Sic transit gloria mundi – Frédéric Boyer (fr)

03/04/2020; publié dans la série « tracts de crise » chez Gallimard, disponible ici;

Sic transit gloria mundi. Ainsi passe la gloire du monde. Toutes les
alarmes se déchaînent. La gloire vacille. Son éclat nous aveuglait.
Nous n’écoutions pas. Nous pensions vivre et nous étions vécus
par quelque chose d’inconnu de nous. Quelque chose que nous ne
voulions pas reconnaître. Quelque chose d’inconnu de nous qui
était bien à nous. La férocité de la vie.
Son agilité à se répandre, à contaminer, infecter, et à tuer. La vie tue.
Ne me dites pas qu’il fallait attendre ce virus pour le découvrir. La vie
n’est pas toujours une amie, non plus. Ou aura-t-on oublié jusqu’aux
usages des noms de la vie pour n’en retenir que le plus rassurant?
Un vieux poème sioux conseillait d’appeler ami, oncle ou frère, les
loups et les ours rencontrés sur les pistes dans la forêt.
— Même ceux qui auront dévoré mon ami, mon oncle ou mon frère?
demandait un jeune chasseur.
— Eux, surtout! répondait le chaman.

La mort cogne à la vitre de nos écrans. Ma fille veut savoir d’où ça vient. Quoi ? La férocité de la vie. Je lui réponds maladroitement, elle nous appartient aussi. Elle vient du monde tel que nous l’habitons, et du monde tel que nous ne l’habitons plus ou pas assez. Elle vient d’une grande volonté que nous avons toujours eue d’habiter, d’exploiter le monde, et de trop peu de conscience de n’être pas tout du monde. Si gloire il y a, c’est elle. Épouvantable et fragile. Et nous qui supplions de nous remettre sur nos rails abîmés. Rouler à tombeau ouvert dans l’éclat du monde.

Ma fille me dit qu’elle se sent très fragile depuis qu’elle a vu littéralement, un été il y a trois ans, la mort bondir comme un fauve et lui arracher sa mère. Et la litanie sombre du virus égrenée aux infos en continu lui rappelle crûment la perte. Je lui réponds que nous ne portons pas suffisamment attention à la fragilité qui est la nôtre. C’est notre cruauté. Cette bête sauvage que nous sommes à nous-mêmes. Et
que cette inattention est aussi notre beauté terrible. Celle des humains, des « êtres éphémères », lisait-on déjà dans l’Odyssée.

Le virus appartient à la force aveugle, insaisissable de la vie. Il nous rappelle brutalement ce que nous préférions ne pas savoir, non seulement la fragilité nue de la vie mais tout autant son implacable raison : nous ne possédons pas la vie,
nous lui appartenons. Et vouloir en sortir ou la dominer, c’est notre folle et crâne prétention. Nous mourrons d’être elle et nous ne pouvons espérer nous sauver que grâce à elle, grâce à ce que la vie nous permet de connaître, d’explorer et d’agir. Pas plus. Nous nous sauvons un temps. Le simple et merveilleux, fragile, temps de vivre. C’est ce que signifiait la vieille expression latine : Sic transit gloria mundi. La gloire du monde, nous ne pouvons la posséder ni l’accaparer. Elle n’est gloire que d’être au monde, de passer. Avions-nous oublié qu’être humain c’était vivre la totalité des événements du monde, être à l’écoute de la féroce et magnifique proposition chorale du monde ? Vie et mort, force et fragilité.

La puissance du virus et son agilité à se répandre atteignent aujourd’hui notre propre puissance d’action et d’organisation communes – la politique. Vie, mort, monde et politique. Il faudra revoir les conditions et les principes de notre occupation du monde, des territoires, des populations. Revoir notre gloire. Tout ce qui nous aura fait oublier ou nous aura détournés de notre précieuse vulnérabilité de vivant.
La politique ne devrait jamais oublier que sa tâche est de nous organiser sains et saufs un monde commun possible, mais en appartenant à deux royaumes distincts et indissociables, celui de la nature, de la férocité de la vie, et celui des sociétés humaines qui voudraient parfois s’abstraire de ce premier royaume. Comment assumer le désastre sinon en oeuvrant pour que reviennent le bien de la citoyenneté et de l’attachement politique au service de tous et de toute vie au monde. Avec cette vieille idée tragique dont je ne démords plus : c’est l’insécurité de vivre qui donne son prix au travail de vivre.

L’hirondelle fraîche du printemps et l’agilité aveugle du virus. Je les conjugue, je les expose, je les conjure. Il faudrait prendre notre vulnérabilité politiquement au sérieux. Opposer à la férocité de la vie moins notre puissance cognitive que notre vulnérabilité de vivants. Notre capacité de résistance à la violence du vivant dépend étroitement de notre degré de conscience de notre fragilité. Les plus anciennes techniques des arts de combat nous l’avaient déjà appris. Je cherche une image. Je dis à ma fille : Tu te souviens des films de Chaplin ? Un petit homme jette toute sa dignité dans une entreprise absurde et impure. C’est nous. Il court pour échapper à un poursuivant jusqu’à ne plus savoir lequel poursuit qui. La faim lui fait dévorer ses chaussures bouillies comme il se régalerait d’un rôti, jusqu’au détail du lacet difficile à avaler. Elle sourit – une parcelle de gloire enfin. Il ne faut rien oublier de notre absurde, drôle et tragique entêtement à vivre et tenir droit. Une autre histoire me revient. Un étrange passage de l’Évangile. Dernière apparition du Ressuscité aux disciples, sur la mer de Tibériade. « Les disciples ne savent pas que c’est Jésus »
( Jean, 21, 4). Mais Jean le reconnaît et le dit à Simon Pierre qui, lit-on, « du manteau se ceignit, car il était nu, et se jeta dans la mer » ( Jean, 21, 7).

Est-ce vraiment par peur et honte ? Un vrai gag absurde à la Charlot, celui du type qui pour se jeter à l’eau prend soin de mettre son manteau parce qu’il était nu. Il se jette à l’eau en s’habillant du manteau abandonné quand il était bien au sec et à l’abri : le manteau de son humanité perdue. Pas si fou. Nous croyons vivre couverts et protégés. Mais nous sommes nus. L’homme ? « Un pauvre animal nu et fourchu », dit le fou dans Le Roi Lear. Et comme des fous nous vivions dévêtus de notre vulnérable humanité. Jetonsnous à l’eau avec nos vieux habits précaires. Et préparons les fêtes à venir.

El Estado, las respuestas públicas, y el día después de la pandemia – Daniel Chavez (es)

02/04/2020; version original aqui; english version here;

La cobertura mediática internacional y la mayoría de los análisis académicos se han centrado hasta ahora en la magnitud de la pandemia del virus COVID-19 en las sociedades ricas del norte, en particular en los países europeos. Las referencias a la realidad europea, sin embargo, ocultan profundas diferencias en cómo la crisis está afectando a diversos países y sectores sociales. Este artículo analiza las respuestas del sector público en el contexto europeo (con énfasis en la dimensión socio-económica) y sugiere algunas “lecciones” que podrían ser relevantes o de utilidad para América Latina y otras regiones del mundo.

Lección 1 – Proteger a la población trabajadora y vulnerable

Un principio rector de la economía de libre mercado es la privatización de las ganancias y la socialización de las pérdidas. Sin embargo, en el marco de la actual pandemia, incluso los libertarios más fundamentalistas están exigiendo regulaciones del mercado más estrictas y un papel más activo para el Estado. En la mayoría de los países del mundo (con la probable excepción de Corea del Norte, y solo hasta cierto punto), la economía nacional se estructura básicamente en torno a tres componentes: consumo de los hogares, gasto público e inversión del sector privado. En tiempos “normales”, los gastos de los hogares y las inversiones privadas aseguran el crecimiento económico, pero en tiempos de crisis –más allá de su origen– incluso los defensores más fervientes de la libertad mercantil exigen que el sector público les proteja.

Esta lógica se tornó evidente durante la crisis financiera global de la década pasada: en todo el mundo, y en particular en los países ricos del norte, durante la gran recesión de los años 2007 y 2008 el Estado intervino para rescatar al sector financiero y otros sectores que se estaban hundiendo. En algunos países, el gobierno desembolsó directamente dinero a los hogares y aumentó las inversiones públicas para compensar la reducción de las actividades del sector privado en áreas cruciales de la economía. Aun así, para muchos gobiernos la prioridad fue rescatar a los bancos. Según datos recopilados por investigadores del Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), en el período 2007–17 y en 37 países, el apoyo público directo a las instituciones financieras ascendió a 1.6 millones de millones de dólares (¡3.5 millones de millones si se incluyen las garantías!).¹ ¿Pero cuántos recursos se destinaron a proteger a la población trabajadora y a los hogares de bajos ingresos?

Una diferencia crucial entre la crisis generada por la pandemia y las crisis anteriores es el hecho de que ahora los problemas no tienen una base económica. En este contexto, los subsidios temporales a las personas que siguen ocupadas, como los previstos en los planes elaborados por los gobiernos de varios países industrializados (por ejemplo en el proyecto de ley actualmente en discusión en el Congreso estadounidense, que incluye transferencias financieras de hasta 1.200 dólares para la mayoría de la población adulta), no serían muy efectivos.² La gente no va a dejar de hacer compras debido a la falta de dinero, sino porque las medidas de distanciamiento social y cuarentena le impedirán salir, sin que la expansión del comercio electrónico compense la baja de la actividad comercial tradicional. El soporte económico a las personas que necesiten ser apoyadas sigue siendo sumamente importante, pero el apoyo monetario debe reorientarse hacia quienes estén perdiendo sus empleos y no, o al menos no principalmente, hacia quienes tienen trabajo asegurado a largo plazo.

La población trabajadora en mayor riesgo de quedar desempleada también debería recibir apoyo. Un supuesto básico de las medidas que se están aplicando para contener la pandemia es que en todos los sectores en los que trabajar desde casa sea posible la gente va a continuar cumpliendo sus tareas y responsabilidades regulares como de costumbre. Pero la inseguridad laboral se está extendiendo tan rápido como el virus y el presentismo –resultante de presiones patronales o incentivos económicos para que las personas acudan a su trabajo incluso cuando estén enfermas– se está convirtiendo en otro problema difícil de contener. Es vital entonces que quienes estén ocupados en sectores esenciales, en los que trabajar desde casa no sea viable, no sufran contagios o propaguen el virus, con nuevas medidas que garanticen la estabilidad del empleo o del ingreso amenazados por la pandemia. Incluso el gobierno británico, conservador y muy cercano al sector empresarial, ha decidido que el Estado va a otorgar subvenciones equivalentes hasta un monto equivalente al 80 por ciento del salario si las empresas no reducen la nómina durante la recesión provocada por la pandemia. Dichos pagos tendrán un valor máximo de 2.500 libras por mes (2.800 dólares), justo por encima del ingreso medio.

En Europa el virus ha encontrado un terreno fértil para su rápida difusión en amplios sectores de la población gravemente afectados por las políticas de austeridad de los años precedentes. Las medidas puestas en marcha por la Comisión Europea (CE), el Banco Central Europeo (BCE), el FMI y los gobiernos conservadores, ha expandido el estrato social del precariado, altamente vulnerable al COVID-19 y amenazas similares. El nuevo precariado europeo incluye a millones de personas sin hogar y beneficiarios de los programas públicos o de ONG de ayuda alimentaria. Una encuesta publicada el año pasado por el Consejo Europeo de Relaciones Exteriores (ECFR) evidenció que solo un tercio de la población alemana y una cuarta parte de la italiana y la francesa tenían dinero sobrante al final de cada mes para gastos discrecionales.³ Al mismo tiempo, los contratos de empleo a tiempo parcial o de “cero horas” se han expandido enormemente, socavando la economía de millones de hogares.

En palabras de una investigadora británica, “los millones de trabajadores atrapados en la pobreza tienen más probabilidades de tener trabajos inseguros, con menos derechos y beneficios laborales y con menos ahorros que les permitan cubrir costos imprevistos o brechas temporales en sus ingresos“.⁴ Por lo tanto, es crucial que los gobiernos tomen todas las medidas posibles para reducir tanto la presión financiera como el aumento de la ansiedad ante la creciente inseguridad laboral causada por la pandemia. Algunas medidas posibles para proteger a estos trabajadores serían: (a) la introducción de programas de garantía del empleo, que asegurarían recursos para cubrir las necesidades básicas en caso de desempleo o reducción del ingreso, dando cobertura a la población afectada por el cierre de fábricas como consecuencia de la caída de la producción durante la crisis sanitaria, empleados en el sector del comercio minorista, trabajadores independientes, artistas, y propietarios de pequeñas empresas; y (b) restructurar el empleo esporádico en la llamada gig economy, con la introducción de nuevas medidas que obliguen a los empleadores a otorgar beneficios de licencia remunerada en caso de enfermedad y a tratar a todos los trabajadores como empleados en planilla y no como contratistas independientes.⁵

Como otros investigadores ya lo han explicado, en el contexto de una pandemia “la economía real necesita ayudas en forma de condonación de deudas, obras públicas ecológicamente sustentables, educación superior gratuita y socialización de la atención médica”.⁶ En los últimos días, varios gobiernos europeos han tomado medidas concretas en este sentido. Entre otras, a modo de ejemplo y con referencias a unos pocos países.⁷

• Bélgica: Más de un millón de trabajadores ya han sido colocados en desempleo temporal. Durante el primer mes, los trabajadores despedidos recibirán un anticipo de 1.450 euros (1.572 dólares), mientras se procesan sus expedientes. El gobierno regional de Flandes apoyará a los trabajadores en paro temporal con el pago de sus facturas de energía.
• Dinamarca: El gobierno ofrecerá ayuda financiera a trabajadores autónomos y estudiantes, así como una compensación por gastos fijos como el alquiler y un acceso más fácil a préstamos garantizados por el Estado.
• Croacia: El gobierno controlará y limitará los precios de mercado de 28 básicos artículos de consumo familiar básico, incluyendo harina, huevos, azúcar, aceite de cocina, carne, pescado, medicamentos y productos sanitarios.
• Francia: Se suspende el pago de impuestos, cotizaciones sociales y facturas de agua, electricidad, gas y alquiler.
• Italia: Con retroactividad al 23 de febrero, una moratoria de 60 días protegerá a los trabajadores de despidos por razones objetivas, evitando que las empresas recorten la planilla con la excusa de razones económicas. También se otorgará un bono de 600 euros a quienes hayan perdido su trabajo por la pandemia y, durante un periodo de dos meses, se ampliarán de tres a quince días al mes las licencias laborales para personas con discapacidad y responsables del cuidado de familiares dependientes. Asimismo, las madres y los padres con hijos de hasta 12 años podrán solicitar una licencia parental de hasta 15 días con una compensación equivalente al 50 por ciento del salario.
• Portugal: Las madres y los padres que necesiten permanecer en casa para cuidar de los niños durante el cierre de las escuelas tendrán garantizado el pago del 66 por ciento de su salario.
• España: Las hipotecas y las facturas de electricidad y agua de personas sin un ingreso regular estarán sujetas a una moratoria. Los empleados temporalmente fuera del trabajo cobrarán el seguro de desempleo sin que se compute el tiempo de la prestación. Las y los trabajadores por cuenta propia dejarán de pagar impuestos si sus ingresos se reducen durante la pandemia. Un fondo específico de contingencia cubrirá las necesidades de personas mayores, sin techo y en residencias de mayores y dependientes. También se flexibilizarán las normas de gasto público para que los gobiernos locales puedan usar su superávit si lo invierten en programas sociales.

Por otra parte, si bien todas las ocupaciones son importantes en tiempos de crisis, en el marco particular de esta pandemia en Europa hemos revalorizado la imperiosa necesidad del servicio público. Las y los trabajadores de la salud pública –en todas las áreas: medicina, enfermería, limpieza, etc.– literalmente están dejando su vida atendiendo a la población enferma, pero hay otros sectores –por ejemplo la policía, los bomberos, el profesorado y el magisterio– que también están trabajando en condiciones extraordinarias. Un nuevo ritual social en las ciudades europeas es el aplauso a las y los trabajadores de la salud al atardecer, pero el funcionariado público no solo necesita aplausos, sino también la reversión de los recortes presupuestarios que dificultan el trabajo en hospitales, escuelas y otros servicios esenciales.

Lección 2 – Invertir en infraestructura pública para enfrentar la próxima epidemia

La rápida difusión mundial del COVID-19 no fue una sorpresa para muchos epidemiólogos y otros especialistas en salud pública que venían advirtiendo desde hace varios años sobre los riesgos de una pandemia. Si los países europeos hubieran invertido en las capacidades físicas y sociales necesarias para enfrentar crisis de este tipo, la región habría estado mucho mejor preparada para controlar la transmisión del virus.

Algunos de los países europeos más afectados son precisamente aquellos que habían sufrido los peores recortes en el presupuesto público en el contexto de las medidas de austeridad aplicadas en la zona euro durante la serie de crisis financieras de la década pasada. La situación actual del sistema de salud italiano es un claro ejemplo de lo que un equipo de investigadores ha caracterizado como “muerte por austeridad”.⁸ Incluso los países que habían desarrollado estructuras de salud pública fuertes y muy admiradas, como el Servicio Nacional de Salud del Reino Unido (NHS), están siendo abrumados por el actual aluvión de enfermos. Primero en Italia, y ahora rápidamente en España y Gran Bretaña, los centros de salud están comenzando a colapsar bajo la afluencia masiva de pacientes. Después de una década de austeridad impuesta por gobiernos conservadores, el NHS tiene hoy un número de camas de hospitales, profesionales médicos y de enfermería per cápita inferior al promedio de los países industrializados y (como ya está sucediendo en Italia) los médicos intensivistas británicos están siendo forzados a tomar la dura decisión de quién vive y quién muere.⁹

Pero la austeridad también ha afectado a los países europeos por otras vías que disminuyen aún más las capacidades de lucha contra la pandemia. En muchos países de la región, las autoridades municipales y regionales han sufrido recortes brutales de sus presupuestos que han socavado las posibilidades de respuesta de los servicios de policía, bomberos y ambulancias.¹⁰ Y a pesar de que los gobiernos de derecha han “secuestrado” parte del discurso y algunas propuestas y demandas de los partidos políticos progresistas y los movimientos sociales de Europa, las medidas recientes anunciadas a lo largo y ancho de la región están lejos de suplir la terrible erosión de los servicios sociales y de la infraestructura de salud pública causada por los recortes presupuestarios de la última década.

Lección 3: Eliminar la obsesión con el déficit público, el nivel de deuda y la caída del PIB

Mucho antes de la erupción de la pandemia, varios economistas y analistas de negocios en Europa y en otras regiones del mundo habían expresado serias preocupaciones sobre la inminencia de una nueva crisis económica y financiera global, ya muy visible en las caídas de la productividad y los ingresos fiscales de varios países en meses precedentes. Pero los impactos del virus COVID-19 en la salud de la gente y de la economía han sido tan drásticos y abruptos que la mayoría de las predicciones a mediano plazo están pasando a ser rápidamente obsoletas. La directora del FMI ha vaticinado que la recesión mundial provocada por la pandemia será tan mala o incluso peor que la crisis financiera del año 2008.¹¹

Las medidas de distanciamiento físico, aislamiento y cuarentena adoptadas por los gobiernos europeos para contener la pandemia implican un enorme colapso de la demanda de una inmensa variedad de productos y servicios, con la excepción de una lista cada vez más reducida de suministros esenciales. Esta tendencia, en la región y en el mundo, conduce a lo que los economistas llaman un “shock de la oferta”; es decir, el cierre de fábricas o producción a capacidad reducida. Al mismo tiempo, hay un “shock de la demanda”, ya que los gastos del consumo caen en picada.

Incluso economistas muy ortodoxos y políticos conservadores están comenzando a reconocer que esta es una emergencia sin precedentes que exige respuestas coherentes y sensatas, abandonando la obsesión habitual con el déficit público, el margen de ganancia, el nivel de deuda y el crecimiento del PIB. La crisis financiera de los años 2007 y 2008 fue terrible tanto en términos económicos como sociales, pero los efectos de la pandemia en la producción, los medios de vida y los empleos podrían ser inmensamente peores. Como dijo el jefe de la Oficina de Responsabilidad Presupuestaria (OBR) del Reino Unido: “este no es el momento de ser puntillosos en torno a las preocupaciones habituales sobre la deuda del sector público, ya que estamos es una situación típica de épocas de guerra”.¹² El Primer Ministro español incluso ha pedido que la Unión Europea implemente un “Plan Marshall” (como el ejecutado después de la segunda guerra mundial) para combatir la propagación del virus y sus consecuencias sociales.

En el contexto de la pandemia, incluso la jerga de los economistas parece inapropiada. El término “recesión” generalmente alude a una disminución en la producción y el empleo , pero hoy la principal preocupación no debería ser la salud de “la economía” (al menos como la entienden los economistas ortodoxos) sino la salud y la vida de las personas. Esta perspectiva implica desafiar el discurso (y las acciones) de los economistas, las agencias de calificación crediticia y los funcionarios gubernamentales encaprichados con la contención de la deuda o el déficit fiscal. ¿Qué valor tiene una calificación AAA para un gobierno nacional cuando los médicos en las unidades de cuidados intensivos deben decidir quién recibe un ventilador, quién vive y quién muere?

Quizás este sea también el momento perfecto para tener una conversación seria sobre el significado real del “decrecimiento”, o más específicamente de un “decrecimiento planificado”, pensando en la posibilidad de que los gobiernos faciliten una transición que no sea perjudicial para el clima y la gente en lugar de implementar programas masivos de “estímulo” que en última instancia están dirigidos a asegurar ganancias para las grandes corporaciones transnacionales. Proponer un rol más activo del Estado no debe confundirse con reformas impositivas como las propuestas por megamillonarios como Bill Gates,¹³ ni con las recetas keynesianas tradicionales para enfrentar la recesión basadas en transferencias de dinero para alentar el consumo o grandes proyectos de infraestructura pública para “reactivar la economía”. Los intentos de revitalización de la actividad comercial en el momento actual podrían empeorar la propagación del virus, y en contextos de aislamiento físico y cuarentenas forzadas fomentar el consumo sería de dudosa eficacia para dinamizar la economía.

Lección 4 : La recuperación de la propiedad y la gestión pública es una gran idea

Los requerimientos al Estado para que intervenga de forma activa y con más fuerza son cada vez más intensos y perentorios, ya que los impactos económicos, sociales y políticos de la pandemia cada día que pasa se tornan más dramáticos, al ser ya peores que todo lo sufrido desde la última gran crisis mundial de la última década. No es sorprendente que los gobiernos europeos hayan estado dispuestos a acudir tan rápido al rescate del sector privado: en el Reino Unido, el gobierno anunció un paquete de préstamos y donaciones de 350.000 millones de libras (403.000 millones de dólares) para ayudar a las empresas británicas durante la pandemia. En Francia, la tesorería del Estado desembolsará 300.000 millones de euros (325.000 millones de dólares) a empresas privadas para evitar quiebras. Medidas similares han sido implementadas por otros gobiernos europeos. Pero al mismo tiempo, los llamados a la recuperación de lo público también se han acentuado.

A mediados de marzo, la noticia de que el gobierno español había “nacionalizado” todos los hospitales y centros de salud del país fue titular de primera página en los diarios de toda Europa. La cobertura mediática era un tanto exagerada, ya que no hubo un cambio en la propiedad y en realidad la medida se limitaba a poner a todos los proveedores de salud privados bajo control gubernamental. Aun así, la decisión española prefigura medidas más radicales que muy probablemente serán tomadas a corto plazo por otros gobiernos.

El cambio hacia un mayor control público podía esperarse del gobierno español, compuesto por una coalición de centroizquierda entre socialdemócratas (Partido Socialista, PSOE) y la nueva izquierda (Unidas Podemos , UP ). Pero incluso el muy conservador gobierno británico ha anunciado su voluntad de avanzar en esa dirección. El Ministro de Transporte anunció que las aerolíneas, las empresas ferroviarias y las compañías de autobuses podrían ser nacionalizadas en el marco de la pandemia, pero también dejó en claro que el objetivo de la medida era proteger al sector privado y garantizó un retorno a la propiedad privada cuando la crisis acabe.¹⁴ Es pertinente recordar que muchas de estas compañías habían sido privatizadas durante el apogeo neoliberal del thatcherismo y que hoy el gobierno contaría con más apoyo popular si reclamara la propiedad pública. Asimismo, la renacionalización tendría mucho sentido desde un punto de vista puramente económico, de acuerdo a los cálculos de especialistas en este campo.¹⁵

El cambio en el discurso hegemónico sobre la propiedad estatal en Europa quedó reflejado en un pasaje de una reciente nota editorial de The Guardian, uno de los más reputados diarios de Inglaterra:

Hemos pasado a vivir en un mundo diferente, que requerirá disciplina para enfrentar cuarentenas durante largos períodos de tiempo. En democracia, el confinamiento tendrá que ser en gran medida auto-vigilado y sin recortar los derechos civiles. La gente ha demostrado ser extraordinariamente resistente. Pero la fortaleza individual, la bondad humana y la solidaridad local no pueden reemplazar el tremendo esfuerzo nacional que será necesario. En última instancia, solo el Estado podrá garantizar la escala de acción requerida para asegurar la vida, las necesidades y la seguridad a un nivel coherente con el esfuerzo de toda la población. [Las itálicas son mías.]¹⁶

Este también podría ser el momento apropiado para una verdadera nacionalización del sector financiero, más allá de las medidas temporales y limitadas implementadas durante la última crisis financiera mundial. Con sustento en una creciente masa crítica de investigación empírica sobre los beneficios de la propiedad pública, activistas de varios países europeos han propuesto la creación de bancos públicos. Una vez más, como ya sucedió en la última gran crisis financiera, los bancos privados van a pedir ser rescatados por el Estado, ya que pasarán a ser insolventes a menos que sus operaciones sean garantizadas por el gobierno. Existe una muy amplia base de datos a partir de experiencias de muy diversos lugares del mundo que demuestra que un sistema financiero diferente y de propiedad y gestión pública que disminuya el poder de las grandes corporaciones y esté al servicio de la gente y del planeta es de hecho factible.¹⁷

Investigaciones recientes del Transnational Institute y entidades asociadas en distintos países del norte y del sur, muestran que en la última década, a nivel mundial, han habido más de 1.400 casos de creación de nuevas empresas públicas o de retorno de empresas privatizadas a la propiedad estatal (nacional, regional o local). Esta tendencia se ha rastreado en 58 países. Los sindicatos y otras organizaciones populares a menudo han liderado estos procesos, movilizados no solo por mejoras de sus condiciones de trabajo, sino también ofreciendo su valiosos conocimientos prácticos y experiencia directa para la mejora de la gestión de los servicios públicos.¹⁸

Lección 5 – No olvidar la emergencia climática

A medida que la pandemia se extendía por todo el mundo, una de las pocas buenas noticias ampliamente compartidas en las redes sociales ha sido el aparente impacto positivo de la crisis en los indicadores ambientales. La caída de las actividades económicas causada por las medidas para contener la expansión del COVID-19 estaría causando notables mejoras, confirmadas por imágenes satelitales de la Agencia Espacial Europea que muestran una marcada reducción de los niveles globales de dióxido de nitrógeno en la atmósfera. Según un investigador británico, “en estos momentos estamos, de forma no planificada por nadie,  en un experimento global a una escala jamás vista […]que nos permite apreciar posibles transformaciones futuras si transitamos a una economía baja en carbono”.¹⁹ Los datos son realmente esperanzadores, pero no serán suficiente para revertir la catástrofe climática si el orden económico mundial no se transforma de forma radical una vez que pase la pandemia.

Por otro lado, todas las acciones destinadas a combatir la emergencia del clima nos ayudarán a estar mejor preparados para la próxima pandemia. Las intervenciones estatales serán esenciales para evitar un brote de un patógeno similar (o peor) al COVID-19. Las agencias públicas deben liderar la investigación en ciencias de la salud y el medio ambiente, no solo proporcionando recursos, sino asegurando que toda la investigación financiada con fondos públicos esté disponible públicamente.

La defensa del equilibrio ambiental y la preparación para la próxima pandemia deben ir de la mano. Por ejemplo, evitar la deforestación puede disminuir la pérdida de biodiversidad y disminuir el riesgo de enfermedades infecciosas. La reciente epidemia de ébola en África occidental ha sido relacionada con los murciélagos – probable vector del virus – y su nueva cercanía a poblaciones humanas, después de que su hábitat natural en el bosque desapareciera cuando se talaron los árboles para extender las plantaciones de palma y producir aceite para exportar a los mercados asiáticos y europeos.²⁰

La única opción para detener o al menos frenar el cambio climático es una reducción drástica de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero resultante de la quema de combustibles fósiles (carbón, petróleo y gas). Esto implica una transformación radical del sistema energético, basada en la producción de electricidad de fuentes bajas en carbono como el viento y el sol. La generación baja en carbono también disminuiría los contaminantes del aire que causan o agravan las enfermedades cardiovasculares, la obesidad, la diabetes y las muertes prematuras que ponen más presión en nuestros sistemas de atención médica , como lo demostró la pandemia del COVID-19. Pero la transición energética que el mundo necesita no será ofrecida por el sector privado, ya que una vasta masa de evidencia empírica con datos de todo el mundo demuestra que el enfoque para la expansión de las energías renovables centrado en el mercado ha fallado y que la única vía viable es la opción pública.²¹ Es imprescindible revertir la creciente privatización del sistema energético, como ya está sucediendo en varios lugares de Europa.²²

Como sucedió durante la crisis financiera de hace una década, los gobiernos de los países ricos del norte estarán prestos a intervenir para apuntalar el mercado y proteger a sus corporaciones transnacionales. Los gobiernos europeos (y el estadounidense) ya han anunciado medidas de rescate para aerolíneas, compañías petroleras y otras corporaciones altamente contaminantes afectadas por la pandemia. Las alternativas a ese tipo de rescates son muy concretas:

Ante este tipo de situaciones, cualquier intervención del gobierno deberá orientarse hacia la urgente transición a una economía y un tipo de sociedad que no sean dependientes de los combustibles fósiles. Las empresas a ser rescatadas o subvencionadas (especialmente las compañías petroleras, las aerolíneas y los bancos que las financian) deben someterse al control público en el marco de un plan de transición climática de emergencia. Una vez bajo control público, estas empresas deberían ser liquidadas o reconvertidas en el marco de una estrategia de política industrial ambientalmente sustentable y superadora del modelo extractivista que conduce a la catástrofe climática.²³

Pero recuperar (o mantener) la propiedad pública no es suficiente. También es necesario democratizar el sector público. Las experiencias europeas y latinoamericanas de las empresas estatales demuestran las razones por las qué el modelo pre-neoliberal de propiedad pública no debe ser idealizado, ya que muchos de estas empresas eran o son altamente jerárquicas y centralizadas, sin permitir a las y los usuarios y trabajadores espacios de participación o incidencia real en la forma de gestión y provisión de sus servicios.²⁴

Lección 6 – Confiar no solamente en el Estado: fortalecer los comunes

Un “efecto secundario” muy positivo y hermoso de la pandemia ha sido la proliferación de redes de solidaridad. En Europa y en todas las otras regiones afectadas, en el contexto del distanciamiento físico y las medidas de cuarentena aplicadas para controlar la pandemia, las comunidades locales han desarrollado alternativas de ayuda mutua muy creativas, a pesar de la erosión de los lazos sociales provocada por cuatro décadas de políticas neoliberales.

Las redes de solidaridad autogestionadas están creciendo rápidamente en cobertura y en escala como “estrategias de ayuda mutua horizontales y de base comunitaria que han surgido espontáneamente para cooperar”, incluyendo la organización y producción de “guías de recursos, seminarios web, canales de comunicación virtual, reuniones en línea, clubes de préstamos, y otras formas de colaboración entre pares tanto en línea como sobre el terreno”.²⁵

Estas iniciativas se enmarcan en el amplio y flexible marco conceptual de “los comunes” (the commons) y la cooperación económica y social entre pares (peer-to-peer, P2P). En esencia, estas ideas están referidas a la transición hacia un sistema que permita responder a la creatividad y las necesidades sociales en base a alternativas viables a sistemas estatales obsoletos y centralmente planificados y a economías de mercado fallidas, lo que permitiría una evolución a una sociedad más igualitaria, más justa y ambientalmente sostenible.²⁶

En particular, la urgencia de respuestas desde la ayuda mutua ante la incapacidad tanto del mercado como del Estado para hacer frente a la crisis ha movilizado a la comunidad de código abierto, una de los colectivos sociales más dinámicos en la esfera de los comunes. El país europeo más afectado por el COVID-19, Italia, ha sufrido una escasez paralizante de equipos hospitalarios; en respuesta a la emergencia, “buenos samaritanos” técnicamente competentes han utilizado sus impresora 3D para producir válvulas para respiradores de distribución gratuita.²⁷

Un investigador canadiense ha ofrecido un resumen altamente poético del poder de las alternativas impulsadas por los comunes:

Mientras tanto, quienes se encuentran en cuarentena y semi-aislados, están descubriendo y utilizando herramientas digitales como formas de asistencia y apoyo a quienes sufren en nuestras comunidades. Lentamente estamos recuperando los poderes de la vida en común que creíamos perdidos, los que estaban escondidos a plena vista, nuestra herencia secreta. Estamos aprendiendo nuevamente a convertirnos en una especie cooperativa, desprendiendo la vieja piel claustrofóbica del homo oeconomicus. El orden capitalista de la competencia, la desconfianza y ajetreo sin fin está inerte y nuestro ingenio y compasión resurgen como los delfines que regresan a la laguna de Venecia o las aves al cielo libre de smog. […] Cuando llegue la primavera, la lucha será para preservar, mejorar, establecer nuevas redes y organizar el ingenio y la compasión para exigir que no vuelva la vieja normalidad y resistir la imposición de una nueva normalidad.²⁸

Lección 7: Prepararse para tiempos muy duros y muchas pérdidas de vida

Pese a que el número de casos de infección registrados (hasta ahora) en América Latina es muy inferior a la terrible cifra de contagiados y muertos en Europa, la región está en alto riesgo de sufrir enormes pérdidas sociales y económicas, incluyendo muchas vidas que se podrían salvar si los gobiernos y la sociedad reaccionan a tiempo. Pero la velocidad y la escala de las reacciones en América Latina han sido mucho más lentas y limitadas que en otras regiones del sur. En África, donde varios gobiernos no vacilaron e impusieron de inmediato restricciones severas a la circulación de personas, “la reacción contundente y oportuna no fue producto de la madurez política, sino el resultado de experiencias amargas y la conciencia de que los sistemas de salud pública ya están sobrecargados y no pueden soportar una nueva embestida”, en palabras de una periodista africana.²⁹ La epidemia de ébola de 2014 todavía está fresca en la mente de quienes la padecieron en carne propia, recordándoles que la prevención, la contención y una rápida reacción gubernamental ofrecen la única esperanza de evitar miles de muertes.

