Calling On Action: A Review of Henry Giroux's 'Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis'

By Yanis Iqbal

Henry Giroux’s new book “Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis”, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, is an informed, impassioned and insightful response to the politico-economic conjuncture in which we are living. Organized into four sections, the book discusses a variety of things: the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic for neoliberalism, the phenomenon of Trumpism, the continued relevance of fascism, and the role of education in bringing about a new world. Operating with a whole network of organically interpenetrating concepts, Giroux does not content himself with isolated terms and one-sided definitions. He is always trying to integrate the totality of particular points and phases in a dynamic movement without suppressing the existential vitality of the individual elements. It is this internal characteristic of the book which makes it a worthwhile read.

Pandemic Pedagogy

Pandemic pedagogy is one of the central themes of the book. It serves as a concentrated expression of the multiple modalities through which neoliberalism has created a reactionary ideological configuration to stabilize pandemic profiteering. Giroux writes: “Pandemic pedagogy is the enemy of critical pedagogy because it is wedded to reproducing a debased civic culture while renouncing democratic social and political relations. It is a pedagogy for which power functions in the cultural sphere to depoliticize people while replacing democratic forms of solidarity with a social order invested in ultra-nationalism, social atomization, hyper-masculinity, a war culture, and an unbridled individualism”. Pandemic pedagogy emerges directly from the various ways in which the pandemic has mapped onto existing inequalities and social injuries plaguing the American society.

Unlike liberals who consider the pandemic as a “great equalizer”, Giroux says that “Its disproportionate effects on the poor and vulnerable, especially black and brown communities, pointed to the widening chasm between the rich and powerful wealthy few and the vulnerable and precarious majority. The inequities that this crisis revealed made clear how disasters unfold through relations of power, making it easier to challenge the myth that major catastrophes such as pandemics that affect everyone equally.”

According to Giroux, the necropolitical reality of neoliberalism is concealed through the deliberate individualization of social problems: “As a politics of control, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands, do not sit on toilet seats, and practice social distancing, as a way to contain the pandemic. In this instance, we learned how to be safe while being depoliticized, or uninformed about the role that capitalist economies play in producing a range of ideological viruses that gut the social welfare state and public health systems, if not resistance itself”. Pandemic pedagogy is present at every level of society and has morphed into a seemingly unshakeable “common sense”. An example of this “common sense” is the discourse on pandemic education which, as Giroux says, “is dominated by a technocratic rationality obsessed with methodological considerations regarding online teaching and learning.”

Afraid that deteriorating material conditions would increase the appeal of socialist politics and strengthen the class cohesion of the proletariat, pandemic pedagogy uses conservative ideological tools to discursively decompose class. Trumpism is an example of such a tool wielded by the ruling class to continue to maintain a gap between the objective structure of class and its self-conscious subjective awareness among the people belonging to that class.

Trumpism

Giroux conducts the analysis of Trumpism in two steps. First, he posits that Trumpism is integrally interlinked to neoliberal capitalism. While reflecting on the movement of the pandemic through the medium of neoliberal social relations of production, Giroux writes: “neoliberalism could not be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities. Neoliberal capitalism created through its destruction of the economy, environment, education, and public healthcare a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.”

The dense feeling of alienation engendered by the intensifying capitalist crisis provides the soil on which Trumpism grows. As the distinction between consumers and citizens is increasingly blurred by the marketization of each sphere of life, people become culturally deracinated. In a situation like this, Trumpism promised to supply these alienated masses with an identitarian anchorage, a cultural fixity witch which they can associate themselves. Insofar as Trumpism aims to satiate the emotive needs of its support base, it is based on irrationalism. Giroux delineates how such irrationalism manifests itself in Trump’s everyday performative politics: “Trump’s…language exhibited a mounting compulsion and hyper-immediacy that flattened out and vulgarized any viable notion of communication…Trump employed a pandemic pedagogy in which language became unmoored from critical reason, informed debate, and the weight of scientific evidence. Instead, it was tied to pageantry, political theater, and the consolidation of power, as well as the dictates of violence.”

Situating Trump’s politics within a wider panorama of historical processes allows us to confront it not as an individual problem but rather as a symptom of a sick society. As Giroux writes, “Cruelty is not something that can be simply personalized in the figure of Donald Trump. Neoliberalism produces its own forms of institutional cruelty through its austerity measures, its decimation of the welfare state, and its support for racialized mass incarceration.” Insofar that Trump is enmeshed in the structural conditions generated by neoliberalism, his authoritarian politics can neither be eliminated through the simple transfer of executive and legislative power to a thoroughly corrupt and corporate Democratic leadership nor through an impeachment process. Commenting on the latter, Giroux says: “The impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage mostly treated Trump’s crimes not as symptoms of a history of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism, but as the failings of individual character and a personal breach of constitutional law.”

To prevent people like Trump from capturing power, we need to build robust movements capable of uprooting the conditions which make people vulnerable to the propaganda of demagogic leaders. Giroux is forthright in acknowledging this: “the criminogenic response to the crisis on the part of the Trump administration should become a call to arms, if not a model on a global level, for a massive international protest movement that moves beyond the ritual of trying Trump and other authoritarian politicians for an abuse of power, however justified. Instead, such a movement should become a call to put on trial neoliberal capitalism while fighting for structural and ideological changes that will usher in a radical and socialist democracy worthy of the struggle.”

Second, Giroux frames Trumpism within the problematic of fascism. It is important to note that Giroux does not interpret fascism in the narrow way of the setting up of a police state. Instead, he perceives it as “a particular response to a range of capitalist crises that include the rise of massive inequality, a culture of fear, precarious employment, ruthless austerity policies that destroy the social contract, the rise of the carceral state, and the erosion of white privilege, among other issues.” Since fascism is invariably tied to specific social conditions, it will not be homologous to the state structures established in interwar Italy and post-WWII Germany. Giroux is spot-on here: “Fascism does not disappear because it does not surface as a mirror image of the past. Fascism is not static and the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms…comparisons to the Nazi past withered in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books”.

Another important feature of Giroux’s conception of fascism is its dynamic nature. He writes: “Fascism is often an incoherent set of assumptions combined with anti-intellectualism, ultra-nationalism, and a demonizing rhetoric aimed at a group singled out as different and undeserving of human rights…Fascism does not operate according to an inflexible script. On the contrary, it is adaptive, and its mobilizing furors are mediated through local symbols, as it normalizes itself through a country’s customs and daily rituals”. This argument resembles Jairus Banaji’s assertion that “fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own.”

When the aforementioned two aspects of Giroux’s analysis of Trumpism are combined, we are presented with the concept of “neoliberal fascism” - “a new political formation…in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of authoritarian states.” Neoliberal fascism is not the apogee of an empty struggle between authoritarianism and democratic ideals. Rather, it is a “fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible.” With this statement, Giroux delves into an incisive study of the deep impacts of neoliberal fascism on agency.

Agency and Hope

Agency, defined as conscious, goal-directed activity, is heavily impacted by neoliberal fascism. Agency is the condition for every struggle and hope is a prerequisite of agency. With the arrival of neoliberal fascism, “the connections between democracy and education wither, hope becomes the enemy of agency, and agency is reduced to learning how to survive rather than working to improve the conditions that bear down on one’s life and society in general.” The overwhelming of hope by “the sheer task of survival” is elaborated in the book “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously”, where Brad Evans and Julian Reid develop the new category of resilience to capture the broad contours of neoliberal asociality and passivity. Resilience, the authors say, is not about overcoming or resolving a crisis but about the ways and means of coming to terms with it. They argue that resilience teaches us to “live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe.”

The re-molding of agency and loss of hope is fundamentally aided by ignorance which renders us incapable of problematizing our structural conditionedness and piercing through the open-ended nature of history. According to Giroux, “Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. Ignorance has become the organizing principle of a pandemic pedagogy that collapses fact and fantasy, truth and lies, evidence and opinion.” Ignore needs to be combated by the constant utilization of history which will make it possible to de-naturalize hierarchies and intensely engage in a movement for social justice. Whenever history is used as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, as a space for opening up to a contextualized understanding of world and as a lens to re-think and constantly evolve our own views, a new politics of memory is developed. Memory becomes an act of moral witnessing and helps to counter what Giroux calls the “bankrupt white supremacist notion of nostalgia that celebrated the most regressive moments in U.S. history.”

Need for Action

Throughout his book, Giroux refers to the imperative need for concrete action. He is not satisfied with a mere shift in consciousness or an educative endeavor aimed at empty verbosity. He is unfailingly dedicated to the construction of a movement capable of fighting against the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses.

In an extremely important passage, Giroux writes: “I do not want to suggest…that the strength of argument can change the political balance of power exclusively through an appeal to interpretation, rationality, and the force of dialogue… Ideas gain their merit, in part, through the institutions that produce them, and as such merit the importance of recognizing that the knowledge/power/agency connection is both a battle over ideas as well as over cultural apparatuses and institutions, and the power relations that create them…Matters of critique now merge with the imperative of actions bringing together not merely critical ideas and balanced judgment, but theory and informed action.”

 A major takeaway from Giroux’s book is that the politico-strategic logic of hegemony should occupy a central position in socialist organizing. Mere academicism is totally incapable of overthrowing the bourgeois state. What is needed is the constant re-interpretation of the world in the context of struggles. Whether this re-interpretation is correct or not is decided from the practical consequences that might conceivably result from that intellectual conception. In sum, knowledge and pedagogy need to be dialectically located in the ecology of struggle where they get endlessly embodied in concrete consequences and thus, help in consolidating the dynamic of action and reflection in conversation with each other. Giroux’s book is an example of precisely that kind of knowledge-in-struggle which is singularly committed to the goal of socialism.

How the Poor Continue to Die

By Kevin Van Meter

Republished from The Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Humanity has entered a period “where every day people are dying among strangers.”[1]  

Daily life itself has become “strange” and isolating as social distancing and quarantine measures are being lifted, then reenacted.  Federal troops operating as secret police in an attempt to occupy American cities, are repelled by protestors and the populace.  News cycles shriek and squall with nearly every pontification from the political class as they continue to carry out their “sacred mission,” which in recent memory is accompanied by squealing ineptitude in regard to improving the actual conditions of life.  Or, maybe they are not inept.  Months ago, at the onset of the pandemic, pundits and politicians had already declared that testing, treatments, and vaccines would not be offered to everyone.    

A pervasive level of violence, of frivolous intrusions into the routine behaviors of people of color, of a cruel disgust directed toward unhoused and poor peoples, of an impulsive need to regulate the expressions of those outside the gender binary, of a paranoid animosity toward immigrants and “antifa” and the “other” is being expressed by a particular sector of the population.  This sector – overwhelmingly good Christians, white, and middle-class – have been expressing this violence to such an extent that everyday life has been saturated by it.  For us “others” it is omnipresent, for many “others” it has been this way for five hundred years.  Yet, the poor continue to die, often “among strangers.”                      

