Capitalism, Coronavirus and War; A Geopolitical Economy by Radhika Desai

Author:Radhika Desai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

THE UNEXPECTED RECKONING

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200000-5

It is perhaps fitting that the novel coronavirus triggered crises in neoliberal financialised capitalist economies around the Ides of March, the traditional day of reckoning of outstanding debts in Ancient Rome. After all, if one word summed these capitalisms up as the neoliberal decades wore on, it was debt. Governments, households and firms were laden down by more of it than ever before. Asset bubbles based on it—through leveraged trading as well as trading in debt instruments themselves—have punctuated the neoliberal decades and the 2008 North American Financial Crisis was serious enough to lead many to think it might put an end to the neoliberal policies that had led to them. Nothing doing. Neoliberalism only lived on, intensified as ‘austerity’. By the late 2010s, critical observers had been expecting a reckoning, not just for financial markets but for the economy as a whole (Roubini 2019). To be sure, financial markets were bound to make their contribution: the housing and credit bubbles were replaced by an ‘everything bubble’ (Langlois 2019) that was now ‘in search of a pin’ (Leonard 2022, 263) and the pandemic provided it. Of course, any reasonably major dislocation would have done the trick and told on neoliberal financialised capitalisms, exposed their increasingly obscene inequities and burdened their already emaciated structures.

Moreover, as many argued, the pandemic was itself a crisis of capitalism. Although, thanks to the politicisation of the search for the origin of SARSCoV-2, we may never know its origins reliably (Koopmans et al. 2021), and while there is at least some robust evidence that the virus did not first infect humans in China (Wei and Qingqing 2021), we also know that recent epidemics are endogenous to capitalism (Davis 2020), related to its extensive and rapacious exploitation of land. The resulting extreme loss of wildlife habitat brings wild animals closer to human habitation and activities, including concentrations of domesticated animals in factory farms, increasing the possibility that viruses normally confined to animal populations immune to them will jump to other species including humans. Indeed, the beginning of the neoliberal era coincided with the AIDS epidemic and the frequency of such jumps of zoonotic viruses appears to have increased as neoliberalism deregulated capital and its relations with nature. In addition to the horrors AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Ebola and Zika hold for humans, zoonotic epidemics of recent times have included outbreaks on farms that have resulted in the mass culling of millions of animals (Uhlig 2002). The latest is the still-raging 2022 outbreak of avian influenza.

As the second week of March 2020 opened and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the contagion a pandemic, it dominated the news cycle as well as the plethora of mis- and disinformation on social media. Cities and even entire countries shut down and businesses of every sort announced layoffs and production stoppages. Amid all this, however, nothing was clearer than that authorities in the leading neoliberal countries were more concerned about financial

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.