John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi: COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism
Since the end of the 20th century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted interconnected commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations. These chains link various production zones (primarily in developing countries) with the regions and nations at the apex of the world's chains of consumption, finance, and capital accumulation (primarily developed countries). These commodity chains constitute the primary physical circuit of global capital, which in turn has formed late imperialism (late imperialism [1]), a stage characterized by the rise of monopoly-finance capital. Within this system, the high profits derived from the control of global production stem not only from global labor arbitrage [2] (namely, the over-exploitation and squeezing of industrial labor in the periphery by multinational corporate headquarters located at the center of the system), but also from global land arbitrage (namely, the expropriation of cheap land and labor in developing countries by agricultural multinationals to produce export crops marketed mainly to developed countries [3]).
In today's global economy, for corporate managers, these complex circuits of capital simultaneously encompass supply chains and value chains. Supply chains represent the flow of physical products, while value chains target the "added value" at every production node from raw materials to the final product [4]. This dual emphasis on supply and value chains is, in some respects, similar to the more dialectical methodology involving use value and exchange value developed by Marx in his analysis of commodity chains in production and exchange. In Volume I of Capital, Marx emphasized the dual reality of natural-material use values (the "natural form") and exchange value (the "value form") existing within every link of the "general chain of metamorphoses" of the commodity world [5].
In the 1980s, world-systems theorists Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein reintroduced the concept of commodity chains based on Marxist theory. However, subsequent Marxist (and world-systems) commodity chain analysis generally neglected the material-ecological aspects of use value, treating commodity chains entirely as economic/value phenomena. Marx never ignored the natural-material limits of the circuits of capital; he emphasized the "negative, i.e., destructive" impact of capitalist valorization on the natural conditions of production and on the metabolism between humanity and nature as a unified whole. The irreparable rift in the interdependent social metabolism (the metabolic rift) constitutes capitalism's destructive relationship with the Earth—first "exhausting the soil" and then "manuring the English fields with guano." This metabolic rift is equally evident in "periodically recurring epidemics," caused by contradictions arising from the natural evolution of the capitalist system [6].
I. The Circuits of Capital and the Eco-Epidemiological Crisis
It is noteworthy that over the past ten years, a new, more holistically collaborative approach to disease etiology has emerged: "One Health-One World." This approach primarily targets recent zoonotic infectious diseases transmitted from animals (wild or domestic) to humans, such as SARS, MERS, and H1N1. The "One Health" model integrates epidemiological analysis on an ecological basis, bringing together ecological scientists, physicians, veterinarians, and public health analysts worldwide within this methodological framework. Consequently, the multi-sectoral collaborative approach of "One Health" has rapidly transformed into a paradigm that combines diverse areas of interest—including public health, private healthcare, animal health, agribusiness, and big pharma—to strengthen the capacity to respond to sporadic epidemics. This also marks the rise of a broad corporatist strategy in which capital, particularly agribusiness, is a primary element. As a result, the link between epidemic crises and the capitalist world economy is systematically downplayed within this so-called holistic model [7].
Therefore, a new and revolutionary approach to disease etiology has been adopted: "Structural One Health." Structural One Health critically builds upon One Health but is rooted more deeply in the broad tradition of historical materialism. For supporters of Structural One Health, the key is to identify how epidemics in the contemporary global economy are linked to the circuits of capital that are rapidly altering environmental conditions. A team of scientists—including Rodrick Wallace, Luis Fernando Chaves, Luke R. Bergmann, Richard Kock, and Robert G. Wallace—has co-authored a series of works such as Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection, as well as the recent article "COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital" published in the May 2020 issue of Monthly Review. Structural One Health is defined as a brand-new field that examines the impact of the global circulation of capital and other relevant fundamental contextual factors, including deep-seated history, on regional agro-economics and the dynamics of associated interspecies diseases.