In 1929 George Orwell was down and out in Paris and witness to the goings-on at a hospital that served the poor.  Seventeen years later he drew on his initial observations along with scribbled notes to complete the article “How the Poor Die.”  These words, published during the aftermath of the second World War, deserve our full attention in this moment: “However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.”[2]  Then, as now, the gallant efforts of medical personnel, front-line and essential workers are often performed with kindness and efficiency, and with haste.  Nonetheless, the poor died in 1929 and 1946 in the ways they have continued to die, have always died.  In hospitals amongst strangers and in the streets, shanty towns and derelict apartments, in asylums and prisons, reservations and Bantustans. And if at all possible, in these same places, amongst relations, chosen as well as blood.    

Currently the cruelty of COVID-19 is compounded not just by social isolation but the realization that those who will die from this disease will do so among strangers.  On ventilators, in isolation units, in nursing homes, without the comfort of loved ones or human touch.  If the projections are correct, even with the recommended medical and social interventions, the dead will overwhelm the living.  It is likely that you, the humble reader, will be called upon to bury the departed, deceased, dead.        

As the dead overwhelm the living, dead labor will attempt to overcome living labor. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” Karl Marx notoriously quipped, “and lives the more, and more labour it sucks.”[3]  What has become clear to large swaths of the populace, not just devotees to hundred and fifty year old texts, is that value and wealth in a capitalist society (the portion consumed in production and reproduction is dead labor) are produced only through the efforts and expended capacities of the working-class (which is living labor).  As Marx offered, “We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which [they] set in motion whenever [they produce] a use-value of any kind.”[4]  And the great promise of Marx, of all revolutionaries, is that we will produce ‘goods and services’ useful to human beings in accordance with their needs and all of our abilities collectively.   

An economic system hell bent on endless growth has seemingly been replaced, possibly only temporarily, by shortsighted kleptocracy.  Extending well beyond the current administration, bourgeois society has embraced law breaking for themselves and harsh, hard-hearted punishment of the poor for minor property and drug “crimes.”  While this has always been, the contemporary American political class now flaunts its wrongdoings in full view.  With the endless accumulation of capital cast aside for the immediate acquisition of wealth, the imposition of work has become more malicious.  Front-line and essential workers and those in the service industry are being forced back to work at the threat of being destitute, with mass evictions looming.  The tiny deaths of exhaustion and daily injury have been replaced by the alternating certainty of death by starvation or death by pandemic.  Major retailers call them “heroes” as they take away their hazard pay.  And even school children, the sacrificial but essential workers of the future, are being sent back to their desks as home instruction and homework has not been sufficiently disciplinary.  All of this is evident with the return of a slogan, a capitalist maxim: Arbeit macht frei, or work will set you free. 

Pandemic and poverty is becoming plague and privation; those who are penniless will soon face famine. Without work there are no wages, without wages there are few ways to obtain the means of survival, the means of reproducing life itself.  Nevertheless, social reproduction is essential, and the work required – often unwaged, racialized, and gendered – is indispensable.  Since workers expending labor-power in the production process is how capitalism produces value, social reproduction is central to the capitalist mode of production.  As a result, the worksite where this is produced has become of key interest to the bourgeoisie.  Feminist scholar Silvia Federici noted this in the historical record: “The body, then, came to the foreground of social policies because it appeared not only as a beast inert to the stimuli of work, but also as the container of labor-power, a means of production, the primary work-machine.”[5]  The body as machine has been a central metaphor of our capitalist society, now the cogs are being discarded willy-nilly with automation and information computational processes that require fewer and fewer workers.  

Of the numerous realities the pandemic has uncovered, few are as stark as how front-line, essential, service industry workers are not just seen as replaceable but as expendable.  And many are out of work.  When a member of the working-class is without wages and the paltry handouts from the government vanish, reproduction of one’s biological functions and faculties are still required.  Working in front-line, essential, service industries is work as is seeking to obtain work in such sectors.  Working to reproduce one’s own capacities is work as is working without a wage to reproduce waged workers along with the “nonwaged, underwaged, not-yet waged, and no-longer waged,” to quote a contemporary feminist scholar.[6]  Hence, all of life has become work, with its simultaneous, and seemingly contradictory absence and total permeation.  Returning to Marx again:      

“the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing it services.  Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of [their] whole life, and that therefore all [their] disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”[7]  

Our whole lives have been subsumed by capitalism, and now, for far too many of our fellow human beings, death has become just as alienating.  

* * *

In collective, common, liberatory moments of ‘great kindness and efficiency,’ ‘amongst relations, chosen as well as blood,’ we are given a glimpse of “a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”[8]  However, the means of communication, mutual aid, and social relations required to build such a paradise are often destabilize by the very forces that should be constructing them.  

Another underling reality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic is final confirmation that the Left in the United States has been historically defeated, the working-class decomposed.  Although generalized austerity, violent repression, mass incarceration, direct attacks on unions and community-based organizations, restructuring of everyday life toward neoliberal and individualistic ends, culture wars, drug wars, endless wars against the populace are partially to blame.  But the Left must take responsibility for its internal operational failures, nonsensical squabbles, unprincipled and self-servingly middle-class politics.  This has left working-class and poor people to their own defenses, with limited material resources, against the pandemic and unfolding crises.  In effect, the poor continue to die in part due to this ineptitude, purity politics, and too often defenses of middle-class ideals and irrelevant academic ideas.  

To define such a sector of the body politic would take many more words than can be allotted here.  Simply put, this includes those who are “practically minded” members of the Democratic Party establishment all the way leftward to include some of the newly articulated Democratic Socialist alternatives, along with much of organized labor, the non-profit sector, as well as do-gooders and providers of social services.  Where the formal Left begins and the bureaucrats, bourgeoisie, social workers, and middle managers of our misery end is unclear, as they are often indistinguishable and hence what that follows is imprecise.  Beyond the established Left there are ongoing mutual aid efforts, wildcat and rent strikes, and uprisings amongst everyday people, often led by young Black insurgents.  These radical, revolutionary, and daring, spontaneous but still organized, abolitionists, anti-capitalists, and commoners are outside of the formal body politic.

Defensive and self-serving reactions in the guise of “What about small landlords?” and “What about family owned businesses?” have erupted on the Left in response to calls for rent strikes, paid sick leave, hazard differentials, and a little workplace democracy with the same veracity as “What about good cops?” and “Don’t all lives matter?” on the right.  Universal demands for income, healthcare, and housing seemingly require an addendum that first we must distinguish between who are the deserving and who are the undeserving poor.  Then, typed into the social media fields of too many who know better: “I support unions but just not at my business or workplace,” “I support tenants’ rights but just not my tenants,” “I support Bernie but what about these horrible ‘__________.’”  While I am paraphrasing, we will get to those who fill these blanks shortly.  Since we have addressed how the middle-class Left and the bourgeoisie defends itself against the rabble informally, we must look at their formal practices.                 

Saving “establishments,” from restaurant chains to retail stores, “public infrastructure” from universities to the library and post office, “private associations” from business improvement districts and landlord lobbying groups to social service non-profits, as well as the facades of representative democracy and private property, are being managed by grinning neoliberal “little Eichmann’s.”  Or, possibly worse, those who wish they were.  Deep austerity measures have been instituted by and throughout these establishments, infrastructures, and associations while money flowing into them has been accumulated by bureaucracies impervious to worker or citizen demands.  

All of life has become work, and to manage this all of life has been infected by bureaucracy.  What is bureaucracy and why is it so pervasive?  Member of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, Claude Lefort, has an answer: “one overlooks the fact that in one and the same movement the bureaucracy establishes itself at the heart of social life and presents itself as an end, that it responds to a technical need and subordinates it to the imperative of power.”[9] Bureaucracies, even progressive and liberal ones, have sought to silence working-class voices: in social services they sought to silence those of unemployed people and welfare recipients, in trade unions expressions of working-class self-activity, political parties those of the masses, universities those of faculty and student shared governance, corporations those of workers initiatives and demands, healthcare those of the ill and infirm, landlords those of their tenants, the legal system and prisons those of prisoners, and then there are others.  At the moment you can hear bureaucrats mumbling out of the side of their mouths, a proverb: “we have effectively silenced them in life, how dare they not be silent in death.”              

Moreover, the desperate need to feel “right” and “moral” is cover for those who ignore structural inequalities and stark differentials of power that exist and are now amplified in our society.  Far worse, after five hundred years of struggle against capitalism and the state most of the Left is willfully ignorant how social change occurs.  Nearly immeasurable personal choices and consumerist acts – such as voting, buying local, eating vegan or organic, riding bikes, being sustainable or peaceful or mindful or, which is by far the worst, conscious – are held as the apex of political action.  Or, maybe by appealing to the “better natures” of bosses and landlords, billionaires and politicians or “speaking truth to power,” things will progress, improve, change.  Worst still, if our arguments are right and true, clear and concise, we will win in the free marketplace of ideas.  And finally, as a great comedic mind once offered, “rights are the last resort of a [person] with no argument” and the Left’s call for “rights” ignore how often they are suspended in times of crisis or have never existed for large swaths of the planet’s populace.  This should be absolutely apparent to anyone who has been on the streets of a supposedly liberal Pacific Northwest city over the past few weeks, or has simply been observing.  Now, that we have considered how the Left views how the actual lives and deaths of working-class and poor peoples as externalities in formal ways, the maliciousness of their informal practices should be noted too.  

A self-serving and moralistic politics has dominated the Left as of late, where faux outrage meant to condemn the personal lifestyles and decisions of the target while holding one’s own personal lifestyles and decisions as morally superior.  Meaning, the illusion of choice and free will results in a working-class bartender being scolded by their middle-class customer, who is in the midst of guzzling down another twenty-dollar cocktail, for taking a cheaper Uber / Lyft home after a twelve hour shift rather than the more expensive local cab company.  Notions of self-care, GoFundMe campaigns for medical bills, Buzzfeed articles and similar lists given as commandments – “20 Books You Must Read this Year,” “6 ways to be antiracist, because being ‘not racist’ isn’t enough” – are individual solutions, often impossible ones, to what are social problems.  These developments are often coupled with a crises of representation and measure along with the disappearance of class as an operating category.  ‘Interlocking oppressions’ and ‘identity’ were to augment and complement class as “new measures of oppression and inequality,” to use the apt words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, rather than replace it.[10]  Or, in fact, it is the middle-class assumptions of the contemporary Left and radical forces that have placed various issues outside of, above, and primary to class because it allows the middle-class to claim legitimacy within a fundamentally unjust and undemocratic system at the expense of working-class and poor peoples.  It is as if the Left has forgotten that, “Immigrant issues, gender issues and antiracisms are working-class issues.”[11]  Nevertheless there are issues neighboring these too.              

Behind call outs, privilege politics, and reinvigorated essentialisms, one can hear the tired slogans: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” and “Fight the People!”  According to various factions that splintered the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, of which the Weather Underground is the most pernicious, the American war in Vietnam was bad, so the Vietcong was good; politically conscious radicals were good, white working-class people were bad.  Purges, purity tests, self-criticism, or better off self-flagellation, immediately followed such recitations.  

Not then, and certainty not now, have such measures resulted in strong liberatory movements much less substantive, material or otherwise, gains for oppressed and working-class people.  Nor have movements themselves found transformative ways to address internalized oppression and behaviors, even with the gallant efforts led by women and trans people of color.  After fifty-years of such politics, one would think with the clearly observable historic defeat of Left and radical forces with the rise of incipient fascism other avenues would be explored, other ideas rediscovered and developed, other strategies and tactics deployed.  

