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</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">CoronaShock: A Virus and the World</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">May 5, 2020</div>
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<h2><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus/"> CoronaShock: A Virus and the World</a></h2>
<p>
<span><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/es/dossier-28-coronavirus/"><span>Español</span></a></span> <span><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/dossie-28-coronavirus/"><span>Português</span></a></span></p><h3><strong>Dossier n°28</strong></h3>
<p><span class="gmail-caption">For this dossier, <i>CoronaShock: The Virus and the World</i>, we invited artists and militants from around the world to contribute visual reflections made in quarantine to the <i>CoronaShock Sketchbook</i>.
Just as we are living the dehumanisation of neoliberalism –
characterised by the flexible and fragmented world of work that makes
working while quarantined possible – our streets and public spaces have
also become dehumanised, largely emptied of their human and economic
life. From the exodus of migrants in Delhi to the plight of precarious
women workers in Barcelona and Kuala Lumpur, the question emerges: what
are essential services and who are the workers who maintain them? From
Buenos Aires’s vacated Plaza de Mayo to the township evictions in South
Africa, from the banners hung from New York City’s fire escapes to the
shouts of São Paulo’s <i>panelaços</i> (pot-banging protests), we
wonder: what could the shape of mass resistance could look like under
social distancing? The sketches of Cuban medical brigades and the civic
collectivity in China remind us of the vital importance of human and
state-led solidarity in this conjuncture. This sketchbook provides a
snapshot and asks us how we might fill – and humanise – these emptied
and haunted public streets and spaces again; it allows us to imagine
what future is possible for life after coronavirus.</span></p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18742" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/01-Vikas-Thakur_Migrant-Labour.jpg" alt="Vikas Thakur_Migrant Labour" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18742" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>‘Home’, a distant dream for India’s migrant labourers.</strong></span><br><span>Delhi, India</span><br><span>Vikas Thakur / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a></span><br><span>In
India, migrant labourers traveled across the country en masse after the
government declared a lockdown. These are workers who, before the
pandemic, already had to struggle daily for even an ounce of food – then
COVID-19 hit.</span></p></div>
<hr>
<p>In December 2019, doctors in Wuhan (China) began to see patients with
a kind of viral pneumonia. By the end of the month, an investigation
began and China’s health authorities <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/03/31/growing-xenophobia-against-china-in-the-midst-of-corona-shock/">sent</a>
out a public warning and notified the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The Chinese authorities isolated a new type of coronavirus on January 7,
and then on January 12 they shared the genetic sequence of the novel
coronavirus for use in developing diagnostic kits. The government, the
Communist Party, and the Chinese public began a major effort to contain
its spread. This mysterious pathogen was a form of coronavirus, which
received the official name of <a href="https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it">SARS-CoV-2</a>;
unlike other respiratory viruses, this one is able to live both in the
nose and throat – from where it is highly contagious – and in the lungs –
where it is deadly for its host, and for whom it often does not present
symptoms immediately. It has spread rapidly around the world, striking
almost every country, causing lockdowns and quarantines, and therefore
having an immense – and continued – impact on social and economic life.
Even as the virus seems to have been contained in many parts of the
world, the return of this strain and of the other thousands of strains
of the coronavirus should be anticipated. This global pandemic, like the
outbreak of cholera in 1832 and the flu in 1918, will return in cycles.</p>
<p>Country after country has gone into various forms and lengths of
lockdowns as the virus has infected more and more people and killed
thousands. As a result of the quarantines and isolation orders, economic
activity has shuddered to a near halt. The International Labour
Organisation released a report which <a href="https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/coronavirus/impacts-and-responses/WCMS_739047/lang--en/index.htm">suggested</a>
that 25 million jobs will be lost due to the CoronaShock, and that
workers will lose about $3.4 trillion in income by the end of the year.
It could get worse, as businesses and corporations are taking advantage
of CoronaShock to restructure their operations to become more
‘efficient’ with less employees. A consequence of long-term unemployment
and underemployment, as well as of uncertainty in the oil market, is
that the global growth rate will likely splutter down to around 1%, as
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggests; even this is predicated
upon Chinese growth which – though dented – is expected to increase as
the SARS-CoV-2 seems to have been managed within the country’s borders.
