A Window of Opportunity for Leftist Politics?
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- Published on Monday, 03 August 2020 01:58
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2160 ... August 3, 2020
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A Window of Opportunity for Leftist Politics?:
How to Continue In and After the Corona Crisis
Institute for Critical Social Analysis, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
The current crisis represents a new form of crisis and can certainly be understood as a sign of things to come. This is because it is not only the result of a dynamic internal to the economy as was the case with the financial crisis, which many on the left had predicted and foreseen. Today’s crisis is what the left has called an intersectional crisis: one in which the metabolic process between nature and society has been disturbed and is thus experiencing a crisis, manifesting itself in the climate crisis as well as through the spread of pathogens. In this regard, the corona crisis is externally induced, every form of society needs to react to it and limit economic and social activities for a while. And yet, the crisis is also part of the capitalist dynamic, which itself creates profound crises for the societal relationship to nature. It is in this... sense that the cause of the crisis does not come from external forces.
The current situation starts with the expansive mode of production and living that increasingly restrict the habitats of other species, allowing viruses to spread to humans and bacterial pathogens to be transmitted much more readily. To turn the argument on its head, this would mean less capitalist valorization of nature. In addition to social and economic transformations in all aspects of life, it would mean curbing the proliferation of land used for production, settlement, and agriculture of monocultures and factory farming which operate at the cost of nature and of wildlife conservation, both of which are essential to promoting CO2 neutrality.
The crisis also indicates that neoliberal globalization has over-expanded the chains of production and supply. It doesn’t make sense to transport products around the globe because of tax advantages or minimally higher profit margins. It doesn’t make sense to travel thousands of kilometres for a business meeting or a holiday. And it is not right that essential products are being produced only in China or India -- and this includes medicines, face masks, and medical equipment. The (overly) intensified circulation of global capitalism is what enabled the virus to spread so quickly in the first place. As an example, the global tourist industry more than doubled between 2003 (the SARS outbreak due to SARS-CoV1) and 2020 (COVID-19 pandemic due to SARS-CoV2).