Is COVID-19 a path towards the philosophy of Karl Marx?

If we are to change course and think

 differently, nothing could be worse than a return to normality, as there was no normalcy for most people in the world and it was in any event leading towards disaster anyway

– Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it –Arundhati Roy

Karl Marx did not advocate the implementation of his philosophy through death and destruction but he did predict that like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.

While it’s too early to tell whether the destruction caused by the coronavirus is philosophically what Marx predicted, the after effect of it at least seems to offer opportunities for the world to seize upon and build a new house where there is much less inequality amongst its inhabitants. Socialism or by any other name, a governance system that takes the world towards a social organisation where the ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange is more broad based and where there is greater ownership by the community as a whole, might be on the cards.

Pandemics are nothing new and history records several that have killed many people, devastated livelihoods and ruined the economies of countries. Despite these, the world has survived.

The worst influenza pandemic recorded, the Spanish flu of 1918 which incidentally had not originated there but supposedly in New York and subsequently spread throughout the world killing some 50 million people and infecting over 500 million people. In percentage terms, taking the estimated population of the world at the time of 1.8 billion people, it killed around 3 % of the population and infected about 30% of the population. The pandemic lasted about two years.

Other large influenza pandemics

The Spanish flu pandemic was the largest, but not the only large recent influenza pandemic.  Two decades before the Spanish flu the Russian flu pandemic (1889-1894) is believed to have killed one million people.

Estimates for the death toll of the “Asian Flu” (1957-1958) vary between 1.5 and 4 million. According to a WHO publication the ‘Hong Kong Flu’ (1968-1969) killed between one and four million people.

The Russian Flu pandemic of 1977-78 was caused by the same H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish flu. According to estimates it had killed around 700,000 died worldwide. Compared to the period of the Spanish flu, differences in health systems infrastructure and medicines matter today and while the potential is there for the numbers being infected and dying to be substantial. The Spanish flu hit the world in the days before antibiotics were invented; and many deaths, perhaps most, were not caused by the influenza virus itself, but by secondary bacterial infections.

It is said that health systems were different then, but also the health and living conditions of the global population were worse than now. The 1918 pandemic hit a world population of which a very large share was extremely poor – large shares of the population were undernourished, in most parts of the world the populations lived in very poor health, and overcrowding, poor sanitation and low hygiene standards were common. Sadly, this situation is not very different today as will be shown later in this article.

The question before us now is not only about if and when the current pandemic will end, and how, as it will end without doubt, but about what we make of what is left behind in its wake. It is also the time to begin discussions as to what kind of world do we want and whether we should go back to the world before the pandemic struck it. Although many tend to describe the world today as wealthy and healthy, economic social and health statistics do not support this claim when considering the number of people in poverty and when considering the health and wealth inequalities in the world.

The following sample of statistics are given to show that the world is not very healthy and wealthy and wealthy today

1. Nearly half of the world’s population — more than three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day  

2. One billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty  

3. 805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat.

4. More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Diarrhoea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally, or approximately 2,300 people per day.

5. In 2011, 165 million children under the age five were stunted (reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic malnutrition.

6. Preventable diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia take the lives of two million children a year who are too poor to afford proper treatment.

7. As of 2013, 21.8 million children under one year of age worldwide had not received the three recommended doses of vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

8. 1/4 of all humans live without electricity — approximately 1.6 billion people.

9. 80% of the world population lives on less than $10 a day.

10. Oxfam estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty—that’s less than one-fourth the income of the top 100 richest billionaires.

11. The World Food Programme says, “The poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty.” Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. An article titled ‘If you see the big picture, then we can see eye to eye’ by Chandula Abeywickrema, Chairman of Lanka Impact Investing Network (LIIN) and Chairman of People’s Merchant Finance PLC (http://www.ft.lk/columns/If-you-see-the-big-picture-then-we-can-see-eye-to-eye/4-698258), quotes the stunning figures published by Oxfam in their 2018 report to the World Economic Forum (WEF) that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people whom make up to 60% of the planet’s population, that in the year 2018, the 26 richest people on earth had the same net-worth of poorest half, the 3.8 billion people of the planet earth. 