Stock markets from Hang Seng to Wall Street saw significant losses,
their already inflated value collapsing.</p>
<p>Vast amounts of emergency funding were brought together by
governments and by international bodies. Money was accumulated by the
United Nation’s Central Emergency Response Fund ($15 million), the World
Bank ($12 billion), and the International Monetary Fund ($1 trillion),
and central banks opened new facilities to lend money to financial
institutions and to companies. The United States Congress passed a bill
for an astronomical $2.2 trillion in emergency funds, vast amounts of it
to bolster corporations. It became very clear that the problem was not
illiquidity in financial markets, which was one of the causes of the
2008-09 financial crisis, but a concatenation of events: the lack of
certainty about the coronavirus, the rapid decline in oil prices, and
the long-term problems of unemployment and underemployment. The money
raised is supposed to deal with the CoronaShock, but how it will be
spent is precisely the issue at hand. There is a habit in a capitalist
society to throw money at banks and at large corporations. Experience
shows us, however, that these entities seldom use this money to meet key
goals of our predicament: to provide relief for the general public –
including the provision of income and jobs – and to provide a long-term
solution to social inequality. That is why Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research and the International Assembly of the Peoples has
produced a document, whose 16-points we reproduce in part 2 of this
dossier, that responds to the CoronaShock from the standpoint of the
world’s people.</p>
<p><i>CoronaShock: The Virus and the World</i> will come in three parts.
Part 1 is on the structural features that resulted in our present
crisis. Part 2 is on the 16-point programme from the International
Assembly of the Peoples and Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research. One of the points in the programme is for a Universal Basic
Income. This is a complex idea that requires discussion. In Part 3 of
our dossier, we provide a brief introduction to the idea of the
Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer some critiques of the concept and
some ways to sharpen the way we think about it.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18751" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/02-Kalia-venereo_nunca-mas.jpg" alt="Kalia venereo_nunca mas" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18751" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Nunca más</strong> | Never Again</span><br><span>Havana, Cuba</span><br><span>Kalia Venereo / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dominiocuba/">Dominio Cuba</a></span><br><span>‘Neoliberal
policies that deprive people of the right to health #NeverAgain’. This
piece represents the Cuban doctors who set out to overcome the pandemic
through solidarity. It was created for the organisation Dominio Cuba in
support of the convocation of French organisations and celebrities for a
global social media campaign to promote a future without neoliberal
policies, which deprive people of the right to health.</span></p></div>
<hr>
<h2><span><b>Part 1. </b><em>The Austerity Virus</em></span></h2>
<p>The global pandemic shows us the clear destructive tendencies of
capitalism in its neoliberal phase. This conjuncture, with the slowdown
of economic activity and the turbulence in the stock markets, has turned
neoliberal capitalist leaders and multilateral institutions into
Keynesians – be they Angela Merkel (Germany) and Emmanuel Macron
(France) or the World Bank and the IMF. Each of them opened windows at
their central banks and in their finance ministries to pour money into
the private sector (and to expand state programmes). On the other hand,
it has made radical right-wing leaders – such as Donald Trump (USA),
Narendra Modi (India), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
(Turkey), and Viktor Orbán (Hungary) – tighten their grip on their
already obscene programmes, including xenophobia. For them, it has been
far easier to blame China for the virus than to take responsibility for
their own failures to tackle the pandemic, even after they received
ample warning. These leaders of the North Atlantic states and the
institutions they control created the conditions for this crisis, which
has led to an unsustainable social situation for the people of the world
– particularly in the Global South. They treated the crisis as though
it had emerged merely from a confluence of circumstances that could be
entirely explained by the pandemic; headlines announced that the ‘crisis
is provoked by the coronavirus’. This virus – like other such viruses –
raises the fundamental question of human encroachment into forests and
the balance between human civilisation (agriculture and cities) and the
wilds. As Miguel Tinker Salas and Víctor Silverman write in <a href="https://www.jornada.com.mx/2020/04/05/opinion/012a1pol"><i>La Jornada</i></a>, the virus is the product of nature, while the crisis is the product of neoliberalism.</p>
<p>However, since the 1970s (and most intensely since the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1991), the neoliberal globalisation project has shown
increasingly striking levels of dehumanisation – including cuts in
public institutions and austerity towards social policies. This
dehumanisation convulsed in a cycle of crises, often motivated by the
turbulence of precarious work, the unsustainable credit given to people
with suppressed incomes in order to manufacture demand, and the further
shift of capital from industry to finance. The crises that emerged did
not come from an upsurge of popular struggles that challenged
capitalism; they came, instead, from the dehumanised logic of capital in
its neoliberal phase. Crises were resolved through remedies that were
often worse than the disease.</p>
<p>The emergence of the novel coronavirus and the crisis that it has
caused reveal the decay of capitalist civilisation. Perhaps the world
will not be the same after the pandemic has been controlled. The eroded
neoliberal state can either be supplanted by a state structure that
favours the neo-fascist project, or by one that builds public
institutions and public action that put the needs of the people over
