COVID-19: Can humanity still afford capitalism?
The Coronavirus crisis blasts light through the gaping holes in Western economic ideology. Can our collective future afford such a delicate system?
"...if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands."
History is a catalogue of sensational collapses. Every advanced society eventually meets the aggressor that it can’t overcome - natural or economic. The trauma, lessons and knowledge left in the wake of disintegration go on to power the systems and structures that slowly reanimate in the dust of the old world’s palaces.
For the West, the Coronavirus pandemic is a new crisis with dire consequences. Both the public health and economic challenges born of an unexpected viral pandemic binds the new with the extraordinary - creating widespread citizen and institutional panic. For citizens, their panic is both instinctive and conditioned. For institutions, it’s a global crisis of economic confidence. Both are energised by the same fear of the collapse of a deeply complex, delicately networked civilisation.
Highly mixed government responses have created a surreal political half-climate - where some countries are collaborating closely - while others double down on their national isolationism. The vast majority of Europe’s labour force has been collectively plunged into an unprecedented, temporary reality - a suspended economic half-way house where all of the furniture’s the same, but the laws of physics are constantly changing. There is immediate, mass unemployment in the world’s richest countries, that incidentally, are now under government-mandated lockdown. Those who are still in work have been sent home indefinitely by the state, many of whom will temporarily cover the lion’s share of the national wage bill. In many countries, rents, mortgages and evictions have been suspended. There are numerous stories of the homeless being housed in hotels to prevent viral transmission. Britain’s railway system has been temporarily re-nationalised, and it’s not even close to the most important story of the day. Sitting Conservative parties in the most fanatically capitalist countries on the planet have initialised the most dramatic socialist interventions since the Second World War. The previously politically impossible is in full swing. All the while, neoliberalism’s most richly-rewarded cowboy surgeons are in hidden rooms spending every waking minute working out how to anaesthetise and resuscitate a patient they knew was far too fragile for surgery in the first place. A ticking clock roars while the patient deteriorates.
Capitalism as Frankenstein’s monster
The power of the individual has formed the most substantive part of the collective western liberal psyche for 40 years. Ego itself is an impossibly large topic - but a singular, unchallengeable truth is this - an intoxicating tale of infinite liberty and personal achievement powers an economy more profitable, more extractive, and more complex than any other in history. It is a spectacular marvel of balance and wonder - but that makes it delicate, and prone to unexpected mechanical failure. In software terms, we might call it Frankenware. Frankenware is a term for a codebase built over time in response to immediate demands, rather than long-term viability. There’s no strategic vision, no shared style guide, and thousands of collaborators - none of whom are sufficiently motivated, incentivised or even authorised to improve the really nasty parts. There are thousands of lines of code that you just don’t touch, because they just-about-work and the consequences of breaking them are severe. The system becomes progressively more difficult to change, so it’s slow to solve any of the new problems it comes into contact with. It very quickly accrues compounding ‘technical debt’. ‘Technical debt’ is a term for the inherent cost of building complex things rapidly rather than thoughtfully. But this debt must be serviced, or it spirals - and eventually, the cost is the system’s own existence. Of Frankenware, the only truths are this - it must be maintained and expanded, until it must be entirely replaced. Not one of these systems lives forever. Similarly, 40 years of profound economic experimentation has ended up bolting together a monster, now rebelling against the same masters that made it.
The many successes of capitalism are well documented, and can’t be ignored - and to do so is dishonest. But when we talk about success through the lens of capitalism, we increasingly speak in diametric opposition to the social, environmental or ecological good needed to feed its infinite appetite. Capitalist economic practices are naturally more extractive than they are regenerative, because their successes are measured by the volume and efficiency of their output. And there is a blatant problem of language when the prevalent economic system effectively hijacks the word ‘success’. This is further antagonised when ‘capitalism’ becomes a synonym for ‘trade’ - and so condemning highly exploitative, extractive globalism somehow means one must also denounce their local barber shop. The two are capitalist enterprises, but only one is a massively fragile economic dependency chain. We would do well to speak more precisely about trade in that regard.
There is no such thing as society
It’s crass and unimaginative to make the case for a redesigned, human-centric economic system by resurrecting the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, but a highly contagious virus is suspending us across an economic abyss, so I think we can all be cut some slack. (Also, I need to set a scene quickly, and I think it might work.)
Thatcher, 1987, goes:
“…and , you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."
