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149НЕОЛИБЕРАЛИЗМ И ПАНДЕМИЯ КОВИД-19: ПОЛИТЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИИ АНАЛИЗ1
NEOLIBERALISM
AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC:
A POLITICAL ECONOMY ANALYSIS2
DOI: 10.38197/2072-2060-2020-223-3-565-572 ФИЛХО Альфредо Саад
Профессор департамента политической экономии и международного развития Кингз колледж, Лондон Alfredo Saad FILHO
PhD, Professor of Political Economy and International Development King's College London
Пандемия COVID-19 поразила мир в конце десятилетия, ознаменованного экономической неэффективностью и «режимом жесткой экономии» после Великого финансового кризиса, а также в разгар кризиса неолиберальных демократий по всему миру. Пандемия умножила эти ограничения неолиберализма, выявила недостатки неолиберальных экономик и правительств, высветила слабость данной модели. Несмотря на эти неблагоприятные тенденции, пандемия также открыла пространство для левой политической деятельности.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world at the end of a decade of economic under-performance and 'fiscal austerity' following the Great Financial Crisis, and in the midst of a crisis of neoliberal democracies around the world. The pandemic intensified these limitations of neoliberalism, revealed the shortcomings of neoliberal economies and governments, and pointed to the intensification of these debilities. Despite these adverse tendencies, the pandemic also opened spaces for left political activity.
Неолиберализм, финансиализация, капитализм, пандемия, кризис.
Neoliberalism, financialisation, capitalism, pandemic, crisis.
1 «Статья публикуется по материалам доклада, представленного на Международном научном онлайн-семинаре «Глобальный кризис 2020: вызовы будущему (политико-экономический дискурс)», который состоялся 21 мая 2020 г. в рамках МАЭФ».
2 I am grateful for the generous comments of Alice Kinghorn-Gray, Aneesa Peer, Aylin Topal, Ben Fine, Ben Wiedel-Kaufman, David Fasenfest, David Laibman, Lucas Bertholdi-Saad, Maria Nikolakaki, Xiaoyu Mei and Navtej Purewal. The usual disclaimers apply. This article draws upon 'Coronavirus, Crisis, and the End of Neoliberalism, https://www.ppesydney.net/coronavirus-crisis-and-the-end-of-neoliberalism/
Аннотация
Abstract
Ключевые слова Keywords
We found ourselves in a transformed world in early 2020. Eerily empty streets, closed shops, unusually clear skies, and climbing death tolls: something unprecedented was unfolding before our eyes.
The news about the economy were especially alarming: the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the sharpest and deepest economic contraction in the history of capitalism [1]. To paraphrase The Communist Manifesto, all that was solid has melted into air: 'globalisation' went into reverse; long supply chains, that were previously the only 'rational' way to organise production, collapsed and hard borders returned; trade declined drastically, and international travel was severely constrained. In a matter of days, tens of millions of workers became unemployed, and millions of businesses lost their employees, customers, suppliers and credit lines3. Several economies expect contractions of GDP in the double digits, and a long line of sectors rapidly formed to beg their governments for bailouts. In the UK alone, banks, railways, airlines, airports, the tourism sector, charities, the entertainment sector and universities were on the verge of bankruptcy, not to speak of the displaced workers and the (nominally) self-employed, who lost everything because of the economic shock4.
The political implications are as yet uncertain. Ideologically, neoliberal discourses about the imperative of 'fiscal austerity' and the limitations of public policy vanished immediately. Principled Austrians and neoliberals of every hue hastily retreated into a half-baked Keynesianism, as they tend to do when economies tank: at the time of need, the first to grab the teats of the Treasury wins the big prize, and state intervention is questioned only for what it has not yet done. The private sector and the media beg for government spending, and preachers of the 'free market' rush to the TV screens to plead for unlimited public spending in order to save private initiative. No doubt they will get back to normal when circumstances change and memories fade. At that point, the state will become 'bad' again, and public services will be ready for another round of culling. In the meantime, neoliberalism finds itself bereft of ideologues, while the irate fringe of anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers and religious fanatics was reduced to denying the pandemic itself, sometimes at great personal risk5, peddling miracle cures based on unproven remedies, or praying and fasting together with Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro6.
