#CoronaCapitalism

How are corporations and capitalism responding to the corona crisis? How have they contributed to it? How are they affected by it? And how are people supporting each other and fighting for a different future as it continues?

Capitalism helped create this crisis: see our article here on a few of the ways this economic system makes and spreads the healthcare crisis and its wider impacts. And as with every crisis, capitalism looks for ways to cash in. Companies like Amazon put workers at risk to pump out deliveries, hedge funds make millions short-selling the stock markets, everyone from banks to landlords push for government handouts even as they lay off staff. Governments take advantage of the panic to ramp up authoritarian powers.

People are organising against this, in their communities and workplaces. Responding to increased isolation, mutual aid groups have sprung up across the UK and the world (see https://covidmutualaid.org/). Fear can turn into anger, not against each other, but against the system that has brought us here. And radical change can happen.

To help us stay informed and think through these important issues, we are using this page to compile some of the most useful and interesting articles, news and resources on coronavirus and capitalism that we come across. If you see some yourselves, tweet @corpwatchuk with the #CoronaCapitalism hashtag or email us at contact[AT]corporatewatch.org. Sign up to our news update emails to receive info straight into your inbox.

In solidarity,
the Corporate Watch crew

Our own articles on Corona Capitalism

6 ways capitalism spreads the corona crisis: industrial agriculture, Big Pharma, healthcare profiteering, work conditions, panic media, lockdown inequality and repression — and the profit system that drives it all.

Riots, resistance and releases — the corona virus and the Prison Industrial Complex: an overview of prison struggles worldwide in the time of corona

Companies cashing in on the crisis — Part 1: featuring Big Pharma; Crispin Odey; Amazon; Deliveroo; Balfour Beatty; Britannia Hotels; Marshall Wace; Richard Branson

Companies cashing in on the crisis — Part 2: featuring airline bailouts, Travelodge, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Wren Kitchens

Other recommended Corona related compilations

Netpol and the Undercover Research Group have a regularly updated blog on the policing of Britain’s #COVIDー19 state of emergency #PolicingTheCoronaState: https://policing-the-corona-state.blog/

The Anarchist Library has a section devoted to documenting and archiving various anarchist and libertarian literature written about the COVID-19 pandemic: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/topic/covid-19

Writing from the web

Obviously the situation with Covid-19 is developing pretty rapidly, but we’ve tried to make sure that the content we’ve chosen will still be worth reading well beyond it’s publication date and some of the older pieces have some great analysis.

• 8 May – On the emergence of a coherent technology based Pandemic Shock Doctrine, with big tech companies and governments conspiring to create a high-tech surveillance future “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.” https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
• 2 June – A global solidarity statement on the four main ways in which mining multinationals are exploiting the pandemic to maximise profits at the expense of people and planet: https://miningwatch.ca/sites/default/files/global_solidarity_statement_on_mining_pandemic_profiteers.pdf
• 12 May – On transformative justice and gender based violence in the context of covid-19: https://freedomnews.org.uk/lessons-from-covid-19-how-transformative-justice-and-mutual-aid-can-help-to-address-harm-in-communities
• 21 May – Some reflections from a group in New Orleans on the importance of interrogating power relations, personal and structural, as part of emancipatory mutual aid: https://roarmag.org/essays/emancipatory-mutual-aid-from-education-to-liberation/
• Spring 2020 – On the specific character of the recent uprisings in the Arab region, their origins in neoliberalism and the Arab Spring and possible effects of Covid-19 on the movements and the regimes they oppose: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/from-one-arab-spring-to-another
• 18 May – On the use of video calls instead of prison visits during the pandemic in the UK and the implications this has for the future: https://freedomnews.org.uk/virtual-panopticon-prison-video-calls-and-family-support-during-the-pandemic-and-beyond/
• 18 May – On Corona, Degrowth, the need for economic systems resilient to crisis, and slowing production by design not disaster: https://theecologist.org/2020/may/18/case-degrowth-time-pandemic
• 20 April – Some feminist degrowth reflections on COVID-19 and the politics of social reproduction, and a call for “just, sustainable and convivial societies brought about by voluntary change” https://www.degrowth.info/en/2020/04/feminist-degrowth-collaborative-fada-reflections-on-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-the-politics-of-social-reproduction/ longer version here: https://www.degrowth.info/en/feminisms-and-degrowth-alliance-fada/collective-research-notebook/
• 22 May – On the rent strikes and attitude of class war that spread through New York during the 1918 influenza pandemic: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/new-york-rent-strikes-during-the-1918-spanish-influenza/
• 5 April – Some note from Mexico on the current situation and the implications for capitalism. “The increasingly acute contradictions of this mode of production .. will not simply give way to the mechanical or messianic end of capitalism. Because in order to see the end of capitalism, it is essential that there will be a social, antagonistic and revolutionary force ..”: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/04/05/covid19-will-the-capitalist-system-collapse-some-notes-from-mexico-on-current-events/
• 6 May – Uneven Earth produce a regular series of recommended readings focusing on ” environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education”. March and April’s readings are a compilation of pieces relating to Corona Virus: http://unevenearth.org/2020/05/march-april-readings/
• 4 April – An examination of the relative capacities of nation-states and decentralised societies in responding to crises such as covid-19  “The State is said by some to be a ‘necessary evil’; it must be made unnecessary.”   https://c4ss.org/content/52761
• 20 April – On the vampric nature of capitalism, the expansion of market discipline and authoritarian control during the crisis: https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/corona-capitalism-and-environmental-crisis/
• 11 May – A post-corona degrowth manifesto from the Netherlands that has gained widespread support, It proposes an end to growth economics, redistribution of wealth, transformation of agriculture, consumption and travel and cancellation of debt:  https://www.degrowth.info/en/2020/05/planning-for-post-corona/
• 15 April – DIY Culture #6, a COVID19 special: “a 34 page online special that has contributions from anarchist transport workers, nurses, care workers, writers, creatives, thinkers and activists. The general thrust, is that we cannot return to ‘normal’ following this pandemic, but that we should have some insurrectionary fun along the way as we eradicate the virus that is capitalism”: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/04/15/diy-culture-6-covid19-special/

