The COVID-19 Crisis: A Case of Capitalism’s Dialectic of Failure

Abstract

Acknowledging the multiple ways capitalism fails humanity and the planet, regularly triggering anticapitalist resistance, this essay employs the term “dialectic of failure” to examine how capitalist failures often boost profits and facilitate capitalism’s reproduction. This tendency for capitalism’s failures to create opportunities as well as risks for itself is analyzed with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. After first analyzing the pandemic as a capitalist failure, and while acknowledging the social-justice and anticapitalist struggles the pandemic has given rise to, the essay examines how the pandemic may also be facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of the prevailing socioeconomic order.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• COVID-19
• Democracy
• Externalities
• Neoliberalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the coeditor of the journal, Yahya M. Madra, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback, which helped me sharpen the argument of the essay while also adding clarity to my presentation.

Notes

1 A third possibility, raised by autonomist Marxism and its inheritors, is that both of these options may be true at the same time, with capitalism using resistance movements to reproduce itself and evolve over time. I will briefly discuss the difference between that view and the concept of capitalism’s dialectic of failure below.