Las observaciones sobre la previsible sobrecarga de los hospitales en África también son pertinentes para América Latina. En comparación con Europa –donde los hospitales ya están colapsando bajo el influjo repentino y enorme de pacientes con necesidad de cuidados críticos–, en América Latina, con sistemas de salud más débiles y otros factores significativos –mayor desnutrición, grandes aglomeraciones urbanas, incluyendo decenas de megalópolis con más de cinco millones de habitantes, y deficiente suministro de agua y saneamiento–, la tasa de mortalidad podría ser mucho peor que en Europa. En muchos lugares, la indicación básica de lavarse las manos no se puede aplicar debido a la falta de agua corriente. Las precauciones que se han tomado en Europa para detener la pandemia son imposibles de seguir miles de residentes en las favelas de Rocinha, Tabajaras y Providência de Rio de Janeiro, donde justo ahora se ha cortado el servicio de agua, por ejemplo. Como lo expresa una residente de una favela carioca, reflejando preocupaciones similares en muchas otras partes de América Latina :

La cuarentena es muy selectiva. Quienes puedan permitirse el lujo de quedarse en casa estarán bien. Pero quienes sobrevivimos con un ingreso diario tendremos que salir a la calle pese a todo, porque tenemos que trabajar para ganar lo suficiente para comer. Si no hay programas federales de apoyo público dirigidos directamente a los pobres, cuando el virus llegue a las favelas las personas caerán enfermas como en un juego de dominó.³⁰

Y económicamente, la pandemia podría significar el comienzo de una recesión sin precedentes en la región. América Latina logró salir de la crisis financiera mundial menos afectada que otras regiones del mundo, y durante algunos años – entre 2010 y 2015– incluso disfrutó de una bonanza alimentada por la creciente demanda de materias primas de China y otras economías en expansión. Los países latinoamericanos, ricos en recursos naturales, pudieron exhibir altas tasas de crecimiento económico y en la mayoría de ellos disminuyeron los indicadores de pobreza y desigualdad. Pero el llamado “ciclo de los commodities” terminó hace cinco años y hoy, cuando se requieren recursos para enfrentar la pandemia, las arcas estatales de muchos países están casi vacías y no existe un colchón financiero que permita ofrecer paquetes de estímulo o el pago de seguros de desempleo o beneficios sociales temporales lejanamente comparables a los que están siendo aplicados por los gobiernos europeos. La región ya presentaba un crecimiento económico estancado y un descontento político generalizado desde el año pasado, mucho antes de que golpeara la crisis.

Sin embargo, la posición más débil de los países latinoamericanos en la economía global no significa que todos estén inermes ante la pandemia. De hecho, varios países latinoamericanos aún cuentan con sistemas de salud pública relativamente robustos y estructuras cercanas a la de un “Estado de bienestar”. A primera vista, en comparación con Europa, la región en su conjunto tiene muchas menos camas de hospital por cada 1.000 personas, un indicador esencial para enfrentar la pandemia: apenas 2,2 en comparación con 5,6 en los países de la Unión Europea.³¹ Pero estas cifras podría ser engañosas, ya que los países del Cono Sur (Uruguay, Argentina y Chile), en particular, presentan sistemas de salud más fuertes que varios países de Europa del Este, según datos comparables, pero aún estos países supuestamente mejor preparados (a los que se podría agregar Cuba) exhiben indicadores de gasto en salud e infraestructura hospitalaria mucho peores que los de Italia y España, dos países que a duras penas están enfrentando esta crisis sanitaria. Y al menos 10 países (Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haití, Honduras y Guatemala) no cuentan ni con la capacidad hospitalaria ni con otras condicionantes esenciales para enfrentar la pandemia incluso a una escala muy inferior a la que está sufriendo Europa. 

Pese a todas sus limitaciones, incluso países pequeños y económicamente endebles están medidas de emergencia social para proteger a los trabajadores y la población vulnerable comparables –o incluso más avanzadas– a las implementadas por países europeos. El gobierno de El Salvador, el país más pequeño de América Central, ha suspendido el pago de las facturas de energía eléctrica, agua, teléfono e internet durante tres meses, además de congelar el cobro de créditos hipotecarios y personales y mejorar el salario de las y los trabajadores de la salud.³²

Otras naciones latinoamericanos están mejor posicionadas para combatir la pandemia gracias a la resiliencia de sus empresas públicas. Países como Uruguay y Costa Rica tienen compañías estatales fuertes y muy respetadas que brindan servicios de agua, energía y telecomunicaciones de clase mundial.³³ En Uruguay, por ejemplo, el gobierno anunció que la compañía estatal ALUR-ANCAP (responsable de la refinación de petróleo y la distribución de combustibles) aumentará la producción de alcohol en gel desinfectante para garantizar el suministro nacional y evitar prácticas especulativas durante la emergencia.³⁴ También en Uruguay, los científicos del Laboratorio de Biología Molecular de la Universidad de la República y el Instituto Pasteur han desarrollado localmente un procedimiento para identificar el virus Covid-19, viabilizando así la producción y distribución de sistemas de diagnóstico más baratos y más rápidos que los kits disponibles (y cada vez más escasos) en el mercado internacional. Estos ejemplos muestran la importancia del sector público como un instrumento crucial para enfrentar la pandemia.

Después de la pandemia…

Este es el momento de pensar y prepararnos para un mundo que será muy diferente una vez que finalice la pandemia del virus COVID-19. Como ya ha sido correctamente observado, “los think tanks (usinas de pensamiento) de la derecha y los defensores del capitalismo han entrado en pánico, temerosos de que medio siglo de cuidadoso trabajo ideológico para convencernos de la necesidad del neoliberalismo termine en la basura en las próximas semanas”. Este es el momento de discutir el significado real y la viabilidad del “socialismo”, el “ecofeminismo”, la “nacionalización”, la “(re)municipalización”, el “decrecimiento” y “los comunes”, entre otras ideas que han sido el foco de debates a menudo puramente abstractos entre quienes estamos comprometidos con la construcción de una sociedad más justa y más democrática.

Las pensadoras y activistas ecofeministas ya nos habían advertido mucho antes del inicio de esta crisis que teníamos que poner mucho más énfasis en la ética y la política del cuidado, reconociendo las interdependencias sociales y ecológicas como principios rectores para la construcción de una sociedad superadora del capitalismo. La revalorización de la perspectiva ecofeminista implica reconocer que no es posible concebir el futuro de la humanidad sin considerar la relación de nuestra especie con otros seres vivos y con el planeta en su conjunto,³⁵ cómo ha quedado en evidencia al considerar las condiciones del origen y la expansión de esta pandemia.

Décadas de privatización, tanto en Europa como en América Latina y en otras regiones del sur, han debilitado nuestros servicios públicos y hacen mucho más difícil enfrentar crisis como la pandemia actual. Ahora somos mucho más conscientes de que quienes trabajan en los hospitales, en las escuelas, en los servicios de atención a las personas mayores y discapacitadas, lo hacen bajo mucho estrés y en condiciones altamente precarias. La pandemia también nos ha demostrado cómo nuestros sistemas de energía, de producción de alimentos y de transporte, que se basan en patrones de extracción perpetua que inevitablemente derivarían en la catástrofe ambiental climática ya muy palmaria en muchas partes del mundo, necesitan ser reestructurados de manera radical. El virus COVID-19 ya ha producido mucho sufrimiento, pero también nos deja algunas lecciones útiles que no podemos permitirnos ignorar.

---

Nota

¹ Igan, D., Moussawi, H., Tieman, A.F., Zdzienicka, A., Dell’Ariccia, G. and Mauro, P. (2019), “The Long Shadow of the Global Financial Crisis: Public Interventions in the Financial Sector”, WP/19/164. Washington DC: The International Monetary Fund (IMF).
² Cochrane, E. and Fandos, N. (2020), “Congress and White House Strike Deal for $2 Trillion Stimulus Package”, The New York Times, March 25th.
³ Rice-Oxleym M. and Butler, P. (2019), “Cash, credits and crisis: life in the new European precariat”. The Guardian, March 15th.
⁴ Barnard, H. (2020), “Coronavirus: what does it mean for people restricted by poverty?”, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, March 18th: https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/what-does-covid-19-mean-people-restricted-poverty.
⁵ Mitchell, B. (2020), “The coronavirus will redefine what currency-issuing governments can do – finally”. Available at Modern Monetary Theory, March 15th: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=44507.
⁶ Dallavalle, C. and Parenti, C. (2020), “Wall Street Is High on Government Supply”. The Jacobin, March 9th.
⁷ For a comprehensive list of measures implemented by governments across Europe in the framework of the COVID-19 crisis, see Bocanegra, R. (2020), “Así afrontan los países de la UE la crisis del Covid-19”. Público, March 17th.
⁸ Arcà, E., Principe, F., and van Doorslaer, E. (2020), “Death by austerity? The impact of cost containment on avoidable mortality in Italy”, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3529892
⁹ Toynbee, P. (2020), “Coronavirus will force hospital chiefs to make some terrible choices”. The Guardian, March 17th.
¹⁰ LGiU and MJ (2020), State of Local Government Finance Survey 2020. London: LGiU and the Municipal Journal (MJ).
¹¹ Georgieva, K. (2020), “The IMF and COVID-19. Statement Following a G20 Ministerial Call on the Coronavirus Emergency”, March 23th. Washington DC: International Monetary Fund (IMF).
¹² Chu, B. (2020), “Coronavirus: Who will pay for this bailout?”, The Independent, March 19th.
¹³ Phillips, L. (2020), “Bill Gates Wants Socialist Medicine to Combat Coronavirus – Without the Socialists”, The Jacobin, March 4th.
¹⁴ Mikhailova, A. (2020), “Airlines and train companies could be nationalised to prevent them going bust, transport secretary says”, The Telegraph, March 17th.
¹⁵ Hall, D. (2019), “We’ve crunched the numbers – nationalisation would be a bargain”, The Guardian, December 9th.
¹⁶ The Guardian (2020), “The Guardian view on the UK’s Covid-19 economic plan: fine sentiment, but lacks details”, The Guardian, March 17th.
¹⁷ Steinfort, L. and Kishimoto, S. (eds.) (2019), Public Finance for the Future We Want. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).
¹⁸ Angel, J. (ed.) (2020), 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy: The Future is Public Conference Report. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).
¹⁹ Watts, J. and Kommenda, N. (2020), “Coronavirus pandemic leading to huge drop in air pollution”, The Guardian, March 23th.
²⁰ Bernstein, A. (2020), “Coronavirus, climate change, and the environment”, available at Environmental Health News, March 20th: https://www.ehn.org/coronavirus-environment-2645553060.html
²¹ Sweeney, S. and Treat, J. (2017), “Preparing a Public Pathway: Confronting the Investment Crisis in Renewable Energy”, Working Paper #10. New York: Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED).
²² Becker, S. , Angel, J., and Naumann, M. (2019), “Energy democracy as the right to the city: Urban energy struggles in Berlin and London”, Environment and Planning A , online. DOI: 10.1177 / 0308518X19881164
²³ Hanna, T.M. and Santos Skandier, C. (2020), “We can’t let this economic crisis go to waste”, available at Open Democracy, March 16th: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/we-cant-let-economic-crisis-go-waste/
²⁴ Wainwright, H. (2019), “Transforming the state: from ‘new public management’ in a market state to democratic public management in a socialised state”, The Future is Public: Working Paper 15. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).
²⁵ Raymond, R. (2020), “Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing”, available at Shareable, March 16th: https://www.shareable.net/coronavirus-catalyzes-growing-wave-of-grassroots-action-despite-social-distancing/?
²⁶ For a detailed discussion of the meaning and the scope of the commons, see Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V., Troncoso, S. and Utratel, A.M. (2017), Commons Transition and P2P: A Primer, Amsterdam: Transnational Institute and P2P Foundation.
²⁷ Toussaint, K. (2020), “These Good Samaritans with a 3D printer are saving lives by making new respirator valves for free”, available at Fast Company, March 16th: https://www.fastcompany.com/90477940/these-good-samaritans-with-a-3d-printer-are-saving-lives-by-making-new-respirator-valves-for-free
²⁸ Haiven, M. (2020). “No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation”, available at ROAR Magazine, March 23th: https://roarmag.org/essays/no-return-to-normal-for-a-post-pandemic-liberation/
²⁹ Malik, N. (2020), “This virus is ravaging rich countries. What happens when it hits the poor ones?”, The Guardian, March 23th: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-rich-countries-poor-west-covid-19-developing-world
³⁰ Barbon, J. and Teixeira, T. (2020), “No Rio, favelas esperam a chegada do vírus sem água e com aglomerações”, Folha de S. Paulo, March 22th.
³¹ The World Bank (2020), “Hospital beds (per 1,000 people)”, available at the World Bank Data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sh.med.beds.zs
³² Europa Press (2020), “El Salvador suspende el pago de electricidad y agua y congela el cobro de hipotecas por el coronavirus”. Europa Press, March 19th: https://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-salvador-suspende-pago-electricidad-agua-congela-cobro-hipotecas-coronavirus-20200319020433.html
³³ Chavez, D. and Torres, S. (eds.) (2014), Reorienting Development: State-owned Enterprises in Latin America and the World. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).
³⁴ Messina, P. (2020), “ANCAP y el coronavirus”, available at Hemisferio Izquierdo, March 16th: ANCAP y el coronavirus: https://www.hemisferioizquierdo.uy/single-post/2020/03/16/ANCAP-y-el-coronavirus
³⁵ Herrero, A. (2018), “Ecofeminismos: apuntes sobre la dominación gemela de mujeres y naturaleza”, available at Ecología Política: https://www.ecologiapolitica.info/?p=10136

Why are we tired all the time – Slavoj Žižek (en)

0204/2020; first published here; una prima versione in italiano si trova qui;

The coronavirus epidemic confronts us with two opposed figures that prevail in our daily lives: those who are overworked to exhaustion (medical stuff, caretakers…) and those who have nothing to do since they are forcibly or voluntarily confined to their homes. Belonging to the second category, I feel obliged to use this predicament to propose a short reflection on different ways in which we can be tired. I will ignore here the obvious paradox of the enforced inactivity itself making us tired, so let me begin with Byung-Chul Han who provided a systematic account of how and why we live in a “burnout society.”[i] Here is a short resume of Byung-Chul Han’s masterpiece shamelessly taken from Wikipedia:

“Driven by the demand to persevere and not to fail, as well as by the ambition of efficiency, we become committers and sacrificers at the same time and enter a swirl of demarcation, self-exploitation and collapse. ‘When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself. The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism. This is what accounts for the system’s stability.’ Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: ‘Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.’ Individuals has become what Han calls ‘the achievement-subjects’; they do not believe they are subjugated ‘subjects’ but rather ‘projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves’ which ‘amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint – indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.’”

While Han offers perspicuous observations on the new mode of subjectivation from which we can learn a lot – what he discerns is today’s figure of the superego -, one should note that the new form of subjectivity described by Han is conditioned by the new phase of global capitalism, which remains a class system with growing inequalities. Struggle and antagonisms are in no way reducible to the intra-personal “struggle against oneself.” There are still millions of manual workers in Third World countries, just as there are big differences between different kinds of immaterial workers (suffice it to mention the growing domain of “human services” like the caretakers of old people). A gap separates the top manager who owns or runs a company from a precarious worker spending days at home alone with his/her PC: they are definitely not both a master and a slave in the same sense.

A lot is being written on how the old Fordist assembly line mode of work is replaced by a new mode of creative cooperative work that leaves much more space for individual creativity. Nonetheless, what is effectively going on is not so much a replacement but an outsourcing: work at Microsoft and Apple may be organized in a more cooperative way, but final products are then put together in China or Indonesia in a very Fordist way. Assembly line work is simply outsourced. So, we get a new division of work: self-employed and self-exploited workers (described by Han) in the developed West, assembly line debilitating work in the Third World, plus the growing domain of human care workers in all its forms (caretakers, waiters…) where exploitation also abounds. Only the first group (self-employed, often precarious workers) fits Han’s description.

Each of the three groups implies a specific mode of being tired and overworked. Assembly line work is simply debilitating in its repetitiveness. You get desperately tired of assembling again and again the same iPhone behind a table at a Foxconn factory in a suburb of Shanghai. In contrast to this tiredness, what makes human care work so tiresome is the very fact that you are (also) paid to pretend to do your work with true affection, that you really care about your “objects” of work. A kindergarten worker is paid also to show sincere affection for children, and the same goes for those who take care for old retired persons. Can one imagine the strain of “being nice” on and on? In contrast to the first two spheres where at least we can maintain some kind of inner distance towards what we are doing (even when we are expected to treat a child nicely, we can just pretend to do it), the third sphere demands of us something which is much more tiresome. Imagine I am hired to elaborate how to publicize or package a product in order to seduce people to buy it. Even if I personally don’t care about this or even hate the idea, I have to engage quite intensely with what one cannot but awaken my creativity, trying to figure out original solutions. And such an effort can exhaust me much more than boring repetitive assembly line work: this is the specific tiredness Han is talking about.

And, last but not least, we should avoid the temptation to condemn strict self-discipline and dedication to work and propagate the stance of “Just take it easy!” Arbeit macht frei! is still the right motto, although it was brutally misused by the Nazis. So, to conclude with the ongoing pandemic: yes, there is hard exhaustive work for many who deal with its effects, but it is a meaningful work for the benefit of the community, which brings its own satisfaction, not the stupid effort to succeed on the market. When a medical worker gets deadly tired from working overtime, when a caretaker is exhausted, they are tired in a way that is totally different from the exhaustion of being obsessed with career moves.

Here is how my friend Andreas Rosenfelder, a German journalist from Die Welt, described the new stance towards daily life that is emerging: “I really can feel something heroic about this new ethics, also in journalism – everybody works day and night from home office, making video conferences and taking care of children or schooling them at the same time, but nobody asks why he or she is doing it, because it’s not any more ‘I get money and can go to vacation etc.’, since nobody knows if there will be vacations again and if there will be money. It’s the idea of a world where you have a flat, basics like food etc., the love of others and a task that really matters, now more than ever. The idea that one needs ‘more’ seems unreal now.” I cannot imagine a better description of what one should call a non-alienated decent life.

Notes:

[i] Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Redwood City: Stanford UP 2015.

The State, Public Responses, and the Day After the Pandemic – Daniel Chavez (en)

02/04/2020; first published here; version espagnol aqui;

The international media coverage and academic analyses have mainly focused on the magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis in the affluent societies of the North, in particular the European countries. The rather biased references to Europe, however, hide profound differences in the ways the crisis is affecting diverse countries and social sectors. This article examines the responses of the public sector to the pandemic in the European context and then suggests possible “lessons” for Latin America and other regions of the world.

Lesson 1 – Protect the workers, all the workers

A cornerstone of free-market economics is privatising gains and socialising losses. In the midst of a global pandemic, however, even fundamentalist libertarians are demanding stricter market regulations and a more proactive role for the state. In most countries around the world (with the probable exception of North Korea, and only to some extent) the national economy is basically structured around three components: household consumption, government spending and private sector investment. In “normal” times, household expenditures and private investments keep the economy growing, but in times of crisis – whatever the origin might be – even the most ardent defenders of the free market demand the public sector to intervene.

This logic became clearly evident during the recent global financial crisis: around the world, and in particular in the richer countries of the North, in the aftermath of the great recession of 2007/08 the state stepped in to rescue the banking sector and other failing sectors. In some countries, the government directly disbursed money to households and increased public investments to offset the shrinkage of private sector operations in crucial areas of the economy, but in too many cases the priority was to rescue the banks. According to data compiled by International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers working for over the period 2007–17 in 37 countries, direct public support to financial institutions amounted to $1.6 trillion ($3.5 trillion including guarantees!).¹ But what about the workers and low-income households?

A crucial difference with previous crises is the fact that now the troubles are not economically driven. In this context, temporary cash transfers to people currently in work to be rolled out by richer countries (like the bill currently being discussed in the US Congress,² which includes direct payments of up to US$1,200 to most adults) will be rather futile. People will not stop shopping due to lack of money, but because of social distancing and quarantine measures that will prevent them to go out. Direct economic support to ordinary people is still hugely important, but monetary support should be reoriented towards those who are losing their jobs, not mainly those who will keep them.

Workers who might be at higher risk of becoming unemployed should also be supported. A basic assumption of current measures to prevent the expansion of the pandemic is that, in all the sectors where working from home is feasible, workers will continue to perform their regular tasks and responsibilities as usual. But job insecurity is spreading as fast as the virus itself, and presenteeism – people going to work outside even when ill – is becoming another problem hard to contain. It is vital then that workers in essential sectors, who cannot afford to work from home, do not risk becoming sick themselves or spreading the virus, being assured that their jobs or their income will not be threatened by the pandemic. Even the conservative and business-friendly British government has decided that the state will pay grants equivalent to up to 80 per cent of the salary of workers if companies keep them on their payroll during the recession triggered by the pandemic. Such payments will be worth up to a maximum of £2,500 per month (US$ 2,800), just above the median income.

In Europe, the virus has found fertile ground for rapid replication in wide sectors of the population highly affected by austerity policies. The measures implemented by the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF and conservative governments, have created a precariat class that is highly vulnerable to COVID-19 and similar threats. The new European precariat includes millions of homeless people and food bank users. A survey published last year by the European Council on Foreign Relations noted that only a third of Germans and a quarter of Italians and French had money left over at the end of each month for discretionary spending.³ At the same time, part-time and zero-hours contracts have expanded enormously, greatly undercutting the economic resilience of millions of households.

In the words of a British researcher, “the millions of workers trapped in poverty are more likely to have insecure jobs, with fewer rights and employee benefits, and they are less likely to have savings to help cover additional unplanned costs or gaps in income”.⁴ It is therefore crucial that governments take all possible action to reduce both financial pressure and increased anxiety. Some possible measures to protect these workers are: (a) the introduction of job guarantee, which would provide income security to anybody facing the prospect of being made redundant or lack of income, including workers affected by factory closures as a consequence of the pandemic, employees in the retail sector, freelancers, artists, performers, and small business owners; and (b) restructuring the gig economy, with the introduction of new measures to force employers to pay sick and holiday pay and to treat all workers as employees rather than independent contractors.⁵

As other researchers have argued, in the framework of a pandemic “the real economy needs help in the form of popular debt forgiveness, green public works, free higher education, and significant socialization of health care”.⁶ In recent days, several European governments have taken concrete steps in this direction. For example, and with references to only a few countries:⁷

• Belgium: More than a million workers have already been placed on temporary unemployment. For the first month, furloughed workers will receive an advance of €1,450 (US$1,572), while their dossiers are being processed. The regional government of Flanders will support workers placed on temporary unemployment with the payment of their energy bills.
• Croatia: The government will limit and control the market prices of 28 basic items, including flour, eggs, sugar, cooking oil, fresh meat, fish, medicines and sanitary products.
• Denmark: The government will offer financial help to freelancers and students, as well as compensation for fixed expenses such as rent and easier access to state-guaranteed loans.
• France: The payment of taxes, social security contributions, house rentals, water, electricity and gas bills have been suspended for people with reduced income as a result of the crisis.
• Italy: Starting retroactively from February 23, a 60-day moratorium will shield workers from dismissals for objective reasons, preventing companies to fire employees on economic grounds. The government also allocated €10 billion (US$ 10.8 billion) to protect labour rights, including the payment of a bonus of €600 (US$ 650) to workers who have lost their job. Leave permits for workers with disabilities or in care of family relatives have been extended from three to fifteen days. Likewise, parents with children up to 12 years of age may request a new parental leave of up to 15 days with a compensation equivalent to 50 per cent of the salary.
• Portugal: Workers who might need to remain at home to take care of children during the closure of schools will be guaranteed the payment of 66 per cent of the salary.
• Spain: Mortgages and electricity and water bills for people left without a regular income will be subject to a moratorium. Employees temporarily out work will collect unemployment benefits without computing the provision time. Self-employed workers may also stop paying taxes if their income is reduced during the pandemic. A new and specific contingency fund will reinforce care for the elderly, the homeless and people in nursing homes. Spending rules for municipalities will be relaxed to allow local authorities to expend any surplus in social care programmes.

Moreover, even though all occupations are important in times of crisis, in Europe, in the particular context of this pandemic, society has rediscovered the great need for public service staff. Public health workers – in all areas: medicine, nursing, cleaning, etc. – are literally giving up their lives caring for the sick population, but there are other sectors – for example the police, the firefighters and the teachers – who are also working under extraordinary and difficult conditions. A new social ritual in many European cities is to applaud health workers at dusk, but the public servants need not only applauses; they also need the reversal of the budget cuts that made working in hospitals, schools and other essential services much harder.

Lesson 2 – Invest in public infrastructure to face the next epidemic

COVID-19 did not come to a surprise for the many epidemiologists and other public health specialists who had warned early enough about the risks of a pandemic. If European countries had invested in the physical and social capacities required to face an epidemic, the region would have been in a far better position to control the virus.

Some of the European countries most affected by the pandemic are precisely those that had suffered the worst cuts in public expenditure in the context of the austerity measures implemented in the eurozone during the global financial crisis, with Italy being a clear example of what a team of researchers has referred to as “death by austerity”.⁸ Even countries that had developed strong and highly admired public health structures, such as the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), are currently being overwhelmed. First in Italy, and now rapidly in Spain and in Britain, health facilities are beginning to collapse under the massive influx of COVID-19 patients. After a decade of austerity implemented by Conservative governments, the NHS now has fewer hospital beds, doctors, and nurses per capita than most other industrialised countries, and (as it is already happening in Italy) doctors are being forced to decide who lives and who dies.⁹

But austerity has affected European countries in other ways that diminish even further the national capabilities to fight the pandemic. In many countries of the region, the municipal and regional authorities have had their budgets brutally reduced, undermining the response capacities of the police, fire and ambulance services.¹⁰ And despite “hijacking” some proposals and demands of progressive European political parties and social movements, the recent measures announced by many governments hardly address the appalling erosion of social services and public health infrastructure under the ill-conceived budget cuts of the last decade.

Lesson 3 – Stop the obsession with the public deficit, debt levels and GDP losses

Long before the eruption of the pandemic, forecasters in Europe and around the world had expressed serious concerns about an imminent new global economic crisis, already visible in falls in productivity and tax revenues in several countries. But the implications of COVID-19 for the world’s medical and economic health have become so drastic and so abrupt that most middle-term predictions are quickly becoming outdated. The IMF’s managing director has warned that the global recession prompted by the pandemic will be as bad as the 2008 financial crisis, if not worse, in terms of severity.¹¹

The social distancing, isolation and quarantine measures implemented by European governments to contain the pandemic entail an enormous collapse of demand for all but essential supplies, leading the region (and the world) to what economists call a “supply shock”, meaning the closure of factories or production at reduced capacity. At the same time, there is a “demand shock”, as consumer spending plummets.

Even mainstream economists and conservative politicians are beginning to recognise that this is an unprecedented emergency which demands coherent and sensible responses, away from the usual obsession with public deficit, business profits, debt levels and GDP growth. The financial crisis of 2007/08 was dreadful in both economic and social terms, but the impact on output, livelihoods and jobs threatened by the pandemic might be immensely worse. As the head of the United Kingdom’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said: “This is not the time to be squeamish about one-off additions to public sector debt … it’s more like a wartime situation”.¹² The Spanish Prime Minister has even called for a “Marshall Plan” to be implemented by the European Union to combat the spread of the virus and its social consequences.

In the context of the pandemic, even the jargon of economists seems inappropriate. The term “recession” usually refers to a decline in production and employment, but today the main concern should not be the health of “the economy”, but the health (and the lives) of people. This also means challenging the discourse (and the actions) of economists, credit rating agencies and government officials obsessed with government debt or public budget deficits. What is the value of an AAA rating for a national government when doctors in intensive care units must decide who gets a ventilator, who lives and who dies?

Perhaps this is also the perfect time to have a serious conversation about the real meaning of “degrowth”, or more specifically “planned degrowth”, with governments facilitating a climate- and people-friendly transition instead of implementing stimulus programmes aimed at securing profits for large transnational corporations. A reinvigorated role for the state should not be confused with the tax reforms proposed by billionaires like Bill Gates,¹³ or the traditional Keynesian recipes for facing recessions based on transfers to encourage consumption or large public infrastructure projects to “reignite the economy”. Attempts to encourage economic activities at the present moment could worsen the spread of the virus, and in the context of forced isolation encouraging consumption would doubtfully be effective to boost the economy.

Lesson 4 – The recovery of public ownership and management is indeed a great idea

The calls for public sector interventions are getting louder and more urgent, as the economic (and social and political) impacts of the coronavirus pandemic will be much more dramatic than anything the world economy has suffered in recent years. Not surprisingly, European governments have been eager to bail out the private sector: in the United Kingdom, the government announced a £350 billion (US$403 billion) package of loans and grants to help British private companies cope with the impacts of the pandemic. In France, the state treasury will disburse €300 billion (US$ 325 billion) to private businesses to avoid bankruptcies. Similar measures have been implemented by other European governments. But at the same time the calls to bring public services under democratic public ownership and control are also becoming louder.

In mid-March, the news that the Spanish government had “nationalised” all the hospitals and healthcare facilities in the country made headlines in newspapers throughout Europe. The news was rather exaggerated: there had not been a change in ownership and the measure was limited to put all private health providers under governmental control, but nevertheless the Spanish decision might signal more radical measures to be implemented by other governments.

The shift towards greater public control could be expected from the Spanish government, being composed of a centre-left coalition of social-democrats (the Socialist Party, PSOE) and the new left (Unidas Podemos, UP). But even the conservative British government has announced its willingness to move in that direction. The Transport Secretary announced that airlines, railways, and bus companies could be nationalised in the framework of the pandemic, but also made clear that the aim of the measure was to protect the private sector and avoid “good companies going bust”. He also guaranteed a return to private ownership once the crisis was over,¹⁴ despite the fact that many of these companies had been privatised during the neoliberal heydays of Thatcherism and that now the government would get clear social support if it were to reclaim ownership. Experts in this field have also demonstrated with very convincing data that the idea of renationalisation makes perfect economic sense.¹⁵

The change in the hegemonic discourse on state ownership in Europe was summarised in a recent editorial of The Guardian, a leading British newspaper:

We are living in a different world, one in which it looks as though quarantine discipline will be required for long stretches of time. In a democracy the lockdown will have to be largely self-policed and not heavily infringe on people’s rights. People have proved themselves to be extraordinarily resilient. But individual fortitude, human kindness and local solidarity cannot replace the radical national effort required. Ultimately, it is only the state that can ensure the scale of action necessary to show that life can continue with security, and to equalise sacrifice across the population.¹⁶ 

This might also be the time for a real nationalisation of the financial sector, beyond the limited and time-bound measures implemented during the last global financial crisis. Based on an increasing critical mass of empirical research on the benefits of public ownership, activists across Europe are proposing the creation of public banks. Once again, as it happened in the past decade, private banks will ask to be bailed out by the state, becoming insolvent unless their operations are guaranteed by the government. There is plenty of real-world evidence that demonstrates that a different and publicly-owned and run financial system that curbs the power of big corporations and serves people and planet is indeed feasible.¹⁷

Recent research from the Transnational Institute and its global partners shows that in the past decade alone, globally, there have been more than 1,000 cases of creation of new public enterprises or the return of privatised enterprises to state (national, regional or local) ownership. This trend has been traced in 58 countries. Workers and their unions have often been at the heart of these processes, striving to improve workplace conditions while endeavouring to place their valuable knowledge and experience at the centre of public services.¹⁸

Lesson 5 – Let’s not forget the climate catastrophe

As the pandemic spread all over the world, one of the few good news widely shared in social media has been the apparent positive impact of the crisis on the environment. The plunge in economic activities caused by the measures to contain the COVID-19 transmission seems to be causing noticeable improvements, with satellite imagery from the European Space Agency revealing a marked fall in global nitrogen dioxide levels in the atmosphere. According to a British environmental researcher, “we are now, inadvertently, conducting the largest-scale experiment ever seen […], looking at what we might see in the future if we can move to a low-carbon economy”.¹⁹ This data is indeed hopeful, but clearly it will not be enough if the world economic order is not radically transformed once this health crisis is over.

On the other hand, all actions aimed at fighting the climate emergency will help us to be better prepared for the next pandemic. State interventions will be essential to avert an outbreak of a pathogen similar (or worse) to COVID-19. Public agencies should lead research in health and environmental sciences, not just providing resources, but ensuring that all publicly-funded research is publicly available.

Climate actions and preparedness for the next pandemic go hand in hand. For instance, preventing deforestation can diminish biodiversity loss and decrease the risk of infectious diseases. The recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been linked to bats – a carrier of the virus – being forced to migrate into new habitats after their natural forest habitat had been cut down to grow export-oriented palm oil trees to supply Asian and European markets.²⁰

The only option to stop or at least slow climate change is a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas). This means a radical transformation of the energy system, generating power from low-carbon sources like wind and the sun. Low-carbon electricity generation would also decrease air pollutants that cause or aggravate cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, and premature deaths that put further strains on our health care systems, as it was proven by the COVID-19 pandemic. But the energy transition that the world needs will not be brought by the private sector: a growing mass of empirical evidence from around the world demonstrates that the profit-based approach to renewable energy is failing and that the only viable pathway is to pursue public alternatives.²¹ Privatisation of the energy system must be reversed, as it is already happening in diverse parts of Europe.²²

As it happened during the global financial crisis a decade ago, governments across the Global North will be ready to intervene to prop up the market and failing transnational corporations. Direct bailouts for highly polluting airlines, oil companies, and other corporations hit by the pandemic have been already suggested by European (and the American) governments. The alternatives to that kind of bailouts have been already outlined:

In this case, any government interventions should be predicated upon making the urgently required transition to a post-fossil fuel economy and society. Rescued or subsidized institutions (especially oil companies, airlines, and the banks that finance them) should be put under public control as part of an emergency climate transition plan. Once in public control, these institutions should be wound down or converted in alignment with a green industrial strategy that breaks free from the extractive business model that continues to fuel climate catastrophe.²³

But reclaiming public ownership is not enough. We should also democratise the public sector. Both the European and Latin American experiences of state-owned enterprises show why the pre-neoliberal model of public ownership should not be romanticised, as too many of them were highly top-down and centralised, offering their service users and workers very little space to participate or have any real influence in the way they were managed and run.²⁴

Lesson 6 – Let’s not rely only on the state: strengthen the commons

A very positive and beautiful side effect of the pandemic has been the proliferation of solidarity networks. In Europe and in all the other regions of the world, in the context of the physical distancing and quarantine measures put in place to control the pandemic, local communities have developed very creative mutual-aid alternatives, despite the erosion of social bonds caused by four decades of neoliberal policies.