Shockingly, the epidemic itself was not unexpected. For decades, civilian and military strategists have considered a wide variety of scenarios, especially since the experiences with HIV in the 1980s, SARS in 2003 and, more recently, Ebola, and other 'new' diseases7. The likelihood of a flu-type virus emerging in the animal markets in the South of China was well known8. It follows that the crises of public health and
3 For a review of how the pandemic tracked the global circuits of capital, see [2].
4 For an overview, see [3].
5 For a sample, see [4; 5; 6; 7].
6 [8]. The Argentine actor and director Ricardo Darin succinctly put it, 'it is very difficult to struggle against
the pandemic of imbecils'[9].
7 See, for example, [10].
8 See, for example, [11]. More generally, 'China was the epicentre... In no other country was there such
a vertiginous convergence of urbanisation, integration into global value chains, and the adoption of new
food norms'[12].
9 For
a detailed account, see [13].
10 For the not-yet-adopted Eurobond option,
see [14; 15].
11 See, for example, [17; 18; 19].
12 See, for example, [20; 21].
the economy were not caused by failures of planning; instead, they reflected political choices, the dismantling of state capacities, staggering failures of implementation, and a shocking underestimation of the threat - for which, surely, reputations must be destroyed and heads must roll, as the starting point for a systemic reckoning9. For several weeks in early 2020 China bought the world time to prepare for the epidemic, and offered an example of how to confront it. Other East Asian governments came up with (more or less intrusive) policy alternatives, especially Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, and they were highly successful. Meanwhile, the West fumbled: faced with a problem that could not be resolved with bribes, or by sanctioning, blockading or bombing a distant land, the governments of the wealthiest countries in the world did not know what to do. Unsurprisingly, the UK and US governments fared especially badly, while the European Union, once again, disappointed at an hour of need10.
Although the magnitude of the implosion of several economies - centred in the advanced Western countries - was unprecedented and is bound to have long-term consequences for the operation of capitalism, COVID-19 did not hit a prosperous global economy. In early 2020, the world was already enmeshed in a 'great stagnation' that had followed the 2007 Global Financial Crisis (GFC); even the best-performing large Western economy, the USA, was noticeably slowing down. This is not to minimise the magnitude of the hurricane, since any economy would have been overwhelmed; however, since COVID-19 hit fragile countries, it immediately exposed their vulnerabilities.
The pandemic hit after four decades of neoliberalism had depleted state capacities in the name of the 'superior efficiency' of the market, fostered deindustrialisation through the 'globalisation' of production, and built fragile financial structures secured by magical thinking and the state, all in the name of short-term profitability. The disintegration of the global economy left the most uncompromisingly neoliberal economies, especially the UK and the USA, exposed as being unable to produce enough face masks and personal protective equipment for their health personnel, not to speak of ventilators to keep their hospitalised population alive. At the same time, service provision was instantly transformed beyond recognition, with online work becoming the norm in countless areas in a matter of days, rather than the years that this transition would have normally taken. Finally, the neoliberal worship of consumption dissolved into undignified scrambles for hand sanitiser, pasta and sardines, and fistfights for toilet paper.
Neoliberalism was quickly shown to have hollowed out, fragmented and part-privatised health systems in several countries, while it also created a precarious and impoverished working class that is highly vulnerable both to disruptions in their earning capacity, and to health scares because of their lack of savings, poor housing, inadequate nutrition, and work patterns incompatible with healthy lives [16]. In the meantime, the destruction of the social-democratic left had rendered the working class politically unprotected. These processes culminated in unseemly commotions for (state-led) Chinese output, in which the USA often behaved like a drunken bully, stealing the masks and ventilators that it could neither produce nor buy, and insulting weaker countries to boot11.
