Biodun Jeyifo
After every war, every global or regional catastrophe, every pandemic, it is time to rebuild, time to emphasize the common fate of humanity. Systems of governance, economic orders and prevailing notions and practices of right and wrong and of justice and injustice are more or less thoroughly reimagined and refashioned. This happened after the end of the two horrendous world wars of the first half of the 20th century. Though on a much smaller scale, it happened also in all the regional wars in Africa and the Balkans in Europe in the second half of that century. In particular, the greatest moments of economic and social engineering for a more equitable world came on the heels of the devastations of the first and second world wars. After war comes peace, after torrential, greatly unwelcome rain comes quiescent calmness in the heavens, in homestead and farmlands. So will it be with capitalism as the reigning global order after the end of Covid-19.
Now, this idea might seem counterintuitive, perhaps even wrong-headed. This is because on a first look at the inner logic of the destructiveness of Covid-19 which separates people, communities and even family members apart, it attacks the moral and pragmatic foundations of human solidarity. Indeed this inner logic of the pandemic seems to have come just in time to intensify and expand the long trend in capitalism to make economic life more and more capital-intensive while making labour more and more exploited and even made superfluous as robots and processes of automation edge out workers in their millions in the rich countries of the world. But I don’t believe that even 21st century capitalism, with all its considerable advancement in making economic life on the planet more capital-intensive and the exploitation of workers and their families more expansive will escape this older logic of nature and organized social life. What is this older logic? In the aftermath of every global or regional war or pandemic, there always comes a time to rethink and refashion the bonds that unite us as human beings.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. It is not every attempt to rethink and reorganize life and its economic and social bases after a war or a pandemic that succeeds. Some succeed and many fail. Here’s one example of a spectacular failure. After the end of the second world war, it was clear to everyone, colonizer and the colonized, that the old colonial-imperialist order that gave the pre-war global order both its rationale and justification had to go. But what happened? Colonialism went and neocolonialism came to replace it as black and brown skins teamed up with white skins and turned billions of black and brown skins, with some millions of white skins, into the wretched of the earth.
But if there is no guarantee that the project to reimagine and rebuild life after a war or a pandemic will succeed, neither is there a certainty that it will end in failure. Nigeria and its encounter with the Ebola epidemic is one instance of this seeming “neutrality” of success or failure after a collective disaster. The whole nation rallied into a united peoplehood and nationhood during the brief rampage of the epidemic. But that real but in the end makeshift unity ended in no time at all as the nation, especially its rulers and leaders, quickly settled into the business-as-usual divisiveness that undergirds all acts of massive and unrelenting despoliation of the resources and assets of the nation and life became hellish for most of the populace. But Nigeria under the invasion of the Ebola virus was an epidemiological skirmish, not a total war. Not only was it short in duration, it did not cause a massive disruption of economic and social life that could prompt a “post-skirmish” reimagining of better life for all. For that, we have to look to the civil war of 1967-70. About two to three million dead and most of it under extremely savage conditions whose ferocity shocked the entire global community. And yes, some attempt at reconciliation and reconstruction was made after the cessation of hostilities. But the imbalance between “victors” and “losers” was too wide and we must admit that the devastation caused by the war was heavily lopsided as more than two-thirds of the country and its peoples were spared the worst horrors of destruction during the war. And there was also this: a ruthless, wasteful and predatory form of capitalism replaced the “export crop”, import-substation and benign and reformist capitalist economy of the pre-civil war era.
Will Covid-19 have a more sobering and chastening impact on Nigeria? This question is falsely put. Ebola was an epidemic, not a pandemic; for this reason, it could validly be regarded as a Nigerian occurrence, even with its connections with other countries in our West African subregion. And for all its savagery and the wide ripples it caused in the international community, the civil war was also ultimately a “local” Nigerian affair. By contrast, there is no “Nigerian Covid-19” as such since the whole world without exception, together with the global economic order, is dealing with its rampage. To look at its real and potential impact on the global economic order, Nigeria will suffer the same fate as all the other countries of the developing world. Regardless of size and location, all countries with an economy that does not have a convertible currency and is massively dependent on imports will become extremely vulnerable as Covid-19 wreaks its havoc while it lasts. Here’s one thing everyone can and should easily appreciate: we will be hard hit by the looming disruptions in the supply chain of the global economy.