The self-organised solidarity networks are growing rapidly in scope and scale, as “grassroots, horizontal, community-led aid that has emerged spontaneously to help”, including diverse “resource guides, webinars, slack channels, online meetups, peer-to-peer loan programs, and other forms of mutual aid emerging online and on-the-ground”.²⁵

These initiatives might be included within the broad conceptual umbrella of the commons and the Peer to Peer (P2P) economic and social transition. They refer to the evolution towards a system that responds to social needs and creativity as a viable alternative to both obsolete and centrally planned state systems and failed market economies, enabling a transition to a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally sustainable society.²⁶

In particular, the urgency for mutual-aid responses to the incapacity of both the market and the state to cope with the crisis has mobilised the open source community. The European country worst hit by COVID-19, Italy, has experienced a crippling shortage of hospital equipment; in reaction to the emergency, “good samaritans” have used their 3D printers to produce respirator valves that they are giving away for free.²⁷ 

A powerful and rather poetic summary of the power of commons-driven alternatives has been offered by a Canadian researcher:

Meanwhile, the quarantined and semi-isolated are discovering, using digital tools, new ways to mobilize to provide care and mutual aid to those in our communities in need. We are slowly recovering our lost powers of life in common, hidden in plain sight, our secret inheritance. We are learning again to become a cooperative species, shedding the claustrophobic skin of homo oeconomicus. In the suspension of a capitalist order of competition, distrust and endless, pointless hustle, our ingenuity and compassion are resurfacing like the dolphins returning to the Venice lagoon or birds to the smog-free sky. […] When the Spring arrives, the struggle will be to preserve, enhance, network and organize this ingenuity and compassion to demand no return to normal and no new normal.²⁸

Lesson 7 – Let’s brace for very hard times once the pandemic arrives

Even though has (so far) fewer COVID-19 cases and a slower rate of infection than Europe, the region is at risk of suffering huge social and economic losses. But the speed and the scale of the reaction have been much slower and limited than in other regions of the South. In Africa, where several countries were quick to impose severe restrictions to the circulation of people, “the tough and timely action is borne less out of political maturity than it is bitter experience, and an awareness that already overburdened public healthcare systems cannot sustain an onslaught”, in the words of an African journalist.²⁹ The Ebola epidemic of 2014 is still fresh in the mind of many Africans, reminding them that prevention, containment and a swift governmental reaction offer the only hope of fending off thousands of deaths.

The observations on the predictable overload of hospitals in Africa are also relevant for Latin America. In comparison with Europe – where hospitals are already collapsing under the sudden and enormous inflow of patients in need of critical care – the region’s weaker health systems and other contributing factors – such as higher malnutrition, large urban conglomerations (including tens of megalopolis with more than five million inhabitants) and deficient provision of water and sanitation services –, the rates of mortality could be much greater than what has been seen so far in Europe. In cities like Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, many residents in the favelas of Rocinha, Tabajaras, and Providência are unable to follow the advice of washing hands due to the lack of running water. As a local dweller puts it, echoing similar concerns across Latin America:

This quarantine is very selective. Whoever can afford to stay at home will be fine. But those of us who survive on a daily basis will have to go out despite everything, because we need to earn enough to eat. If there are no federal public support programmes directly targeting the poor, when the virus arrives to the favelas people will fall sick like in a domino game.³⁰

And economically, the pandemic risks ushering an unprecedented recession. Latin America emerged from the global financial crisis less affected than other world regions, and for some years even enjoyed a bonanza fuelled by the rising demand for raw materials from China and other expanding economies, between 2010 and 2015. Resource-rich Latin American countries exhibited high rates of economic growth and most of them diminished poverty and inequality indicators during the boom years. But the so-called “commodities supercycle” ended five years ago, and in the face of the pandemic there are no war chests and no financial space for stimulus packages or insurance payouts comparable to those being launched by European governments. The region was already struggling with stagnant economic growth and widespread political unrest since last year, long before the crisis hit.

But the weaker position of Latin American countries in the global economy does not mean that they will be all powerless in the face of the pandemic. In fact, several Latin American countries still have relatively robust public health systems and institutional structures close to that of a “welfare state”. At first glance, compared to Europe, the region as a whole has far fewer hospital beds per 1,000 people, an essential indicator to tackle the pandemic: just 2.2, compared to 5.6 in the countries of the European Union.³¹ But these figures could be misleading, since the countries of the Southern Cone (Uruguay, Argentina and Chile), in particular, have stronger health systems than various countries in Eastern Europe, according to comparable data, but health expenditure and hospital infrastructure indicators of even these supposedly better prepared countries (Cuba could be added to the short list) are much worse than those of Italy and Spain, two countries that are hardly coping with this crisis. And at least 10 countries – Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras and Guatemala – have neither the hospital capacity nor other basic structures to face the pandemic, even on a much lower scale than what we see in Europe today.

Nevertheless, even small countries and economically poor countries are proposing social emergency measures to protect the workers and the vulnerable population comparable to those implemented by European countries. El Salvador, Central America’s smallest country, has suspended electricity, internet, and phone bills for three months, frozen monthly rental payments, mortgages, and loan payments for three months, and raised the salary of health workers.³²

Other Latin American nations are better positioned to fight the pandemic thanks to the resilience of its public enterprises. Countries such as Uruguay and Costa Rica have strong and extensive state-owned companies that provide world-class water, energy and telecommunications services.³³ For instance, in Uruguay, the government announced that the state-owned company ANCAP (responsible for the production of petroleum products, cement and alcoholic beverages) will increase the production of alcohol-based hand sanitizer gel and other disinfectants to guarantee supply in the market and avoid speculative practices during the emergency.³⁴ Also in Uruguay, scientists from the National University’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Pasteur Institute have locally developed a procedure to diagnose the Covid-19 virus that will lead to the production and distribution of cheaper and faster diagnostic kits than those offered in the international market. These examples show the significance of the public sector as a crucial instrument to confront the pandemic.

After the pandemic…

This is the time to think and prepare for a world that will be much different after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. As it has been rightly observed, “right-wing and capitalist think-tanks are panicking, fearful that half a century of careful ideological work to convince us of the necessity of neoliberalism ⁠— the transformation of our very souls ⁠— will be dispelled in the coming weeks and months”.³⁵ This is the time to rediscuss the real meaning and feasibility of “socialism”, “ecofeminism” and the “commons”, among other big words that have been the focus of endless (and often purely abstract) debates among those of us committed to building a more just and more democratic society.

Eco-feminist thinkers and activists had already warned us, long before the start of this crisis, that we needed to pay much more attention to the ethics and politics of care, recognising social and ecological interdependencies as guiding principles for building a different kind of society beyond capitalism. The rediscovery of the ecofeminist perspective implies recognising that it is not possible to think about the future of humanity without considering the relationship of our species with other living beings and with the planet as a whole,³⁶ as it become evident when considering the conditions of origin and expansion of this pandemic.

Decades of privatisation, in Europe as in Latin America and other regions of the South, had rendered our public services profoundly lacking in the forms of care that now we clearly see as the most appropriate strategy to confront crises like the current pandemic. Now we are much more aware that those working in hospitals, schools and services for elderly and disabled people do so under a lot of stress, facing intense time-pressures and in highly precarious conditions. The pandemic has also shown us how our energy, food, transport and water systems, which were based on perpetual extraction patterns leading us to an imminent climate and ecological emergency, had to be radically restructured. COVID-19 brought plenty of suffering, but also provided some useful lessons that we cannot afford to ignore.

---

¹ Igan, D., Moussawi, H., Tieman, A.F., Zdzienicka, A., Dell’Ariccia, G. and Mauro, P. (2019), “The Long Shadow of the Global Financial Crisis: Public Interventions in the Financial Sector”, WP/19/164. Washington DC: The International Monetary Fund (IMF).

² Cochrane, E. and Fandos, N. (2020), “Congress and White House Strike Deal for $2 Trillion Stimulus Package”, The New York Times, March 25th.

³ Rice-Oxleym M. and Butler, P. (2019), “Cash, credits and crisis: life in the new European precariat”. The Guardian, March 15th.

⁴ Barnard, H. (2020), “Coronavirus: what does it mean for people restricted by poverty?”, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, March 18th: https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/what-does-covid-19-mean-people-restricted-poverty.

⁵ Mitchell, B. (2020), “The coronavirus will redefine what currency-issuing governments can do – finally”. Available at Modern Monetary Theory, March 15th: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=44507.

⁶ Dallavalle, C. and Parenti, C. (2020), “Wall Street Is High on Government Supply”. The Jacobin, March 9th.

⁷ For a comprehensive list of measures implemented by governments across Europe in the framework of the COVID-19 crisis, see Bocanegra, R. (2020), “Así afrontan los países de la UE la crisis del Covid-19”. Público, March 17th.

⁸ Arcà, E., Principe, F., and van Doorslaer, E. (2020), “Death by austerity? The impact of cost containment on avoidable mortality in Italy”, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3529892

⁹ Toynbee, P. (2020), “Coronavirus will force hospital chiefs to make some terrible choices”. The Guardian, March 17th.

¹⁰ LGiU and MJ (2020), State of Local Government Finance Survey 2020. London: LGiU and the Municipal Journal (MJ).

¹¹ Georgieva, K. (2020), “The IMF and COVID-19. Statement Following a G20 Ministerial Call on the Coronavirus Emergency”, March 23th. Washington DC: International Monetary Fund (IMF).

¹² Chu, B. (2020), “Coronavirus: Who will pay for this bailout?”, The Independent, March 19th.

¹³ Phillips, L. (2020), “Bill Gates Wants Socialist Medicine to Combat Coronavirus – Without the Socialists”, The Jacobin, March 4th.

¹⁴ Mikhailova, A. (2020), “Airlines and train companies could be nationalised to prevent them going bust, transport secretary says”, The Telegraph, March 17th.

¹⁵ Hall, D. (2019), “We’ve crunched the numbers – nationalisation would be a bargain”, The Guardian, December 9th.

¹⁶ The Guardian (2020), “The Guardian view on the UK’s Covid-19 economic plan: fine sentiment, but lacks details”, The Guardian, March 17th.

¹⁷ Steinfort, L. and Kishimoto, S. (eds.) (2019), Public Finance for the Future We Want. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).

¹⁸ Angel, J. (ed.) (2020), 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy: The Future is Public Conference Report. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).

¹⁹ Watts, J. and Kommenda, N. (2020), “Coronavirus pandemic leading to huge drop in air pollution”, The Guardian, March 23th.

²⁰ Bernstein, A. (2020), “Coronavirus, climate change, and the environment”, available at Environmental Health News, March 20th: https://www.ehn.org/coronavirus-environment-2645553060.html

²¹ Sweeney, S. and Treat, J. (2017), “Preparing a Public Pathway: Confronting the Investment Crisis in Renewable Energy”, Working Paper #10. New York: Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED).

²² Becker, S. , Angel, J., and Naumann, M. (2019), “Energy democracy as the right to the city: Urban energy struggles in Berlin and London”, Environment and Planning A , online. DOI: 10.1177 / 0308518X19881164

²³ Hanna, T.M. and Santos Skandier, C. (2020), “We can’t let this economic crisis go to waste”, available at Open Democracy, March 16th: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/we-cant-let-economic-crisis-go-waste/

²⁴ Wainwright, H. (2019), “Transforming the state: from ‘new public management’ in a market state to democratic public management in a socialised state”, The Future is Public: Working Paper 15. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).

²⁵ Raymond, R. (2020), “Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing”, available at Shareable, March 16th: https://www.shareable.net/coronavirus-catalyzes-growing-wave-of-grassroots-action-despite-social-distancing/?

²⁶ For a detailed discussion of the meaning and the scope of the commons, see Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V., Troncoso, S. and Utratel, A.M. (2017), Commons Transition and P2P: A Primer, Amsterdam: Transnational Institute and P2P Foundation.

²⁷ Toussaint, K. (2020), “These Good Samaritans with a 3D printer are saving lives by making new respirator valves for free”, available at Fast Company, March 16th: https://www.fastcompany.com/90477940/these-good-samaritans-with-a-3d-printer-are-saving-lives-by-making-new-respirator-valves-for-free

²⁸ Haiven, M. (2020). “No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation”, available at ROAR Magazine, March 23th: https://roarmag.org/essays/no-return-to-normal-for-a-post-pandemic-liberation/

²⁹ Malik, N. (2020), “This virus is ravaging rich countries. What happens when it hits the poor ones?”, The Guardian, March 23th: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-rich-countries-poor-west-covid-19-developing-world

³⁰ Barbon, J. and Teixeira, T. (2020), “No Rio, favelas esperam a chegada do vírus sem água e com aglomerações”, Folha de S. Paulo, March 22th.

³¹ The World Bank (2020), “Hospital beds (per 1,000 people)”, available at the World Bank Data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sh.med.beds.zs

³² Europa Press (2020), “El Salvador suspende el pago de electricidad y agua y congela el cobro de hipotecas por el coronavirus”. Europa Press, March 19th: https://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-salvador-suspende-pago-electricidad-agua-congela-cobro-hipotecas-coronavirus-20200319020433.html

³³ Chavez, D. and Torres, S. (eds.) (2014), Reorienting Development: State-owned Enterprises in Latin America and the World. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).

³⁴ Messina, P. (2020), “ANCAP y el coronavirus”, available at Hemisferio Izquierdo, March 16th: ANCAP y el coronavirus: https://www.hemisferioizquierdo.uy/single-post/2020/03/16/ANCAP-y-el-coronavirus

³⁵ Haiven, M. (2020), op. cit.

³⁶ Herrero, A. (2018), “Ecofeminismos: apuntes sobre la dominación gemela de mujeres y naturaleza”, available at Ecología Política: https://www.ecologiapolitica.info/?p=10136

Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in Coronavirus Capitalism – Christian Fuchs (en)

01/04/2020; first published here;

1.   Introduction

The coronavirus-disease (COVID-19) is a highly infectious respiratory disease. Its name stems from the fact that it looks like a crown under the microscope. The virus is highly contagious and has a death rate that is multiple times higher than the one of seasonal flu. Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, shortness of breath, and extreme tiredness.The majority of cases have a mild development, but in a certain share of cases a severe pneumonia develops that can be life-threatening.

The first patient suffering from the disease was identified on 1 December 2019 in Wuhan, a city with more than 11 million inhabitants in China’s Hubei province. By the end of January 2020, there were almost 12,000 reported cases in Mainland China[1]. Given the networked and global character of contemporary societies, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, referred to as “coronavirus” in this article) spread globally within a short time period. “Earlier experience had shown that one of the downsides of increasing globalization is how impossible it is to stop a rapid international diffusion of new diseases. We live in a highly connected world where almost everyone travels. The human networks for potential diffusion are vast and open” (Harvey 2020). On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a pandemic. On 29 March 2020, there were 638,146 confirmed coronavirus cases in a total of 203 countries that had resulted in 30,105 deaths[2].

As a reaction to the virus threats to humankind and human lives, many countries introduced wide-ranging public health-measures such as the shutdown of public life and social distancing measures. This paper is a contribution to the social theory analysis of coronavirus crisis’ implications for society. It asks: How have everyday life and everyday communication changed in the coronavirus crisis? How does capitalism shape everyday life and everyday communication during this crisis? 

Section 2 focuses on how social space and everyday communication have changed due to the coronavirus crisis. Section 3 focuses on the communication of ideology in the context of coronavirus by analysing the communication of coronavirus conspiracy stories and false coronavirus news. 

2.   Everyday Communication and Sociality in the Coronavirus Crisis

As long as there is no vaccination against the coronavirus disease, the virus poses a danger to the lives of all humans and the societies they form because it is highly contagious and has a relatively high death rate that is manifold times higher than the one of seasonal flu.

In order to fight the pandemic, WHO (2020) recommends “that social distancing and quarantine measures need to be implemented in a timely and thorough manner. Some of the measures that countries may consider adopting are: closures of schools and universities, implementation of remote working policies, minimizing the use of public transport in peak hours and deferment of nonessential travel”.

Boris Johnson’s Social Darwinism

As a reaction to the pandemic, social distancing was implemented as a public health measure in many countries. Some have taken strict measures such as curfews, whereas others only recommended social distancing but did not enforce it by law. Some countries have shifted their policies. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in the UK first took a laissez-faire approach. It did not shut down public life. It later took measures common in many countries continental Europe such as the closure of schools and non-essential businesses, the prohibition of public events, and the order that people have to stay at home.

In a press conference on March 12, Johnson said that due to coronavirus “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time”. At the same time, he did not take measures such as shutting down public life as other countries had already done at the same point of time. The strategy that he announced together with his scientific and medical advisors was based on not containing the virus but letting it spread until “herd immunity” is reached. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty argued that the “our top planning assumption is up to 80 percent of the population being infected”. Given the UK has 66 million inhabitants and the death rate of coronavirus is on average one percentage, this implies letting more than 500,000 people die from coronavirus in order to reach what in medical jargon is called herd immunity. In a Sky News interview, Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallace defended this approach by saying that “of course we do face the prospect of, as the Prime Minister said yesterday, an increasing number of people dying. […] This is a nasty disease”[3].

Johnson and his chief medical and chief scientific advisor chose a social Darwinist approach where the fittest survive and the government tolerates that others die although public health measures could reduce the amount and share of deaths. Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton (1822-1911) argued that society should be based on “the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest” (Galton 1909, 42). Just like the Thatcherism that the Tories have advanced preaches and practices survival of the fittest companies in the capitalist economy, Johnson and his advisors planned to use the same principle as population policy. The implication is that those who are old, weak, and ill are sacrificed. In a radically neoliberal society such as the United Kingdom and the USA, the Darwinist Alfred Russel Wallace concept of nature is applied to society: in the coronavirus crisis, the “best organised, or the most healthy, or the most active, or the best protected, or the most intelligent, will inevitably, in the long run, gain an advantage over those which are inferior in these qualities; that is, the fittest will survive” (Wallace 1889/2009, 123).

Social Distancing

Humans are social and societal beings. They live in and through social relations in society. Communication is the process of the production and reproduction of sociality, social relations, social structures, social systems, and society (Fuchs 2020a). In a social relation, at least two humans make sense of each other’s actions. Each of them interprets what the other one is doing, which leads at least to new thoughts and potentially results in changes of the social system. The measure of social distancing practiced as a response to the coronavirus crisis doesn’t mean the dissolution but the radical reorganisation of social relations. Humans avoid face-to-face social relations and substitute them by mediated social relations, in which communication is organised with the help of the telephone, social media, messenger and video communication software such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Zoom, Skype, Panopto, Blackboard Collaborate, Jitsi, Discord, etc. Social distancing isn’t an avoidance of communication, but the substitution of face-to-face communication that bears the risk of contagion by mediated communication. Mediation becomes a strategy of both avoidance and survival. Social distancing is not a distancing from the social and other humans, but communication and sociality at a distance.

In 2020, billions of humans experienced and practiced a radical rupture and reorganisation of their social life. In modern society, we organise our everyday life as social practices that take place in distinct social systems, where we repeatedly in a routinised manner spend certain time periods together with others in order to achieve certain goals. Key social systems of our everyday life include the home, the workplace, and educational organisations (nursery, school, university). And there are public spaces accessible to everyone where we spend leisure time, meet others, commute from one place to another one, or organise other aspects of our everyday life. Such spaces include parks, playgrounds, cafés, trains, buses, the underground, shops, etc.

The division of labour and activities means that humans spend certain times of the day in particular spaces. An example is work in an office or factory from Monday to Friday between 9am and 5pm. This means that space and time are zoned into particular time periods spent at certain places. The flexibilization, globalisation, digitalisation, individualisation, and neoliberalization of capitalist society have transformed the space-time of everyday life. More and more people work from different spaces, including their home and public spaces, at a variety of times. The workplace, the home, and public spaces have partly converged. The boundaries between leisure time and labour time, play and labour, consumption and production, the office and the home, etc. have become blurred. For many people, this tendency has meant an increase of their labour-time and the extension of the logic of capital into spheres outside of the traditional workplace. More and more people have had to work more in order to survive, but have only done so in precarious ways.The Radical Transformation of the Space-Time of Everyday Life

The coronavirus crisis brought about a radical transformation of the space-time of everyday life. Workplaces and public spaces shut down. The physical and social differentiation of the spaces of everyday life collapsed. Workplaces and schools suddenly completely converged with the home as the space of everyday life. The blurring and convergence of social spaces that had been advanced by neoliberalism was suddenly taken to its extreme. The intermediary spaces of public life, where we used to spend leisure time and transit times in cafés, restaurants, parks, nature, public transport, etc. emptied out, which created ghost towns and urban ghost spaces.

Politicians had to decide between two basic policy options in light of the coronavirus crisis, namely to either radically disrupt everyday life and ask the majority of citizens to stay at home or to minimally disrupt everyday life. The first option tries to save human lives by reducing the direct communication and direct social relations as far as possible and thereby inevitably creates an economic crisis. The second option keeps up direct communication and direct social relations, which risks human lives in order to try to avoid an economic crisis.

In existential crises such as the coronavirus crisis, neoliberal political strategies choose to keep most businesses open. In contrast, socialist government strategies shut all non-essential businesses that are not needed to guarantee the survival of society. In the first strategy, human life and well-being stand above economic interests. In the second strategy, economic growth and profitability are put before human life.

Social space is structured and regionalised into specific locales. These are time-space locations, zones, stations, and domains such as homes, streets, cities, workplaces, schools, nurseries, parks, shops, restaurants, cafés, means of public transport, etc. “Locales refer to the use of space to provide the settings of interaction, the settings of interaction in turn being essential to specifying its contexuality.  […]  Locales may range from a room in a house, a street corner, the shop floor of a factory, towns and cities, to the territorially demarcated areas occupied by nation-states. But locales are typically internally regionalized,and the regions within them are of critical importance in constituting contexts of interaction” (Giddens 1984, 118).

A locale is a particular physical or virtual space that is used at particular time, typically in a routinised manner, which implies repetition, for social actions and communication that have a particular goal. Space-time is organised in the form of demarcated and bounded zones or regions (locales) that are the physical, spatial and temporal context of specific types of action and communication. Locales are the places and physical settings of humans’ communicative practices.

In the coronavirus crisis, the social spaces and locales of work, leisure, education, the public sphere, the private sphere, friendships, family converge in the locale of the home. The home is at the same time workplace, family and private space, school, nursery, leisure space, natural space, a public space from where we connect to friends and professional contacts, etc. Social spaces converge in the home. In this convergent social space, it can easily become difficult to organise everyday life by breaking up time into small portions of which each is dedicated to specific activities in a routinised manner. In the coronavirus crisis, the home has become the supra-locale of everyday life.

Whereas daytime used to be for many individuals working time, at the time of the coronavirus crisis it has to be simultaneously working time, play time, educational time, family time, shopping time, housework time, leisure time, care time, psychological coping time, etc. The convergence of social spaces in the home is accompanied by the convergence of time periods dedicated to specific activities. The result is that activities that humans usually perform in different social roles at different times in different locales converge in activities that are conducted in one universal, tendentially unzoned and unstructured space-time in one locale, the home. The Overburdening of the Individual

This convergence can easily result in an overburdening of the individual who cannot manage multiple social roles at the same time in one locale. The situation is made worse by the exceptional psychological burdens that the coronavirus crisis causes, where individuals worry about the lives of their family, friends and themselves, have to think of how to organise everyday activities such as shopping and going out without risking their life and others’ lives, have to cope with not being physically close to their family members, parents and friends, dedicate time to supporting old, weak and ill people from their families and communities who self-isolate, etc. In such a crisis, lots of time is survival time, time used for activities that secure immediate physical, psychological, and social survival. Routine activities become challenging tasks to which significant amounts of time need to be dedicated.

Survival work shapes everyday life in the coronavirus crisis. Given that direct communication is limited, more time needs to be spent on organising communication at a distance. There are times where individuals are not able to properly continue and “function” because they have to cope with fears of death, illness, and the future. In times of crisis, humans like to come together with their closest companions in order to help and support one another. In the coronavirus crisis, physical proximity of larger groups is discouraged because it increases the risks of contagion, illness, and death. Social distancing puts psychological burdens on many humans because they cannot be physically close to some or many of their loved ones. Mediated communication can provide some emotional support, but lacks the capacity of touching, feeling, smelling, hugging, etc. one another. You can say nice words to a friend or relative via a webcam, but you cannot look him or her into the eyes, which is part of empathetic communication. Physical proximity is an important aspect of care that is missing in the coronavirus crisis, which puts additional psychological burdens on individuals. It is much more difficult to communicate emotions, love, solidarity, and empathy in mediated communication than in face-to-face communication.

Houseworkers have traditionally had to deal with multiple types of work, including care, education, cleaning, cooking, shopping, etc., at the same time in the locale of the home. In a sense, the coronavirus crisis is a process of radical mass housewifization that confines work, social action, and communication to the locale of the home. This condition has been characteristic for houseworkers since a long time (Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Werlhof 1988).

It is decisive how the state acts in such a situation of profound emergency. There is a continuum of state action ranging from neoliberal action to socialist action. Neoliberal state action tolerates unemployment and precarity of workers and is only concerned with bailing out companies. It does not secure the social security, livelihood, income, rent payments, and survival of the working class. Socialist state action in contrast secures the survival of the working class by measures such as an unconditional basic income during crisis time, the continuation of wage payments for workers and freelancers, rent freezing, etc.

Socialist crisis action makes sure that humans have the time and resources needed to survive the crisis without becoming poor, indebted, bankrupt, etc. It recognises the need of humans for sufficient time during which they engage in survival work. It provides the material foundations needed for survival work.

Neoliberal crisis action tolerates an increase of poverty, misery, debt, precarity, homelessness, unemployment etc. in order to reorganise society in the interest of capital in a state of emergency. Thinking this logic to its end implies that neoliberal crisis management establishes a state-organised dictatorship of capital that enslaves the impoverished, indebted, and precarious working class that struggles to survive. The coronavirus crisis is a rupture and existential crisis of society that poses both potentials for the development of socialism and solidarity on the one side and slavery and fascist dictatorship on the other side.Social Space, Everyday Life, and Everyday Communication in the Coronavirus-Crisis

Based on the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) theory of space, the critical theorist David Harvey (2005) provides a typology of social space (see table 1). Using Lefebvre’s distinction between perceived, conceived, and lived spaces as three dimensions of space, Harvey distinguishes between physical space, representations of space, and spaces of representation. He adds to Lefebvre’s theory the distinction between absolute, relative, and relational space. Spaces are absolute in that they are locales that have certain physical boundaries. They are relative because objects are placed in them that have certain distances from each other. And they are relational because these objects stand in relations to each other. In society, humans produce and reproduce social space by a dialectic of social practices and social structures. The cells in table 1 describe particular aspects of social space.

	Physical space (experienced space)	Representations of space (conceptualised space)	Spaces of representation (lived space)
Absolute space	physical locale	symbols, maps and plans of physical locales	locales as social spaces where humans live, work, and communicate
Relative space (time)	humans in a physical locale	symbols used and meanings created by humans in physical locales	humans as social actors acting in social roles
Relational space (time)	social relations of humans in a physical locale	language as social and societal structure	communicative practices that produce and reproduce social relations, sociality, and social spaces

Table 1: David Harvey’s (2005) typology of social space

Table 2 shows how social spaces are changing and organised in the coronavirus crisis.

	Physical space (experienced space)	Representations of space (conceptualised space)	Spaces of representation (lived space)
Absolute space	the home as the supra-locale	plans and strategies of how to use the supra-locale of the home for the organisation of everyday life	the home as the dominant social spaces and supra-social space where humans simultaneously organise multiple aspects of their life and work, convergence of absolute spaces in the home
Relative space (time)	humans stay predominantly in one locale, their homes	symbols used and meanings created by humans in the supra-locale of the home	convergence of humans’ social roles in the supra-space of the home
Relational space (time)	social relations at a physical distance organised via communication technologies between home locales	language as social structure	the convergence of humans’ communicative practices in the convergent space and under conditions of the convergent time of the home, mediation of the convergence of space-time by communication technologies

Table 2: Social space in the coronavirus crisis

In the coronavirus crisis, humans are largely confined to the physical space of the home, for which certain organisational strategies are needed so that everyday life can be organised from the home. Humans experience, conceptualise, live and thereby also produce social space-time in manners that make social spaces converge in the supra-time-space of the home. Communication technologies play a decisive role in organising everyday life from the locale of the home in the coronavirus crisis.

Everyday life refers to social practices within the totality of society (Lefebvre 2002, 31). Everyday life is an “intermediate and mediating level” of society (45). Lefebvre identifies three dimensions of everyday life: natural forms of necessity, the economic realm of the appropriation of objects and goods, and the realm of culture (62). So Lefebvre sees nature, the economy, and culture as the three important realms of everyday life. What is missing is the realm of politics, where humans take collective decisions that are binding for all and take on the forms of rules. The critique of everyday life analyses how humans live, “how badly they live, or how they do not live at all” (18). Lefebvre argues that in phases of fundamental societal change, “everyday life is suspended, shattered or changed” (109). The coronavirus crisis has suspended, shattered, and necessitated the reorganisation of the practices, structures, and routines of everyday life.

The lived (le vécu)	The living (le vivre)
individual	group
experience, knowledge, doing	context, horizon
practices	structures
present	presenc

Table 3: Lefebvre’s distinction between the lived and the living (source: Lefebvre 2002, 166, 216-218)

Lefebvre distinguishes between the lived (le vécu) and the living (le vivre) as two levels of everyday life (see table 3). Figure 1 shows a model of everyday life.

At the level of lived reality, humans produce social objects through communicative practices. They do so under the conditions of the living, i.e. structural conditions that enable and constrain human practices, production, and communication. The level of living life consists of an interaction of social structures, social systems, and social institutions. All structures, systems and institutions have economic, political, and cultural dimensions. In many social systems, one of these dimensions is dominant so that we can differentiate between economic, political and cultural structures/systems/institutions. At the level of lived life, humans relate to each other through communicative practices. These communicative practices are the foundations of the production, reproduction, and differentiation of economic, political, and cultural structures/systems/institutions that condition human practices. There is a dialectic of the living and the lived in any society. This is a dialectic of human subjects and social objects.

 


Figure 1: Everyday life and everyday communication

Means of communication mediate the dialectic of objects and subjects and the relations between humans. We can distinguish five types of the means of communication (table 4).

	Role of mediation by technology	Examples
Primary communication technologies	Human body and mind, no media technology is used for the production, distribution, reception of information	Theatre, concert, performance, interpersonal communication
Secondary communication technologies	Use of media technology for the production of information	Newspapers, magazines, books, technologically produced arts and culture
Tertiary communication technologies	Use of media technology for the production and consumption of information, not for distribution	CDs, DVDs, tapes, records, Blu-ray disks, hard disks
Quaternary communication technologies	Use of media technology for the production, distribution and consumption of information	TV, radio, film, telephone, Internet
Quinary communication technologies	Digital media prosumption technologies, user-generated content	Internet, social media

Table 4: Five types of the means of communication

Figure 2 visualises the transformation of everyday life and everyday communication at the time of the coronavirus crisis. Humans isolate themselves and therefore avoid direct communicative relations. This circumstance is visualised at the level of the lived by enclosed individuals and small enclosed groups. Dense networks of direct communication and direct social relations are suspended. At the structural level of the lived, the economic, political and cultural dimensions are not organised as separate locales but tend to converge in the social system of the home that takes on the form of a supra-locale from where economic, political and the cultural life are organised and structured from a distance. Humans spend the vast majority of their time in physical isolation in their homes, from where they access and organise social structures, systems, and institutions at a distance by making use of secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and quinary means of communication. The use of the primary means of communication, namely face-to-face communication, is avoided. Whereas under regular conditions humans organise the economy, politics, and culture in the form of separate social systems that they access in everyday life by commuting to different specialised physical locales, in the coronavirus crisis specialised physical locales are suspended. These systems’ structural social roles are preserved: a multitude of humans who are located in the physical locales of their homes organises these systems at a distance with the help of mediated communication. Humans hardly communicate with each other face-to-face but through mediating communication technologies.

Figure 2: Everyday life and everyday communication in the coronavirus crisis

The Coronavirus Crisis as Deceleration of Everyday Life?

In the coronavirus crisis, most people traverse only smaller physical distances and fewer goods are transported so that everyday life is decelerated and comes to a relative standstill. There are fewer people for overall less time on the streets, in public and intermediate spaces. At the same time, the number of social activities and communicative practices taking place from the home and conducted from there at a distance massively increases. As a consequence, communication networks such as the Internet and mobile phone networks are used at a maximum capacity. The thinning out of social activity in public spaces corresponds to the thickening and multiplication of social activities taking place in the home and locally. The coronavirus crisis deglobalizes and therefore localises everyday life.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2020b) argues that the corona virus crisis means “forced deceleration”[4]. He argues that there is a “massive deceleration of real physical life, where on the one hand one feels silenced and excluded but on the other hand one discovers new forms of solidarity and new forms of amenability”[5] (Rosa 2020b). Rosa is rather optimistic about the consequences of the coronavirus crisis. On the one hand he sees the loss of ontological security and trust so that “relationships become suspect”[6] and there is “growing alienation”[7] (Rosa 2020a). On the other hand, he sees new opportunities for resonance, a condition where humans enter into unalienated relations with others and the world: “We have time. Suddenly we can hear and experience what is happening around us: Maybe we indeed hear the birds, look at the flowers and greet the neighbours. Hearing and answering instead of domination and control are the beginning of a relation of resonance from which something novel can emerge”[8] (Rosa 2020a).

Socialism or Barbarism

The coronavirus crisis certainly means that humans make fewer direct social relations, commute much less, live quite locally, and traverse less physical distance. But this does not necessarily imply the deceleration of social life. The speed of social life has to do with the amount of experiences we make per unit of time. Even if we do not move at all, we can live in a high-speed society where vast amounts of information are rapidly processed and large numbers of decisions are taken and many actions are performed per unit of time. Whether or not the coronavirus crisis is an opportunity for generally slowing down the pace of modern life is first and foremost a question of political economy. It depends on whether or not governments take measures that allow humans to survive without depending on constantly having to perform labour under precarious conditions and provide material foundations that help to avoid an overburdening of the individual from the convergence of social spaces, social times, and social roles.

What humans realise in the coronavirus crisis is that life, wellbeing, health, and survival are not self-evident. This crisis is a radical confrontation of the individual and society by death. The collective experience of the fear of death can create new forms of solidarity in society and elements of socialism. The ”threat of viral infection also gave a tremendous boost to new forms of local and global solidarity, plus it made clear the need for control over power itself. […] the present crisis demonstrates clearly how global solidarity and cooperation is in the interest of the survival of all and each of us” (Žižek 2020). But if right-wing demagogues manage to ideologically manipulate these fears, then the realisation of such potentials might be destroyed and fascist potentials that divide society and advance dictatorship, genocide, war, inhumanity, and mass murder might be realised. The coronavirus crisis radicalises the perspectives for the future of society. It makes it more likely that we are either heading towards socialism or barbarism.
Coronavirus, Risk Society, Class Society

Coronavirus and other risks can also hit the rich and powerful such as Prince Charles, Prince Albert, Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, Michel Barnier, or Tom Hanks. But this circumstance does not imply, as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) claims, that we live in a classless world risk society where existential risks affect everyone equally beyond status and class.
        The rich and powerful can purchase access to the best private doctors and hospitals and can escape from risks, whereas the poor, workers, and everyday people suffer the consequences of privatisation and universal commodification, which means they are more likely to die. The coronavirus crisis once more shows that the risk society is first and foremost a class society.

The Most Vulnerable

In the coronavirus crisis, those worst hit and most vulnerable are humans who do not have a home to which they can retreat such as the homeless and refugees who are on the run or live in refugee camps. It is very difficult for these groups to shield themselves from the virus. In the coronavirus crisis, politicians can either protect these vulnerable groups by creating and providing suitable shelters that allow social distancing or abandon them by not providing support, which implies that many vulnerable individuals will die. Humans in developing countries face the problem that they often live in overcrowded spaces in poor metropolises or in areas that lack access to water, soap, hospitals, doctors, etc. Protective measures such as social distancing and washing one’s hands can therefore be more difficult to organise in developing countries. The lack of material foundations of protection therefore can especially affect and harm humans in poor countries and regions.  

