The capitalist agenda has long reached its expiry date and the suffocating stench of this rot has been let loose by the menacing pandemic.
Those who have doggedly claimed the supremacy of the capitalist system have been ipso facto proven wrong. Companies who have managed to survive thus far face the imminent threat of bankruptcy, those that have the financial latitude are ruthless in exploiting the opportunity granted by the pandemic to artificially inflate prices and maximise profits. Further exacerbating to the crises is the wave of corporate cannibalism which will be as a direct effect of the economic crises, resulting in mass retrenchments and further marginalization of the poor and working class. Millions of workers around the world are faced with the unimaginable task of physically and economically surviving the plague of both an economic crisis and a pandemic.
However culpable we may claim the pandemic to be, it cannot be viewed as the direct cause of the economic crises. At best, this claim is an obfuscation of the truth aiming at shielding the capitalist system from the denunciation it is so deserving of. In his theory of totality, Hegel provides that the totality, in this instance the economic crises, is the product of ‘that process which preservers all of it its “moments” as elements in a structure, rather than as stages or phases.’ Therefore, we cannot view the crises as being unconnected to other “moments” or small causes which given rising to the event.
The viral pandemic has served as the spark to a wildfire which has been fuelled by a fragile and volatile economic system which has indefatigably exploited labour and the environment towards the accumulation of wealth. Because this wealth is monopolised, labour – which capital not only heavily relies on for production but consumption as well – as alienated from the fruits of their labour and resorts to sourcing out what Karl Marx defines as “fictitious capital” through the credit system. The contradictions which capitalism conceives, the fragmentation of labour, the reduction of labour to a surplus commodity, and overproduction have all grimly exposed capitalism’s tendency for crises.
Any attempt at a capitalist solution should be fervently rejected. It must be said that a solution that fails to arrest the pandemic-induced health and economic crises at the same time, will only assist in taking us out of the frying pan and throwing us into the fire. It will only serve to further entangle us in the restraining web of debt and form the foundation for the next crises. To this, we must unequivocally state asiyifuni iagenda yama capitalist!
But what is it that we need so much that we cannot obtain from a system which has, as Marx remarked, ‘created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’? We need that which a free market system cannot feasibly offer, equality; abolition of the exploitation of man by man; national health insurance which is guaranteed to every citizen regardless of their socioeconomic status; the emancipation of those who are fettered in social and economic bondage. We need maximum social welfare, we need socialism.
At this instance, it is incumbent on me to fortify my argument for a socialist society by explaining how such a society would have avoided the socioeconomic calamity we are faced with. Firstly, there are elements of the National Health Insurance system already being implemented in the response against COVID. The rigid separation of health facilities and supplies is representative of a society which remains skewed and fragmented; it’s a tale of disparities which disproportionately affects the black and the poor. In a two-tier system, the public health sector carries the overwhelming burden of a largely downtrodden and dispossessed population. Under an NHI system, both the private and public health actors would be mobilised towards achieving universal health care access. The positive role of the state in facilitating the distribution of resources would breathe life into the socialist maxim, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
In his foreword to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation Joseph Stiglitz correctly states that “the myth of the self-regulating economy, in either the old guise of laissez-faire or the new clothing of the Washington consensus, does not represent a balancing of these freedoms, the poor face a greater sense of insecurity than everybody else”. The freedoms which were being referred to by Stiglitz were freedoms from hunger and freedoms from fear. The pandemic seems to reveal these greater insecurities in the threat of unemployment, debt, and a serious decline in the living standards of the poor. National wealth is one of the principal tenets of socialism, a socialist society would not be as harshly affected by a viral pandemic as national demand for food and other basic necessities such as hygiene products could be fulfilled, in recognising this, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) postulates that “No significant national demand can be completely fulfilled without the eventual destruction of capitalist structure”.
However noble the intent, the stimulus package will not solve the problem. As mentioned, the pandemic is a “moment” in the entire event therefore to attempt to circumvent only the material challenges is to completely miss the window (of opportunity) to change the socio-economic paradigm. The poor and working-class have only been granted temporary relief from the abuses of capitalism. The best that can be expected from this is slow economic recovery, high unemployment, financial austerity (which will affect all public sectors), capitalist retaliation and debt which will be the only part of national wealth that enters into the collective.
It is indeed true that we cannot eat ideology. However, a response which lacks ideology can only lead to many more hunger days for the poor and working class. After all, it is the capitalists’ ideology that has predestined us to the crises we find ourselves in. As soon the opportunity arises, it will return to its sterile form reproducing the conditions necessary for production, i.e., exploitation of man by man and the reproduction of intergenerational poverty, unknowingly, it will be fertilising the ground for the next crises.
The capitalist system has reached its expiry date and it should be thrust aside in favour of a humane and emancipatory alternative. Down with capitalism, forward with socialism!
Ntokozo Lunga is a member of SASCO UNISA Sol Paatjie branch and a former Branch Secretary at Rhodes University. He writes in his personal capacity.