This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another
“ask Prof Wolff” question from our patreon community. This question comes from Derek Speer,
and Derek’s question is simply: What are the contradictions in capitalism that are exposed
and underscored for us by the Covid-19 pandemic? Well there are actually many,
but I think what you’re interested in is to see how a specific event like the pandemic
can serve, if you’re willing to see it, to expose capitalism’s contradictions.
So, here we go with an example. In order for capitalism to work reasonably well- that is,
to enable capitalist’s to hire workers, to put them to work, to sell the output that
those workers produced at a higher price than is necessary to cover the costs of the inputs,
the costs of the machines, and the cost to hire the workers, in other words, to sell the output
at a profit- how does capitalism do that? Well, one of the things you have to have
is a healthy worker. Another thing you have to have is a safe workplace. If workers are sick
and can’t work or if they’re not sick, they can work but coming to work is simply
too dangerous to their health, either or both of those will prevent capitalism from producing
the surplus or the profit that the capitalist is in business to get. So capitalism has to make sure
people, its workers particularly, are healthy and secondly, are safe enough to be willing to come to
work. Clearly, the pandemic produced problems on both counts. Millions of people got sick.
Almost a million in the United States died, depending a little bit on how you count.
Sick workers and dead workers are not profitable for capitalism, and even when
workers weren’t too sick or dead, they didn’t go to work because of the risk of becoming sick
or dead by doing so, so capitalism was hobbled. I’ll give you just one statistic. Over the 15
months since March of 2020 when the pandemic hit and when our capitalist system crashed,
82 million Americans had to file for unemployment compensation- some for just a few weeks,
others for the entire 15 months. Well, the total labor force in the United States-
adults able and willing to work and looking for work- is about 160 million people,
and that means if 82 million of them had to file unemployment at some time over the last 15 months,
more than half of the entire labor force was unemployed. While they’re unemployed,
they don’t make profits for their employer. That’s the problem. Capitalism was very severely impacted
negatively. Therefore, it is logical to say that the capitalist system, which wants and needs
healthy workers in safe workplaces, failed to have healthy workers in safe workplaces.
Is that failure the sign of a contradiction? It wouldn’t be if the causes of all of this
were external to the capitalist system, but they weren’t. The virus may have come
in from outside the United States (there’s debate about that), but it doesn’t matter one way or the
other because the capitalist system itself played a major role in making people sick who therefore
couldn’t work and in making workplaces risky, and thereby keeping profit-making workers away.
Here’s how that worked. Capitalist enterprises in the United States exist that can produce tests,
masks, ventilators, hospital equipment, ICU units, hospital beds- everything that we need.
We know they can do it, they’ve done it in the past. The capacity is there,
but it was not used to produce and stockpile the necessary tests, masks, ventilators,
and all the rest of it. They should have been produced to make us ready for a virus. They
should have been stockpiled around the country where concentrations of population exist
so they would have been easy to provide to people to keep them from getting sick. But they weren’t,
and you know why they weren’t? Because private enterprises didn’t find it profitable
to do that. You know, to produce a test or a mask or any of those other things, and then store it in
a warehouse somewhere, a warehouse that you have to rent, a warehouse that you have to keep clean,
where you have to inspect these things, make sure they’re in good shape, replace them,
repair them, as needed, and for how long? Well, who knows when the next virus will come?
The costs are huge, and the risks of doing it for many years- well you put those together and the
capitalist system drove those companies that could have produced what we needed for the virus to find
more profitable investments doing something else. Yep, the capitalist system of profit-driven
decisions produced the failure to prepare for and therefore cope with the virus. Capitalism’s
profit-making system was in contradiction to capitalism’s profit-making system.
That kind of internal contradiction plagues capitalism all over the place. What the pandemic
did was expose it as starkly as imaginable because it involved literally life and death. Yes,
capitalism is an internally contradictory system whose contradictions hobble it and hurt
the people living in it over and over again. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.