Resistance in the Time of Cholera: Preliminary Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

In Gabriel García Márquez’s classic Love in the Time of Cholera, cholera is both literal and metaphorical. So too is COVID-19. Not the virus itself necessarily (though its complicated emergence and uneven spread and effects surely implicates our current system), but the massive and largely preventable or treatable harms of the virus that have thus far gone largely unprevented and untreated are the metaphor. Not merely a metaphor, of course. Not a metaphor in the sense of being immaterial or unreal. Metaphor in the sense of representing something much more than itself, symbolizing that which is beyond itself.

Metaphor. Representation. Microcosm. Heuristic. Epitome. Choose your label. The key point is that we must pay attention to the important reality that if we focus exclusively on the COVID-19 pandemic from a medical or public health perspective we are going to miss most of what we must learn from and through this crisis. Unlike the bacterial cholera, the viral COVID-19 is not as easily treatable or preventable, though with an eventual vaccine it can become more preventable. Cholera persists for the same systemic reasons why COVID-19 and the flu persist. This is what global capitalism’s demands of sadistic efficiency and perverse profit-seeking produce. What these infections share is their dialectical imbrication within the same system that contains the potential technical means to humanely resolve various harms, but profits off of their continuation.

COVID-19 is only on our radar such as it is because of the inability of our unjust, unequal, irrational, sadistic, and undemocratic political economic system to care for all the people who need and deserve care in this world. It is the match on an accelerant-soaked woodpile. We should be paying attention less to the match and more on the precursory conditions. And this isn’t a suggestion we don’t also pay attention and attempt to organize around the specifics of the harmful effects of COVID-19 and the systemic failures specifically related to the current crisis. To not prioritize these immediate concerns would be ethically unconscionable and politically unsound. People have immediate needs. This is instead a call, as I’ve written before in a different context, to focus on the forest and the trees.

What can resistance look like before we regain the option to gather in public together and protest and lead campaigns for the necessary radical reforms needed in the short-term? What can it look like given that we then must necessarily aim towards the more systemic, revolutionary changes needed to produce a democratic, egalitarian post-capitalist world – a genuinely democratic, socialist world?

Theodor Adorno wrote of the splinter in the eye that becomes a magnifying glass. Who has the splinters in their eyes right now (beyond the everyday splinters that all precarious workers, poor, and oppressed peoples have in their eyes)? The immunocompromised. The elderly. Those without insurance or are underinsured. The otherwise at-risk. The already-infected. Our healthcare workers. Logistics, factory, and warehouse workers.

These people are already facing the tip of the spear. For many, the spear has already pierced the skin. These are the best sites of contestation and struggle at the moment. For those in other industries who are not on the front lines of the current crisis, what can we do? We can prepare for the post-social distancing struggles. We can support those who are in need and in struggle today. And we can engage in a wider array of solidarity-building activities that reach those people who are waking up politically during this pandemic. These are our best tools—and they are tools that are not unique to this crisis.

Right now, basically all forms of conventional public resistance would do more harm than good—perhaps with the exception of strikes (or preferably, strong strike-threats that are more likely than ever to be acceded to without need to resort to an actual work stoppage). It is hard to imagine a more sympathetic group of workers at the moment, with greater power to inspire fundamental systemic change, than our front-line healthcare workers. So long as they are put at disproportionate risk, not wholly different from their pre-pandemic workplace experiences no doubt, they could and should demand the world.

This isn’t just about leveraging this crisis to win previously needed workplace safety reforms and benefit increases though, while “essential workers” have much more power that they have ever had before (or at least experiencing a greater awareness of their latent political-economic power). The fights that were on-going before the crisis remain. In the US, we have immigrants in concentration camps. We have a racialized mass incarceration system. Endless warfare remains endless. Most people are struggling week-to-week to make ends meet, often to no avail. We are also seeing states like Texas and Ohio prohibit abortion procedures under the guise of bans on non-essential medical procedures. Shove a fetus inside one of these wealthy white, straight male GOP lawmakers and see if they don’t think its removal is essential. We need to keep our eyes open and voices loud, however we can.

