“‘There is a rich man’s tuberculosis and a poor man’s tuberculosis. The rich man recovers and the poor man dies.’ This succinctly expresses the close embrace of economics and pathology.” – Dr. Norman Bethune, 1932
The pandemic is teaching us about what really matters — and has been possible all along
Before anything else I want to acknowledge what is unfolding in Canada and around the globe as a human tragedy. Even as this crisis offers an object lesson and has things to teach us, it is important to never lose sight of the scale of calamity in terms of suffering and loss of life.
We cannot give workers a choice between spreading the virus and missing rent. The consequences could be disastrous.
In Canada, COVID-19 has meant that public events and gatherings are being cancelled. Flights, concerts, and hockey games are getting cancelled across the board. Restaurants and bars are closing. People’s contracts and work hours are being lost.
COVID-19 is finally the monster at the door. Researchers are working night and day to characterize the outbreak but they are faced with three huge challenges.
First the continuing shortage or unavailability of test kits has vanquished all hope of containment. Moreover it is preventing accurate estimates of key parameters such as reproduction rate, size of infected population and number of benign infections. The result is a chaos of numbers.
Wherever Bernie Sanders’ campaign goes from here, the left critique of establishment politics is getting empirical backing through popular support for his candidacy. The establishment’s response— incredulity that the little people have the temerity to question their betters, is combined with a posture of victimhood, that blameless elites are being demonized by neo-collectivist malcontents who are too stupid to appreciate the blessing that four decades of neoliberalism has bestowed on them.
As we enter the second decade of the new century, signs of crisis are all around us. Climate change, rising economic inequality, assaults on workers’ rights and wages, unchecked corporate power, financialization, entrenched racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, and emboldened neo-fascism and right-wing populism, to name a few.
In the wake of Australian fire storms, global crop loss and catastrophic climate change shifts, billions of people are recognizing the dangers to society and life itself presented by capitalism’s profit-driven despoiling of nature. At the same time, the last 40 years of deepening inequality inside virtually all nations have undermined their social cohesion, and increasingly, capitalism’s mechanisms are being blamed. Anti-capitalism is exploding across many political landscapes.