I think about this as the needle in the political syringe that pumped British industry full of the complex, potent cocktail of steroids that deeply reformed the citizen-to-citizen relationship. Neoliberal ideology - a spectacular marketing achievement by those a long way from the sharp-end of its Darwinian teeth, demands compliance with a highly individualist, competitive mission - first in a survivalist sense (e.g. you must partake, or you will have no money or respect, and die) and then in many subtle, cultural senses (e.g. if you do not partake, you are parasitic, and do not qualify for joy, love or freedom.) A collective worship of work, productivity and infinite economic growth rolled into the 1990s like a steamroller, handsomely rewarding many in the rentier and corporate services economies bolted onto the backs of the production, manufacturing and innovation sectors. The few citizens that genuinely scramble their way out of their marginalised beginnings become convinced by the system’s (and their own) power, and the majority that don’t, find its unpredictable variable rewards addictive and hard to kick. When asked about her own greatest success, Thatcher is said to have answered “New Labour”. She had not just dragged the entire political landscape to the right - but completely repurposed the economic machinery that the political landscape sat atop of. The problem isn’t that 40 years on, it can’t be stopped - the problem is that it can’t even be paused to save lives.
The bastard son of romantic Babylon
One of the major successes of the rise of individualism is that for the small number of people who were stupendously rewarded, arose a shadow culture of servitude, worship and esteem for the rich - still held up by even the weakest survivors of capitalist ideology. In normative circles, the most prestigious thing an individual can often do is become rich - because true wealth creates an insulation from a previously romanticised economic struggle - one that that erodes many fundamental human needs. It powerfully satiates the ego - and creates a deep, meaningful sense of group approval and influence. Of course, it’s arbitrary morality that generally influences how much of that success finds its way back down via ‘trickle down economics’ - an opposing, counter-philosophy that suggests that after profit, there might be enough left for random acts of benevolence or social relief. The minimum wage in the UK is £8.21. The trickle, is indeed, a trickle.
For the overwhelming majority, existence is designed as competition for now highly abundant, artificially-made-scarce resources, motivated by the pervasive cultural story that there is no community, and that ‘getting ahead’ involves either the complete divorce from, or dominance of, people within their own economic class. A highly energised, ambitious working class confuse themselves for capitalists - when they are, in fact, capital - even if they remain in relative poverty. They vote for lower taxes for the rich - in case that one day, they too are rich. To win, someone else must lose. The best thing they could do would be to organise - to exploit a class solidarity that demands a better collective deal for their joined-up production power.
And for those elites that are resourced enough to retain their roles during a pandemic, well, their position within a humanitarian crisis is simple. Their obligation is nothing. If they can hold out for a while, they usually only need to wait for their administrative arm (the state) to repair the hole in the boat with taxpayer funds and national debt, which often happens during capitalism’s recurring implosions, as some paltry offering to a mythical God economy with completely irrational rules. Socialising risk while privatising profit is the system’s extraordinary, malevolent contradiction, and both the macro and micro undoing of the story of individualism.
Fear of a blank planet
But it seems that fate is not without its own sense of irony. Now in the throes of attempting to eradicate a killer viral epidemic, the self-interest circuit at the core of the power supply of the western economy is in direct opposition with the values and behaviours needed to survive a serious existential threat to the species. In a crisis where co-operation, support and organisation delivers far and away the best odds on minimising death, we aren’t citizens or neighbours - we are competitors. We now need to learn completely new behaviours and incentives - ones that are actually to our detriment in a regular world where collectivism, community and collaboration is either widely discredited or treated with contempt - especially by a corporate-backed press. Put more simply - we must now abandon our own individual egos for the sake our own individual survival. This is wild, unfamiliar psychological terrain for the majority of us - in fact, an identity crisis.
This necessary, organised, herd-wide ego-death is an absolute catastrophe for the captains of an economy that build fragile, mission-critical structures on the back of all-costs individualism. In the context of Coronavirus, we must now work together to save ourselves from the malice and avarice of an economy that definitely can, but absolutely will not, offer the most vulnerable their own survival.
One of the Coronavirus’s most significant issues within liberal societies is that total preservation of social freedom initially persisted - regardless of the risk of transmission. The first demonstration, was the panic buying. A fragmented, chaotic, and sustained run on local food supplies illustrated, in real time, the acute lack of co-ordination, community and empathy built into our social crisis response systems. People physically fought in supermarkets in the richest countries in the world, and immediately depleted its local inventory - not because there wasn’t enough food - but because our supply chains couldn’t move our abundance fast enough to sell it to us. A crisis of competition in a world of hyper-abundance is as profound as it is irrational.