While there are many aspects of the variable and uneven government responses to stopping the spread of COVID-19 (“flattening the curve” through differentially enforced “social distancing” and “test, track, and trace” approaches) that are absolutely vital to avoiding a more massive death toll than anyone wants to think about; they should not be viewed as permanently inviolable rules that all should follow as long as they’re told. They are also not innocuous, even so long as we are participating. Even a necessary policy is not necessarily wholly virtuous. There are questions of privacy and data-profiteering to be concerned about. While we should always be skeptical of enhancements to the power of the national security state, it does seem like compliance is the lesser evil at the moment. That may change, if things get far worse and governments fail to response adequately and justly. I write this not be produce this outcome sooner. I write it so you will be prepared to think differently about the current public health demands being placed on billions of people around the world. No one must stay home to die when acting publicly can save lives.

That said, people won’t—or shouldn’t—long withstand the demand from the capitalist class and their ideological snake oil salespeople that people go to work and die for the short-term profits of corporations, nor will they stay home and suffer, perhaps to death. At least, I see enough reason to be optimistic that people will not tolerate either of these developments. People have been made—conditioned—to withstand much over many, many decades of capitalist violence and exploitation, suffering irrationally without any sense of what possible alternatives are achievable in practice. While it is possible people will “choose” to suffer more, I have hope that this time things will be different. Either genuine socialist demands are won, or capitalism should not be allowed to be resuscitated. Either the people are resuscitated and healed, made more whole than capitalism ever allowed before, or capitalism should be allowed to die—and a new order built on its ungrievable ashes.

We are in a paradoxical, indeed dialectical, moment (though, within capitalism, when aren’t we?). The response we need to this crisis—the twin-crisis of COVID-19 and capitalism—is organized, collective, mass democratic action. Yet this is precisely what good public health guideline compliance prohibits. Still, we must comply. Compliance today is solidarity. Even if that may change, today it is undeniably true. Stay home. Wash your hands. Use the technologies available to check-in on others. This is what we can do. But the contradictions of organizing within capitalism, the extreme difficulty in getting people to show up and stand out, are not particular to the COVID-19 pandemic. We cannot do what must be done, but too many people weren’t doing what was politically necessary two months ago either. This is something we must reflect on and be honest about. This is not an indictment. It is a call for political growth.

We can use technologies to do some things, but not what is fully-required in this moment. If you’re reading this right now and are thinking, “he is wrong and I have the answer,” please speak up. We need questions and critique as ever before, but we also need answers and alternatives perhaps more than ever before. At least as much as before.

Of course, it is a cruel irony that for many people for whom work is a major time and energy occupier during “normal” times, for whom work is the primary barrier to more fully committed organizing and activist, that these people who have more time to spend on political activities are now required to stay home. I know for many people there is no irony at all; either their work responsibilities have remained unchanged (or increased) or their care and home labor obligations have increased in precise quantity to the amount their waged work requirements have diminished. For many, both sides have increased. This is not a cruel irony. It is, simply, a cruelty.

However, the cruelest irony is that we continue to live in a global society that could, actually quite easily provide for all the basic needs, and possibly beyond, for all people on this planet, and yet we are compelled to live within a system that prevents that from becoming a reality; a system that actively undermines that possibility at nearly every turn.

Postscript

I was wrong several weeks ago when I compared COVID-19 to the flu (though at that time the data was so sketchy and testing so incomplete, the 1% morality rate seemed like an exaggeration. Globally, today the percentage is closer to .5%, which is still roughly five times higher than the flu). When I said what I said, it was not to diminish the suffering or severity of COVID-19, but a somewhat misguided attempt to highlight just how many people die from the flu every year. Compare the typical response and outrage to annual flu death to that of COVID-19, and you would be left with the sad truth that no one fucking cares if people die from the flu, apparently. COVID-19 is both more contagious and deadly, but at some point we should probably have a conversation about why so many people die unnecessarily from the flu….

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University and also teaches as an adjunct professor at Florida International University. He is a contributing editor for the Hampton Institute and founding curator of  LeftHooked, a monthly socialist media aggregator and review powered by the Hampton Institute. Bryant is also the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power. He is the co-editor (with Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; Haymarket 2020), and author of “Dialectical Ends and Beginning: Why Barbarism at the End of Capitalism Means Barbarism Beyond Capitalism” in Postcapitalist Futures: Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope (eds. Adam Fishwick and Nicholas Kiersey, forthcoming with Pluto Press).