The revolutionary historical materialist methodology represented by Structural One Health departs from the mainstream One Health methodology in the following respects: (1) [8] it focuses on the driving force of commodity chains in epidemics; (2) [9] it dismisses the usual practice of "absolute geography"—which focuses on the specific locations where new viruses emerge—and instead recognizes global economic transmission channels; (3) [10] instead of viewing pandemics as episodic problems or random "black swan" events, it sees them as reflections of the generalized structural crisis of capital, as explained by István Mészáros in his book Beyond Capital; (4) [11] it adopts the dialectical biology method used by Harvard biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in The Dialectical Biologist; (5) it insists on a radical reconstruction of society as a whole for the purpose of promoting a sustainable "planetary metabolism." In his book Big Farms Make Big Flu and other works, Robert Wallace draws on Marx's ideas regarding commodity chains and the metabolic rift; his views are also based on the Lauderdale Paradox (the principle that the growth of private riches occurs at the expense of the destruction of public wealth) to critique economic austerity and privatization. Thinkers upholding the spirit of this critical tradition rely on dialectical methods to reflect on ecological destruction and the etiology of epidemics.
Of course, the new historical materialist epidemiology did not emerge from a vacuum; it is built upon a long tradition of socialist struggle and critical analysis of epidemics, such as: (1) [8] Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, which discusses the class basis of infectious diseases; (2) [12] Marx’s discussion of epidemics and public health conditions in Capital; (3) [13] the countermeasures regarding the anthropogenic factors of disease and their foundations in capitalist agriculture, markets, and finance proposed by British zoologist E. Ray Lankester in The Kingdom of Man; and (4) [11] Richard Levins’s "Is Capitalism a Disease?". [8]
The new historical materialist epidemiology associated with Structural One Health clearly recognizes the role played by global agribusiness. It focuses on examining new zoonotic infectious diseases and combines this with detailed research into various aspects of pathology. As Robert Wallace states in Big Farms Make Big Flu, these diseases are "the unintended biological consequences of efforts to steer animal genetics and ecology toward transnational profitability," out of which new deadly pathogens emerge. "Offshore" agriculture (including large-scale hog lots and massive poultry farms) consisting of monocultures of genetically identical livestock—which eliminates immune firebreaks—and rampant deforestation have led to the intermingling of wild birds and other wildlife with industrial animal production (wet markets being no exception). This has created the conditions for the transmission of new deadly pathogens such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1, H5N1, and now COVID-19. More than 500,000 people died globally from the H1N1 flu, and the death toll from COVID-19 is likely to far exceed that number.
Robert Wallace writes that "agribusiness" is "moving companies into developing countries to take advantage of cheap labor and land" and "spreading its entire production lines across the world." The interaction between humans and animals produces new diseases. He tells us: "Now, no matter where a particular strain evolves first, influenza will spread through the globalized corporate livestock production and trade networks." As livestock are rapidly transported from one region to another, multiple influenza strains are constantly transmitted to places where susceptible animal populations congregate. It has been proven that large commercial poultry enterprises have a much higher probability of infection with these deadly zoonotic diseases. Value chain analysis is used to track the etiology of nascent flus like H5N1 along the commodity chains of poultry production.
The interconnected global commodity chains of agribusiness provide the foundation for new zoonotic diseases. Robert Wallace and his colleagues write in "COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital": "Some pathogens emerge directly from production centers... but many others, like COVID-19, originate at the frontiers of capital production. In fact, at least 60% of new human pathogens emerge from the spillover of viruses from wildlife to local human communities." As they summarize the conditions for the spread of these diseases, the underlying operating premise is that the etiology of COVID-19 and other such pathogens can be found not only during the clinical diagnosis of any infectious agent’s victim, but also in ecosystems that suffer from the throttling of structural factors of capital for selfish ends. Various pathogens with different classifications, source hosts, transmission modes, clinical courses, and epidemiological outcomes all share the aforementioned characteristics. Thus, every disease outbreak sends us racing to search engines, marking different regions and paths along the same map of land-use and value-accumulation circuits. [14]
The restructuring of imperialist production at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries (which we call globalization) was primarily aimed at expanding the interests of world capital and financial centers through global labor arbitrage and the over-exploitation of workers in developing countries (including the intentional pollution of local environments).