profit. This is a formidable choice. There is anxiety in sections of the
neoliberal bloc that whatever policies of a social nature are put in
place on an emergency basis during the CoronaShock might become hard to
undo; it will take more than inertia to ensure that any gains made in
this period remain in place when the immediate crisis is over.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18760" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/03_Panelac%CC%A7o.jpg" alt="Panelaço" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18760" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Fora Bolsonaro!</strong> | Get out, Bolsonaro!</span><br><span>São Paulo, Brazil</span><br><span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/digneves/">Ingrid Neves</a> / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a></span><br><span>‘Get
out Bolsonaro’, ‘get out Fascist’, and ‘not him’ are among the chants
that fill the air during panelaços (protests characterised by the
banging of pots and pans) in Brazil under quarantine. Isolation has not
stopped voices, pots, and noisemakers from uniting against the
government of President Jair Bolsonaro in large urban centres.</span></p></div>
<p>The crisis engendered by the global pandemic far exceeds the issue of
health. Beyond the chaos and uncertainty of the present, the question
is posed about whether a new social model and political order are
possible in the near future. In a discussion between the philosophers
Slavoj Žižek and Byung-Chul Han, they posed an idea of the future: will
what emerges resemble some kind of ‘re-founded communism’, or will it
develop into a kind of police state propped up by big data?</p>
<p>There is no <i>a priori</i> answer to these questions. The current
crisis is part of a series of accumulated trends that have accelerated
over the previous decades and that have exploded as a result of the
global pandemic. Four structural characteristics of the crisis need to
be elaborated: deepened financialization, the decline of US hegemony,
the displacement of labour by technology and increases in productivity,
and the crisis of the neoliberal state.</p>
<h3><span><i>A Wave of Financialization</i></span></h3>
<p>What was presented as a way out of the 2008 credit crisis was not a
true exit. The bailout policy for investment banks and large
non-financial companies adopted by the countries of the Eurozone, as
well as by the United States and the United Kingdom, generated a process
of global hyper-liquidity (that is, an over-abundance of dollars).
Whenever capital faces weak profitability, it always prefers speculative
fictitious activity – rushing, for instance, to the stock markets; in
the current period, the quantitative extent of the financial sector
relative to the real economy is stunning, and this is what makes it
unique.</p>
<p>There are at several elements that are key to the process of
financialization. The process refers to the ballooning of the financial
sector that has been taking place since the 1980s, with larger volumes
of surplus value created by the productive sector being absorbed into
the financial firms. Immense debt of various kinds is accumulated by
households – notably working-class households – to finance everyday
life; this debt is packaged into securities and bounces around in the
giant casino of the financial world. What we observe is a qualitative
shift in economic activity, so that new crises develop out of the
instability of finance in the realm of circulation alongside the old
crises of profitability from activities of production.</p>
<p>This great abundance of money did not trigger a global process of
productive investments. On the contrary, most of the world’s money once
more ended up adding to sovereign debt and financial assets (including
through re-energized stock buys), causing the process of
financialization to accelerate. New asset bubbles were inflated through
such instruments as government bonds, and finance flew to capitalise
companies in the new technology sectors.</p>
<p>Technology firms have begun to dominate the stock markets, and they
have absorbed a considerable part of the world’s liquidity; this
absorption was generally characterised by the centralisation of capital,
especially in US firms (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and
Facebook were the firms that had the highest valuations). These US
technology firms have been fundamentally challenged by the growth of
Chinese technology firms – such as Huawei. Huawei’s advances in such
areas as 5G threaten the US firms’ domination over intellectual property
rights claims, which give them the advantage of monopoly rent over
these property rights. The trade war prosecuted by the United States
against China can be understood directly by the threat that Chinese
technology firms pose to powerful US technology firms.</p>
<p>Both the Global North and the Global South have experienced a rise of
financialization. While finance in the North channelled capital into
new hyper-profitable sectors (such as platform capitalism and
technology), in the South finance took on the dynamic of indebtedness,
followed by capital flight. In 2015, the US Federal Reserve adopted the
policy of strengthening the US dollar by increasing the federal funds
rate (the overnight rate that depository institutions charge each other
for loans), which drew in money from the rest of the world to bolster
the US economy. As a result of such policies, the United States
recovered its leading role as the destination of capital after more than
a decade of the ‘emerging markets’ drawing in global capital. In 2018,
the three countries with the highest net capital inflow were the United
States ($258 billion), China ($203 billion), and Germany ($105 billion).
The United States attracted a large part of the world’s liquidity,
largely due to the US Federal Reserve policy of higher interest rates;
this drew capital from the Global South to the Global North.</p>
<p>The deepening power of finance over society and the economy has led
to three outcomes: the political dependence of economically indebted
Southern countries, the stagnation of the productive sectors of the
economy in the Global North, and the chronic instability of the world
system, which puts the interest of capital before the needs of people.
