COVID-19 Will Open Up a New Era of Class Struggle Globally

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retried

After the Great Recession in 2008, pandemonium raged among the capitalist class and its intellectual protagonists. They, or more accurately their system, was dragged from the abyss by public funds and what are considered in the U.S., socialist measures. Major industries were nationalized although the US capitalist media uses the term “conservatorship” to assure their class that it is a temporary measure.

In time of crisis, bigger is generally seen as better. “We need a bigger boat”, said Roy Scheider in the movie, Jaws after getting a glimpse of the shark.  And after the Great Recession, the banks that were apparently “too big to fail” got even bigger, “with the blessing of policy makers who encouraged the strong to gobble up the weak.”, says Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and that by 2012, “…five banks were twice as large as they had been a decade earlier…”

The coronavirus pandemic is another opportunity for capital to increase and consolidate its power over labor and society. All the major capitalist journals are reminding us that when the dust eventually settles, many of the businesses and names consumers are familiar with will have disappeared and the big ones will get bigger. In the first quarter, Amazon.com Inc. has hired a couple hundred thousand workers to keep up with increased demand as consumers order more and more on line and sales rose 26% in what is normally a slow quarter; a $75 billion windfall.

Amazon already has about 40% of the online retail market. On line shopping will be a wave of the future and a more permanent aspect of retail as it isolates shoppers, keeps workers apart from each other even more than the super mall has done, weakening communities and destroying main street stores and businesses.

In the meat industry, three companies, Tyson, Cargill and JBS SA already control 66% of US beef production. Cargill is a private company so it doesn’t have to share information about ownership. But the Cargill family has 14 billionaires in it, more than any other family in the world. JBS SA is a Brazilian company and Tyson is a well known US corporation that has been accused of safety violations, price fixing and the super exploitation of immigrant labor. An interesting look at consolidation of the global food industry.  The global food crisis: ABCD of food – how the multinationals dominate trade.

It is a given that the big drug companies will be frothing at the mouth in anticipation of the profits that can be made from the pandemic. US capitalism and its sycophantic partner, the UK is blocking efforts at global cooperation in creating a vaccine. The entire US body politic is bought and paid for by the multi-nationals, the best democracy money can buy.

On the other hand, the airlines, and other industries are on the verge of bankruptcy and we will be likely to see consolidation there. Retail giants like JC Penney, Nieman Marcus, L Crew are also vulnerable and on the brink of extinction.  “I do worry that that the world that recovers from this will be one characterized by firms having failed and a pressure to consolidate.” Daniel Crane a Michigan professor whose field is antitrust law told BusinessWeek.

Another aspect of this slump is that in events like these it is normally men who are the leading job losers, especially manufacturing. But it is women this time as so many women are employed in the education, leisure and hospitality fields.

“Every recession is a ‘mancession’ except this one.” Stephanie Albanesi, University of Pittsburgh.

Due to the growth of the service sector women have overtaken men as a percentage of the US labor force as the Wall Street Journal explains. This Journal article makes some very important points and has useful statistics explaining the added downside of female job losses and the effects on the “consumption and income” of the American family. Yes, we are getting a real sense of who the “essential” workers are, paid or unpaid.

Increased Strikes

In response to the crisis we have seen an increase in strikes and protests that, not surprisingly, do not get the media coverage that a bunch of armed, mostly white nationalists who are being funded by sections of big business to demand the economy open up do. But according to the labor site, Payday Report, there have been at least 150 strikes during the pandemic. “Before, we’d see 2-3 strikes in a week; hence a weekly newsletter made sense. Now, we’re dealing with at least 2-3 strikes a day.”, says Mike Elk, the founder of Payday Report.   We have seen numerous actions in meatpacking, call centers, truckers, janitors, nurses and in the health field in general, and, of course, Amazon.

The push to open up the economy is about profits not jobs and families. Horse racing, football matches and other sports with no one in the stands does not put more money in the pockets of the 25 million unemployed. There can be no stronger proof that profits come before safety, health, the environment or our communities than the opening of the Grand Canyon that is supposed to start this week despite protests from the Navajo Nation that is being savaged by the pandemic. The Grand Canyon is a tourist site and an important revenue source for the state of Arizona that has no problem building walls to keep economic refugees from escaping hunger and poverty.

