The unrealizable surplus of potential capital values and commodity outputs must be either pushed to the extremes of realizing value in the social processes of exchange, or constrained in output and thus consistently exert an overleveraged burden on the costs of enterprise. Our employment in society is increasingly meaningless, increasingly only existing to serve the maintenance of the waning abstraction of value and thus perpetuate the class domination which serves and is reproduced by it. It is then unsurprising to see where these sites of proletarian struggle in the US have broken out in the present conjuncture. The strange desperation of the “essential worker” ploy then deserves some broader contextual grounding in the composition of this particular historical instance of widespread wage precarity.
it should also come as a surprise to no one that the fact that renting is an extremely unstable option
The symbiosis between the US and China is eroding, and it seems to be harming the US more than China
We already seem to be in a new Cold War with China
2016 was the signal year of reaction against the liberal center globally, it would seem
Given the above, class war may be the most relevant struggle in the future (god willing!)
Rendering context...