Coming out of Covid

Abstract

The pandemic is not over. It is entering its third year with a new variant, Omicron, which has a high infection rate and uncertain damage to health. People are being forced to live (or die) with Covid. The pandemic has exposed the huge inequalities of wealth, income and health between countries globally. The ‘sugar rush’ recovery from the pandemic has driven up inflation rates everywhere, and there seems to be no evidence to justify the claim that the advanced capitalist world is about to experience a roaring 2020s as the US briefly did in the 1920s after the Spanish flu pandemic. Maybe the political and economic conditions for a new lease of life for capitalism could happen in the next decade, but only as a result of further slumps that drive up profitability significantly. More likely, the capitalist mode of production is getting closer to its use-by date in historical terms.