We are witnessing in growing horror daily scenes of panic-buying and empty supermarket shelves. Australians are hoarding basic goods, like toilet paper, pasta and rice, in preparation for a large-scale COVID-19 outbreak. Similar behaviour has occurred in other countries, like the United Kingdom. In the United States, people are reportedly queueing up to buy guns.
These actions are apparently irrational. Australia produces enough food and toilet paper for all, so there is not real risk of running out. The same applies to the United States. So, what is going on?
Some have argued that panic-buying reflects a psychological need to reassert control in a highly uncertain situation. This is likely true, but focusing on individuals’ psyche provides only part of the explanation.
The real story behind panic-buying and hoarding is the collapse of trust in the state’s capacity to address serious societal problems. Many people can no longer see an alternative other than market or barbarism. Either they look after their families’ own needs, or no one will. In this context, hoarding appears rational.
This much-bemoaned collapse in public trust did not occur all on its own. It is a result of decades of piecemeal changes to the role of government and public institutions, accompanied by constant messaging from political leaders urging people to become self-reliant in the market – ‘lifters’, not ‘leaners’ in former Treasurer Joe Hockey’s formulation.
After the upheavals of the two world wars and the Great Depression, Australia and other Western states developed extensive capacities to intervene in society to ameliorate the disadvantages that naturally accompany capitalist development. High levels of progressive taxation ameliorated income and wealth inequalities. States constructed hospitals, schools, universities and even housing on a large scale. They provided education, unemployment benefits, and healthcare. Critically, states also dominated capital, restricting financial adventurism and developing national industrial policies to promote favoured industries.
I do not wish to romanticise the postwar welfare state. Its bureaucracy was often stifling and officious. Industrial policy often propped up favoured but inefficient industries. It did, however, enjoy far higher levels of societal trust and possess a capacity to mobilise a wide range of institutions towards a shared political goal. Both are badly needed but in short supply today.
From the late 1970s, successive governments in Australia and other Western states have slowly dismantled the welfare state to restore capital’s profitability. Many public functions, like housing, were almost entirely eliminated. Others, like education, health and unemployment benefits have remained but subjected to powerful ideological attacks and institutional tweaks to encourage reduced societal reliance. Industrial policy has all but vanished, and financial capital was freed to roam the globe. Unequal access to assets and finance has meant wealth inequality has skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, the state has retreated to a regulatory role. It is fragmented and decentralised. Government’s capacity for purposive intervention has weakened drastically. Instead it now mainly attempts to coordinate the actions of a host of quasi-independent agencies and regulators. No wonder that using the military, one of the state’s few remaining command-and-control organisations, has become increasingly attractive for managing domestic challenges, like the bushfires.
In response to supply shortages in supermarkets, for example, the Australian government has largely attempted to cajole private companies and individuals. But why should individuals stop hoarding? For decades they have been told not to expect assistance from the state. It was up to them to gain sought-after qualifications to be competitive in the job marketplace, find a place to live, look after their retirement and so on. And their suspicion of the state’s impotence, if not indifference, is not unfounded. It was created by design.
In order to understand what is possible, two comparisons are apposite. The first is between countries like Australia, the US, the UK, and many EU members, where the transformation of the state has been deepest, and countries like Singapore, Israel and Korea. These rather different states have coordinated a largely successful response to COVID-19, and panic-buying scenes have been quite rare too.
Singapore, for example, recorded its first confirmed case eight days before Italy. Yet, whereas Italy now has around 35,000 confirmed cases and nearly 3,000 fatalities, Singapore is yet to record a fatality from the coronavirus and has kept confirmed cases to around 300. Israel recorded its first COVID-19 case in mid-February, but has so far managed to avoid exponential growth, recording only around 430 confirmed cases to-date and no deaths. Korea was initially one of the worst hit countries, but has managed to ‘flatten the curve’ of infection successfully so far, without resorting to draconian measures like China.
Arguably, Singapore, Israel, and Korea’s capacity to respond to COVID-19 stems in part from these states’ enhanced capacity to mobilise people and institutions for war. But it is not essential to go down this path to improve the state’s capacity to address public health crises.
This brings me to my second comparison, between the US’s feeble public health response to COVID-19 and the Federal Reserve Bank’s rapid and forceful actions to stabilise financial markets. As critical markets, like the trade in US Treasury Bonds, seized last week, the Fed enabled US$1.5tn in cheap loans to banks to restore liquidity. A similar injection of funds to fight the coronavirus pandemic would have arguably yielded remarkable results.
