Their Freedom, and Ours: A Case Study on Morality, Inequality, and Injustice Amid a Pandemic

Photo: Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

By Peter Fousek

David Hume opens his essay “Of the First Principles of Government” with the statement that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”[1] Though she uses different terminology, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power is analogous to Hume’s “Force.” In On Violence, she asserts that “[i]t is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and that this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with.” Both accounts consider social power to be something fundamentally popular, rooted in collective action undertaken in accordance with a shared will. Thus, “[a]ll political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power,” which “petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”[2] This understanding of power is consistent with the nature of the social world: institutions do not come into existence of their own accord, but are created and maintained by the actions of people. Laws do not exist as natural truths—they are established in accordance with shared beliefs and modes of understanding, and retain their jurisdiction only insofar as people assent to them. Therefore, those social structures and formations which hold significant influence over our world, do so because they have substantial, popular support underlying their authority and answering their commandments with corresponding action.

Given this notion of power, “[n]othing appears more surprising…than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”[3] If the governed possess a constitutive power over their social world, how is it that institutional authority so often supersedes the will of the masses with that of its ruling contingent? I will argue that this counterintuitive state of social organization, in which the few hold dominion over the majority, must rely on an imposed, hegemonic system of belief capable of convincing the general population that their oppression is just and their liberation villainous. Such a system of belief, while certainly instrumental in the maintenance of totalitarian states, is especially important in the context of ostensibly representative systems of government like that of the contemporary U.S.

In these contexts, voters must be convinced not that it would be amoral for them to overthrow their rulers, but rather that it is moral for them to continue to formally reproduce the power of those rulers year after year, by way of the voting booth. In the United States, that process of coercion has proved quite successful. According to exit polls, over 42% of voters with household incomes under $50,000 per year voted for Donald Trump, despite his promises to cut taxes for corporations and the super-wealthy while defunding already limited social services; in 2020, that contingent rose to 43%.[4] Over half of the Kentuckians in that income bracket voted to reelect Mitch McConnell in the same election cycle.[5]  In a country where well over half of the population has a household income of under $75,000,[6] our governing authorities consistently promote the aims of the wealthiest few, often at the expense of the many. While the United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and while 969 people have been killed by U.S. police this year alone,[7] the State does not rely solely on such direct repressive force to achieve its inequitable ends. As the electoral data shows, the electorate consents to its own socioeconomic oppression; with shocking frequency, we as a nation “resign [our] own sentiments and passions to those of [our] rulers.”[8]

What system of belief is responsible for convincing American citizens, whose collective sovereignty is systematized in electoral systems, to continue voting directly against their economic interests? If we are to build a better world by overcoming the oppressive systems and structures of the established order, we must first understand the mechanism by which that implicit consent of the oppressed is elicited. A society designed to pursue the aims of a small and exclusive minority at the expense of the majority cannot rely on force alone to sustain itself, since institutional authority possesses the apparatus of force only so long as a substantial contingent of the people are willing to follow its orders. Instead, it requires the tool of an official moral framework capable of securing the popular mandate upon which its dominion is established. It is possible for a small ruling class to maintain its jurisdiction over a much larger oppressed one only when the dominant segment promotes its ends as necessary, and thereby convinces its society that anything which goes against those ends is immoral. The ruling class perpetuates its existence by convincing the ruled majority that their subjugation is just, according to supposedly universal moral precepts.

That moral indoctrination is possible because, to use Marx, the economically dominant class “rule also as thinkers and producers of ideas and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”[9] Therefore, the ruling class is able to disseminate its own beliefs and understandings as comprehensive fact, absorbing, in the words of Barthes, “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination.”[10] The universality of the established ruling order and its corresponding cultural norms supersede any alternative worldviews or systems of belief, and thereby create the illusion that the entire social formation lacks meaningful class differentiation (the absence of ideological stratification is implied as evidence that social class does not cause a fundamentally different experience of the world). So, using its near monopoly on the dissemination of far-reaching ideas and discourse, through channels including broadcasting companies, social media platforms, and the national political stage, the economically dominant class convinces its entire social world that its particular morality, corresponding to its particular class interests, is in fact universal, natural moral law, obligatory for all.

