INEQUALITIES AND THE MANEUVERINGS OF MONOPOLY CAPITAL DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS: A CASE FOR SOUTH AFRICA

COVID-19 has in South Africa brought to bear Laski’s assertion that ‘a State divided into a small number of rich (monopolistic) and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property’. Laski’s statement centres inequality as an epistemic site from which to interpret a state’s capacity to respond on behalf of all its citizens during times of crisis such as COVID-19. In responding the State will, and depending on who does the judgement’, be judged on how it increases access to care for those that would otherwise have afforded in contrast to those of whom limited access is a normality. As the increase in reported cases of COVID-19 claws itself towards a 1000 mark in South Africa, and as at its second week since the first report, the established patterns of in-country regional  and spatial poverty are getting into a territory of their most consequential review. These conditions generates questions on how will the inequality of South Africa impact COVID-19 interventions, will interventions recalibrate the nations outlook towards poverty, and will South Africa emerge with a new patriotism.

 

The marginality and peripherality of the poor in respect of adequate health care, already foregrounded by the immediate pre-COVID-19 policy discourse on universal coverage, also called National Health Insurance, as one of the identified lodestar policies to define Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency, got elevated to become the biggest provincialized policy spaces for, and arguably so, South Africa’s first ‘private sector endorsed candidate’. The manner in which the President reacts to the pandemic will be the first of ‘visible’ laboratories within which the 25 year old illusive state-capital collaboration is going to be tested.   The implications of COVID-19’s demands on the capacity of the state to handle it is becoming more consequential on the role of the country’s private care industry than it is on that of government as an agency of the State. Given that South Africa is a creature of an unrepentant capitalist order, Rhodesian to be exact, that is ‘centrally managed’ by ‘market forces’ whose capital accumulation remains a ‘chronic post-colonial national grievance’, the established in the ‘order’ are challenged to de-imperialize, decolonize, de-racialize and democratize or be ‘genuinely inclusive’ in the making of decisions on how to respond.

 

In a condition where the majority in a society possess in the main only political and social capital to transact, and economic capital still in the hands of a few rich individuals, membership into the economy by the majority is stuck in the quicksand of being consumers of goods and recipients of ‘ritualised’ corporate social investment based economic model of wealth distribution. Whilst this is in itself a systemic and epistemic crisis of the  South Africa’s economy, its contours, which become templates for planning, are creating, and in the interiors of thinking, asymmetries of intervention reflective of who sits in chambers of COVID-19 response resourcing. The hierarchisation of intervention criteria in respect of how critical matters such as economic stimulus packages are constructed, the in-business community epistemic inequalities. Through that  ‘business communities’ whose unity only has the COVID-19 crisis as the unifying fulcrum, are invented as clones of their pre-1994 counterparts. The self-sustaining stamina of big and monopoly business through its ritualized power to influence, the otherwise now absent, foreign direct investment community, is in this process projected as what is keeping national cohesion on the response; notwithstanding the rise to the occasion displayed by the South Africa National Cabinet as a collective unit.

 

As the national cabinet plateaus on the crises management graph, and getting in-crisis experience in pandemic management, particularly as a result of a calm President and an intellectually astute Minister of Health, the often overrated efficiency of the South African private sector will need to fight for credibility space, as the return of public administration and management prowess is in ascendance. The growing narrative to outrightly abrogate success on the intervention to monopoly capital, thus valorising the artificial invincibility of capital in social crises, will have to be backed-up by the performance of private health care institutions in managing the crisis as it occurs internal to their facilities. As data is starting to interface with reality at health facilities, and analytics are drawing models on the relationship thereof with government intervention, it will be prudent for research institutions to commission the size of the COVID-19 induced economy, its pollical economy, its social costs, and ultimately impact on the political capital accruing to state intervention and public administration. Data obtained from such studies must be factored into how South Africa factors these into its international relations matrices. The geopolitical implications of our approach, as a function of Ramaphosa’s Africa Union Chairperson ascendancy, should be further factored into how a permanent export economy the accruing crises benefits are. In continental terms, South Africa should, through President Ramaphosa, position itself as the centre of the response and a global regional node of significance.

 

In as far as this pertains to the structure of the economy, which has always been in search for a moment to flatten the persistent inequality bell curve created by years of economic exclusions, race-based profiling of economic opportunities, and the systemic apartheid economic infrastructure, COVID-19 creates a new theatre for economic remodelling into and through the crises. Interventions should, as they target the curtailment of the corona virus spread, also target the DNA of inequality as an area that will make post-intervention economic recovery benefits to accrue to all South Africans outside the pre-corona templates of exclusion. Interventions should target the DNA strand of our economy in order to alter its make-up so that its post-corona replication  bring into the economic mix new ‘mitochondria’, mutations or new transformation energy structures that will spawn out new trajectories in economic access. The radicality of public policy enforcement in conditions of emergency like the one COVID-19 has created establishes for the state the most-predictive environment expected of a government dealing with inequalities at the scale of South Africa.

 

The Weberian dictum that ‘economic ends are always intrinsic to (technology’s) development and deployment’, thus making policy or government action to determine objectives whilst the materiality of obtaining conditions become the means through which systemic structures could be altered or recalibrated, should instruct how the intervention emerges post COVID-19. As capitalism has positioned itself in a manner that makes all crises of society to be terrains within which economic objectives of the capital resources are expressible, the Ramaphosa government should be the apex guardian for the flattening of economic inequalities and creating further spaces for heightened African participation. The conflating commercial imperatives of current incumbents in South Africa’s monopolistic economic environment and the transformation necessity must be the inevitable outcome of all integrated spending on COVID-19. As portfolios of intervention are designed to mitigate the risky determinants of health associated with public health policy interventions required to stabilise the virus into a condition is is treatable like others.

 

The logic of intervention should therefore be stripped of its vulnerability to the economically dominant. The ritual of R2bn and more to come should be seen in the context of what would the state have done in the absence of the gesture, plausible as it was and still is. The manoeuvrings of monopoly capital in the ultimate design of stimulus packages should not be hermetically sealed from the obtaining and potentially contaminating environment within which the informal of the monopolistic economy operates. The ultimate retail outlets for the centralised producer-to-distributor value chain should be targeted as the primary beneficiaries of the least in the impact of the packages. The social safety nets provided thus far by the informal economy of South Africa should, and maybe decisively, be factored into economic structure recalibrations beyond COVID-19. It is not enough to identify the centrality of the taxi industry as a distribution agency for viruses such as corona, and included in this are the informal traders attached to the exchange spots of taxis, but efforts should be made to establish these industries as public revenue subsidy recipients and ultimately formalisation as an economy to be celebrated post COVID-19.

 

MIGHT BE CONTINUED

 

FM Lucky Mathebula