COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism

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COVID-19 and Disaster Capitalism

International commodity chains and ecological-epidemiological-economic crises

By John Bellamy Foster & Intan Suwandi

[This article was published on 6/1/2020 on the Internet on the Monthly Review site.]

Capitalism is accompanied by enormous ecological, epidemiological and economic fragility. The current COVID-19 pandemic makes this more evident than ever. At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing how the structural crisis of the capitalist system takes on planetary dimensions and is increasingly accompanied by the emergence of a global catastrophe capitalism.

Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly taken the form of interlinked commodity chains. Controlled by multinational companies, they connect the production zones located predominantly in the Global South with the centers of world consumption, financial industry and capital accumulation located predominantly in the Global North.[1] Such commodity chains essentially form the material cycles of global capital. They are also accompanied by the phenomenon of late imperialism associated with the rise of general monopoly capitalism. This system is based on the appropriation of exorbitant profits generated by the control of global production: This is done both through the exploitation of global labor arbitrage and the consequent over-exploitation of peripheral industrial labor by the multinationals at the center of the system, and through the exploitation of global land price differences, through which agribusinesses appropriate cheap land and cheap labor from the global South to produce export crops primarily for sale in the Global North.

To describe the complex cycles of capital in the current global economy, management refers to both supply chains and value chains. While supply chains primarily refer to the movement of material products, the term value chains aims at the value "added" at each node of the chain - from the extraction of raw materials to the production of the finished product.[3] This double access to supply and value chains is very similar to the dialectical approach of Karl Marx. In the first volume of "Capital" in his analysis of commodity chains in production and exchange, Marx had worked out the dual character of the commodity as a utility and exchange value. Here the natural-material aspect of the commodity in its natural form as a utility value and its socio-economic aspect as an exchange value expressed in the respective value form are "a link ... in the general metamorphosis series of the world of commodities"[4] Marx's approach was further developed by Rudolf Hilferding in the early twentieth century in his work "Finanzkapital" ("Warenaustauschprozess"[5]).

In the 1980s, the world system theorists Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein again put the commodity chain concept up for discussion within Marxist theory.[6] What was lost, however, in later commodity chain analyses of Marxist and world system theory was the material-ecological aspect of utility values. The commodity chains were treated as an exclusively economic-exchange-value-specific phenomenon.

Marx, on the other hand, had always kept the natural-material limits and framework conditions of the circulation of capital in mind. Thus he emphasized "the negative, that is the destructive side" of capitalist value creation with regard to the natural conditions of production and the metabolism of the human species with nature as a whole.[7] He diagnosed an "incurable rift ... in the context of the social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life", which constituted the destructive relationship of capitalism to the earth. This rift in metabolism was manifested in the leaching of the soil and the forced fertilization of English fields with [South American] guano, as well as in the "periodic epidemic(s)" resulting from the organic contradictions of the system.

In order to understand the current combined ecological, epidemiological and economic crisis tendencies of late imperialism, exactly such a theoretical framework is needed, which is able to take into account the dual character and contradictory forms of commodity chains by including both utility and exchange values. Such a view makes it possible to understand the connection between the aetiology of diseases caused by agribusiness and the capital circuits of late imperialism and the related emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

ut with a focus on commodity chains, it is also possible to understand how the interruption of the flow of utility values in the form of material goods and the accompanying interruption of the flow of value could produce a serious and lasting economic crisis. As a result, an already stagnant economy is brought to the extreme limit, threatening to collapse the financial superstructure of the system.

Ultimately, behind all of this lies a much larger planetary rift caused by today's catastrophic capitalism, which is manifested in climate change and in the exceeding of multiple planetary stress limits. The current epidemiological crisis is just another dramatic manifestation of this process.