Any system of official morality imposed on a society is necessarily repressive on account of that claim to universality. Morality is the product of social development in the same sense that the institutions, laws, and norms of our societies are, as Arendt notes, the products of beliefs held by the popular masses. As social institutions etc. exist to achieve defined ends, such as the preservation of property rights and relations, morality also serves social interests. We see this to be the case in moral precepts as basic as the commandment that “thou shall not kill,” which provides a foundational basis for social cohesion by establishing a normative framework in which a might-makes-right paradigm becomes condemnable. Nonetheless, even so fundamental a moral tenet as that one fails to prove universally applicable in the context of the real and dynamic world. History shows that societies which condemn killing in times of peace often herald it as the most honorable task of their soldiers in times of war. Therefore, the presentation of any system of morality as something universal, and so too ahistorical, is deceptive, given the necessarily specific and dynamic nature of moral analysis (and thus the impossibility of truly natural and universal morality).

Still, such universal moral precepts do serve social interests, even if those interests differ from those which the popular majority perceive as the purpose of their moral laws. The imposition of a particular morality onto the whole of society establishes a moral hegemony, wherein only that which promotes the aims of the social class who defines the moral system is considered right and just. Such a process serves the social interests of the dominant class, allowing the many to be subjugated by the few: the universal application of specific moral norms is all too often employed to prevent the oppressed from striving towards their own liberation. During times of relative historical calmness, that morality-mediated oppression may be concealed to the point of near-invisibility. In the United States, a nation satiated with spiritual and secular prosperity gospels, whose popular consciousness is inundated with myths of the American Dream predicated on the principle of productivity (the notion that an individual’s success is the reflection of their efforts), the illusion that social mobility is always possible—if only for the “most industrious” among us—lends credence to a moral framework that condemns the poor as lazy people suffering from self-imposed shortcomings, while celebrating the wealthy as tenacious and driven individuals whose opulence is merely the manifestation of their moral virtue.

On that basis, cycle after cycle Americans vote against their economic interest, without even understanding that they are doing so. When we are taught that poverty is personal iniquity embodied, and wealth the reflection of the opposite, then those who are not wealthy must identify “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,”[11] if they are to consider themselves virtuous according to the official moral framework. Thus, as they have for decades, millions of working-class Americans continue to vote for “representatives” who facilitate their exploitation for the sake of the wealthy elite. When we fail to recognize the foundational social power we hold as a class, or even our position as members of the working class as such, we unwittingly provide consent for our continued oppression. The underlying misconception of the meritocratic nature of our society is bolstered by the perception that our political and legal institutions are egalitarian, and therefore that all members of our citizenry have an equal shot at financial success, free from any undue external influence or restriction. In other words, we are told that the official morality of our society is just, because all members of our society share equal freedoms under the law. However, I will argue that even if we use that politically conservative understanding of freedom, labeled negative liberty by Isaiah Berlin (that is, the understanding of freedom as freedom from interference in an individual’s exercise of her rights), supposedly universal freedom is not, in fact, shared universally across class divisions.[12] For that reason, the official morality imposed by one class onto all cannot validly substantiate its claims to universality, and can only be understood as a repressive apparatus implemented to ensure the continued self-subjugation of the oppressed. 

The contradictions of normative morality often appear more sharply when contrasted against a backdrop of historical tumult and upheaval. Such has been the case over the past fourteen months, as the national response to the pandemic in the United States has exposed the degree to which our official morality is willing to sacrifice the wellbeing, and even the lives, of the working class, in order to promote the interests of the possessing one. In this time, it has become clear “that lack of money implies lack of freedom,” even in the sense that it is defined by Berlin and the political Right, as “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.”[13] This inequitable distribution exposes the class-interestedness of an official morality which heralds such freedom, by which is meant, for the most part, negative liberty, as the most just and morally virtuous ideal to be promoted by our norms and institutions. Our socioeconomic order is one predicated on the value of individual productivity and wealth accumulation. Resultantly, the freedom of the individual to exist in such a way that they might promote their own wellbeing without restriction by external influence is foundational to the American sociopolitical psyche. Hence Berlin’s explanation of the moral condemnation of the poor, whose wellbeing, we are told, is not our concern, since “it is important to discriminate between liberty and the conditions of its exercise. If a man is too poor or too ignorant or too feeble to make use of his legal rights, the liberty that these rights confer upon him is nothing to him, but it is not thereby annihilated,” (Cohen 4). According to the Right, that is the freedom of which this nation’s founders wrote, the liberty to which the United States declares its dedication, our ultimate moral value: the nominal liberty to act without restriction in pursuit of a given set of possibilities, with no guarantee to the outcome or ease of such a pursuit.

