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In addition to the population, more and more people are inoculating the principles of the western economy. The omnipotence of competition and the fetish of the weak state have, of course, been criticized many times prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but post-capitalist voices have intensified in recent months.
We have compiled the most important of the relevant statements and books of the last weeks and months.
Chomsky: We’re still lucky with Covid …
According to the philosopher Noam Chomsky, also known as the father of modern linguistics, the man of our time has so far had some luck with viruses because they
- or they were very deadly but hardly widespread, like Ebola,
- or quickly become infected, but in most cases it did not cause death, as in the current Covid epidemic.
But a combination of these two can appear at any time: a pervasive and deadly virus. However, for such imaginary mutations, private research institutes will never develop a drug or vaccine. They will not spend money to prevent a possible disaster, even decades later. After all, they are interested in making the fastest possible profit tomorrow.
(It should be noted that many, including, for example, New York Times Economic Director, Neil irwin – the Pfizer vaccine is not considered a purely private product, as the US government has prescribed 100 million doses for almost $ 2 billion, so serial production started due to an injection of public capital ).
According to the philosopher, basic research should take place at the government / state level in the future,
(including, of course, the salaries of employees of public research institutes), as it is an elementary life interest, Chomsky believes. How much? Well, it’s still orders of magnitude less than the epidemic is beating down on the economy right now.
An MIT professor also recalled last summer that the scientific community had signaled in 2003, with the outbreak of the SARS epidemic, that a new variant of the coronavirus could soon arrive, something that states could have prepared for if they had not spent more in nonsense.
Wolff says the system has failed
According to American star economist Richard Wolff, the functioning of an economic system is shown not by how it works in peacetime, but by what happens in it when it is hit by a crisis. And global capitalism, he says, has certainly taken off. He explains this Disease is the system in his new book titled, with a visual subtitle: When capitalism is unable to protect us from the epidemic or from itself.
Wolff estimates that the coronavirus is so devastating in the United States because there has been a systematic campaign for decades against state involvement in public policy. From the McCarthysta witch hunt in the 1950s, Ronald Reagan was proudly committed to his fight against poverty, to today’s neoliberalism.
While President Roosevelt has only been able to emerge victorious from the recent similar crisis with aggressive state intervention, extensive government programs and redistribution (New Deal).
There could be rubber gloves and masks in every city, we have the ability to add them in production and storage as well, but they are not because it is not profitable. It follows that free market competition is certainly not the most optimal way to provide public health care in the future.
According to the economist’s assessment:
the common neoliberal mantra that only the private sector operates and the state is just one column is completely defeated,
that is, before our eyes. Indeed, the experience of managing the global epidemic has made it clear that without strong government intervention, such as direct public funding, the liberated market would not survive at all, but sometimes not even the workers themselves.
Piketty is watching the beat
Capital in the 21st century According to Thomas Piketty, a world-renowned French economist who published his book, his argument that any state intervention must be considered very carefully can never be accepted again, because it can be a big problem.
After all, the current emergency has shown that immediate government decisions can be made in hours, and the balance of swift and drastic interventions (health or financial) is clearly positive in all cases. Be it health redistributions, curfew or rules for the use of masks.
Radical steps have been shown to be possible
– summarizes Piketty’s collective experience, which he considers to be of historical importance.
Galloway darabolna
Scott Galloway (an otherwise million-million-dollar publicist and public writer) is perhaps more optimistic than anyone else, believing that something good can come out of the current epidemic financially if we find out in time.
In his current book (Post Corona: From crisis to opportunity) Above all, it captures the main economic lesson of the pandemic: the number of online purchases has exploded. Instead of a convenience store, we pay for streaming service providers instead of a website.
So the biggest winners are the tech giants: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
Yet this excessive growth, Galloway says, is suffocating the economy because it gets too much, too little. And this trend will only continue.
Therefore, according to the author, these gigantic companies should be dismantled, as was the case with the telecommunications giant AT&T in 1984. Then, the state divided it into eight parts, eventually producing more, creating more jobs and, therefore, taxing more than its gigantic-sized predecessor.
Ultimately, it is in the common interest of all to curb oversized monopolies.
Galloway says. Anyone who thinks that the big pharmaceutical manufacturers will be able to go after the techies will also have to be eliminated, as will the key players in all other sectors. To get air for others, the little ones, to have more jobs and, ultimately, to obtain much more income for the public than it is now.
(Cover image: Health worker checks the body temperature of a woman in China. Photo: Betsy Joles / Getty Images Hungary)
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