Capital cycles and ecological-epidemiological crises

Remarkably, a new, more holistic approach to the etiology of disease has emerged over the last decade under the term One Health - One World. This was mainly in response to the emergence of newer zoonotic diseases (or zoonoses) such as SARS, MERS and H1N1, which were transmitted to humans from non-human, wild or domesticated animals. The One Health model puts the epidemiological analysis on an ecological basis, bringing together environmental scientists, physicians, veterinarians and public health experts within a global approach.

This approach, which with its originally ecologically motivated framework represents a more comprehensive contribution to the control of zoonoses, has increasingly been adopted by dominant organizations such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has been deprived of its critical potential. They thus made One Health's interdisciplinary approach a simple tool for bringing together such diverse interests as public health, the private health sector, veterinary medicine, agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry. In this form, however, the approach works primarily to strengthen the response to so-called episodic epidemics while promoting the rise of a broad corporatist strategy in which capital, especially agribusiness, is the dominant element. This ultimately leads to the systematic downplaying of the links between the epidemiological crises and the world capitalist economy in an ostensibly holistic model [9].

In response, a new, revolutionary approach to the aetiology of disease emerged under the term Structural One Health, which is based on the One Health concept but rooted in a broader, historical-materialist tradition. For the advocates of Structural One Health, the key issue is to find out how pandemics in today's global economy are linked to those capital cycles that are rapidly changing environmental conditions. A series of essays by a team of scientists* (including Rodrick Wallace, Luis F. Chaves, Luke R. Bergmann, Constância Ayres, Lenny Hogerwerf, Richard Kock, Robert G. Wallace) on Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection, and most recently on COVID 19 and capital cycles (by Robert G. Wallace, Alex Liebmann, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace) in "Monthly Review", May 2020. Structural One Health is defined by them as "a new field that explores the impact of global capital cycles and other fundamental contexts, including an extensive cultural history, on regional agricultural economics and related inter-species disease dynamics"[10].

This revolutionary, historical-materialist approach differs from the mainstream view in that 1) commodity chains are viewed as drivers of the pandemic; 2) the usual approach of "absolute geographies", which focuses on specific places where new viruses appear without perceiving the global economic transmission routes, is discarded; 3) the pandemic is not understood as an episodic problem or a random Black Swan event, but as a reflection of the general structural crisis of capital in the sense of Mészáro's "Beyond Capital"[11]; 4) the approach of dialectical biology from Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin u. a. in "The Dialectical Biologist" and finally 5) by insisting on the radical reconstruction of society as a whole towards a sustainable "planetary metabolism"[12].

In a similar vein, Robert G. Wallace has already used the notion of commodity chains and the metabolic rift and the Lauderdale paradox (according to which private wealth is accumulated only through the destruction of public wealth) in "Big Farms Make Big Flu" and other writings at Marxʼ to formulate a critique of austerity and privatization in the context of agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry. Thinkers in this critical tradition take a dialectical approach to ecological destruction and the aetiology of disease [13].

Of course, this new historical-materialist epidemiology is not simply a figment of the imagination, but is based on a long tradition of socialist struggles and critical analysis of epidemics. This includes historical contributions such as 1) Engel's "Situation of the Working Class in England", which already names the class dimension of infectious diseases; 2) the Marxian discussions on epidemics and general health conditions in "Kapital"; 3) the studies of the "Epidemics of the Working Class" by the British zoologist E. Ray Lankester (who was a protégé of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley and a friend of Marx) in his work "Kingdom of Man" (1907) on the treatment of anthropogenic sources of disease and their basis in capitalist agriculture, markets and finance; 4) Levins' "Is Capitalism a Disease?

Of particular importance in the new historical-materialistic epidemiology associated with Structural One Health is the explicit recognition of the role of global agribusiness and the integration of detailed research on every aspect of the etiology of diseases, with a focus on the new zoonoses. Such diseases, as Rob Wallace has already stated in "Big Farms Make Big Flu", are the "unintended biotic result of efforts to steer animal ontogenesis and ecology towards multinational profitability", generating new deadly pathogens. 15] Overseas farms, consisting of monocultures of genetically similar animals, which eliminate natural immune "firebreaks" (including large pig and poultry farms), combined with rapid deforestation and the chaotic mixing of wild birds and other wildlife with industrial animal production (such as in wet markets), have created the conditions for the spread of new deadly pathogens such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1, H5N1 and now SARS-CoV-2. More than half a million people worldwide died of H1N1, while deaths from SARS-CoV-2 are likely to far exceed this number [16].