The result is partially driven by global land arbitrage conducted through transnational agribusiness. According to Eric Holt-Giménez in A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism, "land prices" in much of the global underdeveloped regions are so low relative to their land rent (the value it can generate) that the gap—the arbitrage—between low land prices and high land rents brings substantial profits to investors. Regarding these transactions, any actual benefits from crop cultivation are secondary. Opportunities for land arbitrage arise from bringing new land with considerable land rent into the global land market, allowing that rent to be truly capitalized within the market. This is largely driven by the so-called "Livestock Revolution," which has turned livestock into a globalized commodity based on giant feedlots and genetic monocultures (for the realization of high productive performance). [23] Various development banks, under the euphemism of "land adjustment," have facilitated the preconditions for land arbitrage. This includes the displacement of peasant farmers and small producers from the land at the behest of transnational corporations (primarily agribusiness), as well as rapid deforestation and ecosystem destruction. This is also referred to as the land grab of the 21st century. The surge in basic food prices in 2008 and 2011, and the search for tangible assets by private wealth funds facing uncertain risks after the 2007–2009 financial crisis, further accelerated the land-grabbing process. The result has been the largest migration in human history: in a process of global de-peasantization [N1], people have been driven off the land, agro-ecology across entire regions has been destroyed, traditional agriculture has been replaced by monocultures, and massive populations have been pushed into urban slums. [24]
II. Commodity Chain Disruption and the Global Bullwhip Effect [25]
The new pathogens inadvertently brought by agribusiness are not in themselves natural-material use-values; rather, they are toxic residues of the capitalist production system, traceable back to an inseparable component of the globalized food system—the agribusiness commodity chain. Under the impact of pandemic lockdowns and social distancing, production in key sectors globally was shut down, thereby shaking international supply/value chains. This produced a massive "bullwhip effect" [N2] that diffused simultaneously from both the supply and demand ends of global commodity chains. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic occurred against the backdrop of a global neoliberal monopoly-finance capital system that has imposed mandatory austerity worldwide, including in the field of public health. In the global commodity chain system, the widespread adoption of "just-in-time" production [29], together with time-based competition, left institutions like hospitals with almost no inventory. The practice of residents urgently hoarding certain commodities further complicated the issue, ultimately leading to extraordinary chaos in the global economy.
Today's global commodity chains (or what we call labor value chains) are primarily designed to exploit the lower unit labor costs (taking into account both wage costs and productivity) of poorer countries in the global developing world. In 2014, unit labor costs in India and Mexico were 37% and 43% of U.S. market levels, respectively. Indonesia's unit labor costs were higher, at 62% of the U.S. market level. [26] This is largely due to extremely low wages in developing countries, which are only a fraction of wage levels in developed countries. At the same time, "arms-length" production carried out under the transnational corporate system, as well as the introduction of advanced technologies in new export platforms, produces productivity in many fields comparable to that of developed countries. The result is an integrated global system of exploitation in which the wage differential between developed and developing countries is greater than the productivity differential. This leads to very low unit labor costs in developing countries, generating enormous gross profit margins (or economic surplus) on the export prices of goods from poorer countries.
The massive economic surplus created by the global developing world is counted as "value added" in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of developed countries. However, it should be more accurately understood as value captured from the developing world. This new system of international exploitation associated with the globalization of production constitutes the deep structure of late imperialism in the 21st century. It is a system of world exploitation/expropriation formed around global labor arbitrage, leading to the drain of massive value created by poor countries toward rich countries.
All of this has benefited from revolutions in the fields of transport and communications. As standardized containers proliferated, transport costs plummeted; communication technologies such as fiber-optic cables, mobile phones, the internet, broadband, cloud computing, and video conferencing transformed global connectivity. Air travel reduced the price of rapid transit; global air passenger traffic grew at an average annual rate of 6.5% between 2010 and 2019. Roughly one-third of U.S. exports are intermediate products—such as cotton, steel, engines, and semiconductors—intended for the production of final products elsewhere. It is under these rapidly changing conditions that an increasingly integrated and hierarchically rigid system of international capital accumulation emerged, giving rise to the current global commodity chain system. Consequently, all regions of the world are situated within the same system of exploitation and oppression. Under the dual impact of the U.S. trade war against China and the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy, this connectivity is showing signs of destabilization.