This example shows that rather than state capacity declining absolutely, it has been redeployed to protect capital from destroying itself: this is a political and ideological choice. To restore trust and avoid society’s descent into barbarism it is time to make a different choice.
Mucio Tosta Gonçalves | Mar 27 2020
Dear Mr. Hameiri, good afternoon here from Brazil. I’d read your article and would like to express my congratulations. Thanks for sharing your ideas. You’re right: it’s a matter of choice. It’s time to fight to bring the State back, starting with the recovery of public trust in progressive and transformative ways, if I understood your point of view. It’s a core question, even to capitalist development. Nevertheless, bringing the State back, eroding its foundations and surpassing capitalism, is another essential task. Seizing the opportunity, I would like to know if it’s possible to translate the text to Portuguese and share it with my Political Science students (I’m a Professor at a Federal University here). I think it will be an interesting reading in this quarantine time (and most of them don’t read English). Thanks! And thank’s to PPE editors, as well!
Shahar Hameiri | Mar 27 2020
Dear Mucio, many thanks for your kind words. I’d be delighted if the piece was translated into Portuguese. Please send me a copy when it’s done for my reference. Take care and stay well, in this difficult time.
Kind regards,
Shahar
Robert Austin Henry | Apr 21 2121
FREE CUBA, OCCUPIED PALESTINE AND ALLENDE’S CHILE IN TIMES OF CORONAVIRUS.
[A Reply to “COVID-19: Time to Bring Back the State”, originally written in April 2020, with apologies for delayed lodgement by author].
One historic and two gaping omissions detract from international politics academic Shahar Hameiri’s otherwise sober analysis. The latter two characterise Western scholarship.
Firstly, the author holds up Israel as a model responder to the COVID-19 crisis. But he fails to accurately historicise it as the Zionist apartheid state of Israel, let alone say how disastrously its policies against the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) since 1967 are now playing out for 6 million Palestinians. Paradoxically it is precisely that history which facilitates any effective Israeli response to the pandemic, a facility built on its well-documented genocide against Palestinians since the 1930s [1]. Indeed while Jewish Israelis enjoy First-world clinics built with historically-unique multi-billion dollar US subsidies, as well as Israel’s imperial capital accumulation extracted from the occupation itself and Israel’s globally-interventionist military-industrial empire, the UN has shown that the health system in the OPTs is at the point of collapse (see https://bit.ly/2XkFTCa). From the probable source of the xenophobically-named “Spanish Flu” of 1918 [2], the armed forces of the United States, the equally-xenophobic “China Virus” Trump regime’s cancellation of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in 2018 has further imperilled Palestine’s deepening health crisis, and by knock-on effect Israel and the region’s Coronavirus response (see https://bit.ly/2JUcHcV) [3]. The local is now inescapably global, the global local.
Since 1967 the Israeli state has colonised all major Palestinian water supplies (when not destroying them: see https://bit.ly/2wnS9Xn)—including in occupied Syria (Golan Heights)—and annexed the remaining Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip territories in a way which, according to the United Nations as early as 1985, “has had a tremendously negative impact on the political and socio-economic life of the Palestinian population” and “has resulted in the overall stagnation of the Palestinian economy, dismantling of the Palestinian communities, violations of the fundamental human rights and exploitation and depletion of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian and other Arab territories” (see https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-199702/). To this can be added a series of Zionist war crimes—for instance, Israeli pharmaceutical firms testing medicines on unwilling Palestinian prisoners, and organ harvesting from Palestinian prisoners and those slain in the Intifada, including children—all of which are routinely facilitated by withholding of bodies and with an unknown death toll into the many thousands [4].
Moreover, the UN has warned that “poverty and a debilitated health system in the Palestinian territories would make an outbreak of the coronavirus disastrous” (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52089337). Law Professor Neve Gordon of Queen Mary University, London, argues that “Gaza residents will suffer not just from the natural complications the virus causes, but from the fact that the siege puts them at an extreme disadvantage in all three categories considered vital to battling the coronavirus epidemic: health services, social conditions that determine the level of health, and the ability to keep social distance from one another.” Paradoxically the lockdowns working in Israel and much of the world only deepen the Israeli-US-made catastrophe, given the miniscule OPTs’ asphyxiating population density of 827.5 per square kilometre, among the ten worst globally (see https://bit.ly/2VaoWaP & https://bit.ly/3c12GqD).