"Agricultural companies," Wallace writes, "are moving their businesses to the global South to take advantage of cheap labor and land," and "are thus spreading their production line all over the world,"[17] poultry, pigs and humans interact, creating new diseases. "Waves of influenza," Wallace says, "are now emerging within a globalized network of companies that produce and trade feed, and within which specific strains usually develop first. With poultry and livestock herds being moved from region to region - with spatial distance changing into just-in-time calculations - diverse strains of the virus are regularly introduced into places with populations of susceptible animals"[18] It has been shown that large commercial poultry farms are much more likely to harbour these virulent zoonoses. Value chain analysis has been used to understand the aetiology of new influenza viruses such as H5N1 along the poultry production supply chain.[19] Thus, the origin of influenza in southern China could be traced back to the context of "a 'historical present'". Within this "multiple virulent recombinants emerge from a mixture of agrarian ecosystems of different (historical) times (a mélange of agroecologies originating at different times), which interact with each other as path dependent as contingent. In the case of H5N1, for example, from the interplay between antiquity (rice), early modern times (semi-domesticated ducks) and the present (intensification of poultry production)". This analysis has also been expanded by radical geographers* such as Bergmann, who deal with "the convergence of biology and economy beyond a single commodity chain up to the fabric of the global economy"[20] The interconnected global commodity chains of agribusiness, which form the basis for the emergence of novel zoonoses, ensure that these pathogens migrate rapidly from one place to another. As human hosts move from one part of the world to another within days, even hours, germs can also take advantage of these chains of human mobility and globalization. Wallace and colleagues write: "Some pathogens are created directly in the centers of production (...). But many, such as COVID-19, originate at the limits of capital production. In fact, at least 60 percent of novel human pathogens are created by leaking from wild animals to local human communities (before the more successful ones spread to the rest of the world). With regard to the spread of such diseases, they summarize: "The underlying operational premise is that the cause of COVID-19 and other such pathogens is to be found not only in the environment of a single infectious agent or in its clinical course, but also in the ecosystemic relationships that have transformed capital and other structural causes to their own advantage. The great diversity of pathogens, representing different taxa, source hosts, transmission pathways, clinical courses and epidemiological outcomes, all have characteristics that lead us to run like crazy to our search engines at each outbreak to find the same sections and pathways along the same types of cycles of land use and value accumulation [21].

The imperialist restructuring of production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-also known as globalization-was primarily the result of exploiting global wage differentials and the over- and super-exploitation of the wage labor force of the Global South. It accepts the deliberate pollution of the local environment and is carried out predominantly for the benefit of the global capital and financial centers. This process has also been driven by the simultaneous exploitation of global land price differences by multinational agribusiness.

ence between low price and high land rent gives investors a decent profit. Any benefits from the actual cultivation of plants are only marginal to this deal (...). Opportunities for land arbitrage arise when new land - with an attractive land rent - is brought into the global land market, where the rent can actually be capitalized"[22] Much of this capitalization process is fed by what is also called the "cattle revolution", which has turned cattle into a globalized commodity on the basis of huge feed resources and genetic monocultures.

These conditions were promoted by the various development banks in the context of measures euphemistically referred to as "territorial restructuring. These "restructurings" include the displacement of subsistence farmers and small-scale producers at the behest of multinational corporations, primarily the agribusiness sector, and the rapid deforestation and destruction of ecosystems. These forms of land appropriation (land-grabbing) were accelerated by the high prices of basic foodstuffs in 2008 and again in 2011, as well as by the use of private asset funds, which, in the face of the uncertainty following the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/2009, sought stable material assets. The result is one of the largest migratory movements in human history: people are being driven from their land and into urban slums in a global process of de-population (de-peasantization), while the agroecology of entire regions is changing and traditional forms of agriculture are being replaced by monocultures.

