Doom and gloom are cheap ways to fill blog pages, I know. In between feeling doomful gloomful panic the last six months while the Saga Of The New Landlord played out, I tried to write a few upbeat posts, and failed.
And now I’m going to write another gloomful doomful post, damnit.
World Political Situation:
It’s scary-dicey. Countries aren’t behaving in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration. (No big secret, they’ve always done things this way. But one would have hoped that this pandemic might have fostered some spirit of commonality. Sadly . . . – well, just look around * waving everywhere *) Canada, the ‘nice people’ country, has bought enough vaccinations to inoculate five Canadian populations. How is there ANY altruism in that action?
The United States is falling in on itself and soon won’t have the wherewithal to keep up their mutual obligations and international machinations, another source of disquiet and unease.
China is using the pandemic and its news-spotlight-hogging cover to invade (let’s face it. it’s an invasion) and now are after a few more, which bodes ill because it’s obvious they want to expand – not just in population, but to broaden the base of their credo and belief systems. There’s no live and let live in the Chinese officialdom, and that should be worrying countries like Australia.
Europe’s finding out that you can’t really have an end to COVID-19 on a country by country ad hoc basis and they are going to have to use their EU to actually do something other than just shuffling the economy around. The fact is that Europe is going to be struggling for a few years, just like the USA.
And Russia is being quite quiet, which is very worrying…
COVID-19:
Loads of countries have been finding the price of being too complacent / relieved with their pandemic precautions is a high price indeed, going back for ‘second waves’ that are simply horrendous.
People say “well, the mortality rate is only 1% – 2% you know,” but I’m going to say it – that’s between 70 and 140 MILLION people world-wide. And it’ll be asymmetrical and discriminatory – third world countries are going to have far higher rates, and there are a lot more people living in poor conditions than there are in the reasonably wealthy sector whose countries can afford the right care, enough vaccines, and so forth.
Also, of course, we haven’t hit ‘peak pandemic’ yet – witness second, third, and more waves ad nauseam that are happening as I write this – so we are going to see more and more pressure on all the things that capitalism holds dear as fewer people remain to exploit.
Capitalism:
The world’s major motivation is capitalism, it’s what drives progress, production, consumption – and in fact the very lives of everyone, even those that aren’t in capitalist countries.
While there’s very active propaganda (read: “news / media / chatter”) suggesting that if we only hang in there, the ‘economy’ will get back on track and everything will get back to business as usual, this isn’t likely to be the case.
How can the facade of finance be maintained when it’s been shown to be able to suspend it at will, when a suitable incentive like a global pandemic occurs? This suspension of the norm, leads to the corollary, namely, that there were alternative systems, which (while not perfect) were able to create empires and sustain what at those times were record human populations.
And there are alternative systems, of government, of economy, and of land stewardship. Some (such as communism, dictatorship, selling out national resources) we see as not working particularly well, and some (ancient and native land management, barter and local economies) we’re only just now seeing the advantages of.
Future:
Capitalism will fail, or survive. If it survives, it’ll be far worse for the working class than its current format, wield far more power than it already does, and the world climate and biosphere will end up failing catastrophically, leading to capitalism failing anyway, just with a longer and deeper period of suffering in between.
If capitalism fails, it won’t go quietly unless we are very pro-active in managing the change from capitalism to The New Whateverism that will take its place, and ensuring the The New Whateverism is never allowed to reign uncontrolled and unmanaged as capitalsim has been.
If we don’t stay on top of this change when it comes, it’ll end up on top of us. Keep an eye out, amidst the clamour of the pandemic, for the ringing of rust at the heels…