When I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.
Consider some obvious examples. Poor people have fewer resources to tide them over if their regular paycheck is unavailable because of an epidemic or a depression. Rich people who have seashore summer homes that are lost during flooding carry insurance, often government financed, so that they can recoup their losses, while poor people living in shacks at a riverside lose their homes and have no insurance to cover their losses. Poor people have less well constructed homes and so are more likely to lose them in a hurricane or tornado. Toxic waste dumps that pollute an environment are more likely in poor neighborhoods and so poor people suffer more if there is a disaster where toxic chemicals are released into the water stream or into the air. People living in overcrowded and under ventilated neighborhoods are more likely to catch and spread disease. Poor people do not have the resources to wait out a depression and are less able to afford the doctors that will get them a note to stay out of a military draft. Stigmatized groups, such as Jews, Gypsies and the poor, are more likely to be blamed for being carriers of disease than are jet setters and, in the present instance, those people from New York City with summer homes in the Hamptons who may carry the epidemic from one place to another.
But it isn’t just that their circumstances dictate that the poor will suffer more. The economic recovery bill that was passed last week and signed by the President shows just how much the fact that the poor suffer more is also driven by choices made by legislators and the executive branch. They make sure the rich do well and the poor do badly. The bill was a compromise between what the Democrats wanted and what the Republicans wanted, Democrats wanting larger grants of unemployment insurance and Republicans smaller grants. So, at the least, there are two sides to the debate and a compromise is reached between the advocates of the poor and the advocates of the rich. Forgetting about that, look at what the bill actually does. It has no provisions to prohibit the price gouging that is now going on by the manufacturers of masks, gowns and other equipment. We know this because governors are in bidding wars with other governors, mayors, the federal government and foreign governments for what are limited supplies of things that are needed immediately. The federal government could step in with legislation or an executive order preventing such price gouging which benefits the rich but serves no other economic purpose in that we are in a market where there is nothing to keep producers to keep market discipline because there is no competition when there is just endless unsatisfied demand.
There was also a fight in Congress over whether there would be any supervision over the money given to corporations so that they could not turn the money they received from the federal government over to rich people either in the form of bonuses to upper executives or buybacks of company stock, which would also reward large shareholders and so not be used to make sure that workers were kept employed. Democrats haggled with Republicans over how to control that and some Republicans simply lied and claimed that the bill prohibited buybacks and bonuses when what the bill finally said was that the Secretary of the Treasury would have the authority to waive those restrictions and all Democrats were able to do was to hold out for an Inspector General who would supposedly monitor a somewhat transparent process for reporting what happened to the money given to the companies, after which the President said in his signing statement that he would simply disregard the oversight provision. So it is clear that the bill was a largely successful attempt to make sure that the rich got their mighty large cut, some twenty five percent, off the top, whatever else the bill did that was useful and necessary for getting the poor and the middle class through the crunch. That is considerable vigorish; it would make a corrupt African warlord proud.
So why is it that the rich get their way, that a crisis is just an opportunity to line the pockets of the rich, no such opportunity be wasted, even if it is collateral with or supposed to be addressed at a problem of noone’s making that is plaguing--literally-- the entire nation, regardless of social class, and is itself not caused by social class? The answer might lie in Marxist theory, a set of ideas now out of fashion though vaguely invoked by those who support Bernie Sanders and more straightforwardly the underpinning for what Bernie Sanders himself has to say, which is that the rich control this country and that only an awakening of the American people to that fact will allow the country, through democratic elections, to free us from the domination by the rich that does not serve the interests of the American people as a whole, however much the rich proclaim otherwise, that they serve the people rather than control them.
Marxism was a very sophisticated political theory when I was young because it postulated a very complicated process of the intersection of consciousness and economic structure. The rich, who were in charge of the main institutions of government and business, believed that what they were doing was right for the American people. They were creating jobs and modeling the hard work ethic that they believed had made the prosperity of the country possible and that, anyway, they were contributing to the safety net that helped out those who did not do enough to advance their own fortunes. The workers, for their part, may have resented the rich but by and large bought into the same ideology of self-reliance, except for those who saw through it, such as the labor movement and some intellectuals. The culture was the vehicle whereby the rich influenced the poor, it providing various opiates such as sports and scapegoats and a consumerist orientation fostered by television whereby the workers became deluded and so did not recognize how much they were being exploited, that meaning that the rich folks took most of the profits that their workers had generated for them, handing back to the workers only a part of what they had produced in value.
The main lever of the political system was the ability of the rich to influence the workers so that they would accept half measures to alleviate their problems or even to fool them into thinking they had no problems, preferring an idealized small town where everybody, the local doctor, the local general store owner, all labored in an interdependent and friendly fashion. Capitalism was insidious because it was so able to fool people into neglecting their self interest even as the capitalists themselves saw how they themselves lived and how they operated through the same rose colored glasses. None but the activists and the intellectuals realized what a toll this system took on the population that paid for its consumer products by accepting racism, alienation and a limited appreciation of their own spiritual potential.
My own critique of Marxism was that if you sophisticated it enough by, among other things, acknowledging that the various institutions of society, such as government and the mass media, had a certain degree of autonomy in that they had their own institutional imperatives, practices and points of view, then you were pretty much in the territory of what non-Marxists considered the advanced Liberal state, where the various institutions compensated for one another and haggled with one another over issues such as the power of unions, desegregation, the opposition between the cities and the rural areas of the country and so on. The Marxists overlooked the extent to which apparent differences within the society were real differences. It was not that the Democratic and Republican Party nominees for President were just tweedle dee and tweedle dum, not much difference between them except on the edges; it was that there was a difference between FDR and Hoover and even between Eisenhower and Stevenson. One was less in favor of civil rights and powerful unions than the other. So don’t give me the overall picture. Get down to cases.
There was a species of Marxism that was at the time dismissed as “vulgar Marxism”. That version suggested rich people were perfectly aware of their own greed. They knew they were paying their workers as little as they could get away with so that they could increase their own wealth even if that meant that their workers would starve only slowly. Nothing had changed since the days of the early factory owners in England. Both wealthy groups just wanted to build larger mansions. When they wanted to get something done by the government, they just called up their lobbyists and the politicians to whom they had made political donations, and more or less politely gave them their marching orders. Politicians would comply because their political lives depended on it. The culture was irrelevant except as another source of revenue, the purpose of the various opioids simply a way to get people to pay money for products they didn’t need.
Sometimes I despair and think that the vulgar Marxist perspective has become an accurate description of the actual situation, as is attested by the greed of the large companies and the willingness of the politicians to make them happy. My higher capacities tell me, however, that this is a partisan issue rather than a uniform quality of political life. The two parties differ on all the key economic issues not to speak of the personality issues whereby Trump sounds optimistic because it safeguards his political support and just offers whatever crosses his mind because that is the kind of person he is. The important takeaway is that the government does its job, however slowly, regardless of what the President says. The experts disagree with him at his own press conferences and Mike Pence goes on consulting with the governors whom Trump has disparaged. The system is mightier than the President, which is exactly what the Founding Fathers had hoped would be the case, even in a situation such as this where the President is so clearly not up to the task of managing the federal government. Moreover, the electoral system remains autonomous. It was the American people not the plutocrats or the party leaders that put Trump into office and that same institution, should it function in November, notwithstanding Russian interference and Republican attempts to restrict the ballot, can replace him with a more capable occupant.