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Capitalism isn't the cause of all police brutality, but the upper class deliberately divides working people against each other, which creates the racism and classism (middle vs. lower) that makes it commonplace and which make brutal, racist police officers (who are probably not the majority) nearly invulnerable. You'd still have a few incompetent cops in any economic system, but it's because of capitalism's doing that there are so many bad apples on forces. As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously, capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th century. Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would have been a disaster. In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything, but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them back. |