- The pandemic was initially propagated by consumers of the global air travel industry, and likely would have been a localized epidemic otherwise.
- The police largely exist to protect the assets of the wealthy and preserve the societal structure that enables them to make and store wealth.
I don't necessarily agree with much of what this article is saying, but it's good to stretch the mind and read a variety of viewpoints. (otherwise you're only reading things that agree with your biases, which, of course, has issues)
Is there any world in which global air travel doesn’t arise but where people are better off overall? I feel like regardless of your method of allocation of resources, people are going to want to go experience other places. If a society isn’t doing any of that, it seems unlikely that it’s because they’re too busy doing other things that are so amazingly compelling that no one desires to travel. The desire for adventure and novelty is not a capitalistic desire, but rather a human one.
I can’t therefore conclude that global air travel is “capitalism’s fault” and, as contagious as SARS-COV2 is, a pandemic was virtually assured.
On a high-gravity world with a thin atmosphere it'd be harder to float, fly, or orbit. So high-speed rail and automobiles would be the pinnacle of land transportation with ships being the only way to cross the oceans separating continents. On such a world, a global internet could easily arise before flight.
As to whether those inhabitants would be better off than us, I believe that's much more to do with their socio-econo-political systems than their available modes of transportation. Slower vehicles means germs and goods travel slower, and culture too until said internet is built.
I think one of the problems of global air travel is that it has several externalities that are really not felt by its users. This is often tied to capitalism in the sense that it takes a capitalist system for the wealthy to be able to say "I don't care about these externalities and by my possessions I have a right to not care."
Not that I think it makes much difference in terms of a pandemic, but maybe if travel patterns had been different the pandemic would have played out differently in turn.
Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to uphold it's monopoly for violence. This monopoly in turn is (in the current situation) neccessary to uphold the expolitation of labour and the functioning of the state itself.
Of course this is not exlusive to the capitalist system. The expropriation of serfs in feudalist societies through the armed forces of nobility serves a similiar purpose under a different economic and political system.
Just the same as capitalism has a tangible effect on how the pandemic is dealt with. Where I live for example there were multiple cases of industrial workers (often migrants working for a few month and then returning to their home country) contracting the virus en masse, which in turn had a lot to do with overcrowded houses and flats where they were forced to live.
> Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to uphold it's monopoly for violence.
The only alternative to a monopoly on violence is an open turf war among crime gangs, quite probably involving far more brutality. There are plenty of nation states outside the U.S. with better run police and no gang wars, implying that they do manage to successfully regulate (i.e. "monopolize") the initiation of force. These things have basically nothing to do with each other.
The prevailance of gang violence has it's root in social and economic imbalance, too.
I do not disagree, police violence is different and not as "brutal" (can't find a better word) where I live, but of course I look onto the US as an outsider.
I also do not think that letting society splinter into rackets would be preferable to the status quo, but I do think the status quo leaves a lot do be desired for the majority of people.
EDIT: This shows itself e.g. in the organisation of precarised people in gangs.
That police brutality and the state upholding it's monopoly for violence have nothing to do with each other seems far-fetched though. The police is the instution that guarantees this monopoly within the borders of every Nation state, it's quite literally their raison d'etre.
Whenever someone only offers me one alternative, I get suspicious.
Street gangs as they currently exist in the US were created by the prison system, an arm of the state violence apparatus. Conveniently, they're also an excuse to increase police budgets. More policing, in turn, puts more people into prison.
I don't think that alternative is actually even an alternative.
Capitalism isn't the cause of all police brutality, but the upper class deliberately divides working people against each other, which creates the racism and classism (middle vs. lower) that makes it commonplace and which make brutal, racist police officers (who are probably not the majority) nearly invulnerable. You'd still have a few incompetent cops in any economic system, but it's because of capitalism's doing that there are so many bad apples on forces.
As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously, capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th century.
Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would have been a disaster.
In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything, but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them back.
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.
To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..."
Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
I think the sentence is just sloppy and the author himself doesn't quite know if he's talking about characteristics of late capitalism or just current events which happen to be occurring in the context of late capitalism.
COVAX had nothing to do with an "open source" model, it was about better distribution of the existing vaccine supplies. There were early concerns that IP rights enforcement might make it harder to develop and supply SARS-CoV2 vaccines, but a patent waiver was ultimately agreed upon. It made very little difference in the end because effective vaccines (such as those based on mRNA) are not like other drugs, and there are inherent constraints to expanding supply or making a "generic" version.
