Capitalism is the cure!

Based on these interpretations, the advocates argue that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a revolutionary socialist program is the only solution to the global capitalism’s failures on the pandemic. Further, they assert that the pandemic gives the impetus to the ongoing deeply rooted class struggle between the ruling class and the working class while it necessitates a fundamental social change toward a Marxist government (IMT 2020; SEPA 2020).

Henceforth, based on a rather brief review of this movement, the present author would like to outline several critiques on their proposals. The first is that they look over the fact that the most advanced capitalist economy has succeeded in producing highly effective pandemic virus vaccines in record time, in only nine months, because of the entrepreneurial successes of the leading pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca which are one of the hallmarks of capitalism (USFDA 2020a, b).

In the Marxist economy in which the supplies of medicines and medical services are controlled by the government and the communist party, such successful pharmaceutical companies with cutting-edge technologies would not be possible to build, making it far more difficult to develop rapidly such highly effective vaccines during the pandemic strikes (Azar II 2020).

Second, the vaccine success in 2020 is in turn in large part attributable to the advances in microbiology, medicine, and virology accomplished and dominated by the universities and research centers in the most capitalist economy, say, the US (Kariko et al. 2011; Pardi et al. 2018).

Third, the medical devices that were urgently needed in hospitals around the world during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 were made available through a successful partnership between the capitalist government and high-tech private businesses. With the invocation of a wartime emergency production system, major private companies were called upon to produce the emergency devices, including General Motors (GM), General Electric (GE), and Phillips. The devices produced included rapid COVID-19 test kits, ventilators, respirators, emergency field hospitals (USDHHS 2020).

These successes demonstrate that the capitalist economy marked by successful high-tech businesses is not a hindrance but an essential weapon in the fight against a highly lethal contagious virus. In addition, the capitalist economic system nestled in a democratic political system proved to be flexible enough to fight the pandemic together when called upon as demonstrated by the partnerships between the government sector and private businesses. For these reasons and others, the capitalist economy is better positioned to fight a pandemic virus than a Marxist economy is.

Fourth, what about the overall government responses? The government’s choices in the capitalist economy were clarified in detail in Chap. 4, which showed that the responses were unfortunately focused on restrictions of people’s and businesses’ activities with heavy-handed measures, like a national lockdown and a universal mask mandate. This does not mean that the government in the capitalist society has to behave in that way. On the contrary, as the present author elaborated in that chapter, a different course of governmental actions was certainly possible and perhaps a more apposite one to the capitalist society, say, based on individual responsibility. The government of Sweden demonstrated it (Deccan Herald 2020; Financial Times 2020).

Fifth, the Marxist advocates may assert that a global pandemic is more likely to occur in a capitalist economy than in a Marxist economy, which is amply implied in the quotations in the beginning of this section. It is an assertion difficult to validate quantitatively, owing in part to only a small number of global pandemics that broke out after, say, the Russian revolution (Marx 1867).

On the one hand, humankind has advanced remarkably in the fields of biology, epidemiology, virology, and medical sciences over the past two millenniums. These advances made it possible for humanity to declare an eradication of many deadly infectious diseases such as smallpox and malaria in developed countries (WHO 2020). These achievements are attributable to a large extent to the success of the market economy in the capitalist society.