When we zoom out what will COVID-19 look like?

Originally published on April 7th, 2020 on Medium

The structures upon which the global economic system currently stand are partly to blame for how badly COVID-19 is disrupting us today. But the disruptions that we will encounter tomorrow, when we struggle to bounce back from the deep recession that will follow; those are the disruptions that will truly expose how fragile our economic system is.

When we zoom out what will COVID-19 pandemic look like? Will it be THE event, THE inflection point, THE thing that changed everything? Or, will we look back at it as just one of the catastrophic events that combined with several others during the first three decades of the 21st century to weaken and eventually destroy the global economic system?

My bet is, it’s the latter.

The economic crisis that will follow the COVID-19 crisis, will be deeper and more painful than it would have been had we been living under a more resilient economic model before the pandemic hit. But, the world’s powerful, wealthy, nations will slowly and painfully recover. They’ll crank up the old capitalist machine and tell us things are ‘back to normal’ and, for us in the U.K., for a bit, they’ll feel quite normal. We’ll go back to our usual hobbies, our cheap flights and our rat race busyness.

Unless there is a genuine political revolution, in two- or three-years time, what we’ll notice, more than anything, is that nothing much has actually changed. The rich will be still be rich, the poor will still be poor and VAR will still be ruining football. But this will be an illusion of stability, it will mask something we’re less likely to notice, something we won’t be encouraged to go searching for. That is that, beneath the surface, the economic system will be a lot more fragile. So, even though on the surface things will feel ‘normal’ they won’t be. We will be nothing like as resilient to future shocks as we were in the run up to COVID-19. We won’t have a bulging war chest to fall back on.

The ‘war chest’ is like a safety valve. It is a pot of money, either saved up or borrowed, that can be released when the shit hits the fan. We had a ‘no deal Brexit’ war chest, we had a ‘National Emergency’ war chest and we no doubt had an ‘actual war’ war chest. Given the vast sums of money currently being spent, it feels like we’ve probably raided all of these war chests a couple of times over already. Nobody really knows.

Post-pandemic, plenty of reassuring sounding voices will try to tell us that a collapse event like COVID-19 was a ‘once in a generation’ catastrophe, ‘the likes of which we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetime.’ They’ll find someone or something to blame (that won’t be themselves) and tell us about the ‘strict measures’ they are putting in place to stop the UK from ever having to face something like COVID-19 again. Politicians on ever more garish podiums will tell us about the ‘early warning systems’ they have set up to help us spot the next pandemic; they’ll tell us about the testing centres and labs they are going to build; they’ll tell us about the increased ICU capacity; and the state of the art ‘British made’ PPE and ventilators they have got on order. Most of all though, they’ll tell us to shop, ‘shop for Britain.’ In other words, the message will be: ‘don’t worry folks, get back to life as normal, everything is going to be fine.’

And we will lap it up. Who doesn’t want to hear that things are going to be OK? Who doesn’t want to get back to their normal routine? If we can; lets. Right? Hmm.

Obviously, a return to the status quo benefits some more than others, yesterday’s winners will be tomorrow’s winners if nothing really changes. Post-pandemic, yesterday’s winners will still be powerful, powerful enough to go on seducing and sedating us with their bread and roses; we’ll be fed just enough to keep us happy and quiet.

This ‘return as fast as possible to the status quo’ strategy will be based on two things. Firstly, a belief born out of pride and a lack of imagination, that deregulated, neoliberal, free market economics is the only game in town. Secondly, an assumption, born of ignorance and wishful thinking, that there won’t be another catastrophic event for a generation or two.

It is this second assumption that is so dangerous for it fails to recognise that the global economic system with all its rapaciousness, corruption, injustice and inequality, isn’t a passive and benign object; it is a machine for creating catastrophic events — and is getting incredibly productive at doing it. This is not, however, something we’re trained to see.

The powerful have a vested interest in separating, in our minds, any connection between the way global economic system is structured and the catastrophic events that keep hitting us. The economic system is to be thought of as a God-given thing; something that is the way it is and will always be the way it is, a bit like the sun, the moon, the mountains or the oceans. To suggest that the economic system could be structured in a different way is like saying that instead of making the sea out of salty water, we could make it out of custard instead.