Australian relief worker Mary Kelly reports from the OPTs that “97% of all Gaza’s water is not fit to drink and the hospitals do not have enough clean water even for medical staff to wash safely. Basic preventative measures such as washing hands regularly and keeping social distancing are again impossible to carry out” (see https://bit.ly/2RlJdc8). Baroness Helena Kennedy points out that Israel regularly murders Palestinian medics with impunity, and that “the protected status of hospitals and medical personnel under international law is not being upheld” (see https://bit.ly/2JQbO5a). The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories has alleged that as the Coronavirus crisis intensifies, Israel has confiscated or demolished tents designated for a clinic in the Northern West Bank of the OPTs (see https://bit.ly/2x4Ns5c).
Ali Kazak, former Palestinian ambassador to Australia, responded to Hameiri’s article within 24 hours that, for starters, it is wrong on the number of cases in Israel. “The Guardian report (at https://bit.ly/2x2YdF9) … says there are 530 confirmed cases in Israel. This is about a 25% increase on the number (the author) mentions in 24 hours, so Israel is hardly avoiding ‘exponential growth’ of the virus. Indeed, while he acknowledges Israel’s ‘capacity to mobilise people and institutions for war’ he completely avoids the ones under its occupation” and against whom it launches its war (email to author, 20 March 2020). In sum: any claim to Israel’s curative exceptionalism collapses in the light of the evidence.
Secondly, the author elides the standout living example of how to confront and defeat the COVID-19 pandemic: socialist Cuba. While Palestine has been under Israeli blockade for much of the current century, the US blockade of Cuba—routinely condemned by c.195 UN member-nations and backed only by Israel and a few US outposts—began barely a year after the triumph of the Cuba Revolution in 1959. It has cost Cuba around US$900 billion in lost revenue.
Yet despite the pharaonic and lethal hardship inflicted in consequence on Cuban society, Cuba has been on the frontline of global medical, biomedical and pharmaceutical defences against the Coronavirus pandemic, sending medical brigades to 11 countries since early March including China, Italy and Venezuela. The Cuban-developed drug Interferon Alfa 2B (IFRrec) has proven successful in China in reversing Coronavirus spread, in tandem with other medications (see for instance https://cnn.it/2JTxZaB, https://bit.ly/2xXHCCy, https://bit.ly/3c1kMsm, https://bit.ly/39W8wrD and https://bit.ly/34kgYQj). This in turn will have a domino effect on retarding the global spread of the virus. Cuban medical brigades have become legendary in disaster zones across the planet since 1959, as University of Glasgow economic historian Helen Yaffe has recently noted in Le Monde Diplomatique [5]. Its Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade won the prestigious PAHO/WHO award “for life-saving work in many of the world’s worst natural disasters and epidemics” in 2017 (see https://bit.ly/2ViULhs). Last month Cuba allowed the UK cruise ship MS Braemar to dock after it became stranded, then treated the sick and repatriated the healthy.
A World at Risk Report of September 2019 states that “disease outbreaks disrupt the entire health system reducing access to health services for all diseases and conditions, which leads to even greater mortality and further economic depression” (see https://bit.ly/3e7uafV). It also notes that negative impacts from poverty, poor governance, weak health systems, lack of trust in health services, specific cultural and religious aspects and armed conflict can greatly complicate outbreak preparedness and response. Moreover, it urges regional and global leaders to aid country actions and develop networks of partners to collaborate in preparations and disease control. Despite the report’s silence on theme it seems clear that the effect of blockades and economic sanctions, given existing knowledge of their devastating impacts during times outside of crisis, surely compromise a global response once in a global crisis, and further entrench North-South inequalities. This emerges as a self-evident argument for their abandonment and payment of historic reparations, grotesquely so in the case of Western-led economic sanctions against both Cuba and Palestine. Indeed, global calls from civil society to end the blockade of Cuba have rarely been so loud: see for instance https://bit.ly/34p1LNZ.
Finally, briefly, and if not to state the obvious, state intervention of the kind Hameiri envisages is inconceivable without a radical transformation from below of the reigning state formation. Meanwhile, as we watch more billionaire corporate welfare doled out by the capitalist state across much of the planet, including in Australia where historically-low corporate tax remains a protected species, another recent and iconic example of popular organisation to defeat state-terrorist and empire-orchestrated hoarding might have merited mention on its 50th anniversary.