In times of crisis, like that brought on by the pandemic, the most crucial exercise of such freedom involves the liberty to protect oneself and one’s family from immediate threat of harm. The relative ability or inability of American citizens to do so, depending on their socioeconomic status, provides a tragic illustration of the fact that in the United States, “lack of money implies lack of freedom.”[14] In contemporary America, as in any capitalist society, right (as either or both ownership and access) to any object or pursuit is conferred largely by money. This claim is exceedingly apparent: for example, one does not have the freedom to sleep in a hotel room that they have not paid for, and their attempt to do so would likely be met with interference regardless of their otherwise complete ability, will, and legal allowance. In Cohen’s words, “when a person’s economic security is enhanced, there typically are, as a result, fewer ‘obstacles to possible choices and activities’ for him.”[15] Even under the dictum of nominal or negative freedom, an individual’s liberty is largely determined by their wealth. During the COVID crisis, the limits to liberty begotten by poverty have become a visible, existential threat to the marginalized poor.

In the early months of the pandemic, when we knew little about the life-threatening contagion sweeping the globe, many state and local governments to attempted to secure the safety of their citizens through mandatory stay-at-home orders and economic closures. However, the Trump administration, along with countless others in positions of power and influence, were quick to employ the tools of their official morality to an antithetical end. Mask mandates designed to promote some degree of communal security were decried as unjust, immoral attacks on freedom,[16] and as to shutdown orders, these guarantors of liberty held at best that it is the prerogative of an individual to stay at home if she so chooses, but that the State should have no say. As a result, sections of the country opened prematurely, well before the prevalence of testing, much less the existence of a vaccine.[17] Even in places where that was not the case, the categorization of almost 74 million working class Americans as “essential workers” forced them and their families into positions of very real, potentially life threatening, risk.[18] That undue burden placed on the working class was deemed the necessary condition for the restoration of moral equilibrium, according to the language of negative liberty. The resultant dichotomy of freedom as a function of wealth is substantiated by New York Times polling. Higher earners, far more likely than their lower-income counterparts to hold substantial savings, were largely free to continue working from home without risk of job loss or pay cuts. Lower earners were not afforded the same security, financially or otherwise.[19] In this, we see that the working class were compelled to observe moral norms established by the investor class, and thereby to sacrifice of self in accordance with precepts that the wealthy members of our society did not observe themselves. Through the mechanism of universalized official morality prescribed by the dominant contingent, the subjugated were convinced to accept their own suffering while those who demanded their sacrifice refused to do the same.

And to what end? While many essential workers were employed in healthcare or public infrastructure fields, millions of others included members of the food service industry,[20] Amazon warehouse laborers,[21] Tesla factory line workers[22]—in short, the exploited employees of massive, profit-seeking firms focused solely on their goal of increasing shareholder’s returns. In pursuit of profit, these firms compelled countless workers, for pitifully inadequate wages and often without even the most basic protective measures, to sacrifice their safety,[23] and in many cases even their lives.[24] These efforts by executives for the sake of their investors certainly did pay off: according to Inequality.org, “between March 18, 2020, and April 12, 2021, the collective wealth of American billionaires leapt by $1.62 trillion, or 55%.”[25] All this, as thousands died preventable deaths and millions in the world’s wealthiest country faced hunger and eviction. But what of the workers’ freedom? Surely, they were not literally forced to come into their workplaces. The answer to that depends on how we define force. Essential workers, as well as employees of businesses allowed to preemptively reopen, were barred from receiving unemployment benefits if they refused to work, as our legal framework for employment regulation deemed such refusal voluntary even when motivated by fear of death.[26] So, these workers, many of whom would have received more money through unemployment insurance than they were paid at their “essential” jobs,[27] were compelled—quite literally under threat of starvation—to put themselves and their families in harm’s way so that the rich were able to continue amassing wealth at as aggressive a rate as possible.

The hypocrisy of the official morality, and thus its repressive class-interestedness, is evidenced by the fact that this shockingly inhumane restriction of the right of the working class to self-preservation was undertaken under the guise of “freedom,” and thereby given a “moral” justification. In April 2020, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth echoed widespread convictions with his statement that “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.”[28] That stance was, and remains, a truly popular sentiment—protests in opposition to shutdowns were prevalent across the country last spring, populated largely by working class Americans who had been convinced that economic closures represented government overreach and a restriction of individual liberty.[29] To foster that sentiment, members of the investor class funded media campaigns to promote the notion of the shutdowns as morally wrong[30] These campaigns serve as a tragic example of the investor class forcing its ends onto the whole of our society, portraying anything that interferes with the pursuit of those ends as morally condemnable. The campaigns, of course, concealed their class interestedness to preserve the supposed universality of their precepts. In their polemics against “unfreedom,” they were careful to omit the fact that the “immorality” of the shutdowns, the restriction of liberty which they constituted, was a restriction of the freedom of wealthy firms to force their workers into life-threatening conditions for the sake of profit margins.

