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INTERVIEW

“Internationalism Must Sweep Away Globalization”

Jabardakhal, the communist paper published in Kolkata, interviewed me on the global economy of COVID-19.140

Jabardakhal (J): While the British government had initially relied on herd immunity to justify their decision to refrain from preventive measures, the German pro-Nazi AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) activists are demanding authoritarian measures and forced quarantine. The Central Government of India, led by an ultra-right party famous for its authoritarian implementations, has invoked a colonial (1897) “Epidemic Act” in relation to the corona outbreak. The Act includes provisions to give extreme power to bureaucrats, right to detain on suspicion, introduce temporary restrictive and authoritarian measures, and provide legal immunity to government. How do you see such contrasting measures?

Rob Wallace (RW): Pandemics are mirrors in which countries see themselves. Each ruling party will try to force their country to see itself in the party’s premises and platforms, even if those premises, and the actions that follow, worsen the country’s outbreak. In the United States, for instance, President Trump closed the border with Mexico, even as many more confirmed cases of COVID-19, numbering now 360,000, and likely only a tenth of true infections, were already circulating ill-addressed within U.S. borders.¹⁴¹

Indeed, for many of these parties, controlling the infection is hardly the first task at hand. Protecting power—or in these parties’ minds—projecting power comes first. So we have in these mirrors, one after the other, American racism, British Malthusianism, Nazi ghettoizing, and in India’s fascist-like Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in a Fanonian inversion, a recapitulation of the worst of British colonialism. Indeed, all such sociopolitical manifestations are likely to make pandemic control worse. Neglect, letting COVID run rampant, violating population trust, and jailing people into clusters—each will only amplify the outbreak.

We’ve seen such outcomes before. As historian Mike Davis describes, 60 percent of deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic occurred in western India where the British requisitioned food for export during a coincidental drought.¹⁴² At a time in which human solidarity within and between countries is the only path out from underneath a global pandemic, another program in ethnic cleansing pursued in the gruesome Trojan Horse of a deadly virus will only make matters worse. Scapegoating people is no more than a governmental effort to cover up its failure to prepare for the pandemic while pursuing its own Victorian genocide.

J: There’s been a rumor of a biological trade war between the United States and China. It has gained momentum after disputed social media talks on U.S. patents, articles published in Granma and mutual accusations of the Chinese Foreign Minister and CIA agents against each other. How do you see this circus?

RW: Such utterly unfounded accusations are part and parcel of what I call pandemic theater. The efforts we just talked of to control populations within-country are rivaled only by attempts to pin blame for the present pandemic and its socioeconomic ramifications upon other countries. These are all modern updates on calling diseases after an international enemy, now spun into vast, unsubstantiated conspiratorial theories aimed at fast-talking debunkers into exhaustion. What were previously simplified into piquant aliases, such as the Spanish flu or the French disease, are now wound into stories about Wuhan labs or biowarfare gone amok.¹⁴³

Much as for UFOlogy—space saucers, aliens, and the like—perpetrators of such frauds and their dupes are seeking a means by which to avoid grasping the material roots by which capital-led modes of production are increasing our vulnerabilities to the emergence of multiple pathogens of pandemic or near-pandemic capacity. We’ve seen in rapid succession, upon deforestation and development, H5N1, SARS-1, H1N1 (2009), MERS, H7N9, Ebola Makona, Zika, African swine fever, and now SARS-2 exit out of marginalized wild reservoirs across poultry and livestock and into human populations. Blaming an enemy allows rulers to avoid having to blame themselves for the sudden surge in multiple deadly diseases.

J: Do you think that the world order is using the coronavirus epidemic crisis to restrict international transactions and promote domestic trade for overcoming the global recession?

RW: I don’t think the world order, if you mean the capitalist ruling class and its state enablers, is in any position to restrict international transactions, however much, for instance, President Trump attempts a nationalist economics the United States no longer has the might to impose upon the world. The virus itself is restricting trade by reducing effective demand, sickening workers, and cutting off supply lines. Hoarding is extending beyond the household to the state with the most ill-prepared nations, among them the United States and Britain, struggling to obtain enough COVID tests and personal protective equipment. Indeed, in the United States, abandoned by the federal government, individual states—New York, California, New Jersey—are competing on the black market for ventilators at many times their actual costs.¹⁴⁴

The stories are mind-boggling. The comptroller for the state of Illinois raced to meet up with some moving company executive who knew a guy who works with China’s factories, handing over a check for US$3.5 million in a McDonald’s parking lot, like a drug deal, buying Illinois N95 masks and ventilators, maybe.¹⁴⁵ After being continually outbid by his own federal government for medical supplies and equipment, the Republican governor of Massachusetts hatched a plot with China’s consul to the United States and American football team owner Robert Kraft to smuggle in supplies from China aboard the team’s private airplane.¹⁴⁶ Jaw-dropping. And markers of a failing nation-state. The richest country in the history of humanity.