In the streets many revolutionaries now call forth “fire from heaven,” not out of revenge or resentment but for our very survival.  Emile Zola was not so forgiving in Germinal: “There he stood with arms raised like an inspired prophet of old, calling down the wrath of God upon the murderers, foretelling the age of justice and the coming extermination of the bourgeoisie by fire from heaven, since it has committed the foulest crime of all and caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain.”[12]  Though, what is to be done when those who “caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain” are not just the political class, the bourgeoisie, Republican governors and liberal mayors but our fellow citizens?  Fellow citizens refusing to wear masks, coughing in the faces of essential workers and spitting on cashiers, setting up roadblocks to harass those fleeing wildfires, driving through crowds of protestors and arming themselves against their neighbors.  And, with particular vitriol, calling for and in some cases actively exterminating Black and Indigenous people of color, trans women of color, immigrant children, the elderly and infirm.  

As I have claimed herein, the Left not only lacks a concept of social change, it is entirely unprincipled.  But even without principles the Left is being educated nightly as it is struck over the head by police batons.  And the radical and revolutionary movements are discovering its principles and power in concert with thousands of others who have set the fires from heaven upon police stations. Banks, bosses, landlords will burn too.  

Where does one find prospects and possibilities within this plague?  Now, as always, in the new struggles that are emerging, and new social antagonisms being expressed.  As I sat down to write this it is the multitudinous mutual aid projects growing in barren landscapes, then those standing “with arms raised.”

For those of us who are radicals and revolutionaries, we will be called to do immoral things in this crisis. Immoral by the standards of the Left and progressive moralists and possibly immoral by our own standards.  It is clear that the Democratic Party establishment and Left which aligns itself with it has made peaceful revolution impossible.  Whereas the Left is more interested in its own self-preservation and defense of its position in the capitalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, settler colonial, property owning systems then a substantive redistribution of wealth, land, power.  Whereas much of the radical Left would rather confront each other over perceived slights than directly confront power and construct counterpowers.  Currently the streets of Portland, Chicago, New York along with the streets of rural towns are all bursting with protestors. They are refusing to delegate responsibility for their futures to agencies outside of themselves, to representatives and non-profits, to the so-called official organizations of the working-class.  However, now, rather than dying amongst strangers, thousands of unhoused, poor, women, trans and gender non-conforming people, people of color, Indigenous, immigrant, imprisoned, “others,” and militant accomplices who accompany them have chosen the possibility of death rather than certain death so that they may live. So that we all may live.     

An organizer, autonomist, and author, Kevin Van Meter is the author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (IAS/AK Press, 2017), co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents (AK Press, 2010), and is currently writing his next book Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (Forthcoming, AK Press, 2021-2022).  Van Meter can be reached via his website: www.readingstruggles.info.   

Notes

[1] George Orwell, “How the Poor Die” in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. (Boston: David R. Goodine, 2000), 232.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London and New York: Pengiun Books, 1990), 342. 

[4] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 270. 

[5] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 137-138. 

[6] Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London” Duke University Press, 2011), 121.  

[7] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 375. 

[8] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Build in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3. 

[9] Claude Lefort, “What is Bureaucracy?” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John B. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 119-120.

[10] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 4.

[11] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 216.

[12] Emile Zola, Germinal (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 413. 

‘Ecological Leninism’: On Waging War Against the Common Cause of Corona and the Climate Crisis

By Justin Reynolds

Republished from Curious.

What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis? Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.

COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’

The book is shot through with biblical imagery of plague and pestilence, but Malm finds his lodestar in the urgent rhetoric of a 20th century prophet. The Bolshevik leader Lenin, surveying the desperate situation of Russia in September 1917, riven by war, famine and economic breakdown, urged that the powers of the state must be seized and directed against what he saw as the root causes of the crisis of his day–the chronic conflict generated by warring capitalist empires. Malm sketches an ‘ecological Leninism’ for today, a programme for marshalling the hard power of the state to rewire an economic system that is destroying us.

Use of the imagery of ‘war communism’ is bold even for the Marxist writer of Fossil Capital and The Progress of this Storm. But if Malm offends, that is his intention: ‘When there is a threat to the health or even physical existence of a population one doesn’t leave it to the least conscientious individuals to play with the fire as they want. One snatches the matches out of their hands.’

Disturbing the hornets’ nest

Our crisis, he argues, is systemic. Individual, companies, industries and nations do not intend to destabilise the conditions that support our civilisation by ripping up the planet’s ecosystems. The economic machine in which they are entangled is hardwired to do so. And as it careers onwards it disturbs more and more of the pathogens that have lived for millions of years in the depths of tropical forests, the recesses of cave systems, and the mephitic atmospheres of marshes, lagoons and swamps.

Most of those viruses have been contained within the luxuriant ecosystems that proliferate around the equator, able to move between thousands of hosts before exhausting themselves. There has always been the possibility of ‘Zoonotic spillover’, the process by which a microbe leaps from its habitual animal carrier to a human intruder. These transmissions are only as frequent as we allow them to be: so long as we don’t poke our hand into the hornets’ nest, we don’t get stung.

But as widening circuits of global trade have compelled the clearing of ancient forests, the mining of caverns and the bleeding dry of wetlands, the natural barriers between humans and the carriers of pathogens are breaking down.

Soaring demand for beef, soybean, palm oil and wood accounts for much of the depletion, as loggers and farmers cut into the heart of great forests such as the Amazon, the Ecuadorian Yasuni and the Indonesian Harapan. Some 70 per cent of the total agricultural land of Malaysia and Indonesia is now devoted exclusively to the production of palm oil. The hydrocarbons and mining industries have also established their presence, opening up timeless fastnesses such as the peatlands of the Congo basin, an ancient rainforest harbouring colonies of viruses that have slept undisturbed–until now.

And as the loggers and drillers move in, the pathogens and their carriers flood out: rats, mosquitos, insects, and, above all, bats, the most effective of viral agents, sheltering thousands of coronaviruses in dense roosts where as many as 3,000 individuals can congregate in a square metre.

The hollowing out of the world’s great biospheres has–and continues to be–primarily driven by demand from wealthy northern countries for ever more rarefied commodities:

[T]he American appetite for hamburgers is satisfied from pastures carved out of the Amazon. The import of coffee to the North presupposes deforestation in the tropical belt. Chocolate consumed in the most tremendous quantities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and supplied by a mirroring top trio of Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia comes from cocoa trees grown where wild forests once stood.

‘A drizzle of viruses’

Increasingly intense extraction has seeded a bloom of viruses. Since the turn of the millennium outbreaks have followed in quick succession: Nipah, West Nile, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika. The coronavirus is merely the first to move beyond their habitual seedbeds in Asia, Africa and South America.

The replication of northern consumption patterns in Southeast Asia provided the ideal conditions for the genesis of COVID-19. The wet markets of Wuhan have become ever more decadent and reckless in response to demand from prosperous consumers. Just as the western world increasingly demands novelties such as zebra steaks, crocodile sausages, whale, camel and python meat, so Wuhan’s wealthy patrons have come to expected ever more carnivalesque displays of pangolins, flying-foxes, racoons, dogs and rats.

Nearly 20 per cent of all the world’s species have now been commodified. And, as at Wuhan, viruses lurk among them. Unrestrained consumption ‘violently shakes the tree where bats and other animals live. Out falls a drizzle of viruses.’

Extraction means global heating, which means more viruses. Depletion of forests and wetlands diminishes their capacity to soak up and sequester carbon dioxide. And rising global temperatures open opportunities for the carriers of pathogens to move northwards beyond their ancient tropical habitats. An alarming story somewhat lost amid the noise when the pandemic took hold was the appearance of swarms of locusts more than 20 times larger than normal–embodying an area three times that of New York–across east African and west Asia. As temperatures rise they may even be able to glide over the mountain ranges that until now have confined them to southern regions.

The pandemic has inspired comparison with the great plagues of the past. But Malm suggests our predicament is different and, modern medicine not withstanding, in some ways worse. He acknowledges the parallels with the decline and fall of Rome drawn in Kyle Harper’s intriguing 2017 study The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, detailing how imperial expansion pulled in diseases causing outbreaks that shook the classical world’s foundations with catastrophes such as the Antoninian and Justinian Plagues.

But empires have risen and fallen and risen again. Today’s pandemics are entangled with climate change, a chronic ecological rupture. COVID-19 threatens to be one of ‘an avalanche of missiles’ that will continue to rain down over centuries. The process can only be stopped by inoculating ourselves against the unchecked extraction that Malm, in one of the book’s boldest images, suggests is itself a virus:

Capital doesn’t mean to destroy the intricate cellular structures of wild nature; it doesn’t have an intention formed in the mind and then engage in efforts to realise it–there is just no other way for it to replicate. … Unlike other parasites, this one cannot stay content with vegetating in the furs or veins of other species for millions of years of co-evolutionary equilibrium. It can subsist solely by expanding and, in this sense, it exhibits a sort of permanent pandemicity; it doesn’t return to lurk in the shadows until the next visitation, like Ebola or Nipah. Once it had leapt out its reservoir host on the British Isles, it commenced the long historical work of subsuming wild nature on this planet, be it in the form of a palm oil plantation, a bauxite mine, a wet market or a rat farm. All of these and uncountable other entities represent wild nature dragged into the chain of value, and given the biological fact that pathogenic microbes are constituent elements of such nature, capital must call them up too.

Impending catastrophe, then and now

Looking for a way forward, Malm, whose previous works have elaborated Marx’s concept of metabolic rift–the imbalance in our relationship with nature wrought by unsustainable production–turns to Lenin’s essay The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution.

There, Lenin, drawing on Marx’s stark assessment in the The Communist Manifesto that the fight for socialism will end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’, argued that the devastation wrought by the war was the inevitable endpoint of competition between empires for resources: humanity had to ‘choose between perishing’ or transitioning to ‘a superior mode of production’.

For Lenin the way out was both impossible and obvious: to dare to use ‘the rich store of control measures’ the Russian government, like the other warring nations, had already designed and exercised during the conflict to plan production and prevent food systems collapsing. But with a critical difference: rather than being employed to defend the status quo they should be used to overturn it. The powers of the capitalist state should be used against capitalism itself.

Like Lenin, Malm rejects the left alternatives of social democracy and anarchism as inadequate to the scale of the crisis. Social democracy is fatally entangled with a capitalist system of overproduction that is the root cause of our predicament. And by forsaking the power of the state anarchism denies itself the agency necessary to act at sufficient scale. Lenin urged something new: a state prepared to use its powers to wrench Russia onto a new path: to withdraw from the war, to commandeer the grain supply, to take control of the banking system, to redirect production for communal need.

Malm imagines what a systematic climate change programme charged with similar urgency might look like. It would audit supply chains and import flows to determine the extent of resource extraction from the south to the north. It would pare those supply chains down to a minimum of essential goods. It would redirect resources to the rewinding and reforesting of regions worn down by northern consumption. It would ban the import of meat, especially beef, investing plant proteins. And so on: in brief, it would do whatever is necessary to establish trade circuits that do not continually extract and exploit. Above all, it would require planning: ‘Comprehensive, airtight planning. Everybody knows this. Few say it.’

