[...the super-capitalism of today has become an absolute fetter on
the development of the productive forces necessary for our species
survival.] [[link removed]]

MIKE DAVIS ON PANDEMICS, SUPER-CAPITALISM AND THE STRUGGLES OF
TOMORROW  
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Sharif Abdel Kouddous
March 30, 2020
Mada Masr (Egypt)
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_ ...the super-capitalism of today has become an absolute fetter on
the development of the productive forces necessary for our species
survival. _

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The coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming to comprehend. There are now
hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases. Tens of thousands have died.
Nations are on lockdown as the disease continues to spread. The planet
is in crisis.

How did this happen?

What are the underlying political, economic and environmental
structures that paved the way for this global outbreak? Where do
pandemics emerge from? Is our capitalist way of life biologically
sustainable?

To shed light on some of these questions, we turned to American
writer, historian and political activist Mike Davis, author of over 20
books, including _City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, Ecology of Fear__,_
and _The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu_. Davis
is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of California,
Riverside and is a recipient of a McArthur Fellowship and the Lannan
Literary Award for Nonfiction.

He responded in writing to a series of questions from Mada Masr about
the coronavirus pandemic.

_MADA MASR: How has the combination of capitalist agriculture and
urbanization led to the emergence of pandemics? And why do these
strains of influenza generally emerge in southeast Asia?_

MIKE DAVIS: Some viruses have natural breeding grounds, like cholera
for instance. Almost all cholera outbreaks originate in the warm,
fecal-rich waters of the Gulf of Bengal. Others have permanent homes
in certain animal families: plague in rodents, influenza in wild
birds, yellow fever in monkeys and coronaviruses in bats. Influenzas
usually emerge in the south of China. It’s an inadvertent
consequence of one of civilization’s greatest success stories. For
several millennia, the farming system of southern China, which
subsequently spread through southeast Asia, has been the most
productive on earth, with domestic ducks and chickens raised
side-by-side with pigs in rice fields that produce two harvests a
year. Lots of protein with a double portion of carbs. But the flooded
paddies attract migratory birds that often pass on new flu strains to
ducks and chickens, who in turn infect pigs, an animal whose immune
system closely resembles our own. The leap from swine to man is easy
and sometimes catastrophic. Since pigs can acquire flu from both birds
and humans, a double infection can lead to the “reassortment” of
their gene segments and the creation of a hybrid virus with wild bird
lethality that also has a key to enter human respiratory cells. The
result is a pandemic, as in 1918-19. 

_MM: Can you explain why RNA viruses — like coronavirus — often
lead to deadly outbreaks?_

MD: Viruses, of course, are basically parasitic genes that hijack the
genetic machinery of the cells they invade to make copies of
themselves. Viruses based on DNA have a built-in proof-reading
mechanism to ensure accurate replication, but RNA viruses lack it. The
result is swarms of mutants with slightly different amino acid
architectures. (Imagine a Xerox machine that makes an error in
virtually every copy.) In fact, influenza A, which has only four genes
(corona has eight), is so error prone in reproduction that it probably
hovers on the edge of extinction. Put another way, it pushes the rate
of mutation to the limit, about one million times faster than
DNA-based viruses or cells. Spitting out so many different and
inaccurate versions of one’s genome has a huge advantage in
resisting the human immune system because there will inevitably arise
viruses at least partly resistant to the antibodies produced in past
infections or generated by vaccination. This is why influenza A
changes annually and continues to sicken humans despite many previous
infections. This is called antigenic drift. Antigenic _shift_ is what
I just described as happening when two different influenzas “mate”
in the same cell and produce a novel virus. Although the process is
slightly different in coronaviruses, as they have an equally
extraordinary talent for recombination and shift.

_MM: Why haven’t we seen a universal vaccine developed for
influenza? Is it even possible?_

MD: Mutations usually occur in the ‘heads’ of the two to three
proteins on the virus’s surface that allow it to “dock” on a
human cell and then enter. Those are the sites that annual vaccines
target. But the “stalks” of these proteins are stable and don’t
mutate. Virtually all researchers agree that the tools exist to
fashion a broadband vaccine that incapacitates the invariant stalks
thus conferring general immunity against all strains that might last
for years. The research is out there, but Big Pharma won’t develop
or manufacture such a vaccine because it is not profitable. (If given
a radical design for a car that lasts for a lifetime, would GM
manufacture it?)

