We Can't Afford Capitalism in the Year of the Plague (Boson Workers) 25 March 2020
The COVID-19 crisis, like the 2008 crash, has exposed the myth of capitalist individualism. It has made clear that the banks and corporations cannot survive without massive state support.
If the capitalist class is unopposed in its efforts to make the working class bear the weight of the crisis, it will be at the cost of millions of lives. Mankind has reached a point where the most basic function of society–the preservation of human life–is incompatible with capitalism.
As the pandemic spreads, the economic impact is acquiring dimensions that are without precedent in the history of the United States. As people are being instructed to “shelter in place” and practice “social distancing,” the economy is shutting down.
While deceitful and cynical lip service is being paid to protecting workers, the only purpose of the negotiations in Washington is to protect the wealth and profits of the superrich corporate-financial oligarchs. On a scale even greater than the bailout of 2008-09, the titans of Wall Street and the corporate boardrooms are demanding that the government place limitless sums at their disposal.
Up to this point, the federal government has spent less than $10 billion on emergency disaster relief related to the pandemic. And yet the US Treasury has purchased some $600 billion in securities in recent weeks, meaning it has spent 60 times more money propping up the banks than on addressing the healthcare crisis.
On top of the more than $2 trillion that has already been pledged to backstop the values of financial assets held by major banks, Congress is debating an additional $2 trillion bailout package.
The vast majority of that proposal consists in various handouts to business in the form of a payroll tax holiday and loans, including measures specifically targeting the airline and other industries. Less than $50 billion of the bill funds emergency measures to combat the pandemic. Just one company, Boeing, is demanding a bailout larger than every public health measure contained in the bill.
The New York Times declared in an editorial published yesterday, “The only practical way to limit mass unemployment, and to preserve previously viable companies, is for the government to pump money into the private sector.”
The last time this was done, in the response to the 2008 crash, the outcome was a bonanza for the superrich and affluent holders of financial assets. The wealth of the 400 richest people in America soared from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to $2.96 trillion in 2019.
The ugly reality of capitalist financial practices and the grotesque plundering of corporate assets refute the lying phrase that is intoned whenever reference is made to the needs of the working class: “There is no money!”
The problem is not an absence of money, but the control of society’s productive forces by the capitalist class.
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