Wallace and his colleagues point out that historian and urban theorist Mike Davis and others "have found how these newly urbanized landscapes function both as local markets and as transit points and regional hubs for global agricultural commodities (...). As a result, the dynamics of forest diseases, the primeval sources of pathogens, are no longer confined to the hinterland. The epidemics associated with them have themselves become relational, tangible along the axes of time and space. A SARS virus can - only a few days after it has crawled out of its bat cave - suddenly spread among the people of a large city" [25].

Interruption of commodity chains and global "whip effect”

The new pathogens, which are unintentionally produced by the agricultural industry, are not in themselves natural-material utility values. Rather, they are toxic by-products of the capitalist production system, which can be traced back to the commodity chains of agribusiness as part of the globalized food regime.[26] But now - in a kind of metaphorical 'revenge' of nature, as already described by Engels and Lankester - the ripple effects of the combined ecological and epidemiological catastrophe have significantly contributed to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, thus disrupting the entire global system of production.[27]

The effects of the lockdown and social distancing measures resulting in the (temporary) closure of production in key global sectors have shaken supply and value chains worldwide. This has produced a gigantic "whip effect"[28] that runs through global commodity chains from both the supply and the demand side. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has occurred in the context of a global regime of neoliberal monopoly financial capitalism that has imposed austerity measures, including public health care, around the world.

The universal adoption of just-in-time production, as well as time-based competition and regulation of global commodity chains, has led to low inventory levels in many companies and institutions such as hospitals - a problem exacerbated by the hoarding of certain goods by the population.[29] The result is an extraordinary disruption of the entire global economy.



Today's global commodity chains - or more precisely: labor value chains - serve primarily to take advantage of the lower unit labor costs (taking into account both labor costs and productivity) in the poorer countries of the global South, where world industrial production is now predominantly located. For example, unit labor costs in India in 2014 were only 37 percent of the US level, while unit labor costs in China and Mexico were 46 and 43 percent of the US level, respectively. In Indonesia, unit labor costs were higher at 62 percent of the US level [30] A considerable part of this difference can be attributed to the extremely low wages in the countries of the South. At the same time, the external production of the export platforms of the global South, designed according to the specifications of multinational corporations and with the introduction of the most advanced technologies, leads to productivity levels comparable to those of many areas of the global North. The result is an integrated global system of exploitation in which the wage gap between the Global North and the Global South is greater than the productivity gap. This leads to low unit labor costs in the countries of the South and thus to enormous gross profit margins (i.e. economic added value) with respect to the export prices of goods from poorer countries.

The enormous mass of added value generated in the global South is recorded in the gross domestic product calculation as value added in the North, even if it is more of a value captured in the South. This new system of international exploitation and expropriation, linked to globalized production, forms the deep structure of late imperialism in the twenty-first century.