The COVID-19 pandemic, along with lockdown measures and expanded social distancing, led to the "first global supply chain crisis," [27] resulting in loss of economic value, massive unemployment and underemployment, business closures, intensified exploitation, and widespread hunger and deprivation. The key factor making the current crisis so complex and chaotic is that no CEO of a transnational corporation anywhere has a complete map of their company’s commodity chain. Typically, a company’s financial center and procurement staff know their Tier 1 suppliers but do not know their Tier 2 suppliers (the suppliers' suppliers), much less Tier 3 or Tier 4 suppliers. As Elisabeth Braw wrote in Foreign Policy, Michael Essig, a professor of supply management at the Bundeswehr University Munich, calculated that a transnational corporation like Volkswagen has 5,000 suppliers (so-called Tier 1), and each supplier has an average of 250 Tier 2 suppliers. This means the company actually has 1.25 million suppliers, the vast majority of which it knows nothing about. Furthermore, this does not even take Tier 3 suppliers into account.
The impact of the coronavirus has forced companies into an urgent need to map their entire commodity chain lineage. But this is extremely intricate. When the Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred, it was discovered that the Fukushima region produced 60% of the world's critical auto parts; a large portion of the world's lithium battery chemicals also originated there; additionally, it produced 300mm silicon wafers accounting for 22% of global output. All these products are vital to industrial production. At that time, some monopoly-finance firms tried to map their supply chain lineages. According to the Harvard Business Review, an executive at a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer mentioned that after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami (and the Fukushima disaster), it took a team of one hundred people over a year to map the company’s supply network down to the level of suppliers providing materials to subcontractors.
Many links in the supply chain are invisible, and the supply chain is fractured in many places. Because unstable factors exist in overall supply and demand, enterprises face disruption risks and uncertainty risks in the production, distribution, and consumption of material products. The scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on world accumulation is unprecedented, and the enormous cost paid by the global economy continues to climb. By the end of March 2020, about 3 billion people in the world were in a state of lockdown or expanded social distancing. Most companies had no contingency plans to handle multiple disruptions in the supply chain. In the first few months of 2020, various suppliers issued tens of thousands of force majeure declarations, stating that they could not fulfill contracts due to extraordinary external events. This reflects the scope of the problem. Meanwhile, many scheduled voyages of cargo ships were canceled due to insufficient supply or demand. In early April 2020, the National Retail Federation in the U.S. stated that cargo volume in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) in March 2020 was at a five-year low, and it was expected that from then on, cargo volume would decline significantly at an even faster rate. Global air passenger flights were reduced by about 90%, such that major U.S. airlines converted planes into cargo flights to utilize their holds and cabins.
