Are you feeling slightly anxious but also feeling a bit being liberated from the drudgery of capitalism? Well don't be too hard on yourself, there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that unfulfilling work and low paid work sucks.
Because of the spread of Covid 19 Capitalism has effectively stopped and our day to day lives are for once planned around our own human needs - not the needs of faceless insatiable CEOs, managers and bosses.
Thinking about my new unrecognisable daily routine it got me wondering, is this what socialism would look like? Socialism does not suggest we all stay at home all day writing poetry and watching a publicly owned Netflix. Yes that is the minimum it will deliver, but a democratically planned world of work ( not an economy) will unleash the most powerful transformative change we have ever seen, because we will own it and shape it in the interests of the 99% not the 1%.
The current crisis has shown us people naturally pull together. We often see this at funerals, the voluntary sector and GAA clubs. Because it stands to reason - can you imagine a supermarket, hospital or building site without anyone cooperating - it would be mayhem.
Providing our basic needs are met, food, shelter, a job, purpose, companionship etc. society is naturally cooperative and socialist. It's when there is scarcity that people compete for those precious resources and we see the worst in people. Capitalism ensures that there will always be scarcity, inequality and crime. If we are to fight climate change and global pandemics we will need cooperation not competition. We will need a society not an economy. We will need the collective not individualism and we will need to put people and the planet before profit.
When I turned the radio on this morning I heard a commentator saying “all non essential work gatherings must stop”, it made me stop and think, if it's not essential then why the hell are we doing it in the first place and what kind of work is unnecessary? It turns out that currently quite a lot of work is unnecessary.
Yes it's all necessary in the context of gathering wages in order to eat. But humans need purpose in their work and if that work can be deemed non-essential then surely those workers could be put to work in “useful jobs” - not to mention the disconnection and alienation those workers must feel in an unnecessary job.
We have alway been led to believe capitalism is the most efficient way to organise the workplace and in turn society, yet so much of what we do seems unnecessary. The reality is that capitalism is a chaotic way to organise society when you look around with your own eyes. It has workers doing repeatedly unnecessary mundane tasks, it keeps crashing and it creates monopolies. It can't provide adequate housing even when there are 250,000 empty houses and 25,000 people die of starvation every day when we produce 10 times the amount of food we can eat!
Capitalism has never been able to meet our basic needs, not because of useless politicians, stupid people, waste or red tape but because capitalism is unplanned and individualistic in nature.
The Paradox Of Capitalisms Efficiency.
Surely it's inefficient for a worker to hand over 60% of their wages to a landlord or a bailed out bank just because the latter can get away with it.
Surely it's inefficient that capitalism has had at least 55 major crashes.
Surely it's inefficient that an unplanned economy results in €10 billion a year to spend on gambling, but we don't have enough hospital beds or respirators.
Insurance brokers, creative accountants, estate agents, hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, financial consultants, industries that play on our insecurities, marketing, advertising, the arms industry, all keep millions of people in work but are they really essential? The inefficiency of capitalism has created millions of jobs that do very little that is productive but they do allow unproductive middle men to take a portion of the wages from the workers who actually do the work.
Companies like Uber, Just Eat, Amazon, Airbnb and recruitment agencies only exist because capitalism's drive for efficiency has atomised the workplace to such an extent the bi-product is it has created millions of new unproductive pointless jobs in the quest to eliminate “the fat”. These are actual jobs that are created in order to destroy jobs.
Did you know that part of the stock market actually makes bets that companies and countries will fail? Some capitalists are actually getting rich literally on the ruination of workers' lives; this is only one example of what socialists call “opposing class interests” and yet they are heralded as job creators.
The stock market predators rationalise their greed by suggesting that the stock market ensures some workers have a pension pot in their retirement. Let's get real here, they are parasitic and spend their working day lobbying governments to attack workers' wages and conditions, public healthcare, childcare, environmental protections, food standards and social care. (example 2 of “opposing class interests”)
It has atomised the workplace on a scale that Henry Ford who is credited with the modern efficient production line could not have imagined. I imagine he would have salivated at the concept of forced obsolescence.
It was this drive for profits, cost cutting and super efficiency in China that created the perfect conditions for Covid 19 to flourish. Intensive generic farming meant animals could not develop immunity to viruses and in turn these viruses mutated and jumped species from animal to humans. Capitalism destroys biodiversity and is now threatening our very existence. Karl Marx observed this 150 years ago.
…all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.
– Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1
But surely socialists are not suggesting we get rid of peoples jobs? We should look at jobs the same way we look at eating, jobs are like teeth. Teeth are essential in aiding us to nourish the body but the primary purpose of eating is nourishment not the act of chewing. Surely the primary purpose of a job should be to do something productive and not just to create a job. Under capitalism jobs hold a waged value but often they have little use value.
We could easily swap all those unnecessary jobs for necessary jobs including jobs that work in healthcare, a green new deal and have cheap sustainable energy and public transport.
The reality is we no longer need to work such long hours or have that much money to have a much better quality of life if the necessities of life like housing, childcare, utilities, public transport, health and food didn't take up so much of people's income, labour and time.
We entered an age of automation decades ago and the basic necessities of life should be a given by now. But under capitalism labour saving automation results in workers being laid off and scarcity. Under socialism, automation will deliver abundance and free time to pursue other meaningful activities (not idleness) as suggested by conservatives. Think about it, ask people what they want to do in life and very few people will say “nothing” and there are complex structural reasons why a tiny pool feels alienated from the world of work.
As the Covid 19 crisis deepens, public pressure on governments have resulted in the government being forced to put a pause on rents, mortgages, utility bills and debts. Bus drivers are refusing to take fares from vulnerable passengers, taxi drivers, GAA clubs and communities are collectively rallying around to help those in need .