All of this was favored by the revolutionary developments in the field of transport and communication. Shipping costs fell with the spread of standardized containers. Communication technologies such as fiberglass cable, cell phones, Internet, broadband, digital clouds and video conferencing changed global networking. Cheap air travel enabled faster travel and increased by an average of 6.5 percent between 2010 and 2019.[31] About one-third of U.S. exports are intermediate products for end products manufactured elsewhere, such as cotton, steel, engines and semiconductors.[32] Today's global commodity chain structure emerged from these rapidly changing conditions, which created an increasingly integrated, hierarchical international accumulation structure. Its result was a connection of all parts of the world within a system of oppression. This connection is now showing the first signs of destabilization under the impact of the US trade war against China and the global economic impact of the COVID 19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its lockdowns and social distancing measures, is "the first global supply chain crisis"[33] It has led to economic losses of value, enormous unemployment and underemployment, the collapse of companies, widespread hunger and other deprivations. A key to understanding the complexity and chaos of the current crisis is to understand that no CEO of any multinational company has a complete overview of the company's supply chain.[34] Typically, the financial centers and corporate buyers only know their direct suppliers, not those at the second, third or even fourth level. This means they have no idea about their suppliers' suppliers. In this context, Elisabeth Braw refers in Foreign Policy to Michael Essig, a professor of supply chain management at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, who has calculated "that a multinational company like Volkswagen has 5,000 direct suppliers, all of whom have an average of about 250 second-tier suppliers. This means that the company actually has 1.25 million suppliers, the vast majority of whom it does not know. Third level suppliers are not even included. With the beginning of the current corona pandemic in Wuhan, China, it was found that about 51,000 companies worldwide had at least one direct supplier and about another five million companies had a second-tier supplier in the region. On February 27, 2020, when supply chain disruption was still largely confined to China, the World Economic Forum, citing a Dun & Bradstreet report, reported that more than 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies had a first- or second-tier supplier affected by the virus [35].

The impact of SARS-CoV-2 has suddenly made it an urgent necessity for companies to try to cover their entire supply chains. But this is enormously complex. For example, when the Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred, it was discovered that the Fukushima area produced 60 percent of the parts essential to the production of cars, a significant amount of chemicals for lithium batteries and 22 percent of the world's production of three-hundred-millimeter silicon wafers. All three products are critical to current industrial production. At that time, some monopoly financial groups tried to map their supply chains. According to the Harvard Business Review, "executives at a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer told us that it took a team of 100 employees more than a year to (...) map the company's supply networks deep into the sublevels"[36].

Currently, companies are confronted with commodity chains in which many links of the chain are invisible and the chains break at numerous points simultaneously. This leads to interruptions and uncertainties in what Marx called the "general metamorphosis series"[37] in the production, distribution and consumption of material production. Added to this are unforeseeable changes in general demand. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on global accumulation is unprecedented, with costs to the global economy still rising. At the end of March, about three billion people on the planet were directly affected by lockdowns or social distancing measures.[38] Most companies did not have a contingency plan to respond to multiple breaks in the supply chain.[39] The scale of the problem became apparent when - starting from China and then covering more and more regions - tens of thousands of suppliers declared that they would not be able to fulfill their contracts due to the extraordinary events, invoking force majeure. The "empty runs" of cargo ships, whose regular cargoes were cancelled due to the loss of goods supply or demand, became more frequent. [40] At the beginning of April, the U.S. National Retail Federation reported a five-year low in ship freight (containers) for March 2020, although the slump was expected to accelerate. [41] Worldwide, passenger flights fell by about 90 percent. Major US airlines converted passenger cabins and removed seats to use the machines for cargo flights [42].

At the beginning of April, the World Trade Organization assumed in an optimistic scenario for 2020 that annual world trade would decline by 13 percent as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic, and by 32 percent in a pessimistic scenario. In the latter case, what happened in one year would have been what happened in the Great Depression in 1930 over a period of three years [43].

The serious effects of the pandemic-related disruption of global supply chains have become particularly evident in the medical device sector. Premier, one of the most important hospital procurement organizations in the United States, stated that it typically purchases up to twenty-four million N95 respirators (masks) per year for its members and healthcare organizations. However, in January and February 2020 alone, fifty-six million masks were used by members. At the end of March, Premier ordered 110 to 150 million more masks, while his member organizations, such as hospitals and nursing homes, indicated in a survey that they had little more than a week's supply. Demand for medical masks skyrocketed while global supply froze [44] COVID-19 test kits also experienced a chronic global supply shortage until China ramped up production in late March [45].