Only in being justified by the official morality of the dominant class was such blatant disregard for human life allowed to occur. During the initial months of the COVID pandemic, the foundational social power of the working masses could have been utilized to substantial and life-saving effect, if only there had been sufficient organization for the development of a collective will to do so. Consider the power represented by the opportunity of essential workers to join together in a general strike in protest of unsafe conditions, or in opposition to unjust regulations which cut them off from unemployment insurance if they refused to work. Consider the power of the voting population to hold their elected officials accountable for refusing to put such protective measures in place, or that of the consumer base to boycott companies engaged in blatantly exploitative and dangerous labor practices. These collective actions were not taken because the iniquity of the situation was masked by a veil of official morality, which labelled the direct repression of the working class—the elimination of its most basic liberties—as itself a crusade for freedom. Such “moral” manipulations enable the paradox of power noted by Arendt and Hume, in which “the living power of the people,”[31] despite its foundational importance, is restrained and left unrealized by the amplified repressive force of a small but economically dominant social contingent.

It is important to note the role of the State in this process of moral imposition on behalf of the ruling class. By debating and legislating in accordance with the official morality, institutional authority reifies it, providing those precepts of ruling class interest with an appearance of naturalness and thereby working to validate their claims to universality. Representative Hollingsworth was not alone in expressing the sentiment that the flourishing of the stock market is more important than the lives of American workers; instances as brazen as the vehement attempts of conservative politicians to prevent an increase in food stamp funding despite the staggering number of children going hungry represent efforts to embody the official morality. [32] The success of such reification is heartbreakingly clear: ours is a country in which Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton “explained the anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’,”[33] having failed to realize their own “moral value” in the terms imposed on them, unable to earn anything above a starvation wage regardless of their efforts.

Such is the outcome of the ruling class indoctrinating “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it,”[34] using the apparatus of authority as an aid in its illusion. The supposed truth of the official morality, that most insidious of the “ruling ideas”[35] disseminated by the dominant class, holds a devastating weight in the popular psyche because it is manifested by our systems of power and thereby made to seem concrete. To that end, our political representatives, armed with the formalized consent of their constituents, speak and legislate in a manner that serves to enshrine official morality in the rule of law. In the face of the pandemic, they declared that the just action on the part of the working poor was to accept their loss of liberty for the sake of their country. And, faced with that reactionary mandate justified by an apparently eternal morality, we chose not to oppose oppression, but instead to clap for the essential workers as they made their way home.

“The price of obedience has become too high,”[36] writes Terry Tempest Williams, following a vivid illustration of the destruction wreaked by U.S. nuclear arms tests in the Southwest on American lands and American people. Such state-sanctioned harm is the norm, rather than the exception, as we have seen in examples ranging from the Tuskegee Study to the COVID pandemic response. It is enabled by the “inability to question authority,”[37] on account of its justification by official morality, which would have a repressed populace rather accept the rule of their oppressors than challenge it in the hope of change. But this does not have to be the case; ours could be a better world. A governing body loses its legitimacy if its commands are not carried out; its orders are not heeded if the popular masses refuse to recognize its sovereignty. Strikes, protests, and other acts of defiance, in which participants utilize their communal power by refusing, in unison, to conform to the commands of their oppressors, demonstrate the ability of an organized populace to make authority impotent and annul its influence. That transformative kind of resistance is only possible when the official morality which condemns it is recognized as a tool of reaction, when the oppressed declare a morality of their own, oriented towards the liberation and collective betterment of the social world. “[A]nd even then, when power is already in the street, some group…prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.”[38] These tasks: the revocation of repressive morality, its replacement with a conviction for true justice, and the development of leadership capable of organizing such a movement, are all possible. It is imperative that we undertake them if we are to liberate ourselves by realizing our collective power.  

References

Arendt, H. On Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970.

Barthes, R. Mythologies. Trans. Jonathan Cape. Paris: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957.

Blake, A. “Analysis | Trump's Dumbfounding Refusal to Encourage Wearing Masks.” The Washington Post.      Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 25 Jun. 2020: Digital Access.

Cohen, G.A. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Scholarship Online, 2011.

Collins, C., Petergorsky, D. “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers.” Inequality.org. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 29 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

DeParle, J. "As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become a Partisan Flash Point." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 6 May 2020: Digital Access.

