Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Health Over Wealth

The Associated Press posted a story in April with the following headline: “Health or wealth? Nations pressured to loosen virus rules.”

It was an apt headline, though I’m not convinced the AP intended it the way I read it. For the AP, the issue is “the delicate balance between keeping people safe from a highly contagious virus and making sure they can still make a living or even have enough to eat.” It is a choice between a return to the previous economic status quo and ensuring we are beyond the immediate effects of the virus.

This sounds more benign a choice than it seems. As Slavoj Zizek in his new book Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World points out, the language used to describe this choice obscures the actual stakes. The choice between capitalist economy and the health and safety of the populace places two cruelties in opposition. It is “barbarism with a human face,” a set of “ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimized by expert opinions.” And managed on behalf of the powerful.

The world economy, as Zizek points out, has been structured along class lines, to the benefit of the wealthiest classes. The various national governments — even the communist ones — are beholden to this wealth, to power, and to the preservation of both. Their concern for the citizenry does not go beyond efforts to maintain order, to maintain a level of docility.

From the AP: “Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his government must balance its response to the virus crisis that ‘threatens to destroy lives and at the same time destroy the economic and social fabric of our country.’” There’s that word again: Balance. It is the language of accounting, of cost-benefit analysis. The implied but unstated question is “what is a life worth?”

It’s a question no one wants to admit they are asking, but it is at the heart of every decision we are making at the moment. Jon Schwartz in The Intercept, writing about the Dow’s record climb this week, argued that “the stock market is simply agnostic about human happiness.” The market is “just a best-guess measure of future post-tax corporate profitability. If future post-tax corporate profitability is compatible with people being alive and having enough to eat, that’s OK. If not, that’s likewise totally fine. We’re just not part of the equation.”

Our lives, unless they contribute to “post-tax corporate profitability,” have no value. “What matters,” Schwartz writes, is that Donald Trump and his functionaries — along with, I would argue, far too many Democrats — are willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship to keep big corporations alive and profitable.”

Health or wealth? It is a question that frames much of our politics, going beyond the immediate concerns of the pandemic and offering a concise framing of the questions we should be asking, but often do not in so-called normal times.

Health or wealth? It’s a choice we’ve made but refuse to admit to in the United States, where we our health care system is tethered to work and serves to generate massive profits for private insurers often at the expense of patients. We great this as a natural outcome, but it is a choice. The alternative — universal access and the declaration that access to health care is a human right — has been removed from the table.

Health or wealth? It is a question at the heart of the debate over the environment: Do we spend the money and put in the work to address the large-scale environmental catastrophe we are living through — climate change, poisoned water, deforestation, species and habitat destruction — caused by the profit taking of a corporate class that sucks cash out of the system and then socializes the waste product?

These questions, as Zizek says, indicate a clear message: “the choice is between a substantial, if incalculable, number of human lives and the American (i.e. Capitalist) ‘way of life.’ In this choice, human lives lose.”

Zizek advocates a new communism, one that unites us, that allows us to “think outside the coordinates of the stock market and profit and simply find another way to produce and allocate necessary resources.” Our isolationist tendencies — which make themselves apparent in our irrational nationalisms — must be eliminated. We have to admit how intertwined we are. We have to admit how misplaced our priorities are. We have to recenter our politics and economy away from profit and on what truly matters: humanity.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Patreon Newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020

Populist.com