There are now also supply bottlenecks for other important goods. While general chaos prevails, department stores are piling up goods such as fashionable clothing for which demand has fallen into the basement. In a world of just-in-time production and time-based competition, inventories are usually reduced to a minimum to cut costs. Peter Hasenkamp, formerly responsible for supply chain strategy and involved in the purchase of Lucid Motors, an electric car start-up, put it this way: "It takes 2,500 parts to build a car - but one part is enough for it not to work". A shortage of COVID-19 test kits also occurred in part because swabs were missing. [46] By mid-April 2020, 81 percent of global manufacturing companies were suffering from supply shortages. By March, this was already reflected in a 44 percent increase in the number of contracts not fulfilled due to force majeure since the appearance of the coronavirus and a 38 percent increase in production stoppages. As a consequence, not only material bottlenecks but also a crisis of the flow of money and thus a huge "peak of financial risks" [47] have occurred.

The multinational corporations, which do not care about the utility value of their products as long as they can generate sufficient exchange value, experience the real economic effects of the rupture of supply chains through the resulting interruption of the value chains, i.e. the flows of exchange value. Even if the effects of the global disruption of the supply side will not be fully known for some time to come, the losses in value that companies have suffered are an indication of the crisis they are experiencing for the general accumulation of capital. Supply chain disruptions are nothing new, however: hundreds of companies, including companies such as Boeing, Nike, Hershey, Sun Microsystems and Cisco, have faced critical supply chain disruptions over the past decades. Studies based on about eight hundred cases have shown the average impact of such supply chain disruptions on companies. These include a "107 percent drop in operating income, 114 percent drop in sales, 93 percent drop in return on physical capital, 7 percent lower sales growth, 11 percent cost growth and 14 percent growth in inventory," with the negative effects typically lasting about two years. The same research shows that "companies suffering from supply chain disruptions experience between 33 and 40 percent lower stock returns compared to their industry benchmarks over a three-year period beginning one year before and ending two years after the date the disruption was announced. The volatility of the share price in the year after the interruption is also 13.5 percent higher compared to the volatility in the year before the interruption"[48].

Even if no one knows exactly how all this will affect in the current crisis, even in the case of a single company, capital has every reason to fear the consequences in terms of value creation and accumulation. Everywhere production is falling and unemployment and underemployment are rising. Companies are laying off their employees, which in the United States means that they are simply left to their own devices. Companies are now in a race to re-integrate their commodity chains as quickly as possible and maintain some semblance of stability in a seemingly all-encompassing crisis. Moreover, the disruption of the entire chain of metamorphoses involved in global labor arbitrage threatens to lead to the financial collapse of a global economy that is still characterized by stagnation, debt and financialization.

The so-called supply chain financing, which enables companies to use bank financing to defer payments to suppliers, is not necessarily the least of the weaknesses that have become apparent. According to the "Wall Street Journal", some companies have supply chain financing obligations that far exceed their reported net debt. These debts to suppliers are sold by other financial institutions in the form of short-term debt securities. For example, Credit Suisse owns bonds issued by major US companies such as Kellogg and General Mills. In the event of a general interruption in commodity chains, this complicated financial chain, which is itself the subject of speculation, is itself put into a crisis mode. This creates additional weaknesses in an already fragile financial system [49].

Part II follows in Z 124 (December 2020)

* First published under: https://monthlyreview.org/2020/06/01/covid-19-and-catastrophe-capitalism/. Translated and reprinted with kind permission of the authors and the editorial staff of Monthly Review. Translation: Philipp Piechura. Part II follows in Z 124 (December 2020).

[1] See here: John Bellamy Foster, Late Imperialism, in: Monthly Review 71, No. 3 (July-August 2019), p. 1-19; Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value, New York 2018.

2] On the relationship of global wage differences and commodity chains, see Intan Suwandi, Value Chains, New York 2019, pp. 32-33, 53-54, one of our joint contributions with R. Jamil Jonna was published as "Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism", in: Monthly Review 70, No. 10 (March 2019), pp. 1-24. On global land price differences, see also Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism, New York 2017, pp. 102-4.

3] Evan Tarver, Value Chain vs. Supply Chain, in: Investopedia, 24 March 2020.

4] Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Second Volume, MEW 24, p. 62.

