The Chains Around Some Brains

by Les May

Editor:  Here Les May, who was ahead of many of us
in dealing with this pandemic, addresses the problem
of the political idée fixe or apriori methodogy of thought.
Or what I have elsewhere called a 'cookbook mentality'.  
The writings of Charles Chahalambous, editor of the 
Labour Internationalist, are merely an aspect of this approach.
See the earlier post:

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2020/04 › on-certainty-in-coronavirus

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IN writing this I make no attempt to defend capitalism as a form of social and economic relationship.  My concern is to question the assumptions behind the assertion ‘the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population’.  If we are going to take any lessons from what we are reluctantly experiencing now, I would like them to be the right ones.

Historically we experienced at least one outbreak of disease that can be said to qualify as a pandemic.  That is the so called ‘Black Death’ which swept through Europe in 1348 to 1349 and is thought to have killed some 30 to 60% of the population.  Even with the limited transport of that time the disease spread at about 10-15 miles per day, which is the sort of distance an individual might walk in a day.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/could_the_black_death_actually

Two other more recent outbreaks of disease are relevant here.  Between September 1665 and November 1666 disease, usually assumed to be plague but possibly an Ebola like haemorrhagic virus, killed 260 people in the village of Eyam.  It did not spread to neighbouring villages because the villagers ‘self isolated’ and it eventually died out.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/

The second relevant pandemic is the so called ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-19.  This spread rapidly across America along the routes of the railway system.  I would argue that the thing which facilitated the spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus to produce a pandemic is the frequency of the movement of individuals between and within countries.  People move to and from work, for leisure activities, for holidays, to visit family and to facilitate national and international trade.  None of these is unique to the capitalist economic and social system.

That there is frequently a tension between the interests of ‘big business’ and the well being of people is not disputed, but at the moment, at least in most of the industrialised developed economies, that is being resolved bt governments in favour of keeping people safe from infection by this virus.

In the UK we are in our present situation because of specific choices made by our politicians and to blame ‘the capitalist system’ simply shifts the blame for the outcomes we are seeing away from them and onto some abstraction of reality which has itself evolved into something very different from what it was in the 19^th century.

The Black Death started the long decline of feudalism as labour was suddenly in short supply and a wage economy came into being; ‘market forces’ at work one might say.   I doubt that our world after the Covid19 pandemic passes will be the same as the world we knew before.   We have a choice. We can reach into our ‘goody bag’ of ever ready solutions and wait for some vaguely defined ‘historical force’ to sweep away the present order and forge a ‘New Jerusalem’.  Or we can ask what lessons should be learned from our present experiences and then set about putting things right. 

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