Trade forecasts released by the WTO in early April 2020 showed that the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to a contraction of world trade by 13% to 32% in 2020. In a pessimistic scenario, the severity of the great collapse in world trade over one year would equate to three years of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the dire effects of global supply chain disruptions were particularly evident in medical equipment. Premier, one of the main purchasing organizations for U.S. hospitals, noted that it typically buys up to 24 million N95 masks annually for its healthcare providers and organizations, yet in 2020, its members had already used 56 million masks in January and February alone. In late March, the company ordered 110 million to 150 million N95 masks, while member organizations like hospitals and nursing homes responded to surveys saying they had only enough mask inventory to last just over a week. Demand for medical masks surged while the global supply froze. Coronavirus testing kits were in chronic short supply worldwide, a situation that did not improve until China resumed production in late March. [30]
Many other commodities are currently in short supply, but looking at the overall picture, amidst this upheaval and chaos, market demand has dropped sharply, with warehouses filled with goods like fashion apparel. In the field of just-in-time production, inventory is generally reduced to the minimum to lower costs. In the absence of an economic slowdown, by early May, the U.S. auto industry and many retail supply chains might face long-term supply shortages. As Peter Hasenkamp, former Director of Supply Chain Strategy at Tesla and current Director of Purchasing at Lucid Motors, put it: "It takes 2,500 parts to build a car, but lack of only one part and you can't build the car." Part of the reason for the supply shortage of coronavirus testing kits in the U.S. was the lack of swabs. By mid-April 2020, 81% of manufacturing enterprises worldwide experienced supply shortages. By March, force majeure declarations increased by 44% compared to the beginning of the year, and the production shutdown rate increased by 38%, which created not only material shortages but also a cash flow crisis, thus "financial risks surged." [31]
For today's transnational corporations, as long as use-value can generate exchange-value, they do not care about the use-value they sell. However, the actual economic impact of supply chain disruption is on the value chain—that is, on the flow of exchange-value. While the full value impact of global supply chain disruptions will not be known for some time, the accumulation crisis it has caused can be seen in the losses of value suffered by companies. For decades, hundreds of companies, including Boeing, Nike, Hershey, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco, have encountered severe commodity chain disruption crises. Research based on approximately 800 cases shows that the general impact of such supply chain disruptions on companies includes: "operating income down 107%; return on sales down 114%; return on assets down 93%; sales growth down 7%; cost increase 11%; inventory growth 14%."
", such negative impacts typically persist for two years. The same study indicates that during the three-year period starting one year before the announcement of a disruption and continuing for two years after, companies affected by supply chain disruptions saw stock returns decrease by 33% to 40% relative to industry benchmarks. Furthermore, share price volatility in the year following a disruption was 13.50% higher compared to the year preceding it. Moreover, disruptions across entire supply chains involved in global labor arbitrage have the potential to trigger a financial collapse in a world economy still characterized primarily by stagnation, debt, and financialization.
A significant portion of the exposed vulnerabilities involves the issue of so-called supply chain finance, which allows firms to delay payments to suppliers with the aid of bank financing. These debts owed to suppliers are then sold by other financial interests in the form of short-term notes. Credit Suisse, for instance, held notes owed by major American corporations such as Kellogg’s and General Mills. With the generalized disruption of commodity chains, this intricate financial web—itself an object of speculation—is in an inherent crisis mode, creating further weak links in an already fragile financial system.
III. Imperialism, Class, and the Viral Pandemic
The COVID-19 virus, like other dangerous pathogens that have emerged or re-emerged in recent years, is closely linked to a complex set of factors: (1) With the development of global agribusiness, the continuous expansion of genetic monocultures has increased susceptibility to zoonotic infectious diseases [17] spreading from wild animals to livestock herds and then to humans; (2) the destruction of wild habitats and the disruption of the normal life activities of wild species; and (3) the narrowing of the distance between human living spaces and wildlife. There is no doubt that global commodity chains and the connectivity they produce have become vectors for the rapid transmission of disease, calling into question the global exploitative development model. As Stephen Roach—former chief economist at Morgan Stanley, a primary originator of the concept of global labor arbitrage, and faculty member at the Yale School of Management—wrote in the context of the coronavirus crisis, corporate financial headquarters seek "low-cost goods without regard for what those cost-benefits might do to public health, or, I might add, for the negative impact on environmental protection and climate quality." This unsustainable law of "cost-benefit" has led to the contemporary global ecological crisis, the pandemic crisis, and the financial crisis, further destabilizing a capital system already characterized by an "excessive surge" in financial bubbles.
Currently, wealthy countries are at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic and the financial crisis, but the combined crisis—including economic and pandemic dimensions—will strike poor countries even harder. In March 2020, the COVID-19 response team at Imperial College London released a report stating that in a global context where the pandemic remained unmitigated and no social distancing or lockdown measures were taken, 40 million people worldwide would die. The report suggested that death rates in wealthy countries would be higher than in poor countries because the former have a larger proportion of the population over age 65. On the surface, this analysis accounted for the factor that wealthy countries have greater access to medical services. However, it ignored factors such as malnutrition, poverty, and the greater susceptibility to infectious diseases in poor nations. Based on these assumptions, Imperial College projected that in an unmitigated scenario, deaths would reach 15 million in East Asia and the Pacific, 7.6 million in South Asia, 3 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2.5 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 1.7 million in the Middle East and North Africa. By contrast, deaths in Europe and Central Asia would be approximately 7.2 million, and about 3 million in North America.
