Corona's Bio-Economic Crisis and the Post-Corona World

ABSTRACT

While pandemics are pervasive, this is for the first time that the capitalist mode of production reached the outer limits of biology, biosphere, ecology, economy, geography, and international relations in unison resulting in an all-encompassing crises that devastated the entire planet. The upshot of this pandemic has overwhelmed the infrastructure of public health across the globe with stunning speed and with infections in millions in just a few months and the velocity of economic damage and devastation much worse than the Great Depression of the last century. It is also the “proof of the pudding” for the “conquest of mode of production”—à la Marx and against the view of majority on the left that incorrectly identify globalization as neoliberalism—i.e., holding a doctrine as an epoch. It is implicit that this crisis must alarm those assembling within the Cox-Robinson group in heterodox international relations theory that seemingly holds unto a mirage of “neoliberal international order”—amounting to self-delusion that indeed may have its own Catch-22. Precise periodization of capitalism is inseparable from value theory. This paper underscores the authenticity of value-theoretic periodization toward the identity of our epoch.

KEYWORDS:

• Bio-Economic crisis
• COVID-19
• globalization
• neoliberalism mantra
• periodization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Cyrus Bina is Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota (Morris Campus), and Fellow of Economists for Peace and Security, US. He is a pioneering theorist of globalization of oil and the unification of energy sector, globalization of world economy and decline of the Pax Americana, and a specialist on modern Iran and the contemporary in the Middle East. Bina is the author of The Economics of the Oil Crisis (1985), Oil: A Time Machine (Second Edition, 2012), and A Prelude to the Foundation of Political Economy: Oil, War, and Global Polity (2013); and co-editor of Modern Capitalism and Islamic Ideology in Iran (1991), Beyond Survival: Wage Labor in the Late Twentieth Century (1996), and Alternative Theories of Competition: Challenges to the Orthodoxy (2013). He has published nearly 300 scholarly papers, essays, chapters, policy papers, and encyclopedia entries. His work is translated into dozen languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish.

Notes

1 Monthly Review is the primary source for the dissemination of monopoly capital. For a further critique of monopoly theory, see Bina (2014), Moudud, Bina, and Mason (2014). For the notion of “global north/global south,” see Amin (2013). For a critique of Monthly Review School and Samir Amin, see Bina (2019).

2 The postwar Pax Americana is the period in which Keynesianism was the hallmark of economic policy, and development policy essentially revolved on Import-Substitution Industrialization (ISI). Here Pax Americana is a structure and Keynesianism a policy. On ISI and its part vis-à-vis transnationalization of capital, see Bina and Yaghmaian (1988, 1991).

3 An extensive spectrum of opinions among the radical left tends to identify neoliberalism with globalization or sometimes utilizes them in succession as a phrase, i.e., “neoliberal globalization.” Here are a few samples that casually speak in this fashion as relate to COVID-19: Orbie and De Ville (2020), Rosenberg (2020). Fine and Saad-Filho (2016) and Saad-Filho (2020) identify “neoliberalism” not only of a period of policymaking by the state but as a new epoch also of the capitalist mode of production.

4 This point is critically important for the appreciation of a dialectical unity between historical and geographical dimensions of value theory in conjunction with the periodization of capitalism. The notion of globalization owes a great deal to this misunderstanding. Davis Harvey's dichotomy of “logic of history” and “logic of Territory” allows neither a relevant theory of periodization nor a cogent notion of globalization, based on Marx's value theory (see Harvey 2003). But the most misleading piece by Harvey is his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), a cursory assemblage made to camouflage as an “epoch.” Harvey even invented the term “neoliberalization,” an expression that wittingly sounds as an objective process. For a critique of Harvey, see Bina (2013, Ch. 5; 2019).

5 One may retrace this very issue, for instance, in Panitch and Gindin (2012).

6 It is a habit of orthodoxy to lump categories of risk and uncertainty together and carelessly submit them to the law of probability. This habit persuaded Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) to boast before the US Congress (that was probing the roots of the 2008 financial crisis) that he was not a total failure but “seventy percent” successful on the issues surrounding the financial market and the role of derivatives. Little did he know while the risk is calculable, based on the available probability distribution, uncertainty has no probability distribution in advance of the event and thus cannot be calculated (see Bina 2020).