Malm points to recent instances of where a strong state has pushed through the noise and forced through effective climate change mitigation measures. During his tenure as Brazilian President, Lula oversaw a significant reduction in the deforestation of the Amazon, expanding protected areas and enforcing forest codes against illegal logging, measures that slashed Brazil’s CO2 emissions by some 40 per cent. And although the Chinese state’s prolific use of coal has been an environmental catastrophe, it has pushed through a massive reforestation programme.

Malm echoes Lenin’s call that ‘war must be declared on the oil barons and shareholders’. For Lenin that meant socialising the industry to ramp up production for the construction of a new Soviet state. Today we need public control to manage the sunsetting of the industry. But radically reducing fossil fuel production and phasing out carbon emissions will not be enough. We need to drawdown the excess carbon already in the atmosphere. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic reduced emissions by some 5 per cent. But a 7.6 per cent reduction is needed every year over the next decade to keep within the Paris Agreement targets.

Only the state has the power to roll out the direct air capture technologies we need at sufficient scale. And only the state can redirect the oil and gas industry away from carbon production towards carbon capture and burial: ‘The demand for nationalising fossil fuel companies and turning them into direct air capture utilities should be the central transitional demand for the coming years.’

An ‘acid taste’

Malm acknowledges that the harsh language of ‘rationing, reallocating, requisitioning, sanctioning, ordering’ leaves an ‘acid taste’. But this is what needs to be done:

Here we truly are in the situation of Lenin’s September text: everybody knows what measures need to be taken; everybody knows, on some level of their consciousness, that flights inside continents should stay grounded, private jets banned, cruise ships safely dismantled, turbines and panels mass produced–there’s a whole auto industry waiting for the order–subways and bus lines expanded, high-speed rail lines built, old houses refurbished and all the magnificent rest.

The ‘classical Marxist dream of a humanity liberated in a land of abundance’–which finds contemporary expression in manifestos for a technologically advanced ‘luxury communism’–must be sidelined for the foreseeable future: ‘those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of these needs to happen, that there will be no sacrifices or discomforts for ordinary people, are not being honest.’

Lenin of course was that rarest of polemicists: one who got the opportunity to follow through on his words. And follow them through he did, not without brutality. Malm acknowledges the cruelties of ‘actually existing’ war communism: the authoritarianism, the food requisitions at gunpoint, the militarisation of labour, the summary executions to enforce discipline in the ranks. The experience ‘of civil war ‘deposited a poison of brutalised power in the heart of the workers’ state, to which it eventually fell victim’. Freedom of expression and assembly must be sacrosanct, however dire the emergency.

But planning allowed resourcefulness. At the start of the conflict the White and allied forces held 99 per cent of the coal and 97 per cent of the oil resources that had powered the pre-war Russian state. Surrounded on all sides, and forced to live completely by their own means by an import blockade, the Soviets marshalled the resources they did have effectively, constructing a functioning ‘biofueled workers’ state’ using the boreal forests that blanketed the Russia that remained to them for construction, heat and energy. And despite having to fell so much timber, they were conscious of the need to preserve, setting half of the forests aside as inviolable ‘monuments of nature’. That legacy persists: Russia still has more pure wildernesses than other nation.

Like Lenin’s essays, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is in the best tradition of the polemic: the anger controlled, the urgency palpable, the imagery vivid, the case emphatically made, agree with it or not. And like Lenin, Malm is writing at a time of emergency. The critical difference, of course, is that Lenin wrote in the knowledge that a revolutionary vanguard was close to power.

Today’s left, at least that section offering a transformative agenda, is nowhere near. For all the talk of Green New Deals, by and large progressives retain faith in the sufficiency of a gradualist path to climate mitigation, placing hope in renewables technology and market mechanisms: solar, wind and batteries, carbon pricing and capture. In his anger Malm does not acknowledge that there is a certain tough-mindedness in pragmatism too: we need to do what we can within the context of the current political and economic environment, with the imperfect tools it affords. That means pressing for more investment in clean energy, for carbon taxes, for market regulation, and perhaps even for nuclear power and some forms of geoengineering.

But as the crisis bites harder, governments will have to take some or all of the tougher measures Malm anticipates. And the right, not the left, might be positioned to use it. Nationalist authoritarianism of various degrees has already taken hold in several nations: China, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom.

The pandemic has illustrated the public will accept harsh measures if the threat is close by. Malm: ‘No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement … ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.’

The challenge for the left would seem to be to ensure that it, not the authoritarian right, has the keys to the state when the eye of the storm arrives. That day seems some way off. Whomever holds power, and whatever one thinks of his analysis, Malm, echoing Lenin, is surely right about this: it is necessary to act now–‘this very evening, this very night’.

COVID-19, Marxism, and the Metabolic Rift

By Sagar Sanyal

Originally published at Red Flag.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from a purely natural occurrence. Respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) that exist in populations of birds and various mammals such as pigs, horses, cows and humans, are nothing new. But the circulation of these viruses between species, and the frequency of viruses spreading from animals to humans, has increased in recent decades, and changes in the relationship between human society and nature have been the main driver of this.

The origin of COVID-19 and the vector for its spread to humans are still under investigation by scientists. The closest variant of the virus has been identified in bats, and it’s possible it was transmitted to humans through wild meat or bush meat markets, perhaps via pangolins. Whatever the exact origin and vector, however, the jump from animals to humans fits a familiar pattern, one long understood by epidemiologists.

The destruction of nature by capitalist industry plays a big part. As forests and other areas untouched by human development are destroyed, wild species like bats are forced out to forage for food in urban centers. Those wild species carry diseases that previously remained confined to forests and only rarely infected humans – never enough to cause an epidemic. But now this migrating wildlife comes into more frequent contact with large human populations. Sneezes and droppings from wild animals spread the virus to other animals that humans handle more often – like pigs, chickens or, as with the MERS outbreak in the Middle East a decade ago, camels.

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is among the writers who for years have warned of the increasing likelihood of such epidemics. On COVID-19 specifically, Wallace and his collaborators emphasize how the wild meat sector fits into the broader context of industrial food production. “How did the exotic food sector arrive”, he asks, “at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or in an alleyway”.

Increasingly, according to Wallace, wild food is being integrated into the mainstream of the capitalist food market. “The overlapping economic geography”, he writes, “extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands”.

Right wing news outlets more interested in racist scapegoating than in facts made a big deal of the wild meat issue, as if the world would have been spared the virus if only Chinese consumers had stuck to eating chicken or pork. But that is a false narrative. Since the 1990s, several deadly strains of bird flu and swine flu have developed and spread from industrial farms of chickens or pigs, including in North America and Europe, as well as in China.  

It has long been understood why these places breed disease. The animals are crowded into feedlots under conditions that run down their immune systems. The genetic monoculture of these populations takes away the natural diversity that reduces the prevalence of diseases. As farmers try to minimize time from birth to slaughter, this has the perverse consequence of acting as a natural selection pressure for pathogens that can survive more robust immune systems. All these things mean diseases can spread very fast within industrial herds and flocks. The cost cutting imperative means that work conditions (like protective equipment) are so poor that farm laborers are highly vulnerable to catching viruses from these animals.

The danger to humanity from such practices was reinforced in June, when scientists discovered a number of new strains of swine flu with pandemic potential circulating among pigs on farms in China. Although the strains, collectively referred to as G4 viruses, don’t appear currently to be able to spread between humans, around 10 percent of blood samples taken from farm laborers showed evidence of prior infection. All it would take is a small mutation and one or other of these viruses could start jumping from human to human and spread rapidly through the broader population, just as has occurred with SARS-CoV-2.

Marx and Engels’ groundbreaking work on the relationship between human society and nature in the context of the emergence of capitalism as a global system in the 19th century can help us understand the destructive dynamics underlying these developments. Central to their work in this area was the idea of the “metabolic rift”. All living things have a metabolic relation with their ecological surroundings, taking in certain things and putting out waste. When it comes to humans, Marx and Engels noted that our metabolism with the rest of nature is not due to our biology alone, but also to the kind of society we’ve built. To understand human metabolism with nature, we thus need social science in addition to natural science.

The metabolic rift has both historical and theoretical aspects. On the historical side is the displacement of peasants and peasant farming methods from the countryside, and their corralling into towns to create the modern working class. Workers, unlike the peasantry, had no means of livelihood of their own, and therefore had to move around to find waged work, crowding into the cities where that work was concentrated. One consequence of this was that, instead of being reabsorbed back into the local environment, human waste now collected in vast pools in the cities.

This process was the main driver of the soil fertility crisis that struck Europe in the late 19th century. By displacing the peasantry, and forcing more and more people into the cities, capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”.

What about the theoretical aspect? The rift isn’t just about the natural effects they observed, but also their social cause. It is a rift in social relations: the forcible conversion of a peasantry into the modern working class.

Peasants farmed a plot of land to which they had customary right over generations. They controlled their own labor process, and this meant there was a feedback mechanism between their labor and its effects on the land. If they depleted the soil and thus threatened their livelihood, they could adjust their methods of work accordingly. Peasant farmers had, over many generations, developed practices to maintain soil fertility through crop rotation, cycling between crops and pasture to ensure manuring, and returning human excrement to the fields. Peasant methods of labor were the main factor in the metabolism between feudal society and the rest of nature. Feudal lords would leave peasants to farm as they wished, then take a portion of the produce.

By contrast, the capitalist mode of production involves the capitalist dictating the labor process, and then just hiring laborers to do what they are told. As capitalist farmers emerged, they realized more money was to be made by cutting out the aspects of peasant farming practices that had no immediate pay-off (even though they maintained soil fertility) and focusing just on the highest earning aspects.

Around the same time the first factories were bmetabloismeing established in towns, and the emerging capitalist class and the state that served them realized that wages could be forced down if large masses of former peasants were concentrated in a handful of industrial areas rather than scattered across a large number of small population centers. During the 18th and 19th centuries, vast numbers of peasants were driven from the land by a combination of brute force and legal changes (such as the Enclosure Acts). Out of this uprooted peasantry, the modern working class was born.

A new dynamic began to shape social metabolism with nature. Unlike the peasants who worked the land directly, capitalist farmers and the new captains of industry were far removed from the destructive consequences of their activities. So long as they had workers prepared to exchange their labor for a wage (and the desperate poverty in which most people lived ensured that there was no shortage), they could turn a profit, even if their actions were detrimental to the natural world on which their business ultimately depended. If they destroyed the land, they could use the profits they had made to buy more land elsewhere. More often, however, the destructive consequences of their activities were simply externalized – the poisoning of the air and water in factory districts, which had a major impact on the lives of workers in this period, provides a clear example.

From this point on, what was produced in society and through which methods was determined by the profit motive and competition among rival capitalists and nation-states. The impact of production on the natural world became, at best, an afterthought. A new dynamic was driving society’s metabolism with nature – one that would create environmental disasters on an ever widening scale.

Scientists who study the origins of diseases have been telling us for decades that we will continue to have outbreaks of novel viruses that hop from other animals to humans because of how we farm animals and how we destroy wilderness. This advice is ignored, just as the advice of climate scientists is ignored, because acting on it would require breaking from the profit-driven logic of capitalism.

