Is it about a virus?

By Bryan Palmer

The pandemic is about the virus, but the virus has come into being because of other developments, including changes that are a consequence of globalization and the ongoing ecological assault on those areas of the underdeveloped world where rainforest and other environments have been assailed by large capital and agribusiness, undermining biodiversity, and altering forever delicate balances of humans and other species. This is accentuated by changes in heavily populated regions of the world, like parts of Asia, where diets have been changed by new pressures on the land, and staples like rice being replaced by agribusiness cultivating of poultry, swine, etc, which are processed for international markets. With rice production declining, people in these areas are forced to look for substitutes, and the wet markets of China and elsewhere provide proteins in the way of live animal sales, some of the species being trapped as their natural habitats have been shrinking under various pressures. The consequence of all of this is that viruses once specific and endemic to animal or bird species are increasingly transferable to humanity, and with globalization, the spread of these diseases is not containable. Hence swine flu, bird flue, and the current Covid 19. The pandemic is about the virus, but the virus is about capitalism and its assault on the planet. 

Bryan Palmer is the author of Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (Haymarket Books, 2014) and edited the journal, Labour/Le Travail. He teaches at Trent University, Canada.