Desilver, D. "10 facts about American workers." Fact Tank. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2019. Aug. 2019: Digita Access.

Diaz, J. “New York Sues Amazon Over COVID-19 Workplace Safety.” The Coronavirus Crisis. Washington,     D.C.: National Public Radio, 17 Feb. 2021: Digital Access.

“Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together.” Occupational Health & Safety. Dallas: 1105 Media Inc., 7 May 2020: Digital Access.

“Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 22 Jan.        2020: Digital Access.

Flynn, M. “GOP congressman says he puts saving American ‘way of life’ above saving lives from the coronavirus.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 15 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Hume, D. “Of the First Principles of Government.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume Texts Online,   2021: Digital Access.

“Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.” CNN. Atlanta: Cable News Network, 2020: Digital Access.

Maqbool, A. “Coronavirus: The US Resistance to a Continued Lockdown.” BBC News. London: British         Broadcasting Corporation, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Marx, K. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M. “Who Are Essential Workers?: A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages,             Demographics, and Unionization Rates.” Economic Policy Institute. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy             Institute, 19 May 2020: Digital Access.

Nuttle, M. “Essential Workers Accounted for 87% of Additional COVID-19 Deaths in California, Data         Shows.” abc10.com. 30 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

Reinberg, S. “Nearly 74 Million Essential Workers at High Risk for COVID in U.S.” U.S. News & World        Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. News & World Report, 9 Nov. 2020: Digital Access.

Siddiqui, F. “Hundreds of Covid Cases Reported at Tesla Plant Following Musk's Defiant Reopening, County            Data Shows.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 13 Mar. 2021: Digital Access.

Tankersley, J. "Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Tempest Williams, T. "The Clan of One Breasted Women." Psychological Perspectives (23): 123-131. Los Angeles: C.G. Jung Institute, 1990.

“U.S. Income Distribution 2019.” Statista. Statista Research Department, 20 Jan. 2021: Digital Access.

Vogel, K. P., et al. “The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests.” The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 21 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Wright, R. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.

Wronski, L. New York Times|SurveyMonkey poll: April 2020. New York: The New York Times, 2020: Digital Access.

Zhang, C. “By Numbers: How the US Voted in 2020.” Financial Times. London: Financial Times, 7 Nov.        2020: Digital Access.

Notes

[1] Hume, 1

[2] Arendt, 41

[3] Hume, 1

[4] Zhang

[5] “Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.”

[6] “U.S. Income Distribution 2019”

[7] “Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.”

[8] Hume, 1

[9] Marx, 129

[10] Barthes, 140

[11] Wright, 124

[12] G.A. Cohen provides a proof of this in his essay “Freedom and Money.” 

[13] Cohen, 9

[14] Cohen, 9

[15] Ibid., 10

[16] Blake

[17] Tankersley

[18] Reinberg

[19] Wronski

[20] McNicholas

[21] Diaz

[22] Siddiqui

[23] McNicholas

[24] Nuttle

[25] Collins

[26] “Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together,” 1

[27] Ibid.

[28] Flynn

[29] Maqbool

[30] Vogel

[31] Arendt, 41

[32] DeParle

[33] Livingston

[34] Barthes, 140

[35] Marx, 129

[36] Williams, 128

[37] Ibid.

[38] Arendt, 49

Seven Theses on "Re-opening the Economy": Further Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

1.  The economy is not—and never was—closed or shutdown.

At the peak of the global economic shutdown, it is likely that less than 50% of the economy actually shutdown. And for most of the initial “lockdown” period, much much less than 50% of the economy was inactive. Unskilled workers, sometimes having their hours cut, sometimes increased without overtime pay, magically became “essential workers.” While there is national and regional global variance, this is nearly universally true. Of course, many millions—if not billions—have lost their jobs around the world. Some of these are entertainment or hospitality/comfort service workers, but many are truly essential care and educational workers. The real backbone of the capitalist economic system has been endangered, hyper-exploited, or otherwise cast off. The stock market thrives all the while. Maybe, just maybe, we should actually shutdown this foundationally unjust world order.

2.  The cure is worse than the disease.

The shutdown—and this weird post-shutdown partial shutdown period—has caused enormous harm to countless people. Actually, we could count them, but the people who make those decisions about what to count (and what counts) don’t care enough. It is because of the literal insanity of our system that people are literally being driven insane, into the depths of emergent and exacerbated mental illness. People are killing themselves because of the responses to COVID-19. But that isn’t because we shut down, but rather it is because of how we shutdown, without coming close to addressing long-preexisting social inequities that were barely below the surface—if below the surface at all. This is no cure at all. The most vulnerable are either dead or more vulnerable; the safe and secure are, for the most part, at least as safe and secure as they were before.

