Live music venues and arts hubs will suffer, while the corporate sector is poised to grow

The economic impacts of coronavirus are set to disproportionately impact the most vulnerable, and there’s a disturbing potential for corporate expansion at the cost of small businesses of high social value.

Too-big-to-fail institutions will be the primary beneficiaries of government hand-outs and interventions, while small businesses and the inner-city community hubs which are maintained by the small, independent venues, bars, cafes, restaurants, clothing and other stores, are already taking such a hit that it’s anyone’s guess what these areas will look like in a few months time.

In most major Western cities such businesses were barely surviving anyway with an inflated real estate sector, incomes crushed by debt impacting spending, streaming, online shopping and delivery services turning us into slack home-bodies, government regulatory and tax regimes targeted to make life hard for small business and easy for their multinational competitors, among other issues.

Big institutions will be able to ride out the storm, even those most exposed like airlines will certainly not be allowed to collapse, with forthcoming tax-payer funded support. Most or all of the major multinationals and financial institutions will shrink in the interim in absolute terms, but they will grow in relative terms, and they certainly won’t vanish as will many of the small businesses that give our cities life if these do not receive critical federal support.

In the recovery phase the individuals with modest means who constitute the small businesses will not be able to deploy funds and resources rapidly enough to re-establish themselves. Corporations will, and they will seize this advantage.

In Anglo-sphere nations, where the prerogative of landlords to stubbornly cling to inflated rents is upheld even in the face of mass vacancies, governments will, as it is already abundantly clear, do nothing to preserve and protect small business and social districts from being gutted.

The slow disappearance of significant social spaces was an issue before coronavirus. Many critics have posited that their disappearance is a major factor in the successful rolling back of democracy by international finance and corporations.

Corner Hotel

By reducing an atmosphere of society and community, our democratic instincts have been blunted, helped along by a range of factors from the tech sector rolling out more and more services catered to never leaving your house, to a real estate sector that has lost all sense of the value of their properties in current economic conditions for middle and working class people.

Of course, we share part of the blame, through passive acceptance of this status quo, to our unbridled take-up of all the questionable products and services coming out of the tech sector.

Night-life and arts and social hubs in great cities are something corporations know they could never really get a piece of. Niche, dirty, boundary-pushing, experimental, quirky – not a marketing team on Earth could counterfeit the qualities that make up the independent social hubs of great cities.

So every night out spending money at a great restaurant, bar or strange venue, is a night less spent on corporations. Any money you might spend on food or drink could be spent at home, but at home you’ll be consuming corporate entertainment, browsing online stores, using “social” media – all preferable to being out actually socialising and spending money at a small business, as far as the regimes of neoliberal organisation are concerned.

I’m afraid this crisis is going to seriously advance the assault on community and small business by governments and corporations that has been underway for decades. I’m not saying, and I do not believe coronavirus was deliberately unleashed upon the world by these interests for this purpose, and not because I don’t think they’re not capable of something this abominable, but because I think it would be seen as too risky and unpredictable.

But I do believe the potential for exploitation of this disaster by governments and corporations will already have been sensed: opportunity to further drive down wages, bring more of the workforce under the employ of multinationals, reduce the small business share of economy, increase the debt burden and thus power over the people, increase desperation and dependency on the status quo, and broadly continue the assault on what’s left of community and the social fabric.

Of course, none of this is new, coronavirus may just accelerate these trends. When are we going to push back?

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.