Capitalism is somehow responsible for police brutality and a pandemic. That was my cue to stop reading.
- The pandemic was initially propagated by consumers of the global air travel industry, and likely would have been a localized epidemic otherwise.
- The police largely exist to protect the assets of the wealthy and preserve the societal structure that enables them to make and store wealth.
I don't necessarily agree with much of what this article is saying, but it's good to stretch the mind and read a variety of viewpoints. (otherwise you're only reading things that agree with your biases, which, of course, has issues)
I can’t therefore conclude that global air travel is “capitalism’s fault” and, as contagious as SARS-COV2 is, a pandemic was virtually assured.
As to whether those inhabitants would be better off than us, I believe that's much more to do with their socio-econo-political systems than their available modes of transportation. Slower vehicles means germs and goods travel slower, and culture too until said internet is built.
Not that I think it makes much difference in terms of a pandemic, but maybe if travel patterns had been different the pandemic would have played out differently in turn.
The only alternative to a monopoly on violence is an open turf war among crime gangs, quite probably involving far more brutality. There are plenty of nation states outside the U.S. with better run police and no gang wars, implying that they do manage to successfully regulate (i.e. "monopolize") the initiation of force. These things have basically nothing to do with each other.
Street gangs as they currently exist in the US were created by the prison system, an arm of the state violence apparatus. Conveniently, they're also an excuse to increase police budgets. More policing, in turn, puts more people into prison.
I don't think that alternative is actually even an alternative.
As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously, capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th century.
Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would have been a disaster.
In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything, but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them back.
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.
To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..."
Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
> Foo is bar, with its baz.
Clearly baz is an example of how foo is bar.
https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause....
One was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVAX
From the wiki: """The continued shortage of COVID-19 vaccines delivered through COVAX is blamed on "vaccine nationalism" by richer nations ... """
The efforts were thwarted by investors prioritizing corporate profit.
People might like or dislike it, but this is 100% due to capitalism.
Regarding police brutality, its correlation with poverty is extensively documented by social scientists.
The other proposal (whose name I don't remember) was to share the IP.