3. The disease is worse than the cure.

An economy isn’t a thing that is capable of caring. In the midst of a mass pandemic where likely well-over a million people have already died, we should care about something that has never cared about us? How could it? Economies are systems that reflect the distributions of power and then the character of the values and priorities of that society. The responses to COVID-19 are perfectly in-line with the systemic values of capitalism. As the infamous graffiti reminds us, capitalism is the virus. A COVID-19 vaccine won’t change that. There is a vaccine for capitalism, and it is up to all of us to find it (really, to create it, in practice) together.

4. Yes, the economy is more important than your grandma.

And it always has been. It is more important than you too! It shouldn’t be though. It doesn’t have to be, but if we look at the absolutely wretched state of elder care in the US and around the world, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear actual alive human beings—elected officials and policymakers no less—suggest that grandparents should be willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of capitalism. Think about that. These people have been made completely fucking psychotic. Then again, before COVID-19 too many of us accepted this basic logic on a daily basis.

5. We really should compare this to the flu.

Not that COVID-19 is as serious as the seasonal flu—a mistaken thought I had and quickly abandoned in early March 2020. And yet, seasonal flu is an enduring civilizational challenge that we too easily accept as intractable, beyond what we’ve achieved thus far with the existing vaccination protocols. We have, occasionally more than 50% effective, vaccines that people need to take every year. Still, we have hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from the flu. Perhaps millions are saved, yes. But how many billions of dollars are made by the health care companies that make and distribute these vaccines? Vaccines that—while better than nothing—are still wildly inadequate. There are political-economic lessons we must learn from how the flu is treated, and we must refuse to allow the same things to happen with COVID-19, a much more serious problem.

6. Don’t let them bring evictions back.

We should be paying more attention to the fact that right now, in many places (but, perhaps, most notably in the US), evictions are effectively non-existent. As banks, landlords, and local sheriffs still try to find a way to evict people, we should fight to get the prohibition against eviction accepted as a new political norm—even if the result of such a struggle is a compromise that simply makes it harder for people to be evicted.

7.  Physical distancing is new. Social distancing has been going on for a while. Since the late 1700s probably.

With the urbanization associated with the industrial revolution people have, over the past several centuries, lived increasingly close to one another. Physical proximity has increased along with the development and spread of global capitalism. During that same period, humanity has become increasingly socially-isolated. Family ties are less. Friendship bonds, while they may be maintained in more mediated form through social media, are perhaps stronger and more significant than ever before. Still, these bonds are not as powerful or enduring at this stage of historical social development as family bonds were prior to the advent of global capitalism—however oppressive and violent they indeed were. COVID-19 has merely exacerbated a problematic sociological pattern that was already with us. One wonders whether social ties will experience a jump in strength once COVID-19 is under better control, epidemiologically and medically speaking (likely only possible once mass vaccination is achieved).

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is the founding curator and editor of LeftHooked, a monthly aggregator and review of socialist writing, published by the Hampton Institute, where he is also a contributing editor. He is a visiting assistant professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. Bryant is also the politics of culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power and co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (originally published with Brill and now available in paperback with Haymarket Books).

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 the Path Beyond Post-Industrial Society

By Connor Harney

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, we must justify our right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

- Richard Buckminster Fuller

It has been a little over a week since President Trump deemed my co-workers at Whole Foods and I critical infrastructure during the global Coronavirus pandemic, and already, any sense of appreciation that title conferred—both in being categorized as essential in combating COVID-19 and better everyday treatment by customers—has already dissipated. In the place of that gratitude, our customers seem as entitled as ever toward the labor we thanklessly provide.  At the same time, any supply-chain issue or corporate-rationing policy out of our control means we face their ire, rather than the faceless executives and middle management responsible.

Taking aside that this global outbreak has everyone on edge, this sort of behavior is not at all surprising given the highly-stratified nature of class in the United States. There is a massive gulf in wealth, even among those that work. That is, the pay differential between say a software engineer and grocery stocker like myself is immense: the stock clerk can expect a median pay of just over 12 dollars an hour and the software developer, on the other hand, can expect just under $58. Even the lowest paid developer makes twice that of the clerk. Of course, none of this takes into account benefits connected to employment in the U.S. like healthcare and retirement, which widens this gap even further.