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Zachary Barnett-Howell of Yale University, analyzing the Imperial College projection methodology, authored an article for Foreign Policy magazine titled "Poor Countries Need to Think Twice About Social Distancing." In the article, Mobarak and Barnett-Howell argued clearly that "epidemiological models make it clear that the cost of non-intervention for wealthy countries would be hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, a result far worse than the severest imaginable economic recession. In other words, implementing social distancing interventions and taking aggressive measures to control the outbreak in high-income societies is extremely rational, even if it comes at a high economic cost to save lives." However, they argued that this was not the case for poor countries, as their elderly populations are relatively small, and according to Imperial College estimates, the elderly account for roughly half of the infection mortality rate. They acknowledged that such predictive models "do not account for the higher incidence of chronic disease, respiratory illness, environmental pollution, and malnutrition in low-income countries, factors that may increase mortality caused by a COVID-19 outbreak." Nevertheless, the article (and a related study conducted by the Yale Department of Economics) largely ignored these model flaws. The authors insisted that given the poverty, mass unemployment, and underemployment in these countries, people would be better off not implementing social distancing or aggressive testing to control the outbreak, but should instead dedicate themselves to economic production. Since supply chains primarily originate in low-income countries, this might maintain the integrity and flow of global supply chains. Doubtless, in the eyes of these authors, trading tens of millions of deaths in the developing world for the continued growth of the capital empire is a rational choice after weighing the pros and cons.
As Mike Davis observed, twenty-first-century capitalism demonstrates that "humanity’s permanent unequal treatment... leads to a portion of humanity being destined for eventual extinction." He asked: But what happens when COVID-19 spreads through populations with the least access to medical care, more severe malnutrition and unresolved health issues, and compromised immune systems? For impoverished youth in the slums of Africa and South Asia, the advantage of age will be negligible and not worth mentioning. Large-scale infections in slums and poor cities might also "flip the switch" on COVID-19 infection patterns and change the nature of the disease. Before the emergence of SARS in 2003, highly pathogenic coronavirus epidemics were limited to livestock, especially pigs. Researchers quickly recognized two different infection pathways: fecal-oral transmission attacking gastric and intestinal tissues, and respiratory transmission attacking the lungs. Mortality in the first case is typically very high, while cases in the second are usually milder. Currently, a small portion of infection cases, particularly those on cruise ships, have manifested as diarrhea and vomiting. One report noted: "The possibility of COVID-19 spreading through sewage, waste, contaminated water, air conditioning systems, and aerosols cannot be underestimated."
The pandemic has now reached the slums of Africa and South Asia, where fecal contamination is ubiquitous—in the water, in home-grown vegetables, and in wind-borne dust. Will this increase the chances of intestinal infection? Will it lead to more lethal infections breaking out across all age groups, as has occurred in animals? Davis’s argument makes it clear that the position that "aggressive suppression measures such as social distancing should be implemented in rich countries but not poor countries" is extremely immoral. This imperialist epidemiological strategy is even more sinister because it uses the product of imperialism—the poverty of populations in the developing world—as a justification for practices based on Malthusianism or Social Darwinism. Once implemented, millions of people will die to ensure global economic growth, primarily for the benefit of those at the apex of the capital system. From an economic perspective, the developing world as a whole is destined to pay the highest price, beyond the direct impact of the pandemic. The collapse of global supply chains caused by the cancellation of orders from developed countries (as well as global social distancing and lockdowns) and the subsequent realignment of commodity chains will cause heavy losses across developing nations and regions.
