From failing to develop a vaccine, to evicting the jobless and
cutting off their health care, to needlessly subjecting workers and
the public to infection: capitalism will be responsible for millions
of coronavirus-related deaths.
Critics of socialism often point to the mass deaths that occurred
under dictators like Stalin and Mao. Such deaths were abhorrent, of
course. But one problem with this line of attack is that it
selectively ignores the numerous examples of
that are a matter of course under capitalism,
caused by grinding and utterly unnecessary poverty.
Both of these realities are or soon will be confronting us under
the unfolding coronavirus pandemic. The virus will likely kill
millions of people in the United States alone. Many of these
fatalities could have been avoided if we had a social order that
placed the needs of people over profit. Make no mistake: we’re
facing a pandemic that could produce one of the worst mass deaths in
human history, and capitalism will be responsible for many of them.
Profit Over
People
To explain why, we should first go over some basics about
capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system in which a small number
of people (capitalists) own the vast majority of material resources
(land, buildings, factories) necessary to produce useful things.
Other people, the working class — the vast majority of us — own
very little or no such resources.
Members of the working class must sell their labor to capitalists
for a wage in order to survive (or they must depend on the financial
support of someone else who works for a wage). The capitalist then
sells the products made by the worker on the market, hoping to fetch
a price over and above the cost of materials and what they paid the
worker who made the goods. The difference between a good’s cost of
production and the price the good sells for is what the capitalist
keeps as profit (and can do with whatever the hell they feel like:
buy a yacht, build a fourteenth bathroom in their mansion —
whatever their heart desires).
Usually, capitalists compete with one
another to sell similar goods. That competition forces each
capitalist to keep their prices as low as possible. But, in order to
continue making a profit, capitalists need to keep costs low as
well.
Competition forces each capitalist to not just make profits, but
to make greater profits than their competitors, Why? Because greater
profits mean a greater ability to beat out your competition moving
forward: by investing in labor-saving technologies and lowering
one’s labor costs, or by expanding production and making use of
economies of scale, or by spending money on marketing and taking
away competitors’ market share. Capitalists who fail to maximize
profits will soon find themselves unable to sell their goods and be
put out of business. And being put out of business means ending up
in the dire position of a worker.
This way of organizing the production and distribution of goods
has its virtues, as Karl Marx himself
emphasized.
Capitalism can inspire incredible innovation. But the same feature
of the system that breeds innovation — the imperative that
capitalists maximize profits — also gives rise to capitalism’s
most destructive tendencies.
It means that capitalists prioritize profits over the welfare of
their workers and of humanity as a whole. Owners will make their
employees work in uncomfortable and dangerous conditions and refuse
to pay them a living wage. They will pollute the environment with
deadly toxins and planet-destroying greenhouse gases before spending
money on safe production processes. And they will oppose life-saving
social policies like Medicare for All because they increase their
taxes and strengthen employees’ power to bargain for better wages.
Which brings us back to coronavirus.
The Coronavirus and Capitalist
Dysfunction
The coronavirus pandemic is showing us the many ways in which the
relentless drive for profit can be deadly.
First,
pharmaceutical
companies could have started to develop a vaccine for the virus
years ago. The novel coronavirus that is now ravaging the world is
actually one of a family of coronaviruses (including SARS and MERS)
with which
we
have long been familiar. It would have been possible to begin
research on vaccines and cures for coronaviruses in general, giving
us a head start on treatments for the current outbreak. But
pharmaceutical companies did not pursue this research, because the
prospect of a cure was not sufficiently profitable. (A similar
problem afflicts development of new drugs
to
treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.)
Researchers are now working on vaccines, but those are twelve to
eighteen months away from being ready. The outbreak may well have
run its course by then.
Epidemiologists estimate that the coronavirus could kill
up
to 2.2 million people in the United States, 510,000 in Great
Britain, and 50 million people globally. Many or most of those
deaths could have been avoided if we had a vaccine. We don’t have
a vaccine because developing one wasn’t profitable for
corporations.
Second, the measures necessary to slow the spread of the
coronavirus mean that most businesses need to suspend operations,
and many workers will lose their jobs or find their hours
drastically reduced. In countries where left-wing political parties
and strong labor movements have built robust welfare states that
check some of capitalism’s worst features, this will be bad but
not catastrophic.
Norway, for instance, is giving all workers affected by the
coronavirus slowdown
generous
paid leave while businesses shut down.
Denmark
and the
United
Kingdom are putting forward a similarly expansive relief
package, covering the vast majority of workers’ wages while
they’re out of work.
The United States, on the other hand, has
never
had a powerful left party, and its labor movement is
incredibly
weak. As a result, the American working class confronts a
particularly pure and brutal form of capitalism. Unlike countries
with a stronger labor movement, we do not enjoy strong collective
bargaining rights, nor basic social welfare provisions like
universal health care.