The second, is the lack of co-ordination around transmission-beating social isolation. Our fundamental inability to work together - to honour a very simple social promise that we would remain indoors for our collective safety, ended up resulting in a government-enforced, 3-week UK-wide lockdown. Liberty, while vital, has become so worshipped, that even the concept of stemming a humanitarian disaster could not curtail it without state enforcement - which even then, was met with various degrees of societal contempt. I suspect that this is further agitated by the advent of the post-truth political age - where previously disempowered tranches of the population can vote in new, surreal realities, based entirely on emotion-driven entitlement in the name of democracy. In the place of collectivism, instead we observed a ‘principled individualism’ - an absolutely minimal, mostly performative effort based on our own individual moral prerogative. Infections continued to spiral out of control. In short, doing whatever you want, to save yourself, might just about be the most damaging thing to do for everyone in any group crisis.
Who wants to live forever?
It’s feasible to imagine that our next widespread crisis will be significantly more severe than the Coronavirus pandemic. The global climate is changing quickly, broadly thanks to massive industrialism - particularly as developing countries up the ante in the race for the material trappings of profit. And a changing climate affects global food production, supply chains, transport networks and planet-wide weather systems. When (and not if) those crises occur, we can expect enormous shifts in human behaviour that demands a collectivism that dwarfs the co-ordination required to mitigate the Coronavirus. Economic and political ideology aside - it is crucial that discussions on post-capitalism are taken seriously as part of thorough preparation for the survival of humanity’s next shared catastrophe. Our first dress rehearsal, well, leaves room for improvement.
As the world’s economists scramble to muffle the sound of yet another economic sonic boom, one thing is clear. Capitalism may, through some feat of fantastical spreadsheet wizardry, survive this new chaotic implosion in the short term. But we are at the beginning of an economic recession far more serious than 2008’s property disintegration - which the loss of 2.6 million jobs in the USA alone. There is also an obvious, deeply tragic, unquantifiable human cost - in the many tens of thousands - because our healthcare systems simply can’t withstand the demands of managing massive viral infection. We can’t realise the full consequence of pausing the economy yet, and the jury is still out on whether the government’s same-old financial measures will prevent just enough human misery to stop massive civil unrest. And at the time of speaking, there’s one highly disturbing narrative that may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back - that to some, there is a certain amount of death that justifies keeping the stock market awake - and if it comes to it, some people are expected to lose their lives as tribute to the God economy.
Make no mistake. Capitalism will die, and it will die sensationally. And now, more than any other time in the last 40 years, the questions that present themselves are capitalism’s deepest existential challenges yet:
In a world where the politically unimaginable can become the economically essential overnight, how will capitalism re-spin its personal responsibility, austerity and self-sustainability story?
How will capitalist states fare compared to more heavily socialised states in their response and recovery - and how will this reform the role of the citizen worker in both?
What will citizens newly demand of the state, if it manages to pull them through another crisis of economy?
How will one of capitalism’s most important pillars - the media, spring into action to save their parent institutions? Who will hold them accountable?
Which politicians and business leaders will be revered and which will be reviled? Why?
As natural ecology and the environment start their own recovery in the breath between onslaughts of industrialism, how will capitalism sell springing its destructive practices back into action?
How does remote technology and automation now change the role of work?
Capitalist ideologues have a task on their hands. They’ll need to defend and repackage a philosophy that has crumbled under the weight of global scrutiny - and not just in the short term.
Excuse me, I have questions
And if capitalism can’t revive itself, we’re immediately left with the largest questions that an advanced, social species ever really needs to engage with. How is a post-capitalist civilisation built in the wake of an old-world disaster?
We’ve got to ask:
What are the key social contracts - what are the values required to create co-operative, safe, stable and rewarding post-capitalist societies?
How do these new values transcend existing, fixed philosophical narratives - like religious, tribal or political affiliation? What are our new cultural stories?
Within a newly imagined society, what are our new incentives? How possible is it to create a model that exploits the human default for co-operation - while leveraging the raw power of individualism and recognition?
How does profit, of any kind, fit into this model (if at all)?
How is innovation inspired, facilitated and celebrated?
What is wealth, now? What is owned, and what is collectivised?
What is the new role of work in a technologically sophisticated and automation-heavy society?
How do we fit together the necessities of personal responsibility and group collectivism to arm a steadfast commitment to each other and ourselves?
How do we value and distribute leadership in our communities, and who becomes qualified to lead?
There is an abundance of resources. How are they distributed to create communities that are safe at ‘the bottom’? Is equality a necessary tenet of future humanity, or is it enough to create a ‘safety’ that can be expanded upon?
How do we redesign our trade systems so they’re generative (or at the very least, regenerative), rather than as extractive?
Capitalism will continue to be tested against the raw power of the biological world, and when forced, will mobilise an awesome might to fight its new aggressors - many of which it created itself. But the mechanical observations are less complex than the philosophical. The true challenge lies in the redesign of the incentives, relationships and structures that answer the real pressing question - what do we demand of the world we return to?
Have a day.
Twitter: Thomas KR