Following the H5N1 avian flu outbreak in 2005, the Bush administration
took baby steps to gear up production but lost interest after the
outbreak subsided. Since then, a chorus of scientific voices has
regularly demanded action but was ignored during the Obama years. But
vaccine design has been revolutionized, and, with the surge of
research to conquer COVID, a universal flu vaccine may follow. The
only certainty is that it won’t come from Big Pharma. 

_MM: It appears that the coronavirus is less risky for younger age
groups. Are countries in the Global South that generally have younger
populations therefore less at risk from the current pandemic?_

MD: No, not necessarily. Remember that up to this point, the virus has
circulated in populations where under-50s are generally well-fed with
reasonably good access to doctors and hospitals. This means that
severe and critical cases among younger people occur mainly —
although by no means exclusively — among those with pre-existing
health conditions. But what happens when COVID spreads through
populations with minimal access to medicine and dramatically higher
levels of poor nutrition, untended health problems and damaged immune
systems? The age advantage will be worth far less to poor youth in
African and South Asian slums.

There’s also some possibility that mass infection in slums and poor
cities could flip the switch on coronavirus’s mode of infection and
reshape the nature of the disease. Before SARS emerged in 2003, highly
pathogenic coronavirus epidemics were confined to domestic animals,
above all pigs. Researchers soon recognized two different routes of
infection: fecal-oral, which attacked the stomach and intestinal
tissue, and respiratory, which attacked the lungs. In the first case,
there was usually very high mortality, while the second generally
resulted in milder cases. A small percentage of current positives,
especially the cruise ship cases, report diarrhea and vomiting, and,
to quote one report
[[link removed]], “the
possibility of SARS-CoV-2 transmission via sewage, waste, contaminated
water, air conditioning systems and aerosols cannot be
underestimated.”

The pandemic has now reached the slums of Africa and South Asia, where
fecal contamination is everywhere: in the water, in home-grown
vegetables, and as windblown dust. (Yes, shit storms are real.) Will
this favor the enteric route? Will, as in the case of animals, this
lead to more lethal infections, possibly across all age groups?

_MM: Does the coronavirus pandemic come as a surprise? Was this
predicted? And if it was, why does the world seem so unprepared?_

MD: Nothing has been less surprising. The imminence of a pandemic has
been uppermost in the minds of epidemiologists since the outbreak of
SARS in 2003. Following the arrival of avian flu in 2005, the US
government published an ambitious “National Strategy for Pandemic
Influenza” based on the finding that all levels of the American
public health system were totally unprepared for a large-scale
outbreak. After the swine flu scare in 2009, the strategy was updated,
and, in 2017, a week before Trump’s inauguration, out-going Obama
officials and incoming Trump administrators jointly carried out a
large-scale simulation that tested the response of federal agencies
and hospitals to a pandemic arising in three different scenarios, from
Swine flu, Ebola or Zika virus. The system, of course, failed to
prevent the outbreaks or, for that matter, flatten the curves in time.
Part of the problem was detection and coordination. Another was
inadequate stockpiles and supply chains with obvious bottlenecks, such
as depending on a few overseas factories to produce vital protective
equipment. Behind all this, moreover, has been a failure to
aggressively take advantage of revolutionary advances in biological
design over the last decade in order to stockpile an arsenal of new
antivirals and vaccines.

_MM: Is capitalist globalization biologically sustainable?_

MD: Only by accepting a permanent triage of humanity and dooming part
of the human race to eventual extinction. 