Commentary on the Concept of Enlightenment

By Spenser Rapone

Despite years of supposed progress, both technological and social, we remain slaves to capital, subjected to a dull, daily routine within a prescribed division of labor. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment outlines how the desire to "enlighten" human beings merely reproduced domination and oppression, leading to our current alienated state. Contextualizing their work specifically, its dour tone of course reflects that of its publication in 1947; nonetheless, I insist that it remains relevant, given the political precipice we currently find ourselves. Regarding the first chapter, of which I examine in this piece, the authors aspire to turn enlightenment on its head, conceptualizing a critical enlightenment that rejects absolute power and domination. [1] Of course, enlightenment remains a rather nebulous concept. To be enlightened, at face value, seems to conjure up an image of self-actualized thought. The Enlightenment, as we know it from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, sought the progress of our collective human existence. Yet, at what cost do we seek progress? Herein lies Horkheimer's and Adorno's focus. While enlightenment sought to assert the human race as masters of our domain, by the 1940s, "the wholly enlightened earth [was] radiant with triumphant calamity." [2] Specifically, the 20th century had brought about two devastating world wars, the rise of fascism, and widespread destitution and alienation. How did the desire for an enlightened human race produce such barbarism?

Adorno and Horkheimer's work demonstrates how the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, et al. were in many ways the logical conclusion of enlightenment thought. They did not exist as an aberration, but were in the spirit of other oppressive enlightenment figures and regimes (when one takes into account the genocidal impulses of the British Empire in India, or the same of the United States with regards to indigenous peoples, this picture becomes much more clear). Francis Bacon's edict of "knowledge is power" is far more than a pithy musing; Horkheimer and Adorno insist that when it comes to knowledge and power, the two are synonymous, within the Baconian framework. [3] Thus, enlightenment did not seek out knowledge for the sake of knowledge; knowledge was only useful insofar as its utility in the pursuit of power. In other words, knowledge became the object of instrumental reason; that is, knowledge was used to achieve a certain end, in this case, power. [4] Resultantly, knowledge itself existed as a crude, empirical framework to arrange, observe, and dominate objects; inevitably, this process further entrenched the capitalist mode of production. [5] Yet, the enlightenment's regressive tendencies under the guise of human progress, did not appear out of thin air; it traces its lineage to and draws from the various mythologies of the western canon.

More than anything else, I seek to emphasize that both Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment as a warning against the cult of "progress." In other words, we ought to see to it that in the process of liberating ourselves from the shackles of our miserable existence, we do not lose sight of what it means to truly carry out an emancipatory movement. Enlightenment merely perpetuated myth under a veneer of scientism and technocratic impulses, existing as manipulator of things as dictator exists as manipulator of human beings. [6] Enlightenment was not a movement in the spirit of liberty, but in the spirit of control, domination, and sovereignty. I claim that the most critical line of this opening chapter lies in the assertion that "a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify." [7] An authentic emancipatory movement must not fall prey to instrumental reason; revolutionary thought must both liberate but also recognize the inherent value of thought itself.

Although Dialectic of Enlightenment was published nearly 70 years ago, many of its concepts, particularly the fetishization of technological advancement, can be examined in the current day. Let us take a brief foray into Silicon Valley, where progress narratives and TED Talk "solutions" serve as an idol to which lanyard dicks such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many others, bow down. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that the maxim of western civilization lies with Spinoza's claim that virtue is ultimately motivated by self-preservation. [8] While self-preservation itself is not irrational, it becomes profoundly alienating when the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois division of labor organizes society. [9] Peter Thiel believes that he can achieve permanent self-preservation, essentially immortality, through the use of blood transfusions from the youth. [10] A terrifying prospect, his absurd proposal has its origin in the advancement of technology and empiricist, "scientific" thought.

The "massive rejuvenating effect" that Thiel desires at the expense of human beings also contains another implication: that the lives of the ruling class, especially those of the so-called "innovator" class, hold more value than those of the poor. [11] Is this not the ultimate "reification of human beings in factory and office?" [12] Thiel's dystopic, obscene vision carries with it the legacy of eugenicist, fascistic thought. Yet, in a world where Thiel vehemently endorsed the likes of Donald Trump, [13] further confirming the Republican Party's status as a white ethno-nationalist cabal, the Democratic Party, through propping up Hillary Clinton, doubled-down on neoliberalism in the face of neofascism. Thus, in keeping with the enlightenment traditions of the guiding star of trusting a lesser evil, [14] the American political system failed, and continues to fail, to produce an alternative. Progressivism, positivism, and technocracy rule the day in late stage capitalist society. Much like how the United States recruited Nazi scientists in the postwar period, valuing scientific "progress" over any sort of authentic political commitment to antifascism, so too do current establishment political figures and parties value technological efficiency over human empowerment.