5] Cf. Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital, Eine Studie über die jüngste Entwicklung des Kapitalismus, Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 71.

6] Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, Commodity Chains in the World Economy Prior to 1800, in: Review 10, No. 1 (1986), pp. 157-70.

7] Marx, Capital Volume 1, MEW 23, p. 529.

8] Karl Marx, Kapital, Volume 3, MEW 25, p. 825; Karl Marx, Kapital, Volume 1, MEW 23, p. 253.

9] Robert G. Wallace, Luke Bergmann, Richard Kock, Marius Gilbert, Lenny Hogerwerf, Rodrick Wallace, and Mollie Holmberg, The Dawn of Structural One Health: A New Science Tracking Disease Emergence Along Circuits of Capital, in: Social Science and Medicine 129 (2015), pp. 68-77; Robert G. Wallace, We Need a Structural One Health, in: Farming Pathogens, 3. August, 2012; J. Zinsstag, Convergence of EcoHealth and One Health, in: Ecohealth 9, No. 4 (2012), pp. 371-73; Victor Galaz, Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, and Christian Stein, The Political Economy of One Health, in: STEPS Centre, Political Economy of Knowledge and Policy Working Paper Series 2015.

10] Rodrick Wallace and others, Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection, Cham 2018), p. 2.

11] See István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, New York 1995.

12] Wallace and others, The Dawn of Structural One Health, op. cit. -72; Wallace, We Need a Structural One Health; Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace, COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital, in: Monthly Review 72, No. 1 (May 2020), p. 12; István Mészáros, Beyond Capital, op. cit.; Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Cambridge, MA 1985.

13] Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, New York 2016, pp. 60-61, 118, 120-21, 217-19, 236, 332; Rob Wallace, Notes on a Novel Coronavirus, in: Monthly Review Online, January 29, 2020; on the Lauderdale Paradox, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift, New York 2010, pp. 53-72.

14] See John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature, New York 2020, pp. 61-64, 172-204; Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, in: MEW Vol. 2, pp. 225 - 506; E. Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, New York 1911, pp. 31-33, 159-91; Richard Levins, Is Capitalism a Disease? in: Monthly Review 52, No. 4 (September 2000), pp. 8-33; see also Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness, New York 1983.

[15] Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, 53.

16] Ibid., 49.

17] Ibid., pp. 33-34.

[18] Ibid., p. 81.

19] Mathilde Paul et al., Practices Associated with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Spread in Traditional Poultry Marketing Chains, in: Acta Tropica 126 (2013), pp. 43-53.

20] Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, op. cit., p. 306; Wallace and others, The Dawn of Structural One Health, op. cit.

21] Wallace et al., COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital, op. cit.

[22] Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism, op. cit.

[23] Philip McMichael, Feeding the World, in: Socialist Register 2007; Coming to Terms with Nature, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, New York 2007, p. 180.

[24] Farshad Araghi, The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times, in: Hungry for Profit, edited by Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Fredrick H. Buttel, New York 2000, pp. 145-60.

25] Wallace et al., COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital, op. cit., p. 6; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London 2016); Mike Davis in interview with Mada Masr: Mike Davis on Pandemics, Super-Capitalism, and the Struggles of Tomorrow, in: Mada Masr, 30. March 2020.

[26] Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, op. cit. On the significance of the concepts of residuals and residues for materialistic dialectics, see J. D. Bernal, Dialectical Materialism, in: Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, edited by Hyman Levy et al., London 1934, p. 103-4; Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy, London 2016, p. 299-300.

27] Friedrich Engels, Dialectic of Nature, MEW 20, p. 452; Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, op. cit.

[28] Matt Leonard, What Procurement Managers Should Expect from a Bullwhip on Crack, in: Supply Chain Dive, 26. March 2020.

[29] On time-based competition and just-in-time production, see Boston Consulting Group, What Is Time-Based Competition?

30] Suwandi, Value Chains, op. cit., pp. 59-61; John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, New York 2016.