The Working Class in the Coronavirus Crisis

Life and work have been radically transformed in the coronavirus crisis. There is a group of workers who cannot work from home and from a distance. They depend on a differentiation of social spaces and direct social relations in order to produce. Examples include personal services (cooks, cleaners, waiters, bartenders, hairdressers, travel attendants, childcare workers, etc.), manufacturing labour, construction labour, agricultural work, food processing labour, garment labour, drivers, transport labour, refuse labour, elementary labour etc.

Many of these occupations have low and medium skills and rather low wages. Given that many workplaces were shut down in the coronavirus crisis, lower-paid and lower-skill workers who depend on direct social relations and the access to work spaces outside their homes faced a high likelihood of becoming unemployed. For example, in Austria the number of the unemployed rose from around 400,000 to 550,000 within ten days in March 2020 (APA 2020). The largest share of the newly unemployed belonged to the economic sectors of accommodation, gastronomy, and construction (APA 2020).

In the coronavirus crisis, especially highly qualified white-collar workers can continue to work from their homes. This includes both employees and freelancers. Think for example of the activities of architects, managers, scientists, engineers, designers, teachers, academics, writers, artists, analysts, administrators, accountants and financial workers, marketing and public relations workers, software developers and other digital workers creating digital goods and services, lawyers, translators, secretaries, typists, call centre agents, consultants, etc. Such workers may in principle be able to work from home. In many countries, there is a general guideline or rule in the coronavirus crisis that says that those who can conduct their work from home should or have to do so.

There are two main problems such workers face:

a) they may face social and psychological overburdening when trying to work in the home that at the time of an existential crisis is a convergent space of manifold activities, including care work, educational work, wage-labour, survival work, etc.

b) given the relative shutdown of society, there is a reduced demand for services, which means that there might be diminishing sources of income for many homeworkers.

It is decisive how governments support white-collar workers and other workers in the coronavirus crisis. Neoliberal strategies put capital and economic growth first, which means that white-collar workers are expected to work at normal capacity and pace from home and cannot rely on special support. Socialist strategies put survival, health, well-being, and social security first and therefore support white-collar workers and other workers materially so that they do not face the existential danger of material ruin.

Critical Infrastructures

There is a number of occupations in the organisation of critical infrastructures that are necessary for society’s survival in an existential crisis. Such foundational work is performed by, for example, doctors, nurses, care workers, midwives, paramedics, pharmacists, psychologists, firefighters, public transport workers, journalists, public service media workers, police officers, food producers, food processing workers, food delivery and transport workers, supermarket workers, post office and delivery workers, sanitation workers, pharmaceutical workers, manufacturing and assemblage workers producing medical equipment, utility workers, telecommunications workers, emergency workers, legal sector workers, etc.

Workers in critical infrastructural sectors face a higher risk of falling themselves ill because in their work they have more direct social contacts than others. Think for example of doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients in hospitals. It is important that governments and organisations do everything that is possible in order to provide protective equipment, measures, and working conditions that protect these workers. A particular problem during the coronavirus crisis was the lack of protective equipment, as a result of which many nurses and doctors contracted the virus. Workers in critical infrastructures show a high level of solidarity that is needed for securing the survival of society and humankind. It is insufficient that they are publicly lauded as heroes. The crucial importance of their work should be acknowledged not just symbolically but also economically and socially by e.g. special bonus payments that are not just symbolic, special retirements benefits, etc.

Especially in emergency situations, the market provision of key infrastructures is bound to fail because the commodity form operates based on the profit principle and not on the principle of human interest. Insofar as key infrastructures are not public services, establishing public ownership combined with worker control is a measure that puts humanism over the logic of capital accumulation. Neoliberalism has in countries such as the USA and the United Kingdom prevented or undermined the public provision of health care. As a consequence, there is a lack of resources in (including personnel and physical resources) and of individuals’ access to the health care system. In a state of exception such as the coronavirus crisis, dysfunctional health care systems multiply the number of deaths. It has become evident that universal health care and public ownership of the care sector are of crucial importance for guaranteeing wellbeing for everyone. The writer and activist Mike Davis (2020) argues in this context that the coronavirus pandemic shows that “capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsus-tainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure”. Bernie Sanders commented in this context in the following way on the coronavirus crisis:

“[M]illions of people are now demanding that we have a government that works for all. What role should the campaign play in continuing that fight to make sure that health care becomes a human right, not a privilege, that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage, et cetera, et cetera. people now understand that it is incomprehensible that we remain the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all, that we have an economy which leaves half of our people […] living paycheck to paycheck. […] What kind of system is it where people today are dying, knowing they’re sick, but they’re not going to the hospital because they can’t afford the bill that they’ll be picking up?” (Sprunt 2020).

The implication of Sander’s programme is that countries struck by coronavirus should “hire enough people to identify COVID-19 home-by-home right now and equip them with the needed protective gear, such as adequate masks. Along the way, we need to suspend a society organized around expropriation, from landlords up through sanctions on other countries, so that people can survive both the disease and its cure” (Wallace et al. 2020). Coronavirus makes evident that the world needs to realise a global right to public healthcare, i.e. public healthcare at a high standard for all. “The spiral form of endless capital accumulation is collapsing inward from one part of the world to every other. The only thing that can save it is a government funded and inspired mass consumerism conjured out of nothing. This will require socializing the whole of the economy […] without calling it socialism” (Harvey 2020).The Social Distancing of Old, Weak and Ill Individuals

Old people and people suffering from cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, cancer or having a weakened immune system are at a particular risk to die from coronavirus. Many governments therefore have recommended or mandated that at-risk groups should stay at home and isolate themselves. This, however, entails the problem that reduced direct social contacts might be experienced as a psychological burden. The use of communication technologies for staying in touch with loved ones and communities is not a fix for the lack of direct social contacts, although it is a means for providing certain forms of emotional support. Older people, however, face a digital divide. This group’s physical, motivational and skills access to digital technologies such as computers, the Internet, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, apps, social media, etc. is significantly lower than in the younger generation. In 2019, 98 percent of EU citizens aged 16-24 were Internet users, whereas only 60 percent of those aged 65-75 uses the Internet. In the age group of 65-75, 31 percent had low and 2 percent no digital skills 2019[9].

 Given the digital divide, older people face a particular risk of feeling lonely and depressed as a result of social distancing. Whereas neoliberal strategies simply tell pensioners to isolate without supporting measures, a socialist strategy devises measures in order to alleviate the psychological burdens of social isolation. Examples include social and community services that provide food, install easy-to-use communication technologies in at-risk group members’ homes, engage in daily contacts with at-risk individuals, etc.Children, Youth, and (E-)Learning in the Coronavirus-Crisis

In the coronavirus crisis, many countries shut nurseries, primary and secondary schools, as well as universities. As a consequences, children and youth needed to stay at home with their parents. The general expectation has been that teaching continues at a distance making use of e-mail, video conferencing, messaging systems, and a variety of e-learning technologies.

The first problem that arises is that children, and especially small children, need lots of attention, which conflicts with parents being able to work from home. Parents have to act not just as workers and carers, but also as teachers. A socialist strategy has to put childcare and well-being over labour. The implication is that in an existential crisis of society, wages should be continued to be paid and subsidised by governments without performance expectations. States of emergency are radical ruptures of society and everyday day. One cannot expect that life, work, and education can continue as normal. Therefore, also the educational performance expectations of pupils and students should be suspended or put at a minimum level. One feasible option is that learning materials and support are provided but there are no exams and all students and pupils automatically pass.

The second problem is that e-learning that is purely mediated and virtual tends to be inefficient and difficult to organise. Therefore, blended learning where virtual learning at a distance is combined with face-to-face learning sessions has become the generally accepted standard in e-learning. Blended learning “is the full integration of face-to-face and online activities. […] Blended learning can include the blending of individual and collaborative activities, modes of communication (verbal and written), and a range of face-to-face and online courses that constitute a blended program of studies“ (Garrison 2011, 75-76). Blended learning “represents a significant conceptual and practical breakthrough in enhancing the quality of teaching and learning […] The great advantage of blended learning is that while it is transformative, it builds upon traditional ideals of communities of learners and familiar face-to-face learning” (Garrison 2011, 82).

The radical virtuality of e-learning in the coronavirus crisis easily reaches limits and causes problems. Keeping up the performance principles of grading, success, and failure under such difficult learning conditions is counterproductive to the cultural and social development of young people.Global Cities and Rural Areas in the Coronavirus Crisis

Global capitalism created a power gap between global cities on the one side and rural areas on the other side. Global citiesare urban spatial agglomerations of capital, labour-power, companies, banks, infrastructure, corporate headquarters, service industries, international financial services, telecommunication facilities, etc. Global cities include, for example, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. “The more globally the economy becomes, the higher the agglomeration of central functions in a relatively few sites, that is, the global cities“ (Sassen 1991, 5). “The need to minimize circulation costs as well as turnover times promotes agglomeration of production within a few large urban centers which become, in effect, the workshops of capitalist production” (Harvey 2001, 245). Geographical expansion goes hand in hand with geographical concentration (Harvey 2001, 246).

Whereas wealth and power are concentrated in global cities, there is a lack of resources, people, and infrastructures in many rural areas, which is a source of social problems. In the coronavirus crisis, people living in densely populated global cities are at a disadvantage in comparison to those in rural areas. There is a lack of natural spaces and accessible gardens in global cities, which makes it hard for families and individuals living in such cities to endure quarantine and social isolation. It is especially difficult for those who have kids but live in small apartments without access to a garden. In addition, the high population density in global cities makes it more likely and easier that the virus spreads than in sparsely populated rural areas. People in rural areas are less likely to contract the coronavirus and they have better access to nature, which makes it easier to cope with quarantine measures.

“High-density human populations would seem an easy host target. It is well known that measles epidemics, for example, only flourish in larger urban population centers but rapidly die out in sparsely populated regions. How human beings interact with each other, move around, discipline themselves, or forget to wash their hands affects how diseases get transmitted” (Harvey 2020).

In the coronavirus crisis, the unequal geography has partly been reversed in respect to the absolute and relative number of illnesses and death. Rural areas certainly can face the disadvantage of less equipped and advanced hospitals, but their inhabitants are less likely to contract coronavirus than the inhabitants of global cities.

Section 2 focused on the analysis of a variety of aspects of everyday life and everyday communication in the coronavirus crisis. It outlined profound changes of how space-time is organised in societies struck by the pandemic. It became evident that the well-being of everyday people depends on political economy and what policies governments takes in response to the crisis. Political responses to the crisis range on a continuum between neoliberalism on the one side and socialism on the other side. The next section will focus on how and what type of ideology is communicated in the context of the coronavirus crisis.

3. The Communication of Coronavirus Conspiracy Stories and False News

Slavoj Žižek (2020) warns against not taking the coronavirus serious:

“Both alt-right and fake Left refuse to accept the full reality of the epidemic, each watering it down in an exercise of social-constructivist reduction […] Trump and his partisans repeatedly insist that the epidemic is a plot by Democrats and China to make him lose the upcoming elections, while some on the Left denounce the measures proposed by the state and health apparatuses as tainted by xenophobia and, therefore, insist on shaking hands, etc. Such a stance misses the paradox: not to shake hands and to go into isolation when needed IS today’s form of solidarity”.

Downplaying and denying the seriousness of coronavirus is an ideological dimension of the crisis. The spreading of fake news is another manifestation of ideology in the state of exception. False News

There is no generally accepted definition of fake news. The core of many definitions is that fake news is factually false news that is circulated online, predominantly on social media, lacks journalistic professional norms, and tries to systematically and deliberately mislead and misinform (Fuchs 2021, chapter 7). Some observers prefer to use the terms mis- or disinformation. Some of those who spread fake news, such as Donald Trump, use the term in order to try to attack credible news sources. Based on the tradition of ideology critique that stresses that false consciousness is an expression of ideological attempts to manipulate the public’s perception of reality, a critical theory approach to fake news should better use the term “false news”. False news is an expression of a highly polarised political landscape, where lies are used for trying to manipulate election results and decision-making (Fuchs 2020b).

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a typical manifestation of false news (ibid.). In false news culture, facts are declared to be wrong and lies are declared to be true. There is a distrust of experts, liberals, and socialists. There is a distrust towards facts and rationality and a belief that truth is what one finds ideologically and emotionally agreeable. Demagogues try to scapegoat experts and political opponents by claiming that they form an elite that hates the people and considers them as silly. Demagogues spreading false information claim that they stand on the side of the people who share their ideology and that elites deliberately bias and misrepresent reality.

The coronavirus crisis created a state of exception in many countries and parts of the world. Suddenly billions of people’s everyday life was disrupted and had to be reorganised. They have had to fear for their lives and the lives of friends and family. They have had to think of how to organise their children’s care, how to manage to live in isolation, how to best organise shopping, how to deal with the situation’s psychological stress, etc. The situation of crisis, uncertain futures, collective shock, and the collective fear of death characteristic for the coronavirus emergency is a futile ground for the spread of false news. We do not know exactly what the motivations of those spreading false coronavirus news have been, but it is possible to provide an overview of the main themes of false stories that have circulated at the time of the global spread of the pandemic[10].

Types of False Coronavirus News

There are two main types of false coronavirus news stories:

a) false news related to the origin of coronavirus;

b) false news about how the virus is contracted and can be killed.

The first type focuses on how coronavirus is produced, the second on how it circulates and can be destroyed.

Fake news stories about the origin of coronavirus:

·    The coronavirus is a Chinese biological weapon developed in the Wuhan Institute of Technology.

·    The Chinese government collaborated with other forces, such as the Democratic Party in the USA or the North Korean government, in releasing the virus in order to bring down Donald Trump.

·    The CIA created and spread the virus as a biological weapon in order to challenge the economic and political power of China, Russia, or Iran.

·    Israel developed and spread the virus in order to create a financial market crisis and financially benefit from the resulting volatility.

·    Israel or Jews such as the Rothschild family manufactured the virus in order to seize world power.

·    Chinese spies stole the virus from a virus research laboratory in Canada.

·    COVID-19 is part of a population control strategy developed by Bill Gates and the UK-government funded Pirbright Institute.

·    Donald Trump created the pandemic in order to arrest or kill paedophiles, political opponents, and Hollywood actors.

·    Eating meat is the cause of coronavirus.

Fake news stories about contracting and killing coronavirus:

·    A vaccine against infection already exists.

·    Cocaine cures coronavirus.

·    Africans are resistant.

·    5G wireless networks caused the outbreak of coronavirus.

·    Pets spread coronavirus.

·    Vinegar kills coronavirus.

·    Drinking boiled ginger or lemon water or cow urine kills coronavirus.

·    Gargling bleach kills coronavirus.

·    Going to the sauna kills coronavirus.

·    Using a hair dryer kills coronavirus.

·    Taking medicinal herbs kills coronavirus.

·    The Holy Communion protects one from coronavirus.

·    Using silver-infused toothpaste kills coronavirus.

·    Spiritual healing kills coronavirus.

Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, and False Coronavirus News

Let us have a look at an example of a false coronavirus news story. Breitbart is a far-right propaganda website. On 27 March 2020, it was the 256^th most accessed web platform in the world[11]. This means that Breitbart stories reach a very large audience. On 24 February 2020, Breitbart ran a story about right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The Rush Limbaugh Show is with an average of more than 15 million listeners not just the USA’s most-listened-to talk radio show, but also the country’s most-listened-to radio programme[12]. Created in 1988, this show is a prototype and main manifestation of far-right broadcasting. It airs on weekdays and around 600 local radio stations broadcast it.

The Breitbart article’s title was “Limbaugh: Coronavirus Being ‘Weaponized’ to Bring Down Trump”[13]. Limbaugh claimed that “probably is a ChiCom [Chinese communist] laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. […] It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus”[14]. “Some people believe that it got out on purpose, that the ChiComs have a whole lot of problems based on an economy that cannot provide for the number of people they have. So losing a few people here and there [is] not so bad for the Chinese government”[15]. “The coronavirus is an effort to get Trump”[16].

So what Limbaugh claims is that China manufactured the coronavirus in order to target the USA with a bioweapon and weaken Trump’s political position by bringing about many deaths. Fact-checking organisation PolitiFact analysed the claims made in this episode of The Limbaugh Show and concluded that the claims were false[17].

Breitbart also made use of its social media channels in order to spread Rush Limbaugh’s conspiracy theory. At the time of writing, Breitbart had more than 4 million followers on Facebook, 1.2 million followers on Twitter, 620k followers on Instagram, and 160k subscribers on YouTube[18]. On 25 February 2020, Breitbart posted a link to the Limbaugh-story on its Facebook page (see figure 3). On 28 March, the Facebook posting had been shard 900 times, and had received 4,200 emotional reactions and 1,200 comments. At the same point of time, 2,279 users had commented on the news article on the Breitbart platform to which the Facebook posting linked.

Figure 3: Breitbart’s spreading of Rush Limbaugh’s coronavirus conspiracy on social media, https://www.facebook.com/Breitbart/posts/rush-limbaugh-it-looks-like-the-coronavirus-is-being-weaponized-as-yet-another-e/10164646988865354/, accessed on 28 March 2020

The example of Rush Limbaugh’s conspiracy claim that China manufactured coronavirus in order to bring down Donald Trump shows how the far-right uses a combination of different media in order to spread false news in the public. In this particular case, the broadcast medium of radio was used in order to launch a false news story. Breitbart used the Internet and social media in order to amplify the false news story. Broadcast media and social media that allow commenting and sharing together amplified the audience reach and thereby the spread of coronavirus false news.

Like all conspiracy stories, Limbaugh’s claims lack evidence and ignore the findings of experts. He builds on the ideological conviction and moral outrage of Trump-supporters who think that there is a big conspiracy where intellectuals, socialists, liberals, and foreign countries try to attack the United States.

False news ignores scientific evidence. There are no indications that the coronavirus was manufactured by humans. The DNA sequences of the coronavirus are most closely related to viruses found in bats (Cohen 2020a, York 2020, Ye 2020, Zhou 2020). Based on environmental sampling, there is evidence that the virus was contracted from animals to humans at Wuhan seafood market (ibid.). Scientists found out that animals such as the pangolin could be the species mediating the infection between bats and humans (Cyranoski 2020, Lam et al. 2020). Andersen et al. (2020) write based on an analysis of the virus-genome that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Ignoring scientific evidence, a variety of conspiracy theories has emerged around COVID-19. “Speculations have included the possibility that the virus was bioengineered in the lab [Wuhan Institute of Virology] or that a lab worker was infected while handling a bat and then transmitted the disease to others outside the lab” (Cohen 2020b). In a letter to leading medical journal The Lancet, 27 public health scientists “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. […] Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus” (Calisher et al. 2020, e42). Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife” (Calisher et al. 2020, e42).Nationalism, Fascism, War

The coronavirus pandemic is a crisis of humankind. The virus was transferred from animals to humans and given the global and mobile character of societies, it spread globally within three months causing many deaths. Given that contemporary societies are not nationally contained, but involve the international transport of goods and people and global travelling, a novel virus can originate in and spread globally from any part of the Earth. What the far-right tries to do is to deflect attention from the fact that the coronavirus crisis is a crisis of humanity that can only be overcome by global solidarity among and mutual aid of humans.

The far-right ideologizes the virus. They declare coronavirus to be a project designed and manufactured by single nations in order to weaken, attack, and try to destroy other nations. Their goal is to use the crisis situation in order to radicalise nationalism and spread nationalist hatred among the populations of different countries. It is not a rational assumption that a country such as China spreads a virus in its own country, which causes many deaths, in order to attack other countries. Coronavirus has caused many deaths in all parts of the world. Coronavirus ideology works by combining nationalism and conspiracy thinking. The far-right uses traditional mass media and social media in order to spread nationalism and hatred in the context of a crisis of humanity.

Donald Trump repeatedly spoke of coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” (Mangan 2020). The World Health Organization warned against this term, saying that viruses “know no borders and they don’t care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank. So it’s really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus” (Kopecki 2020). The danger of nationalist ideology in a state of exception and a crisis of humanity is that authoritarian characters such as Trump are prone to use violence, which can result in wars, nuclear attacks, the creation of a fascist state, etc.

There is a social dimension of the coronavirus crisis: there is a large number of persons who fall seriously ill or die. The relative standstill of society necessary for containing the virus translates into economic crisis. And there is a political dimension of the coronavirus crisis, where nationalism and ideology can bring about the rise of fascism and world war. Coronavirus is a natural disaster that threatens humanity. Irrational reactions such as nationalism, ideology, and violence pose a serious danger in such profound crises. The lack of solidarity and the displacement of solidarity by nationalism can turn a natural disaster that brings about a social and economic crisis into a political crisis that features war, mass killings, genocide, and fascism.

4. Conclusion

This paper asked: How have everyday life and everyday communication changed in the coronavirus crisis? How does capitalism shape everyday life and everyday communication during this crisis? 

We can summarise the main findings:

·    Social distancing:

The social distancing practiced during the coronavirus crisis isn’t an avoidance of communication and social relations, but the substitution of face-to-face communication that bears the risk of contagion by mediated communication. Social distancing is not the distanciation from sociality and communication but rather sociality and communication at a distance.

·    The rupture of everyday life and everyday communication:

 The coronavirus crisis brought about a radical transformation of the space-time of everyday life and everyday communication. In this crisis, the social spaces and locales of work, leisure, education, the public sphere, the private sphere, friendships, family converge in the locale of the home. The home takes on the role of the supra-locale of everyday life from which humans organise society at a distance with the help of communication technologies. Activities that humans usually perform in different social roles at different times in different locales converge in activities conducted in one universal, tendentially unzoned and unstructured space-time in one locale, the home.

·    The danger of overburdening individuals:

The convergence of space-time in the home characteristic for the coronavirus crisis can easily overburden the individual who cannot manage multiple social roles at the same time in one locale. Public health policies that unburden the individual are therefore of key importance for managing such a crisis.

·    Communication technologies as means of sociality at a distance:

Communication technologies play an important role in the organisation of everyday social life under the exceptional conditions that the coronavirus crisis poses for society and individuals. Primary means of communication are by and large avoided. There is the wide use of mediated communication with the help of secondary, tertiary, quaternary and quinary means of communication. Face-to-face communication is replaced by mediated communication, which creates challenges because closeness, love, and emotions are hard to achieve and communicate in mediated communication. You cannot hug someone over the Internet.

·    Coronavirus and class structures:

Although everyone can contract coronavirus, the social effects of the pandemic are unequally distributed along class structures. The poor, the old, the weak, and the ill are especially vulnerable and affected. Whereas some workers can continue to work from home but face the danger of overburdening activities and lack of demand, other workers lose their jobs and face the danger of destitution, unemployment, and homelessness. 

·    Government measures:

Government responses to the coronavirus crisis range on a continuum between neoliberalism and socialism. Neoliberal strategies could for example be found in the United Kingdom. They take a laissez-faire approach that avoids disrupting everyday life and put economic growth and the profit imperative over human interests and human lives. Everyone is left to themselves, which means that only the strong survive. Such responses make clear that neoliberalism is a form of social Darwinism. Socialist strategies are based on the idea of collective solidarity in fighting the pandemic. Measures are taken that minimise the death toll and try to safeguard a good life for everyone. Human interests and human lives are put over capitalist interests. The coronavirus crisis is an existential crisis of humanity and society. Socialist measures aim at providing resources and forms of relief to humans that allow them enough time for survival labour in order to better cope with the difficulties of the ruptures of everyday life and to be better able to reorganise routine activities, cope with fears and anxiety, support friends, family, and communities, etc.

·    False coronavirus news:

The collective shock and the collective fear of death that emerged in the coronavirus crisis are a futile ground for the spread of false news about coronavirus.

·    Types of false coronavirus news:

There are two main types of false coronavirus news stories:
a) false news related to the origin of coronavirus;
b) false news about how the virus is contracted and can be killed.

·    The far-right’s communication of false coronavirus news:

The far-right has taken advantage of the coronavirus crisis in order to spread nationalism and hatred by communicating false coronavirus news stories via traditional and social media.

Socialism or Barbarism

The coronavirus crisis is an existential crisis of humanity and society. It radically confronts humans with death and the fear of death. This collective experience can on the one hand result in new forms of solidarity and socialism. Humans realise that life, wellbeing, health and survival are their most important and most fundamental goods, that they need to take care of themselves and of each other, and that collective and global solidarity is needed in order to overcome the pandemic.

But on the other hand there is the danger of war and fascism. The biggest political danger of the coronavirus crisis is that the far-right uses the state of emergency in order to spread false news, nationalism, hatred, which can result in violence, warfare, dictatorship, genocide, and fascism. The coronavirus crisis radicalises the perspectives for the future of society. It makes it more likely that we are either heading towards socialism or barbarism. Just like hundred years ago, bourgeois society also today and in the coming time “stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism” (Luxemburg 1916, 388). “In this hour, socialism is the only salvation for humanity” (Luxemburg 1971, 367).

References

Andersen, Kristian G. 2020. The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9

APA (Austria Press Agency). 2020. 153.100 mehr Arbeitslose seit 15. März. Wiener Zeitung, 25 March 2020, https://www.wienerzeitung.at/nachrichten/wirtschaft/oesterreich/2055625-153.100-mehr-Arbeitslose-seit-15.-Maerz.html

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

Calisher, Charles et al. 2020. Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combatting COVID-19. The Lancet 395: e42-e43, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9

Cohen, John. 2020a. Mining Coronavirus Genomes for Clues to the Outbreak’s Origins. Science Magazine, 31 January 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/mining-coronavirus-genomes-clues-outbreak-s-origins#

Cohen, John. 2020b. Scientists “Strongly Condemn” Rumors and Conspiracy Theories About Origin of Coronavirus Outbreak. Science Magazine, 19 February 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/scientists-strongly-condemn-rumors-and-conspiracy-theories-about-origin-coronavirus#

Cyranoski, David. 2020. Mystery Deepens Over Animal Source of Coronavirus. Nature 579: 18-19.

Davis, Mike. 2020. In a Plague Year. Jacobin, 14 March 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/mike-davis-coronavirus-outbreak-capitalism-left-international-solidarity

Fuchs, Christian. 2021. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. Third edition.

Fuchs, Christian. 2020a. Communication and Capitalism. A Critical Theory. London: University of Westminster Press.

Fuchs, Christian. 2020b. Nationalism on the Internet: Critical Theory and Ideology in the Age of Social Media and Fake News. New York: Routledge.

Galton, Francis. 1909. Essays in in Eugenics. London: The Eugenics Education Society.

Garrison, Randy D. 2011. E-Learning in the 21^st Century. A Framework for Research and Practice. New York: Routledge. Second edition.

Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity.

Harvey, David. 2020. Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. Jacobin, 20 March 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions

Harvey, David. 2005. Space as Keyword. In Spaces of Neoliberalization, 93-115. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital. Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge.

Kopecki, Dawn. 2020. WHO Officials Warn US President Trump Against Calling Cornavirus the “Chinese Virus”. CNBC, 18 March 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/who-officials-warn-us-president-trump-against-calling-coronavirus-the-chinese-virus.html

Lam, Tommy Tsan-Yuk et al. 2020. Identifying SARS-CoV-2 Related Coronaviruses in Malayan Pangolins. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2169-0

Lefebvre, Henri. 2002. Critique of Everyday Life. Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London: Verso.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1974/1991. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Li, Xiang et al. 2020. Bat Origin of a New Human Coronavirus: There and Back Again. Science China Life Sciences 63: 461-462, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1645-7

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1971. Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1916. The Junius Pamphlet. In Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, 371-477. New York: Pathfinder.

Mangan, Dan. 2020. Trump Blames China for Coronavirus Pandemic: “The Worls is Paying A Very Big Price for What They Did”. CNBC, 19 March 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/coronavirus-outbreak-trump-blames-china-for-virus-again.html

Mies, Maria, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof. 1988. Women: The Last Colony. London: Zed Books.

Rosa, Hartmut. 2020a. Interview. Philosophie Magazin, 18 March 2020, https://philomag.de/auf-einmal-sind-wir-nicht-mehr-die-gejagten/

Rosa, Hartmut. 2020b. Interview. TAZ, 25 March 2020, https://taz.de/Soziologe-Hartmut-Rosa-ueber-Corona/!5673868/

Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City. Princeton, NJL Princeton University Press.

Sprunt, Barbara. 2020. Bernie Sanders on His Campaign: “It’s Going to Be A Very Steep Road”. NPR, 27 March 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/03/27/822171139/bernie-sanders-on-his-campaign-it-s-going-to-be-a-very-steep-road?t=1585500234287

Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1889/2009. Darwinism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wallace, Rob, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chavez and Rodrick Wallace. 2020. COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital. Monthly Review 72, https://monthlyreview.org/2020/03/27/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/

World Health Organization (WHO). 2020. WHO Announces COVID-19 Outbreak a Pandemic. WHO, 12 March 2020, http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-emergencies/coronavirus-covid-19/news/news/2020/3/who-announces-covid-19-outbreak-a-pandemic

Ye, Zi-Wei et al. 2020. Zoontic Origins of Human Coronavirus. International Journal of Biological Sciences 16 (10): 1686-1697.

York, Ashley. 2020. Novel Coronavirus Takes Flight From Bats? Nature Reviews Microbiology 18: 191.

Zhou, Peng et al. 2020. A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated With a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin. Nature 579: 270-273.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please! The Philosophical Salon, 16 March 2020, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/monitor-and-punish-yes-please/

---

[1] Data source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_mainland_China

[2] Data source: WHO, https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019, accessed on 30 March 2020.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XRc389TvG8

[4] Translation from German: „Zwangsentschleunigung”.

[5] Translation from German: „Dem steht eine massive Verlangsamung im realen physischen Leben gegenüber. Wo man sich einerseits stillgestellt und ausgeschlossen fühlt, andererseits plötzlich neue Formen von Solidarität und neue Formen von Zugewandtheit entdeckt“.

[6] Translation from German: „Beziehungen werden suspekt“.

[7] Translation from German: „wachsende Entfremdung“.

[8] Translation from German: „Wir haben Zeit. Wir können plötzlich hören und wahrnehmen, was um uns herum geschieht: Vielleicht hören wir wirklich die Vögel und sehen die Blumen und grüßen die Nachbarn. Hören und Antworten (statt beherrschen und kontrollieren): Das ist der Beginn eines Resonanzverhältnisses, und daraus, genau daraus kann Neues entstehen“.

[9] Data source: Eurostat, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat

[10] Data source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic, accessed on 27 March 2020.

[11] Data source: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/breitbart.com, measured as a 90-day trend, accessed on 27 March 2020.

[12] Data source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio_programs, accessed on 27 March 2020.

[13] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/02/24/limbaugh-coronavirus-being-weaponized-to-bring-down-trump/

[14] Ibid.

[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp3EBJFKnGo

[16] Ibid.

[17] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/27/rush-limbaugh/fact-checking-rush-limbaughs-misleading-claim-new-/

[18] Data source: https://www.facebook.com/Breitbart, https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews, https://www.instagram.com/wearebreitbart/, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmgnsaQIK1IR808Ebde-ssA

« Pourquoi dire que l’épidémie n’aura aucune conséquence notable…? »

01/04/2020; Nelson Lerias;

1. Badiou commence son article du 27.03.2020, intitulé « Sur la situation épidémique », par dire qu’il a toujours considéré que la situation actuelle, la pandémie de virus corona, n’avait rien de bien exceptionnel. Notons d’emblée que Badiou n’écrit pas, mot à mot, qu’il considère que le situation actuelle n’a rien d’exceptionnel. Dire « J’ai toujours considéré que la situation actuelle […] n’avait rien de bien exceptionnel » n’est pas littéralement la même chose que de dire « Je considère que la situation actuelle n’a rien de bien exceptionnel ». La formulation de Badiou, ne se conjuguant pas au présent, laisse (du moins provisoirement) un certain espace de manoeuvre pour la nuance – ou pour l’équivoque, l’incompréhension, le malentendu, c’est-à-dire elle invite le lecteur à quelques exercices herméneutiques. Après tout, la proposition « J’ai toujours considéré que la situation actuelle […] n’avait rien de bien exceptionnel » pourrait ouvrir le chemin à ce que l’on ajoute par la suite quelque chose comme « Mais maintenant, finalement, je considère qu’elle a quelque chose de très exceptionnel ». Il faudrait donc, dans un premier temps, arriver à décider si Badiou considère que la situation actuelle n’a rien d’exceptionnel ou si, au contraire, Badiou considère que la situation actuelle a quelque chose d’exceptionnel. Il faudrait, dans un second temps, passer des considérations de Badiou à la situation elle-même (ou à d’autres considérations établies à partir d’autres points de vue) et vérifier si elle a ou non quelque chose d’exceptionnel indépendamment des considérations de Badiou.

2. Dès la première ligne, le lecteur de l’article de Badiou est, pour ainsi dire, invité à décider entre le tourbillon de l’exceptionnel et l’accalmie de l’habituel. Il n’est pas exclu que le lecteur ne cherche une troisième voie, qu’il ne reconnaisse le mélange des eaux. Autrement dit, même si l’on considérait que la situation actuelle n’a rien de bien exceptionnel, on ne pourrait que très difficilement considérer qu’elle n’a rien de mouvementé, en dépit des restrictions de la liberté de mouvement consacrée dans la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme et en dépit, également, des sentiments d’ennui [1] ou de mélancolie [2] ressentis par certaines personnes en situation de confinement. On serait ainsi amené à pondérer la possibilité selon laquelle l’agitation ne s’applique pas exclusivement à ce qui est exceptionnel, elle s’accorderait aussi à ce qui est habituel, régulier, récurrent. D’un autre côté, apparaîtrait la possibilité selon laquelle ce qui est habituel, familier, ordinaire peut devenir, à tort ou à raison, mouvementé, tumultueux, inquiétant. Quelqu’un pourrait croire qu’il est insensé de s’étonner avec la répétition du même, fût-ce la douleur, la souffrance, la maladie et la mort.

3. Badiou paraît néanmoins reconnaître quelque chose d’exceptionnel : « […] la pandémie actuelle frappe cette fois à grande échelle l’assez confortable monde dit occidental ». Il venait pourtant de mentionner le SIDA. On pourrait se demander, quelque peu rhétoriquement, si Badiou croit que le SIDA n’a pas atteint l’assez confortable monde dit occidental, comme il écrit – ou si simplement il a oublié qu’il venait de le mentionner. À moins que, selon son opinion, le SIDA n’ait pas frappé l’Occident à grand échelle. Les milliers et milliers de morts du SIDA, y compris en Occident, paraissent le démentir. Badiou écrit ensuite que le vrai nom de cette épidémie est SARS 2. Elle a, comme le chiffre l’indique, un antécesseur, le SARS 1. « Il est donc clair que l’épidémie actuelle n’est aucunement le surgissement de quelque chose de radicalement nouveau, ou d’inouï ». Si doute il y avait, certains lecteurs trancheront maintenant, à partir de ces mots, en soutenant que, pour Badiou, clairement, la situation pandémique actuelle n’a rien de bien exceptionnel. Quelques voix se lèveront pour dire qu’il se trompe, que la situation est tout à fait exceptionnelle, qu’elle est, politiquement, un état d’exception. Il y aura même ceux qui, avec une certaine méchanceté, se demanderont si la vieillesse n’estompe pas la sensibilité à la nouveauté.

