I have it all figured out. I’ve used my expertise as a computer science bachelor’s graduate who knows SQL to come up with the perfect quarantine, testing, and general healthcare regime. I’ve written it all up on Medium. Please read it and forward to your friends who work at the CDC.
For those of you that didn’t click the link, that was a joke. Like most of you, I am in quarantine. I’m fortunate–the shelter-in-place order coincided with the last day of my engineering contract on the Bernie campaign. I planned to take a long sabbatical and work on things around the house anyway. But it’s hit my immediate family, who work in restaurants, much harder, and we’re counting on the government to provide relief. I hope everyone is weathering the crisis as well as possible.
Among other projects, I’m currently organizing an online reading group for the book How To Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century. We’ll meet over video, and there’s plenty of time to get the book and read the first 35 pages before our first meeting. If you’re interested, sign up here. If you like what I write you will like this book.
I graduated from Stanford in the year 2008. It’s often cited that 2008 was the worst year to graduate from college in recent history. But at least I had a graduation; classes and commencements are being cancelled across the world right now, and graduates are entering a world of deep uncertainty.
It’s useful to look at what may happen to institutions in our lives, how the amorphous force of capital will respond, and how workers could response. The 2008 crisis illustrates what capital and the US state will likely do.
I recommend this investigative piece from the New York Times on how private equity groups bought up single-family homes after the 2008 housing market collapse and became awful landlords. Hundreds of thousands of homes now belong to private equity, their revenues securitized and pinched by sovereign wealth funds and wealthy American investors (or the few remaining Americans with pensions). In San Francisco, Veritas now owns over 5,000 units and has discovered so many loopholes in rent control laws that they routinely raise rents 30% YoY on “rent-controlled” units. As workers suffered, Blackstone made billions. This is plainly upward redistribution. It’s simply class war.
You could ask, what is the right size of an organization of capital resources? Do we prefer landlords with five units over landlords with five-hundred thousand units? Is there any reason that a few dozen different owners own a few dozen different taquerias in my neighborhood? These are good questions, but capitalism doesn’t actually answer them. Capitalism says if my three favorite taquerias don’t accumulate capital at a competitive rate, and replacing them all with Chipotles makes an owner of capital more money more quickly, then Chipotles they shall become.
We’re likely to see a lot more conglomeration. In 2008, we had a housing crisis and a corresponding fall in investment. This time, productivity itself is decimated as people can’t go to work. Small businesses will close. Vulture funds will be ready to swoop in and buy them up. Our neighborhoods will look a lot different a year from now, if we allow the same kind of “recovery” as the capitalist national parties instituted after 2008.
This is what capital does under capitalism. You can say it optimizes inefficiencies, but really it accumulates, it conglomerates, it captures. Nothing about the accumulation process we saw after 2008 was creative, human, or valuable. After COVID-19, we need a different kind of recovery. As the authors of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal write, we cannot let another crisis go to waste.
This is time to make forward progress towards our vision. The first thing we need to do is pass a Green Stimulus. When we go back to work, we need jobs that build a world we can expect to keep living in.
Thus, we propose an ambitious Green Stimulus of at least $2 trillion that creates millions of family-sustaining green jobs, lifts standards of living, accelerates a just transition off fossil fuels, ensures a controlling stake for the public in all private sector bailout plans, and helps make our society and economy stronger and more resilient in the face of pandemic, recession, and climate emergency in the years ahead.
We could view COVID-19 is a test for the crises to come under climate collapse. So far, I’d say we’re failing. But there is still time to build the resilient systems we’ll need as the global temperature rises.
The state has a role to play. In 2008 the bailouts all went into the financial system. We’ve already seen in this crisis the Fed is happy to pour free money into the financial sector for very little gain. That cannot be allowed to happen again. We need a People’s Bailout. Rents need to be not delayed but elided. Now is the time to implement an Unconditional Basic Income. During peacetime, UBI risks flowing directly into landlords’ pockets. With the state already poised to pause rent collection, we are in a position to pass UBI and hold on to our shared wealth by freezing rents for the foreseeable future. And the UBI needs to be robust; $2,000 a month for an individual is the starting point. This will be expensive, but the cost of doing less will be higher.
As capital will fight to centralize power and wealth, we need to fight to decentralize it. To me, this means a robust cooperative economy. Cooperative, decentralized structures avoid a single point of failure. In chaotic times, as firms may go through downturns, we cannot abide capitalist firms that are too big to fail. Instead, we need the essentials of our lives to be provided as close to our communities as possible. Housing cooperatives don’t securitize your rent and impose fees to drive profit. Grocery cooperatives don’t price-gouge. Worker cooperatives don’t outsource your job.
The story of this country since I became an adult is that things tend to get worse, not better. We are a decadent society in decline, but I believe the possibility of things getting worse is a necessary precondition for the possibility that they improve. I am hopeful that we will see these crises as opportunities. And as James Baldwin says, “I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”