We humans have to navigate and survive in a universe that's basically unpredictable. Sure, as the pattern-seekers we've evolved into, we see and look for reoccurring events, natural rhythms if you will, to satisfy our need to feel secure...
source: YouTube
The sun coming up every day, the flow of the seasons and our deep understanding of the laws of cause and effect are great aides for satisfying that need for security and predictability. We further regiment our lifes with clocks and calendars, so we know in advance when to be where and when to reap the harvest. And that's all fine, but ultimately everything, from our living environment to our societies and even our very bodies, consists of systems so complex, that the predictability we wish for more often than not eludes us...
It's a great mystery to me therefore why we hang on so desperately to a man-made system that's inherently incapable of dealing with the many surprises life throws at our feet. I'm speaking of capitalism, of course. We could say, I guess, that capitalism is very reliable in its unreliability. We could also say that crises are to be expected in a capitalist economy; it's one of the certainties of capitalism we learn about in business education. Crises are to be expected; who hasn't heard about capitalism's built-in "boom-bust-cycle"?
I won't go deeper into capitalism's many injustices; for that you can read the majority of the posts I've published in this blog. This time I only want to briefly share with you the fact that our current socioeconomic paradigm is especially bad at dealing with unexpected crises in an adequate, quick and compassionate manner. Whenever a poor country is hit by an unexpected disaster, like a hurricane, tidal-wave or war, the "aide" coming from the rich global north is always hinged on the expected profitability; the 2010 Haiti earthquake is a "fine" example mentioned in today's video.
And even the disasters we can predict, are dealt with in a market-friendly way, which means they're not dealt with at all as long as possible solutions aren't also very profitable; this is the sole reason why nothing's done effectively against global warming. It's also the sole reason why some countries are always at war, as their economies depend highly on the military-industrial complex. If we compare how countries deal with the pandemic, we see that the most successful ones have less focus on the free market economy; America, where the free market economy is almost religiously revered, is one of the worst, Europe, where many countries have some form of social democracy, fares much better, and countries like North Korea and China have some of the best numbers when it comes to containing the virus.
The best solution to all of this is of course socialism, a system where the means of production are owned by the workers, and every decision is voted on by those workers. But that won't happen any time soon, so I point to another solution; why not invoke wartime politics in times of crisis? All of us in the west have done this in the last World War, so it's not that far-fetched. A government can't ask people to stay at home to fight a virus without also giving them compensation for lost income and jobs. And you can't ask them to not work without freezing rents and mortgages. And you can only take these life saving measures when you're willing to, at least temporarily, forget about profitability and the GDP. Which we did in the Second World War, and which we can do again if only we shake off our addiction to the socioeconomic paradigm that literally puts a price on human life.
Why Capitalism can't handle crises.
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