CAPITALISM has been imploding for a number of years; the coronavirus outbreak has brought it to a head.  

Seen as necessary to save capitalism, the government’s interventions are good preparation for a post-capitalist future.  

The railways fell into public ownership out of sheer necessity. Capitalism is calling on socialism to take over. It remains for the working class to do the same. 

In globalisation, capital has reached its peak, peak capital, and it has brought humanity and the planet to the brink of disaster. 

The link between air pollution and capitalism has been shown to be indisputable by the Covid-19 pandemic — and this is increasingly being recognised.

Peak capital is when the increase in capital investment is not sufficient to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit occasioned by increased mechanisation and improved technology which with robotics and computerisation is taking place at at breakneck speed. 

This has led to the flight of capital from the west to the east with its consequential effect of deindustrialisation in the former and fundamental distortion of the economy of the latter. 

Globalisation has seen capitalism running amok, tossing aside national boundaries and democracy, and crippling the capacity of countries to be self-reliant. 

It has paved the way for the spread of the pandemic and left us dependent on others for masks and ventilators. 

Never has self-reliance been as critical as it is today. The folly of dismantling our manufacturing base, making the country dependent on non-domestic suppliers, and the subcontracting of our manufacturing capacity is clear for all to see. 

With supply lines stretching across continents and commodities shipped halfway across the globe, Covid-19 found its ideal medium to spread. 

And with the shipment of commodities comes the shipment of another commodity — workers, or to be precise, workers’ ability to labour, the essential ingredient to all other commodities. 

Workers scour the world looking for work and for a better life, leaving behind communities that are, more often than not, in a greater need of their labour than the countries they moved to. 

With no answers to the fundamental questions facing humanity, capitalism turns onto itself, abandoning its proclaimed rationale: society is best served if everyone follows their individual self-interest. 

In a few days, we moved from the “tragedy of the commons” to the tragedy of capitalism. 

When Boris Johnson calls on people to stay at home to save the NHS or, in the current trace and track phase, to self-isolate if you come into contact with someone who is tested positive, to save other people’s lives, he goes against every tenet of capitalism, at odds with its very DNA. 

Humanity has a stark choice: preserve capitalism and run down the planet or preserve the planet and run down capitalism. 

The government may have questions to answer: it has undoubtedly made mistakes but to emphasise the negative in the midst of the crisis instead of the positive is not helpful. 

A major drawback of pointing the blame of our predicaments is it treats workers as helpless victims. 

Blaming someone else means the solution is in someone else’s hands at the very time when we need to take control and we cannot take control without taking responsibility, responsibility not just for the future but for the present. 

As a species, we humans have to take responsibility for what we have done. What is our offence? Our offence has been to retain the system of capitalism for far too long. We should have ditched it long ago.

In glaring contrast to those who spend their time indulging in recriminations, stand the trade unions. 

They have joined the national effort to combat and defeat the virus; they have no time to snipe and sneer. 

Trade unions have called for a “manufacturing army” to make the products the NHS and other public bodies need and for an agricultural union to pick our crops to feed the people. 

They are making tremendous efforts to get people back to work, taking control of the process to ensure a safe working environment.  

You can’t do that by disengaging from the process. And the TUC, for decades viewed with contempt, was immediately invited by the government to join in the national endeavour. 

Workers belong at work, there is where their power lies.  

Using the coronavirus outbreak to rediscover lessons such the importance of solidarity and collective strength, lessons that workers have long learnt, and presenting them as new discoveries limits our horizons and stifles new thought. 

Today, there is a pressing need to venture out of our comfort zone. There is a plethora of criticism of capitalism but precious little critique. 

As the government takes over the running of the economy including the most basic task of capitalists, paying the wages of their workers, and turning the banks into agents to deliver state-guaranteed  funds to keep businesses going, one institution is left untouched, the stock exchange, the engine room of capitalism. 

While the stock exchange remains, the gains that we may be able to make will be temporary. 

Witness how achievements of the post-war Labour government were, with the exception of the NHS, reversed. 

Contrary to popular belief, this process did not start with the election of Thatcher in 1979. 

It began five years earlier under a Labour government. It was a Labour secretary of state, Anthony Crosland, who, in 1974, told local authority representatives: “The party’s over.” 

Only if the stock exchange is dismantled and the stranglehold of the City is broken would any programme of industrial and social change be sustainable. 

It was Picasso who observed: “You start a painting and it becomes something altogether different. It's strange how little the artist’s will matters.” 

So it is with the present collective effort to combat a new and deadly virus, it may well transform into something altogether different. 

These are historic times. Let’s get engaged, get stuck in.

Fawzi Ibrahim is a former treasurer of the college and university union UCU and author of Capitalism versus Planet Earth, An Irreconcilable Conflict.