In the last article, I shared the story of how our intelligence as living creatures has evolved through time to allow us to control our world. But also our intelligence is still flawed because it's not able to protect our existence from major events like war, famine, economic crisis, climate change... and most recently covid-19.
The flaw is in the way we organize our economy, in other words which goods and services we produce, how do we produce and distribute them, and what we do with benefits. We call the current organization Capitalism, in which a wealthy minority makes all of these decisions without any democratic control. Not only such concentrated decisions do not leverage the intelligence of all of us, but also tends to be biased for the interest of the few, which is simply opposed to the interest of all of us, human beings.
Covid-19 pandemic is one of these crises where you can see the opposition of interests and how this opposition threatens our existence. On one side, you got large capital owners backed by national governments, and on the other side, there is us, the working people. Capitalist organization of our economies worsened the impact of covid-19 and made it a lethal virus. Let me make my point with some concrete examples.
Capitalism requires sustained growth in profit to function. One of the ways to increase profit, is by reducing taxes. Companies avoid taxes either illegally or through "optimizations”, pressure governments to reduce taxes and even to subsidize them. For example, president Macron reduced taxes from 33% to 25% in France, and president Trump lowered it from 35% to 21%. These cuts are directly translated into less spendings in public services, including health care. There are no budgets to buy detection test units, masks, to provide enough beds or personnel to treat patients with covid-19. Patients are dying because they either can't afford private hospitals, or are not admitted in saturated hospitals or finally aree admitted but in quite too late stages.
Capitalism prioritizes private profit over anything else, including public health. Most governments were delaying confinement to the last moment although risks were quite obvious from the experience of first affected countries like China. Governments were under a lot of pressure to avoid shutting down businesses, and even when it happened, large corporations were able to continue their businesses while risking the lives of their employees, despite the fact that some do not produce essential goods.
Capitalism dig inequalities and impoverish people. In the strongest capitalist economy of the world, the United States, a survey shows that 61% of American households can't afford an unexpected expense of 1000$ using their savings. In other words, during such crisis, you are pushing everyone to risk their health, and the health of others, by going out every day to work in order to survive financially.
Capitalism only functions when there's profit. People's wants and need, including health, are not considered in the bottom line of financial reports. This means that when there's no profit to make, our economy collapses and people starve. In the current situation with covid-19, profits are slowing down, and this is threatening our economy and lives.
History showed us that crises produces angry people, and this anger can either translate to fascist movements (2008 in UK/USA, 1929 in Germany), or socialist ones (1917 in Russia, 1929 in USA). I can only hope for socialist movements that can help us move beyond Capitalism to an economy organized based on a democratic basis, where every worker like me and you, has a vote and a say on what to produce, how to produce it and distribute it. We would reach, as humanity, a new level of intelligence, a common and conscious one.
Spread the word, and stay safe because of course, covid-19 kills too!