Where it’s a choice between booking short-term profits and taking a hit to profit to address potentially destructive consequences in the longer term, capitalists will always put profit first. They, after all, can escape the consequences of their actions. They spend their days in air conditioned offices, unlike the farm laborers who spend their days surrounded by hundreds of pigs riddled with swine flu. In a pandemic, capitalists can hide away in their country mansions and, in the event that they fall ill, can pay for the very best of medical care.

For workers it’s a different story. We’re the ones on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, not through our own free choice, but through economic necessity. For the vast majority of workers around the world, stopping work isn’t an option. We must work to survive, even if in doing so we are actually putting our lives at risk. This suits the capitalists very nicely. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a moment when the world economy was already struggling. The ruling class, whether in Australia, the US or any other country, is desperate to limit the economic damage from the crisis, even if that means many more people will die.

If workers ran the world, it would be very different. It would make no sense for us to ignore the warnings of scientists about how industrial agriculture and environmental destruction are fueling the emergence of new diseases, for the simple reason that we’re the ones who will suffer when they appear. We don’t have a stake in the relentless scramble for short-term profit that defines capitalism today. We can organize production – both what we produce and how we produce – with human health and environmental sustainability in mind.

In the current pandemic, that might mean shutting down all but the most essential parts of the economy to slow the spread of the virus, while ensuring other workers are paid to stay home. In the longer term, it would mean reshaping animal agriculture to limit the potential for it to function as a petri dish for the emergence of deadly diseases.

This is how Marx envisaged the metabolic rift being healed. “Freedom in this field”, he wrote in volume 3 of Capital, “can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”.

Such freedom will never exist under a capitalist system in which the drive to profit rules. The first step in fixing the metabolic rift is to make our labor our own again. That means taking it back from the ruling class.

Reopening Schools: We Do Not Have To Descend Into COVID Hell

By Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee and E.B. Shaw

With Corona virus cases spiking across the country, America is on the verge of forcing millions of people into extreme danger. Suddenly, everyone from CEOs, the President, state governors, and the corporate media are calling for schools to open “to save the economy”.

No country has tried to open schools with the virus spreading like here in the US. We are currently in a massive wave of surging cases in 40 states. There are not enough tests or testing. How do you open schools if you can’t test and trace? There’s no way that you can keep a school safe from coronavirus if the virus is raging out of control in the community where the school is located.

Before schools physically re-open, certain principles of public health must be established:

• No re-opening without full scientific best practices. So far, this is seriously lacking.

• No re-opening without dealing with the vast practical hurdles. These steps require more funding, not less. So far, the funding to address these problems does not exist.

• No re-opening without total and complete public transparency. So far, decisions are made behind closed doors. Planning is slapdash and haphazard at best. Teachers, unions and communities must be fully involved as co-equals with politicians in establishing policies.

• Schools should continue to be food centers for the communities, but they should reinstate and expand what government has cut — access to nurses, vision services, mental health and cultural support. Communities need these services now more than ever.

• We cannot fail to hold government accountable for securing public health and public safety. Governments must do what it takes to guarantee childcare in safe ways.. We have no choice here. Public schools are still controlled locally. We must exert our power to protect our children.

We’ve already seen what happens when we use shortcuts and go against public health guidance in reopening. Other countries have been successful in suppressing the level of COVID-19, they have one thing in common — a national coordinated strategy.

The US response to the virus has been fractured, reckless, and incompetent. Rather than the federal government organizing a national coordinated response, it has put corporations in total control.

The government refuses to provide adequate unemployment or health care, thus making families desperate to work.  Many European countries cover 60% to 90% of workers’ wages when they can not work. So do we really have to risk our children and our families so corporations benefit? It really does not have to be this way.

Corporations are demanding their workers return to work so they can make a profit from their investments, but they refuse to provide childcare. So children, teachers and school staff, families and communities, must risk their lives to open schools that could not even guarantee toilet paper before the virus. The only people to benefit from a premature physical opening will be billionaires and politicians of both parties. This is why they tout political reasons to re-open, while ignoring scientific precaution.

These same people, who previously had no trouble closing schools throughout neighborhoods and subjecting children to hours of high-stakes testing at computer screens, now state that keeping children out of school denies them the “emotional, social, and knowledge growth they desperately need.” Suddenly, also, the teachers who were degraded as the worst problem with public schools are now heroic essential fron-tline workers!

Schools are set to open district-by-district across the country while many nail shops, gyms, and bars remain closed. Many schools only use easily contaminated recycled air throughout whole buildings instead of widows that can be opened to bring in fresh air. Taking steps as minimal as social distancing will cost vast amounts. Little things become big problems. Before, a Kindergarten teacher could take the whole class to the bathroom at once. Now a class of 15, that requires 6 feet of spacing, forms a line 90 feet long! And how exactly are bathrooms going to be sanitized?

There are no clear guidelines; planning is confused and hidden from the public; PPE’s are in short supply; school budgets are being slashed even as the costs of adequately dealing with the virus skyrocket. School nurses were virtually eliminated before the virus hit. Now, what exactly is going to happen if a child feels sick?

The gap between school finances, destroyed by the virus, and the greatly increased costs, also caused by the virus, runs into billions. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has estimated the funding required to reopen public schools safely is at least $116.5 billion.

Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana Congressman, stated that people dying from the virus is the lesser of two evils to the economy not opening up. CNN reported that Hollingsworth said: “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, announced that old people should welcome re-opening, even if that means they would die.

This corporate class also touts the murderous notion of “herd immunity”, meaning that after 3 million people or so die, the virus cannot spread any more. We have watched health care workers sicken, live in their cars so not to infect their families, and wear plastic bags instead of PPEs. What will happen to school staff?

When policies and political choices set up people to die at “acceptable levels”, it is fair to conclude that this is not an accident. Even before the virus, digital technology has been turning jobs into temp work or no work at all. Corporations are simply not going to spend money to support people they cannot use. In this context, physical re-opening is designed to accept a specific amount of death, to establish toleration of death as a new normal.

Can schools physically re-open now? If so, how?

Hawaii has announced that schools will re-open when no one in the state has tested positive for one month. The Florida Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, is the former Speaker of the Florida House and a charter school owner. He demands that Florida open its schools 5 days a week even as Florida COVID cases reach record high levels. Precaution is scrapped for pragmatism.

America’s schools do not meet even the most lenient advice for physical re-opening, which are found on the White House website. Teachers advocate no physical re-opening until no new cases arise in the past 14 days, the time for symptoms to appear. Some districts are beginning to scrap immediate physical re-opening.

Once again, as with the George Floyd rebellion, our character as a people will be tested. Will we stand together, or will our passivity make us complicit in sanctioning unnecessary public death?

Yes, the mental, physical and emotional health of children is critical. No, this cannot be achieved by physical re-opening schools like before. That is impossible. We can find ways to bring young people back together again, but it means letting go of the idea that schools can return to normal. This step requires the imagination and agency of the communities schools serve.

The virus proves that no one is safe unless everyone is safe. The same is true for our schools. For a country founded on genocide, slavery and inequality, the challenge once again is to stand up for the right of quality public education for all.

Everyone now can see the critical and vital importance of public schools to our communities. Even before the virus, schools have been the anchor of the community. Closing public schools is a method of gentrification and community dispossession. Now we see once again that healthy schools create healthy communities and healthy communities create healthy schools.

Teacher unions and parents are advocating that public schools, in these times of COVID, should anchor the communities by expanding the public services they offer.

Immediate and Future Challenges

Whether schools physically open or not, the nature of public education has dramatically changed. Through the Spring, public schools offered online distance learning. As students graduated in June, Zoom Video Communications, Inc announced that it was being used by 100,000 schools globally.

Education has gone from being supported by technology to being dependent on technology and from being corporate-supported to becoming corporate-dependent.

Corporations like Pearson and Google tout online education as a way of saving money in tough times, but this just leads to private profits for corporations.

The latest vampire is Turnitin.com. Students turn in their essays. The website checks for plagiarism; then it sends it back to you, marked in red where you copied something out of the encyclopedia. But they also offer school districts more advanced options like: grading every paper… or maybe even student surveillance.

Under corporate control, online learning, distance learning and virtual charter schools are a dismal failure. The California Attorney General is investigating the entire virtual charter industry for putting private profit ahead of quality education. The largest virtual charter corporation, K12 Inc, “educates” 120,000 students, making $900 million in revenue, all from taxpayer money earmarked for public education. Only half of online high school students graduate within four years, compared to 84% nationally. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that students in virtual charters do so poorly in math and English that it’s as if they didn’t attend school at all.

Most teachers estimate that only about 25% of their students do well in online education. The education model is the same drill & kill, test & fail regime that students could not succeed in even before the virus. Most students have trouble learning through screens since the other vital ways that humans learn are eliminated or reduced. And, of course, how does a family provide enough laptops for every child, much less the expense of connecting through Wi-fi?

Government at every level has invited billionaires, tech corporations, and CEOs to determine what public education will look like as the virus rolls on. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invited Bill Gates and Google into the state to “re-imagine public education.” In other words, government is systematically replacing elected officials, who are (theoretically) accountable to the people, with private, unaccountable capitalists in a campaign to defund and privatize public schools and debase the purpose of education.

The ethical and moral implications of this corporate effort to terminate the education our children and communities need are highly disturbing. There is little public discussion about this even as government proclaims online learning as the miracle of the age.

US schools at every level are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. By the time the 2020-2021 school year is over, corporations and governments – if unopposed – will establish a degraded model that works only for the elite and very few others.

When government can bailout billionaires with trillions of dollars, we see that the money exists to build a system of public education that can build the leaders we need to transform the world.

Teaching today must unleash the marvelous powers and creativity of our collective humanity. Students are the people the world needs today to overcome the challenges of a desperately sick population, a sick society and a sick planet.

Unlike most of the world, where the needs of society were put first, in the US every problem is presented as an individual problem and every solution is presented as an individual solution.

It is the same with public education. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that there was no such thing as “society”, meaning no problems result from society, so you’re on your own. This has been America’s mantra ever since, unless of course it relates to corporate governance.

But now we see, scientifically, that the only solutions that can work must be organized at the national level by government to benefit everyone. Social problems are not individual; the emanate from how society is organized. Social problems require social solutions.

Just as COVID-19 demands a national coordinated strategy, the problems of safely re-opening public schools demand national solutions. Not piecemeal, local, short-term quick fixes. Instead, upgrade our schools by combining a public health approach with a public schools approach.

Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee, and E.B. Shaw are members of the National Public Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

Yes, the U.S. Response to COVID-19 is a Genocide

[PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Ontiveroz/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Image]

By Alex Harley

Republished from Emphasis Added.

A Yale epidemiologist was castigated for equating the virus to a genocide in a series of tweets. Why? The answer lies in a foundational understanding of white supremacist capitalism: death for profit isn’t murder.

As hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people living in the U.S. protest racist police violence in all fifty states, another act of racist violence is being perpetrated through governmental policy and business practice: The COVID-19 Genocide.