This financial relief has taken a huge burden off of the backs of millions of struggling families. So why would anyone want to go back to the way things were? In any case it doesn’t look like things can go back to the way they were regardless.
We know we produce a multiple of the food we can eat in Ireland, we have an abundance of meat, fish, veg and dairy, an abundance green energy possibilities, we have a highly educated and skilled workforce. We have never been more connected and we have an infinite amount of jobs that need to be done. Ireland has a lot going for it if we had a planned economy.
Disaster Covid Capitalism.
In contrast to the cooperation and collective actions of the working class. The super rich and the market money men/women that dominate our lives are currently looking for opportunities to make even more profit in this crisis. They want to buy up vaccines and use the crisis to profit on disaster capitalism.
Richard Branson who is €4.1 billion (2019) won't pay his workers sick pay but wants all workers to bail him out to the tune of €7.5 billion. There is speculation that every single airline company in the world could go bankrupt, are we to bail them all out?
When a hospital in Italy recently ran out of life saving respiratory valves, quick thinking volunteers used 3D printing to make them for €1 a pop. But the response by the company who held the patent was a refusal to cooperate with them and were hostile to these upstanding citizens. The realty is capitalists are job destroyers not job creators. There are an infinite amount of useful jobs that need to be done but if a capitalist can't make money on building a house or making a drug then a house won't be built or a drug won't be produced. We don't need them, they need us. There is a saying I recently learnt; who would you rather go on strike a bin-man or an accountant?
If you feel I've been a bit cynical I would urge you to watch the money channels like Bloomberg, they are not discussing their concern for our health, or our futures, they are obsessing about their profit opportunities in this crisis. Pointing out these irreconcilable opposing class interests is not creating division merely pointing out the obvious. We literally get to watch class warfare in action on Bloomberg every day.
How Do We Pay For It?
Believe it or not the cost to the state bailing out people in this crisis is not that much when you consider the 2009 bank bailout and the EU’s Quantitative easing program (approx €80 billion a month or €4.65 trillion)
Unsurprisingly these biblical sums of conjured up money did not go to create productive jobs on Main Street but were for the benefit of the super rich on Wall Street who used the money to engage in a feeding frenzy of speculation on the global stock markets. It's worth noting a mere €30 billion, would mean we could feed the world for a year.
We are the 5th richest country in the world per capita, we have €13 billion to collect from Apple and 750 billion sloshing around the Irish Financial Service District plus billions in idle cash reserves. The money is not the problem, political will is the problem. We can see clearly there is an abundance of money, property and resources to meet people's needs but yet the basics still elude the vast majority of people on earth.
After The Crisis We Must Mobilise Immediately.
I have heard many people talk of their priorities after the crisis. Talk of supporting small restaurants and business. Yes that's all comes from a good place but our priority must not be jump starting the beast. Capitalists will be doing that for themselves anyway and they will have the government and whole state apparatus working on the side of Capital. Who will be fighting for the working class?.
Capitalists will want lower wages, cut healthcare budgets and lower taxes on the rich. If you think it will be different or there is a 3rd way to 2008 I respectfully and hesitantly say “Don’t Be so Fucking Stupid”
The first thing is to organise our workplace's resistance to another decade of austerity, we have seen that it is the workers that keep the lights on, not the capitalists. The government will be scrambling to restore profitability into the system, this means one thing , unprecedented austerity and they will tell us there is no other way. Leo Varadkar has already told us “tough decisions will have to be made after the crisis” They will tell us (not the rich) to put on “the green jersey”, to again bail out banks, airlines and thousands of other failed capitalist ventures and place that burden on us.
The markets, landlords, speculators and the capitalists will be their priority - not us. We should be under no illusion they will try to make us shoulder the cost of this crisis not the reckless capitalists whose industrial intensive farming created the conditions for profits and Covid 19 to flourish.
Many businesses are going to collapse and those workers, factories and assets should not be allowed to rot but must be taken into public ownership and put to good use.
The worst that could happen to a billionaire is they could end up signing on or getting a job like the rest of us. Once again this will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, particularly women, people with disability’s and help create the conditions for the far right to grow.
Maybe Michael O’Leary’s transport expertise could be put to good use to drive a Luas as he has on many occasions has remarked about how easy that is. This is not going to be the last crisis another one is always around the corner, capitalism has been critically ill for decades and now is unquestionably terminally ill. It has served a purpose but now is possibly the last window to save this planet and build a world complementary to our natural human nature - cooperative, adaptive and kinder.
A new world won't be given; it will have to be taken by organising, a revolution of hearts, minds and our in actions. We should not fear revolution or change, we should embrace it, we will shape it and we should look at it as a precious opportunity.
What is more noble than creating a better world.? We should only fear going back to the rat race, a world of pointless consumerism and the environmental destruction that goes with the past path..
Politics (Greek for affairs of the city) is everywhere, it saturates our lives from the cradle to the grave. If we don’t shape it now others will. Those others are the capitalists today jacking up the price of masks, sanitising gel and insulin.
We undoubtedly will see revolution all over the world as capitalism continues to eat itself. But we must not make the past mistakes; of replacing one rotten system with another like in Egypt or the Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael merry go round. This is not some socialist utopia dream as there is no such thing as a utopia, it's about providing very basic things that are in abundance. Bad things will always happen but today for the first time in living memory we can glimpse a possibility of a better new world.
The author Arundhati Roy wrote “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
That has never been truer than it is today and we only can make it happen by joining anti-capitalist political organisations, being clearly anti-capitalist in our activism, lives and politics.
Peadar Hopkins - People Before Profit Sligo