What COVID-19 has revealed about our economic and political systems
Our political and economic systems need a serious reevaluation to ensure that the most vulnerable are not left behind in the quest for money and power.
- Quick note before you start reading. This has been written off the cuff. Challenge me, don’t take me to court.
Over the years I have been increasingly interested in people’s movements and the failure of the neo-liberal capitalist system that we have bid our allegiance to. I’ve come to realise how difficult it is to bring people together even if they believe in the same cause, and I can’t help but wonder if this is a conspiracy of capitalists, for whom access to power and money trumps all else. If people fear unemployment because they have mouths to feed, then it is hard to weave folks together for an uprising. A system, let’s say, where there was a universal basic income, then perhaps people would have access to more disposable income to focus on pockets of revolution. The competitive, free market world we live in believes in competition and it believes in keeping us in competition with one another. Most people work their entire lives as slaves with corporations as their feudal lords for incremental increases in their salaries, hoping one day that they will be comfortable enough like the millionaires and billionaires of the world. But the truth is that very few of us starting from a working, middle class bottom line will make it to the top tier of the population. And if we do, there will be considerable luck involved, obviously on top of hard work. The system tells us that we all have the same starting lines, which is absolutely false.
As I sit in Day 9 of my quarantine — craving for a walk outdoors and to mingle with naked pregnant trees, about to burst in bloom — I can’t help but extrospect about all that this pandemic has revealed about our socio-political-economic systems, and the “generosity” of our governments. I’m scoffing as I write out the word generosity, because the very purpose of leadership is to further the progress of its people. They are mere actors on behalf of the masses, the people. But long-term privatisation has landed power in the hands of few and our governments have become puppets of those with billions of dollars.
I come from India, a poor country still by any measure, but also with a strong and upwards progressing middle class, and few extremely wealthy people at the top. Mukesh Ambani’s 26 level house, towering adjacent to slums is the perfect picture of the kind of deep inequality that exists in India. I come from India, and have lived a considerable part of my life there, but currently I am living in the more developed Canada and one of the more richer countries of the world. It makes it easier for me to feel gratitude towards many of the services in Canada that would be hard to access in India. But at the same time, I can observe with an air of detachment at the entitlement that exists here because most people have not experienced hardships of livelihood.
Canada, in my opinion, has responded adequately by declaring an emergency aid package that doesn’t leave its most vulnerable workers behind. Healthcare is also considered a human right in Canada, and so has a public healthcare system that can be accessed by anyone across all classes and intersectionalities. Of course, this is not to forgive the problems and lacks that exist in the current public healthcare infrastructure. But within a week of the pandemic exploding in Canada, the government announced an aid relief package for all those workers who are unable to work due to non-essential businesses shutting down. But the government could certainly do more about halting rent and mortgage payment at a time when Canada is due to see more unemployment than it has in the past 70 years.
The sense of relief I also feel is because Toronto is bordering New York, which has become the new epicenter of the crisis. And I feel relief that Canada is not being headed by a sociopathic manic who can’t help but lie about everything. And I feel relief to have access to healthcare even though I am currently not working because of the crisis. For me, COVID-19 has exposed America, not as the place for people to achieve themselves, but as a country ever ready to bend over backwards for large corporations. America is the world’s most powerful and richest country. Despite that status, it is currently severely lacking in safety gear for its frontline workers, and medical equipment and beds to handle the rising intake of patients. It’s private healthcare system means that millions of Americans, who have lost jobs and therefore lost access to medical insurance, are now vulnerable. I can confidently say that if I didn’t have employer medical insurance in America, I would not go get checked for many of my problems. Even India, which is far less developed than America, at least has a public healthcare system free to anyone. It has its fair share of problems, but at least it exists in some shape or form. America has sold itself as a libertarian, neo-liberal market and has pushed other countries into accepting the same fate if they want to become friends with this powerhouse. But this very system has created a huge chasm of inequality. For the first time in America’s history, life expectancy of the white working class is reversing. And I say white because white people have historically had access to privileges and resources and therefore a higher life expectancy than people of colour and indigenous people.
Finally, I can’t help but think of my home country — India. The second most populated country in the world, where the streets are quiet only for a few hours a night. If the pandemic begins to spread in India, it will spread like wildfire because poverty is intimacy. And well, social distancing demands the complete opposite. A very slim portion of the country lives in houses that aren’t closely packed together. Let alone slums and people on the streets. Just Dharavi slum in Mumbai alone is 30X more densely populated than New York. A lockdown for India was necessary to have the best chance at flattening the curve. But only the privileged, above a certain economic class have benefitted from this action. I don’t know what the alternative could have been. I don’t know what measures could have been put into place. What I do know is that this decision needn’t have been made and enforced within a few hours as it was. What I do know that the lockdown could’ve been enforced in phases, giving the people — especially and especially daily wage earners, people who live on the streets and rural migrant workers — an opportunity to find a safe space or return to their villages.
Honestly, I don’t even know how major chunks of the population in India are surviving in this lockdown. There are people who literally live under flyovers. They are homeless if we look at the them from the lens of a developed nation. They literally live on the streets — day and night. The space underneath flyovers is a common space for people to erect themselves. They cook there, wash their clothes there, birth and raise children there. These people are mostly migrant workers, but they also get their livelihood from begging and selling this and that to traffic jams. Now that the cars have completely disappeared, who are they selling what to? Where are they getting money from? Where are they living?
I like to believe there is a silver lining to everything. There is a silver lining to this crisis. It has given us the opportunity — those of us privileged enough to be sat at homes, working jobs on laptops that frankly don’t matter as much as those that fuel our lives and economies such as manufacturing workers — to sit up and acknowledge that we’re all in this together. There are some things that bite ALL OF US. It has given us the opportunity to realise how our systems and economies are sometimes leaving the most vulnerable behind. What future does India, for example, have if millions of its children are growing on the streets? Indians have become so normalised at seeing poverty around them, that it’s just become a part of the background noise. Why hasn’t ELIMINATING poverty through systemic revolutionary methods yet become a part of our politics rather than increasing rations here and introducing more cards there? Why aren’t we asking the government to create shelters and systems and homes for MILLIONS of children who live, bath, shit, eat, grow up ON THE STREETS? Why is 70% of India’s population being thrown in the background?
In Canada, the 2019 federal election established that 90% of young Canadians are worried about housing affordability, disparity between the rising cost of living and their incomes and the climate emergency. The government obviously has the wherewithal to introduce measures to help their young, working class that are increasingly involved in contract and gig jobs without benefits. Clearly these people are the first to be laid off during a crisis. And the climate emergency means we will be living through MORE SUCH CRISES. Does the government acknowledge that $2000 is the basic everyone needs to survive in this country? Can we start talking about a universal basic income so that aid packages don’t have to be kicked into place when an emergency strikes, and people always have access to a stable income?
No two nations are handling the crisis the same way, but the way they handle it will determine how they come out on the other side. And I hope that the conversations about our neo-liberal economic and democratic systems that this virus has brought into focus are ones that don’t die out when we get a vaccine to kill the virus.
