By Josh Hager ’22
Staff Writer
Photo Credit: The Week
The pandemic of COVID-19 is exposing the fragility of the system of capitalism. As the world plunges deeper into the pandemic situation, with the US being the country with the most cases, the capability for a proper response is limited in a system where the labor of the working class is necessary so that profits do not collapse. Stories are pouring in from across the country of mass layoffs, but landlords are continuing to demand rent despite their tenant’s lack of income. A combination of workers still needing to pay for necessities and the capitalist class continuing to demand labor so that the stock market does not totally collapse, as it very well may happen, demands that the working class continues to show up for work in the midst of a pandemic.
The Trump administration, along with the supposed Democratic “opposition,” is helping to support this exploitation with exemptions for workers to stay at home (that applies to roughly 80 percent of workers nationally) and a one-time check. With a meaningless stay-at-home system that only applies to a small minority of workers, the capitalist class and its allies in Washington are putting their interests in maintaining profits over the health of the working class. Construction, retail, sanitation, health, and other workers comprising broad swaths of the economy are enraged at the prospect of having to work with limited safety precautions rather than being able to stay at home.
The vast majority of workers staying at home is necessary to “flatten the curve” and prevent the worst possibilities of this pandemic, but this is prevented by the class of people who continue to demand rent and demand labor so that their wealth, which comes from the labor of the working class, does not cease. President Trump discussed mass returns to work by early April, and it is obvious that he did this because the markets are on the verge of collapse. For capitalists, profits have been considered to be more important than human lives.
But despite what many say, coronavirus is not the actual cause of the looming economic crisis. Capitalism prevents an effective response to coronavirus because of the threat of crisis, but a crisis is inevitable under capitalism, coronavirus is just the trigger. As Jailson De Souza discusses in the Brazilian outlet, A Nova Democracia, capitalism constantly produces a crisis of overproduction wherein production outpaces demand, causing rates of profit to be lowered, which in turn causes a crisis. For years the US economy has been boosted by injections of money from the Federal Reserve to prevent utter collapse. Even last year, German markets were on the verge of collapse, but the crisis was postponed and is now rearing its ugly head in 2020 with coronavirus as the immediate impetus. Coronavirus is simply the needle that could pop the biggest bubble in decades. Many people across the country, having already realized the hardship that rent and working in this economy produces, are realizing that their landlord relies on their money for their income and that the companies they work for need their labor to survive. It is the power of the working class that powers the world, and capitalists would rather see them risk their lives in a pandemic than to stop working and reduce their profits.
What does it say of capitalism that it is on the verge of collapse when some of the workers cannot work for a small amount of time? What does it say that capitalists are weighing the cost-benefit analysis of lives and profits? It says that the masses of humanity must not risk themselves for the profit of a class of exploiters so that the exploitative class may survive.
