Why globalist capitalism is to blame for the coronavirus pandemic

The current epidemic is man-made – in the sense that its rapid spread around the globe is a direct result of the inequitable economic system we have created. In the sense that there was a culpable lack of preparation to meet it – a lack that was predicted. And in the sense that the impact is falling precipitously on the world’s poor, as a result of the deep divisions of wealth and life chances our iniquitous economic system creates and perpetuates.

An exaggeration? No, our neoliberal, globalist system has been playing Russian roulette with the planet for decades. Take Ebola, for instance, a viral, haemorrhagic fever spread by bodily fluids – anything from a mother’s milk to semen – that kills humans and primates, with a horrific 50% death rate.

Ebola was first encountered in the 1970s. As with coronavirus and many other modern diseases, the natural reservoir for Ebola is thought to be bats. The high metabolic rate of bats – a by-product of their ability to fly – tends to kill a lot of onboard viruses, leaving only the hardiest to survive and pass on to humans. Blame bats, then? Or Chinese markets for selling them?

Actually, bats are notoriously reclusive animals. It is the relentless encroachment of humans into their natural habitat, in search of profit, that is the problem. Especially where tropical forests are being denuded to provide land for industrial agriculture to serve global export markets.

In the case of Ebola, there is a double bind. Starting in the newly-globalised 1980s, subsidised EU and Chinese fishing vessels began to trawl the long, 5500km coast off West Africa – much of their catch illegal, thanks to bribery.

This environmental rape killed off the local African fishing industry and left 200 million West Africans looking for something else to eat – fish had been their stable diet. Instead, they began to eat meat from the fast-eroding tropical forests, including monkey meat. But these primates had been infected by Ebola from the local, agitated bat population.

Ebola spread thanks to a chain of globalism, economic greed, political corruption, deliberate environmental degradation and the collapse of indigenous cultures. There were other consequences. By destroying the local West African fishing industry, the EU created its own a Frankenstein monster. Tens of thousands of unemployed West Africans were forced into becoming economic migrants to Europe. Remember that the next time you eat tuna or feed it to your cat.

We share a planet with millions of different viruses – a strange material that serves the useful purpose of spreading and increasing genetic variety, while frequently killing its ill-prepared host cells. As humans spread across the planet, they were (and are) bound to take their local viral and bacterial infections with them. Yet there is a difference between the accidental impact of intrepid of travellers and the mega-deaths caused by unnecessary, militarised economic colonisation.

Take, for instance, the infamous Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19. Anywhere between 20-50 million people died, making it probably the deadliest pandemic in human history. But the global impact was uneven. The biggest concentration of Spanish flu deaths was in the Punjab in India – perhaps as much as 60% of the global mortality rate.

Why? Because under the British Imperial Raj, local grain was forcibly requisitioned for export to Britain. The resultant food shortages drove millions of Indians to the edge of starvation, suppressing their immune systems’ response to the flu. Hence mass human extermination.

A pandemic is never a simple matter of a rogue virus – it is how that virus interacts with the existing social order or is spread by it. When the existing social order is inequitable or unjust, it is the innocent and poor who suffer more than the ruling elite and the wealthy.

TODAY in Chicago, 72% of the city’s deaths from Covid-19 have been among poor and working-class black people, who make up just 30% of the population. As I write, the virus has yet to spread deeply into the wretched slums and teeming favelas of the global south, where two billion people eke out a precarious living. If the virus takes hold there, the mortality rate will be horrendous.

These slums are no accident. Our globalised world is not so global as it claims. There is free movement for capital and investment, and for affluent Western holiday makers. But despite the immigration scare stories, most people in the global south are chained to where they live. Those lucky enough to have jobs are paid a pittance by Western standards. The global supply chain provides cheap labour for Western companies while chaining local workers to their machines. Meanwhile, the unemployed billions in the slums of the southern hemisphere provide the social pressure that ensures local wages are low and Western profits high.

This is the globalist world we have made. Where the planet’s rainforests are bulldozed, the savannah burned, the virgin earth excavated, and the oceans swept clean, in order to feed the demand for raw materials. And where the majority of humanity is corralled in the south’s mega-cities, piled deep in faeces.

As a result, the traditional, natural boundaries between animal disease reservoirs and human beings have been eliminated. The next global pandemic is always only a plane ride away.

This is my point: dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is not the end of the problem. The certainty of repeated global pandemics has been trumpeted by epidemiologists since the outbreak of SARS in 2003. Then there was avian flu in 2005 and the swine flu scare in 2009.

After Covid-19, there will be other pandemics unless we physically restructure the globalist economic system that allows them to flourish. Let Covid-19 be our wake-up call.

Certainly, we need to create new, preventative medical weapons. Amazingly, in search of profit, the big drug manufacturers have well-nigh abandoned research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilisers and treatments for male impotence make them more money. We need to nationalise the drug cartels and reorient the focus of their research. A universal vaccine for influenza is possible and should be a top priority.

But we need to go much further and dismantle the whole globalist production system and the consumerist, growth-dependent economy it feeds.

It is no accident that SARS and avian flu first appeared in Guangdong, now the world’s biggest manufacturing hub. A hub created in the past two decades with Western capital, by herding millions of poor peasants (usually young women) into crowded dormitories in new mega-conurbations along the South China coast.

Fortunately, China has reached the stage of development where it can concentrate on its own needs rather than supplying cheap widgets for Western consumers. Instead, let’s reconfigure the world as a series local economies and trade ideas and culture instead of cheap mobile phones we can make for ourselves. Because if we don’t, we may not meet again – ever.

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