While scientists agree that the virus itself was a natural, and not lab-created phenomenon, its handling in the US is an unequivocal disaster. As of June 29, 2020, the crises is forty-two times the size of 9/11 casualties: 128,000 deaths. So where are the calls for accountability and justice?

It is not despicable to characterize the U.S. response to COVID-19 a genocide. It is imperative. It is an assertion that clarifies U.S. behavior. Unfortunately, MacLeod’s hesitance to call it genocide is no outlier. It is the default reaction from defenders of the status quo.

One British legal authority agrees that the case for genocide is weak, citing “specific intent” (Heieck, 2020).

But it is no insult to victims of state and vigilante violence to call it genocide. It is the acknowledgement of historical record.

The capitalist ideological foundations of the U.S., and all modern states built on settler-colonialism, do not frame death through exploitation as a crime. It’s the price of doing business. They’ve been in excess of deadly business for over four centuries now, and it hasn’t stopped.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder.

But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

- Fredrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England

The (predominantly white) federal government and the (predominantly white) business elites are both guilty of sacrificing working people to profit from and during the COVID-19 crisis. Their (predominantly white) adherents, with their anti-lockdown demos, anti-mask violence, victim blaming, hoax conspiracy theories, and scapegoating of China, are equally culpable.

The rulers of the U.S. do not recognize their own extant record of mass murder: not in illegal military operations; not at the hands of police; not in the workplace; not in the streets. The nation socializes its citizens to normalize systemic murder, successfully. It is a critical piece of settler-colonial ideology. Deception is another key piece.

From “Heroes” to Fodder

Early on in the crisis, front-line workers were heralded for their bravery. They were called “heroes”. But in reality, the fanfare was a just nice way to say “Get back to work!” And this, of course, was reserved for those who weren’t laid off.

Corporations were quick to slash their rosters as soon as the crisis reared its head. The Federal Government acted just as quickly to “bolster the economy” by pouring trillions directly into corporate pockets. Corporations, and especially their rich executives, made out handily.

Between March 18 and April 10, 2020, over 22 million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged toward 15 percent. Over the same three weeks, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $282 billion, an almost 10 percent gain. (Institute for Policy Studies, 2020)

To secure the fortunes of the wealthy, businesses must stay open, with severely reduced staff (and overhead!). Retail and service employees must relent to exposing themselves to infection by interacting with large, diverse segments of the population. They must take on new duties, including enforcing social distancing measures, which exposes them to violent reaction. Doctors and nurses must work without enough equipment, beds, or sometimes even space. And all the while, protests against police violence must be brutally repressed with the billy club, rubber bullet, sound cannon, and tear gas canister. In some cases, the police have directly targeted children and the elderly. And, the police continue to murder civilians.

The connection between racist policing and racist capitalism must be highlighted. They are thoroughly enmeshed.

COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups, CDC

Nationally, hospitalizations show a rate 15 times higher for oppressed nation’s peoples as opposed to whites. The statistics of death rates among them are equally disparate (Ford, 2020).

Race gaps in COVID-19 deaths are even bigger than they appear. Brookings.

Reservations have been some of the hardest hit areas in the nation. But instead of aid, the federal government sent body bags to the Seattle Indian Health Board (Grande, 2020).

What is this brazen attitude, if not dripping with intent? The intent is to make money, whatever sacrifice working and oppressed people must make.

How do you characterize a nation which denies its people access to a functional, modern health system by means of predatory business practices and fiscal austerity? And when centuries of racist capitalist underdevelopment magnify the crisis within the oppressed and working class communities of the US?

This is not by accident, but design. Uneven capitalist development and sheer disregard for human life have proven “profitable” time and time again; and, will continue to do so. Theft and murder are profitable. But who are the murderers? Can we see them clearly?

Responsible Parties

The virus is not the main agent; willful, deliberate neglect is; the result of governmental policies and business operations which have identifiable delegates. There are responsible parties. We must not lose sight of that.

Working solutions were and are available to solve this crisis. This is illustrated by the disparity in how effective certain responses have shown to be across the globe. Nations who took the crisis seriously have fared demonstrably better than the US. They mustered human and material capital to create solutions, during the time they bought through strict containment policies.

Instead, the U.S. flouted scientific consensus and advice from other nations. The U.S. eventually locked down, but did nothing substantial with the time bought. All of the states which re-opened under business and right-wing popular pressure have all surged again (Hawkins, 2020). The infection curve should look like a bell by now; instead, it looks like an insurmountable mountain. And until a vaccine is found, it will continue to do so, if the U.S. ruling class continues its regime of denial.

They withheld vital aid through confiscation of protective equipment and economic sanction. They continued high-tech military operations during a global viral outbreak. In May, the U.S blocked a vote in the UN for a global ceasefire (Borger, 2020). The rulers of the U.S. do not seek peace, but war. War with the world’s oppressed people, domestically and abroad. War for profit.

At every turn, American bourgeoisie will try to make money, no matter how insidious it may seem. As reported by Qiao Collective, US corporation Gilead’s vaccine is slated to cost the American public “$3,120 per [patient] with private insurance.” If China finds a vaccine, they will make it a “global public good” (Qiao Collective, Twitter).

While the ruling class can largely isolate themselves in their lavish homes, padded from infection by layers of workers, the crisis outside is just a complication. The deaths of workers are simply inconvenient, when there is a surplus of unemployed laborers from which to draw. Our deaths truly mean nothing to them. If a guardian‘s charge dies by neglect, it is considered murder. What about when a nation allows its subjects to die?

We should consider it murder.

Taken independently, the historical abuses perpetuated by the leaders and ruling class of the United States are reprehensible. When viewed as a singular phenomenon, they amount to genocide. COVID-19 is just another blood-soaked chapter in the American project of unlimited exploitation.

Coronavirus and American Exceptionalism

By Matthew Dolezal

Republished from the author’s blog.

America is the Fyre Festival of countries. It is pure hype with little to no positive results. It is a back-alley drug deal culminating in a sweaty palm gripping a wrinkled bag of oregano. It is broken promises, shattered dreams, and shameful regret. All our lives we are told with inflated enthusiasm, with charismatic apologia, that America is a spectacular monument to freedom and democracy, a “shining city upon a hill” and a beacon to lesser nations. We are told our country is “exceptional.” And all our lives we wait for supporting evidence to verify these sensational claims as we gawk with confusion at our surroundings.

In a sense, the “exceptionalism” narrative is true, but not in the sense the propagandists and gatekeepers from prominent institutions had intended. As we reevaluate the very notion of American policing — from its origins in southern slave-catching patrols, to its use as a violent deterrent against labor and civil rights struggles, to its ruthless enforcement of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs — we are also faced with a more profound question regarding the very nature of our “great” nation.

America is a political project founded, at first, by the violent ethnic cleansing of its indigenous inhabitants, then, by the colonizing of the blood-drenched land mass and, finally, by the instituting of industrial capitalism through a slavery-based economy. The European colonizers fought resolutely to maintain this barbaric system of kidnapped, forced, torturous, uncompensated labor in what historian Gerald Horne refers to as “the counter-revolution of 1776.” The subsequent development of white supremacy as a ubiquitous ideology then served the economic elite faithfully as a successful “divide and conquer” mechanism for decades and centuries to come.

As V.I. Lenin’s groundbreaking observations regarding imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” foresaw, the U.S. began expanding beyond its own borders — those which were initially forged through violent conquest, land theft, and treaty violations. In a stage of neocolonial domination beginning primarily with the Spanish-American War and continuing with covert military coups and death squads in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the U.S. brutally secured natural resource acquisition for Western capital. The American military, globally perceived as the greatest threat to world peace, has an estimated 700 bases in 130 countries. In recent decades, the so-called “War on Terror” has taken the lives of approximately 1.3 million people. This inherently bellicose organization serves as a de-facto police force for the World Bank and the IMF, punishing any attempt at national sovereignty outside the confines of Western neoliberal capitalism.

The domestic effects of neoliberalism display themselves with such starkness that multi-billion dollar PR industries and corporate news media organizations make it their livelihoods to gaslight us and whitewash our own tangible material conditions. As the brief foray into a “prosperous” standard of living was dismantled by bipartisan Reaganomics, disillusioned Americans rejected their own ostensibly enlightened political process by refusing to vote in elections. Wealth concentration continued unabated, with three men now owning more than half the population. The prison population increased unabated, and is now the highest in the world. The for-profit healthcare system, claiming tens of thousands of innocent lives each year, continued unabated, and is now an outlier in the so-called “developed world.”

As the federal government doubled down on its commitment to serving the interests of private capital, public institutions and services were systematically gutted. This profound dedication to “profit over people,” specifically in the realm of healthcare, set the stage for America’s exceptional death toll in the wake of the voracious coronavirus pandemic. The flip side of this carnage is, of course, the ability of the ruling class to further enrich itself amidst the chaos. In a natural evolution of what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism,” we are now well on our way to anointing the world’s first trillionaire.

If America was a political satire film, the coronavirus pandemic would be its whimsical climax; its Dr. Strangelove mass-nuking scene juxtaposed with a comforting musical score. Once again, we are exceptional, but in a rather insidious and villainous sense. In a black humor sort of way, America is the laughing stock of the world. The Global South must think our chickens are coming home to roost, just as they had on 9/11. Our lofty ideals are effortlessly unraveling before the eyes of billions, culminating in an unsightly mountain of corpses and petroleum-based consumer goods. Indeed, the empire wears no clothes.

As the late comedian George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” In lieu of the fabled “land of the free,” what persists is simply an empire in decline; something more resembling an American Nightmare for the vast majority of those affected, both domestically and abroad. All possibilities for revolution or even reform have failed. America is the Titanic of countries; an ostentatious facade naively heading toward utter destruction. The question now is who will survive this final, epic, prolonged plateau; this dark moment while the glimmering vessel ominously rests vertically, partially above water; this death rattle before rapid descent into oblivion.

Here Comes the Second Wave

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Originally published at Empire and Economics.

As the pandemic spread across the world, unprecedented lockdowns followed. Now, as many of those countries are in the early weeks of lifting restrictions, we see signs of what may be the start of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we cannot rule out a second wave of lockdowns.

The spread of the viral pandemic resulted in one country after another beginning the process of shutting down its society. It began in Asia, spread to Europe, then to North America and across much of the rest of the world. By early April, half of humanity was living under lockdown.

The lockdowns were incredibly controversial. This time period will be seared into the collective human memory for as long as we all live. Its significance to our societies, our economies, our political systems and our own individual experiences cannot be overstated.

People have grown tired of the lockdowns, and understandably so. But business leaders and politicians feel worried about the economy most of all, and want to reopen in order to revive the economy.

Countries in Asia began the process of lifting the lockdowns last month. With the earliest cases of the pandemic and some of the more effective means of handling it, everyone was keeping a close eye on these countries as they emerged from restrictions.

South Korea marked the ending of the most strict social distancing measures last week. Within days, numbers of the infected began to spike. The spike in South Korea’s numbers resulted entirely from one man’s night out going to clubs. South Korean President Moon Jae-in warned Koreans to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave.”

The Chinese province of Wuhan, where the COVID19 outbreak first began and where the lockdown ended the previous month, experienced its first cluster of new infections.

