A few days ago, prominent Jordanian businessman Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, said in an interview that “we should not allow our economic system to collapse in order to save lives. We lose lives at wars; let’s consider fighting the coronavirus pandemic a war.” Similar implications were echoed by Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, when he vowed to “help businesses recover from this pandemic because it’s not their fault,” all the while making no economic recovery plan that includes helping small businesses recover from the pandemic. What these businessmen and politicians mean to say is that we are not willing to spend our money to save lives. What Abu Ghazaleh and his peers of corporate emperors prioritize is the return to “normal” under an economic system that is exclusively built to serve them and fails to serve Abu Ghazaleh’s fellow Jordanians, of which 19% are currently unemployed. That is because, to Abu Ghazaleh and the economic elite, spending on health funds, medications, and public financial aid harms the economy, an economy that is built around tax breaks for big corporations, enormous spending on the military, and privatizing social security.
Calls to resume all economic activities come after the coronavirus pandemic took the lives of more than 136,000 people worldwide, and millions of others have been affected economically and psychologically. As millions of people lose their source of income, hundreds of thousands lose loved ones, and many essential workers are forced to work for minimum wage and no healthcare, putting their lives at an immediate risk, indicating that their lives are somehow less important than others’. The lack of action was heard even louder when Texas lieutenant governor said in an interview with Fox News that elderly people should be willing to die to save the economy, “but don’t sacrifice the country. Don’t do that. Don’t ruin this great American dream.”
The most alarmingly obvious failure global capitalism has had was amidst the coronavirus pandemic, with tens of thousands of people dying, many of whom are minorities or from lower income households. In the UK, 34% of more than 3,000 critically ill coronavirus patients identified as Black, Asian, or minority ethnic. In the United States, where Black Americans represent 13% of those living in places releasing data by race, they have accounted for 32% of all known COVID-19 deaths. With almost two million people suffering from the disease, health systems in several countries are collapsing. Italy’s health system collapsed shortly after it was hit by the virus, Spain’s shortly followed, and the United States is quickly catching up.
In 2018, Italy’s military and defense spending was about 28 billion USD. Spain’s was about 20 billion USD in the same year, while the United States’ military and defense budget is close to 934 billion USD in 2020. What these three countries have in common is that when the coronavirus outbreak happened, they had a shortage of ventilators, masks, gloves, and other medical supplies. Government spending on the health sector is far less than spending on military and defense related matters, and underfunded medical institutions leave coronavirus patients to either die or fight the disease on their own.
Pandemics are not new to humanity. In fact, nearly 100 years ago, the famous “Spanish Flu” pandemic lasted two years and took the lives of almost 50 million people worldwide. Several years later, this, coupled with fluctuating stock prices and high federal interest rates amongst other reasons, led to the 1929 recession. Historically, this economic system has had disastrous failures; from the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, world hunger, and the repetition of a similar financial crisis as seen during the 1929 Great Depression, to nearly a hundred years later the identical 2008 Wall Street financial crisis, and many more in-between, it has been a system predicated on serving the richest on Earth with no regard for the majority of the rest of the world.
The coronavirus pandemic revealed many things, and most noteworthy in the case of the economy is that to the wealthy “elite,” human lives are only worth the amount of money they can generate. There is no limit to what they would do to maintain and increase their wealth. Furthermore, it has shown that the governmental and private priorities are aimed towards generating and keeping wealth amongst specific individuals and corporations with no regard for human rights whatsoever. This is evident in the United States’ $2 trillion stimulus to the economy. The irony in this stimulus is that almost the exact same amount of funds is going to all Americans as big corporations — $500 billion — indicating that the life of every person in the United States is not worth more than big corporations, and that corporations are much more important than the entire health sector, which only received $154 billion. Meanwhile, there were only five test kits for the coronavirus per one million citizens in early March, a time when other countries such as South Korea had tested thousands per one million citizens.
What this pandemic is signaling is that a health crisis is crippling to the economy due to decades of low spending on the health and social security sector, in contrast to trillions of dollars being spent on military and corporate bailouts. The stance taken by many countries focuses on bailing big corporations and ensuring they do not crash during the economic recession, but what they fail to take into account is that a country’s majority is the working class, the same working class who lost their livelihood due to quarantine measures, or lost their lives fighting for their income. Millions of low wage workers are now left with no income, while millions of others are sent to work each day with no guarantee that they will return safely to their families. These workers are stuck between the hammer of being safe with no money to feed their families, and the anvil of feeding their families at the expense of their health and lives.
Capitalism is responsible for the lives of millions who are affected by the coronavirus pandemic, from debilitating health systems to forcing health workers to work in harsh conditions. Capitalism is responsible for the failure to face this pandemic; this is evident in the case of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, whose wealth grew by almost $24 billion since the start of this pandemic, which would be enough to fund the WHO for the next 11 years.
What we must realize now and work on after this pandemic passes is that for decades, we have been living the lie that if people work hard enough, they will all be safe from disaster. What this catastrophe has shown us is that the economic system is not built to keep us alive during difficult times. It is not built to help us prosper or to protect us, nor is it using our tax money to build our communities. On the contrary, this economic system sees us as tools, as “war victims,” casualties that must be sacrificed in order to save the bank accounts of the “elites.” And we are now equipped with tools to resist it. We are the working class of this economic system, and we can learn from this disaster that we run the economy, not the other way around, and in order to avoid a future catastrophe, we must build an economic system that is centered on humanism, not profit gain.
Ahmad Shwieke is a lawyer living in Palestine. During covid-19 isolation, he’s spending his time learning Hebrew and reading philosophy. His current read is How to be a Friend by Cicero.