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:
.
***********
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:
.
***********
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.
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 19th
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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