As Zizek wrote recently, “the impossible has happened, our world has stopped,” and yet, as we are expected to provide a sense of normalcy for the rest of country during what can only be described as a breakdown of all norms, workers in the service sector still struggle for basic human dignity. It was only after public shaming that my company offered paid sick leave, and only for the extent of the pandemic. Even our hazard pay is laughable, two dollars more an hour to put ourselves and our families on the front lines of this biological battle.

Given that, it has been nearly a decade since Fight for $15 began their campaign to raise wages and unionize typically-unorganized workers. And as the minimum still sits at under eight dollars, it should come as no surprise that conceptions of the nature of the work constitute a major dividing line among American workers. As a society, we fetishize technology, and its presence looms large over our national consciousness. For that reason, those who work in that sector of the economy find themselves held in high esteem by the public.

Unfortunately, this reverence is almost always accompanied by a zero-sum view, whereas only certain workers deserve dignity. Just like the literal wealth of the nation, there is only so much goodwill to go around—low-skilled workers, or the ones that make sure that everyone is clothed, fed, and sheltered, are barred from pride in their work that those in other sectors are allowed. This belief in the lowly nature of the service worker is by no means a new one.

Dolores Dante, a waitress interviewed by Studs Terkel in the early-1970s for his famous book Working, speaks to this long-standing state of affairs when she described her response to those who would say she was “just a waitress.” According to Dolores, “people imagine a waitress couldn’t possibly think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food,” but for her the job fulfilled a sense of purpose to the point that: “I don’t feel lowly at all. I myself feel sure. I don’t want to change the job. I love it.”

As human beings, we need to engage with the material world for our survival. Under capitalism, the way we meet our material needs is determined by factors like where we live, our level of education, skills we have, jobs available on the labor market, as well as the social networks we are a part of.  All of these things set the stage for where and how we work. That a game of chance governs our career trajectories should highlight how arbitrary the barriers to respectability we create are: the Dolores Dantes of the world should find dignity in their work.

However, the strongly-held belief in the connection between “skill” and compensation remains an obstacle to a world where such self-worth for service workers is publicly embraced. In many ways, this problem comes out of the notion of the United States as reaching a new level of economic development—a concept that would not have been foreign to our waitress. During the 1970s, manufacturing began to shift from the core to the periphery of the capitalist world system, and what are often called the service and knowledge economies emerged as the dominant growth sectors. With a certain optimism, Daniel Bell and other thinkers responded to these changes by predicting the coming of the Post-industrial society.

Under these new social arrangements, making things no longer mattered. That the U.S. could provide the bare necessities of life was a foregone conclusion. The focus of the new economy would be on ideas and technical know-how. What this view did not consider is that, rather than a transcendence of industrial society in one country, it represented more its international universalization. This was at least Harry Braverman’s response to the idea of Post-industrial society. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, released in the same year as Bell’s book, he argues that the theory is just another in a long line of “economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time.”

Most importantly, rather than a decline in Taylorism or scientific management in the world of work, the rise of the service economy symbolized its universal application. He describes the segmentation of work similar to that used on an assembly line as “a revolution…now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had ever imagined possible.” Not only was American society still reliant on that manufacture of commodities, other workplaces were beginning to look more like the shop floor.

Even so, the link between knowledge and the so-called new economy placed a certain import on those with higher levels of education—as it was often assumed the technology used in the growth sectors of the American economy required more formal learning. Such a view still prevails, but considering the level of technology that has been integrated into our daily lives and the abundance of people with advanced degrees working behind Starbucks counters and driving for Uber, it should be left in the past along with the myth of the post-industrial society the current pandemic has clearly laid bare.

Instead, we should use the current crisis to break down barriers between working people—highlighting the work of all that keeps our economy in motion.  Moving past these antiquated notions, we can come together to forge new social bonds to fight for an economy that works for the working class and not just the rich.

COVID-19 Proves Workers Are Essential and Capitalists Are A Drain

(Photo: Johnny Louis / Sipa USA via AP)

By Jasmine Duff

Republished from Red Flag.

The Marxist argument that it’s the labour of workers, and not the supposed intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit of bosses, that keeps society running, has long been ridiculed by defenders of capitalism. In the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the truth of Marx’s claim has been brought into sharp relief.

Those whose work has been deemed essential under the current restrictions aren’t the CEOs, bankers, mining executives – or the politicians who serve them. It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to anyone but themselves, that these so-called wealth creators can spend months isolated in their mansions or country estates without this having any impact on the basic functioning of society.

