{"id":23790,"date":"2020-04-01T11:13:09","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T18:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/?p=23790"},"modified":"2022-04-01T03:48:35","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T10:48:35","slug":"state-power-in-the-time-of-corona-to-protect-and-serve-whom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/?p=23790","title":{"rendered":"State power in the time of Corona: To protect and serve \u2026 whom?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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At the time of writing, nearly half the world has closed down or is waking up to an unfamiliar world of\u00a0\u00a0encroachments on physical mobility in ways not seen since the War of\u00a0\u00a01914 to 1918. Covid-19 has\u00a0exposed existing fault lines in public health care provision and in\u00a0\u00a0public health crisis in both the global South and the global North. The realities\u00a0of socioeconomic exclusion have exposed\u00a0ongoing inertia in public service provision and the rescinding\u00a0role of the State in those provisions. Race, gender and class have been foregrounded in this time of crisis.\u00a0\u00a0Whilst the Corona virus offers a critical moment to rethink and reframe the social compact between state, citizens and residents, it is also a dangerous and alarming time of enforced mass\u00a0\u00a0enclosure. This is not the first time that humanity has been here though the scale and reach are\u00a0unprecedented<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Following Hurricane Katrina, many people sought to answer the question of whether its social effects and the government response to the country\u2019s biggest natural disaster had more to do with race or with class. Media images broadcast from Louisiana showed nearly all those left behind to suffer and die were Black Americans\u2014it\u00a0looked<\/em>\u00a0a race, gender and class issue because it was. A few years later during Hurricane Sandy, it was clear that the US had learnt nothing from the traumatic upheaval wrought by Katrina. In this instance, it appears that nearly all might be left behind, but that the social\u00a0\u00a0binaries of race based poverty and gender would endure, starkly.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Though often hampered by\u00a0\u00a0resource constraints, most African countries have a better track record of deploying state support and resources to deal with the upheavals of disease and the aftermath of war. The Ebola virus, the ongoing HIV\/AIDs pandemic and malaria have provided lessons in the folly of denial, the importance of protecting health workers, of accessible and low-cost medication, robust public education, and open and consistent communication. So much of what seems like basic sense has been found wanting in the handling of Covid -19.\u00a0\u00a0The news that British Prime Minister\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Boris Johnson has tested positive\u00a0after robust handshaking\u00a0\u00a0whilst we have been advised to keep a distance and wash our hands shows a reckless\u00a0leadership deficit during a defining moment.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The last forty years of globalisation as market orthodoxy has commodified health care.\u00a0The globalisation of trade is\u00a0\u00a0central\u00a0\u00a0to\u00a0\u00a0health services that have become a tradeable commodity\u00a0\u00a0in an era in which many States have disinvested from health services altogether. Like education, access to water and electricity,\u00a0\u00a0health provision\u00a0\u00a0has been a casualty of structurally\u00a0\u00a0adjusted States and the curve between the global South and the North has been exposed during this crisis as the UK and the US, often considered to be \u2018developed\u2019, have again been found weak and unprepared for a health trauma of this scale. The prescripts and onerous\u00a0impacts\u00a0of conditional aid and state disinvestment in social provision\u00a0\u00a0have long been felt by African and Latin American countries.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Globally, states are all experiencing the impacts and limits to free market logic. Though\u00a0 characterised by many as the great equaliser,\u00a0a time when States are equally fragile across the global north and global south, the true genesis of this global devastation is northern capitalism and demobilised\u00a0\u00a0States. Structural adjustment as a project has evolved and is a continuing mantra of the\u00a0\u00a0International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.\u00a0Both\u00a0\u00a0recently unveiled their market driven response of emergency loans targeting developing countries\u00a0\u00a0primarily in the Global South. The depleted\u00a0\u00a0health and sanitation\u00a0systems in many\u00a0\u00a0countries\u00a0\u00a0is testimony to the devastating success of neoliberal globalisation in immobilising national\u00a0\u00a0state capacities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Following structural adjustment programmes, most health care and essential services \u2013 including water, energy, education \u2013 may be removed from state purview for cost recovery\u00a0\u00a0arrangements. In this scenario private companies invest their funds in return for state guaranteed monopolies and price control, further dispossessing and excluding vulnerable communities. Public Private Partnerships \u2013 which are essentially polite privatisation \u2013 have existed for centuries,\u00a0\u00a0thriving even more when States are weakened. These have also\u00a0\u00a0become the\u00a0easy allies of disaster capitalism\u00a0as seen in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy where education and energy supplies were privatised, monetised and removed from the domain of public good.