I Will Not Grieve if Covid-19 kills Neoliberalism.

The old world we know seems so long ago. We who have been furloughed or can work from home have adapted to a new quasi monastic order where we are allowed out to exercise, attend a doctor or service the economy by buying food and alcohol.

Some of us, mainly the rich and the establishment are in denial, keen to get back to the old ways were they can pretend they are superior to the rest of us because of superior genes and continue trying to wipe out all those inconvenient poor people who are just a burden on the tax payer.

Some of the poor people are in denial, seeking a way of life hard but familiar. Others have, much to the disgust of the rich, found the pleasures of learning and thinking using the extra time previously denied by the 40 hour week plus (often unpaid) overtime, to engage with politics.

The longer lockdown lasts the harder it will be to go back to the old life which pinched like a pair of shoes not quite painful enough to drive us to the shops, change or revolution. The longer lockdown lasts the harder the plutocrats and power obsessed politicians will fight to restore the old ways. The longer lockdown lasts the more likely it is society will change.

Mike Small has argued that we are in the first stage of the famous five stages of grief- denial and that the next stage is anger.

Laura Spinney pointed out that, In 2010 Peter Turchin predicted, in a letter to Nature, that mounting political instability would peak in the US and western Europe around 2020 and there could be a decline in technological progress lasting several hundred years. A number of worrying social indicators, including wealth inequality and public debt had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval.

The basis for this prediction was a controversial quality called the political stress indicator which has peaked at turning points in history, just before revolution or radical social change. When this indicator was at its peak a minor incident that would otherwise have been forgotten triggered widespread unrest and change.

The political stress indicator continued to climb and the factors he mentioned continued to increase. In the UK the election of the Conservative party in 2010 and its surprise victory in the 2010 election allowed inequality to rise with the poorest section of the population paying, through “Austerity” for the money used to bail out the banks in the crisis of 2008.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 confirmed right wing dominance in Western Civilisation and furthered discontent in the USA.

In February 2020 the website 99-percent noticed some disturbing trends in Britain.

• The economic pie (real per capita GDP) is just about continuing to grow, but most people’s slice (the median income) is shrinking – the rich are getting richer and the rest are getting poorer;

• the UK already has very low social mobility compared with most other countries, and the barriers for poorer people are growing not shrinking;

• There is an increasing sense that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.

They identified eight possible scenarios based on the whether GDP grew or shrank, and whether inequality grow or not. They ignored four because GDP is just about growing. Of the eight scenarios four involved violent transition to the new normal, and only one scenario was attractive. A violent transition was more likely if the pie shrank.

Floyd’s death triggered worldwide protests.

The protests resulted in damage to property, which the propertied classes have always regarded as more important than the lives of poor people. Violence seems to have have been directed against institutions regarded as symbols of oppression. In the UK the statue of a slave trader, who was also a philanthropist, was toppled and thrown into a harbour.

This anger is legitimate, but the target should be the neoliberal money worshipping culture the ruling classes invented that was later named “Capitalism” not as it should have been “Moneyism.” A culture appropriated to disguise the continuation of Feudalism with a newly moneyed class included among the masters. A culture that gave rise to Slavery, the Highland Clearances the massacres in the Congo and the Irish Famine. A culture that gave rise to its left wing twin that destroyed the Kulaks, and birthed the post revolutionary RussianFamine, the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s killing fields.

Two political creeds so bitterly opposed producing the same results argues for a common cause, a cause to be identified and tamed.

Coronavirus may turn out to have raised global political instability to a level where the slightest thing could have caused global turmoil and change. The killing of George Floyd may have been that trigger. We cannot and should not go back to the savage Neoliberalism that prevailed between 1979 and 2019 BC (Before Coronavirus). If we are not careful it will be replaced by something worse, sneaked in while we are all making ourselves feel virtuous by throwing statues of slave traders into rivers.