We are trained to believe that catastrophic events are not the fault of a flawed economic system. Disasters are, we are told, just bad luck, or ‘natural’, or the actions of a few rouge actors. This is a reassuring story, which is why we go along with it, we like to believe that the economic system is as solid and reliable as the sun in the sky. We can’t face the truth that it is a construct; and one that is driving us to extinction.

Which brings the greatest market failure of them all into view: the climate and ecological emergency (CEE). This developing and deepening emergency is the chief reason why assuming the COVID-19 catastrophe is a rare one-off is so dangerous. COVID-19 is not a temporary disruption to an otherwise stable economic and planetary system, it is one in a series of catastrophes that are disrupting both in wave after deadly wave.

The CEE will keep delivering catastrophic events over the coming decades; left unchecked the injustices and inequalities of the global economic system will deliver them too. They will increase in frequency and ferocity; they will send us scurrying for our war chests again and again until eventually the coffers run dry. Then what? When the war chest has emptied, societal collapse will follow. Businesses won’t be bailed out, employees won’t receive furlough payments, the state will lose its ability to maintain order.

If that is hard to accept, or hard to believe, look outwards to be global south where the war chests are already practically empty. These countries (pick just about any in the global south), aren’t throwing money at COVID-19 in anything like the same way as the global north. They don’t have it and can’t borrow it. There are no payments for citizens cast into unemployment, there’s barely any money to scale up health services or to sure up food supplies; social collapse is a very real possibility.

COVID-19 isn’t a one-off, once in a generation event — and we mustn’t allow ourselves to be bought into a story that it is. The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest catastrophe in a string of catastrophes created by, or made worse because of, the structures of the global economic system. The pandemic is a symptom of a flawed system.

This is why calls to fundamentally change the economic system, rather than just manage its symptoms, are becoming more and more urgent. Making that change might help us prevent some future catastrophes — we could tackle the injustices and inequalities that ferment the tensions that lead to violence, conflict, wars and terrorism. We could end air pollution, end the suffering of farmed and wild animals, end the destruction of precious habitats and end the slow death of the oceans. We could also prepare those most vulnerable, to adapt to and cope with the catastrophic climate and ecological collapse events that are already locked in.

Changing the economic system will not be easy, but it won’t be possible at all if billions of people are seduced and sedated once again by the shiny objects of consumer capitalism. They need to hear a different story, one that will make letting go of consumerism less daunting. A good life, with plenty of bread and roses, plenty of the benefits of civilisation, is possible; we can achieve it without being chained to a machine that creates catastrophic events. New forms of civilisation can emerge; look to the Make Rojava Green movement in northern Syria, explore the potential of deliberative participatory democracy. Delve into history to find ways of organising society that were more egalitarian, where power was devolved, and policies were written with resilience and the needs of future generations in mind.

Let’s not resolve to just manage the symptoms of a broken system — look how badly COVID-19 has been managed. Lets change the system entirely, let’s build resilience, equality, justice and true democracy back into our societies and design an economic system to match. You will be hearing a lot of calls like this, they’ll come from people who understand the warning COVID-19 is. But their (our) voices are not as powerful as we’d hope they are.

As mega as it feels and as much as I dearly want to see a fundamental redesign of the global economic system, I don’t quite think COVID-19 will be the thing that triggers revolutionary. The ideology that props up deregulated, small state, neoliberal capitalism is still too strong; the state will be more prominent in our lives for a bit, but it will gradually retreat again like it has for the last 40 years – we are, after all, suckers for the status quo. It will take more than COVID-19 to humble the neoliberal consumer capitalism. Neoliberalism isn’t Communism and COVID-19 isn’t Chernobyl.

So when we zoom out we’ll see this pandemic as one of the catastrophes that eventually led to the collapse of the global economy, we won’t see it as the catastrophe. We’re going to take a few more beatings before the powerful are finally unable to con us into believing that consumer capitalism is the only way.

World leaders face a choice, they can make a collective decision to accept the warning shot that COVID-19 is and set a new course for how our economies are run, or they can individualistically throw everything at keeping the status quo going until it finally destroys itself. My fear is they’ll choose the latter, I hope I’m proved wrong.