No one would deny that our world will never be the same. It is correct to be vigilant and recognize that there is no doubt that those introducing repressive measures in the face of a health crisis, will want to make them permanent as the dust settles. Profit and social control are the goals. The idea of people working from home will be expanded on. There will be plenty of investors salivating at Amazon and Jeff Bezos’ huge growth in this period who will want to get in on the online shopping business and put an end to the malls that have been slowly dying anyway.

Workers have been forced to take concessions under threat losing their jobs altogether in the interests of keeping US capitalists competitive in the domestic, but particularly the international marketplace. Doing so has undermined our ability to build solidarity and strong links with other workers at home and abroad; a necessity if we want any future at all. Despite all the promises, we never get those giveaways back. There will be some revenge exacted on the billionaires in the period ahead.

This pandemic has shown that money can be found when capitalism is in trouble, twice in a decade workers have bailed it out. Of course, we know what section of society and their children and grandchildren will pay the present bill but workers will demand we look to other sources, billionaires, their corporations and the misnamed defense industry. It will not be easy to put the genie back in the bottle.
 

The thousands of workers that have never had sick leave will want it and the mindless media propaganda pushing celebrities and sports millionaires on our children as heroes and people of importance and moral integrity has all but disappeared. Health care workers, grocery clerks, home carers, bus drivers and so on have taken Kim Kardashian and Steph Curry’s spot in the media and they are not selling our kids make up, $160 sneakers or diet Coke.

The need for fairness and more regulation will follow this crisis. Robert Reich, an important player in an administration that brought us NAFTA just published an article titled: "America’s corporate elite must place the health of their workers before profit." I didn't bother reading it. It does not give him any credibility at all to even say that with a straight face. It's not possible for them to do that. Such cowardice really, capitalism doesn't work that way it would be class suicide and he knows it.

Capitalism: We cannot change the destructive nature of this beast.

As I write, two giant concerns, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Apple, have been investigated for anti-trust violations by the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and state attorneys general for over a year. These same companies use tax havens and low tax countries like Ireland as their headquarters in order to avoid US taxes. They rip off both US, and Irish workers. Time and again we have seen the results of failed regulation. From the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico that cost 11 workers their lives and catastrophic environmental damage to the region, to the fire in West Texas, the deaths in factories, coal mines, construction sites and so on.

We have some history here.

Theodore Roosevelt is often thought of as a “Trustbuster”, a relentless defender of the working man and woman against the predatory power of big business.  Roosevelt was not against big business though. He was against big business that used unfair or uncompetitive tactics, so he was concerned about how capitalists related to each other in the marketplace.

One such example was the railroads and shipping rates. In 1906, legislation granted the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) the power to set maximum rates which curbed predatory practices by the railroad barons. They sometimes call this behavior “crony” capitalism today, especially when foreign, former colonial, states use government power to protect their economies from western imperialism.

So Roosevelt was protecting capitalism from itself. He was no friend of workers. Capitalism is not a friendly system of production, it is an exploitative one and cannot be made “fair”. It will always rape the environment and will always exploit wage labor.

We are 120 years on from Roosevelt and if we have learned anything at all, regulating business to protect the consumer or the environment does not work as a solution for workers and our communities; capitalism is a system of production that ultimately leads to monopoly and destruction in a rapacious quest for profits. As we live in a bourgeois (capitalist) democracy those that regulate economic activity do so under the direction of the capitalist class.

The mass media tells us this pandemic is not a crisis of the capitalist economy. It is being imposed on the system by the health crisis. But the pandemic is a product of capitalism and the market. The destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina was a market driven catastrophe as was the near catastrophic collapse of the Oroville Dam in California. The coronavirus and many of the diseases, afflicting the global population, as well as hunger, poverty and lack of basic human services are a product of industrial farming and how we produce the necessities of life under the capitalist system.

This madness will only end when the working class internationally, the millions upon millions of people whose labor creates all wealth, collectively owns, manages and determines the nature of what we produce, how we produce it, when we produce it and that production is carried out in harmony with nature as the greatest threat to humanity today is climate change and the extinction of our species.

This is not a utopian concept. History is full of such examples; it's how human society has progressed and the important lesson we must draw from history is that society needs new managers.