“…so many of the out-of-the way things had happened lately, that Alice has begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
The peasants' revolt after the 14th-century plague saw off feudalism. After COVID-19, will it be the turn of capitalism?
The pandemic begins in Asia, rips through the capital cities of Europe and wipes out at least a third of all human beings in its way. When it is all over, revolts begin, cherished institutions fall, and the entire economic system has to be reconfigured.
That is a short history of the Black Death, a bubonic plague pandemic caused by the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which spread from Mongolia to Western Europe in the 1340s.
The oil industry saw its opening and moved with breathtaking speed to take advantage of this moment
I’m going to tell you the single worst story I’ve heard in these past few horrid months, a story that combines naked greed, political influence peddling, a willingness to endanger innocent human beings, utter blindness to one of the greatest calamities in human history and a complete disregard for the next crisis aiming for our planet. I’m going to try to stay calm enough to tell it properly, but I confess it’s hard.
There is no magic money tree – the ‘rescue packages’ aim to rescue a rotten system, and won’t work. Everything that central banks have done since 2008 has been designed to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning. But now that day has come.
![The Dow Jones Industrial Average is displayed after the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York City on March 10, 2020 [Andrew Kelly/Reuters]](https://ecosocialistsvancouver.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/article-image/6abd634221cb4c868553b8db1e8ccf5d_18.jpg?itok=vrxSqLhO)
