Navigating (some) Conspiracies & (a few) Truths About Coronavirus & its Beneficiaries
I should first mention how much in need of critique the word “conspiracy” and its numerous references are. For this piece I’ll take its most common usage, which is something like, “an alternative and by definition false interpretation or account of events at variance with the official and by definition true account”.
“Conspiracies” have unsurprisingly been sprouting up like shrooms in response to this crisis, and the horrible work coming out of mainstream media isn’t helping. They all revolve around the most obvious theme, the virus was engineered and unleashed for some purpose — financial profit, geopolitics, the US election etc. The reason, I believe, for the implausibility of these alternative accounts is not because the accused aren’t capable or willing to execute such a scheme (just think of the arms trade and how incentivised actors foment wars for profit) but because it would be seen as too risky and unpredictable.
Still, there are a number of serious questions we should be asking about the potential for gain by some actors from this crisis, despite the fact establishment pundits will try to smear these questions with the conspiracy theory brush.
We are in the midst of this crisis, and the worst is probably yet to come, but for most working people who live week-to-week, the fear of sickness or death by coronavirus is a distant afterthought to the fear of how they’re going to keep a roof over their heads. And there’s nothing irrational about this considering most people, if they contract coronavirus, will get through it as they would a regular flu. We should be looking now at how this crisis might affect power relations in its aftermath.
Our economies have been structurally disadvantaging small businesses and workers for the best part of 40 years, and this trend has exponentially accelerated over the last 10 or so years. Tax and regulatory regimes that burden small to medium-sized businesses disproportionately, and grant their far larger competitors loopholes to exploit; financial markets that “produce”, but “conjure” is more accurate, exorbitant sums of money for a small number of speculators and professional insiders, leaving the volatility impacts and risks to the middle class; a banking and finance industry which inflates real estate values, saddling ordinary working people with lifelong debts; an increasingly desperate labour market, which has crushed wages and instilled economic fear into working and middle class households, empowering the corporate sector and disempowering the people; government resources, tax-payer dollars focused increasingly towards propping up the profits of banking and finance at the expense of the rest of the economy, among a range of other factors, some accidental others less so, that have dramatically shifted power and wealth away from working people to a parasitic financial class.
So these trends were already in play, have been accelerating, in fact, and all signs point to the current crisis even further dramatically accelerating these shifts in economic and political power, and the mechanics of this are reasonably simple: While small businesses right now are going under and workers are being laid off, with token and practically useless federal support to cushion their demise, stock markets are getting multi-trillion dollar cash injections. Even in the absence of these bailouts, the corporate sector can weather this crisis, leaving them smaller in absolute terms but larger in relative terms when the recovery phase begins, with opportunity to occupy more market share than ever with a shattered small and medium-sized business sector.
In the recovery phase the individuals with modest means who constitute the small businesses will not be able to deploy funds and resources rapidly enough to re-establish themselves. Corporations will, and they will seize this advantage. In short, it is almost a certainty that an even larger portion of the economy, in employment as well as production terms, will be in the hands of the corporate sector when this peak crisis period is over, just the extent of this change cannot be known and is contingent on decisions being taken now.
This will have a two-fold impact: firstly on the social and communal role small businesses play, when talking about the live music venues, the bars, the cafes, small performance spaces, clubs, and restaurants which constitute significant hubs of what’s left of society and community in our cities — the impact on these businesses is going to be catastrophic, along with the significant democratic role they play. As things were, this aspect of city life has been contracting for decades, or longer. Left-wing historians and critics like Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and Alain Badiou were/have been lamenting the disappearance of such social spaces since the 60s and 70s! They have argued that the disappearance of community and social spaces has been a major factor in the assault against democracy by finance and big capital.
Secondly, the more direct implications of the contraction of the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector will be even greater control of the economy by corporations, more dependence of workers on corporations for employment, more goods and services provided by corporations over SMBs, making wages and pricing less competitive. In short, even less power and representation for the people, and more for the 0.01%.
The image of once-abundant, derelict inner city areas littered with “For Lease” signs, a McDonald’s on one corner, a corporate retailer on the other, lifeless and without hope of revival barring drastic action — this already somewhat common feature of some cities in some Western countries, may become all too common.
The health implications and fatalities are tragic, but according to current trends, the political implications of this crisis will be catastrophic. While I don’t believe this crisis was engineered, it is a fact that the most nefarious global actors will exploit it, and possibly come out of it more powerful than ever.