The rest of us would be better off without them. The people we depend on in this crisis are those whose labour we depend on in everyday life: nurses, teachers, those who grow our food and those who transport it to the supermarket shelves, and the people who, despite the health risks, continue to serve us in the supermarkets and chemists.

We’re told that corporate bosses like Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and mining magnate Gina Rinehart deserve their immense wealth because they play a special role in the economy. Typical of this perspective is the argument made by Forbes columnist and “leadership strategy” expert Rainer Zitelmann in a 2019 article. “For entrepreneurs, who usually earn far more than top-tier managers, high earnings are usually a reward for particularly good ideas”, he wrote. “The richest people in the world are those who have the best ideas.”

The ideologues making these arguments want us to believe that workers are unimportant and replaceable – nothing more than a “human resource” to be exploited at the whims of the capitalists. If you’re a worker, they think, it’s because you’re not smart, creative or driven enough to have climbed through the ranks. That’s why you deserve low wages, poor job security, a shitty education in chronically underfunded schools and a lack of decent health care.

The COVID-19 crisis has torn this argument to shreds. The global economy is grinding to a halt because many workers have to stay home. The CEOs self-isolating in their mansions can do nothing to save the situation. All their supposed creativity and intelligence is useless without the labour force that their wealth was built on.

The actions of our political leaders confirm this. The only creative and intelligent thing they’ve thought of to do to stave off the prospect of a deep recession is to keep as many workers as possible at their posts – recklessly sacrificing our health to protect the profits of their corporate masters. Prime minister Scott Morrison gave the game away when he said in a press conference on 24 March that while all “non-essential” workers would be sent home “everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker”.

As Morrison put it, “It can be essential in a service whether it’s a nurse or a doctor or a schoolteacher, or a public servant who is working tonight to ensure that we can get even greater capacity in our Centrelink offices, working until 8:00pm under the new arrangement in the call centres, these are all essential jobs. People stacking shelves – that is essential.”

When the basic functioning of society is on the line, it’s not the Alan Joyces or Gina Rineharts who are deemed essential. It’s the shelf stackers. Without workers, the capitalists are nothing.

The flipside of this equation is expressed in Marx’s description of the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism. Workers are the engine that keeps society running. When our labour stops, society comes to a halt.

Already, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen numerous examples that illustrate this potential. Thousands of Italian workers in the auto and metal industries have walked out in wildcat strikes to enforce social distancing, refusing to risk their health and the health of their families for Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte. Conte had made clear his desire to keep profits flowing despite the country having a 10 percent mortality rate from COVID-19 infections – tweeting on 14 March that “Italy doesn’t stop”. Workers, however, had other ideas.

Workers in Argentina who took over a factory in 2017 that previously sewed police uniforms are now using it to produce surgical masks. Another group of Argentinian workers who in 2011 took over one of the largest printing presses in Latin America are now using it to print 3D protective masks and produce hand sanitiser.

There has even been some action by workers here in Australia. Early in the morning on 27 March workers at a Coles warehouse in Melbourne’s western suburbs walked out in protest management’s refusal to provide adequate protective equipment. The industrial power of these workers is immense. A three-day strike at the same warehouse in 2016 resulted in supermarket shelves across Victoria and Tasmania lying empty for weeks.

Workers have the power to prevent capitalists exploiting our skills as pickers in warehouses, shelf stackers in supermarkets or as truck drivers. In a world without bosses, we could collectively and democratically decide how our skills should be used to advance the interests of everyone. We could distribute food, for example, according to human need. This would end the barbaric reality that exists under capitalism, where millions starve to death every year despite enough food being produced to feed the world 1.5 times over.

We could use our skills as construction workers to rapidly build hospitals, rather than, as this the case today, endless luxury apartments and shopping malls for the rich – so that in any future health crisis no one would be forced to go without a bed.

Working class solidarity, democracy and collectivity: these are building blocks of socialism. Socialism is a society in which workers can democratically decide, using all our skills and creativity, what kind of world we want to live in, rather than allowing a wealthy minority of capitalists to run society in the interests of profit. The bosses need us. We don’t need them.

Right now, capitalism is in crisis. Workers have more power than ever, but we’re being forced into more barbaric conditions every day. To quote German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the context of the of the epochal slaughter of World War One, we now stand at a crossroads, “Either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

Every day, new sacrifices are made at the altar of corporate profits – whether it’s the destruction of the environment, or the destruction of human health. The task of organising for a socialist future has never been more urgent.