The appearance of the coronavirus has accelerated this process. China
has become central to global manufacturing; the halt of production in
China, and the fall of its industrial production by 15% (as compared to
performance in the previous year), make it hard to understand how
liquidity to the big banks in Global North is expected to revive not
only the global supply chain, but also aggregate global demand.</p>
<h3><span><i>The Acceleration of the Decline of the United States </i></span></h3>
<p>Giovanni Arrighi, in <i>Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century</i>
(2007), considers the increased and accelerated financialization
process to be an indicator of the crisis of US hegemony. The United
States has driven a hybrid war against several non-aligned states (Iran
and Venezuela) in order to gain dominance over China in Eurasia, and it
has used its financial power for this process, as well as to
re-establish its position of eminence over its allies. But this drive
marks the weakness of the unilateralism of Washington.</p>
<p>The health and humanitarian crisis aggravated by this global pandemic
has strengthened the role of China, in particular, as a state capable
of controlling the virus within its borders, and then of using its
expertise and resources to help people suffering beyond its borders. On
the other hand, Trump’s callous attitude towards even his own people –
putting ‘care’ for the economy ahead of the humanitarian disaster – made
the decline of US leadership evident as the US failed to lead any kind
of response – even through the typically pliant G20. Whatever the lack
of clarity about what will come in the future – whether we have entered
an Asian Century or a bipolar era or a multipolar period – it is clear
that that Western liberal civilisation has not even been capable of
responding to the needs of the people in its own part of the world.</p>
<h3><span><i>Digitalization Against Labour</i></span></h3>
<p>The concentration of capital in the technology sector should not go
unnoticed. It raises at least two important debates: first, that it
generates a speculative asset bubble focused on high-tech companies, and
second, that it both expands the influence of global capitalism
throughout the world and allows for the control of data that is in turn
used to manage people. The exponential growth of ‘platform capitalism’ –
or economic activity that is rooted in Internet-based platforms – and
of the collection and analysis of big data produces new logics of
consumerism; this is a key part of what is known as the Fourth
Industrial Revolution. This platform capitalism shapes and channels
consumer needs, produces new forms of subjectivity, and even intervenes
in creating political identities. The overall creation of
individualisation through the atomisation of social activity creates new
ways of being in the world.</p>
<p>The global pandemic, and the lockdown that it has occasioned in large
parts of the world, have been propitious for the development of
platform capitalism. Remote work using the Internet provides a way to
continue working during the quarantine. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and
Zoom have made it possible to work from home, and they have suggested
that this is beneficial for the world’s workers. For example, they
suggest that we are able to use our time more freely, and that we are –
through flexible contracts – able to change jobs with greater frequency.
Of course, the idea of life-long employment for workers under
capitalism is now anachronistic, and flexible work has become the
paradigm of this period of neoliberalism. Among jobs that are possible
to carry out remotely, this model also ignores the increased burden of
uncompensated labour – such as caring for children who are out of school
due to the crisis and caring for family members who are at increasing
risk of falling ill, all while working remotely. Furthermore, the
central role played by platform capitalism in the midst of this lockdown
period advances the agenda of neoliberalism – notably the segmentation
of the work force and the fragmentation of workers – further
subordinating the workforce to the unfettered interests of capital.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18769" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/04-Essential-Workers_NY_BelenMarco.jpg" alt="Essential Workers_NY_BelenMarco" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18769" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Who sustains life?</strong></span><br><span>New York City, United States</span><br><span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/belensianetha/">Belén Marco Crespo</a> /<a href="https://www.instagram.com/peoplesforumnyc/"> The People’s Forum</a></span><br><span>The
working class has been facing the systemic crisis of capitalism long
before the outbreak of Covid-19 and it is the working class, still, who
continues to sustain life. Immigrants, informal and low-wage workers,
and women in New York bear the burdens of care work in a time when all
of humanity needs to prioritize care over profit.</span></p></div>
<h3><span><i>The Crisis of the Neoliberal State</i></span></h3>
<p>The neoliberal state system has shown that it is incapable of solving
the problems that its model creates. In 2008, for instance, the
neoliberal state system, led by the United States, hastened to pump
enormous amounts of capital into the financial system, and into
particular large corporations (such as General Motors). This
intervention was known as ‘financial Keynesianism’, or state
intervention to sustain the architecture designed by financial firms to
promote and benefit the neoliberal project. The underlying issues –
namely the lack of income for billions of people who live on expensive
and unsustainable credit – were not addressed.</p>
<p>In many countries, discredited neoliberal and ‘third way’ (or
centrist) politicians gave way to projects of the far right and
neo-fascists. Álvaro García Linera, the former Vice President of
Bolivia, calls this the stage of capitalism <i>zombie neoliberalism</i> –
a neoliberal project that favours hatred and resentment. In the context
of this zombie neoliberalism, the bourgeois state enters into crisis,
since it cannot acknowledge – let alone address – the democratic demands
of the people; a ‘state of exception’ prevails, with neo-fascist
authoritarianism eclipsing the already frazzled liberal democratic
institutions. Political theorist William Davies uses the term <i>punitive neoliberalism</i>
to describe a neoliberalism that responds to the crisis by deepening
its policies of austerity and fiscal rigour and imposing greater
indebtedness, especially in the Global South. In Davies’ words, this
leads to ‘a melancholic condition in which governments and societies
unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations’.</p>
<hr>
<h2><span><b>Part 2. </b><em>In Light of the Global Pandemic, Focus Attention on the Needs of the People</em></span></h2>
<p>Those with power in the system are the first to design mechanisms to
protect themselves during a crisis. Whenever there is a financial
crisis, for instance, the actual cause of the meltdown is not addressed;
what is hastily put on the table is an enormous financial bailout for
those who provoked the crisis in the first place. As the global pandemic
has unfolded, governments have once more set aside great sums of money
for the interests of capital to protect themselves, as central banks –
following the lead of the US Federal Reserve – cut interest rates to
deliver liquidity to the stock markets so that the wealthy can ensure
the health of their investments, rather than ensuring the health of the
people. Resources of the public, which in this period are rarely turned
over for the public good, are rapidly made available to save the private
sector.</p>
<p>States with a socialist orientation (from national governments as in
China to state governments as in Kerala) have mobilised whatever
resources they have available – regardless of economic losses – to
contain the pandemic. The WHO <a href="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf">called</a>
China’s efforts ‘the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease
containment effort in history’. Meanwhile, the bourgeois order has
utterly failed to use their considerable resources and has failed to
prepare a rational plan for these resources; the death rates from Italy
to the United States of America have been catastrophic, a political
crime against humanity.</p>
<p>Over the course of the past thirty years since the fall of the USSR
and the weakened condition of the global left, forces of the left have
been placed on the back foot. Governments eager to please the interests
of the billionaire class have cut taxes and enforced austerity,
privatised precious public assets, and deregulated industry and
commerce. In the name of efficiency, the bourgeois state has intensified
the class struggle, attacking labour unions and left organisations,
attempting to fragment the reservoirs of the left. The growth of
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), often backed by the foundations
of the plutocracy, undermined the political left as it turned the
attention of people away from the totality of their problems to
single-issue campaigns; someone was interested in water delivery,
someone else in education, but no entity was drawing the people into a
frontal assault on the system as a whole – namely against capitalism.</p>
<p>A consequence of the weakening of the left in a period of full-front
class struggle and the development of a media onslaught that sold
commodities as dreams is that the left has been forced to engage
considerable energy on short-term struggles. Relief against the regime
of austerity came alongside building struggles against the increased
brutality of capitalist production processes and state violence. Without
the left forces playing a role alongside popular sentiment against the
cuts and the violence, the brutalisation of the labour process, and the
impoverishment of the workers, the impact of neoliberalism and
globalisation on the dispossessed and working class would have been far
worse. A weakened left, driven by reality to focus on the short-term,
has nonetheless produced many programmes for a socialistic approach
towards several crises; these programmes have important elements that
require study. Where the left has been in government, it has
experimented with new approaches to the endemic crisis of capitalism and
has sought to mobilise its resources for the social good and to develop
public action to transform society and to advance the class struggle.</p>
<p>As the global pandemic escalated beyond China’s borders, it became
clear that the societies that had undermined their public institutions
would suffer immeasurably from the virus. The Chinese government has
used its considerable resources to test its population, to establish who
the infected patients had contacted, to treat and monitor patients, to
tend to the needs of the shut-down cities, and to ensure that society
did not suffer unnecessarily from disruptions. From the United States to
India to Brazil, however, the evisceration of public institutions –
particularly public health institutions – has left society vulnerable.
The privatisation of medical colleges has led graduates to the higher
paying end of medicine as a way to pay off their debts, while the
privatisation of hospitals has driven cuts to the surplus or surge
capacity; in these hospitals, every bed and machine is treated as real
estate from which to maximise rent collection. Just-in-time medicine for
private gain became the formula.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18778" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/05-Tings-Chak_East-is-Red.jpg" alt="Tings Chak_East is Red" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18778" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>THE EAST IS RED.</strong></span><br><span>Shanghai, China</span><br><span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/thingswithouttheh/">Tings Chak</a> / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a></span><br><span>On
4 April at 10am, China held three minutes of silence to commemorate
those who fought and died in the international battle against COVID-19 –
it was the Qingming, the festival for ancestors. The country stopped
and the sounds of sirens, car and ship horns, and the belltower playing
‘The East is Red’ filled the air.</span></p></div>
<p>The failure of the austerity health care system is now clearly
visible. So too is the utter failure to establish institutions to take
care of the vulnerable in times of an emergency, and the universal
failure to nurture a culture of public action that would propel worker
organisations and social groups to help sustain communities in the midst
of the crisis. This failure of the state and of society in countries
that have watched neoliberalism and austerity cannibalise public
resources could not be justified by the wrath of the virus itself; why
was it that countries with more robust states and with a tradition of
public action have been able to more effectively curtail the virus?</p>
<p>One of the key achievements of the very rich has been to delegitimise
the idea of state institutions. In the West, the typical attitude has
been to attack the government as an enemy of progress; to shrink
government institutions – except the military – has been the goal. Any
country with a robust government and state structure has been
characterised as ‘authoritarian’. But this crisis has shaken that view.
