Coronavirus exposes inequality and shows how it can be tackled

The coronavirus crisis is simultaneously exposing inequality and revealing how it can be tackled and reduced.

Can the national, regional and global co-operation and solidarity needed to overcome the virus be mobilised to create a more fair and just world? Or will the outcomes of the distributive battle over its costs reproduce and deepen the existing unequal distribution of power?

These questions increasingly divide citizens, politicians, policy makers and analysts. Their answers are set to determine the shape of a world already afflicted by a much graver existential threat from climate breakdown, exposing a huge contrast between the richest groups most responsible for global warming and the poorest and weakest who most suffer its consequences. The current epic pause in globalised economics and human interaction points to many of the tasks needed to tackle that threat, which was so reinforced in the last 40 years.

At global level the period since the 1980s saw huge increases in production and consumption, as manufacturing was outsourced from capitalist heartlands in the United States and Europe to China at cheaper cost and as Japan and other East Asian economies caught up economically with those heartlands. Global warming accelerated in the resulting explosion of consumption and mobility. Technological revolutions did not shift that balance.

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The fruits of these changes were highly unevenly distributed between the richest groups who benefited from financialisation of assets in the heartlands and ordinary middle and working class ones there whose incomes increased much more slowly or stagnated. Stronger welfare, trade union rights and equalisation of incomes achieved in the 1950s to the 1970s were eroded, as many jobs became more precarious.

The economic crisis of 2007-12 exposed the fragility of this late capitalist globalisation to financial and banking collapses, while also shifting power from Atlantic to Asian heartlands in China, East Asia, Southeast Asia and India. Recovery tended to reinforce those shifts from the 1980s, while not altering their fundamental inequalities. Latin American and African countries participated in the transition to a more multi-polar world but have not escaped the Global South’s relative peripherality.

The corona pandemic suddenly freezes and interrupts this world, whose dynamics will be altered profoundly by how costs are distributed and structures changed. Renewed values and practices of solidarity are displayed at national, regional and global levels, alongside stark examples of inequality.

The virus hits poorer people and ethnic minorities disproportionately. It hits the more vulnerable older generation hardest, even though many of them also display the solidarity needed to defeat the virus. Such a contradiction raises collective awareness that a conflict of values is at play. There is a momentous shift from competition to co-operation, from individualism to group endeavour and from privatised to public and state means of working together. Social cohesion is reinforced even while physical separation is enforced. Those burdens of separation also reveal great inequalities of living space and access to nature.

The national, regional and global levels at which this worldwide drama is played are both uneven and combined, making for a complex picture in the forthcoming battles over a recovery.

In Ireland the shifts of social and political value so evident in the February general election have been implemented in crisis mode by the very party so many rejected when voting. Health and housing problems suddenly become available for public solution, even if the longer term conditions to do this become more difficult. The aspirations of middling and poorer groups and classes demand attention, making for a more volatile politics. Younger generations previously frustrated and frozen out of social, housing and occupational mobility by more privileged elders now extend solidarity to them and will demand reciprocity. North-South relations on the island have a more urgent focus of co-operation against the virus in spite of Brexit’s differentiation of policy in handling it.

At European level Ireland’s recent shift away from the northern Hanseatic group of richer EU states towards the more southern group seeking mutualised debt instruments to handle the crisis seems to reflect these changing values, even if presented in pragmatic guise. The politics of recovery will reveal how resilient the EU is in a changing world.

That world is deeply challenged by new patterns of power, competition and cooperation to tackle recovery, climate breakdown and to avoid reinforcing inequalities. Those who favour values of solidarity, public means, evidence-based argument and ecological sustainability will have to fight and organise hard for them if they are to succeed.