Pandemic, Housing and Socialism
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‘Covid created an opportunity’: Lisbon to turn tourist flats into homes | Portugal | The Guardian
For sure it is not free access t0 accommodation but even under capitalism the covid pandemic shows how the shortage of homes can be redressed.
Imagine with a socialist administration, when needs take priority and the spare surplus tourist accommodation are turned into liveable homes. Eliminating homelessness could be accomplished almost overnight.
As with providing healthcare, building emergency hospitals, reducing unnecessary work and travel, the pandemic offers signs of what can be done and how it can be done quickly if the urgency was there.
Perhaps we should produce a pamphlet using the pandemic as a template for how socialism will solve many of the problems of capitalism that they said were unsolvable.
“As with providing healthcare, building emergency hospitals, reducing unnecessary work and travel, the pandemic offers signs of what can be done and how it can be done quickly if the urgency was there.”
Not to mention the speed with which vaccines were produced from several quarters. Things like this could probably be done even more quickly in socialism with a concerted effort rather than multiple competing efforts.
Sad isn’t it ttat we still have the jingoists who perceive progress as a race between nations.
Coronavirus: UK got vaccine first because it’s ‘a better country’, says Gavin Williamson – BBC News
The UK is getting a coronavirus vaccine first because it is a “much better country” than France, Belgium and the US, says Gavin Williamson, the education secretary.
Even the editorial in today’s Times calls his comments “crass” and hints that he should go in the next cabinet reshuffle. He’s got form. Theresa May sacked him as “Defence” Secretary (yes, believe it or not, he did once occupy one of the top posts in the state) for leaking details of a top level meeting. He had also been an advocate of sending an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea (which even the top brass thought was bonkers).
Mind you, he is not the only “vaccine nationalist”. Boris and a section of the media are too;
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/12/britain-vaccine-brexit-covid/617280/
He wasn’t the only jingoist
“We will remember this moment as the day the UK led humanity’s charge against this disease,” tweeted Alok Sharma, the UK’s business secretary
The more i think about it, the more i believe we have an opportunity to directly link the pandemic’s problems to capitalism and offer world socialism as an alternative.
We could be the first out of the starting gates with a something substantial on the pandemic.
How capitalism exacerbates the problems of it, how some of the advisable approaches to contain it expresses the socialist idea of altruism and mutual self-interest, how some of the solutions would be even more effective with a socialist administration, and why socialism offers a scenario of future less risk of another pandemic of this scale.
Good idea. Do you suggest we use some method in addition to our usual outlets, and go for wider distribution?
Easiest way is to do a trawl of what we have already said here on this forum…hundreds of posts with plenty of pertinent observations.
Once we have something to go online, to circulated by e-mail to all the internet discussion groups put up by those explaining the pandemic and its economic and political ramifications.
What about creating a Podcast and reading or recording the most important articles of the Socialist Standard? Some leftist organizations are doing that at the present time and I am listening to their articles on my computer or while I am driving in my car. We have to get out of the box
We already have the audio of the many Discord meetings that could be the base for the podcasts, MS.
So i am sure it is very do-able
How capitalism exacerbates the problems of it, how some of the advisable approaches to contain it expresses the socialist idea of altruism and mutual self-interest, how some of the solutions would be even more effective with a socialist administration, and why socialism offers a scenario of future less risk of another pandemic of this scale.
AJ, the idea is great.
Money constrains and couples pandemic responses to its use- market concerns.
Under socialism we make use of human produces/responders, and mobilise according to need. The primacy of market (monied interests) would end the parasitic drain of knowledge and skill and human will centred in capitalism- and centre response without any market constraints, nor profit margin- sheer utter ingenuity and will of society. A proper human economy! Socialism as ‘human economics’ in its most basic needs, wants, based form.
Housing: done. Health: done. Welfare: done. Not a profit in sight: no human plight… Done!
We already have the audio of the many Discord meetings that could be the base for the podcasts, MS.
So i am sure it is very do-able
I know that, but they are not recorded in Podcast. I am talking about recording the articles of the Socialist Standard
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