Countries with intact state institutions that have been able to handle
the pandemic – such as China – cannot be easily dismissed as
authoritarian; a general understanding has come that these governments
and their state institutions are instead efficient. It is impossible to
make the case any longer that this sclerotic and hollowed-out bourgeois
state form is more efficient than a system of state institutions that
are made efficient by the process of trial and error.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18787" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/06-Henar-Diez-Villahoz_The-life-supporters-2020.jpg" alt="Mobile" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18787" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Quien sostiene la vida</strong> | Those who sustain life.</span><br><span>Madrid, Spain</span><br><span>Henar Diez Villahoz</span><br><span>The
stock exchange is empty, the stock market has plummeted. Solidarity
networks are being organized in neighborhoods as well as a call to
defend public health, which has been collapsed by budget cuts. At the
forefront of this struggle are precarised workers, who continue to go to
work in sectors such as distribution, food provision, and cleaning in
order to sustain life.</span></p></div>
<p>What we have learned not only from China, but also from Cuba,
Venezuela, and the Indian state of Kerala, is that if a society is
organised by people’s organisations (trade unions, women’s
organisations, student unions, youth organisations, cooperatives), then
they have the capacity for public action. An organised society is one
that builds the ability of people to learn how to act collectively in
normal times – even more so in a crisis. The socialist project is only
partly developed through the institutions of the state; the other part –
the most vital part – is for society to be organised and energised and
to be prepared for the everyday and extraordinary work of social
construction.</p>
<p>As the global pandemic grew in scope, Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research and the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), a
platform of over two hundred organisations from almost a hundred
countries, opened a discussion on the crisis and on the most dire and
immediate needs for the global working class. The document that we
produced includes a sixteen-point programme based on the experience of
struggle and governance that has emerged from these movements, unions,
and political parties. More than a debate about each separate policy and
point, the programme initiates a debate about the very nature of how to
understand the state and its institutions.</p>
<ol><li>Immediate suspension of all work, except essential medical and
logistical personnel and those required to produce and distribute food
and necessities, without any loss of wages. The state must assume the
cost of the wages for the period of the quarantine.</li><li>Health, food supply, and public safety must be maintained in an
organised manner. Emergency grain stocks must be immediately released
for distribution amongst the poor.</li><li>Schools must all be suspended.</li><li>Immediate socialization of hospitals and medical centres so that
they do not worry about the profit motive as the crisis unfolds. These
medical centres must be under the control of the government’s health
campaign.</li><li>Immediate nationalization of pharmaceutical companies, and immediate
international cooperation amongst them to find a vaccine and easier
testing devices. Abolishment of intellectual property in the medical
field.</li><li>Immediate testing of all people. Immediate mobilization of tests and
support for medical personnel who are at the frontlines of this
pandemic.</li><li>Immediate speed-up of production for materials necessary to deal with the crisis (testing kits, masks, respirators).</li><li>Immediate closure of global financial markets.</li><li>Immediate gathering of the finances to prevent the bankruptcy of governments.</li><li>Immediate cancellation of all non-corporate debt.</li><li>Immediate end to all rent and mortgage payments, as well as an end
to evictions; this includes the immediate provision of adequate housing
as a basic human right. Decent housing must be a right for all citizens
guaranteed by the state.</li><li>Immediate absorption of all utility payments by the state – water,
electricity, and internet provided as part of a human right; where these
utilities are not universally accessible, we call for them to be
provided with immediate effect.</li><li>Immediate end to the unilateral, criminal sanctions regimes and
economic blockades that impact countries such as Cuba, Iran, and
Venezuela and prevent them from importing necessary medical supplies.</li><li>Urgent support for the peasantry to increase the production of
healthy food and supply it to the government for direct distribution.</li><li>Suspend the dollar as an international currency and request that the
United Nations urgently call a new international conference to propose a
common international currency.</li><li>Ensure a universal minimum income in every country. This makes it
possible to guarantee support from the state for millions of families
who are out of work, working in extremely precarious conditions or
self-employed. The current capitalist system excludes millions of people
from formal jobs. The State should provide employment and a dignified
life for the population. The cost of the Universal Basic Income can be
covered by defence budgets, in particular the expense of arms and
ammunition.</li></ol>
<p>These sixteen points are a charter for discussion and debate to begin
to focus attention towards struggles and policies for a post-capitalist
future.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18796" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/07-Dani_Plaza-de-mayo_ver1.jpg" alt="Dani_Plaza de mayo_ver1" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18796" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Madres de la Plaza, el pueblo aún las abraza</strong> | Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the people still embrace you.</span><br><span>Buenos Aires, Argentina</span><br><span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/elmargendelahoja/">Daniela Ruggeri</a> / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/thetricontinental/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a></span><br><span>The
Plaza de Mayo is empty on this 24 March, the Day of Remembrance for
Truth and Justice. For the first time in the history of this march, we
could not take to the streets in support of our comrades who were
disappeared during the dictatorship that began in 1976. On social media
and on our balconies, we hung white handkerchiefs for our Mothers of the
Plaza de Mayo.</span></p></div>
<hr>
<h2><span><b>Part 3. </b><em>Universal Basic Income</em></span></h2>
<p>Over the course of the past half century, it has become clear that
the entire system of employment has broken down. In a modern capitalist
society, some percentage of unemployment is seen as acceptable (it was
even codified into theory as the ‘natural rate of unemployment’); the
state provides various forms of social assistance to compensate for the
lack of wages. Now, as a consequence of the globalisation of labour and
the technology-induced increase in productivity, billions of workers are
either unemployed, underemployed, or in situations of great
precariousness (such as short-term contract workers and day labourers).