4. Quelques lignes après, Badiou donne l’impression qu’il ne voulait pas intervenir, participer à la discussion, mais que finalement il s’est décidé à le faire, en se sentant « quelque peu contraint ». Il ne serait alors pas trop excessif d’interpréter que la nuance de l’usage du passé composé et de l’imparfait à la place du présent préparait le « Mais » qui introduit sa décision d’intervenir. « Mais voici que vraiment, je lis trop de choses, j’entends trop de choses, y compris dans mon entourage, qui me déconcertent par le trouble qu’elles manifestent, et par leur inappropriation totale à la situation, à vrai dire simple, dans laquelle nous sommes ». Que la situation, selon Badiou, ne soit pas exceptionnelle a déjà pu provoquer une certaine perplexité chez le lecteur, mais si telle n’était pas le cas, voici que maintenant Badiou dit que non seulement la situation n’est pas exceptionnelle, mais que, en plus, elle est simple. Il paraîtrait que son déconcertement n’est pas dû tant à la situation, son exceptionnalité et sa complexité, mais plutôt à l’inappropriation totale des choses lues et entendues. Il faudrait alors essayer de comprendre quelles seraient les choses lues et entendues qui seraient appropriées à cette situation simple et habituelle, autrement dit on ne connaît pas le critère de simplicité à l’oeuvre dans la réflexion de Badiou, espérons que ce ne soit pas celle de l’esprit. Il parle même de « redoutable simplicité » et d’« absence de nouveauté ».

5. Les choses lues et entendues par Badiou (il parle de « déclarations péremptoires », d’« appels pathétiques », d’« accusations emphatiques ») seraient, entre autres qualifications (telles que mysticisme et pessimisme), « inutilement serviles au regard des pouvoirs, qui ne font en fait que ce à quoi ils sont contraints par la nature du phénomène ». Les pouvoirs politiques (et/ou autres) ne feraient alors que ce à quoi ils sont contraints. Une politique donc de la contrainte, que l’on pourrait, en d’autres termes, appeler aussi politique de la nécessité, Badiou parle même d’« une nécessité imposée par la diffusion d’un processus mortel qui croise la nature […] et l’ordre social », il parle d’un confinement « tout à fait nécessaire » et il dit qu’il est nécessaire de respecter « une stricte discipline ». Or, si la politique est, pour ainsi dire, le royaume de la liberté et si la contrainte ou la nécessité sont le contraire de la liberté, alors on pourrait se demander, en toute simplicité, si une politique de la contrainte ou de la nécessité n’est pas, à proprement parler, anti-politique, si cela ne signifie pas, précisément, une suspension, ou même une abolition, de la politique. Mais il se peut qu’on n’ait pas, aujourd’hui, à notre disposition un concept claire, univoque, de politique. Il se peut que quand on parle de politique on ne sache pas de quoi on parle, à quoi on se réfère. Badiou écrit que le « pauvre Macron […] ne fait […] que son travail de chef d’État en temps de guerre ou d’épidémie ». L’activité de l’homme politique ne serait alors qu’un ‘‘travail’’ ? Et en quoi ce prétendu ‘‘travail’’ se distinguerait-il alors du travail de la terre d’un agriculteur ou de la fabrication artisanale d’un menuisier, par exemple ?

6. Le pauvre Macron ne fait alors « que son travail de chef d’État en temps de guerre ou d’épidémie ». Guerre ou épidémie, comme s’il n’y avait pas de différence. Badiou dira même que la « métaphore de Macron, « nous sommes en guerre », est correcte : Guerre ou épidémie, l’État est contraint […] de mettre en oeuvre des pratiques à la fois plus autoritaires et à destination plus globale, pour éviter une catastrophe stratégique ». Non seulement l’État est contraint de mettre en oeuvre des pratiques plus autoritaires et à destination plus globale, accentuant ainsi une politique de la nécessité, mais ici la différence entre guerre (une métaphore, selon Badiou lui-même) et épidémie n’est pas opérante. À la suite de Macron, Badiou serait-il en train de prendre une métaphore à la lettre ? Quel est alors le critère de correction d’une métaphore ? Serait-ce équivalent à prendre une image pour de la réalité, quelque chose comme de l’idolâtrie ? D’ailleurs, est-il seulement constitutionnel de déclarer une guerre à un virus ? Ceci n’est pas littéralement une guerre, c’est-à-dire les analogies éventuelles avec une situation de guerre ne devraient pas nous ensorceler, par la magie du langage, au point de ne plus apercevoir les disproportions et donc la singularité de la situation dans sa contingence incalculable. On ne devrait pas seulement se demander qu’est-ce que l’on voit en ayant recours à la métaphore de la guerre, qu’elle obscurité sa lumière illumine, mais aussi qu’est-ce que l’on ne voit pas, qu’est-ce que cette métaphore, comme un écran, empêche de voir, quel éblouissement, pour ne pas dire cécité, sa lumière produit.

7. Badiou déclare encore que « l’épidémie en cours n’aura, en tant que telle, en tant qu’épidémie, aucune conséquence politique notable dans un pays comme la France » et que « ce genre de situation (guerre mondiale ou épidémie mondiale) est particulièrement « neutre » sur le plan politique. Les guerres du passé n’ont provoqué de révolution que dans deux cas [Russie et Chine, selon Badiou] ». Notons que, dans la première phrase citée, Badiou utilise le future « n’aura ». Une première attitude de prudence est celle d’attendre pour voir, mais l’autre est celle d’ouvrir les yeux et voir ce qui est déjà là, devant nous, le plus difficile à voir selon Goethe. Pourquoi dire que l’épidémie n’aura aucune conséquence notable dans un pays comme la France ? L’épidémie a déjà, aujourd’hui, des conséquences politiques notables dans un pays comme la France, à commencer par l’état d’exception (ou état d’urgence, selon les terminologies). Ne fut-ce Badiou à écrire que « l’État est contraint de mettre en oeuvre des pratiques plus autoritaires » ? À moins que la mise en oeuvre des pratiques plus autoritaire ne soit pas une conséquence politique. Si la métaphore de la guerre est correcte, et selon Badiou elle l’est, alors cette affirmation de Badiou sonne comme si l’on disait qu’il y a une guerre, mais qu’elle n’aura pas de conséquences politiques (pour ne pas parler d’autres conséquences). Mais qu’elle est la guerre qui n’a pas eu de conséquences politiques ? Il serait peut-être prudent, herméneutiquement, de se demander qu’est-ce que cela peut bien vouloir dire. De même, que l’on ne sait pas trop bien, à partir de la lettre du texte, qu’est-ce que « neutre » veut ici dire exactement. Étant donné que Badiou mentionne le concept de révolution, on pourrait se demander si c’est celui-là son critère pour évaluer les conséquences politiques d’une guerre (métaphorique, paraît-il) et que tout ce qui n’est pas révolution n’est pas une conséquence, est « neutre ».

---

[1] À propos de l’ennui, quelques mots de Pascal : « […] ôtez leur [aux jeunes gens – ou bien aux hommes en général] divertissement vous les verrez se sécher d’ennui » « […] on cherche le repos en combattant quelques obstacles et si on les a surmontés le repos devient insupportable par l’ennui qu’il engendre », « Ennui. Rien n’est si insupportable à l’homme que d’être dans un plein repos, sans passions, sans affaires, sans divertissement, sans application. Il sent alors son néant, son abandon, son insuffisance, sa dépendance, son impuissance, son vide. Incontinent il sortira du fond de son âme, l’ennui, la noirceur, la tristesse, le chagrin, le dépit, le désespoir », etc.

[2] À propos de la mélancolie, quelques mots percutants, peut-être surprenants, de Jean Starobinski, dans un entretien de 2012 : « La mélancolie, au fond, n’est jamais superficielle : c’est un blocage, une paralysie des fonctions vitales. Ses symptômes principaux sont la tristesse, l’anxiété et l’abattement, l’animosité envers les proches […] La mélancolie est souvent génératrice de violence. De tourmenté, le mélancolique peut devenir tourmenteur. Il peut être suicidaire ou meurtrier ».

Coronavirus and self-organization

01/04/2020; Giorgi Kobakhidze;

Until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Karl Marx, 1852

In Georgia, political life is taking unexpected turns.

The mayor of Tbilisi, who has insisted in the past on having “no information about the existence of homeless people” in the city, is now undertaking efforts to house them in various shelters. The prime minister, who built his career on suppressing strikes and protests against large businesses, is now threatening those businesses with expropriation, and condemning them for putting profits over people’s lives in this time of crisis. This metamorphosis has proven to be essential: the measures taken by the government against the virus are helping to save lives and preventing (or in the worst case, delaying) the collapse of the Georgian healthcare system.  

While most of the population follows recommendations on isolation and social distancing, there are those who invoke the idea of individual freedom to portray safety measures as repressive. The most shameless of them, like the former Deputy Minister of Labor, Health and Social Affairs, compare the quarantined regions to Nazi concentration camps as if the Holocaust was a public safety effort. His own plan calls for an immediate cancellation of the state of emergency, a moratorium on regulations, and a return to “having fun outside”—paralleling the logic of flagellants who publicly whipped themselves to combat black death.

On the other hand, those affected most by the crisis: precarious workers, street vendors, the unemployed, the elderly etc. display unprecedented examples of public responsibility, consciously sacrificing their fragile material stability, social life and freedom in an attempt to save society as a whole. Exceptional circumstances have revealed the lifesaving potential of intergenerational solidarity, interpersonal accountability and mutual recognition of shared interests on a mass scale. They also reveal the infantile and, in this case, fatal character of neoliberal individual freedom making clear that the true restriction lies not in quarantines but in the capitalist realism that plagues our political imaginary.         

When the number of cases drops, and the government reverts back to its usual functions, this historical instance of mass public responsibility will be the only lever we’ll have in facing the imminent brutal austerity measures. The majority of those who survive the virus will be forced to suffer from its economic aftermath. So, the imperative political task is in transforming our reaction to the crisis into organized resistance against its structural reasons. This self-organized network should support its every composite just as we support the vulnerable ones right now, and serve as a popular basis for progressive demands. The wave of collective responsibility must outlast not only the virus but also the economic reaction that will follow. It must become the new normal. The existing wave is already conditioning the possibility of what Panagiotis Sotiris, in a polemic commentary on Giorgio Agamben’s recent article about the coronavirus, termed communist biopolitics—democratic practices aimed at building reproductive autonomy beyond the reach of both market competition and state coercion, extending their democratizing effect from below to other spheres of social life. The realization of this possibility depends on political intervention (from home, for now).  

Le retirement du monde – Alain Borer (fr)

01/04/2020; publié dans la série « Tracts de crise » chez Gallimard, à télécharger gratuitement ici;

Allons ! à l’assaut du pouvoir, de la liberté, de la terre,
De la santé, des défis, de la gaité, de l’estime de soi,
de la curiosité ; Allons ! trêve de formules !
Walt Whitman, Chanson de la piste ouverte

Enfermés au dehors,
libres au dedans
à l’assaut de ce qui sauve :
le vertical en nous
André Velter, Le Grand Sursaut, 20 mars 2020

Quand même nous comptons les morts, quand même nous compterions prochainement parmi eux, la pandémie se distinguerait d’avoir été d’abord langagière, d’un mot nouveau, inconnu la veille, prononcé pour la première fois par l’humanité tout entière et simultanément, un mot à consonance latine (mais de morphologie américaine) long de cinq syllabes telle une chenille noire proliférant soudain en milliards d’occurrences, et dont taire le nom ici, quelques instants; un seul mot, signe sûr de l’événement inouï, procédant à l’unification de ce monde (c’est le sens même d’épidémie: «tout le monde»)! Entraînant à sa suite d’autres locutions locales, geste barrière, hydroalcoolique, confinement — et bien sûr une propagation de l’anglobal, cluster à la place de foyer, dont un ministre se fait promoteur et porteur, transmis par toutes les télévisions, tandis que le Président appelle care un comité scientifique: parlons la langue du maître pour les choses sérieuses, et le soir français à la maison.

Le pape marche seul dans les rues de Rome fantomatiquement désertes, comme s’il était le dernier survivant de l’humanité décimée. Pas un domaine n’échappe à la dérégulation générale, santé publique, économie, politique, société, la vie intime de tout humain : ainsi l’épidémie ne se laisse-t-elle pas saisir en un objet – parce qu’il n’y a pas d’extériorité d’où en parler ; comme la langue et le Réel, nous sommes à l’intérieur.

Nous sommes entrés dans une période smectique : qui concerne le savon. Même ces grands témoins d’une grande époque déjà lointaine, Bardot, Belmondo, Delon, Godard, toujours parmi nous, que font-ils à cette heure-ci ? Ils se lavent les mains, probablement. À Melbourne Rod et Nicole se lavent les mains ; sur la côte Ouest Mark chante I will survive ! en regagnant sa maison enneigée du Colorado. Trois milliards de confinés. S’agit-il encore de la « mondialisation » ? Non, il ne s’agit plus que de l’espèce humaine.

On pourrait opposer les confinés aux héros, les planqués et le personnel sanitaire ; les uns montent au front pour les autres, les confinés tiennent tout autre à distance, comme ils firent avec les migrants ; et tant de morts qu’on s’en lave les mains. Les confinés succèdent à « ces bureaucrates inemployés » qui fuyaient Paris pour Versailles à la suite d’Adolphe Thiers, le 18 mars 1871 et qui, « bénéficiant d’un
congé extraordinaire, attendirent la suite des événements, préoccupés seulement de savoir si l’on paierait ces deux mois de vacances non réglementaires » ; mais l’événement tient sa puissance de se dire en un seul tableau d’Albertus Pictor (1457), La Mort jouant aux échecs : pour la première fois dans l’histoire, l’humanité tout entière réagit en même temps comme un seul humain à l’approche de la mort. C’est ainsi que l’on peut reconnaître dans cet accroissement d’intensité collective tous les comportements de l’homme devant la mort qui rôde, courage et lâcheté, culpabilité, élévation d’âme, blagues proliférantes pour conjurer l’angoisse, et ce sentiment du moment ultime qui est sans doute le plus fréquent à mesure qu’elle s’approche : l’incrédulité.

À l’histoire, cependant, qui réclame qu’on l’honore en entrant par une seule grande Porte à deux battants, celle du Réel économique et politique, répond soudain une
petite porte dérobée, brusquement ouverte sur les utopies d’hier instantanément réalisées. Et voilà que le ciel chinois s’éclaircit ! Le pont de Brooklyn apaisé ! On entend à nouveau les oiseaux dans Paris, les trente-neuf espèces différentes ! Venise déserte, délestée de ses bateaux géants et approchée par les dauphins de l’Adriatique…

L’État vous dit, face caméra : je t’interdis d ’aller travailler ! Sous peine de contravention ! Les humains se répartissent harmonieusement dans la nature. Dans le temps retrouvé, veillez à votre santé, redécouvrez vos proches, apprenez à vivre avec eux. Antidote à la pandémie, par l’internet qui a aussi ses virus, la bibliothèque
de la Sorbonne est en accès libre et l’on peut visiter tous les musées du monde : ce qui relève du commun est enfin accessible !

De même que les avocats leurs robes noires, les infirmières jetaient leurs blouses blanches ? Aujourd’hui la Voix dit : la santé est un trésor public, la santé échappe aux lois du marché ! Le Commandeur prend la parole à 20 heures pour dire : « lisez ! » – et non plus : bossez, payez, comprenez ! L’impossible brusquement réalisé : la suspension sine die de toutes les lois-du-marché, la décroissance immédiate, le retour à soi et à la solidarité, le grand virage écologique ! Et personne pour voir venir un tel changement planétaire. Aucune décision humaine, aucun révolutionnaire pour l’engager. Restera-t-il sans conséquence de s’être à tout le
moins laissé entrevoir ?

Il se peut après tout qu’un virus, en dépit ou en raison du peu de cas que nous portions à la survie de notre monde, en prenne la défense contre les excès des hommes, cette espèce animale qui aurait bientôt fini d’exterminer toutes les autres espèces et se trouvait à deux doigts de détruire la planète elle-même. Pour se tenir du côté de l’homme malgré tout, celui qui veut encore l’harmonie générale, et se réjouit d’entrevoir le rêve advenu, un espoir se fait jour : au contraire du confinement (si ce mot dit prison alors qu’il parle des confins!), cet espoir tient au retirement, d’un mot francophone réapproprié au sens d’un refus de revenir au libéralisme, à l’exploitation éhontée du monde, un retirement comme la mer se retire, et comme l’humanité elle-même le fera bien un jour complètement – un jour comme ceux-ci que nous vivons, qui en sont la répétition
ou l’annonce.

“Beyond the Breakdown: Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath” – Bifo Berardi

31/03/2020; originally published here;

All of a sudden, what we have been thinking for the last fifty years has to be rethought from scratch. Thank god (is god a virus?) that we have an abundance of extra time now because the old business is out of business.

I’m going to say something about three distinct subjects. One: the end of human history, which is clearly unfolding before our eyes. Two: the ongoing emancipation from capitalism, and/or the imminent danger of techno-totalitarianism. Three: the return of death (at last) to the scene of philosophical discourse, after its long modern denial, and the revitalization of the body as dissipation.

1. Critters

Number one: the philosopher who best anticipated the ongoing viral apocalypse is Donna Haraway.

In Staying with the Trouble she suggests that the agent of evolution is no longer Man, the subject of History.

The human is losing its centrality in this chaotic process, and we should not despair over this, like the nostalgics of modern humanism do. At the same time, we should not seek comfort in the delusions of a techno-fix, like the contemporary transhumanist techno-maniacs do.

Human history is over, and the new agents of history are the “critters,” in Haraway’s parlance. The word “critter” refers to small creatures, small playful creatures who do strange things, like provoking mutation. Well: the virus.

Burroughs speaks of viruses as an agents of mutation: biological, cultural, linguistic mutation.

Critters do not exist as individuals. They spread collectively, as a process of proliferation.

The year 2020 should be seen as the year when human history dissolved—not because human beings disappear from planet Earth, but because planet Earth, tired of their arrogance, launched a micro-campaign to destroy their Will zur Macht.

The Earth is rebelling against the world, and the agents of planet Earth are floods, fires, and most of all critters.

Therefore, the agent of evolution is no longer the conscious, aggressive, and strong-willed human being—but molecular matter, micro-flows of uncontrollable critters who invade the space of production, and the space of discourse, replacing History with Her-story, the time in which teleological Reason is replaced by Sensibility and sensuous chaotic becoming.

Humanism was based on the ontological freedom that the Italian philosophers of the early Renaissance identified with the absence of theological determinism. Theological determinism is over, and the virus has taken the place of a teleological god.

The end of subjectivity as the engine of the historical process implies the end of what we have called capital-H “History,” and implies the beginning of a process in which conscious teleology is replaced by multiple strategies of proliferation.

Proliferation, the spread of molecular processes, replaces history as macro-project.

Thought, art, and politics are no longer to be seen as projects of totalization (Totalizierung, in Hegel’s sense), but as processes of proliferation without totality.

2. Usefulness

After forty years of neoliberal acceleration, the race of financial capitalism has suddenly ground to a halt. One, two, three months of global lockdown, a long interruption of the production process and of the global circulation of people and goods, a long period of seclusion, the tragedy of the pandemic … all of this is going to break capitalist dynamics in a way that may be irremediable, irreversible. The powers that manage global capital at the political and financial level are desperately trying to save the economy, injecting enormous amounts of money into it. Billions, billions of billions … figures, numbers that now tend to mean: zero.

All of a sudden money means nothing, or very little.

Why are you giving money to a dead body? Can you revive the body of the global economy by injecting money into it? You can’t. The point is that both the supply side and the demand side are immune to money stimulus, because the slump is not happening for financial reasons (like in 2008), but because of the collapse of bodies, and bodies have nothing to do with financial stimulus.

We are passing the threshold that leads beyond the cycle of labor–money–consumption.

When, one day, the body comes out from the confinement of quarantine, the problem will not be rebalancing the relation between time, work, and money, rebalancing debt and repayment. The European Union has been fractured and weakened by its obsession with debt and balance, but people are dying, hospitals are running out of ventilators, and doctors are overwhelmed by fatigue, anxiety, and fear of infection. Right now this cannot be changed by money, because money is not the problem. The problem is: What are our concrete needs? What is useful for human life, for collectivity, for therapy?

Use value, long expelled from the field of the economics, is back, and the useful is now king.

Money cannot buy the vaccine that we don’t have, cannot buy the protective masks that have not been produced, cannot buy the intensive care departments that have been destroyed by the neoliberal reform of Europe’s healthcare system. No, money cannot buy what does not exist. Only knowledge, only intelligent labor can buy what does not exist.

So money is impotent now. Only social solidarity and scientific intelligence are alive, and they can become politically powerful. This is why I think that at the end of the global quarantine, we won’t go back to normal. Normal will never come back. What will happen in the aftermath has not yet been determined, and is not predictable.

We face two political alternatives: either a techno-totalitarian system that will relaunch the capitalist economy by means of violence, or the liberation of human activity from capitalist abstraction and the creation of a molecular society based on usefulness.

The Chinese government is already experimenting on a massive scale with techno-totalitarian capitalism. This techno-totalitarian solution, anticipated by the provisional abolition of individual freedom, may become the dominant system of the time to come, as Agamben has rightly pointed out in his recent controversial texts .

But what Agamben says is only an obvious description of the present emergency, and of the probable future. I want to go beyond the probable, because the possible is more interesting to me. And the possible is contained in the breakdown of abstraction, and in the dramatic return of the concrete body as a bearer of concrete needs.

The useful is back in the social field. Usefulness, long forgotten and denied by the capitalist process of abstract valorization, is now the king of the scene.

The sky is clear in these days of quarantine, the atmosphere is free from polluting particulates, as factories are closed and cars cannot circulate. Will we go back to the polluting extractive economy? Will we go back to the normal frenzy of destruction for accumulation, and of useless acceleration for the sake of exchange value? No, we must go forward, toward the creation of a society based on the production of the useful.

What do we need now? Now, in the immediate now, we need a vaccine against the malady, we need protective masks, and we need intensive care equipment. And in the long run we need food, we need affection and pleasure. And a new culture of tenderness, solidarity, and frugality.

What is left of capitalist power will try to impose a techno-totalitarian system of control on society—this is obvious. But the alternative is here now: a society free from the compulsions of accumulation and economic growth.

3. Pleasure

The third point I would like to reflect on is the return of mortality as the defining feature of human life. Capitalism has been a fantastic attempt to overcome death. Accumulation is the Ersatz that replaces death with the abstraction of value, the artificial continuity of life in the marketplace.

The shift from industrial production to info-work, the shift from conjunction to connection in the sphere of communication, is the end point of the race toward abstraction, which is the main thread of capitalist evolution.

In a pandemic, conjunction is forbidden—stay home, don’t visit friends, keep your distance, don’t touch anybody. An enormous expansion of time spent online is underway, unavoidably, and all social relations—work, production, education—have been displaced into this sphere that prohibits conjunction. Offline social exchange is no longer possible. What will happen after weeks and months of this?

Maybe, as Agamben predicts, we’ll enter the totalitarian hell of an all-connected lifestyle. But a different scenario is possible.

What if the overload of connection breaks the spell? When the pandemic finally dissipates (assuming that it will), it’s possible that a new psychological identification will have imposed itself: online equals sickness. We also have to imagine and create a movement of caressing that will compel young people to turn off their connective screens as reminders of a lonely and fearful time. This does not mean that we should go back to the physical fatigue of industrial capitalism; it rather means that we should take advantage of the richness of time that automation emancipates from physical labor, and dedicate our time to physical and mental pleasure.

The massive spread of death we are witnessing in this pandemic may reactivate our sense of time as enjoyment, rather than as the postponement of joy.

At the end of the pandemic, at the end of the long period of isolation, people may simply continue sinking into the eternal nothingness of virtual connection, of distancing and techno-totalitarian integration. This is possible, even probable. But we should not be confined by the probable. We should discover the possibility hidden in the present.

It may be that after months of constant online connectivity, people will come out of their houses and apartments looking for conjunction. A movement of solidarity and tenderness might arise, leading people toward an emancipation from connective dictatorship.

Death is back at the center of the landscape: the long denied mortality that makes humans alive.

States of Emergency, Metaphors of Virus, and COVID-19 – Joseph Owen (en)

31/03/2020; first published on versoblog;

With the COVID-19 pandemic increasing in severity by the day, governments across the world have invoked viral metaphors to effect emergency legislation, in the process clamping down on civil liberties. In such a circumstance, what can the work of those who have studied liberal regimes’ propensity to make the state of exception the rule, such as Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, offer to us – if anything at all?

On 26 February, Giorgio Agamben wrote a short piece for the Italian journal Quodlibet, titled ‘L’invenzione di un’epidemia.’^[i] There, Agamben claims that coronavirus (recently renamed “SARS-CoV-2” and its disease “COVID-19”) is an epidemic conjured up by the Italian authorities and exacerbated by the national media. For him, the virus functions as an insidious form of mass panic and misdirection, as an excuse to extend prohibitive emergency measures over a mostly willing and anodyne population.

For anyone vaguely acquainted with Agamben’s work, his response won’t come as much of a surprise. His view is that citizens accept the bare minimum of existence to live under almost permanent restrictions of liberty. Governments treat every event as a pretext for the suspension of normal laws. Citizens adapt to the new reality: they defer to the exception, and so it becomes the rule. In doing so, some vital element of human life is suppressed or undone.

Agamben’s work has long looked at the nefarious implications of “bare life” and “states of exception.”^[ii] So it should surprise no one to see him reiterate these themes amid an extraordinary collective human crisis, especially one which he believes has been engineered to the effect of both bolstering our experience of life as one of mere biological survival, and of thwarting our ability to experience life as living, that is, to move freely in the world.

So, here we are, galled by an elderly and misguided sage, a man born in 1942 whose stringent theoretical dispositions have clouded his judgement. On this small amount of evidence, Agamben is a coronavirus truther. His reliance on philosophical abstractions, just as the material world deteriorates around him, is his intellectual ruin. That he is personally more at risk from his wrongheaded assumptions adds an extra level of pathos and concern.

The following day, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote a rebuttal in another Italian journal, Antinomie.^[iii] Not only does Nancy state the obvious medical knowns about COVID-19 to contradict Agamben’s analysis, he also draws on damning personal experience. About thirty years ago, Agamben had been one of the few people to advise Nancy to avoid having a heart transplant. Nancy politely reminds us (and him) that if he had acted on this advice he would almost certainly be dead, which counts as something less, presumably, than mere biological survival.

On 17 March, Agamben attempts to clarify his position.^[iv] He claims journalistic manipulation. He remains disturbed by the probable long-term residue from the new draconian powers implemented at federal and municipal levels. He predicts the unstoppable movement of social life online. He also makes a curious value judgement. The fear of death, now closely allied to touching and proximity, “is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them.”

Most of us are now aware of the gravity and horror of the current calamity, more so in Italy than here in the UK. Many of us recognise that by social distancing and self-isolating we’re committing to acts of compassion, however futile. This is more acute for the young and healthy, as our withdrawal from physical intimacy is a fundamentally altruistic gesture, helping to prevent the spread of infection to those more at risk. This self-assurance seems quaint and belated but, crucially, good enough.

To think that states of emergency have become the permanent condition of political life obscures a thorough scrutiny of the present moment in all its contradictions. But Agamben’s near-sightedness, if nothing else, does encourage vigilance. The second reading of the UK Government’s ‘Coronavirus Bill 2019-21’ took place just a week after Agamben’s initial intervention.^[v] The bill not only increases police powers of detention and isolation, it also removes certain safeguards on state surveillance and relaxes protections on forced detention and treatment, which disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalised people. These measures will be in place for at least two years.

*

In times of crisis, the function of language takes on a new salience. Yet, even in peril we bristle at the words of our leaders. On 12 March, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned “families” that they “will lose loved ones.”^[vi] Those who will actually die aren’t afforded the courtesy of direct address. When we’re unequivocally spoken to it comes in waves of hallucinogenic communication. On 18 March, Johnson signs off on a press release containing several visual assaults, among them: “Yes this enemy can be deadly, but it is also BEATABLE.”^[vii]

Where do we look, then, for leadership and guidance? Expert opinion gains in importance. Never before have I attached so much authority to the words of a virologist or an epidemiologist. That those same experts may disagree, or that they emphasise different things, is seemingly a testament to their scrupulousness and rationality. It is this deference to these unassuming overlords that Agamben, in fairness, cautions against. Yet as our political and administrative leaders invoke the language of emergency and of enemy, the apparition of Carl Schmitt, Agamben’s great influence, ghosts into view.

Perhaps it is because in sick times we demand a diagnostician, or at least one who looks like one. Schmitt, Weimar critic of liberalism and subsequent Nazi jurist, has already become the go-to intellectual authority for our uncertain, divisive, byzantine age. His insights into the nature of sovereignty, state conflict, and legal order supposedly envisage the general geopolitical landscape, one populated by authoritarian demagogues, ‘us and them’ domestic policies, and arcane global institutions. Schmitt, after all, spent the 1920s warning of indecisive parliaments and leaky constitutions before offering his judicial expertise to the Third Reich, writing articles like “The Führer Protects the Law.” Who better then to characterise and cure the political ills of the present than a figure so deeply complicit in the horrors of the past? History neither rhymes nor repeats itself; during an extraordinary pandemic, it offers a derisory echo.

William E. Scheuerman prefaces his 2019 edition of his book on Schmitt The End of Law, with an admission of failure.^[viii] His original intervention twenty years ago was to forestall Schmitt’s recovery. Now, Schmitt is “a household name in the English-speaking academic world”, whose disciples range from right-wing populists to China’s policymakers. Clear authority and quick decision-making is seen as an international priority, not least when tackling COVID-19.

According to Scheuerman, Schmitt’s legal beliefs founded his political choices. His criticisms of the rule of law led him to formulate and endorse “a National Socialist alternative to liberal jurisprudence.” This alone should give us pause. However suggestive Schmitt’s analysis, his solutions were disastrous. Scheuerman’s main problem, as it is for so many Schmitt scholars, is in balancing fair criticism with just admonishment, in giving due consideration to a thinker he understandably abhors.

For Schmitt, indeterminacy—the view that legal questions lack single right answers—was the key theoretical dispute within law, and his thoughts on this influenced a generation of big-name social scientists and economists. From this, Scheuerman’s book highlights Schmitt’s compelling idea that we live under permanent states of emergency, as governments indefinitely extend their powers to counter perceived existential threats.

Scheuerman argues that Schmitt saw this executive tendency coming. His legal scepticism and “dire portrayal of the political universe” led him to the understanding that emergencies were unavoidable, irrepressible and ubiquitous. Emergency powers are transformed in the globalised world as a function of authoritarianism and economic exploitation. They are secretive and unaccountable. Clear resistance is difficult. The book offers a seductive example: one worker in Kentucky, learning that a multinational corporation has acquired his coalmine, asks only: “Who do we shoot now?” Authentic crises, such as the one wrought by COVID-19, cleave through the fog. They necessarily reveal figures of accountability; we must know who is to blame if things go wrong.

Schmitt elsewhere offers broad prophecy and portent. Consisting of terse axioms and slippery phrasing, his writing becomes easy shorthand for explaining modern politics. His superficial dictums haunt the present. Recalling Schmitt’s political distinction, “between friend and enemy,” populist leaders employ cronyism and identity politics to shape public policy. For demagogues such as Donald Trump, COVID-19 is primarily a hoax orchestrated by domestic opponents. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, outwardly dubious of the virus’s severity, has contracted himself the COVID-19. On 22 March, news reports reveal that Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei believed that the US manufactured the pandemic.^[ix] Amid catastrophe, one must still define one’s enemy.

Scheuerman doesn’t wish to indulge Schmitt’s resurgence as a radical seer, all the while spending about 350 pages unpacking his tightly compressed and ambiguous body of work. Schmitt’s vaunted prescience seems less rooted in his metaphorical power, in his clinical diagnosis and malignant treatments, more a product of our cravings for palmistry and prediction. The relative inability to test for COVID-19 shows the inadequacy of clarifying the present. In tumult, we gaze back to anticipate.

*

Often in hope and denial, we rely on timeworn assumptions that edge us closer to conspiracy and misdiagnosis. This is partly what catches out Agamben and explains Schmitt’s intellectual revival. The desire to diagnose a crisis during its moment of rupture is a foolhardy enterprise. We may instead invoke Hegel’s reading of the owl of Minerva: that we only understand history as it fades from view. We may just as well state: before making judgement, let’s take a moment to reflect.

If this is the case, how do we comprehend the crisis in the meantime? Viruses provide ostensibly apt metaphors for social watersheds. On 19 March, with reference to Susan Sontag’s essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Paul Elie writes that in the digital and globalised age,

[…] we’ve applied illness metaphors to society, stripping them of their malign associations in the process. It may be that our fondness for virus as metaphor has made it difficult for us to see viruses as potentially dangerous, even lethal, biological phenomena. In turn, our disinclination to see viruses as literal may have kept us from insisting on and observing the standards and practices that would prevent their spread. Enthralled with virus as metaphor and the terms associated with it—spread, growth, reach, connectedness—we ceased to be vigilant. Jetting around the world, we stopped washing our hands.^[x]

I dispute the implied causation but accept the overall point. Without reaching for metaphor, perhaps we indulge etymology instead. Corona comes from the Latin for crown, a metonym for monarchy. The worry is that despite our efforts and the efforts of our political leaders, it will be the virus, inevitably, that reveals itself as sovereign.

In a viral video posted on 14 March, Dr Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned of the sluggish international response to COVID-19: “Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. […] The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure.”^[xi] The most important thing then is to act quickly, recalling Schmitt’s maxim that the ability to decide on the exception is that which reveals the sovereign. That liberal, democratic, pluralist institutions valorise decision is an irony that wouldn’t be lost on Schmitt.

Yet, it is the language of enemy that so far has trumped the metaphor of virus to describe COVID-19. On March 19, the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calls it an “enemy of humanity.”^[xii] The universalism in this would make Schmitt anxious – invocations of humanity obscure the friend-enemy distinction. Speaking of universalism in politics is dangerous because it is ill defined and dishonest: “The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.”^[xiii] Common moral principles risk turning international relations and domestic politics into conflicts between the human and the inhuman, rather than between legitimate competing actors. Even now, Trump, Bolsonaro and Khamenei are identifying their enemies.

The problem with COVID-19 is that while the contagion fails to discriminate, the fatality rate is specific. As the number infected increases, for those at risk, the death toll will rise. I’ve noted dates of publication and pronouncement because this evolving disaster will make fools of all of us. Much of this article will look hopelessly naive in the next weeks and months because it is immediately inscribed into the recent past. To watch a widely-shared news report in the evening, one depicting the delicate mortal balance in a Bergamo hospital, is to render senseless the thoughts of the morning.

---

[i] https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia

[ii] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); State of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[iii] https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/27/eccezione-virale/

[iv] https://itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/

[v] https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2019-21/coronavirus.html

[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA-MsoqRY5k

[vii] https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1240307154671874050

[viii] William E. Scheuerman, The End of Law: Carl Schmitt in the Twenty-First Century, 2^nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

[ix] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-iran/khamenei-says-u-s-offer-to-help-iran-fight-coronavirus-is-strange-idUKKBN2190A2

[x] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/against-the-coronavirus-as-metaphor

[xi] https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/coronavirus-who-says-governments-need-to-react-to-virus-quickly-not-perfectly/news-story/f3cdc60941df854a5d3d1321486ba3ef

[xii] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/coronavirus-covid-19-who-enemy-against-humanity-1255425

[xiii] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. by George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

« Will we then pretend that everything was just a dream? » – David Graeber (en)

31/03/2020; first published here; Originalversion auf Deutsch hier;

Which jobs are bullshit and which are systemically important: We shouldn’t forget that after the Corona crisis, says capitalism critic David Graeber.

ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Graeber, suddenly home office is possible and supermarket cashiers are systemically relevant. Is the Corona crisis turning our working world upside down forever?

David Graeber: Here in Great Britain, the government has compiled a list of the systemically relevant professions – those who work in them can continue to send their children to school, where they are looked after. The list captivates with the amazing absence of management consultants and hedge fund managers! Those who earn the most don’t show up there. The basic rule is: the more useful a job, the worse it is paid. An exception are, of course, doctors. But even there you could argue: As far as health is concerned, the cleaning staff in hospitals contributes just as much as the doctors, and much of the progress in the past 150 years has come from better hygiene.

ZEIT ONLINE: In France, the supermarket employees who are particularly challenged now receive a bonus payment – at the urging of the government. The market does not regulate this on its own.

David Graeber: Because the market is not so much based on supply and demand as we are always told – who makes how much is a question of political power. The current crisis makes it even clearer that my wages do not depend on how much my profession is actually used.

« Some people now contact me and say: I always suspected that I could do my job two hours a week, but now I actually know it is. » David Graeber

ZEIT ONLINE: This is the issue in your current book Bullshit Jobs : Many socially indispensable jobs are poorly paid – while well-paid employees often doubt whether their office work makes any sense at all or whether they are only doing a « bullshit job ».

Graeber: What is important to me: I would never contradict people who feel that they are making an important contribution with their work. For my book, however, I have collected voices from people who do not have exactly this feeling: They are sometimes deeply frustrated because they want to contribute to the good of all of us. But to make enough money for their families, they have to do the jobs that don’t work for anyone. People said to me: I worked as a kindergarten teacher, it was great and fulfilling and important work, but I couldn’t pay my bills anymore. And now I’m working for some subcontractor that provides health insurance with information. I tag some forms all day, no one reads my reports, but I earn twenty times as much.

ZEIT ONLINE: What happens to these office workers who are now doing their bullshit jobs because of the corona virus from their home office?

Graeber: Some people now contact me and say: I always suspected that I could do my job two hours a week, but now I actually know that it is. Because as soon as you do this from home, for example, the meetings that don’t do anything are often dropped.

ZEIT ONLINE: After the financial crisis in 2008, you were involved in the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, including activists occupying a park near the New York Stock Exchange. Could the corona crisis produce a similar left movement? An occupy home office?

Graeber: If so, the motto is rather: Occupy the apartment you live in and no longer pay rent. There is a lot of talk about renting strikes right now because people can no longer pay their rent because of the corona crisis. And then the real point is to support the systemically important workers who are not provided with the equipment they need to do their job. It is in all of our interests that medical personnel and delivery drivers have protective equipment.

ZEIT ONLINE: At the same time, in this crisis we learn very clearly how central work is for our society: No matter how many places people are no longer allowed to visit, they should often continue to work.

Graeber: You can see that with restrictions in public transport: if you close it, then first at the weekend. You can no longer go to the park. But God forbid that you can no longer go to work! Although we have long since noticed that a large part of the work does not have to be done in the office at all.

« It is important that we do not suppress what we finally admit to ourselves in times of crisis – for example, which jobs are systemically important and which are not. »

ZEIT ONLINE: That would actually be an insight from the current situation, right?

Graeber: Yes. The only question is: when the crisis is over, will people pretend that it was just a dream? Similar things could be observed after the financial crisis in 2008: For a few weeks everyone said: « Oh, everything we thought was true is not true! » Fundamental questions have finally been asked: What is money? What are debts? But at some point you suddenly decided: « Stop, we’re going to leave it now. Let’s pretend that nothing has ever happened! Let’s do it all again before! » And neoliberal politics and the financial industry just kept going. That is why it is so important that we do not suppress what we finally admit to ourselves in times of crisis – for example, which jobs are systemically important and which are not.

‘We can’t go back to normal’: how will coronavirus change the world? – Peter C, Baker (en)

31/03/2020; first published here;

Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse.

Everything feels new, unbelievable, overwhelming. At the same time, it feels as if we’ve walked into an old recurring dream. In a way, we have. We’ve seen it before, on TV and in blockbusters. We knew roughly what it would be like, and somehow this makes the encounter not less strange, but more so.

Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days. We refresh the news not because of a civic sense that following the news is important, but because so much may have happened since the last refresh. These developments are coming so fast that it’s hard to remember just how radical they are.

Cast your mind back a few weeks and imagine someone telling you the following: within a month, schools will be closed. Almost all public gatherings will be cancelled. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be out of work. Governments will be throwing together some of the largest economic stimulus packages in history. In certain places, landlords will not be collecting rent, or banks collecting mortgage payments, and the homeless will be allowed to stay in hotels free of charge. Experiments will be underway in the direct government provision of basic income. Large swathes of the world will be collaborating – with various degrees of coercion and nudging – on a shared project of keeping at least two metres between each other whenever possible. Would you have believed what you were hearing?

It’s not just the size and speed of what is happening that’s dizzying. It’s the fact that we have grown accustomed to hearing that democracies are incapable of making big moves like this quickly, or at all. But here we are. Any glance at history reveals that crises and disasters have continually set the stage for change, often for the better. The global flu epidemic of 1918 helped create national health services in many European countries. The twinned crises of the Great Depression and the second world war set the stage for the modern welfare state.

But crises can also send societies down darker paths. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, government surveillance of citizens exploded, while George W Bush launched new wars that stretched into indefinite occupations. (As I write this, the US military’s current attempt at reducing its troop presence in Afghanistan, 19 years after the invasion, is being slowed by coronavirus-related complications.) Another recent crisis, the 2008 financial crash, was resolved in a way that meant banks and financial institutions were restored to pre-crash normality, at great public cost, while government spending on public services across the world was slashed.

Because crises shape history, there are hundreds of thinkers who have devoted their lives to studying how they unfold. This work – what we might call the field of “crisis studies” – charts how, whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare. Who has more and who has less. Where the power lies. What people treasure and what they fear.

In such moments, whatever is broken in society gets revealed for just how broken it is, often in the form of haunting little images or stories. In recent weeks, the news has furnished us with countless examples. Airlines are flying large numbers of empty or near-empty flights for the sole purpose of protecting their slots on prime sky routes. There have been reports of French police fining homeless people for being outside during the lockdown. Prisoners in New York state are getting paid less than a dollar per hour to bottle hand sanitiser that they themselves are not allowed to use (because it contains alcohol), in a prison where they are not given free soap, but must buy it in an on-site shop.

But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds. Some thinkers who study disasters focus more on all that might go wrong. Others are more optimistic, framing crises not just in terms of what is lost but also what might be gained. Every disaster is different, of course, and it’s never just one or the other: loss and gain always coexist. Only in hindsight will the contours of the new world we’re entering become clear.

---

The pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse. People who study disasters – and especially pandemics – know all too well their tendency to inflame xenophobia and racial scapegoating. When the Black Death came to Europe in the 14th century, cities and towns shut themselves to outsiders – and assaulted, banished and killed “undesirable” community members, most often Jews. In 1858, a mob in New York City broke into a quarantine hospital for immigrants on Staten Island, demanded that everyone leave and then burned the hospital down, fearful that it was putting people outside at risk of yellow fever. Wikipedia now has a page collating examples from more than 35 countries of “xenophobia and racism related to the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic”: they range from taunts to outright assault.

“In a totally rational world, you might assume that an international pandemic would lead to greater internationalism,” says the historian Mike Davis, a renowned American chronicler of the disasters incubated by globalisation. For Davis, who wrote a book about the threat of avian flu in 2005, pandemics are a perfect example of the kind of crises to which global capitalism (with its constant movement of people and goods) is particularly vulnerable, but that the capitalist mindset (with its inability to think in terms beyond profit) cannot address. “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”

In the US, President Trump has tried hard to brand the new coronavirus as inherently “Chinese”, and to use the pandemic as a pretext for tightening borders and accepting fewer asylum seekers. Republican officials, thinktanks and media outlets have claimed or implied that Covid-19 is a man-made Chinese bioweapon. Some Chinese officials, in turn, have pushed the conspiracy theory that the outbreak came to China by way of American soldiers. In Europe, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently announced: “We are fighting a two-front war: one front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”

When you’re fighting a war, you want to know as much about the enemy as possible. But it’s easy, in the rush of crisis, to put in place surveillance tools without thinking about the long-term harm they might do. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, reminded me that, prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”

For governments looking to monitor their citizens even more closely, and companies looking to get rich by doing the same, it would be hard to imagine a more perfect crisis than a global pandemic. In China today, drones search for people without facemasks; when they are found, the drones’ built-in speakers broadcast scoldings from police. Germany, Austria, Italy and Belgium are all using data – anonymised, for now – from major telecommunications companies to track people’s movement. In Israel, the national security agency is now allowed to access infected individual’s phone records. South Korea sends texts to the public identifying potentially infected individuals and sharing information about where they’ve been.

Not all surveillance is inherently malign, and new tech tools very well might end up playing a role in fighting the virus, but Zuboff worries that these emergency measures will become permanent, so enmeshed in daily life that we forget their original purpose. Lockdowns have made many of us, sitting at home glued to our computers and phones, more dependent than ever on big tech companies. Many of these same companies are actively pitching themselves to government as a vital part of the solution. It is worth asking what they stand to gain. “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”

In the space of a few weeks, the prime ministers of both Israel and Hungary have effectively been given the power to rule by decree, without interference from courts or legislature. Meanwhile, the UK’s recently rolled-out coronavirus bill gives police and immigration officers the authority – in place for the next two years – to arrest and detain people suspected of carrying the virus, so that they can be tested. The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object. “Those of us who follow the police know how this goes,” said Kevin Blowe of Netpol, a UK group focused on protest rights. “These powers get put in place, and it sounds reasonable enough at the time – and then very quickly they’re applied for other purposes that have nothing to do with democracy and nothing to do with public safety.”

In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals. This suspicious mindset, they argued, ended up most affecting racial minorities and the poor. Tactics like these can make fighting the disease harder, by driving a hard wedge of distrust between government and citizens. As the report put it: “People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.”

There’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility. For thinkers in this camp, the example of the 2008 financial crash looms large. But where, from their view, 2008 led to defeat – with the broad public giving up a great deal while a small few profited – Covid-19 might open the door to political progress.

“I think we’re just so different to how we were before we saw the aftermath of the 2008 crash,” said the American writer Rebecca Solnit, one of today’s most eloquent investigators of crises and their implications. “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”

The argument, in its simplest form, is this: Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them. At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”

For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution. Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit. But then the virus started spreading, governments spent trillions in days – even going so far as to write cheques directly to citizens – and suddenly the question of what was feasible felt different.

From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.

In her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit used case studies of disasters – including the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 2001 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina – to argue that emergencies aren’t just moments when bad things get worse, or when people inevitably become more scared, suspicious and self-centred. Instead she foregrounded the ways in which disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain. The book was not a call to celebrate disaster – but to pay attention to the possibilities it might contain, and how it might shake us loose from old ways. In Solnit’s telling, “official” disaster responses had a tendency to muck things up by treating people as part of the problem to be managed, not an invaluable part of the solution.

Sometimes this mismanagement is a result of mere incompetence – other times it is more sinister. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice. (In fact, Klein argued, these people sometimes engineer Disaster 1 to get the process started.)

Unlike Solnit’s book, The Shock Doctrine doesn’t have much to say about the resilience of everyday people when everything goes horribly wrong. (Indeed, Solnit directly criticised Klein for this omission.) But the two books fit together like puzzle pieces. Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash.

In 2008, days after Barack Obama’s election, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Today’s leftists, for whom Obama mostly represents disappointment, are prone to agree. They feel that, in the wake of recent crises, they lost, and now is the time to make amends. If, facing a pandemic, we can change this much in a few weeks, then how much might we change in a year?

For anyone making this argument, the contrast between 2008 and the present crisis is striking. Compared to the opaque financial crisis, with its credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations, the coronavirus is relatively easy to understand. It is a dozen crises tangled into one, and they’re all unfolding immediately, in ways that cannot be missed. Politicians are getting infected. Wealthy celebrities are getting infected. Your friends and relatives are getting infected. We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.

In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently. Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.

“More people are in a position to connect the dots,” Klein said. “It has to do with people’s experiences; for people of a certain age, their only experience of capitalism has been one of crisis. And they want things to be different.”

---

That screaming buzzsaw noise in the background of this conversation is the sound of the climate crisis. If 2008 is the disaster that Klein and like-minded thinkers want to avoid repeating, climate change is the much bigger disaster they see coming – that they know is already here – and that they want to fight off. Indeed, in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.

Although Covid-19 is likely the biggest global crisis since the second world war, it is still dwarfed in the long term by climate change. Yet the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics. Accordingly, both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment. In other words, to think of this new level of state intervention as a temporary requirement is to ensure that we continue barrelling down the path to climate disaster.

“We’ve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus. Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”

The analogy between the two crises only goes so far. There is no getting around the fact that the impacts of climate change are more gradual than those of Covid-19. Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain. As Salamon pointed out to me, if we truly accepted we were in a climate emergency, then every day the news would lead with updates about which countries were reducing their emissions the fastest, and people would be clamouring to make sure their leaders were adopting the policies that worked.

But it is not unimaginable that the experience of Covid-19 could help us understand climate change differently. As the virus has reduced industrial activity and road traffic, air pollution has plummeted. In early March, the Stanford University scientist Marshall Burke used pollution data from four Chinese cities to measure changes in the level of PM2.5, a particularly harmful pollutant that attacks the heart and lungs. He estimated that, in China alone, emission reductions since the start of the pandemic had in effect saved the lives of at least 1,400 children under five and 51,700 adults over 70. Meanwhile, people around the world have been sharing their own anecdotal findings online – stories of sweet-smelling breezes, expanded bike lanes and birdsong returning to neighbourhoods – in a way that almost resembles a digitally distributed Rebecca Solnit project: people catching glimpses, in the midst of a disaster, of a future they know they want and need.

Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment. On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilities. And advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags. Looking back at the crisis of 2008, we can see that emissions dropped then, too – only to rebound drastically in 2010 and 2011.

Salamon believes that one lesson of the coronavirus crisis is the power of shared emotion, which has helped make possible radical action to slow the pandemic. “I’m not talking about people giving each other medical expertise. I’m talking about people calling each other up and saying: ‘How are you doing? Are you scared? I’m scared. I want you to be OK, I want us to be OK.’ And that’s what we want for climate, too. We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act. “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

---

What kind of actions would it take for the optimists’ vision to materialise? The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.” How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?

“The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.” One major obstacle, of course, is social distancing, which certainly hinders many time-tested methods of waging such struggles, such as political canvassing and street protest. “The biggest risk for all of us,” said Klein, “is going to be frittering away this time sitting at home on our social media feeds, living the extremely limited forms of politics that get enabled there.”

Davis hoped protesters would find their way into the streets sooner rather than later, and speculated that a street action with all the sign-holding participants spaced 10 or 15 feet apart would make a dramatic media image. He lives in San Diego, and as our conversation wrapped up, he mentioned that he was planning to spend part of the afternoon doing his part by standing by himself on a street corner, holding a sign. He hadn’t decided what to write on it yet, but was thinking about “SUPPORT THE NURSES’ UNION” or “DEMAND PAID SICK LEAVE”.

Solnit told me she was taking heart from all the new ways people were finding to connect and help each other around the world, ranging from the neighbourhood delivery networks that had sprung up to bring groceries to people who couldn’t get out, to more symbolic interventions, such as kids playing music on an older neighbour’s porch. The Italian political scientist Alessandro Delfanti said he was finding hope from a post-outbreak wave of strikes roiling Amazon warehouses in the US and Europe, and also the steps that workers across different sectors of the Italian economy were taking to help each other secure equipment they needed to stay safe.

What happens next might depend on the optimists’ ability to transport such moments of solidarity into the broader political sphere, arguing that it makes no sense to address Covid-19 without at least trying to fix everything else, too, creating a world where our shared resources do more for more people. “We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear,” wrote Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell. “We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.”

The world feels awfully strange right now, but not because – or not just because – it is changing so fast and any one of us could fall ill at any time, or could already be carrying the virus and not know it. It feels strange because the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end.

« Werden wir danach so tun, als sei alles nur ein Traum gewesen? » – David Graeber (dt)

31/03/2020; Interview, zuerst in dieZeit erschienen; english version here;

Welche Jobs Bullshit sind und welche systemrelevant: Das dürfen wir nach der Corona-Krise nicht vergessen, fordert der Kapitalismuskritiker David Graeber.

ZEIT ONLINE: Herr Graeber, plötzlich ist Homeoffice doch möglich und Supermarktkassiererinnen sind systemrelevant. Stellt die Corona-Krise auch unsere Arbeitswelt für immer auf den Kopf?

David Graeber: Hier in Großbritannien hat die Regierung eine Liste zusammengestellt mit den systemrelevanten Berufen – wer in denen arbeitet, darf weiterhin seine Kinder in die Schule schicken, wo sie betreut werden. Die Liste besticht durch die erstaunliche Abwesenheit von Unternehmensberatern und Hedgefondsmanagern! Die, die am meisten verdienen, tauchen da nicht auf. Grundsätzlich gilt die Regel: Je nützlicher ein Job, desto schlechter ist er bezahlt. Eine Ausnahme sind natürlich Ärzte. Aber selbst da könnte man argumentieren: Was die Gesundheit angeht, trägt das Reinigungspersonal in Krankenhäusern genauso viel bei wie die Mediziner, ein Großteil der Fortschritte in den letzten 150 Jahren kommt durch eine bessere Hygiene.

ZEIT ONLINE: In Frankreich erhalten die gerade besonders geforderten Supermarktangestellten jetzt eine Bonuszahlung – auf Drängen der Regierung. Von allein regelt der Markt das nicht.

David Graeber: Weil der Markt gar nicht so sehr auf Angebot und Nachfrage basiert, wie uns immer eingeredet wird – wer wie viel verdient, das ist eine politische Machtfrage. Durch die aktuelle Krise wird jetzt noch deutlicher: Mein Lohn hängt überhaupt nicht davon ab, wie sehr mein Beruf tatsächlich gebraucht wird.

ZEIT ONLINE: Um dieses Missverhältnis geht es in Ihrem aktuellen Buch Bullshit Jobs: Viele gesellschaftlich unverzichtbare Jobs werden schlecht bezahlt – während gut bezahlte Angestellte oft daran zweifeln, ob ihre Bürotätigkeit überhaupt irgendeinen Sinn erfüllt oder ob sie nur einen « Bullshit-Job » machen.

Graeber: Was mir wichtig ist: Ich würde niemals Menschen widersprechen, die das Gefühl haben, mit ihrer Arbeit einen wichtigen Beitrag zu leisten. Ich habe für mein Buch aber Stimmen gesammelt von Leuten, die genau dieses Gefühl eben nicht haben: Sie sind teilweise tief frustriert, weil sie etwas zu unser aller Wohl beitragen wollen. Aber um genug Geld für ihre Familien zu verdienen, müssen sie genau die Jobs machen, die keinem was bringen. Leute haben zu mir gesagt: Ich habe als Kindergartenerzieher gearbeitet, das war toll und erfüllend und wichtige Arbeit, aber ich konnte meine Rechnungen nicht mehr zahlen. Und jetzt arbeite ich für irgendein Subunternehmen, das eine Krankenversicherung mit Informationen versorgt. Ich markiere den ganzen Tag irgendwelche Formulare, niemand liest meine Berichte, aber ich verdiene zwanzigmal so viel.

ZEIT ONLINE: Was passiert mit diesen Büroangestellten, die ihre Bullshit-Jobs jetzt wegen des Coronavirus aus dem Homeoffice erledigen?

Graeber: Manche melden sich jetzt bei mir und sagen: Ich habe immer vermutet, dass ich meinen Job auch in zwei Stunden in der Woche erledigen könnte, aber jetzt weiß ich tatsächlich, dass es so ist. Denn sobald man das von zu Hause aus macht, fallen zum Beispiel oft die Meetings weg, die überhaupt nichts bringen.

ZEIT ONLINE: Nach der Finanzkrise im Jahr 2008 waren Sie bei der Protestbewegung Occupy Wall Street engagiert, Aktivisten besetzten unter anderem einen Park in der Nähe der New Yorker Börse. Könnte die Corona-Krise eine ähnliche linke Bewegung hervorbringen? Ein Occupy Homeoffice?

Graeber: Wenn, dann ist das Motto eher: Occupy die Wohnung, in der du lebst, und zahle keine Miete mehr. Gerade wird viel über Mietstreiks gesprochen, weil die Menschen wegen der Corona-Krise ihre Miete nicht mehr zahlen können. Und dann geht es ganz konkret darum, die systemrelevanten Arbeiter zu unterstützen, denen nicht die Ausrüstung zur Verfügung gestellt wird, die sie brauchen, um ihren Job zu machen. Es ist doch in unser aller Interesse, dass medizinisches Personal und Lieferfahrer Schutzausrüstung haben.

ZEIT ONLINE: Gleichzeitig erfahren wir in dieser Krise sehr anschaulich, wie zentral Arbeit für unsere Gesellschaft ist: Egal, wie viele Orte die Menschen jetzt nicht mehr aufsuchen dürfen, an ihren Arbeitsplatz sollen sie häufig weiterhin gehen.

Graeber: Man sieht das bei Einschränkungen im öffentlichen Nahverkehr: Wenn man den zumacht, dann zuerst am Wochenende. Man kann nicht mehr in den Park. Aber Gott verbiete, dass man nicht mehr zur Arbeit gehen kann! Obwohl wir doch längst gemerkt haben, dass ein großer Teil der Arbeit überhaupt nicht im Büro erledigt werden muss.

ZEIT ONLINE: Das wäre tatsächlich ein Erkenntnisgewinn aus der gegenwärtigen Situation, oder?

Graeber: Ja. Die Frage ist bloß: Werden die Leute, wenn diese Krise vorbei ist, so tun, als sei das alles nur ein Traum gewesen? Nach der Finanzkrise im Jahr 2008 konnte man Ähnliches beobachten: Einige Wochen lang haben alle gesagt: « Oh, alles, was wir für wahr gehalten haben, stimmt ja gar nicht! » Man hat endlich grundsätzliche Fragen gestellt: Was ist Geld? Was sind eigentlich Schulden? Aber irgendwann hat man plötzlich entschieden: « Halt, wir lassen das jetzt wieder. Lass uns so tun, als sei das alles nie passiert! Lass uns alles wieder so machen wir vorher! » Und die neoliberale Politik und die Finanzindustrie haben einfach weitergemacht. Darum ist es so wichtig, dass wir, was wir uns in Krisenzeiten endlich eingestehen, danach nicht wieder verdrängen – zum Beispiel, welche Jobs wirklich systemrelevant sind und welche nicht.

ZEIT ONLINE: In diesem Sinne hoffen viele schon jetzt: Wenn wir durch radikale gesellschaftliche Veränderungen die Corona-Katastrophe gemeinsam abwenden können, dann wird es uns danach auch gelingen, den Klimawandel aufzuhalten.

Graeber: Die Frage ich doch: Wie können wir die CO2-Emissionen massiv reduzieren, ohne dass wir damit wieder Belastungen für die Schwächsten schaffen? Wenn in Umfragen ein Drittel aller Menschen angibt, dass ihre Jobs nutzlos sind, dann ist das sehr viel Energie, die wir an dieser Stelle verbrauchen, obwohl wir das gar nicht müssten – allein schon für die klimatisierten Bürogebäude. Man könnte also Emissionen reduzieren und sogar das Leben der Menschen angenehmer machen, wenn man sie nicht mehr dazu zwingt, Jobs zu machen, die sogar sie selbst nutzlos finden.

ZEIT ONLINE: Um die Menschen von ihren Bullshit-Jobs zu befreien, schlagen Sie die Einführung eines bedingungslosen Grundeinkommens vor. Viele Aktivisten sprechen jetzt von einer anderen Welt, die plötzlich möglich scheint. Aber ist es nicht völlig illusorisch, dass wir ausgerechnet in solch einer Krise unser Wirtschaftssystem umbauen können? Während wir gleichzeitig eine weltweite Katastrophe bekämpfen?

Graeber: Es ist sogar viel einfacher, mitten in einer Krise solche Veränderungen durchzusetzen! Wir organisieren unsere Wirtschaft ja gerade sowieso um, ob es uns jetzt gefällt oder nicht. So viele grundsätzliche Fragen wurden lange nicht gestellt, weil man sie gar nicht formulieren konnte in der Sprache der neoliberalen Ökonomen. Die haben so getan, als wären sie im Besitz einer Wissenschaft, die sowieso schon alle Antworten kennt. Der Neoliberalismus ist in seinem Kern ein Mittel, um Leute davon abzuhalten, sich eine andere, abweichende Zukunft auszumalen – weil sowieso alles alternativlos ist. Aber vielleicht hängt die Zukunft in Wirklichkeit ja von uns ab! Genau das bemerken wir jetzt in dieser Krise. Die Frage ist nur: Was passiert danach?

ZEIT ONLINE: Viele Menschen werden sich gerade vor allem wünschen, dass sie gesund bleiben und irgendwann alles wieder so ist wie vorher. Sie wollen keine Veränderung, sondern einfach ihr normales, neoliberales Leben zurück. Verständlich, oder?

Graeber: Klar, das wünschen sich viele. Aber wir haben schon jetzt viele Illusionen verloren, die wir uns gemacht haben, auch über die Arbeitswelt und wer dort wie wichtig ist. Um den Geist dann wieder in die Flasche zu kriegen, muss man viel Vergessensarbeit leisten. Man muss wieder vergessen, wer wirklich die Arbeit macht und dafür viel zu wenig verdient. Außerdem steht uns die allergrößte Krise noch bevor, der Klimawandel. Wir standen die ganze Zeit auf den Gleisen und ein Zug kam uns direkt entgegen. Und jetzt hat uns jemand brutal von diesen Gleisen gestoßen, das tut weh und ist schrecklich. Aber das Dümmste, was wir tun könnten, wenn wir wieder auf die Beine kommen: Uns wieder zurück auf die Gleise stellen, wo der Zug auf uns zurast!

« Selbstversicherungsseuche » – Marcus Quent (dt)

31/03/2020; zuerst hier erschienen;

Wer in den stillgelegten Tagen des gesellschaftlichen lock downs wieder einmal etwas regelmäßiger Zeitung liest, Radio hört oder gar fernsieht, der wird auf nahezu allen Kanälen eingelullt von einer abgestandenen Rhetorik der Besinnung und des Lernens, regelrecht benebelt von einer Lobrede der Solidarität. Es heißt, das Virus sei eine Art Vergrößerungslinse für bestehende gesellschaftliche Probleme, Schieflagen und Ungleichheiten. Doch nicht nur manifeste Unterdrückung und Ausbeutung werden durch die Folgen des Virus sichtbarer. Die Pandemie ist auch ein Brennglas für die Tristesse der intellektuellen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands.

Wenn in den Medien Soziologen oder Philosophen zu den Effekten der Viruskrise auf das Leben der Einzelnen befragt werden, wenn sie über die längerfristigen gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen nachdenken, fällt häufig der Satz, dass man es mit einer völlig neuartigen Situation zu tun habe, die für alle unbekannt und deren Entwicklung unvorhersehbar sei. Merkwürdigerweise scheint sich das nicht auf die eigene Analyse auszuwirken. Denn der Rückgriff auf die von den Theoretikern etablierten Motive und Begriffe, die Abstimmung auf die eigenen Themen scheint meist recht zügig vonstatten zu gehen.

Für Wilhelm Schmid, den Experten in Sachen Gelassenheit, Lebenskunst und Selbstfreundschaft, regt der Verzicht, den die Pandemie mit sich bringt, den Einzelnen an, darüber nachzudenken, was ihm im Leben wirklich wichtig ist.¹ Auch Harald Welzer kann sich vorstellen, „dass die rapide abgebremste Taktfrequenz der Gesellschaft dazu führt, dass viele gucken, was sie Sinnvolles mit ihrer plötzlich gewonnenen Zeit anfangen können.“² Beide Autoren erkennen in der krisenhaften Situation ein Reflexionspotenzial, das bei den Einzelnen und der Gesellschaft im Allgemeinen die Sinnfrage reaktiviere und eine kritische Neubewertung stimuliere. Heinz Bude, der soeben ein Buch über Solidarität veröffentlicht hat, will in den Reaktionen auf die Corona-Krise erkennen, dass Gesellschaften neu beginnen, „Solidaritätsräume zu definieren.“³ Dadurch, dass alle gemeinsam empfinden, wie verwundbar sie seien, ergebe sich „ein Gefühl wechselseitiger Sorge und Verantwortung“.⁴ Laut Hartmut Rosa wiederum, der in der von der Krise erzwungenen Entschleunigung auch Potenziale ausmachen will, befinden wir uns durch das Virus in einem „kollektiven Resonanzmoment“, die erzwungene „Weltreichweitenverkürzung“ aktiviere bei uns einen „Resonanzmodus“.⁵

Trotz der allgemeinen Betonung des Unbekannten, Neuartigen und Herausfordernden, die genannten Experten eint die Tendenz, umgehend sich selbst, das heißt die eigene Theorie und die eigenen Begriffe, im Virus wiederzuerkennen und bestätigt zu sehen. Die Pandemie bietet ihnen die Möglichkeit, Sätze zu ihrer Analyse zu formulieren, die bereits vor dem Auftauchen der Pandemie von ihnen hervorgebracht worden sind.

Offenkundig wird die Mittelmäßigkeit und Harmlosigkeit einer Großen Koalition von eingespielten public intellectuals, die man hierzulande an zwei Händen abzählen kann. Sichtbar wird aber auch, was nach einem jahrzehntelangen Kahlschlag des Bildungssektors und einer öffentlichen Austreibung des Geistes vom sogenannten kritischen Denken übrig ist. Tonangebend ist eine durch und durch entschärfte, brave, meist sozialdemokratische Form des Denkens, die in den deutschen Zeitungs- und Hörfunkredaktionen kultiviert und nachgefragt wird. Ostentativ bedienen die betriebsmäßigen Intellektuellen, die als Experten befragt werden, den Modus der kritischen Infragestellung, bringen aber dennoch meist viel Zustimmungsfähiges hervor. Sie betreiben eine Art der Reflexion, die selten Überraschendes, Irritierendes oder Herausforderndes zutage fördert, eine Art des kritischen Räsonierens, die breites Einverständnis erzeugt.

Sekundiert wird diese kritische Intellektualität in der medialen Öffentlichkeit von einer frömmelnden Virus-Ethik, in deren Rahmen sich die Pandemie als das Geschehen einer großen Selbstverzauberung entpuppt. Die Virus-Ethik ist von der Tendenz beseelt, in der Krise eine Besserungsapparatur der Gesellschaft, der Menschheit im Allgemeinen zu erblicken. „Seit einigen Tagen gehen die Menschen spürbar takt- und respektvoller miteinander um“, beobachtet etwa Konstantin Sakkas in seinem Kommentar für den Deutschlandfunk. Die Transformation, die er auszumachen meint, ist umfassend: „[A]ll die alltäglichen, oftmals nervigen, selten bereichernden Verrichtungen bekommen auf einmal einen höheren Ernst. […] Der Daseinskampf des Alltags wird plötzlich überlagert von jenem Kampf ums Dasein, der ungleich höher potenziert ist, in dem es nicht um Status und Macht geht, sondern um Respekt, Würde und, ja: Tugendhaftigkeit.“⁶ Die naheliegende Frage, warum eine existenzielle Kampfsituation der eigentliche Auftrittsort von Respekt, Würde und Tugend sein soll, sei an dieser Stelle ausgespart. Kommentare wie dieser stellen einen Extremfall des weihevollen Pathos und emporstilisierten Ernstes dar. Er ist jedoch exemplarisch für die weit verbreitete Neigung, das Unvermeidliche und Gegebene, die Kontingenz in ihrer Erbarmungslosigkeit, mit Sinn auszuschmücken.

Das Unerträglichste aber ist der bußfertige Unterton, der hier wie in anderen Einlassungen und Kommentaren zum Ausdruck kommt. Es gibt eine regelrechte Lust, sich selbst andachtsvoll in die Tasche zu lügen und aus dem Virus ein Requisit für die Aufführung der eigenen Besserungsfähigkeit zu machen, gepaart mit einer Art zur Schau gestellten schuljungenhaften Lernbereitschaft. Erstaunlich ist auch, wie dabei gebetsmühlenartig die Rede des Verzichts vorgetragen wird, wie man sich bereitwillig einschränken lässt, demutsvoll, ganz so, als hätte man insgeheim lange auf eine solche Situation gewartet. Das alles soll freilich im Namen und im Dienste einer ideellen Allgemeinheit geschehen. Sie bleibt jedoch in den meisten Ausführungen völlig leer und abstrakt. Es ist die Allgemeinheit einer Gesellschaft, der im üblichen Alltag keine andere Funktion zukommt als nackte Bestandserhaltung.

Die allgemeine Rede über Selbstbesinnung und Selbsterkenntnis, die jetzt allerorten betrieben wird, ist allenfalls eines: Selbstbeweihräucherung. Statt eine Konjunktur der Lernbereitschaft, Selbstbesinnung und der Solidarität auszurufen oder Lobpreisungen der Tugendhaftigkeit anzustimmen, sollte man sich vielmehr darauf konzentrieren, die intakten Mechanismen der intellektuellen Selbstversicherung zu entzaubern, die das Denken lähmen. Eine Einsicht aus der psychoanalytischen Praxis besagt, dass insbesondere dann, wenn ein Analysand meint, unvermittelt selbst angeben zu können, was der Sinn oder die Bedeutung einer Erfahrung sei, Skepsis geboten ist. Man glaubt, in einer krisenhaften Situation etwas zu lernen – und noch darüber täuscht man sich. Es ist erstaunlich, wie schnell in der Presse Artikel und Essays aus dem Hut gezaubert worden sind, die bereits in den ersten Tagen der Einschränkungen davon handelten, was man alles aus dieser Krise lerne oder gelernt haben werde, wie uns die Pandemie als Menschen nachhaltig verändern werde und so fort. Von allen wird die Rede über das vermeintlich Erlernte viel schneller eingeübt als der Lernprozess selbst. Man gaukelt sich und anderen bereits ein Wissen über Erfahrungen vor, die ja eigentlich erst zu machen wären – und die, wenn es denn wirklich Erfahrungen sind, diese ganze eingeübte Rhetorik auch unterbrechen müssten.

Abstand nehmen muss man derzeit nicht zuletzt von einem falschen Pathos der Solidarität, der in der gegenwärtigen Situation besonders weit verbreitet ist. Solidarität, die es zweifellos gibt, wird dabei häufig trivialisiert und von ihrer bloßen Rhetorik substituiert. Plötzlich soll überall Solidarität erblühen. Auch Regierungen und Institutionen appellieren an Solidarität, die in ihrem Normalgeschäft alles dafür tun, sie abzubauen und auszutreiben, ihre Grundlagen zu zerstören. Was ist von politischen Vertretern zu halten, die sich empören oder gar vertrottelt darüber wundern, dass sich in einer krisenhaften Situation plötzlich auch egoistische Verhaltensweisen zeigen, dass sich auch berechnendes, auf Gewinnmaximierung abzielendes Marktverhalten bahnbricht? Es ist ein Egoismus, der tagtäglich systemisch gefördert wird, ein Egoismus der kapitalistischen Subjektivität, der trainiert, kultiviert und gelebt wird. Das Virus: ein großes Schauspiel des kritischen Denkens und der frömmelnden Moral.

