During the capitalist crisis that began in 2008, left-wing observers never tired of pointing out that, when translated into English, the two Chinese symbols for the word “crisis” meant “danger” but also “opportunity.” In medical terms, a crisis is precisely that critical moment when it is decided whether the patient will die or survive.

The current pandemic is both an economic and medical crisis. To be more precise, it is a stress test of the health systems in the OECD countries — and the economic order to which they are subject. In recent decades, they have reduced hospital bed numbers by half — despite their aging populations. The average number of beds per 1,000 population has fallen from 8.7 in the 1970s to 4.7 in 2015: recent figures are even worse for Italy at 3.18, the United States at 2.77, and the UK at 2.54. These are the traces of not just ten years of austerity, but more than four decades of neoliberalism.

The 2008 crisis soon became much more danger than opportunity, for the mass of working people at least. There were cuts in pensions and in the health system, public hiring freezes, reductions in minimum wages, and the erosion of collective bargaining agreements in Southern Europe. This was all done in the name of restoring competitiveness, as well as reducing public debt — which had only become a problem after the bank bailouts.