The covid-19 pandemic did more than trigger the third capitalist crash in this new century.
The combined pandemic-plus-crash tore away the veneer that had helped people avoid seeing
deep social problems and that had allowed politicians, repeatedly, to evade solutions.
Systemic racism, a badly broken education system, a cash-corrupted politics,
ecological degradation – symptoms of a larger sickness become clearer and more acute every day.
My new book, The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us
from Pandemics or Itself, is a compilation of essays that aims to explain how and why
the sickness underlying all these symptoms is the economic system, capitalism. Historians remind us
how the bubonic plague, or Black Death, provoked the final phase of European feudalism because that
pre-capitalist system was already sick with its problems and internal weaknesses. The possible
parallel with covid-19 and global capitalism today is a logical inference that this book explores.
Capitalism has three basic economic problems it has never solved. First, it organizes its
enterprises – factories, offices, and stores – undemocratically. A small minority at the
top – owners, major shareholders, directors – make all key decisions impacting employees, who are the
enterprise’s majority, but it is not accountable to those employees. That’s not democratic. Second,
capitalism is unstable. Its business cycles recur, on average, every 4 to 7 years, everywhere.
They damage and disrupt enterprises, jobs, families, educations, politics, and so on.
And third, capitalism generally fosters and deepens inequalities of wealth and
income. Capitalism lacks economic democracy, stability, and equality – very basic problems.
Across the last several centuries, as capitalism spread from England to its current global
prevalence, its three basic economic problems persisted. Various solutions were proposed,
but none succeeded. At best, reforms softened the problems’ social impacts.
Corporations were advised to recognize “stakeholders” beyond their shareholders. Keynes,
and subsequent economists, developed monetary and fiscal policies for governments to use
against the system’s instability. The history of capitalism is filled
with efforts to redistribute wealth and income to achieve less inequality. Most of those efforts
failed. Inequality remains emblematic of today’s capitalism in country after country.
Capitalism has so far outmaneuvered, or outlasted,
the many movements aimed at reforming it. Capitalistic forces even managed to transform
the most powerful of global movements against capitalism – namely,
socialism – into another version of itself. From a comprehensive opposition to capitalism per se,
socialism became, instead, a movement advocating for the state to control, or even replace, private
capitalists with state officials, and private enterprises with state-operated enterprises.
In reality, the great conflict of the 20th century – capitalism versus socialism, or the US
versus the USSR – was predicated on an elaborate misspecification of what each system actually was.
“Capitalism,” in that great conflict, was “private capitalism” – a system of enterprises producing
goods and performing services that were owned and operated by private individuals who occupied no
position within a state apparatus. “Socialism” was “state capitalism” – a system of enterprises
either owned and operated by the state and state officials, or else privately owned and operated,
but under direct, intrusive state supervision and regulation. The former “socialist” structure got
called “communism,” and the latter, “democratic socialism,” or similar terms of distinction.
And yet, both private and state forms of capitalism, were capitalism. They developed
leaders confident that capitalism’s three basic problems were not existential threats.
No leader imagined or foresaw what has now happened. The covid-19 pandemic arrived
and triggered another of capitalism’s periodic crashes. The pandemic and the
crash then worsened one another. Together they triggered social tensions that brought
inequality back onto the forefront of social consciousness in the United States and beyond.
One consequence of the neoliberalism that took over much of world capitalism after the
1970s was that privatization and deregulation became favored policies for
dealing with capitalism’s continuous crashes. Authorities thus imposed “austerity measures”
after the 2000 dot-com and the 2008 subprime mortgage crises. Public services,
including measures to protect and advance public health, and regulations governing private
healthcare industries, were cut. And those cuts undermined the preparations, private and public,
for a possible viral pandemic. When covid-19 hit, it thus triggered the capitalist crash that was
already overdue since 2008-2009, actually more than the usual 4 to 7 years between crashes.
The readers of The Sickness Is the System will find analyses of the intertwined crises of
public health and the capitalist economy. With each of the book’s five parts, a unique mix of
essays and updated transcripts of videos and media interviews are presented chronologically,
as they were produced in response to the evolution of both the pandemic and the economic crash.
Part I of this book thus argues that the cause of our current societal sickness was not chiefly
the virus, but rather, an unsustainable and vulnerable economic system. Part II explores
capitalism’s accumulated vulnerabilities with particular emphasis on how they undermined the
capacity to contain covid-19’s spread across the US. Part III examines how the intertwined pandemic
and capitalist crash reawakened millions to social problems capitalism had long been unable to solve.
The system had deferred seriously addressing what activists demanded in the way of ending racism,
unemployment, sexism, poverty, inequality, political corruption, and so on. Pandemic
capitalism forcefully returned these problems to the forefront of public awareness.
Whenever capitalism has been challenged as a system, voices of reform arise. Reform
proposals serve as distracting covers for what the main government programs actually do:
throw unprecedented amounts of money, via government deficits and central-bank money
creation, at capitalists to help them get through the crises. Part IV of the book
offers critical looks at reforms of capitalism in the past, and what that history suggests
about the pertinence of similar reforms here and now. Given the history of past reforms,
and this latest crisis’s extreme severity, reforms may no longer suffice. There are signs
that, this time, reform demands may get swept up into social movements for transition beyond
capitalism – the system – itself. Such revolutionary movements will define their goals
as making sure that the set of changes now arising will not only be achieved but will also endure.
Part V of the book considers today’s case for,
and the possibilities of, changing the capitalist system as a whole. All economic systems are born,
evolve, and die. As they decline, eventually, alternative systems replace them.
The catastrophic coincidence of a viral pandemic and an economic crash places extreme pressure
on our institutions and ways of thinking. Yet there were always critical strains of thought
and social movements that understood that we can, and should, do better than capitalism.
I hope that The Sickness Is the System builds on the feeling and thinking of those
today who grasp this critical moment in capitalism’s history. Learn
more about The Sickness Is the System at www.democracyatwork.info.