J: Despite the origin of the corona outbreak and a huge population, China has been able to contain the spread of the disease. What is your take on this?

RW: China bumbled the early days of the outbreak, squashing early whistleblowers, as its instincts tend toward, including a hero doctor who subsequently died from COVID-19 treating his patients. There was a real outside chance that if health authorities moved early enough, the outbreak could have been stanched before it hit the global travel network. No such luck. But upon realization the virus wasn’t cooperating with official decrees outlawing viral activity, as if viruses could read, China moved hard upon the outbreak, aiming for total disease suppression: quarantine for infections and case family members, neighborhood blockades, and door-to-door checks. Some of the efforts appeared more actionism than good sense, including keeping people from returning to their homes at night, but not during the day, as if the virus clocks in a day job. But the Chinese state applied the full weight of its resources to match the scale of the disaster. The United States and Britain, on the other hand, refuse such efforts as a matter of realpolitik, having given up on its own public health as a commons decades ago, increasingly neglecting public health or selling it off as a lucrative fictitious commodity.

Why the difference? It isn’t merely a matter of neoliberal capitalism as opposed to China’s state capitalism. I take the world-systems theorists’ position that whereas the United States, as previously Britain, is on the back end of its cycle of capital accumulation, cashing out on public resources, turning capital back into money to be squirreled away in the rich’s offshore accounts, China, at the start of its cycle of accumulation, is invested in building its new empire, including the kinds of physical and social infrastructures needed to support such global reach.¹⁴⁷ So while its development, aimed largely at feeding its people domestically, is helping select for the emergence of new pathogens, including COVID-19, China is also invested in suppressing such outbreaks in ways the United States and Britain are utterly incapable of as a matter of structural decay.

J: Cubans have proposed the use of antiviral medicine interferon alfa-2b as a possible cure. They are training Venezuelan doctors, assisting Chinese medical teams in Italy, and they have even allowed a ship containing corona-infected patients and denied entry by many Caribbean countries to sail to its port as gestures of international solidarity. What is your view on the Cuban outlook of public health, epidemiological research, and global solidarity? What should we adopt from them to combat such pathogenic outbreaks?

RW: Isn’t that quite the inversion? Cuba (and China) sending doctors to NATO member Italy.¹⁴⁸ Senegal turning COVID tests around in four hours, while in the United States, few results are available before a week.¹⁴⁹ Taiwan tests people at the airport for COVID-19, disinfects their suitcases, drives each person separately to your destination in a government-provided taxi, and gives you an app that tells you where in your area you can purchase a mask and another app, slightly creepy, that lists local infections and their case histories.¹⁵⁰ In the States, American passport holders are waved right on through past border officers. U.S. client state South Korea’s first COVID case was reported the same day as the United States’ first. South Korea’s per-capita caseload and deaths—presently 192 total for the entire country—are more than an order less than the 4,000+ deaths in New York City alone. Part of the break with the conservative-liberal consensus against China, New York State’s governor accepted 100 ventilators from China.¹⁵¹ U.S. stature is evaporating in real time. No one is looking to it for assistance or advice.

Whatever its faults, Cuba has long been on the cutting edge of public health innovations despite its comparative poverty.¹⁵² Along with a political philosophy organized around the commons, it excels at the ergonomics in delivering population health services, simple fixes in logistics, and popular education matched with the proper scale of state resources. Not that everything works every time. But it’s not in the business of monetizing people’s illnesses down to individual insurance plans 28 million people can’t afford at all and that another 24 million can afford only in part. So, it isn’t merely a matter of what specific drugs Cuba derives. That’s terrific, of course. It’s the broader ethos that’s the matter at hand. A global disease requires a global response. Solidarity is the order of the day. Internationalism must sweep away globalization. And countries that do not partake in such mutual aid will be left to their own devices during their time of need.

—JABARDAKHAL, APRIL 8, 2020