There are at least 157 million migrant workers out of 258 million
international migrants – according to the International Labour
Organisation – who are often excluded from social security measures;
their perilous state is rarely brought up for discussion. Social
inequality has dramatically increased, and oceans of poverty lap at the
doors of the majority of the world’s population.</p>
<p>A percentage of workers – the reserve army of labour – is unemployed
even in the most buoyant phase of capitalism; but, increasingly, as
capitalism faces a long-term crisis of profitability, the majority of
workers experience extreme precariousness. Within the logic of
capitalism, these workers are either being super-exploited, or they have
become a surplus population. Their survival is at the level of
desperation.</p>
<p>It is to tackle these problems of poverty and inequality within the
social relations of capitalism that the idea of a ‘Universal Basic
Income’ emerged. If capitalists will not use their financial resources
to invest in jobs, then this surplus population will have to earn its
living from elsewhere, such as from the state. This state-sponsored
payment is known as Universal Basic Income (UBI). It is in the 16th
point of the declaration above.</p>
<p>We should be clear about the limitations of the UBI. The UBI would
free the enormous surplus population from unemployment and destitution,
but it would not emancipate people from either the money form or from
the power of the capitalist state. Cash disbursement means that cash
would still be needed to buy essential goods and services, which could
otherwise be provided on a need basis without the exchange of money
(public education, as an example, or public food distribution systems).
Part of the attraction of a UBI for the neoliberal bloc is that they
would put cash in the hands of the surplus population, who would then be
able to buy goods and services that they would otherwise not purchase.
The social relations of capitalism are not threatened by the UBI, which
is merely a social welfare scheme within the norms of the capitalist
system. In the context of widespread hunger and desperation, such a
scheme should not be scoffed at, even if it has immense limitations in
scope and implementation.</p>
<p>Over the course of the past several decades, Marxist feminists have
developed powerful theories of social reproduction – namely, the
production and reproduction of labour power. Social reproduction, or the
sector of care that renews human life, is an essential part of social
– and economic – existence. Despite this, it is typically neglected in
discussions on income support and wages.</p>
<p>Analyses of social reproduction seek to explain the linkages between
capitalism’s circuits of accumulation and patriarchal frameworks for the
renewal and reproduction of human labour power. Compensation for those
who do the work of social reproduction – mainly women – is seldom
available, unless the work is itself commodified (such as through maid
services, food production, and delivery services). The reproduction of
the working class is a vital condition for capitalist production, but
the reproducers of the working class are themselves not compensated in a
commodified (monetary) form. The debate about the UBI provoked a
discussion about ‘wages for housework’ and about a UBI that would
effectively substitute for wages. The argument for UBI or an equivalent
form of compensation to cover the work of social reproduction, and to
cover the livelihood of those who are disabled and unwell, is a strong
and powerful one. However, as pointed out by Marxists such as Alexandra
Kollontai and Angela Davis, compensation for care work will not by
itself overcome the long history of disparagement of such work and the
patriarchal ideology that upholds it; it will take a strong
anti-patriarchal struggle to break the idea of the gendered division of
labour.</p>
<p>The range of support for UBI is stunning, from socialists to the far
right. Each has a different vision for it, and these differences are
important to catalogue.</p>
<ol><li>Substitution versus supplement. The neoliberal wing (and the far
right) would accept a UBI if it would substitute for all other social
welfare programmes. They see the UBI as a substitute for the range of
policies such as public health, public education, public transportation,
and public food distribution. By giving cash rather than services, they
would like to commodify these parts of social life, and then certainly
privatise them. There is money to be made by selling goods and services
to the surplus populations. This is also a mechanism to dismantle the
social security net and privatise it. The socialist argument is that the
UBI is not a substitute for these schemes, but a supplement to them.
