Our Class versus the Corporate State
COVID-19 Catastrophe: Our Class versus the Corporate State
The new year begins with reflections on the hard lessons of 2020. Countries such as China, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Vietnam, which all-but-eliminated the threat of COVID-19, imposed rigorous national lockdowns (closing all schools and virtually all workplaces) and ensured testing and contact-tracing strategies. They paid a price upfront and began a return to normal within weeks.
By comparison, the United States ended the year with a race between a vaccine rollout and the progress of a disease that’s reached 25,000,000 Americans, spreading at more than 200,000 new cases a day, with over 420,000 Americans dead. Compare that number to the 4,635 who’ve died in China, or the 1,328 in South Korea or the 35 in Vietnam, the 25 in New Zealand, and the 7 who died in Taiwan.
Now, Americans are used to thinking that some of these hard costs are simply the price of freedom. But that doesn’t do much to explain the difference. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) is our ally, while New Zealand is renowned for its civil liberties. In fact, the NGO Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index ranks New Zealand in its Top 10 while the United States ranks in the mid-40s.
What goes a long way toward explaining the difference is how the United States government spent our money. As the independent global news organization, The Conversation reports, New Zealand spent one-fourth of its GDP, the vast majority supporting workers and their businesses through the lockdown and almost half again as much specifically focused on seniors and low-income workers. By comparison, the United States only spent one-fifth of its GDP, over half of it going to businesses and only one-fifth going to workers.
The story of the pandemic in the United States is not simply the story of a country that sacrificed lives by keeping workplaces open; it is the story of a country that chose to line the capitalists’ pockets at the expense of public safety. It is not a story that can be explained away as the result of a bad presidential administration, and the problems it presented won’t go away with a new one. Too much money is at stake.
While 40 million Americans continue to face eviction, Business Insider reported America’s ruling class made $845 billion off the first six months of the pandemic. The pandemic in the United States was an exploited opportunity. Our lives were sacrificed for the sake of private property.
This is happening because the basic formula that made capitalism work has been automated out of existence. Digital technologies are rapidly replacing human labor, creating a new class of workers who are being thrown out of the economic system. Because this new class can no longer sell its labor in the marketplace, it can no longer buy from the market, disrupting and destroying the buying and selling that makes capitalism what it is. The new class has no stake in the system, and if it were to become conscious of itself as a class, it threatens the future of the private property system.
When Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said elderly people should volunteer to die for the sake of the country, he was, in fact, saying out elders should die for the ruling class. Our rulers’ call for “herd immunity” suggested many of us should die for the sake of the capitalist system. In this war, our ruling class hasn’t been, as it was sometimes called in the Gulf Wars, spilling “blood for oil” but spilling blood for the system of private property itself. When we recognize who we are as a class, we realize we are at war with a ruling class built from private property and all too willing to ill us to maintain control.
History is on our side. We are the class being created by new technologies that beg to be set free of a system that hobbles what these technologies can do. With today’s technology, we can take care of everyone, and we can redefine human life as a society to fit our moral standards. We can recognize human life as inherently valuable, far beyond any concept of material wealth. We can remove any incentive to destroy our planet or each other and repair the damage we’ve done to our environment. Once the human mind and spirit are free of the constraints of an outdated system, we can then work together to achieve goals that reach beyond the limits of human imagination.
Published: January 24, 2021
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