That means being laid off is particularly disastrous for American
workers. Losing a job could result in losing your health-care
coverage or being unable to pay your student loans. Worse still, it
could mean being unable to pay rent and getting evicted. Losing your
health-care or home can be deadly, even in the best of times. But
experiencing these hardships during a pandemic is horrific,
depriving people of the ability to avoid infection or to receive
treatment if they get sick.
Some workers will hold on to their jobs, but their work will put
them (and those they come into contact with) at high risk of
exposure to the coronavirus.
Capitalists
should shut down their businesses for the sake of their
workers and of public health; for businesses that can’t shut down,
bosses should make every effort to ensure their workers’ safety.
But capitalists
won’t do these things of their own free
will, for a very simple reason: they hurt bosses’ bottom line.
Starbucks,
for example, kept their stores open, even in cities that had ordered
nonessential businesses to close. (The company has since shifted to
only
providing drive-through service because of employee pressure.)
Many
grocery
stores are not providing gloves or masks, nor allowing workers
to follow CDC guidelines around handwashing and social distancing.
The drive for profit is endangering untold numbers of people by
allowing the virus to spread more rapidly. This is especially true
in the United States, where many workers do not have paid sick leave
and so
will
be compelled to work even if they’re sick. President Donald
Trump is even considering ordering businesses to open again in
April, likely at the peak of the pandemic,
to
protect corporate profits. Millions more could die if this
happens.
Neglect of worker safety is especially unconscionable when it
comes to health-care workers, our first line of defense against the
coronavirus. Many hospitals are woefully understaffed and
under-equipped to deal with the crisis.
At Oakland’s
Highland
Hospital and
Kaiser
Permanente Medical Center, for instance, nurses are being asked
to reuse single-use face masks, making them more likely to catch the
virus from infected patients and spread it to others. Similar
problems are common across the United States:
nurses
in Seattle report a shortage of masks and other protective
equipment, and
Memorial
Sloan Kettering Center in New York City has only a week’s
supply of masks on hand. One Brooklyn Health System in Brooklyn, New
York, will likely be
unable
to afford enough hospital beds to treat victims of the virus.
These conditions mean, again, that many people will die
unnecessarily.
The unpreparedness of our hospitals is not inevitable. It, too,
is the product of a system that puts profit over people. If we
adequately invested in public hospitals or used state resources to
rapidly produce necessary medical equipment, the unfolding pandemic
would not hit our health-care system nearly as hard.
Despite the fact that Italy’s health capacity has been
overstressed by the particularly brutal explosion of coronavirus
there,
its
universal single-payer health-care system is ensuring that every
person, no matter their job or income level, can receive the best
treatment possible.
Single-payer
systems have allowed Denmark and South Korea to quickly
institute coronavirus testing on a large scale, which has been
essential to their success in slowing the virus’s spread.
For the past several decades in the United States, however,
capitalists have waged an all-out assault on public goods and public
investment, fighting for tax cuts for billionaires and promoting
reliance on “market-based” solutions — and ensuring that we
don’t join the rest of the world in developing a public health
system.
People Over Profit
Capitalism is making an already terrible pandemic worse,
especially in countries like the United States where capitalism is
relatively untamed. Much of the damage has already been done: our
failure to develop a vaccine will kill millions or tens of millions,
and our lack of a universal single-payer system means that many will
die because they cannot get tested or treated. This is a disaster on
the scale of Stalin’s gulags or Mao’s mass famines.
But we can still minimize damage by organizing for and demanding
policy changes that challenge this murderous logic. We need Medicare
for All, so all people can receive the treatment they need
regardless of ability to pay. Continuing to support and build on
Bernie
Sanders’s campaign for president — a campaign that
we
need now more than ever — is one way to put pressure on
Congress to pass a version of Medicare for All in response to the
crisis.
We need paid sick leave for all workers (including
gig
and contract workers), so that no one is forced to come to work
sick. We should force all nonessential businesses to close, and pay
all workers enough to live during their time off. We should demand a
freeze on rents and mortgage payments, and a moratorium on evictions
and foreclosures, so that no one has to worry about going homeless.
And we should demand that the state use all resources at its
disposal (including the requisition of private property) to rapidly
expand our health system’s capacity to treat coronavirus patients.
Sanders’s
coronavirus platform, which incorporates all of these demands,
puts forward just the sort of policies we need.
Capitalists will resist these measures, because such measures
challenge their power and their profits. But they are needed to save
millions of lives. We have to organize to win these demands. From
auto
workers to
bakery
and café workers and
Verizon
employees, working people across the country have already shut
down businesses and won paid leave from their employers through
strikes and the threat of strikes. This kind of disruptive action on
a large scale is necessary to force owners and their public
officials to take our health and safety seriously.
By exerting their collective power,
workers
can prevent the worst-case pandemic scenarios. But to avoid
similar massacres in the future, like
the
one climate change could cause, we have to move beyond an
economic and political system that prioritizes profit over human
life.