---

1 https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/leben-mit-der-corona-pandemie-eine-zeit-deslernens.1270.de.html?dram:article_id=472772

2 https://www.fr.de/kultur/gesellschaft/alle-haben-sich-eben-darauf-verlassen-dass-irgendwie-immer-weitergeht-13609180.html

3 https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/soziologe-heinz-bude-zu-corona-solidaritaet-ist-heuteetwas.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=472663

4 https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/schule/2020-03/corona-krise-folgen-neoliberalismus-gerechtigkeit-solidaritaet-heinz-bude

5 https://taz.de/Soziologe-Hartmut-Rosa-ueber-Corona/!5673868/

6 https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/corona-wie-uns-das-virus-respektvoller-und-demuetigermacht.1005.de.html?dram:article_id=472756

Wegmarken

31/03/2020; Stephan Dorf;

Als Kind wurde ich in der Küche meiner Großeltern gemessen. Die Striche sollten zeigen, wie sehr ich gewachsen bin. An den Türrahmen gelehnt, führte mein Großvater den riesigen Bleistift über meinen Kopf. Währenddessen musste ich stillhalten. Also hielt ich inne: Was wird sein, wenn der letzte Strich gezogen worden ist, wenn ich nicht mehr gemessen werde, weil ich nicht mehr wachse – oder anders: weil sich mein Maß erfüllt hat? Neben die Striche notierten meine Großeltern immer das Datum.

31.03.2020: Der Begriff des Fortschritts ist von der Idee der Menschheit nicht zu trennen. Keine Säkularisierung des theologischen Heilsversprechens, die in seinen Begriff mündet, ist ohne den der Menschheit ausgekommen. Der Begriff des Fortschritts ohne den der Menschheit ist morsch – wie der der Menscheit bisher. Das Morsche aber ragt über den Begriff hinaus, spürbar auch für jene, die gerne ganz auf die Idee der Menschheit verzichten würden – weil sie es praktisch nicht können. Was passiert mit der Idee der Menschheit, wenn der Fortschritt, der noch nicht war, dennoch einen Halt findet? »

Lieferwagen

30/03/2020; Philipp Nolz

„Es gehört zur Moral, nicht bei sich zu Hause zu sein.“
Theodor W. Adorno

Rückt man bei sich ein Möbelstück noch so viele Male zurecht, platziert es anders und scheinbar neu, man wird das Gefühl nicht los, dass nach jedem Ortswechsel das Ding noch falscher steht als zuvor. Lange genug vom Zuhause geplagt, beginnt sich eine erste Ahnung davon zu rühren, dass Verrücktheit etwas Eigenes bezeichnet.

Bei alldem wird das Umstellen der Einrichtungsgegenstände nicht mit der Beteuerung einsichtiger gemacht, man erfinde sich dabei neu. Hier korrumpiert bloß die Weisheit des Innenausstatters die Form der Erklärung und damit das Erklärte. Vielmehr könnte man bei aufmerksamer Beobachtung feststellen, dass die Möbelstücke in ihrem stillen Verharren, in ihrer Dauer, den Bewohnern das Leben in all seiner Kürze fühlbar werden lassen, ihre planlose Obsoleszenz.

Diese Einsicht klingt noch im Ausruf einer Wiener Hausfrau mit, die, wenn Geschirr klirrend zu Boden fällt und zerspringt, einen Hauch von Erleichterung spüren lässt: „Endlich ist es hin, sonst hätt‘ es uns noch alle überlebt.“ Allerdings macht die Auffassung, die Einrichtung könne die Bewohner überleben, die Auffassung, dass jene vitaler als diese seien, nicht beim stillheimlichen Eingeständnis des gesteigerten Bewusstseins eigener Verletzbarkeit halt. Denn Verletzbarkeit ist bloß der Schatten, den die Gefahr auf den Leib fallen lässt. So wird im nu dort, wo die Dinge verweilen, die Situation der Gefährdung bemerkbar, eine Stimmung, die nicht von den Möbeln ausgehen mag, nichtsdestotrotz über die Dinge zu gehen hat. Und umso stärker gerät man in Fühlung mit dem, was sie vor uns verbergen, je stummer und unbeweglicher, je ewiger sie uns scheinen.

„Gerade, daß alles bei unserer Rückkehr wieder dasteht, »als wäre nichts gewesen«, kann das Unheimlichste von allem sein“, schrieb Ernst Bloch. Wie die Steinformationen vergangener Völker, die dem Ritus gewidmet waren, legen uns auch die festen Orte der Möbel nahe, gleich einer Geisterbeschwörung beizuwohnen und niemand weiß sich vollends dessen zu versichern, die beschworenen Geister verschwören sich nicht gegen uns.

So könnte man weiter schlussfolgern, dass die immer neuen Anordnungen der Dinge nicht für die Bewohner bestimmt seien, sondern hauptsächlich dazu dienen, den Gegenständen ihre Orientierung zu rauben und das Tor zur Geisterwelt alsbald zu schließen. Die Zwangshandlung des Durcheinanderbringens tritt damit dem Psychologenratschlag entgegen, demzufolge man zuerst das eigene Haus in Ordnung bringen solle. Wo letzterer die Auferstehung mit Aufopferung verwechselt, bezeichnet das Verrückte einen kaum mehr fühlbaren Rest von Unruhe. Diese Unruhe ist ein Nachhall in den vier Wänden, kann ohrenbetäubend werden. Wie die Bergnymphe Echo der griechischen Mythologie, die, zur Strafe ihrer Stimme beraubt, dazu verdammt war, nachzusprechen, was gerufen wurde, drängen Worte von der Straße herein und wir wiederholen hier nur verzerrt, was dort geschieht. Verrücktheit könnte dann im Kleinsten auf die Möglichkeit hindeuten, dass der letzte Schrei ungehört verhallen könnte, weil die Stimme erhoben wurde.

This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For – Laurie Penny (en)

30/03/2020; first published here;

The shock itself is shocking. Shouldn’t we have been more prepared? Hasn’t culture been drenched in catastrophe porn for decades? The bomb. The breakdown. The fallout. The senseless armies of shambling corpses, all the nightmares of dead generations sliding out of our screens. For more than a decade, young and young-ish people have been living in anticipatory grief for everything we know. But somehow, this is different.

The idea of imminent annihilating catastrophe has been part of the collective unconscious for as long as we’ve had one. From the end date of the Mayan calendar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the Genesis flood to the Book of Revelation, humans have been haunted by the idea of the end of everything for a very, very long time. Lately, it’s been our default popular entertainment. Raised with the threat of global warming in the teeth of a financial crisis, we sat stunned and exhausted, watching our civilization die onscreen again and again. More postapocalyptic entertainment has come out in the beginning of this century than in the entirety of the last one. The Day After Tomorrow. Zombieland. The Walking Dead. The Road. Children of Men. The Last of Us. The same story again and again, somewhere between wish fulfillment and trauma rehearsal, getting us used to the idea that the future was canceled, that someday soon everything would collapse, and there would be nothing left and nothing we could do about it.

Ever since I was a twitchy, morbid child, I have kept a private tally of the things I thought I might miss most when the world ended, so that I could be sure to enjoy them as much as possible. Hot showers. Pottering around the shops. Bananas—I didn’t anticipate being a survivor in any country where bananas grow. In fact, I didn’t anticipate being a survivor at all. I am a puny, sensitive creature, and my best hope was that my tall and intimidating sister would sling me over one shoulder while blowing up the baddies one-handed. I just assumed that we’d be together, not stuck on different continents. Funny how things turn out.

Covid-19 changed everything. Suddenly, the immense and frightening upheaval, the cataclysm that means nothing can go back to normal, is here, and it’s so different from what we imagined. I was expecting Half-Life. I was expecting World War Z. I’ve been dressing like I’m in The Matrix since 2003. I was not expecting to be facing this sort of thing in snuggly socks and a dressing gown, thousands of miles from home, trying not to panic and craving a proper cup of tea. This apocalypse is less Danny Boyle and more Douglas Adams.

There’s an important difference between apocalypse and a catastrophe. A catastrophe is total devastation, with nothing left and nothing learned. “Apocalypse”—especially in the biblical sense—means a time of crisis and change, of hidden truths revealed. A time, quite literally, of revelation. When we talked about the end of every certainty, we were not expecting any revelation. We were not expecting it to be so silly, so sweet, and so sad.

“‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” That’s the slogan that swarmed around the world 10 years ago, during the Occupy movements. Attributed variously to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, I first had it explained to me by overexcited, underslept young activists who, like the rest of us, had spent their lives watching New York and London and Washington and Tokyo blow up and burn down onscreen but had never had space to imagine a future that did not include decades of striving to service lifelong debts. Capitalism requires this of us. Capitalism cannot imagine a future beyond itself that isn’t utter butchery.

This is because late capitalism has always been a death cult. The tiny-minded incompetents in charge cannot handle a problem that can’t be fixed simply by sacrificing poor, vulnerable, and otherwise expendable individuals. Faced with a crisis they can’t solve with violence, they dithered and whined and wasted time that can and will be counted in corpses. There has been no vision, because these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system. The airwaves have been full of spineless right-wing zealots so focused on putting the win in social Darwinism that they keep accidentally saying the quiet bit out loud.

The quiet bit is this: To the rich and stupid, many of the economic measures necessary to stop this virus are so unthinkable that it would be preferable for millions to die. This is extravagantly wrong on more than just a moral level—forcing sick and contagious people back to work to save Wall Street puts all of us at risk. It is not only easier for these overpromoted imbeciles to imagine the end of the world than a single restriction on capitalism—they would actively prefer it.

The right, of course, has never had a monopoly on catastrophist fever dreams. The idea of a cleansing armageddon that instantly erases all the awkward parts of modernity, all the weary years of work and compromise between where we are and where we’d like to be, is universal, and universally childish. I’ve spent far too much time listening to drunk hipsters with retro-Soviet facial hair tell me there’s no point in feminism or anti-racism, because all of that will be fixed after the giant, bloody workers’ revolution that is absolutely on the way, so really it doesn’t matter how we treat each other in the present. You can hear the same gleeful anticipation in the rhetoric of “dark-green” eco-fundamentalist groups, which right now are outpacing religious extremists in their rush to claim the coronavirus as nature’s revenge on humanity. If you are really so keen to be punished, there are websites for that. If you find yourself eager to see the whole species punished, that’s not a fetish, that’s fascism.

Social democracy is being reinstated in a hurry, because—to paraphrase Mrs. Thatcher—there really is no alternative. In the US, states are scrambling to support the 3.5 million workers who filed for unemployment in a single week. London’s homeless population, which had doubled in a decade, has been eradicated overnight. The National Health Service has run out of protective gear for doctors and nurses, and the British government has been too slow to restock—but a medical fetish porn site instantly donated its entire stock of scrubs and masks, because this is a big emergency, and we’re all doing what we can.

Pop culture catastrophism didn’t prepare us for this. “Look, this isn’t a movie,” as one furious Italian mayor, broadcasting from his front room, put it last week. “You are not Will Smith in I Am Legend.” For one thing, it’s so relentlessly social. Most of our collective postapocalyptic visions have in common the fantasy of the world becoming smaller. Our heroes—usually white, straight men with traditional nuclear families to protect—are cut off from the rest of the world; the daydream is of finally shaking off the chains of civilization and becoming the valiant protector and/or tribal warrior they were made to be. And part of that catastrophe fantasy is relief—marauding biker gangs in bondage gear might want to murder you for half a tank of diesel and a sandwich, but at least you don’t have to worry about your credit history anymore. Or your college debt. Or your neighbors.

Instead, the world feels larger, not smaller. Right now, with over a third of the world on some sort of lockdown, with the entire world going through some version of the same crisis at once, we are suddenly frantic to touch one another. It seems more important to reconnect with friends. It seems more important than ever to be sweet and silly. We all know someone who’s stuck in a house by themselves, trying not to go bonkers. We all know someone who’s stuck in a house with someone awful, trying to survive the hotboxing of an already toxic relationship. And many of us, by now, know someone who’s sick.

Shit-hits-the-fan escapism—a big part of the alt-right imaginary—never predicted this. I have lurked in countless stagnant ideological internet back alleys where young men excitedly talk about the coming end of civilization, where men can be real men again, and women will need protectors. How inconvenient, then, that when this world-inverting crisis finally showed up, we weren’t given an enemy we could fight with our hands (wash your hands).

The end of the world has never been quite so simple a mythos for women, likely because most of us know that when social structures crack and shatter, what happens isn’t an instant reversion to muscular state-of-naturism. What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.

In the end, it will not be butchery. Instead it will be bakery, as everyone has apparently decided that the best thing to do when the world lurches sideways is learn to make bread. Yeast is gone from the shops. Even I have been acting out in the kitchen, although my baked goods are legendarily dreadful. A friend and former roommate, who knows me well, called from Berlin to ask if I had “made the terrible, horrible biscuits yet.” These misfortune cookies tend to happen at moments of such extreme stress that those around me feel obliged to eat them. They say that if you can make a cake, you can make a bomb; if the whole thing implodes, my job will not be in munitions.

My job will be the same as yours and everyone else’s: to be kind, to stay calm, and to take care of whoever happens to need taking care of in my immediate vicinity. We have been living for many, many years in what Gramsci called a time of monsters, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” The new is now being induced in a hurry, because after this, nothing is going back to normal. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and everything does feel fine—not fine like chill, but fine like china, like glass, like thread. Everything feels so fine, and so fragile, and so shockingly worth saving.

Daun vaschwindt a gschwind

30/03/2020, Christoph Gravogl;

Es wahd a Wind den kennt ka Kind, ka jungs ka oids. A Zeit wost es heislpapier liaba kaufst anstott dast mit dein Nochbarn a Kriagl saufst. A Zeit wost asozial bist ohne dast deinen liabsten aufs schlippsal trittst. A Zeit wost merkst wie schnö das geht, dass  dei Alltag aufn Kopf steht.

Aus dera Sicht, oiso 180 grad verdrahtes Gsicht, schaust eine in die söwa, Schicht für Schicht und merkst sche laungsaum das dei Büd zabricht. A Büd wies Leben hoid so rennt und plötzlich kana mehr wiedererkennt.

Zeast schreckst di recht und schaust perplex, checkst ned gaunz wos passiert als next. Wiast daun laungsam vastehst wos geht, bist mitten drin in da neichn Wöd. In dera Wöd des überroscht jetzt kan, gibts oll den Scheiss den ma scho imma ham. Des söwe Liad von gut und bös von oam und reich von schiach und schön, nur sing mas daham mit den liabsten, oda sogoa allan. Wird scho wieder jo gaunz bestimmt, da Mensch is flexibel der stets a Lösung findt… bis hoid aus is daun vaschwindt a gschwind.

« Il faut surmonter la culture de la peur… » – Emmanuel Faye (fr)

30/03/2020; l’original publié ici;

« IL faut surmonter la culture de la peur et la forme de paranoïa collective instillées à l’égard de notre modernité»

Critiquant l’analyse la plus noire de l’évolution politique de nos sociétés, le philosophe Emmanuel Faye répond, dans une tribune au « Monde », à Giorgio Agamben, soulignant que « le nihilisme apocalyptique n’est jamais une fatalité ».

Au moment où la Lombardie vit une situation sanitaire particulièrement meurtrière, c’est un philosophe italien abreuvé de la lecture de Martin Heidegger et de Carl Schmitt qui nous livre l’analyse la plus noire de l’évolution politique de nos sociétés dans un entretien dans Le Monde (« L’épidémie montre clairement que l’état d’exception est devenu la condition normale », Le Monde du 24 mars). Il ne faut pas prendre la conception de Giorgio Agamben à la légère, mais montrer qu’elle joue sur le ressort même de la peur qu’elle entend dénoncer, en lui ajoutant l’angoisse d’une conspiration sans visage.

Dans les difficultés de la situation présente, les solidarités humaines qui se développent nous aident à déjouer la vision du monde anxiogène dans laquelle s’enferme maintenant Agamben après qu’il a le 26 février, de façon peu responsable, publiquement nié l’existence et la gravité de l’épidémie dans le quotidien italien Il Manifesto. Il évoquait l’« invention d’une épidémie ». Il parle maintenant de « conspirations objectives » : l’obscurité grandiloquente de cette formule vient au secours des « complotistes » en tout genre.

Difficile balance

Dans les villes, des collectifs de voisins se constituent pour assurer les courses des plus vulnérables et des plus âgés. Avec les limites, mais aussi les ressources du téléenseignement, des échanges plus compréhensifs et individualisés se créent entre élèves, étudiants et enseignants, là où jadis toute relation eût été rompue. Et tous, nous admirons l’engagement des soignants pour sauver le maximum de vies.

Les solidarités humaines qui se développent nous aident à déjouer la vision du monde anxiogène

Bien entendu, il y a les problèmes auxquels se heurtent les comités de veille éthique, par exemple lorsque sont confinés dans leur chambre, parfois sans communication Internet ni échange possible avec leurs proches, nos parents séjournant dans des établissements d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes (Ehpad). La difficile balance entre les règles de la prudence sanitaire et le maintien des échanges humains, sans lesquels survivre devient difficile, doit à chaque fois être reconsidérée.

Il ne s’agit donc pas d’enjoliver les difficultés présentes, mais de témoigner que nous n’allons pas vers une mécanisation froide des relations humaines. Les situations d’entraide que nous expérimentons au quotidien sont tout le contraire de ce qu’imagine la noire vision d’Agamben, lorsqu’il affirme que notre vie a « perdu toute dimension humaine ».

« Conspiration »

Il reproche aux gouvernements de jouer sur la peur mais ajoute à la crainte de mourir l’angoisse d’une « conspiration » sans auteur. Or l’angoisse n’est pas, comme l’affirmait Heidegger, la tonalité fondamentale de l’existence humaine mais la dégradation de celle-ci dans une fascination ambivalente pour la mort. Il nous faut surmonter la culture de la peur et la forme de paranoïa collective ainsi instillées à l’égard de notre modernité.

Sans doute des politiques répressives voudront-elles tirer parti de la situation présente. Si donc les institutions démocratiques sont toujours de nouveau à défendre, il ne s’ensuit pas que la lutte contre une pandémie ou la vigilance requise pour maintenir l’intégrité de l’Etat de droit transforment ce dernier de façon irréversible en état d’exception, ainsi qu’Agamben s’ingénie à le faire croire en prétendant que nous, citoyens des sociétés démocratiques, serions toujours à « Auschwitz ». Les atteintes à notre Etat de droit peuvent être combattues. Le nihilisme apocalyptique n’est jamais une fatalité.

Imaginer les gestes-barrières contre le retour à la production d’avant-crise – Bruno Latour (fr)

30/03/2020, publié ici;

Si tout est arrêté, tout peut être remis en cause, infléchi, sélectionné, trié, interrompu pour de bon ou au contraire accéléré. L’inventaire annuel, c’est maintenant qu’il faut le faire. A la demande de bon sens : « Relançons le plus rapidement possible la production », il faut répondre par un cri : « Surtout pas ! ». La dernière des choses à faire serait de reprendre à l’identique tout ce que nous faisions avant.

Il y a peut-être quelque chose d’inconvenant à se projeter dans l’après-crise alors que le personnel de santé est, comme on dit, « sur le front », que des millions de gens perdent leur emploi et que beaucoup de familles endeuillées ne peuvent même pas enterrer leurs morts. Et pourtant, c’est bien maintenant qu’il faut se battre pour que la reprise économique, une fois la crise passée, ne ramène pas le même ancien régime climatique contre lequel nous essayions jusqu’ici, assez vainement, de lutter.

En effet, la crise sanitaire est enchâssée dans ce qui n’est pas une crise – toujours passagère – mais une mutation écologique durable et irréversible. Si nous avons de bonne chance de « sortir » de la première, nous n’en avons aucune de « sortir » de la seconde. Les deux situations ne sont pas à la même échelle, mais il est très éclairant de les articuler l’une sur l’autre. En tout cas, ce serait dommage de ne pas se servir de la crise sanitaire pour découvrir d’autres moyens d’entrer dans la mutation écologique autrement qu’à l’aveugle.

La première leçon du coronavirus est aussi la plus stupéfiante : la preuve est faite, en effet, qu’il est possible, en quelques semaines, de suspendre partout dans le monde et au même moment, un système économique dont on nous disait jusqu’ici qu’il était impossible à ralentir ou à rediriger. À tous les arguments des écologiques sur l’infléchissement de nos modes de vie, on opposait toujours l’argument de la force irréversible du « train du progrès » que rien ne pouvait faire sortir de ses rails, « à cause », disait-on, « de la globalisation ». Or, c’est justement son caractère globalisé qui rend si fragile ce fameux développement, susceptible au contraire de freiner puis de s’arrêter d’un coup.

En effet, il n’y a pas que les multinationales ou les accords commerciaux ou internet ou les tour operators pour globaliser la planète : chaque entité de cette même planète possède une façon bien à elle d’accrocher ensemble les autres éléments qui composent, à un moment donné, le collectif. Cela est vrai du CO2 qui réchauffe l’atmosphère globale par sa diffusion dans l’air ; des oiseaux migrateurs qui transportent de nouvelles formes de grippe ; mais cela est vrai aussi, nous le réapprenons douloureusement, du coronavirus dont la capacité à relier « tous les humains » passe par le truchement apparemment inoffensif de nos divers crachotis. A globalisateur, globalisateur et demi : question de resocialiser des milliards d’humains, les microbes se posent un peu là !

Cette pause soudaine dans le système de production globalisée, il n’y a pas que les écologistes pour y voir une occasion formidable d’avancer leur programme d’atterrissage.

D’où cette découverte incroyable : il y avait bien dans le système économique mondial, caché de tous, un signal d’alarme rouge vif avec une bonne grosse poignée d’acier trempée que les chefs d’État, chacun à son tour, pouvaient tirer d’un coup pour stopper « le train du progrès » dans un grand crissement de freins. Si la demande de virer de bord à 90 degrés pour atterrir sur terre paraissait encore en janvier une douce illusion, elle devient beaucoup plus réaliste : tout automobiliste sait que pour avoir une chance de donner un grand coup de volant salvateur sans aller dans le décor, il vaut mieux avoir d’abord ralenti…

Malheureusement, cette pause soudaine dans le système de production globalisée, il n’y a pas que les écologistes pour y voir une occasion formidable d’avancer leur programme d’atterrissage. Les globalisateurs, ceux qui depuis le mitan du XXe siècle ont inventé l’idée de s’échapper des contraintes planétaires, eux aussi, y voient une chance formidable de rompre encore plus radicalement avec ce qui reste d’obstacles à leur fuite hors du monde. L’occasion est trop belle, pour eux, de se défaire du reste de l’État-providence, du filet de sécurité des plus pauvres, de ce qui demeure encore des réglementations contre la pollution, et, plus cyniquement, de se débarrasser de tous ces gens surnuméraires qui encombrent la planète[1].

N’oublions pas, en effet, que l’on doit faire l’hypothèse que ces globalisateurs sont conscients de la mutation écologique et que tous leurs efforts, depuis cinquante ans, consistent en même temps à nier l’importance du changement climatique, mais aussi à échapper à ses conséquences en constituant des bastions fortifiés de privilèges qui doivent rester inaccessibles à tous ceux qu’il va bien falloir laisser en plan. Le grand rêve moderniste du partage universel des « fruits du progrès », ils ne sont pas assez naïfs pour y croire, mais, ce qui est nouveau, ils sont assez francs pour ne même pas en donner l’illusion. Ce sont eux qui s’expriment chaque jour sur Fox News et qui gouvernent tous les États climato-sceptiques de la planète de Moscou à Brasilia et de New Delhi à Washington en passant par Londres.

Si tout est arrêté, tout peut être remis en cause.

Ce qui rend la situation actuelle tellement dangereuse, ce n’est pas seulement les morts qui s’accumulent chaque jour davantage, c’est la suspension générale d’un système économique qui donne donc à ceux qui veulent aller beaucoup plus loin dans la fuite hors du monde planétaire, une occasion merveilleuse de « tout remettre en cause ». Il ne faut pas oublier que ce qui rend les globalisateurs tellement dangereux, c’est qu’ils savent forcément qu’ils ont perdu, que le déni de la mutation climatique ne peut pas durer indéfiniment, qu’il n’y a plus aucune chance de réconcilier leur « développement » avec les diverses enveloppes de la planète dans laquelle il faudra bien finir par insérer l’économie. C’est ce qui les rend prêts à tout tenter pour extraire une dernière fois les conditions qui vont leur permettre de durer un peu plus longtemps et de se mettre à l’abri eux et leurs enfants. « L’arrêt de monde », ce coup de frein, cette pause imprévue, leur donne une occasion de fuir plus vite et plus loin qu’ils ne l’auraient jamais imaginé[2]. Les révolutionnaires, pour le moment, ce sont eux.

C’est là que nous devons agir. Si l’occasion s’ouvre à eux, elle s’ouvre à nous aussi. Si tout est arrêté, tout peut être remis en cause, infléchi, sélectionné, trié, interrompu pour de bon ou au contraire accéléré. L’inventaire annuel, c’est maintenant qu’il faut le faire. A la demande de bon sens : « Relançons le plus rapidement possible la production », il faut répondre par un cri : « Surtout pas ! ». La dernière des choses à faire serait de reprendre à l’identique tout ce que nous faisions avant.

Par exemple, l’autre jour, on présentait à la télévision un fleuriste hollandais, les larmes aux yeux, obligé de jeter des tonnes de tulipes prêtes à l’envoi qu’il ne pouvait plus expédier par avion dans le monde entier faute de client. On ne peut que le plaindre, bien sûr ; il est juste qu’il soit indemnisé. Mais ensuite la caméra reculait montrant que ses tulipes, il les fait pousser hors-sol sous lumière artificielle avant de les livrer aux avions cargo de Schiphol dans une pluie de kérosène ; de là, l’expression d’un doute : « Mais est-il bien utile de prolonger cette façon de produire et de vendre ce type de fleurs ? ».

Nous devenons d’efficaces interrupteurs de globalisation.

De fil en aiguille, si nous commençons, chacun pour notre compte, à poser de telles questions sur tous les aspects de notre système de production, nous devenons d’efficaces interrupteurs de globalisation – aussi efficaces, millions que nous sommes, que le fameux coronavirus dans sa façon bien à lui de globaliser la planète. Ce que le virus obtient par d’humbles crachotis de bouches en bouches – la suspension de l’économie mondiale –, nous commençons à l’imaginer par nos petits gestes insignifiants mis, eux aussi, bout à bout : à savoir la suspension du système de production. En nous posant ce genre de questions, chacun d’entre nous se met à imaginer des gestes barrières mais pas seulement contre le virus : contre chaque élément d’un mode de production dont nous ne souhaitons pas la reprise.

C’est qu’il ne s’agit plus de reprendre ou d’infléchir un système de production, mais de sortir de la production comme principe unique de rapport au monde. Il ne s’agit pas de révolution, mais de dissolution, pixel après pixel. Comme le montre Pierre Charbonnier, après cent ans de socialisme limité à la seule redistribution des bienfaits de l’économie, il serait peut-être temps d’inventer un socialisme qui conteste la production elle-même. C’est que l’injustice ne se limite pas à la seule redistribution des fruits du progrès, mais à la façon même de faire fructifier la planète. Ce qui ne veut pas dire décroître ou vivre d’amour ou d’eau fraîche, mais apprendre à sélectionner chaque segment de ce fameux système prétendument irréversible, de mettre en cause chacune des connections soi-disant indispensables, et d’éprouver de proche en proche ce qui est désirable et ce qui a cessé de l’être.

D’où l’importance capitale d’utiliser ce temps de confinement imposé pour décrire, d’abord chacun pour soi, puis en groupe, ce à quoi nous sommes attachés ; ce dont nous sommes prêts à nous libérer ; les chaînes que nous sommes prêts à reconstituer et celles que, par notre comportement, nous sommes décidés à interrompre[3]. Les globalisateurs, eux, semblent avoir une idée très précise de ce qu’ils veulent voir renaître après la reprise : la même chose en pire, industries pétrolières et bateaux de croisière géants en prime. C’est à nous de leur opposer un contre-inventaire. Si en un mois ou deux, des milliards d’humains sont capables, sur un coup de sifflet, d’apprendre la nouvelle « distance sociale », de s’éloigner pour être plus solidaires, de rester chez soi pour ne pas encombrer les hôpitaux, on imagine assez bien la puissance de transformation de ces nouveaux gestes-barrières dressés contre la reprise à l’identique, ou pire, contre un nouveau coup de butoir de ceux qui veulent échapper pour de bon à l’attraction terrestre.

Un outil pour aider au discernement

Comme il est toujours bon de lier un argument à des exercices pratiques, proposons aux lecteurs d’essayer de répondre à ce petit inventaire. Il sera d’autant plus utile qu’il portera sur une expérience personnelle directement vécue. Il ne s’agit pas seulement d’exprimer une opinion qui vous viendrait à l’esprit, mais de décrire une situation et peut-être de la prolonger par une petite enquête. C’est seulement par la suite, si vous vous donnez les moyens de combiner les réponses pour composer le paysage créé par la superposition des descriptions, que vous déboucherez sur une expression politique incarnée et concrète — mais pas avant.

Attention : ceci n’est pas un questionnaire, il ne s’agit pas d’un sondage. C’est une aide à l’auto-description*.

Il s’agit de faire la liste des activités dont vous vous sentez privés par la crise actuelle et qui vous donnent la sensation d’une atteinte à vos conditions essentielles de subsistance. Pour chaque activité, pouvez-vous indiquer si vous aimeriez que celles-ci reprennent à l’identique (comme avant), mieux, ou qu’elles ne reprennent pas du tout. Répondez aux questions suivantes :

Question 1 : Quelles sont les activités maintenant suspendues dont vous souhaiteriez qu’elles ne reprennent pas ?

Question 2 : Décrivez a) pourquoi cette activité vous apparaît nuisible/ superflue/ dangereuse/ incohérente ; b) en quoi sa disparition/ mise en veilleuse/ substitution rendrait d’autres activités que vous favorisez plus facile/ plus cohérente ? (Faire un paragraphe distinct pour chacune des réponses listées à la question 1.)

Question 3 : Quelles mesures préconisez-vous pour que les ouvriers/ employés/ agents/ entrepreneurs qui ne pourront plus continuer dans les activités que vous supprimez se voient faciliter la transition vers d’autres activités ?

Question 4 : Quelles sont les activités maintenant suspendues dont vous souhaiteriez qu’elles se développent/ reprennent ou celles qui devraient être inventées en remplacement ?

Question 5 : Décrivez a) pourquoi cette activité vous apparaît positive ; b) comment elle rend plus faciles/ harmonieuses/ cohérentes d’autres activités que vous favorisez ; et c) permettent de lutter contre celles que vous jugez défavorables ? (Faire un paragraphe distinct pour chacune des réponses listées à la question 4.)

Question 6 : Quelles mesures préconisez-vous pour aider les ouvriers/ employés/ agents/ entrepreneurs à acquérir les capacités/ moyens/ revenus/ instruments permettant la reprise/ le développement/ la création de cette activité ?

(Trouvez ensuite un moyen pour comparer votre description avec celles d’autres participants. La compilation puis la superposition des réponses devraient dessiner peu à peu un paysage composé de lignes de conflits, d’alliances, de controverses et d’oppositions.)

[1] Voir l’article sur les lobbyistes déchaînés aux Etats-Unis par Matt Stoller, « The coronavirus relief bill could turn into a corporate coup if we aren’t careful », The Guardian, 24.03.20.

[2] Danowski, Deborah, de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, « L’arrêt de monde », in De l’univers clos au monde infini (textes réunis et présentés). Ed. Hache, Emilie. Paris, Editions Dehors, 2014. 221-339.

[3] L’auto-description reprend la procédure des nouveaux cahiers de doléance suggérés dans Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique. Paris, La Découverte, 2017 et développés depuis par le consortium Où atterrir http://www.bruno-latour.fr/fr/node/841.html

Stornogebühr

29/03/2020; Philipp Nolz

Für Benjamin F., anstelle einer „richtigen“ Arbeit

Der Wert, folgt man dem Gedankengang von Marx, ist mit den Ausbeutungsbedingungen innig verhaftet, beruht auf der Differenz zwischen verausgabter Arbeitskraft und ihrer Unterbezahlung pro Arbeitsstunde – der Mehrarbeit. Andererseits kann die Mehrarbeit nur zum Quell des Mehrwerts werden und damit zu kapitalistischem Reichtum führen, wenn erstere in Kapital verkehrt wird, allgemeines Äquivalent. Damit das Kapital Ausbeutung und Aneignung der Mehrarbeit erwirken kann, bedarf es daher eines Übergangs, eines Sprungs zwischen Produktion und Zirkulationssphäre der Ware. Nun ist heute dieser Prozess ganz grundlegend erschüttert, und zwar auf der Ebene des Weltmarkts. Das deutlichste Zeichen dieser Erschütterung ist der Überfluss an Rohöl- und Stahlbeständen. Dergestalt befinden sich die letzten Symbole des Industriezeitalters Seite an Seite in ihren Lagerstätten: für den Augenblick sind sie ihres sozialen Wertes beraubt, dazu verdammt, ihr nunmehr bloß materielles Dasein in der Vergessenheit zu fristen, in einer Welt, deren Sprache wir nicht sprechen.

Der nicht-verwirklichte Mehrwert entspricht hier dem Bild der Distanz – unendlich und unendlich leer – zwischen zwei, sich zugewandten Spiegeln. Und es ist dieser Raum, in dem sich die Frage nach der Verteilung des Reichtums aufs Neue und umso nachdrücklicher stellt.

Le travail invisible derrière le confinement. Capitalisme, genre, racialisation et Covid-19 – Françoise Vergès (fr)

29/03/2020; publié ici;

En France, nous sommes entrés le mardi 24 mars 2020 dans la deuxième semaine de « confinement » décidé par le gouvernement Macron pour faire face à l’épidémie du COVID-19, et déjà cela craque de partout. Je ne reviendrai pas ici sur les demi-vérités, demi-aveux, mensonges par omission, et preuves d’incompétence, d’indifférence, de mépris par le gouvernement amplement dénoncées et analysées dans les médias et sur les réseaux sociaux. Ce travail d’étude et d’analyse n’est pas terminé ; il doit se poursuivre et s’avère bien plus important – car il nourrit les luttes à venir – que toutes les déclarations sous forme d’oracles (« rien ne sera plus comme avant », « il faudra que… ») ou que toutes les remarques et réflexions sur le confinement comme moment de retour sur soi ou de redécouverte de joies simples.

