Capitalist globalization has produced three interrelated realities:
- Global poverty as its greedy extractivist processes transferred surplus value from the global South to the North,
- A network of class-conscious elites in both Northern and Southern countries who share an interest in maintaining the neoliberal status quo, and
- An integrated, global military-intelligence apparatus to defend neoliberal capitalist relations under the control of the U.S. state.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only stripped away the veneer of respectability and promise that neoliberal capitalist development was supposedly going to offer workers and countries. It has revealed, in stark terms, the repressive reality and potential of a dying capitalist order. From Detroit in the United States to Durban in South Africa, capitalism has shown it cannot protect and realize human rights. That is why the elites are using the pandemic to police people under the pretext of protecting public health.
In the United States, the Black professional/managerial/administrative mis-leadership class openly collaborates with neoliberal Democrats against the interests of the African/Black working class and poor, who desperately need healthcare as well as protection from predatory capitalists.
Colonialism had either underdeveloped or altogether wiped out healthcare systems in Africa. Then came the neocolonial International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs that required state disinvestment in healthcare as a prerequisite for loans.
The neocolonial elites in Africa, like the neocolonial U.S. Black elites, have
conspired in mutual class solidarity with white settler-colonial and imperial power to control, exploit—and when need be—repress the African masses on behalf of colonial power.