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Despite decades of state neglect, social apartheid and various global traumas, consensu has formed on closing down public movement and curbing personal freedoms to address the War called Corona.\u00a0The introduction of \u201clockdowns\u201d with no tangible provision for social safety nets has posed significant risks to\u00a0workers in the parallel economy, internally displaced persons, the working poor, fragile urban communities and other marginalised sectors.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Notwithstanding\u00a0\u00a0outsourcing their most fundamental functions to the private sector and ignoring their duty to distribute social and economic benefits to the most vulnerable in society, States are now\u00a0\u00a0calling on us to trust them as they invoke martial law. This has\u00a0\u00a0resulted in the largest shutdown of the last century. Unlike the two European wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) the impact of this situation is not localised to a few European nations, the Soviet Union, Australia,\u00a0\u00a0Japan and the United States. Globalisation has transmitted both the disease and uniform approaches to problem solving.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Students of civil liberties, human rights and social cohesion have opined on the politics of enclosure in times of war and peace.\u00a0\u00a0Even during enclosed times, States exhibit inherent biases and weaknesses that maintain privilege for corporate and masculinised interests.\u00a0\u00a0South Africa has lived through public control\u00a0\u00a0in living memory, and distrust of the State and state security is still embedded in social discourses. Like many other\u00a0\u00a0countries, the spectre of securitisation of human mobility sits badly, particularly as we still recall the dehumanising\u00a0policing of colonial Apartheid exemplified by the Sharpeville Massacre, Soweto Uprising and Uitenhage massacres among many.\u00a0\u00a0Troublingly, the Marikana Massacre\u00a0\u00a0and the violence against the #FeesMustFall activists illustrates that the State can be a brutal\u00a0\u00a0personality regardless of the supposedly progressive underpinnings of the Government in power.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At the time of writing, South Africans are required to carry Identity Books in case we are stopped by the police or army when going to buy\u00a0\u00a0groceries or medical supplies. Once more, personhood is linked to a form of the much reviled Apartheid Passbook.\u00a0\u00a0It is deeply unsettling, albeit necessary, that states are containing us to\u00a0\u00a0control a warlike virus that might have been prevented had the same States not neglected\u00a0\u00a0and commodified health care\u00a0\u00a0so shamelessly. The same could be said of nearly every country battling the Corona pandemic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Whilst allowing already problematic Father States to lead us through very complex terrain, we recall that States are often inclined towards repression. Public order policing and martial law have often been the retreat of authoritarian regimes, evoking public safety, order and emergencies real or created to control citizens and residents . Late last year the\u00a0Chilean government clamped down on high school protestors who demanded that the State provide\u00a0\u00a0cost effective public transport. The escalating rage resulted in something resembling a nationwide, cross-issue movement against price increases, poor social services, and\u00a0unemployment. It remains to be seen whether\u00a0\u00a0the promise of a constitutional reform will\u00a0quell public dissent. France has faced similar protests on public pension funds\u00a0\u00a0and the retreat of the State in maternity clinics and\u00a0postal services . Macron\u00a0\u00a0effectively\u00a0\u00a0\u2018closed down\u2019 France nearly two weeks ago. In the midst of their lockdown, thousands marched against him the day before local government elections.\u00a0While States might have found the opportunity to indulge their regressive impulses during the time of Corona, not all of us are amnesiac about how we got here.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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(Photo Credit: Daily Maverick<\/a> \/ EPA – EFE \/ Kim Ludbrook)<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the time of writing, nearly half the world has closed down or is waking up to an unfamiliar world of\u00a0\u00a0encroachments on physical mobility in ways not seen since the War of\u00a0\u00a01914 to 1918. Covid-19 has\u00a0exposed existing fault lines in public health care provision and in\u00a0\u00a0public health crisis in both the global South and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":170,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6479,6483,5530,4166,83],"class_list":["post-23790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-covid-19","tag-globalization","tag-liepollo-lebohang-pheko","tag-neoliberalism","tag-south-africa","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/170"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23790"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25836,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23790\/revisions\/25836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}