In this regard, we must recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic occurred against the backdrop of a global hegemonic economic war launched by the Donald Trump administration against China. Since 2008, China has accounted for 37% of the world economy’s cumulative growth. Due to the trade war, many U.S. companies had already begun moving supply chains out of China. However, since approximately one-third of the world’s intermediate products are currently produced in China—most of them in high-tech sectors, which is key to global labor arbitrage—this attempt at structural adjustment will be extremely destructive.
Some multinational corporations that moved production lines out of China later realized that this decision did not free them from dependence on China. For example, Samsung has begun airlifting electronic components from China to its factories in Vietnam—a destination for companies eager to evade trade war tariffs. But the Vietnamese economy is also fragile because it relies heavily on China for the supply of raw materials or intermediate components. The situation in neighboring Southeast Asian countries is similar. China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner; between 20% and 50% of Indonesia’s industrial raw materials come from China. In February of this year, factories in Indonesia’s Batam Island were already dealing with the depletion of Chinese raw materials (which account for 70% of the region’s output). Companies there considered obtaining materials from other countries, but "it is not easy." For many factories, the only viable option was "complete shutdown." Entrepreneurs such as Cao Dewang, a Chinese billionaire and founder of Fuyao Glass Group, project that China’s status in global supply chains may be shaken after the pandemic. However, at least in the short term, it is "difficult to find an economy in the global industrial chain to replace China." He cited facts as evidence, such as the numerous difficulties brought by "insufficient infrastructure" in Southeast Asian countries, the higher labor costs in developed nations, and the barriers wealthy countries would inevitably face if they were to rebuild manufacturing at home.
Although no predictions can be made regarding the actual duration of the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis should not be viewed as the result of external forces, nor is it an unpredictable "black swan" event; rather, it was largely predictable. Today, the expansion and wealth accumulation of countries at the center of capitalism rely mainly on historically low interest rates, high debt, capital inflows from the rest of the world, and financial speculation; yet they now face long-term stagnation in production and investment. Income and wealth inequality are reaching unprecedented historical levels. Ecological rifts have reached a global scale, creating a global environment no longer suitable for the secure survival of humanity. New global pandemics are generated on the basis of the global monopoly-finance capital system, which has made itself the primary vector of disease. Whether neoliberalism or neo-fascism holds power, countries around the world are experiencing institutional regression and a further escalation of class oppression.
This capital system is profoundly exploitative and destructive. This is evident in the fact that, on the one hand, blue-collar workers worldwide have been declared indispensable "essential infrastructure workers" (a concept formally defined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security), while on the other hand, these workers carry out production largely without protective equipment, while the privileged classes and dispensable middle strata maintain social distance. A true lockdown would have much broader coverage, requiring state provision and planning to ensure the protection of the entire population rather than focusing on preserving economic interests. It is precisely due to the class-based nature of social distancing and access to income, housing, resources, and healthcare that the incidence and mortality rates of COVID-19 in the United States are highest among people of color, who face the most severe economic and environmental injustices.
IV. Social Production and Global Metabolism
The theoretical foundation of the Marxian materialist view is the hierarchy of needs. This means that humans are material beings, part of the natural world, who create their own social world within that natural world. As material beings, they must first satisfy their physical needs—food, clothing, shelter, and other basic conditions for a healthy life—before they can pursue the higher developmental needs necessary for the full realization of human potential.
However, in class societies, the vast majority of people—the actual producers—have always struggled to satisfy their most basic needs. To this day, this situation has not undergone a fundamental change. Despite the immense wealth created by humanity over the centuries, even in the wealthiest capitalist societies [18], millions remain in precarious circumstances regarding basic needs such as food security, housing, clean water, healthcare, and transportation—in the United States, the total assets owned by three billionaires are equivalent to the combined wealth of the bottom half of the population.
At the same time, localized and regional environments are in danger, just as the world's ecosystems and the Earth system itself, upon which humanity relies for its peace and security [19], are under threat. The emphasis on global "cost-benefit" (a euphemism for cheap labor and land) has led transnational capital to establish a complex system of global commodity chains. Its purpose is to maximize the over-exploitation (on a hyper-scale) of labor power globally while simultaneously turning the entire world into a real estate market, a large portion of which is land operated by agribusiness. Consequently, the economic surplus from the periphery of the global capital system is drained away in large quantities, and the global commons are plundered. The famous Lauderdale Paradox, proposed by the Earl of Lauderdale in the early 19th century, suggests that the destruction of public wealth is the means to increase private wealth. Today, the entire planet has become the field of practice for this theory.
