A great crisis demands deep reflection
How will COVID-19 transform the economy?
People are wondering about how the COVID-19 pandemic is going to change us both personally and as a society going forward. If they aren’t, they should be. We’ve been on a hamster wheel of endless consumption that’s actually gotten us nowhere in terms of how we think and feel about each other, or in how we progress our collective existence to the next level, if there is one. The threat of climate change and the natural disasters it will bring are still years in the future … maybe, but the pandemic is forcing us to face our existence in a way we’ve never had to in our lives. I choose to see that as a positive.
When the Black Death ravaged Europe in the mid 1300s, it was responsible for reshaping the face of Europe, in reallocating resources, especially land, among the surviving populations. It killed feudalism as an economic system, and the small farmer and landowner, the middle class, came into being. Of course, it’s estimated that almost 60 per cent of Europe’s population died, with death touching every household. That kind of devastation makes you sit up and think. I don’t think we’ll see that here, but that could be my 21st-century exceptionalism talking, the one grounded in the leaps and bounds of scientific research. We know so much more about science than we did in the mid-1300s, but we are still baffled by a little bug we’ve never seen before.
As Alexandre White, historian and sociologist at Johns Hopkins University states in a recent article published on Hub, “during a crises, a lot of commonly held beliefs are questioned and the status quo can be thrown into question.” If there were ever a time, since the Black Death, that we need our commonly held beliefs questioned and the status quo thrown into question, it is in 2020 where rampant neo-liberal ideology has created an unsustainable present and an uncertain future for many people.
Neo-liberalism, that is, deregulated markets, free trade, open competition, privatization and a shift away from the welfare state has promoted globalization and international free trade to the detriment of local and national interests. People will not agree with me, but I argue that we can see it in the challenge in sourcing appropriate PPE for those in need of it.
That Canada doesn’t have the biggest PPE plant in the world in British Columbia is a failure of neoliberal economics. This has been made painfully clear throughout this pandemic as countries source the world for what they wish they made at home.
The people who are struggling are the people who have always struggled, only now it’s more obvious. The people with multiple minimum wage, part time jobs, like nursing home attendants and nurses, cleaners and janitors, the retail and grocery clerks, all working throughout the pandemic because they have to, not because they want to.
The savings on their labour kicked up to make the rich, richer, not the food cheaper. No working from the safety of home for them, or escaping Dodge to a second property.
The increases recently announced for these workers, from the raises promised the grocery workers to the top up funding the government has promised the provinces for their front line essential health care workers is funding that must be continued. If your job is essential, it’s always essential, even on sunny days when the birds are singing. We all need to eat and we all need health care. At the least. We see that, right?
When the talk turns to the threat of collapsing the economy, it’s the neo-liberal economy that we’re talking about. And wouldn’t its collapse be a good thing? People have been complaining about it for years, for its rapacious appetite for development and its effects on the environment to the abuses and exploitation of low wage workers and the degradation of social safety nets. One thing is for certain, it won’t be collapsed for long, for we, the people, are the economy, with our dimes and dollars, our wants and desires.
As long as a body breathes it’s part of the economy, with its last contribution a penny for the ferryman. We can’t escape it, so worries of its death are premature. We need to talk about how the economy will transform itself into something else, something more equitable and socially just. An economy built on collaboration rather than competition and community sharing rather than personal profit. What are we learning now about the needs of those who have been ignored and what can be done to help them? The real question is: What kind of economy do we want to transform into?
We need to talk about how the economy will transform itself into something else, something more equitable and socially just