Abstract
This paper reviews how COVID-19 became a global pandemic, why we now have to live with it, and what needs to be done to stop viruses going global in the future. Specifically, it argues that the still prevailing neoliberal model of development combined with related forms of class structure and ideological struggle all but guaranteed that the priorities of global capital and its agents, along with COVID-19, would win out in the end. Vaccinations have become the only path for resolving the tension between neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19 suppression. However, they take time to develop, are hampered by the capitalist model of vaccine production and distribution, and face a resistant alienated precariat. As a critical alternative, this article explores the neoliberal model of development’s democratic socialist transformation with particular reference to the prevention of global pandemics.
Highlights
The “neoliberal model of development” comprises a global market regulatory form of capitalism that defines the terrain of capital accumulation, which centrally comprises global production and distribution circuits plus tourist-led service sectors [1]
This article has provided a “methodologically trans-national” stylized global overview of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has demonstrated how the neoliberal model of capitalist development and its associated worldview are central to why the virus is becoming a permanent feature of the human world, and how an alternative democratic socialist model of development is needed in order to prevent global pandemics in the future
This paper’s overview conceptual perspective deployed the fundamental Global North/Global South geopolitical distinction, but further research needs to examine in much more detail the varying national forms of the struggles and timing of the stages of the war against COVID19. It should examine ideological variations in the struggle across nation states, especially regarding the nature and danger of the virus that link with varying practical responses that can potentially have global outcomes
Summary
The “neoliberal model of development” comprises a global market regulatory form of capitalism that defines the terrain of capital accumulation, which centrally comprises global production and distribution circuits plus tourist-led service sectors [1]. Within the context of the unfolding ’neoliberal model of development’, the paper makes a broad distinction between the Global North, comprising the wealthy industrially advanced capitalist democracies, and the Global South, that most clearly refers to the poor and uncompetitive ‘underdeveloped’ countries It offers a broad global class analysis, unavoidably without detailed quantitative description, of the process of Societies 2022, 12, 32 virus transmission and associated ideological struggles around social distancing and vaccinations. The WHO struggles to lead a coordinated international effort to stop the virus because it is both underfunded and undermined by the competitive imperatives and ethos unleashed globally and locally by the neoliberal model of development It confronts a trans-national regime of accumulation that undermines sustainable local accumulation and instead creates global market dependency, thereby making it economically unsustainable for countries to decouple from capital’s global circuits that spread the virus. This general critique, that points directly towards the urgency of constructing and deploying an alternative model of development, is applied to accumulation, regulation, class structure, and ideological struggle
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