WINSTON CHURCHILL was no friend of the working class, but we should follow his advice of never letting a good crisis go to waste, and not repeat the mistakes of 2008, when we did exactly that. 

Back then, the subprime mortgage scandal threatened to bring down the entire capitalist infrastructure, prompting the US Federal Reserve to invest an estimated $16 trillion in bailouts to banks and corporations around the world. 

Rampant speculation on obscure and risky financial instruments unleashed by globalised financial capital seeking investment opportunities, unrestrained by national constraints, had brought the international banking system close to collapse. 

However, far from resolving the underlying structural causes of the debacle, the bailouts allowed business to continue as usual with banks and institutional investors recycling the money they received into more speculative activities, thus increasing the gap between the world’s productive output and the “casino” economy. 

According to US economist William I Robinson, by 2018 global output in goods and services was some $75tr, whereas the global derivatives market was estimated at a barely believable $1.2 quadrillion.  

The explosion in financial speculation has been accompanied by massive increases in state and corporate debt. 

The global bond market topped $100tr in 2017 with total global debt touching $215tr in the previous year. 

Meanwhile, dramatic increases in consumer credit have compensated the decline in real incomes for the majority of the world’s population suffering austerity and precarious employment, and British residents have the dubious distinction of being, per capita, the most indebted people in the world. 

Since the 2008 crash and the subsequent return to business as usual for the capitalist class, economists have been predicting that it was only a matter of when, not if, another crisis would occur. 

The underlying structural fragility of a global capitalism that has made fortunes for the few and poverty for the many only needs a push to bring the whole enterprise down, and the coronavirus threatens to do just that.

Serious as the pandemic is, the greatest threat facing humankind today is that of climate change, a phenomenon driven by the wanton destruction of the Earth’s resources and the poisoning of the atmosphere in the endless quest for economic growth. 

Until and unless the capitalist order is replaced by a more equitable socio-economic system that puts people and planet before plunder and profit, there is little hope for humankind. 

The two linchpins of the system are the inviolability of private property, including the ownership of land, and the accumulation of capital.  

Nevertheless, in the plethora of articles and essays that have been written in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak criticising the inability or unwillingness of neoliberal governments to protect their populations, rare is it to encounter a demand for the drastic reform or the outright abolition of joint stock corporations and the limited liability of their directors who run them. 

Since their creation in Britain by the 1844 Joint Stock Companies Act, and their adoption by virtually every jurisdiction worldwide, limited-liability corporations have become the vehicle for capitalist expansion and rent seeking around the globe. 

A key characteristic of these corporations is the legal obligation to maximise shareholder income regardless of any other consideration, and to achieve that goal they accumulate profit and externalise risk. 

In the neoliberal era, encouraged, aided and abetted by compliant politicians who are often little more than their spokespersons in Parliament, corporations have come to dominate every aspect of our lives. 

The commercialisation and privatisation of society has delivered schools, hospitals, energy, prisons, social services, transport, communication and virtually every other economic activity into the hands of rent-seeking companies whose only interest in the “services” they provide is how much capital they can generate by sweating the assets and loading them up with debt. 

Futile debates about private-sector efficiency versus public-sector profligacy are little more than smokescreens to justify handing over publicly owned enterprises to capitalists looking for somewhere to “invest” their capital in the never-ending quest for infinite growth. 

Recent decades have witnessed the meteoric rise of technology companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google making billions of dollar in profits for their shareholders and owners alike. 

Among the most powerful players on the global financial markets are the new breed of investment management firms whose financial clout has bought them enormous influence. 

BlackRock, for example, manages more than $6 billion worth of stocks per year, and in fiscal year 2019 its net income was $4.5bn. Its share portfolio includes significant stakes in coal-plant developers and oil companies, earning it the dubious distinction of being labelled the biggest driver of climate destruction on the planet. 

The coronavirus has served to illustrate that a global economic system designed for and run by corporate interests is failing to address the needs of people across the planet and has created grotesque inequalities between the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population and the rest of humanity. 

In countries of the global south, some 60 to 80 per cent of the population eke out a living from the informal economy, and, as events in Ecuador and Peru have shown us, when a quarantine is enforced, their ability to earn a living abruptly stops. 

Many of them will be inhabitants of city slums, forced to participate on the margins of the capitalist economy after being dispossessed of their land by the inexorable march of transnational agribusiness. 

In Sierra Leone, 50 per cent of the arable land is owned by foreign capital for agricultural exports at the expense of food for domestic consumption. 

Even in the rich countries of the West, millions of people on lockdown face hardship because of their dependence on selling their labour to survive.

In a capitalist society, what is categorised as “democracy” by the mainstream media is little more than a sham. Not for nothing did British imperialists export the Westminster model to their colonies across the world to exclude any notion of popular power. 

A change of government in the US, France or Britain does nothing to alter the characteristics of the state and, at best, allows for a shift in the percentage of national income earned by the working class. The sustained and vicious attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and his programme of mild redistributive measures amply demonstrated the limits of Establishment tolerance. 

In other parts of the world, challenges to the capitalist status quo are met with oppression and violence, often with the backing of the US and its imperialist allies in Nato. 

That does not mean we should abandon parliamentary campaigns for reforms within the system but rather treat them as part of a wider goal for the democratisation of society by the dismantling of the capitalist state. 

Something approaching genuine democracy will only be achieved when people at the lowest possible level have the ability to influence decisions that will affect their lives. 

Crucially, that should include consent for and control of economic enterprises in a new framework of company law that would remove the worst excesses of the 1844 Act and replace it with fresh concepts of co-operative accountability. Remembering Gerald Winstanley’s 1649 quote that “the Earth is a common treasury for us all,” a new concept of land use by popular consent would be established, perhaps along the lines indicated by Henry George in Progress and Poverty, his seminal text on the introduction of a land tax.

None of this is going to happen overnight, but you do not have to be student of Gramsci to grasp his notion of removing the hegemony of the capitalist class or, put another way, replacing the accepted common sense that there is “no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher said at the outset of the neoliberal era. 

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the failings of a global order based on exploitation, land theft, environmental destruction, militarism and greed, and we must seize every opportunity to highlight its failings and clamour for a seismic shift to a new paradigm founded on co-operation, sustainability, egalitarianism and democracy. 

As James Connolly said: “For our demands most moderate are: we only want the Earth.”