Economic globalization — that is to say, the accelerated free
movement of finance and investment within a single world market where
labor is relatively immobile and deprived of traditional bargaining
power — is different from economic interdependence regulated by the
universal protection of the rights of labor and small producers.
Instead, we see a world system of accumulation that is everywhere
breaking down traditional boundaries between animal diseases and
humans, increasing the power of drug monopolies, proliferating
carcinogenic waste, subsidizing oligarchy and undermining progressive
governments committed to public health, destroying traditional
communities (both industrial and preindustrial) and turning the oceans
into sewers. Market solutions leave in place Dickensian social
conditions and perpetuate the global shame of income-limited access to
clean water and sanitation.

The present crisis does force capital, large and small, to confront
the possible breakdown of its global production chains and the ability
to constantly re-source cheaper supplies of overseas labor. At the
same time, it points to important new or expanding markets for
vaccines, sterilization systems, surveillance technology, home grocery
delivery and so on. The combined dangers and opportunities will lead
to a partial fix: new products and procedures that reduce the health
risks of constant disease emergence while simultaneously spurring the
further development of surveillance capitalism. But these protections
will almost certainly be limited — if left up to markets and
authoritarian nationalist regimes — to rich countries and rich
classes. They will reinforce walls, not pull them down, and deepen the
divide between two humanities: one with resources to mitigate climate
change and new pandemics and the other without.

_MM: To what extent does this pandemic open an opportunity to overhaul
economic systems and policies of neoliberalism? A kind of shock
doctrine in reverse?_

MD: As sometimes in the case of wars, governments and ruling elites
resort to collectivist measures and implement policies previously
deemed radical or anti-systemic. In order to maintain popular support
for the two great slaughters of the last century, major concessions
were made to the working-class majority in the Allied countries,
including union recognition, collective bargaining and expansion of
the right to vote. Wartime state capitalism also led to direct state
or military administration of railroads and utilities. If antiwar
opposition was repressed, labor nonetheless found new power in
exchange for participation in the organization of war production. When
the wars ended, of course, corporations and trusts tried to dismantle
these concessions and denationalize war industries, while unions and
the left fought to keep what they had temporarily won. That’s why
1919 witnessed the greatest strike wave in history.

Faced with pandemics which threaten the health of all classes,
today’s situation is genuinely analogous. Along with unnecessarily
repressive policies, panicked governments are also authorizing
progressive measures, such as the nationalization of hospitals in
Ireland and the temporary adoption of income maintenance in the United
States, that offer new platforms for struggle. Thus, we witness a
political arms race as big capital and rightwing parties struggle to
define a capitalist agenda within the crisis, while the left explores
the opportunities for winning permanent reforms like Medicare for All.
But the most important phenomenon has been the re-emergence of a
working-class bloc that has the talisman of “historical agency.” I
refer to the broad coalition of organized healthcare workers (in the
USA led by the nurses union) that is being radicalized by the epidemic
and can be counted upon to assume an even more leading role in
tomorrow’s struggles for fundamental socio-economic rights. Right
now, they are everywhere the social conscience of the crisis. So in
every country, progressives are obligated to make solidarity with
frontline caregivers their immediate priority.

_MM: What is the interrelationship between emergent diseases and the
capitalist world economy, from cases like Ebola to deadly strains of
influenza?_

MD: I’ll enumerate some instances:

* Factory fleets and factory farms compete on unequal terms with local
fishermen and small farmers. Several hundred million people from
Chihuahua, Mexico to Luzon, Philippines have been forced off the land
(and sea) in the last twenty years. Urbanization — China is an
outstanding case — is also needlessly eating up farmland. But the
key point is this: Small-holder agriculture, the foundation of local
food security, has been subordinated to or replaced by capitalist
export agriculture that is subject to the fluctuations of commodity
futures markets and dependent on imports of fertilizers and
pesticides. The latter, of course, are derivatives of crude oil, and,
because of overuse, they end up as dangerous waste streams causing
cancer (pesticides) and kill fishing grounds (the nitrogen
eutrophication of rivers, lakes and offshore waters).