During Chile’s one-thousand-day Popular Unity government led by President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), the Nixon-CIA-Chilean bourgeoisie cabal imposed drastic artificial shortages on much of the population with the aim of fomenting social unrest and legitimising a military coup. Faced with starvation and a manufactured public health crisis, working-class neighbourhoods—especially though not uniquely those organised within the iconic worker-controlled industrial belts (cordones industriales) [6] around Santiago—created peoples’ Supply and Price Boards (Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios) to disempower speculators and forcefully open pharmacies, supermarkets and warehouses. The JAPs would then distribute their contents in a calm, organised and needs-based manner, usually with armed forces and police support in Popular Unity-controlled municipalities. Within 12 months there were 500 in the capital Santiago alone, and with government backing they soon straddled the length and breadth of the country [7]. Their role in defeating the CIA-funded truckers’ strike of October 1972, intended to paralyse production and distribution across the country, was fundamental: the JAPS became the bridge between the worker-controlled industrial belts on the one hand, and the emergent expressions of grass-roots people’s power intent on confronting the imminent military coup on the other. Solidarity blossomed. The process is intricately depicted in Patricio Guzman’s multi award-winning 2-part documentary “The Battle of Chile”. Beyond the early years of the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War and the Cuban Revolution itself, there have been few comparatively successful experiments in worker’s control in the long twentieth century (1914-2008).
If created locally around Australia now, JAPs would rapidly unseat the simple TINA-like “market or barbarism” alternatives which Hameiri sees as socially entrenched, amidst what he accurately calls “the collapse of trust in the state’s capacity to address serious societal problems.” Their potential to empower the working class and labour organisations and create a tangible living memory of grass-roots control—rather than demoralising dole queues and disempowering charity—would be a major step in rolling back the profit gouging, wage-contractionary and increasingly authoritarian practices which the neoliberal state is rolling out under the guise of a Coronavirus response. And it would strengthen the social solidarity needed to give people the confidence to expand that camaraderie into the international sphere. COVID-19 has detonated a global public health crisis of capitalism parallel to the already existing economic one. Or to borrow from one eminent political economist’s characterisation, the Global Coronavirus Crisis (GCC) now intensifies the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) [8]. But if a besieged Chilean working class can socialise both production and distribution within months of Allende’s election and resist such forces, Palestine can resist the same forces and still mount intifadas 90 years on and Cuba can overcome them to the point where its health system is the envy of many advanced capitalist countries—notably the USA—why can’t we?
Notes:
[1] See for instance Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, Oneworld Publications, 2011; and Nur Masalha, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, London, Zed Books, 2018.
[2] See Atilio Borón, “La pandemia y el fin de la era neoliberal”, at https://rebelion.org/la-pandemia-y-el-fin-de-la-era-neoliberal/. Even a US government health website comes close to conceding as much: see Carol Byerly, “The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919”, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/
[3] Philip M. Giraldi, ex-CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, speculates on potential US-Israeli complicity in COVID-19’s origins at https://bit.ly/2RpDPom Its US origins are argued by Panamanian international relations professor Julio Yao, at https://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/205546 and https://bit.ly/34kVIKx.
[4] See “Israel Authorizes Organ Harvesting, Weapons-Testing on Palestinian Prisoners: Report” at https://bit.ly/3b6Gc7H; Middle East Monitor, “Israel Pharmaceutical Firms Test Medicines on Palestinian Prisoners” at https://bit.ly/2RicqVx; and the compilation of articles at https://bit.ly/34oN1yL.
[5] See Helen Yaffe, “The world rediscovers Cuban medical internationalism”, at https://bit.ly/34qVKk6 and her commentary in Tom O’Connor, “Cuba Uses ‘Wonder Drug’ to Fight Coronavirus Around World Despite U.S. Sanctions”, at https://bit.ly/2RlOzo0. Both draw on “Cuban Medical Internationalism”, Chapter 6 in Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, London, Yale University Press, 2020.
[6] See Sandra Castillo Soto, Cordones Industriales: Nuevas formas de Sociabilidad Obrera y Organización Política Popular (Chile 1970 – 1973), Santiago de Chile, Ediciones Escaparate & Museo Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, 2009; Miguel Silva, Los Cordones Industriales y el Socialismo desde Abajo, Santiago de Chile, Miguel Silva, 1998; Julio Faúndez, “The defeat of politics: Chile under Allende”, Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, Nº 28 (1980), pp. 59-75; Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: the Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986, passim; and Anon., “Los cordones industriales: una experiencia de autoorganización en el Chile de la Unidad Popular”, at https://bit.ly/2Xj3i6U.
[7] See Julio Pinto (ed.), Cuando Hicimos Historia: La Experiencia de la Unidad Popular, Santiago de Chile, LOM, 2005.
[8] See Frank Stilwell, “Beyond the Global Coronavirus Crisis: Austerity or Recovery?” at https://bit.ly/2VhBkWv. Distinguished Barcelonan public health professor Joan Benach has also demonstrated the integral connection between both in his “Doctrina del Shock: El relato oficial del coronavirus oculta una crisis sistémica”, at https://bit.ly/39TZJXl.