- “We cannot go back to normal”: Will everything be different after the Corona-Virus? The importance of crises narratives, the deficiencies of capitalism and the requirements for change
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- The Covid-19 pandemic is the first phenomenon that has ever paralysed the world economy as a whole. It has caused thousands of deaths and enormous losses for governments, companies and individuals; but it remains unclear how it may have a more profound, long-run impact in capitalism. Examining how the Coronavirus poses a threat to capitalism and the crucial role of crises narratives in determining government policy, this paper aims to highlight that those in power will frame the pandemic in a specific way to justify any “exceptional measures” they might adopt in light of the crisis. This is the case of the Hungarian government, which approved an ‘enabling act’ in March 2020 allowing them to govern outside democracy by decree to fight the Coronavirus. Analysing the series of challenges that the Coronavirus has posed to the capitalist order, this paper also explores how this crisis may transform the global political economy radically and, perhaps, stop the expansion of neoliberal policies across the globe. Exploring how this pandemic has highlighted the existing social and economic inequalities created by capitalism and revealed the failure of government policies used to tackle the 2008 crisis, it will try to demonstrate that the ‘free-market’ capitalism promoted by the US may become increasingly unpopular after the crisis. This paper will finally discuss that many countries could take the opportunity for economic reform brought by the crisis to adopt certain features of the Chinese ‘state capitalism’ to correct the failures of ‘free-market’ capitalism.
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