AFTER THE PANDEMIC

Economist and political commentator Grace Blakeley says the world that emerges from the coronavirus will be just as unequal  and unstable as the one that entered it - unless working people around the world demand something better. The alternative is the economic and political transformation proposed by a Green New Deal. 

GRACE BLAKELEY IS one of a rare breed; a Marxist economist. She's also a fine political commentator and, at just twenty eight years old, she is arguably already one of the leading figures on the British left.  Her podcast A World To Win is well worth subscribing to.

In all the debate about the pandemic what is often skirted around in the corporate media is how the wealthy have prospered economically while the rest of us have been struggling  just to keep our heads above water. Some have already drowned. While the number of people homeless has continued to mount and while the lines at the food banks have continued to lengthen, the rich have been doing just dandy. Since the pandemic began New Zealand's richest man, Graeme Hart, had made $3.5 billion by January this year.

The rich have got richer with the assistance of Government polices designed to prop up a failed economic system crumbling in the face of the pandemic. Strangely the zealots of the 'free market' - the Mike Hosking's of the world -  have had little to say about this massive state intervention in the affairs of the market. That's worth remembering next time Hosking bashes welfare beneficiaries.

Last year the Labour-led government shelled out over $13 billion in wage subsidies while giving nothing to those who really needed help. As commentator Bernard Hickey observed the Government delivered, 'the biggest shot of cash and monetary support to the wealthy in the history of New Zealand, while giving nothing to the renters, the jobless, students, migrants and the working poor who mostly voted it in'.

The recent derisory increase in benefit levels has done nothing to ease of the plight of those who might of voted for Labour in the expectation that it would be fighting their corner.

As Grace Blakeley observes in her book The Corona Crash the vast chasm that exists between the rich elite who have thrived economically during the pandemic and a working class that has suffered considerably, has been as inevitable as the consequences of the 2008 financial crash. It was then that Governments bailed out the finance sector and now they are bailing out the entire economic system. As Blakeley says the political elites had no choice in the face of a pandemic that threatened the very future of capitalism. 

Since 2008 governments have poured some $10 trillion into the global economy and now capitalism needs to be rescued again. It has been a bailout of historic proportions but, in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has had little to offer the rest of us but plaintive appeals for 'kindness'.

The vast amount of state spending has led some liberal commentators to argue that it represents the death knell of neoliberalism. Some New Zealand commentators have gone as far as to suggest that the vast amount of state money spent represents Labour returning to its social democratic roots.  

Blakeley dismisses such illusions, quoting Lenin from State and Revolution who observed that some people confused a capitalist regime with high levels of state spending and some public ownership with 'state socialism'. And Blakeley contends there is no such thing as 'the market' distinct from 'the state'. Markets can only function when states provide the infrastructure within which market interactions take place. And capitalism can only function - and survive - when the state steps in to soften the impact of a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic.

Without working class intervention says Blakeley the world that eventually emerges from the pandemic will be just as unequal and unstable as the one that entered it - perhaps more so. We need a radical response and that comes in the shape of the economic and political transformation offered by a Green New Deal. The plan is to democratise the economy and society or face an increasingly authoritarian capitalism.  Elsewhere Grace Blakeley has written:

'The choice we face today is not between neoliberalism and keynesianism; it is between authoritarian capitalism and democratic socialism. Capitalist states will not voluntarily transition to the latter. If we want a just, free, and sustainable world in the wake of the Covd-19 pandemic, working people all over the world must organise to demand it'.  

The Corona Crash is published by Verso.