Rekindling our solidarity
A post-coronavirus world will bring contrasting ideologies into sharp relief
AS THE coronavirus disease visits mayhem on the world, political factors of historical and contemporary relevance are coming into bold expression.
So far, two European leaders have invoked images of World War II. Over the past weekend, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described his country’s battle with the virus outbreak as the “greatest challenge since World War II”.
The week before, German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked: “Since German unification, no, since World War II, there has been no greater challenge to our country that depends so much on us acting together in solidarity.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa has also called on the nation to act in solidarity, and accordingly set up a fund to help those who will be most affected by the 21-day lockdown.
While WWII killed 50 million people and devastated the world economy, Covid-19 is thankfully not yet near that dreadful magnitude.
Nevertheless, rising infections and fatalities, the impact upon health systems, economies and the rhythm of social life leave little doubt of its potential to upend human society.
Important as they are, calls for solidarity sharply contrast with the fact that we live in an era of history in which it is in permanent antagonism with the fetish for the self above all else.
This did not happen of its own volition. The late British-American historian Tony Judt lamented as much in his 2010 book, Ill Fares the Land:
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.”
As a result, wrote Judt: “We know what things cost, but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.”
The 30 years in question began with the ideological and all-round ascendance of Reaganite-Thatcherism in the 1980s, and took firm root after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
“Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatisation and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth. We cannot go on living like this.”
Historians, sociologists and political scientists see more than the actual number of doctors, nurses and other resources extended to the world, in particular Covid-19 hardest-hit Italy, by China, Russia and Cuba.
It is significant that the 20th-century political trajectories of these three countries were ideologically poles apart from Reaganite-Thatcherism.
In his one-volume history of WWII:
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945,
British historian Max Hastings wrote that the Red Army was “the main engine of Nazism’s destruction”.
The Soviet Union would consequently pay “the entire ‘butcher’s bill’” in the defeat of Nazism by “accepting 95% of the military casualties of the three major Grand Alliance powers.”
It is not inconceivable that to the rank and file, as to men and women of affairs, history may be seen in replay mode when China, Russia and Cuba take active steps to save humanity from the coronavirus, which threatens to decimate humanity in the 21st century as the Nazi political virus did in the 20th century.
Similarly apparent are shifts between (core) western European “natural affinities” and the eastern European hinterland of post-1989 euphoric add-ons encouraged by the US and British governments.
The recent firm oaths by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic that suggested Serbia’s version of a “Look-East” policy while simultaneously serving as a candidate-member of the EU is not in the least bit geopolitically insignificant. How it will pan out will be a function of the politics of the postCovid-19 world.
US media opinion seems unanimous in its objection to the Donald Trump administration’s attempt to define the coronavirus in anti-Chinese racial undertones.
The importance of the struggle against international racism to the cause of global social justice obliges humanity to condemn the racial, ethnic and xenophobic weaponisation of disease.
As with other issues on which he is misinterpreted as an outlier than an institutional representative, it might be tempting to see Trump’s racialisation of the virus as yet another aberration. But what if there is logic to it; an attempt to weaken the stereotyped into conceding on such issues as: racial profiling and the free movement of peoples within and across borders; demands for an equitable and developmental global trade regime underpinned by a just and equitable global economic order, and; the democratisation and liberation of scientific knowledge from the bondage of intellectual property legal regimes in a post-Covid-19 world?
The marketplace of ideas will soon be awash with post-Covid-19 global political and economic governance policy offerings from a host of quarters. In last Friday’s edition of the Financial Times, author Yuval Noah Harari postulated that Covid-19 “will shape not just our health-care systems, but also our economies, politics and culture”.
Recently, the Australian asset management company Macquarie Wealth Management stated that “conventional capitalism is dying” and the world is headed for “something … closer to a version of communism”.
The issue is not about one “ism” versus another, but how best to organise the world in ways that deliver social justice to all.
The menacing impact of the virus should spur South Africa, more so as the current chair of the AU, to bring our intellectual labours to bear in fashioning the post-Covid-19 global order.
There are no two ways about it: true solidarity will come out of an engaged local and international progressive movement which practices what it proselytises in a sustained battle of ideas against the entrenched materialistic and selfish values of neo-liberal Reaganite-Thatcherism, for we cannot go on living like this.