Iran – one of the early epicentres of the epidemic – had lifted its lockdown. But on May 10, Iran put a region of the country under a second lockdown after a sharp increase of cases in the province.

Lebanon, after emerging from the virus and the restrictions nearly two weeks ago, has put the entire country again under a lockdown as infections started to spike. Just ten days after reopening, Lebanon announced a four-day lockdown of the country, prompting grocery stores to once again be quickly emptied of essential items. This is all taking place in the midst of the country experiencing a brutal economic and financial crisis, one which began prior to the pandemic, and resulted in massive protests and social unrest that began late last year and continued even in the midst of the pandemic, as hunger and desperation spread. (Meanwhile, many Americans were protesting because they want haircuts, to go golfing, and for their favourite restaurants to be opened again.)

Europe followed Asia’s example in the lifting of restrictions and ending of lockdowns. This is a slow process that looks different in different countries. Ultimately, however, it follows the same course of slowly removing restrictions and opening public spaces, schools, businesses and borders, and incrementally easing social distancing measures.

At the start of April, virtually all of Europe except for Sweden was under lockdown. By the second week of May, most of the continent had started easing restrictions. The United Kingdom was the only large European country to not be easing (as it was one of the last to impose a lockdown).

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned about proceeding “extremely carefully” in seeking to emerge from the lockdowns in order to avoid another spike in infections.

“The risk of returning to lockdown remains very real if countries do not manage the transition extremely carefully and in a planned approach.” – WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

“If lockdown measures are lifted too quickly, the virus can take off.” – Maria Ban Kerkhove, WHO epidemiologist

Within days of Germany starting the process of easing restrictions, cases began to spike. Not only the largest country in Europe (by population, economic weight and political power), Germany is also one of the more successful models of countries in dealing with the pandemic. Despite its size, deaths from the virus in Germany were fractions of those witnessed in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and France. Thus, with German infection rates starting to increase, fears grow of a second wave.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned, “We always have to be aware that we are still at the beginning of the pandemic… And there’s still a long way in dealing with this virus in front of us.”

The United States, with the most known cases of COVID19 in the world, has witnessed many individual states begin to reopen their societies in the past weeks. As businesses opened and people started to go to public places, infection rates began to spike in multiple U.S. states. The actual effects of reopening will take weeks to know, however. Though various official models suggest that we can expect a spike in cases and deaths over the coming weeks as a result.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the leading experts in the fight against COVID19 in the United States, warned on May 12 that if U.S. states reopened too quickly and ignored guidelines from public health authorities, “you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control,” which would lead “to some suffering and death that could be avoided.” But, he added, “that could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery.” Doing so, he added, “could almost turn the clock back rather than going forward.”

A research paper from a Harvard economist examined the past Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, looking at the various successes and failures of lockdowns and openings. He concluded that an assortment of restrictions and lockdowns failed to save as many lives in the past because the duration of the lockdowns was for too short a period: four weeks (one month), on average. The lesson from this, he concluded, was that restrictions and lockdowns “have to be maintained for substantially longer than a few weeks. Most likely, 12 weeks work much better than 4-6 weeks.”

People have entered into a state of mental lockdown. Many have shut down to the overconsumption of information and simply grasp onto the hope that things seem to be opening and that, therefore, the worst is behind us and the future is simply a slow decline from present extremes. This is a very hopeful – and one might say naive – perspective. It is fine to hope for miracles, or even to wish them into being, but misguided to plan for them.

Instead, we should mentally prepare ourselves for a second wave of the pandemic and the potential for future lockdowns as a result. South Korea and Germany are among the most successful and advanced nations in dealing with the pandemic, and when their leaders are saying to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave” and that “we are still at the beginning,” we should take these claims seriously.

We are still in the early stages and months of this pandemic and in understanding the virus itself, so nothing can be said of the near and medium-term future with any certainty. Well, except for one thing: the virus is here now.

“Exactly how long remains to be seen… It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.” – Marc Lipsitch, infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health

One wave of lockdowns and social distancing is not going to be enough in the long term. Thus, it is important to manage our expectations and understandings. The virus comes in waves and so we must become like liquid, more able to adapt to the contours of the wave and outlast its peaks and crashes.

Our societies must also become more adaptive. This means that we will need to be more willing to spend and support large segments of the population for extended durations of time. If our politicians and leaders do not meet these standards, widespread (unnecessary) suffering will result. But we can and we must adapt to the necessities and realities of the pandemic.

The pandemic does not have to be hopeless. We can and will get through this. But it is a test of our society and our civilization as to how we get through it. Do we prioritize reopening economies or do we prioritize keeping people safe? If we maintain or return to lockdowns, how do we address and meet the needs of the population confined to their homes? How do we meet the needs of those who don’t have the option to stay home?

There is hope in how we answer these questions and how we move forward through the pandemic and emerge from it. But it is important to not waste our hope on the empty notions that this is over or near its end. We are still in the beginning. There is more to come. Prepare yourselves mentally, arm yourselves intellectually, and plan accordingly.

Put your hope in the right places. But plan according to reality. Yes, we all want haircuts and to spend time with our friends and go out for a drink (or ten). But if the cost of that is to see tens of thousands more infections and thousands more deaths, I can make peace with some out-of-control hair. This “sacrifice” is nothing compared to the lives that will be sacrificed from reopening too early.

This is still the beginning. Plan accordingly.

Beneath Conspiracy Theories, the Class War

[Illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva]

By Aragorn Eloff

It is unsurprising that, as we confront the black swan event of the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in the spread of conspiracy theories. Historically, narratives around malevolent, all-powerful forces controlling reality in various ways have often emerged in times of social unrest and uncertainty, where large numbers of people find themselves socially adrift or unable to control fundamental aspects of their lives.

While the typical response to conspiracy theories is to view them as the product of ignorance or delusional thinking, this is complicated by the fact that history is full of many real instances of powerful people colluding in secret at the expense of society. The numerous price-fixing scandals uncovered in South Africa in recent years surely also constitute conspiracies, as do corporate cover-ups around the world, many of which we know about only as a result of people questioning the presentation of reality and correctly connecting the dots to map out underlying truths.

It is clear though that what we more commonly describe as conspiracy theories – exemplified in the current period by the linking of 5G networks to Bill Gates, vaccination and microchip implants, for instance – are markedly different from these real-world examples. As social and psychological research has shown, conspiracy theories of this kind are not amenable to empirical enquiry and subsist for long periods of time in the absence of any reasonable evidence. Those adhering to such theories tend to exhibit little interest in testing their underlying claims and will often simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories that outright contradict each other.

As The Conspiracy Theory Handbook published by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication observes, this suggests that conspiracy theories function in a similar way to ideology, with belief being more a case of underlying psychological motivators – dealing with feelings of powerlessness, coping with threats or explaining confusing events – than the result of careful research and reflection. If this is true, it becomes important to understand these drives and the social contexts within which they tend to arise. This is especially vital when we acknowledge that many conspiracy theories contain, albeit figuratively, a kernel of intuitive truth.

Indeed, as Marxist group Aufheben writes in an article titled “The rise of conspiracy theories: Reification of defeat as the basis of explanation”, conspiracy theory, like left politics, often has a sense “that the world is structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act in their own interests and against the interests of the majority”. Distinct from the kinds of concrete political analyses that are able to explain these unequal power relations in terms of complex dynamics involving myriad social, political, economic and historical forces, however, conspiracy theories operate with a highly simplified understanding of these aspects of social reality, turning social forces into individual Bond villains and systemic conditions into cabals of all-powerful evildoers. This simplified narrative structure, which tellingly reflects dominant modes of subjectivity and the cult of the personality that has arisen under neoliberalism, also partly explains the appeal of conspiracy theories for large numbers of people looking for a stable foothold in an increasingly complex world.

As simplistic as they may be, it is through empathetic and nuanced engagement with conspiratorial narratives that we can perhaps best grapple with, and nurture meaningful collective responses to, the problems conspiracy theories suggestively outline. For instance, while casting Gates as an evil billionaire who wants to control people with 5G networks via microchips implanted in their bodies through mandatory vaccination is clearly absurd, there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned by the technocratic and paternalistic approach of the Gates Foundation towards addressing malnutrition, malaria and viral pandemics in Africa and, more broadly, the lack of control we have over the actions of the plutocrat class.

Anxieties around being controlled by technology may also be based on intuitions about the extent to which states and big technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth – have infiltrated, influenced and benefitted from our private lives while remaining almost entirely unaccountable, something researcher Shoshana Zuboff explores in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Similarly, the recent fears expressed by people who are convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a nefarious plot by global leaders acting in unison to push agendas that diminish our freedoms have at least some basis in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. Here, we would be quite unreasonable if we weren’t acknowledging that numerous states and corporate actors have leveraged the crisis to push forward anti-social agendas, the recent spate of illegal evictions of shack dwellers across South Africa and the loosening of environmental laws around the globe being just two examples.

Covert agendas

More broadly, we can discern the vague stirrings of a genuinely radical politics in some conspiracy theories. As Aufheben observes, these theories often express a genuine sense of estrangement from – and dissatisfaction with – capitalism, the state and other dominant social forces. While the world is not, of course, completely controlled by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or lizard people, it’s not difficult to see the hints of a class analysis here. And when the staggering inequalities of wealth and power in the contemporary world have allowed the ruling class to live fantasy lives so utterly alien from our own, is it any wonder some of us have come to see them as almost inhuman?

Whatever truths they may loosely allude to, however, it remains the case that conspiracy theories, whatever short-term existential relief they may provide by assuring us that everything is easily understandable and under control, even if not in our interests, are deeply disempowering. If we set out with an incoherent understanding of how the world works, we quickly find ourselves unable to take much effective action to tackle its fundamental injustices or equalise its vast disparities of power, which is why the spreading of conspiracy theories usually results in apathy and fatalistic resignation.

More concerning, the same psychological drivers that make conspiracy theories so appealing also leave people susceptible to the influence of anyone – fascists, sociopaths, corporations and insincere spiritual gurus among them – offering an easy, comforting narrative that explains how things are and what we can do to make them better, usually in ways which, ironically, serve covert agendas.

Our approach to conspiracy theories should therefore be at least twofold. On the one hand, we can gently challenge the fallacious elements of conspiratorial thinking and encourage a more thorough interrogation of those aspects that correctly intuit real problems in the world. In practice, this takes the form of political outreach and radical pedagogy, the creation of collective spaces of learning and teaching through which we can tackle the problems we face at their roots without becoming tangled in them. The more we empower ourselves and each other with knowledge about how science, medicine, technology, politics and so forth function, the more we simultaneously hone our critical thinking skills, in turn cultivating personal agency – the sense that we can be meaningful participants in creating social change.

On the other hand, there is the more difficult task of offering assurance and support to those who find themselves drawn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a reality that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Here, we need to develop frameworks that offer sustainable forms of material, psychological and spiritual care. That the world is increasingly complex and uncertain means that very little is, or ever could be, orchestrated in the contrived ways conspiracy theorists propose, but it also means we have to become better equipped to deal with that complexity and uncertainty. While this may seem like a relatively solitary existential pursuit, a genuine sense of security is grounded in healthy, thriving communities of friends, lovers, families and comrades.