[31] Walden Bello, Coronavirus and the Death of 'Connectivity', in: Foreign Policy in Focus, 22. March 2010; Annual Growth in Global Air Traffic Passenger Demand from 2006 to 2020, in: Statista, accessed 22. April 22, 2020.

[32] Shannon K. O'Neil, How to Pandemic Proof Globalization, in: Foreign Affairs, April 1, 2020.

[33] Stefano Feltri, Why Coronavirus Triggered the First Global Supply Chain Crisis, in: Pro-Market, March 5, 2020.

[34] Elisabeth Braw, Blindsided on the Supply Side, in: Foreign Policy, March 4, 2020.

35] Francisco Betti and Per Kristian Hong, Coronavirus Is Disrupting Global Value Chains. Here's How Companies Can Respond, in: World Economic Forum, 27. February 2020; Elisabeth Braw, Blindsided on the Supply Side, op. cit.

36] Elisabeth Braw, Blindsided on the Supply Side, op. cit.; Thomas Y. Choi, Dale Rogers, and Bindiya Vakil, Coronavirus is a Wake-Up Call for Supply Chain Management, in: Harvard Business Review, 27. March 2020.

37] Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume Two, MEW 24, p. 62.

38] Nearly 3 Billion People Around the Globe Under COVID-19 Lockdowns, in: World Economic Forum, 26. March 2020.

[39] Lizzie O'Leary, The Modern Supply Chain Is Snapping, in: Atlantic, 19. March 2020.

40] Choi and others, Coronavirus is a Wake-Up Call for Supply Chain Management; Willy Shih, COVID-19 and Global Supply Chains: Watch Out for Bullwhip Effects, in: Forbes, 21. February 2020.

[41] Estimated March Imports Hit Five Year-Low, Declines Expected to Continue Amid Pandemic, in: National Retail Federation, April 7, 2020.

[42] Emma Cosgrove, FAA Offers Safety Guidance for Passenger Planes Ferrying Cargo, in: Supply Chain Dive, 17. April 17, 2020.

43] Trade Set to Plunge as COVID-19 Pandemic Upends Global Economy, in: World Trade Organization, 8 April 2020; S. L. Fuller, WTO: 2020 Trade Levels Could Rival the Great Depression, in: Supply Chain Dive, April 9, 2020.

44] Deborah Abrams Kaplan, Why Supply Chain Data is King in the Coronavirus Pandemic, in: Supply Chain Dive, April 7, 2020; O'Leary, The Modern Supply Chain Is Snapping; Chad P. Bown, COVID-19: Trump's Curbs on Exports of Medical Gear Put Americans and Others at Risk,in: Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 9, 2020; Shefali Kapadia, From Section 301 to COVID-19, in: Supply Chain Dive, 31. March 31, 2020.

45] Finbarr Bermingham, Sidney Leng, and Echo Xie, China Ramps Up COVID-19 Test Kit Exports Amid Global Shortage, as Domestic Demand Dries Up, in: South China Morning Post, 30. March 30, 2020.

46] Kapadia, From Section 301 to COVID-19; Companies' Supply Chains Vulnerable to Coronavirus Shocks, in: Financial Times, 8 March 2020; Bermingham, Leng, and Xie, in: China Ramps Up COVID-19 Test Kit Exports.

47] COVID-19: Where Is Your Supply Chain Disruption? In: Future of Sourcing, April 3, 2020.

[48] Thomas A. Foster, Risky Business: The True Cost of Supply-Side Disruptions, in: Supply Chain Brain, May 1, 2005; Kevin Hendricks and Vinod R. Singhal, The Effect of Supply Chain Disruptions on Long-Term Shareholder Profitability, and Share Price Volatility, June 2005, online at http://supplychainmagazine.fr.

49] Supply-Chain Finance is New Risk in Crisis, in: Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2020; CNE/CIS Trade Finance Survey 2017, in: BNE Intellinews, April 3, 2017.