Covid-19: the Welfare State on the day after
by Ricardo Forster; translation and adaptation by Mariano Iguera
The following story was written by Ricardo Forster, an Argentine philosopher, historian of ideas, and political critic. It has been originally published in Spanish in the journal Pagina/12 of Buenos Aires, on April 11, 2020.
A devastating hit to what was the current common sense, at least until a few weeks ago. Not always one can witness the implosion of a way to be in the World, the implosion of the building of ties of domination and subjection funded on an alleged enlargement of individual freedom. This is what’s rapidly happening among us while the global fear does not decrease despite the multiple interventions of the States and the promises of the scientific machinery of a Covid-19 vaccine. Because of those paradoxes that from time to time appear even in the course of a historic lifetime, the same instrument vilified by the neoliberal rhetoric, the State, has become the core of any possible solution to stop the growth of the pandemic. Before, they claimed for less State, less involvement in social and economics affairs. Now, they ask for the State to take over the Health, in an integral way, breaking into pieces one of the mantras of unbridled capitalism: the access to healthcare must not be a universal human right nor drive society to a rise in public spending, which must be rigorously watched to reach the mecca of fiscal balance.
But there is something even more perverse in this imperative of the neoliberal Code. The uprising privatization of healthcare systems and the monumental earnings and royalties of the pharmaceutical industry are milestones of the current role of the States, as it has been devised by the followers of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. In a society in which the individual stand and the material success are worshiped, it seems contradictory to sustain healthcare systems addressed to the collective and common well-being. Within an ideology that canonizes the merit and the taking of risks of the single individual that throws him or herself into the adventure of self-fulfillment, public healthcare is a thorn in its flesh, a contradiction in terms since it awards those who lack merits or who have done nothing to deserve success, while prejudices those who have worked hard for their achievements, which of course do not come from any public or social policy. “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families…”, Margaret Thatcher asserted once, enhancing with enviable power of synthesis the non-plus-ultra of neoliberalism. A World of individuals competing among themselves, fighting to the last breath to be accepted in the platoon of the winners, those who actually can pay for a good medical treatment because they managed, by their own merit, to self-provide for themselves and their families without claim for society to take care of their problems. In the society of risks, there cannot be place for the weak, or worse, for the losers.
Covid-19, in its devastating invisibility, has put in quarantine the self-confidence of the liberal individual with regards to his or her skills to save him or herself without the assistance of the State, of the public, of the common. It is hard to imagine the rebuilding of a universal free public healthcare system without compromising the entire structure that has been forged by neoliberalism. Something has expired. And in that passing the questions about “the day after” are raised. The questions about that moment in which we would supposedly have left behind us the virus –at least until it comes back with a renewed virulence– but without overwhelming the very causes that favoured its planetary expansion. What I am trying to say is that the reconstruction of a universal public healthcare system, which implies an inalienable human right and thus it is free of charge, will inexorably drag down the entire construct of the neoliberalism to that farthest point in which it cannot compromise with its absolute contrary.
This catechism that impregnated the common sense in the last four decades has become dead letter. Nobody recites it anymore. Nobody claims for it anymore. There is nobody trying to impose it, although there are still those persistent nostalgics of absolute freedom, of meritocracy, and of “it’s every man for himself”. Not even the most radicalized libertarians of the Americanism, not even the bombastic self-sufficiency of an ever-more cartoonish Donald Trump, can today uphold those arguments because they have been drawn away by gale-force winds caused by an invisible “bug”. Decades of cultural industry and communicational efforts, of subliminal propaganda going through every kind of borders, real or imaginary, have shown overnight that the certainties and dominant beliefs have blown up. The State is here again. But… what State? and what for? Just to cushion the horror and the catastrophic consequences of the pandemic? Is it possible that after this painful ordeal everything stays the same? Would societies resist a new repetition of the 2008 crisis?