If this global inequality does not shock us, nothing will. This gap between the rich and the poor is vulgar. This inequality is in the main, the result of exploitation of the many, by a few.

As Abeywickrema says, corporate greed, phenomenal economic profit and irresponsible revenue generation by totally sacrificing key fundamental and basic values of the planet and the people has brought all of us in this planet to the brink of annihilation and extinction.

It is difficult to imagine and link the coronavirus as a catalyst let loose to give the world a shock it needed. If its targeting was more discerning and less all-encompassing as being experienced now, one could have come to a conclusion that it is the work of a higher being or of invaders from another planet! The aftermath of its impact however is no different. It has shaken the foundations of the world as we knew it, and it has made the accumulation of unbridled wealth a meaningless exercise as the economic disorder that has been experienced has made such wealth much less potent than it was in shaping that world of inequality.

The coronavirus has made the high and mighty kneel, and brought the world, its life style as it was before it, the economy before it, to a halt like nothing else could. No doubt those who were rich and powerful and those who were supported by them to maintain the status quo and propagate the inequality before the viral attack on the world are very likely longing for a return to “normality”, and the life of avarice and exploitation they practiced and wondering how to stitch a future to the past where they thrived. Their intelligentsia no doubt has been tasked to chart a way to get back to “normal”, the way the world was before December 2019.

However, for others and for those who wish to see a world of greater compassion, a world which is sustained by its climate and its natural eco system, a world less of inequality, a world that is driven by genuine needs rather than wants arising from avarice, where no one dies of hunger or lack of clean water to drink, where basic health needs are met for everyone, this pandemic offers opportunities to rethink and not begin building another time bomb that the world built for itself.

If we are to change course and think differently, nothing could be worse than a return to normality, as there was no normalcy for most people in the world and it was in any event leading towards disaster anyway. Chandula Abeywickrema places some very interesting thoughts in us. He says wealth distribution is not about taking things from rich and giving to the poor or taking things from the people who have and distribution to people who do not have. It is not even the so-called Corporate Social Responsibility activities of many entities and institutions or many philanthropic donations given to community upliftment and benefits. The art of wealth distribution he says is the need to emotionally rationalise the use of many resources at our disposal continually to ensure the products and services are made available, accessible and affordable to more people in more places, and more often. As he says, if most of the products and services commercially viable, humanly needed and important are available, accessible and affordable only to a few people in few places more often, it’s not wealth distribution but wealth accumulation by few people.

That is indeed the current status of affaires in the world today, when we have 26 richest people in the world having the wealth equivalent to wealth of 3.8 billion people, its wealth accumulated by them for them.

If one interprets this right, then, the paradigm being advocated is to turn the economic model that existed prior to the pandemic, upside down and for wealth generation and accumulation to happen at the grass roots so that more and more people acquire and have a share of capital rather than a few. Consequently, economic inequities, and many social and societal inequities that have their roots in economic inequities, will be addressed with greater sustainability. It needs to be said here that such a model could well be making an assumption that is fundamentally at odds with a weakness in many human beings, which capitalism has exploited very successfully, and that is their avarice and the sense of power they derive through the accumulation of wealth far in excess of their real needs.  

The challenge for all of us now is to think strategically and laterally, about the kind of world we would like to have and move on from a world that was destroying itself anyway by killing the very environment that had sustained it, and allowing the world to be controlled by 2000 billionaires whose only interest and ambition would have been to become trillionaires and perhaps leave for Mars if the Earth got destroyed.

Sri Lanka may not be able to determine the trajectory of other countries, but they can collectively give some thought to what they wish the new Sri Lanka to be. It is timely that our thoughts are directed towards the kind of world we would like to see rather than doing hundreds of analysis about the possible origins of the virus, its spread and its containment. While these are important, the origin of a virus spread is most likely something that people cannot control although preventing its spread is something people can control. It is important however to discuss how we could collectively face the aftermath of the pandemic and how we could chart a course that would give us a better country as that would be within our control.