But then there arises the question: which country, which region of the world will be spared the devastating impact of the looming disruptions in the global supply chain of our fully but unequally integrated 21st century capitalism? The answer to this question is unassailable. Yes, we depend on imports for nearly everything, from machines and supplies for our hospitals and factories to very simple products like pencils, toothbrushes, and toothpicks. They, they on the other hand, depend on supply of raw materials from us, on cheap and seasonal migrant labour from our regions of the world and on the insatiable appetite of our arriviste bourgeoisie for the luxury goods of their culture and leisure industries. So, yes, Africa and the other nations and regions of the developing world will be hard hit by the economic depression that is already on the horizon of expectation of the impact of Covid-19 on our world. But so will the rich countries of the developed economies and polities. We are all together in this historic conjuncture, compatriots.
I suggest that this will be the basis for imagining new directions for capitalism in our world in the post-Covid-19 era: we are all together in a leaking, sinking boat. In every country in the world, only cooperation will work against the health, economic and social havocs of the pandemic. Yes, the claims of the richest corporations that employ the largest numbers of workers will attempt to achieve priority over the claims of other sectors of economy and society. Countries will try to assert their right to find their own unique solutions to the threats and uncertainties posed to all of us by the pandemic. And in time, many of the elites of the world will try to exploit and expand the advantages that their lifestyles give them over the lifestyles of the poor and the excluded; they will try to sit out the run of the rampage of the pandemic in relative isolation from the generality of the people. But, remember, compatriots, global capitalism is the glue that holds everything together. Do not leave out global capitalism in your thoughts on the portents of this pandemic.
At this point in the discussion, I come to the heart of the matter. Consistent with its name, its nomenclature, capitalism at every stage and in every form depends on the sovereign import of capital, especially with regard to who controls it, who makes it work for the group or class to which they belong. At the apex of its success as a globalized economic order, capitalism established control by capitalists of everyone and everything in society, including and especially the governments of the countries of the world. This is what gave rise to the subbranch of the discipline of economics known as political economy: the subordination of even politics, of governance itself, to capital, business.
I suggest that Covid-19 is likely to subject this sovereign reign of capital and capitalists to its greatest challenge in the last two hundred years. Why so? The answer to this question is both simple and complex. Here is the simple part of the answer. As the world rises to the challenge posed by the pandemic, the ownership and control of capital and therefore of capitalists, will become the axis around which the defeat of Covid-19 will be consummated. Permit me to rephrase this point and make it easier to understand. The capital, the wealth that will be needed to defeat Covid-19 is too big for any capitalist, indeed too big for all capitalists, all billionaires combined; only the aggregate of the wealth of the nation, of the people, can achieve what is to be done. As a matter of fact, we are finding that in the wake of the devastations of the pandemic, the capitalists themselves have to be bailed out of the leaking, sinking boat! It is often said that they are too big to fail. Well, tell that to Covid-19! This brings us to the more complex part of the answer to our question.
Capital does not create itself; it is created by women and men working together to expand the current levels of individual wealth and social capital. Let us put this in a simple formulation: the infrastructures, the roads and highways, the bridges and tunnels, the airports and motor parks and the whole gamut of physical requisites for the generation of wealth are not the creation of capital and capitalists, they are created by and through the collective wealth of the nation. Even when they are literally built by capitalists, the capital with which to build them are provided through contracts paid for from the collective wealth of the nation and the people. Yes, Dangote made his wealth through his foresightedness and his mastery of modern techniques of entrepreneurship. But who does not know that beyond the sale of cement and other products, he too has depended on the contracts and infrastructures provided by the society?
There has always been a form of wealth, of wealth generation that supersedes the wealth of capitalists as individuals and members of a class. Covid-19 has brought us back to an acute awareness of this capital that has always been there before the modern advent of capitalism and capitalists. Covid-19 has brought back into very sharp focus the supremacy of this capital before and beyond capitalists. I admit that much of what I have said in this piece is heavy on abstract speculation and generalizations about a pandemic whose impact on our world is anything but abstract. In next week’s conclusion, we shall make the observations and reflections more concrete, more evidence and fact-based. First of all, of course, we have to keep surviving the scourge of the pandemic.
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyfo@fas.harvard.edu
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