Building such communities is no simple task: they are at odds with the alienated and impoverished forms of social belonging that have become so prevalent in capitalist society and they require patient and careful interpersonal and political work. However, if we commit ourselves to learning more and communing more, we can slowly build herd immunity to the impoverished thinking of the present, whether it takes the form of conspiracy theories or dominant ideologies, and begin to cultivate something stronger than the multiple pandemics we currently face.

Covid-19 is a virus that attacks the lungs and many of those infected with it struggle greatly to breathe. Capitalism is an economic relation that attacks the social body and most of us forced to participate in it struggle greatly to live. The deep sense of existential disempowerment wrought by these conditions, especially when experienced together, renders us highly susceptible, however rational we think we are, to conspiratorial thinking and noxious ideologies.

When those around us fall prey to these insidious but increasingly endemic forms of magical thought we should, instead of ridiculing, judging or chastising them, remind ourselves that the word “conspiracy” comes from the old Latin term conspiraire, which means, simply, to breathe together. Breathing together, conspiring, we can create something far better than what currently passes for life.

This article was originally published at New Frame.

Profitability, Investment, and the Pandemic

[Photo Credit: REUTERS]

By Michael Roberts

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Last week’s speech by US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington was truly shocking.  Powell told his audience of economists that “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent”. One shocking fact that he announced was that, according to a special Fed survey of ‘economic well-being’ among American households, “Among people who were working in February, almost 40% households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March”!!!

Powell went on to warn his well-paid audience sitting at home watching on Zoom that “while the economic response has been both timely and appropriately large, it may not be the final chapter, given that the path ahead is both highly uncertain and subject to significant downside risks”. Indeed, if the continual downgrading of forecasts of global growth are anything to go by, then the number of optimists about a V-shaped recovery are beginning to dwindle to just the leaders of governments and finance.

Another study projects that US GDP will decline by 22% compared to the pre-COVID-19 period and 24% of US jobs are likely to be vulnerable. The adverse effects are further estimated to be strongest for low-wage workers who might face employment reductions of up to 42% while high-wage workers are estimated to experience just a 7% decrease.

And Powell was worried that this collapse could leave lasting damage to the US economy, making any quick or even significant recovery difficult.  “The record shows that deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy.”, said Powell, echoing the arguments presented in my recent post on the ‘scarring’ of the economy.

Powell reckoned the main problem in achieving any recovery once the pandemic was over was that “A prolonged recession and weak recovery could also discourage business investment and expansion, further limiting the resurgence of jobs as well as the growth of capital stock and the pace of technological advancement. The result could be an extended period of low productivity growth and stagnant incomes.”  See here.

And there was a serious risk that the longer the recovery took to emerge, the more likely there would be bankruptcies and the collapse of firms and eve n banks, as “the recovery may take some time to gather momentum, and the passage of time can turn liquidity problems into solvency problems.”

Indeed, last week, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report, in which it concluded that “asset prices remain vulnerable to significant price declines should the pandemic take an unexpected course, the economic fallout prove more adverse, or financial system strains re-emerge.”  The Fed report warned that lenders could face “material losses” from lending to struggling borrowers who are unable to get back on track after the crisis. “The strains on household and business balance sheets from the economic and financial shocks since March will probably create fragilities that last for some time,” the Fed wrote.  “All told, the prospect for losses at financial institutions to create pressures over the medium term appears elevated,” the central bank said.

So the coronavirus slump will be deep and long lasting with a weak recovery to follow and could cause a financial crash.  And working people will suffer severely, especially those at the bottom of the income and skills ladder. That is the message of the head of the world’s most powerful central bank.

But the other message that Jay Powell wanted to emphasise to his economics audience was that this terrifying slump was not the fault of capitalism.  Powell was at pains to claim that the cause of the slump was the virus and lockdowns and not the economy. “The current downturn is unique in that it is attributable to the virus and the steps taken to limit its fallout. This time, high inflation was not a problem. There was no economy-threatening bubble to pop and no unsustainable boom to bust.  The virus is the cause, not the usual suspects—something worth keeping in mind as we respond.”

This statement reminded me of what I said way back in mid-March when the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. “I’m sure when this disaster is over, mainstream economics and the authorities will claim that it was an exogenous crisis nothing to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure of society.  It was the virus that did it.”  My response then was to remind readers that “Even before the pandemic struck, in most major capitalist economies, whether in the so-called developed world or in the ‘developing’ economies of the ‘Global South’, economic activity was slowing to a stop, with some economies already contracting in national output and investment, and many others on the brink.”

After Powell’s comment, I went back and had a look at the global real GDP growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  Based on IMF data, we can see that annual growth was on a downward trend and in 2019 global growth was the slowest since the GR.

And if we compare last year’s 2019 real GDP growth rate with the 10yr average before, then every area of the world showed a significant fall.

The Eurozone growth was 11% below the 10yr average, the G7 and advanced economies even lower, with the emerging markets growth rate 27% lower, so that the overall world growth rate in 2019 was 23% lower than the average since the end of the Great Recession.  I’ve added Latin America to show that this region was right in a slump by 2019.

So the world capitalist economy was already slipping into a recession (long overdue) before the coronavirus pandemic arrived.  Why was this?  Well, as Brian Green explained in the You Tube discussion that I had with him last week, the US economy had been in a credit-fuelled bubble for the last six years that enabled the economy to grow even though profitability has been falling along with investment in the ‘real’ economy.  So, as Brian says, “the underlying health of the global capitalist economy was poor before the plague but was obscured by cheap money driving speculative gains which fed back into the economy”.  (For Brian’s data, see his website here).

In that discussion, I looked at the trajectory of the profitability of capital globally. The Penn World Tables 9.1 provide a new series called the internal rate of return on capital (IRR) for every country in the world starting in 1950 up to 2017. The IRR is a reasonable proxy for a Marxian measure of the rate of profit on capital stock, although of course it is not the same because it excludes variable capital and raw material inventories (circulating capital) from the denominator.  Despite that deficiency, the IRR measure allows us to consider the trends and trajectory of the profitability of capitalist economies and compare them with each other on a similar basis of valuation.

If we look at the IRR for the top seven capitalist economies, the imperialist countries, called the G7, we find that the rate of profit in the major economies peaked at the end of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era in the late 1990s.  There was a significant decline in profitability after 2005 and then a slump during the Great Recession, matching Brian’s results for the US non-financial sector.  The recovery since the end of the Great Recession has been limited and profitability remains near all-time lows.

The IRR series only goes up to 2017.  It would be possible to extend these results to 2019 using the AMECO database which measures the net return on capital similarly to the Penn IRR.  I have not had time to do this properly, but an eye-ball look suggests that there has been no rise in profitability since 2017 and probably a slight fall up to 2019.  So these results confirm Brian Green’s US data that the major capitalist economies were already significantly weak before the pandemic hit.

Second, we can also gauge this by looking at total corporate profits, not just profitability.  Brian does this too for the US and China.  I have attempted to extend US and China corporate profit movements to a global measure by weighting the corporate profits (released quarterly) for selected major economies: US, UK, China, Canada, Japan and Germany.  These economies constitute more than 50% of world GDP.  What this measure reveals is that global corporate profits had ground to a halt before the pandemic hit.  Marx’s double-edge law of profit was in operation.

The mini-boom for profits that began in early 2016 peaked in mid-2017 and slid back in 2018 to zero by 2019.

That brings me to the causal connection between profits and the health of capitalist economies.  Over the years, I have presented theoretical arguments for what I consider is the Marxian view that profits drive capitalist investment, not ‘confidence’, not sales, not credit, etc.  Moreover, profits lead investment, not vice versa.  It is not only the logic of theory that supports this view; it is also empirical evidence.  And there is a stack of it.

But let me bring to your attention a new paper by Alexiou and Trachanas, Predicting post-war US recessions: a probit modelling approach, April 2020. They investigated the relationship between US recessions and the profitability of capital using multi-variate regression analysis.  They find that the probability of recessions increases with falling profitability and vice versa.  However, changes in private credit, interest rates and Tobin’s Q (stock market values compared with fixed asset values) are not statistically significant and any association with recessions is “rather slim”.

I conclude from this study and the others before it, that, although fictitious capital (credit and stocks) might keep a capitalist economy above water for a while, eventually it will be the profitability of capital in the productive sector that decides the issue. Moreover, cutting interest rates to zero or lower; injecting credit to astronomical levels that boost speculative investment in financial assets (and so raise Tobin’s Q) and more fiscal spending will not enable capitalist economies to recover from this pandemic slump.  That requires a significant rise in the profitability of productive capital.

If we look at investment rates (as measured by total investment to GDP in an economy), we find that in the last ten years, total investment to GDP in the major economies has been weak; indeed in 2019, total investment (government, housing and business) to GDP is still lower than in 2007. In other words, even the low real GDP growth rate in the major economies in the last ten years has not been matched by total investment growth.  And if you strip out government and housing, business investment has performed even worse.

By the way, the argument of the Keynesians that low economic growth in the last ten years is due to ‘secular stagnation’ caused by a ‘savings glut’ is not borne out.  The national savings ratio in the advanced capitalist economies in 2019 is no higher than in 2007, while the investment ratio has fallen 7%.  There has been an investment dearth not a savings glut.  This is the result of low profitability in the major capitalist economies, forcing them to look overseas to invest where profitability is higher (the investment ratio in emerging economies is up 10% – I shall return to this point in a future post).

What matters in restoring economic growth in a capitalist economy is business investment.  And that depends on the profitability of that investment.  And even before the pandemic hit, business investment was falling.  Take Europe. Even before the pandemic hit, business investment in peripheral European countries was still about 20 per cent below pre-crisis levels.

Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics, forecast eurozone business investment would fall 24 per cent year on year in 2020, contributing to an expected 12 per cent contraction in GDP. In the first quarter, France reported its largest contraction in gross fixed capital formation, a measure of private and public investment, on record; Spain’s contraction was also near-record levels, according to preliminary data from their national statistics offices.

In Europe, manufacturers producing investment goods — those used as inputs for the production of other goods and services, such as machinery, lorries and equipment — experienced the biggest hit to activity, according to official data. In Germany, the production of investment goods fell 17 per cent in March compared with the previous month, more than double the fall in the output of consumer goods. France and Spain registered even wider differences

Low profitability and rising debt are the two pillars of the Long Depression (ie low growth in productive investment, real incomes and trade) that the major economies have been locked into for the last decade.  Now in the pandemic, governments and central banks are doubling down on these policies, backed by a chorus of approval from Keynesians of various hues (MMT and all), in the hope and expectation that this will succeed in reviving capitalist economies after the lockdowns are relaxed or ended.

This is unlikely to happen because profitability will remain low and may even be lower, while debts will rise, fuelled by the huge credit expansion.  Capitalist economies will remain depressed, and even eventually be accompanied by rising inflation, so that this new leg of depression will turn into stagflation.  The Keynesian multiplier (government spending) will be found wanting as it was in the 1970s.  The Marxist multiplier (profitability) will prove to be a better guide to the nature of capitalist booms and slumps and show that capitalist crises cannot be ended while preserving the capitalist mode of production.