The concept of intellectual thought, in capitalist society, exists as a mythological construct. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that we are subjected to an "autocratic intellect," one which has standardized what it means to be an intellectual itself. [15] Here, Gramsci's analysis of the intellectual subject must be consulted. Horkheimer and Adorno speak of how the aforementioned standardization produces a supposed cleavage between sensuous, lived experience, vis-à-vis more conceptual, abstract thought. [16] Yet, as Gramsci notes, "[a]ll men are intellectuals, one could therefore say; but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals." [17] Thus, capitalist society establishes tenured professors, technological innovators, and various other positions of authority of having sole access to the intellectual function. This, of course, is elitism at its finest.

A factory worker's labor requires just as much intellectual thought as physical exertion. Gramsci insists that "homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens," [18] meaning man-the-maker and man-the-thinker exists as one complete being. We can see then the ruling class's domination persists in large part due to the manufactured separation of intellectual thought from the wretched of the earth. The "new form of blindness" exhibited by the working class [19] manifests itself through widespread anti-intellectualism, racism driven by economic insecurity, et al. Of course, while many of the conservative punditry takes pride in such behavior, the liberal solution amounts to sanctimonious moralizing that only further entrenches widespread anxiety wrought by social immobility. Gramsci's proposition of the organic intellectual who arises through lived experience, organization, and critical pedagogy offers a compelling solution to the stagnation of mass movements which desire social change. [20] Indeed, as the existing society asserts its dominance further, workers resultantly become even more so powerless to overcome its regressive function. [21] However, there always remains even the slightest glimmer of hope to reverse the cycle of oppression, and one of the first steps can be found in redefining what constitutes an intellectual, through both thought and action, joined together as one.

Enlightenment, that notion of the progressive advancement of human thought, to this day bends to the whim of the ruling class. Yet, despite the underlying pessimism to their work, both Horkheimer and Adorno admit that all is not lost, even with the concept of enlightenment itself; its ideal of human emancipation can still be realized, only if we completely and unabashedly reject the principle of blind power. [22] In doing so, not only would we abolish enlightenment's empiricist cruelty and technocratic impulses, but we would then break away with its mythological tendencies, unlike the past 300 years, which has only served to replace one mythology with another. I believe that there is a meta-narrative present in this text, most readily accessible in one of the closing statements of the first chapter. Horkheimer and Adorno observe that the bourgeois economy has grown so powerful that ruling elites alone cannot maintain its function; in fact, "all human beings are needed" to ensure its continuation. [23] Indeed, the blindness wrought by late stage capitalism leads to some of the most downtrodden elements of our current society complicit in their own exploitation and oppression, sometimes enthusiastically so. Yet, herein lies the revolutionary subtext, exemplified by that simple line of thought, "all people are needed." The moment that the masses of people stir from their false consciousness and channel their desires towards a mass movement, the cycle of oppression can be broken. Yes, enlightenment has produced an "outright deception of the masses." [24] But, in requiring all people for its continuation, we once again affirm the quintessential adage of all emancipatory movements: power lies with the people. Horkheimer and Adorno provide us with hope, for while the attempt to enlighten human beings produced some of the darkest moments of our history, the people, collectively, still have within them the power to bring about a liberated world.

Notes

[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xviii.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid., 2.

[4] Curtis Bowman, Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment . http://www.othervoices.org/1.1/cubowman/siren.php .

[5] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 3.

[6] Ibid., 6.

[7] Ibid., 33.

[8] Ibid., 22.

[9] Ibid., 23.

[10] J.K. Trotter, "What Does Peter Thiel Want?" Gawker. http://gawker.com/what-does-peter-thiel-want-1784039918#_ga=1.142753974.240915375.1460756871 .

[11] Ibid.

[12] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 23.

[13] Dan Primack, "Peter Thiel Gives Full-Throated Endorsement of Donald Trump," Fortune. http://fortune.com/2016/07/21/peter-thiel-gives-full-throated-endorsement-of-donald-trump/ .

[14] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 24.

[15] Ibid., 28.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 9.

[18] Ibid., 9.

[19] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 28.

[20] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 10.

[21] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 29.

[22] Ibid., 33.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 34.