• 10 April – From Crimethink on the longer term implications of the pandemic and government responses to it for radical social change. Briefly considers how this plays out in the terrains of: economy, health, housing, social isolation, ecology and totalitarianism. It then presents three alternative programmes to pursue: the adherents of death, the apostles of survival, and the partisans of life: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-and-after-the-virus-the-perils-ahead
• 11 April – Wouldn’t normally link to a Bloomberg article, but these are strange times and this opinion piece outlines the drastically uneven impact of Corona and how it could result in huge social upheaval: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-11/coronavirus-this-pandemic-will-lead-to-social-revolutions
• 17 March – Economic analysis on how the crisis is revealing the fragility of neoliberalism and the reckoning now faced by western capitalist societies: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-unexpected-reckoning-coronavirus-and-capitalism
• 9 April – On solidarity and organising in times of lockdown and how the crisis is shifting the political landscape in terms of class consciousness, the commons and redistribution https://roarmag.org/essays/organizing-under-lockdown-online-activism-local-solidarity/
• 1 April – On the origins of the virus in the circuits of capitals and the appropriation of nature driven by rich countries, the inability of capitalist societies to effectively combat and prevent contagions and the socialisation of resources and ecological harmonisation required to do so. “Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by the market”: https://monthlyreview.org/2020/04/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/
• 17 April – Some reflections on the social responses to contagion, the similarities to past plagues, and the possibilities opened up by the ruptures to ‘everyday’ life the corona crisis has created: https://communemag.com/letter-on-a-plague-year/
• February – Some in depth analysis looking not just at how capitalism caused the crisis but how the social-economic spheres interface with the biological, and what kind of deeper lessons might be drawn from the entire experience: “..lessons for an era when the destruction wrought by unending accumulation has extended both upward into the global climatic system and downward into the microbiological substrata of life on Earth”  (note this was written in February and that while the analysis is certainly interesting, we at Corporate Watch are certainly not epidemiologists!) : http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/
• 19 March – On the failure of current economic and political systems, impacts on supply chains, and how the slow down due to corona is not ‘degrowth’ but demonstrates its possibility: https://www.degrowth.info/en/2020/03/a-degrowth-perspective-on-the-coronavirus-crisis/
• 12 March – On the links between captial-led agriculture and corona, and how this is all exacerbated due by neoliberalsim etc: http://unevenearth.org/2020/03/where-did-coronavirus-come-from-and-where-will-it-take-us-an-interview-with-rob-wallace-author-of-big-farms-make-big-flu/?preview=true&_thumbnail_id=4111
• 18 March – On the need to break laws collectively and deliberately to survive and escape: “It is not normalcy we seek, but new worlds.” https://itsgoingdown.org/to-survive-this-crisis-and-the-one-we-left-we-must-break-laws/
• 22 March – Thoughts from New York on learning from previous mutual aid efforts, and how networks can prepare for the coming challenges. How can we organise in conditions of social distancing, and how can we stop the state using isolation measures as tools for political de-mobilisation? : https://roarmag.org/essays/from-mutual-aid-to-dual-power-in-the-state-of-emergency/
• 20 March –  Some more from an ER doctor from the same anti-capitalist space in New York: https://itsgoingdown.org/igdcast-doctor-corona/
• 24 March – On the framing of responsibility during the crisis in the UK https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/responsibilising-corona/
• 17 March – On decentralised social support networks in China: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/social-support-networks-springing-coronavirus-stricken-china/
• 27 March – Some thoughts on systemic change in times of crises:  https://code-rood.org/en/2020/03/27/shaking-the-system/
• 12 March – From Milan on distinguishing between two different disasters, the disaster of the virus itself and the disaster wrought by the ways that the existing order responds and does not respond to the pandemic: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/03/12/against-the-coronavirus-and-the-opportunism-of-the-state-anarchists-in-italy-report-on-the-spread-of-the-virus-and-the-quarantine/
• 26 March – On the abuse of emergency powers by the Duterte regime in the Philippines https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/03/26/the-philippines-genuine-service-to-the-people-needs-no-emergency-powers/
• 24 March – On the US response to corona virus prioritising capitalists and companies profits ahead of the lives of workers providing vital services https://www.leftvoice.org/capitalism-is-a-death-cult-notdying4wallstreet