There is a vaccine for the neoliberal disease

If the current pandemic has not infused in our souls a sense of the interconnectedness of our struggles, if it has not taught us that this is a matter of life and death, if it has not forced us to face up to our collective responsibility to shape the future rather than dwell on our powerlessness over the past, then nothing will.

Audre Lorde made those observations in the '80s, as neoliberalism was beginning its soul-destroying trajectory that would lead us to where we are today. And where are we exactly?

We are where this trajectory was designed to take us, to the apogee of the neoliberal disease: to a place of stagnant wage growth, reduced power for working people, lower taxes on corporations and high-wealth individuals, cuts to social expenditure, a retrenched welfare state, an ailing social security system, a decades-long diet of privatisation and outsourcing, a housing crisis, extraordinary levels of work insecurity, precarity as a way of life, and the economic normalisation of mass unemployment and underemployment - along with the institutional punishment for these conditions.

And all of that was the case even before the recession! In relation to neoliberalism, COVID-19 is a bit like those chemical agents used at crime scenes, causing that pale blue luminescence when they react with the presence of blood. It shows us what was already there. It tells us that we are living at the scene of a social crime.

We don't yet have a vaccine for the coronavirus, but we do have one for the neoliberal disease. Unlike the disgusting medicine of austerity prescribed for working class people across the globe by the cheerless harbingers of neoliberalism, the vaccine we have against neoliberalism is pleasing for all the right reasons, unless you are one of the major beneficiaries of the current regime of engineered inequality.

The vaccine is as revolutionary as it is simple. It involves doing for working class people what governments prefer doing for the larger corporations, including measures that even the Morrison government recognised as being necessary but then proceeded to carry out in an ideologically constrained manner, severely limiting their potential efficacy - measures involving the targeted allocation of cash and in-kind support and services.

If we are serious about survival, let alone reconstruction, then we must strengthen measures such as JobKeeper and the JobSeeker supplement, and we must strengthen the public sector, in the context of a broader program of redistributing resources, and with them, a fair share of power over the shape of our economy and the quality of our lives.

It is telling that, as a society, we had grown accustomed to cancelling the working class. For some of us it felt awkward, if not anachronistic, to speak of class at all. We were consistently told that the working class had virtually ceased to exist, except in the factories of our imaginations; that we were all pretty much middle class as long as we had a job.

That was until COVID-19. Now, the reality of class is all lit up. And with it, of course, the reality of gender inequality, with women being subjected to hyper-exploitation and precarity. We, our friends, our neighbours, our fellow workers, the members of our families, are losing jobs or losing hours, forced to work in potentially dangerous conditions or unable to stay home when sick because of the denial of the right to sick leave (one of neoliberalism's greatest hits).

The working class is, in the broadest sense, all of us except those who exercise significant control over big capital, along with their ideological and corporate standard-bearers, including the highest levels of management who are materially aligned with those interests, especially through the size and structure of their remuneration packages.

So that leaves workers who are very poorly paid right through to workers who are well paid, workers who are in relatively secure employment right through to people who are in highly precarious jobs, self-employed sole traders through to those subjected to sham contracting, workers who are engaged in the informal economy through to people engaged in completely unpaid work (including much of the work of caring).

Importantly, it also includes workers who are residualised by the labour market, people experiencing unemployment or underemployment, as well as retired workers, students, young people, people who are unable to work due to illness and people living with a disability.

It is, unlike the bulk of the capitalist class, deeply diverse. It is gender-diverse, ethnically diverse, age-diverse, ability-diverse, culturally diverse. It is global. Whether we want to think about it or not, through what we consume and how we live and work, our lives are deeply connected with the lives of working people across the globe, the majority of whom have neither a living wage nor social protections such as access to appropriate healthcare, education, housing or income support.

As the International Trade Union Confederation, which is led by an Australian woman, Sharan Burrow, points out: "The world is three times richer than 20 years ago, yet 70 per cent of people are denied universal social protection, 84 per cent of people say the minimum wage is not enough to live on, and 81 per cent of countries have allowed violations of the right to collectively bargain. This is inequality by design."

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our lives are also deeply connected to the globe itself and the climate emergency it is in the grips of.

Historically, it was when the working class organised itself collectively through the union movement, and political parties that sprang from it, that working people began to recognise themselves as a class - in other words, as having more in common with each other than not.

One of the triumphs of the neoliberal disease was to break up that shared sense of class identity, partly by setting sections of the working class against each other and partly by disorganising labour and atomising the lived experience of workers.

But neoliberalism is not the end of the story. "The situation is hopeless", said the wonderful Catalonian cellist Pablo Casals at a press conference on his 80th birthday, commenting on the crises facing the world at the time: "We must take the next step."

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If we are to engage in the work of reconstructing our economy, we need to have ambitious goals. We will achieve nothing, though, without taking concrete steps, setting out the clearly achievable.

Our job is to expand the limits of the possible while spelling out the practical. There is no other way to do what our currently hopeless situation demands of us: to reconfigure power, redistribute resources and decriminalise hope.

Just as COVID-19 makes the reality of class completely luminescent, we are being forced to face, with eyes wide open, the fact that we only have one hope. Ourselves. We ourselves, organised and ready to struggle for what we need now and what we long for in the future.

Fighting because our lives depend on it. Never giving up on getting where we're going, even if we have to take the longest route. Because, contrary to the principles of neoliberalism, we can only be safe when everyone is safe.

And to be safe we all need the secure enjoyment of the essentials of life: a place to live, a place to work (and decent income support for those who cannot), a place to learn and a place to heal.

It is reassuring to see in Australia a strong, diverse and inclusive union movement rising to the practical challenge of national reconstruction with a solid plan to create and save jobs and invest in the social and economic infrastructure we desperately need.

A movement of extraordinary working people who bear witness to the veracity of Audre Lorde's claims, a movement that declares that we do not lead single-issue lives, that all struggles for a better society are indeed joined together. That we are not perfect, that we are not alone.