I rush to raise my doubts about the chance that, in this occasion, there would be a social acquiescence like the one that allowed neoliberal governments to bail the banks with public funds, giving them back all their alleged losses while deepening the level of the very problems that caused the aforementioned crisis. I would like to believe that this pandemic, this ominous shadow hunting the global village, is pushing us to limits never seen before, at least not in this way and in the conditions of a society like ours. Can anybody think that the wheel of fortune of speculative capitalism will start to spin again as if nothing has happened? We are experiencing something very touching. To the point, we hope, in which we will open to other dimensions of social life. Knowing, as it is so cruelly shown during the pandemic, that it is always the weakest (the poor, the women, the minorities, the native peoples, the people with disabilities, the elder abandoned by their sons and daughters in retirement homes turned into dying places, the refugees, the illegal immigrants, the informal workers, the pariahs of the World) who are exposed the most, who suffer the most and get the less. Today, the abandonment of the weak as a consequence of States depleted by the global financial market has simply become intolerable. This also becomes visible and unbearable because the middle-classes too have understood that the asset-stripping of the public wealth, the mercantilization of the health and the banalisation of social security are the weak sides that the virus leverages to step in and kill, without making any discrimination. A before and an after?
Álvaro García Linera (former Vice-President of Bolivia, deposed by a military coup in 2019), in a recent conference, makes a sharp description of the material and the symbolic downfall of neoliberal globalisation. He points out it has failed in every order. Be that as it may, the day after will not find us coming back to a State model designed for the benefit of the free circulation of speculative funds.
“How long will it take for the State to finally come back –Linera asks himself–, it is hard to tell. But it is however clear that neither the global platforms nor the media, nor the financial markets, nor the owners of big trusts have the capacity to articulate associative networks or moral commitment like States do. This does not mean a regression to old formats of welfare States, or States that fostered development policies decades ago. Why? Because there are in place some economic and technical interdependencies that are impossible to neglect as it is also impossible to try to raise societies self-focused in their internal market and the universality of salary. We need to understand that without welfare States caring for the life conditions of populations, we will be doomed to repeat these global disasters that brutally crack societies and leave them on the brink of a historic precipice”.
This is one of the poles of his reflections about the prospects for the day after. The illusion of coming back to the post Second World War Welfare States collides with the last structural and technological changes, which have reconfigured most of the social, economic and cultural practices. It would be naif to believe it is just about rebuilding the Welfare State without taking into account the current state of the capitalist way of assigning value to things and services, and the profound mutations launched by the consolidation of global digital platforms, big data and virtual reality. The logic of capitalism is antagonistic to any flange coupling –even when it had had to accept it at some point of its historical path when it had not had another chance. Its nature, just to call it somehow, drives it inexorably to the constant of profit maximisation, along with the unlimited expansion of appropriation of resources that ensures its returns. The wisdom of capitalism has been, in other periods, to absorb its critics, to turn contrary formulations into own supplies, and make it through all crisis strengthened, even having compromised. The Welfare State was the result of an agreement in which capital was forced to enter. This agreement made capitalists accept limitations and give to the workers a part of the profit, behaviour which had been unthinkable until that moment in history. It also gave birth to that strange architecture which was the Social State. García Linera does not see an equivalent scenario, but not because of the uncertainty raised by the lack of capacity of globalisation of taking care of the demands that emerged with the Covid-19 pandemic, but because of the structural problems of the World economic system itself. How can we match the essentially selfish core of capital with the solidarity fabric of free and universal access to healthcare? How can we retrace our steps in terms of the path that led society to its fragmentation and desocialization without dismantling the very mechanism that made that possible?
The virus has left the system naked. That does not mean it is dead. We are going to be witnesses of its efforts to maintain the status quo, to try to make it through this crisis more powerful, as it has done before. Capitalism feeds on and expands with the crisis it raises. We will see how far Covid-19 brings us, what walls it breaks and what opportunities will be created for a new kind of globalisation.
