Weekender XIV: Because I Can't Say Enough Shit About Capitalism

It would be naive to believe our government will ever get a grip on this crisis. No more than it would be to expect Boris Johnson to change skin colour. They cannot save us. There will be no point, between now and the winter, when the flu season returns, that will see this change. There is not going to be a time when things will suddenly 'click'. This is us, now, as it will be.

The government were told, even prior to lockdown, they needed to test track and trace. They didn't. They still aren't. Not in any meaningful way. What they do is interpret all the advice and warnings from the expert community through the lens of capitalism, their ideology. Consequently they give Serco, a dismal useless private firm, the contract to trace. We know how this goes. The PPE contract appears to have gone to a pest control firm with less than twenty grand in the bank. No doubt a quid pro quo.

These are not smart decisions. They are capitalist decisions. One could argue that it isn't capitalism that's the problem; that our leaders are just stupid and could make more informed, yet still capitalist, decisions. Objectively that's possible, but that isn't what happened. To be a little arcane about it: what happened is what happened and could not have been different. It is the natural chain of events that follow from voting in arrogant self aggrandising capitalist rulers like Johnson. It's not just capitalism; Britain combines that with neofeudalism. So while it's possible  to have better but still capitalist decision making, it was never going to be the case. Not here. For the most part not across the world either.

Pretty much all the capitalist world has been struck dumb by this because capitalist society is intrinsically incapable of planning an economy in preparation for this. For our part, we shut down such systems, just like Trump. Capitalism promotes short term thinking. There's no profit in preparing. But there is profit in giving a contract to a private firm. All of that is wrong: contracts? Private profits? This is a health crisis. But to the government, it's just an opportunity.

And so they will continue to struggle and we will continue to be frustrated until something gives. Hopefully we will realise the only answer to this is going to come from revolutionary activity. Labour won't have any answers. They will still make similar decisions, they just might be more decisive about it.