As we know, the capital circulation of late imperialism has utilized the aforementioned resources to the maximum extent, leading to the rapid development of a global ecological crisis that threatens to engulf human civilization, stirring up a perfect storm of total disaster. Wealth accumulation and capital accumulation have become increasingly inseparable from the proliferation of various forms of waste. Within this catastrophe, as the United States—positioned at the teeth of the storm [20]—becomes increasingly unstable, its arrogance grows ever more blatant, and the possibility of a New Cold War and thermonuclear destruction continues to rise. For this reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its famous Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to midnight since the clock was established in 1947.
The COVID-19 pandemic, along with the increasingly severe threat of even more lethal epidemics, are likewise products of the development of late imperialism. Global chains of extraction and expropriation have not only destroyed ecology but have also disrupted relations between species, thereby brewing and manufacturing toxic pathogens. The new coronavirus is also not the only emerging global health issue. Agribusiness and the overreliance on antibiotics in modern medicine have led to a surge in "superbugs," resulting in an increasing number of deaths. By the middle of this century, deaths caused by superbugs may exceed the annual number of cancer deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a "global health emergency." Due to the inequality of conditions in all aspects of capitalist class society, infectious diseases have the greatest impact on the working class, the poor, and peripheral populations. Therefore, as Engels and the British Chartists did in the 19th century, the system that creates such diseases in the pursuit of wealth accumulation should be accused of committing "social murder." As suggested by the revolutionary advances in epidemiology represented by "One Health" and "Structural One Health," the etiology of new epidemics can be traced back to the problem of ecological destruction brought about by capitalism.
Here, the necessity of the "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large" reappears once again, just as it has many times in the past. The logic of contemporary historical development indicates the need to establish a system of social metabolic reproduction based on the public commons—that is, a system in which the associated producers regulate their social metabolism by rationally following the laws of nature to promote the free development of each person, and on this basis, achieve the free development of all, while also conserving energy and protecting the environment. The future of humanity in the 21st century depends neither on the daily increase of economic and ecological exploitation/expropriation, nor on the intensification of imperialism and war. On the contrary, the "universal freedom" advocated by Marx and the maintenance of a sustainable "planetary metabolism" are what decide the present and future of humanity today; they are, in fact, the most urgent needs for human survival.
In the view of Marx and Engels, the historical movement of capital would inevitably lead to a "shaking of the foundations of the state" and the dissolution of the "old society." Today, under the conditions of the New Era, this process has manifested as the logic of globalized "disaster capitalism." The COVID-19 pandemic is not merely a public health crisis but a profound crisis of the capitalist mode of production itself. Within the framework of historical materialism, we can see that the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation has reached a tipping point, where the externalization of costs—environmental destruction, the commodification of health, and the erosion of the public sphere—has turned the world into a site of permanent emergency.
In the face of these global challenges, the concept of a community with a shared future for humanity [21] offers a necessary alternative to the destructive path of "disaster capitalism." While capital prioritizes the accumulation of surplus value even at the cost of "metabolic rifts" between humanity and nature, the pursuit of high-quality development and the cultivation of new quality productive forces must be directed toward the liberation of life rather than the expansion of profit. The current crisis demands that we uphold the fundamentals and break new ground, returning to the core insights of dialectical materialism to understand that humanity cannot survive if it remains trapped in the "vicious circle" of capital’s self-expansion.
Ultimately, the pandemic serves as a warning. If the global community cannot transcend the logic of capital, the "Doomsday Clock" [22] will continue its inexorable crawl toward midnight. The task of Marxist theory today is to provide the intellectual weapons necessary to transform this crisis into an opportunity for a global Great Transformation—one that moves beyond the predatory relations of production and toward a civilization defined by common prosperity and the sustainable reconciliation of man and nature.