There have been no articles on
this blog since early February this year. Largely, this has been based on my
interest in the coronavirus pandemic. Since mid-2019, I had in any case started
reading up on biology, prompted by my own health problems, and the pandemic has
greatly expanded that interest. I had little formal education in natural
sciences, and have only in recent years come to see how fascinating they are,
making ‘economics’ look intellectually trivial and pretty dull by comparison.
As for the economic slump
engendered by the coronavirus, I think little can usefully be added on this
blog to the almost daily, easily available information. (For my more regular
comments, see my Twitter account, Stubborn Facts, or the Facebook page, Imperialism Today) Yes, this will be the biggest capitalist crisis possibly ever, at least
in terms of collapsing output. But that much is obvious. For readers of this
blog, what should also have been obvious is that the already accumulated debts
in the system – onto which vast amounts more are being loaded – will make any
subsequent recovery very difficult.[1]
Capitalism’s troubles have now become more acute, but if/when they are less
acute, perhaps in 3-6 months’ time, the chronic problems revealed in debt will
become less able to be postponed and more likely to result in conflict. Already
there is a stirring of ‘China must pay!’ sentiment in the US.
One purpose of my more recent
self-education is to avoid the often wrong virus-capitalism arguments of many writers.
While I do not plan now to fill this blog with disquisitions on viruses, in the
next week or so I should have completed an article on putting the pandemic into
an imperial context.
Tony Norfield, 10 May 2020
[1] Look in the
‘Search this blog’ box at the top right of the page and insert the word ‘debt’
for a series of articles.