These social wages – such as public education and public food
distribution – must be enhanced and properly managed, with the UBI as
merely an addition to them for other uses, such as leisure.</li><li>Means-testing versus universal disbursement. The neoliberal wing
accepts UBI, but then undermines the spirit of the proposal. It makes
the case that the UBI should not be universal; everyone, they say,
should not be paid a basic income. Instead, there should be a means test
to ensure that only the neediest get access to this payment. A means
test defeats the entire purpose of a <i>universal</i> income, which
attempts to promote social unity rather than once more fragment the
population into the ‘deserving poor’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Any
means test defeats the purpose of the idea.</li></ol>
<p>There is something particularly odd about providing income support to
all people. Why would income support be given to the very rich? There
are several arguments for a universal outlay of either income or goods:</p>
<ol><li>To avoid the moral problem of having to decide who is the ‘deserving
poor’ or the ‘needy’. This sets up divides in society and further
stigmatises those who do receive targeted welfare payments.</li><li>To avoid the massive implementation problems created by having this
moral judgement rest on institutional systems that are not always able
to make these decisions democratically and are not always able to be
efficient in the transfer of these funds or these goods, depending on
whether the ‘income’ comes in cash or in kind.</li><li>Would a cash payment to the rich undermine the goals of
redistribution of wealth? Not at all, because the rich would pay a
wealth tax to finance such a scheme and their tax burden would far
outstrip the income support that they would receive.</li></ol>
<p>If the UBI scheme is not a substitute for the social wage, but a
supplement to it, and if the UBI scheme is truly universal, then it has
the potential for being a valuable demand within the capitalist system
to alleviate the suffering of many while continuing to work towards the
abolishment of the capitalist system. If it is a substitute for the
social wage and if it is targeted, then it is no longer a universal
basic income, but a dangerous mechanism to commodify and privatise
social benefits and to exacerbate divisions within the working class.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18805" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/08-Kate_Eviction.jpg" alt="Kate_Eviction" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="467"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18805" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Evict (v.): To forcefully remove people from a property with the support of the law.</strong></span><br><span>Johannesburg, South Africa</span><br><span>Kate Janse Van Rensburg / Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party</span><br><span>Despite
a moratorium on evictions during South Africa’s Covid-19 national
lockdown, the state continues to displace people, deploying private
security, the military, and the police. Since the end of Apartheid
in1994, the militarised state’s response to the people’s struggle for
shelter has remained intact: apartheid continues.</span></p></div>
<p>One of the questions raised about the UBI is how states are expected
to pay for it, and, based on that, what the actual income payment would
be per working-age individual. The neoliberal solution is to shut down
other social programmes, incorporate that money into one corpus, and
then make cash payments from there; this is unacceptable from a
socialist standpoint because it privatises social goods that should be
treated as a universal human right. Instead, a socialist mechanism for
payments would rely upon at least four different sources:</p>
<ol><li>A wealth tax.</li><li>The enhancement of the tax jurisdiction and dismantling of tax havens and tax shelters.</li><li>An increase in taxes on socially undesirable sectors (armaments, for example).</li><li>An increase in profit taxes.</li></ol>
<p>To ensure that the state will be able to collect this income, which
would otherwise fly off to tax havens, it will need to initiate capital
controls. A UBI scheme that is not implanted as part of a suite of
measures to develop economic sovereignty would merely become
unaffordable and therefore seen as a failure because it would either be
inadequate (if unfunded) or too much of a burden on the existing budget
(if there are no new taxes).</p>
<p>The CoronaShock has exacerbated the problems of unemployment,
precariousness, and hunger. What was being considered as a solution to
the recurring crisis of unemployment under capitalism – a UBI – has now
become a measure for the emergency crisis occasioned by the COVID-19
disease. Once more, neoliberals and the far right are quite happy with a
one-time cash payment to both mollify anger amongst the precariously
employed and the unemployed and to provide money to stimulate demand for
stalled businesses; there is little appetite for a genuine UBI scheme
that would put a floor under the working class.</p>
<p>Certainly, there is grave danger in many parts of the world of the
unemployment crisis imminently becoming a crisis of greater hunger and
famine. Urgent relief measures are of the essence, including cash
transfers and public food distribution; in a time of emergency, all
measures must be utilised to prevent avoidable suffering.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_18814" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/09-Ezrena-Marwan-Labour-2020.jpg" alt="Ezrena Marwan, Labour (2020)" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="467" height="352"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-18814" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span><strong>Objects and labour</strong></span><br><span>Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia</span><br><span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ez.rena/">Ezrena Marwan</a> / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/designarchive/">Malaysia Design Archive</a></span><br><span>A
scene of a private hospital in Klang Valley, Malaysia, at the heart of
Covid-19 pandemic. As a preventive measure, Malaysia is under the
Movement Control Order (MCO), which saw spaces shut down and emptied
out, except for frontline workers: healthcare, janitorial, and food
delivery workers – among others.</span></p></div>
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