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).

Time, Money, and Lives: The Simple Math of Viral Mass Murder

By J.E. Karla

The masses make history, and the mass pushback against a premature end for social distancing efforts has compelled Donald Trump and his allies to relent. Yet for a brief, shining moment markets soared at the mere suggestion of an early end to anti-virus hygiene measures. For the most reactionary leaders -- those like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- the tradeoff of lives for money is ongoing.

How does this calculation work? To understand, just look at the famous chart going around to demonstrate the need to “flatten the curve” of virus cases.

There are three significant numbers represented by this image: the area under each curve, the threshold extending from the y-axis (number of cases), and the x-axis (time). They are each most significant to a different audience.

The public at large cares most about the areas under the curves: how many people are going to get this disease? Am I going to get it, or will someone I care about get it? The bigger the area, the more likely you are to be touched by the virus. Related to this, of course, is a number not represented in the graph: how many will die from it. 

The second number -- the threshold -- is relevant to that question, and most significant to public officials and health professionals. This is the number of cases that the health care system can safely handle at any one time. The area bounded by it and the top of the curve has a dramatically higher mortality rate than the area below it.

The third number is most relevant to the capitalist class -- how long the plague lasts. Capital is bound up with time, as it represents surplus production, the amount of time the capitalists can make workers produce beyond the point at which our labor power has been paid for. The longer the shutdowns last, the less capital is generated. Furthermore, capital not invested in the persistent circulation of goods and labor is not capital at all -- a pause in production poses an existential threat to the system as a whole.

So there is a contradiction at hand between earnest policymakers and the capitalist class. Public health experts and the officials listening to them are desperate to keep the curve as low as possible. This means saving lives (the priority of the public at large) at the expense of a longer duration for the crisis; social distancing reduces the reproduction rate of the virus until it runs out of steam. Capitalists are just as desperate to shorten the duration by simply exhausting the supply of uninfected people as quickly as possible, even if it means many more deaths -- perhaps into the millions.

For them there is really no downside. A disproportionate number of those who die will be old or poor, meaning that a mass die off would likely entail an increase in productivity and a reduction in social support costs. Any bottom line impacts will get covered by a bailout of one sort or another.

The capitalists also own the media so they can control the narrative -- “this is not a time for politics, it’s a time for charity” -- and they have very conveniently placed a hated buffoon as the figurehead of the enterprise so they can blame him and pretend they never liked the idea all along if they need to. They’ll swap him out for another stooge that will kill for them when the time comes, granting symbolic catharsis to outraged liberals happy to see their 401(k)s back in the black.

Worst-case scenario, they can push towards a new world war with China and hide their culpability under a blanket of jingoism. They’ve already begun that play, and it’s worked many times before.

Only a mass revolt would upend their calculations, and history has shown that at crucial moments they have underestimated that risk. This has a strong possibility of being one of those times, but they prepared for this long ago, using a combination of state violence and philanthropic assimilation to suppress and NGO-ify popular movements. The best-case scenario: near-spontaneous and ad hoc mass formations like the Occupy movement. Look for bourgeois openness to social distancing to reawaken at that time.

Until then let’s be as calculating as the enemy. Let’s maximize our creativity and flexibility. Let’s match their disregard with compassion, and their chauvinism with a global perspective. Let’s trust the masses as much as they fear them. Most of all let’s realize that we actually share one thing with them, namely the thing we lack the most: time.

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

By Bryant William Sculos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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