The FAO estimates that global foodstuff production (mostly grain) must
increase by at least 50 percent in the next generation to feed
population growth. Capitalist agriculture, I believe, cannot meet that
goal, even with revolutionary advances in bioengineered crops and drip
irrigation, because the world market misallocates crop production
(beef over grain) and fails to deliver basic income to small producers
and farmworkers. At the same time, the critical foundation of the
Green Revolution of the 1960s — the drilling of millions of tube
wells for irrigation — is crumbling as aquifers everywhere are
depleted or poisoned. Look at the Punjab or the Indus Valley, or, for
that matter, at the acute water crisis in world cities like Mexico
City or, recently, Cape Town.

* Ruined small producers, of course, move to cities, many of which are
still shaped by the legacy of the colonial period, when only the
European districts had sanitation, clean water and medical services.
Despite some dramatic improvements in health conditions by progressive
nationalist governments in the era of Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno,
health conditions in slums, especially on the urban periphery, have
deteriorated dramatically at the same time that their populations have
exploded. 

* The vast majority of these slum-dwellers work in the informal
subsistence economy. They have become, for the most part, redundant to
the requirements of capitalist reproduction on a world scale. These
“surplus people” have no claim to any of the medical benefits that
are often associated with formal employment and lack incomes high
enough to purchase healthcare in the marketplace. Corporate capitalism
globally no longer generates jobs — full-stop. 

* In the 1980s and 1990s, structural adjustment programs — the rules
imposed by rich countries and their banks that coerced poor nations to
give up economic autonomy — have everywhere forced the downsizing
and often the privatization of public services. Public health budgets
in particular have never recovered, nor have salaries for health
personnel. As a result, the West has strip-mined the Caribbean, Africa
and southeast Asia of trained doctors and nurses.

* Healthcare, probably in a majority of non-G20 countries, is financed
by municipal and regional budgets. Highly regressive tax systems allow
big companies and the local middle classes to minimize or escape
fiscal obligations. This is a powerful structural constraint on
medical provision and even more on sanitation infrastructures. The
lack of clean water and toilets, as everyone knows, is the number one
public health issue in the world and the single greatest cause of
preventable mortality, especially among children. 

What could be more obscene than the case of India where even in famed
tech cities like Chennai and Bangalore, women in the slums have to
defecate in public? Or the epidemic of lead poisoning in the decrepit
water pipes of Flint and other Rust Belt American cities? Or the
campaign of Nestle and other multinationals to induce neoliberal
governments to privatize their water systems? (Pay-to-use public
toilets in slum areas are another rapidly growing profit point.)

* Big Pharma, the monopoly of monopolies, epitomizes the contradiction
between capitalism and world health. Extortionate prices and
proprietary patents for medicines often first developed by university
and other public researchers are only part of the problem. Big Pharma
has also abdicated the development of the life-or-death antibiotics
and antivirals that we so urgently need. It is more profitable for
them to produce palliatives for male impotence than to bring on line a
new generation of antibiotics to fight the wave of resistant bacterial
strains that is killing hundreds of thousands of patients in hospitals
across the world. Big Pharma claims protection from antitrust laws
because it is the major engine of drug research, when, in fact, it
spends more on advertising than R&D. The cutting-edge pharmaceuticals
and vaccines that it markets are usually developed first in small,
dynamic biotech companies, which in turn capitalize research from
public universities. Big Pharma, in essence, is rentier capitalism, a
fetter on the emerging revolution in biological design and vaccine
production.

* Finally and most obviously, capitalism kills us directly through its
export of factory-produced carcinogens and poisons to human
residential environments and public spaces. 

_MM: This a lot to take on board. Can you summarize your argument? _

MD: The civilizational crisis of our age, in my view, is defined by
capitalism’s inability to generate incomes for the majority of
humanity, to provide jobs and meaningful social roles, end fossil fuel
emissions, and translate revolutionary biological advances into public
health. These are convergent crises, inseparable from one another, and
need to be seen in their complex ensemble, not as separate issues. But
to put it in more classical language, the super-capitalism of today
has become an absolute fetter on the development of the productive
forces necessary for our species survival.

 
_Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. He
is a correspondent for Democracy Now!, a fellow at the Nation
Institute and a member of the media collective Mosireen._
 
 
 
 

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