Human encroachment upon nature may have created the problem in the first place12, but there is no doubt that the destruction of collectivity under neoliberalism exacerbated the impact of the pandemic. Emblematically, neoliberalism has devalued human lives to such an extent that valuable time was wasted in several countries - notably those with more uncompromisingly right-wing neoliberal administrations: the USA, the UK and Brazil - with government attempts to impose a strategy of 'herd immu-
nity' that would inevitably eliminate the old, the weak and those with fragile health (which was seen positively, as it would alleviate their 'burden' on the fiscal budget)13, as opposed to imposing a lockdown that, although proven to reduce the loss of life, would hurt profits as well as (shock, horror!) showing that states can play a constructive role in social life. Eventually, mass pressure and the evidence of success in China and elsewhere forced even the most reluctant governments to impose lockdowns, but sometimes only partially and hesitantly, and those decisions always risked being undermined by mixed messages and incompetent implementation. In these countries, testing also tended to be restricted and health service staff were often left to cope with unmanageable workloads without adequate protection. This approach to the pandemic has led to many thousands of unnecessary deaths14.
In the UK, the shambolic administration led by the unreliable Boris Johnson found itself confronting two evils: on the one hand, mounting estimates of deaths and, on the other hand, ever-worsening estimates of the potential drop in GDP. Pressed early on by the Conservative Party and by some of the most vocal business supporters of Brexit15, the UK government wheeled out their 'medical experts' to justify the protection of profits and the idea of a 'small state' in the name of science. Faced with an increasingly angry public opinion, the government turned around dramatically in mid-March but, by then, it was already too late. Because of the government's earlier choice to delay action, their lack of preparedness and staggering ineptitude, the UK would inevitably end up in the worst of both worlds: countless dead (literally countless, since there was a deliberate effort to under-report the loss of life)16, and economic losses in the hundreds of billions of pounds [30].
The social implications of the pandemic emerged rapidly, for example, through the differential ability of social groups to protect themselves. In brief, the very rich moved into their yachts, the merely rich fled to their second homes, the middle class struggled to work from home in the company of over-excited children, and the poor, already having worse health, on average, than the privileged, either lost their earnings entirely or had to risk their lives daily to perform much praised but (needless to say) low-paid 'essential work' as bus drivers, care workers, nurses, porters, shopkeepers, builders, sanitation officers, delivery workers, and so on; meanwhile, their families remained locked up in cramped accommodation. It is not surprising that poor and ethnic minority people are dramatically over-represented in the death statistics17.
In response to the shock, many governments dusted off the economic policies implemented after the GFC, but they rapidly proved to be insufficient: this economic
13 [22]. Similarly, 'According to media reports at the weekend, [Prime Minister Boris Johnson's special adviser Dominic] Cummings initially stalled government action, arguing of the coming plague that "if that means some pensioners die, too bad". That approach explains the dragging of heels for many days' [23]. See also [24]. For the similarly scandalous case of the USA, see [25].
14 The example of Bergamo, in Italy, is especially dramatic, as it reveals the cost of protecting profits at the expense of people; see [26].
15 For a particularly egregious example, see [27].
16 In brief, the UK death totals often include only deaths directly linked to COVID-19 reported in NHS hospitals; that is, they did not initially not include deaths at home or in care homes. The callousness with which the British government treated those in care homes must rank as one of the gravest scandals in postwar Europe [28; 29].
17 See, for example, [31; 32; 33; 34].
18 See, for example, [35; 36].
19 [38; 39; 40] For the case
of the USA, see [41].
20 See, for example, [43].
collapse is much more comprehensive, the crisis will be much bigger, and bailouts will be much more costly than ever before18. Unprecedentedly, Central Banks have started to provide direct finance to large companies: essentially they are handing selected capitalists 'helicopter money' (which, in some cases, was immediately transferred to shareholders as dividends) [37]. To disguise the unseemly spectacle of billionaires, often tax exiles, begging for subsidies from the same exchequer that they had previously evaded, some governments have promised to support the incomes of the workers, but usually through their employers rather than directly. In the USA, the federal government is sending a one-off measly cheque (pointedly signed by D. Trump himself) to all households in order to disguise the staggering handouts being offered to capital, starting with an unprecedented US$2 trillion lifeline that, later, escalated rapidly as the shutdown continued to hurt profits and the Presidential election approached.
