Obviously the pandemic is not currently over and will not be in the foreseeable future. For this discussion, assume that the actual end of the pandemic would be when there is no more elevated risk of sickness/disabling relative to the norm before COVID.
The world has decided on a vaccine-only strategy where a majority of the populace does not get vaccinated which isn't going to do anything. The concept of herd immunity through "natural infection" is even less effective, as we can see with the many cases of reinfection. Even something as mild as mask mandates are non-viable in the US.
So, assuming no mitigations are implemented again... how does the pandemic actually end? Is it just gambling on eventually getting a mild strain that actually becomes "a bad flu"? Do we have any historical data on what kind of timeframe we can expect here?
Or is it just going to be like this forever?
When Marx discusses the lengthening of the working day as the bourgeoisie gained dominance in the early chapters of Capital, Volume 1, he discusses how gradually the working day was lengthened so far beyond what was sustainable in terms of maintaining a healthy workforce that the life expectancy of workers was dropping into the 20's and the average height of English conscript soldiers was falling below that of soldiers in its competitors.
In short, capital in England had expanded the level of exploitation of its workforce and robbed their health to the extent that it was undermining the process of capital accumulation. There was a shortage of good labour, and the security of Britain's capitalists was under threat.
At that point, faced by increasing Worker's resistance, the British state stepped in to secure the interests of capital by legally limiting the working day, so that the health of the workforce might be restored and the resistance of workers curtailed in the interests of profit. This netted us the celebrated 8 hour workday, which was gradually chipped away in the latter half of the 20th century.
Now to COVID. We're already seeing labour shortages thanks to COVID-induced disability, and this situation is likely to worsen with time as COVID-induced disability and other disabilities proliferate with the breakdown of health systems. The current health policy in the imperial core is to brush the pandemic under the carpet in the interests of getting people working, and this policy is leading to increasing scarcity of labour and a growing surplus of discarded, disabled workers.
This situation is not in the interests of workers, and in the long term, it is not in the interests of capital. This presents an arena of struggle around which workers might organise and push-back to achieve concessions once again.
We don't want to be getting sick over and over again with a virus that kills and maims us, that impairs our health further with each successive infection. There is nothing good about this situation. But it does strengthen the power of mass mobilisation and strikes, as labour is increasingly scarce. And so, with sustained organising, grass-roots education and resistance, we could push back the high tide of COVID denials, and win back some of the things we need to strengthen workers power and end the pandemic for real.
This includes health protections in the form of paid sick leave, socialised health-care, and disability indemnity. It also includes prevention in the form of limitations of risky workplace practices, non-pharmaceutical interventions in public spaces and at work such as air filtration, masking, UV lighting, limitations on crowding, closed spaces and close contact, as well as socially supplied vaccination and treatment.
In the long run it could also be used to organise for better pay and conditions at work, and stronger unionisation, which we're already seeing.
I've never looked in to it in detail, but my understanding is that the vast amount of death (like 30% of the population) during the Black Plague in Europe massively shifted labor relations for several generations until the population returned to it's pre-plague levels. For a while peasants and other laborers could essentially name their price because labor was so scarce.
There was a century of peasants revolting against the feudal nobility in places like England, France, Germany, and others, not just because of the plague but also because of the nobles' general wastefulness and incompetence stemming from the Hundred Years' War. Sometimes the peasants would even take over cities like London or Paris, but then they would lib the fuck out, beg the king for help, and get destroyed. When it was over, we had capitalism in England, absolutism in France, and another century at least of religious wars to look forward to, which themselves probably only chilled out in the end because of colonialism.
Good books about this: A Distant Mirror, The Origin of Capitalism, Caliban and the Witch, Marx's chapters in capital which deal with capitalism's beginnings (a much easier read than the earlier chapters of Capital). A People's History of the World is also good IMO. I like the author's thesis that history is basically the history of class struggle (heh), meaning that the ruling class is always looking for new ways to extract surplus labor, regardless of whether that's through slavery, feudalism, or capitalism. The book is pretty good until it gets to the Russian Revolution, because the author is a Trotskyist.
Hmm. How do we avoid the pitfalls our predecessors fell into?
If you actually manage to seize power, don’t lib out. Go all the way!
The issue I see here is the contradiction between big pharma and the rest of the bourgeoisie. (I also hate that I sound like an anti-vaxxer as I say this, but I am 4x-vaxxed.) Big pharma profits from making people sick; the rest of the bourgeoisie cannot profit if everyone is either dead or has long covid. I've seen small business owners advocating for bringing in more immigrants, particularly from Ukraine (since they are "civilized"), to help with the labor shortage, in response to this issue.
The big fucking problem, as always with the American working class, is that we/they need to work together with our brothers and sisters around the world. Capital has no issues going overseas for help (even if China is making this increasingly difficult), but American workers think they are traitors if they try to strike together with workers in Mexico, for instance. A major issue with this is that it requires American workers to take a pay cut in the name of long-term benefits (the permanent destruction of capitalism), since American workers are paid far better than workers in the Global South. On the other hand, lib unions capitulate to capital constantly, so theoretically at least, why shouldn't they capitulate to their dark-skinned brothers and sisters in other countries? (Because of settler-colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, etc.)
You should tell them that, I don’t think they’ve realized it yet and it’s fucking baffling
I think they’re mostly still doing okay because of imperialism basically dumping shitloads of money into the stock market / covid handouts to business. Once that gravy train ends they’re going to be extremely fucked and extremely angry.
What I would give just to live under a version of capitalism where the capitalists can see past the bridge of their nose