The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the economic plunge caused by COVID-19 and its economic impact are all crises of capitalism. Caused by the growing instability of the economy, the continual expansion of capital shrinks, and the economy busts resulting in sharp economic decline, unemployment, etc. Make no mistake, this is endemic to capitalism; the period of sharp and unsustainable growth swings to a standstill where employment, consumption, and many facets of daily life suffer. In these moments, there’s a prevailing tendency to “look on the bright side”, to see the current economic crisis as a freak accident that harms everyone in the same way and not as the result of continual accumulation of capital. That’s a tendency we must be ready to resist. Not recognizing the systemic nature of capitalism leads us to the mistaken assumption that we can insulate ourselves from the effects of crisis and even capitalism as a whole. We cannot insulate, we don’t have the power to do so; instead, we must organize outside of the confines of capitalism and develop an alternative through political unity.

Just as the capitalist class knows they are not immune from the unstable nature of capitalism, we must realize that we are not immune even if certain solutions would alleviate effects for a short amount of time. The capitalist class only stays afloat through their solidarity and we must find a way to develop independent organizations that can recognize our current place in capitalism and work against it.

While “crisis” may imply a large event, crises within capitalism are woefully quite normal. Causes of a specific crisis can usually be tied back to an intra-economic conflict; the 1980 recession was caused by rising inflation amidst a plateau in economic growth and the 1990-91 recession was caused by the Gulf War rise in oil prices and the subsequent decline in manufacturing. In both cases, the effects were similar to that of The Great Recession, then only two decades away from the 1990 recession. A sharp rise in unemployment as certain industries contracted and the solutions implemented were monetary policies focused on jumpstarting economic growth. While we’re nowhere near the other side of COVID-19 and can’t accurately judge the effects, we should be able to see parallels with the past and now. Whether it’s farmers destroying their own crops as they did in the recovery from the Great Depression or the bailouts that get pushed through Washington for certain industries, capitalism necessitates the same solution to the problem its system creates; keep feeding the machine. The capitalist class even with its internal faction-based conflicts will always promote this as a solution.

If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The rise in unemployment and insecurity of certain professions are just a few things that all these crises have in common. The responses to the Great Depression and the Great Recession were very similar to the response to the current situation; both Roosevelt and Obama instituted bailouts and emergency spending programs to stimulate the economy, but in both cases, most of the spending focused on big business while only offering a pittance to the workers, nurses, servers, delivery people, students, teachers,

 In an economic crisis, the capitalist class will consolidate in an attempt to maintain while we are unable to do the same. The different factions of the capitalist class can put aside their own specific interests and use the state to ensure that they are secure enough to weather the crisis. Financial capital is basically keeping the entire economy afloat considering how much money has been moved around through loans and bailouts to certain industries and small businesses. They will end up keeping themselves above water because they have the means and organization to do so.

 

 

The capitalist class organizes and uses their power in their response to crisis while everyone else searches for solutions because the masses do not have actual power in this social arrangement. As a marker of domination, the capitalist class can use the state as a tool for their survival and we cannot. The state functions as the jack holding up capitalism; it’s a neutral actor in this crisis, acting only in the interests of the dominant class. We lack organization at this moment and that leaves us vulnerable to the capitalist solution of “funnel money to ourselves so we can stay afloat while ignoring everything else.” That’s something that has to change. Organizing is the key to shifting this moment to gain what we need just as it was during the Civil Rights movement and the fights for the 8-hour workday and Universal Suffrage. Those before us could not make these happen if they stayed insulated from their political reality; they had to organize and develop political unity to make those progressive gains that benefited them.

The wider response to COVID-19 has led to the working class bearing the majority of the burden while the government consolidates and does whatever it can to stop further economic collapse. The House and Senate passed a stimulus package handing billions of dollars to multiple industries while healthcare workers scramble to treat those infected with the virus and “essential workers” are interacting with people who may or may not be infected. As the Federal Reserve injects $1.5 trillion in loans to prevent market freefall, unemployment claims have reached an all-time high. As conservative groups and protesters push governors to ease stay-at-home restrictions in certain states, farmworkers are working in conditions without Personal Protective Equipment all across the United States. 

This is not to say the capitalist class does not have internal conflict but to point out that the level of unity they have is one of the main reasons they are able to ride out every crisis while the working class cannot. The solutions their unity affords them are much more powerful than the solutions available to us. We’re seeing one of these conflicts play out in real-time. With the recent stimulus bill, certain industries like the airlines are set to receive billions in assistance. Tentatively locked out of this assistance is the cruise line industry; because the stimulus bill specifies, “businesses ‘created or organized in the United States’ under American law and those with a majority of their employees in the US” for eligibility, the biggest players in that industry cannot receive assistance. 

It’s necessary to point out that there is a major difference in the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 and the other economic downturns of the past. No economic downturn in recent memory was caused by an infectious disease-causing virus and really laid bare the inability of capitalism to stem the tide of such a virus. This disease is a different beast than wars and economic mishaps of the past, not just because it’s something we couldn’t predict, but because it has blown a lot of the dissonance around capitalism’s contradictions out of the water at such a faster scale. Many people now recognize the instability of their jobs, the contradictions within the housing sector, and the ease of which the U.S. Government has bailed out certain industries. Yet these are the similar messages that the masses learned in the aftermath of the Great Recession, that solutions to the problem of economic collapse rarely include or benefit them to the extent of the capitalist class.  So why didn’t these messages stick within mass consciousness? 

A lot of people desire a solution. Considering that our lives are subject to domination from capitalism, people feel blessed to make it through every day; any solution that can cement that gets lauded because the solutions rarely take the masses into account. Yet the current solution presented is only a stopgap meant to keep the cycle of consumption going in a time of economic decline, not one that accurately hits at the problems inherent to capitalism. $1200 to every adult is nothing in the face of continued economic shrinkage to the capitalist class because the capitalist class must maintain their dominance but it’s everything to those of us who face uncertainty because of COVID-19. In order to fight against it, solutions need to come from outside the framework of capitalism and must not put individuals over the collective. We must develop a movement that can actually resist capitalism and imperialism and works outside the framework that does not represent us. Just as electoral politics proves itself to be a dead-end, organizing on capitalism’s terms will lead us nowhere fruitful. We must organize and develop political unity and collective power as that is what will allow us to resist. Capitalists understand this, so should we.