If the economic implications of the pandemic are certain to be catastrophic, the political implications cannot be anticipated precisely. In the UK, the pandemic unmasked the Conservative Party (and, at a further remove, the ill-fated Coalition government and its predecessor, New Labour), for having attacked social resilience and systematically ground down the NHS19. Even when money was spent in the health service, as was the case during New Labour, the goal was to disorganise and slice up the NHS, introduce competition regardless of cost, hollow out the service and privatise whatever could be sold off, in order to increase the health system's reliance on the profit motive.
With the pandemic, Conservative sermons about the imperative of 'fiscal austerity' was obliterated by the evident capacity of the state to create money from nothing and deliver salvation to selected sectors, as long as they were deemed to be 'essential' (which, consequently, was not the case for housing, health, employment and so on, in the previous period). At the same time, the ideology of individualism was shown to be a fraud because, although there can be individual flight from the virus, there can be no individual solutions to the catastrophe: one person alone can never be safe from an epidemic or nursed when they fall sick, and only the state can contain the economic meltdown, secure income flows when the economy seizes up, enforce the lockdown, and resource the health service. As the left had always known and the UK Prime Minister was forced to recognise, there is, after all, such a thing as society [42]. And the inhumanity of capitalism's profit imperative was unmasked through the mass rejection of its favoured policy of 'herd immunity', with its consequent decimation of the non-workers.
We can now focus on what the left can press for. First is to learn the lessons. The health crisis and the economic collapse in the West, compared to much more efficient responses in the East, demonstrated that radically neoliberal administrations are unable to perform the most basic functions of governance: to protect lives and secure livelihoods. The pandemic is also likely to be a marker in the transfer of hegemony from West to East. It is plain to see - and cannot be forgotten - that centralised and capable states (whether more or less democratic - the experience shows that political regime has little to do with policy competence) and a sophisticated manufacturing base matter for peoples lives and that, when the chips are down, borders can be closed and friends disappear.
Second is the imperative to secure life itself. States must guarantee jobs, incomes and basic services, including the rapid expansion of the health system. This is not merely for reasons of economic policy, but as part of efficient health policies: guaranteed jobs and incomes make it possible for more people to stay at home, which eases the load on the health system, speeds up the end of the pandemic and accelerates the recovery20.
In order to do this, the banking system should be nationalised to secure the flow of credit and prevent speculation, and Central Banks should ensure that there is enough liquidity to keep the economy afloat. Key services should be taken over by the state to ensure that basic needs are served and, if the central authorities can give tens of billions to the airlines, the railways and supermarket chains, the public might as well own them21.
Third is to consolidate the rediscovery of collectivity and the irreducible sociability of the human species that has emerged through the strains of the crisis. The left must stress that the economy is a collective system ('we are the economy!'), that we are bound together as humans, and that public services are essential. This could pave the way for a progressive alternative to (a by now clearly zombie form of) neoliberalism.
Fourth is the allocation of costs. The economic burden of this crisis will be much higher than that of the GFC and there is no way that public services can, or should, bear this burden. The only way out is through progressive taxation, nationalisation, default where necessary, and a new 'green' growth strategy.
I am cautiously optimistic that capitalism cannot wash this stain. It is now time to imagine what kind of society can serve the majority and avoid the repetition of the disgraceful outcomes that we are experiencing. Instead of the crimes and inefficiencies of neoliberalism, we need progressive taxation, the expansion of public services with built-in spare capacity for emergencies, and a society based on solidarity, human values and respect for nature. This is easy to say, and it is unquestionably correct, but the left has been on the defensive almost everywhere, sometimes for decades, and the pandemic may well lead to authoritarian, racist and reactionary responses.
To sum up, the COVID-19 pandemic happened by chance but it was not unexpected. Its consequences are much more than scandalous: they are criminal, and the left must say this loudly and clearly. Neoliberal capitalism has been exposed for its inhumanity 21 For and criminality, and COVID-19 has shown that there can be no health policy without
a similar solidarity, industrial policy and state capacity. This is a desperate fight. We must come
approach, out of this crisis with a better society. The left is needed like never before, and it must
see [44; 45]. rise up to the challenge.
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Contact information
Political Economy and International Development, King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Alfredo Saad Filho
+44 20 7836-54-54 / [email protected]