Je ne m’exprimerai pas non plus ici sur la controverse autour de la chloroquine ; ce n’est pas de mon ressort. Je reviendrai par contre sur un point que j’ai exprimé sous forme de post sur Facebook le 18 mars et qui reste pour moi important. J’écrivais alors :

« Il y a donc désormais les confiné.e.s et les non-confiné.e.s qui assurent leur vie quotidienne des premiers – qui apportent les denrées aux boutiques, qui rangent sur les étagères, nettoient, tiennent la caisse, les éboueurs, les postier.e.s, les livreurs (j’en ai vu 3 déjà depuis ce matin), les conductrices/conducteurs de transport, les femmes de ménage des hôtels et les serveuses/serveurs des hôtels (qui restent ouverts et assurent un room service), et tant d’autres. Classe, genre, âge, racialisation, santé traversent les deux groupes mais les non-confiné.e.s sont les plus exposé.e.s.
Dans les éléments du confinement, il y a celles/ceux qui vivent dans 12m2 et celles/ceux dans 150m2, qui peuvent se faire livrer ou pas, qui ont de quoi s’abonner à des tas de sites de streaming ou pas, qui ont un grand débit pour assurer les cours à la maison ou pas, qui peuvent aider les enfants à faire les leçons ou pas, qui ont un ordinateur et une imprimante ou pas, qui sont totalement isolées ou pas, qui ont des papiers ou pas, qui sont financièrement à l’aise ou pas, les femmes et enfants qui vivent avec des compagnons violents, les femmes seules avec des enfants, bref, des milliers et milliers de situations noyées sous le discours d’union nationale dans un pays où les inégalités, les violences d’état, le racisme et le sexisme organisent la vie sociale depuis des années.
Les actes de solidarité, nombreux, qui s’organisent et sont formidables ne doivent pas remplacer les responsabilités de l’État. (Je parle là de la vie quotidienne, pas du personnel médical et de toutes les personnes qui assurent la vie d’un hôpital – donc aussi celles et ceux qui nettoient, gardent, font l’administration… – évidemment très exposé). Le confinement est rendu possible grâce à toutes ces personnes invisibilisées et bien trop souvent mal payées et exploitées. »

Ce que soulignais ici, c’est la permanence d’une structure : ce qui rend la vie possible en temps « normal » comme en temps de pandémie, ce n’est pas seulement l’exploitation, mais l’invisibilisation du travail effectué par des millions de femmes, mais aussi d’hommes. Notre solidarité avec le personnel soignant ne doit pas nous faire négliger la solidarité nécessaire avec tou·te·s les galérien·ne·s du capitalisme en temps de pandémie.

La métaphore du bateau négrier comme machine du capitalisme racial, comme une des matrices de la modernité ou comme matrice de la race ainsi que l’a démontré Elsa Dorlin, peut être ici adaptée. Dans la soute, les invisibles étaient parqué·e·s, captives et captifs, dans une totale promiscuité. L’un pouvant être allongé sur un cadavre, la maladie se répandait à une vitesse incroyable. Les mort·e·s étaient jeté·e·s par-dessus bord, mais le bateau avançait, et armateurs, banquiers, assureurs, capitaines, propriétaires de plantations, industriels amassaient des fortunes.

Les esclavagisé·e·s furent une source d’énergie indispensable à l’émergence du capitalisme. Leur invisibilité était une nécessité, permettant de rendre naturel ce qui ne l’étaient nullement : les conditions de production, d’approvisionnement et de consommation, mais aussi le soin et le nettoyage, où s’enchevêtraient classe, racialisation, genres et sexualités. Ainsi cette invisibilité contribuait-elle à façonner le consentement au capitalisme, et partant l’hégémonie au sens où le définit Gramsci :

« L’exercice ”normal” de l’hégémonie […] est caractérisé par la combinaison de la force et du consentement qui s’équilibrent de façon variable, sans que la force l’emporte trop sur le consentement, voire en cherchant à obtenir que la force apparaisse appuyée sur le consentement de la majorité »[1].

De même, le confinement s’appuie en France sur le discours de l’union nationale, de la responsabilité collective et de la solidarité, qui assure la production d’un certain consentement, mais aussi sur la peur, la répression, l’amende et même la garde à vue pour désobéissance aux mesures de confinement. Le discours gouvernemental et la pratique policière tracent ainsi une frontière entre, d’un côté, les bon·ne·s citoyen·ne·s, qui obéiraient et comprendraient les besoins associés à l’union nationale et à la responsabilité collective, et, de l’autre, les habitant·e·s des quartiers populaires indiscipliné·e·s, immanquabelment conçu·e·s comme un peuple désobéissant ; entre la personne qui fait son footing dans un quartier socialement favorisé et celle qui, oubliant son autorisation, sort faire ses courses dans un quartier populaire.

La référence, la mesure, sur laquelle se fonde la norme du confinement, est ainsi une personne en pleine santé, sans aucun handicap, aisée, qui habite un quartier où les commerces et les pharmacies sont proches, un homme blanc de la classe bourgeoise en quelque sorte, dont les écarts aux mesures de confinement sont vus avec bienveillance par la police, et à partir duquel d’autres figures se distinguent et déclinent selon une hiérarchie de la dangerosité, non pas sanitaire, mais sociale.

À l’opposé de cette figure du bourgeois confiné, en capacité de travailler à distance ou de profiter de ses enfants dans un cadre spacieux et agréable, les personnes qui travaillent dans les centres de tri ou les entrepôts, les assistantes maternelles, les livreurs, les éboueurs, les femmes de ménage, les aides à la personne, etc., témoignent toutes de l’absence de gants, de masques, de possibilité d’observer la distance requise, du refus du droit de retrait, des menaces sur leur emploi, des difficultés à trouver comment garder leurs enfants, d’assurer les cours à la maison, du stress, de l’angoisse, et de l’inquiétude qui les rongent et sont nocives pour leur santé.

Elles doivent obéir aux injonctions contradictoires du gouvernement, le « en même temps » qui dit « allez travailler mais ne sortez pas car vous mettez les autres en danger », sans que les moyens minimaux de protection ne soient fournis. On ne peut alors que comprendre les gestes de refus d’une vaste campagne d’obéissance au nom de la solidarité alors que cette dernière est criminalisée quand il s’agit de soutenir migrant.e.s et réfugié.es, travailleuses et travailleurs du sexe, personnes de rue, ou victimes de violence policière, et que les services publics ont été, depuis des décennies l’objet d’attaques et de démantèlement.

La définition du racisme avancée par Ruth Wilson Gilmore, la production et l’exploitation d’une vulnérabilité différenciée à une mort prématurée [2] (sanctionnée par l’État ou par des lois), est ici éclairante : la mort prématurée, c’est la vie amoindrie ou écourtée par les intersections entre classe, racialisation, et genres. À l’occasion de la mobilisation contre la réforme des retraites, des études ont fait apparaître une vulnérabilité différenciée parmi les personnes travaillant dans des secteurs différents et à des niveaux hiérarchiques inégaux (espérance de vie des éboueurs et égoutiers beaucoup plus courte que celle de cadres) ; on notera d’ailleurs que la norme restait le plus souvent le corps masculin blanc, et qu’on ne trouvait pas d’étude des vulnérabilités différenciées à une mort prématurée croisant classes, racialisations et genres.

Cette vulnérabilité différenciée – par la classe, les formes de racialisation, le genre – à une mort prématurée est une constante du capitalisme racial et, dans le cas d’une pandémie, elle aggrave la létalité du virus. Le féminisme européen, qui s’est focalisé sur le travail domestique, a effacé le fait que le champ de la reproduction sociale est traversé par la classe et la racialisation et, ce faisant, a contribué à l’invisibilité du travail exploité effectué par des femmes des classes populaires bien souvent racisé·e·s ; le confort des féministes bourgeoises était à ce prix.

Mais, me dira-t-on, la « découverte » par des journalistes, des responsables politiques et des universitaires de cette invisibilité, et de l’exploitation qui en découle, n’indique-t-elle pas une prise de conscience ? Leur « héroïsme » est célébré, et l’aspect indispensable de leur travail souligné. Le vocabulaire de l’héroïsme en fait des soldates se sacrifiant pour la nation, alors que leur sort renvoie à l’organisation structurelle de la société capitaliste patriarcale. S’opposer à leur exploitation revient tout simplement à exiger une transformation profonde, ne faisant plus dépendre l’organisation du soin et de la protection du profit et de « l’ordre du monde ». Cela signifierait déjà soutenir les luttes des femmes précarisées, par exemple d’être des centaines de milliers à exiger d’Accor, une des plus grandes boîtes mondiales de l’hôtellerie, le respect de la dignité et du travail des femmes de ménage employées en sous-traitance.

Le confinement trace aussi une frontière entre les populations qui peuvent enfreindre les consignes en toute impunité et les groupes qui se trouvent punis de l’avoir fait, ou d’avoir omis leurs « attestations de déplacement dérogatoire ». Alors qu’un million de bourgeois parisiens seraient partis dans leurs résidences secondaires, faisant peser la menace de leurs contaminations sur des structures hospitalières encore plus démunies qu’à Paris, des « vidéos postées sur Twitter en provenance d’Asnières, de Grigny, d’Ivry-sur-Seine, de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, de Torcy, de Saint-Denis et d’ailleurs en France, montrent des habitant·e·s apparemment frappé·e·s, gazé·e·s, et, dans un cas, une personne se faisant heurter par un policier à moto. Les vidéos semblent aussi montrer qu’elles/ils n’opposaient ni violence, ni résistance aux forces de l’ordre. Dans certains cas, les propos proférés par les forces de police avaient un caractère xénophobe ou homophobe » (Syndicat des avocats de France (27 mars 2020).

La protection n’est pas la même pour toutes et tous : ni dans une société donnée, ni au niveau planétaire. Les différences entre celles et ceux qui peuvent être confiné·e·s parce que cela ne menace pas profondément leurs conditions de vie et celles et ceux qui ne peuvent pas se le permettre ou qui sont obligé·e·s de s’exposer au virus, se retrouvent amplifiées au Sud, et entre Nord et Sud. Les départements et régions dits « d’outre-mer » sont les suds de la France, et leur situation n’est évoquée ni par le gouvernement, ni dans les médias. Dans le Sud global, les programmes d’austérité imposés par la Banque mondiale et FMI dans les années 1970, ont ravagé les services de santé, et les conséquences de ces programmes ont été redoublées par les politiques des gouvernements locaux.

Ces structures de pouvoir asymétriques entretiennent l’illusion de zones de confort au Nord, construites sur l’exploitation, l’extraction et la dépossession. Ce que la pandémie rend un peu plus visible, ce sont ces asymétries – violentes, meurtrières, destructrices –, mais la visibilité n’est qu’un élément de la lutte pour que les structures changent. Le confinement met au jour les conditions même de sa possibilité : le travail invisible et exploité, racialisé, et genré (les différences de genre se produisant évidemment à l’intérieur d’un genre – toutes les femmes ne sont pas égales, et tous les hommes ne sont pas égaux).

Il met aussi au jour les objectifs des pouvoirs : sauver le capitalisme, augmenter la surveillance, punir les classes populaires et racisées. Tous ces éléments – violences d’État, privatisation de la santé, pouvoir de Big Pharma, augmentation des techniques de surveillance et de contrôle, confinement qui prend pour mesure le corps d’un homme bourgeois en bonne santé pour définir ses conditions, mesures au nom de préserver la « nation », l’économie capitaliste, l’hétéro-patriarcat, asymétries Nord/Sud—sont à collecter pour une analyse des défis présents et à venir. Les déclarations sur une crise « déterminante » du capitalisme font fi du fait que le capitalisme n’est qu’une succession de crises, et qu’au bord de l’abîme, peu importe les pertes humaines, environnementales, sociales et économiques, ses partisans trouvent de nouvelles technologies pour surveiller et punir.

Seule la lutte mettra un frein aux politiques que les États déploient en réponse à la pandémie, car au-delà de l’urgence médicale (contenir le virus), les mesures de confinement comme celles prises pour maintenir la production, au risque hier comme aujourd’hui de la santé de celles et ceux qui l’assurent, nous alertent sur ce qui reste une nécessité pour le pouvoir : « tout changer pour que rien ne change ».

À l’inverse, bousculer l’ordre des choses suppose de tenir ensemble une multiplicité d’éléments que l’on tend généralement à séparer, et requiert ainsi une attention constante aux enchevêtrements entre prolifération des maladies contagieuses, surexploitation des terres, agro-business, privatisation de la recherche, monocultures d’animaux pour la consommation, hyperproduction, extractivisme, hyperconsommation, patriarcat, processus de racialisation, genres, capitalisme, impérialisme.

Notes

[1] Antonio Gramsci, Guerre de mouvement, guerre de position, textes choisis et présentés par R. Keucheyan, La fabrique, 2011, p. 234.

[2] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag : Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition to Globalizing California. Berkeley University Press, p. 261.

The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour – Joshua Clover

29/03/2020; first published here; a critique of this article of Bruno Latour;

How swiftly do genres of the quarantine emerge! Notable among them is the discovery of the relation between the present pandemic and onrushing climate collapse. The driving force of this genre is not holy shit two ways for a lot of people to die but the realization, or hope, that the great mobilizations of state resources currently being unspooled to address COVID-19 prove the possibility of a comparable or greater mobilization against ecological catastrophe, an even greater threat if somewhat less immediate. There is to be sure a certain mixing of analogies: in the United States, confronting climate change is conventionally likened to the New Deal or Marshall Plan, schemes to hedge against the charisma of communism, while addressing the pandemic decisively takes the language of war itself, a “war footing,” “wartime president,” and so on. This is an interesting slippage, no doubt, though both analogies rely on a vision of preserving global hegemony. Insert rueful laugh.

Bruno Latour provides a recent example of this genre; it appeared dually in Le Monde and Critical Inquiry on 25 March, here under the title “Is This a Dress Rehearsal,” and in French under the more prosaic but imperative “Health Crisis Demands We Prepare for Climate Change.”[1] The short piece is filled with the author’s habits of mind such as the inevitable “Latour Litany,” a list of all the various actors human and inhuman in an “entire network,” enumerated with an insistent leveling of its contents where what matters is that all these actors stand in ratio with each other, mute equivalents. It is as if exchange value had taken up a side hustle as a theorist. The goal is to demonstrate yet again the indistinction of nature and society toward discovering the obvious truth that “The pandemic is no more a ‘natural’ phenomenon than the famines of the past or the current climate crisis.”

But here problems arise for the comparison, as the author himself admits. Writing from France, he notes that Emmanuel Macron’s capacity to confront the pandemic is not of a kind with even his least gesture toward (purported) climate abatement, recalling how his gas tax was met not with relief and a thirst for more but with the riots of the Gilets Jaunes movement. Per Latour, this is because Macron — and ostensibly other leaders — have not forged the kind of new state that climate collapse will require. Instead, “we are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture.”

He means Foucault’s final lecture on the theme Society Must Be Defended, describing a new kind of power. Whereas once “Sovereignty took life and let live,” he writes, we discover toward the end of the eighteenth century “the emergence of a power that . . . in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.” This is the famous formula of biopolitics: the sovereign power to make live and let die.

Latour notes that this power’s deployment in the present moment includes “the obliteration of the very many invisible workers forced to work anyway so that others can continue to hole up in their homes.” Rightly so — this is a peculiarly awful time to be a delivery worker, from the warehouse or restaurant to the driver anxiously tossing a box on your porch. Recent days have presented an even more devastating turn: recent pronouncements by various governmental figures who, noting the economic devastation of COVID-19, proclaimed that people would have to abandon quarantine procedures after a fortnight at the very most and return to work so as to avoid cratering the economy. This despite the medical certainty that this would lead to more transmissions and more deaths. Forty-four years and five days after Foucault’s lecture, Donald Trump tweeted, WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO! If this was in any way opaque, two days later Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick speculated, “are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren? And if that is the exchange, I’m all in.”

But this course of action is not speculative at all: rather it seems to be the express plan of the state, coming soon. Look, to save the economy, we’re gonna have to kill some folks. Like, a lot. Horrified humans immediately noted this was a blood sacrifice to capitalism and who could disagree? This is the most dramatic political development since the early hours of millennium if not very much longer. It must seem like the apotheosis of biopolitics: a crackpot sovereign deciding at national scale who will be made to live, who let die.

Except for the way in which this was, in the clearest manner, the reverse. By 22 March, Goldman Sachs was already predicting an unparalleled 2.5 million new jobless claims; this would prove optimistic.

Meanwhile the Senate tinkered with its relief bill. The massive transfers to corporations were a given, for which 2008 now appears as a dress rehearsal. The haggling endeavored to dial in the exact size of the direct payment to citizens. It would need to restore enough aggregate demand to keep the economy breathing (a ventilator of sorts) while taking care not to give a single prole the incentive to be, in the face of a global and terrifying pandemic poised to kill millions absent assiduous measures taken by all, lazy. And it is to this delicate measure that presidents must also dance, not the measure decided on by the legislature, but the measure of that abstraction “the economy.” Nothing could have thrown Foucault’s formulations about sovereignty and regimes of power, and especially the limits of these ideas, into clearer relief than this week’s pronouncements, provisions, and data.

This is not to say there is no such thing as biopolitics nor any power to make live and let die. Clearly there is; clearly it is this that is wielded by all the Trumps great and small. Nonetheless it is apparent that the sovereign is not sovereign. Rather he is subordinated entirely to the dictates of political economy, that real unity of the political and economic forged by capital and its compulsions. Make live and let die is simply a tool among others in this social order whose true logic, from Trump’s tweet to Dan Patrick to the Senate bill, is the power employed always as a ratio of make work and let buy.

Here we must take a final turn toward where we began and reenter the genre named at the outset. The link between coronavirus and climate is more direct than mere analogy, two threats that challenge our senses of scale and temporality and so seem to demand something like a state to address them. Rather it turns out that one shows us the character of the other with horrific lucidity. We should not be surprised to discover that, like the 2008 economic collapse, the pandemic has significantly reduced emissions globally. The reductions have been particularly marked in China and Italy, the two most devastated nations. We might expect, glancing at the rate of spread and those unemployment numbers, that we will see similar results from the United States. Maybe we will get right with the Paris Accords after all.

This is not to say that we should imagine the virus as a redeemer; that is a particularly grotesque fantasy. Its role in a temporary retreat of planetarily fatal emissions is nonetheless informative. Ecological despoliation is a consequence not of humans, as the name “Anthropocene” and Latour’s essay suggest, but of industrial production and its handmaidens, and only forces which can bring that to heel allow us to prepare for climate change. Capital, with is inescapable drive to reproduce itself, is not some actor in a network, equivalent to other actors, but an actual cause. The compulsion to produce, and to produce at a lower cost than competitors, in turn compels the burning of cheap and dirty fuels to drive the factories, to move the container ships, even to draw forth from the ground the material components of “green energy” sources. The Gilets Jaunes did not riot because they object to ecological policies but because the economy dictates that they find jobs in places they cannot afford to live, and to which they must therefore commute. As long as the compulsions of production for profit and of laboring to live persist, climate survival will be beyond the reach of any state.

We must take this fact with the utmost seriousness: that Foucault’s new regime of power appears in the late eighteenth century, which is to say, alongside the steam engine and the industrial revolution, which is also to say, alongside the liftoff of anthropogenic climate change. We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while the sovereign lives.

Denkt Euch, die schlafen nicht

27/03/2020; Sylvia Kratochvil

„Wo gehobelt wird, da fallen Späne.“ – Nicht ganz. Es gibt auch ein Hobeln, bei dem nichts abfällt, das Nichts ist, wie Kafka in seinem Tagebuch notiert: „Ihm ist das Hämmern ein wirkliches Hämmern und gleichzeitig auch ein Nichts.“ Wem? Einem, der sich vornimmt, einen Tisch zu schreinern und dabei gleichzeitig nichts zu tun, aber nicht „so als ob“, sondern in dem kühneren, entschlosseneren, wirklicheren, irrsinnigeren Sinn wahrer Gleichzeitigkeit. Nichts-Tun ist unmittelbar. Es ist nicht wie das Schlafen und Träumen zeitlich verzögert. Weil Nichts-Tun und Tun zusammenfallen, kann nicht mehr geschlafen werden und ist jener, der da hämmert, nimmermüde. Das Leben ist über Nacht urplötzlich kurz geworden, kürzer als die Schwelle, die den Tag von der Nacht trennt. „Dort sind Leute!“ sagen Kafkas Kinder auf der Landstraße von einer Stadt im Süden und: „Denkt Euch, die schlafen nicht! – Und warum denn nicht? – Weil sie nicht müde werden. – Und warum denn nicht? – Weil sie Narren sind. – Werden denn Narren nicht müde? – Wie könnten Narren müde werden!“ Der Wunsch nach Nimmermüdigkeit hängt mit dem Wunsch nach Nichts-Tun aufs Engste zusammen. Wo nichts mehr getan werden kann, da muss etwas getan und kann nicht mehr geschlafen werden. Es ist die Umkehr des Satzes: arbeiten, um zu schlafen. Dass das Nichts trotzdem ein Tun sei, kein monotones, das einhämmert, sondern eins, das wacht, wo der Mensch schläft, arbeitet, wo der Mensch ruht, ist ein utopischer Wunsch. Was Benjamin in Bezug auf Kafka als „leere, fröhliche Reise“ bezeichnet, der Versuch des Menschen, seinen Schatten einzuholen, ist kein Scherz. Es ist aber doch ein Arbeitsausfall, denn wo nicht mehr praktiziert und nichts mehr produziert wird, ist das Tun ein Nichts. Das Nichts aber ist das, schreibt Benjamin und zitiert Rosenzweig, was das Etwas erst brauchbar macht. Es beschreibt den Ort, von dem aus überhaut etwas in Sicht kommt und seinen Sinn greifbar macht: Etwas wie Arbeit, Krankenpflege, Kinderbetreuung, Schule, Müllabfuhr, Post und Versorgung, Nachbarschaft, Wohnen, Familie, Wahlen, Sport und vieles mehr. Diese Aufzählung spart aus, was man auch zuhause machen kann, das über das stille Dasein hinausgeht: lesen, schreiben. Nicht im Sinne eines Träumens, sondern als Signal, als Hämmern, mit dem sich das Nichts trotzig Gehör verschafft – wie Kinder, die nicht schlafen gehen wollen. Und während hobelnd, aber ohne Späne, eine Nicht-Welt laut wird, anders als die, die uns immer müde gemacht hat, zeichnet sich ab, dass am nächsten Morgen wieder aufgestanden wird, um die im Schlaf angefallenen Späne wegzukehren. Umkehr aber hieße, nicht weiterzumachen, nichts weiter zu machen, sondern auf die Antwort, die das Nichts erst brauchbar macht, zu pochen.

« La pandémie reproduit les écarts et les clivages sociaux » – Jean-Luc Nancy (fr)

28/03/2020; d’abord publié dans le journal Marianne;

Marianne : Parmi les objets philosophiques qui sont les vôtres, il y a le toucher. Comment le philosophe réagit-il à cette période où, s’il est toujours pensable, le toucher de l’Autre est presque impossible ? Notre hébétude ne vient-elle pas, en partie, de cette privation ?

Jean-Luc Nancy : Il ne me semble pas. D’abord si nous sommes hébétés par un côté, nous sommes aussi stimulés, réveillés, alertés et mobilisés par plusieurs autres. Et en tout cas pas à cause du toucher puisqu’au contraire il se produit une prolifération proprement virale de contacts, messages, appels, suggestions, inventions… Depuis mes voisins d’immeuble jusqu’à mes amis ou à des inconnus des pays les plus lointains ça fourmille… ou bien ça s’agite comme dans une ruche.

Privation il y a, c’est sûr, mais comme toujours la privation fait ressortir les traits de ce dont on est privé. On ne peut pas se toucher et on touche d’autant plus et d’autant mieux cette séparation. Mais bien sûr la seule interdiction de se serrer la main en dit long sur le sens de ce geste ; serrer la main c’est ne pas la broyer ni lui opposer un gant. C’est déjà toute une pensée.

Le corps, résumez-vous dans différents ouvrages , « c’est où on lâche pied ». Ces lieux d’existence, appelés également espaces ouvert, doivent-il vivre l’enfermement comme une menace ?

J’enchaîne sur ma réponse précédente : la séparation est toujours non seulement ce à quoi on touche mais ce par quoi on touche. Le toucher, c’est la distance minimale et non l’abolition de la distance. S’inquiéter du confinement est bien sûr une réaction naturelle et il faut souhaiter retrouver les contacts et les présences. Mais la présence de quelqu’un n’est pas sa simple situation à moins d’un mètre de moi ! Une présence se donne essentiellement dans une approche, ou dans une venue. C’est un mouvement, un être-devant ou auprès (« praes-entia »).

Manifestement, la maladie rejoue la partition des inégalités sociales.

Mais en même temps, oui, le confinement fait ressortir les différences sociales. Si on habite dans une cité où quelques milliers de gens n’ont que le même supermarché comme épicerie les déplacements et les achats sont bien plus lourds et difficiles que si vous avez une supérette et une épicerie de quartier, sans compter la boulangerie, à l’angle des rues voisines. Si vous êtes un enfant de six ans ou un ado de 15 dans un appartement spacieux vous êtes loin de la situation d’un jeune en foyer social. Selon les quartiers, les écoles, la formation des enseignants et les équipements informatiques des familles vous aurez des cours à distance bien organisés ou vous n’aurez rien du tout. Et il faudrait multiplier les exemples.

Cela revient à dire que la pandémie reproduit les écarts et clivages sociaux, économiques, nationaux. Le confinement – pour en rester à ce thème – n’a pas le même sens s’il intervient dans une population déjà très habituée à vivre entre les quatre murs des demeures familiales ou bien dans une autre habituée à vivre surtout dehors, dans la rue, le marché ou la place, au café, en bande…

Nous faisons l’épreuve précipitée, précoce, apeurée, de la mort et de la maladie. Dans Le Côté de Guermantes, Proust écrit que « Demander pitié à notre corps, c’est discourir devant une pieuvre, pour qui nos paroles ne peuvent avoir plus de sens que le bruit de l’eau ». La philosophie, elle, voudrait nous « apprendre à mourir ». L’Occident est-il préparé cependant à un tel apprentissage ?

Oui, la pandémie fait surgir une mort oubliée : ni celle des maladies connues, ni celle des accidents, ni celle des attentats. Une mort qui rôde partout, qui peut défier toutes les protections. Nous sommes très loin des situations de guerre ou de guérilla permanente, de famine, de désastre nucléaire ou autre mais nous sommes en effet rapprochés d’une hantise – au sens propre, premier – de la mort qui ne nous était plus familière depuis assez longtemps. Elle s’était pourtant déjà rapprochée par diverses invasions virales – le sida en particulier, et aussi des épidémies animales. De manière générale on peut dire que si la mort a pu sembler éloignée elle retrouve ses droits depuis quelque temps, comme en témoigne une agitation grotesque autour de rêves de vie prolongée indéfiniment.

La maladie n’est plus ce qu’elle est trop souvent : une souffrance individuelle et une expérience privée. Que se passe-t-il quand la maladie est l’affaire de tous, une urgence sociale pour la communauté : devient-elle sitôt un fait politique ?

Je préférerais dire « social » car le mot « politique » aujourd’hui sert à tout… La maladie est et a toujours été sociale, je dirais même éminemment sociale : elle demande l’aide d’autrui, elle implique autrui de beaucoup de manières, elle affecte nos capacités, nos rapports – et surtout dans le contexte d’une culture hypertechnique elle mobilise l’industrie, la recherche, l’administration, etc. C’est pour cette raison que le terme « biopolitique », qui sert à beaucoup de stigmate infâmant pour une politique supposée se mêler indûment des vies, est un terme creux.

Toutes les sociétés ont eu à gérer au moins des aspects de la santé, de la natalité, de l’alimentation – mais bien sûr cela dépend de l’état des savoirs et de celui des modes de vie. Au XVe siècle l’Etat n’avait guère à se soucier de la santé des paysans, mais s’il y avait une famine ou une épidémie il fallait intervenir. Au XXe siècle on a dû rendre obligatoires de nombreux vaccins sans lesquels certaines maladies seraient devenues des fléaux socio-économiques. Il n’y a pas plus de « biopolitique » que de « noopolitique » – mais toute politique a une façon de gérer la santé et le savoir…

Ce qui est décisif en la matière, c’est la question de ce qui est attendu et possible en matière de santé. Lorsque la vie durait en moyenne 50 ans, l’attente n’était pas la même que lorsqu’il s’agit de 75 ans… Lorsque la névrose ne portait pas ce nom elle ne faisait pas l’objet de soins médicaux… Et lorsqu’on ignorait ce qu’est une molécule on ne pouvait pas avoir une industrie pharmaceutique. Or chacun de ces exemples – et il y en aurait mille autres – ouvre sur un univers entier de techniques, de rapports économiques et de valeurs symboliques…

Le rapport en corps et technique est largement relancé. En tant que greffé du coeur, vous éprouvez la chose, ce couple, dans votre chair. Vous avez réaffirmé récemment des désaccords à ce sujet avec le philosophe italien Giorgio Agamben, votre ami. Sur quoi portent-ils, ces désaccords ?

L’axiome d’Agamben en la matière est qu’il ne faut pas se soucier de la santé, que c’est une préoccupation mesquine. Je suis d’accord avec lui si du moins on sait ce qu’on propose à la place. Or il n’a rien à proposer à la place, et moi non plus. Les gens ont toujours désiré vivre, et toujours selon les conditions disponibles. Il est certain que si on fait miroiter une vie interminable et gavée de jouissances on suscite un désir correspondant.

En fait, la position d’Agamben est celle d’une révolution renversée : la Révolution communiste s’étant avérée techno-capitaliste, détournons-nous en esprit de tout cet horrible monde moderne. Que veut dire alors « se détourner » ? ou comme il dit « désactiver » ou « destituer » ? Ce sont des mots, c’est tout ce qu’on peut en dire.

Ce qui demeure certain, ce qui crève même les yeux, c’est que nous allons vers un bouleversement de la civilisation. Mais on ne peut pas laisser croire que nous en détenons d’avance le secret ! Et pour le moment il est légitime de continuer à vouloir vivre. On peut aussi mourir pour une cause : des médecins, des infirmiers sont en train de le faire. Leur cause, c’est notre vie…

La question de l’héroïsme moderne est posée depuis longtemps, depuis qu’il n’y a plus d’héroïsme révolutionnaire mais seulement fanatique… Sans doute ne peut-on plus penser en termes d’héroïsme, et pas non plus en termes de « désactivation » – pas plus qu’on ne peut continuer dans le techno-capitalisme. Alors on peut au moins être en éveil, en alerte, c’est-à-dire à l’erta en vieil italien : sur la hauteur.

Comment habitez-vous ou habillez-vous votre confinement ?

Rien de spécial à dire. Cela ne change pas beaucoup ma vie car mon âge et ma condition physique suffisent à me contenir, sinon à me confiner. Heureusement, celle qui partage ma vie peut faire les courses. En revanche le virus informatique – dont vous êtes un agent, cher ami – occupe beaucoup de place. J’ai peur qu’il nous fasse trop parler !

Mais c’est peut-être une bonne chose car cela nous oblige aussi à être circonspect. On a déjà tout entendu sur le virus et la pandémie, tout ce que nos logiciels ou nos algorithmes, toutes nos leçons, bibles ou védas nous ont déjà mis dans la tête. Y compris parfois jusqu’à la caricature. Ici on dénonce un complot, là on pointe la mondialisation, là-bas on nous trouve pusillanimes devant la mort, ailleurs on clame que l’humanisme doit revenir en force, ici on croit que le capitalisme va en crever, là-bas qu’il va s’en repaître. Ici on dénonce tel gouvernement, ailleurs telle bande d’irresponsables. Biopolitique ou géopolitique, viropolitique, coronapolitique… au moins on va avoir épuisé les ressources déjà si maigres de ce malheureux concept.

Sans parler – last but not least – des estimations, supputations, pronostics et conjectures sur l’avenir de la pandémie. Car l’essentiel est là : jusqu’où et comment elle va s’étendre, jusqu’où fera-t-elle des effets et lesquels… En fait nous commençons sans doute seulement une période dont moins que jamais nous ne pouvons prévoir ce qu’elle apportera. C’est là sans doute ce qui est le plus impressionnant pour les populations habituées à une relative continuité plus ou moins programmée.

Le confinement local n’est pas grand-chose comparé à ce confinement temporel : désormais l’avenir devient clairement incertain et obscur. Nous avions oublié que c’est son essence.

About the pandemic situation – Alain Badiou (en)

27/03/2020; version originale ici; Merci à Isabelle Vodoz et Alain Badiou pour partager cet article avec nous; thanks to Alberto Toscano for his english translation;

From the start, I thought that the current situation, characterised by a viral pandemic, was not particularly exceptional. From the (viral) pandemic of AIDS, and passing through the avian flu, the Ebola virus, and the SARS 1 virus – not to mention several flus, the appearance of strains of tuberculosis that antibiotics can no longer cure, or even the return of measles – we know that the world market, combined with the existence of vast under-medicalised zones and the lack of global discipline when it comes to the necessary vaccinations, inevitably produces serious and devastating epidemics (in the case of AIDS, several million deaths). Besides the fact that the current pandemic situation is having a huge impact on the rather comfortable so-called Western world – a fact in itself devoid of any novel significance, eliciting instead dubious laments and revolting idiocies on social media – I didn’t see why, beyond the obvious protective measures and the time that the virus would take to disappear in the absence of new targets, it was necessary to climb on one’s high horse.

What’s more, the true name of the ongoing epidemic should suggest that in a sense we are dealing with ‘nothing new under the contemporary sun’. This true name is SARS 2, that is ‘Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome 2’, a name that signals the ‘second time’ of this identification, after the SARS 1 epidemic, which spread around the world in Spring 2003. At the time, it was called ‘the first unknown illness of the 21^st century’. It is clear then that the current epidemic is by no means the emergence of something radically new or unprecedented. It is the second of its kind this century and can be situated as the first’s descendant. So much so that the only serious criticism that can today be addressed to the authorities in matters of prediction is not to have funded, after SARS 1, the research that would have made available to the medical world genuine instruments of action against SARS 2.

So, I didn’t think there was anything to be done other than try, like everyone else, to isolate myself at home, and nothing to be said other than to encourage everyone else to do the same. Adhering to a strict discipline on this point is all the more necessary in that it provides support and fundamental protection for all those who are most exposed: all medical staff, of course, who are directly at the front, and who must be able to rely on a firm discipline, including on the part of the infected; but also all the most frail, like the elderly, especially those in care homes; as well as all those who have to go to work and run the risk of contagion. The discipline of those who can obey the imperative ‘stay home’ must also find and propose means for those who have barely any ‘home’ or none at all so that they may nevertheless find a secure shelter. One could envisage in this case a general commandeering of hotels.

It is true that these duties are increasingly urgent but, at least on initial examination, they do not require any great analytical efforts or the constitution of a new way of thinking.

But I am reading and hearing too many things, including in my immediate circles, that disconcert me both by the confusion they manifest and by their utter inadequacy to the – ultimately simple – situation in which we find ourselves.

These peremptory declarations, pathetic appeals and emphatic accusations take different forms, but they all share a curious contempt for the formidable simplicity, and the absence of novelty, of the current epidemic situation. Some are unnecessarily servile in the face of the powers that be, who are in fact simply doing what they are compelled to by the nature of the phenomenon. Others invoke the Planet and its mystique, which doesn’t do any good. Some blame everything on the unfortunate Macron, who is simply doing, and no worse than another, his job as head of state in times of war or epidemic. Others make a hue and cry about the founding event of an unprecedented revolution, whose relation to the extermination of a virus remains opaque – something for which our ‘revolutionaries’ are not proposing any new means whatsoever. Some sink into apocalyptic pessimism. Others are frustrated that ‘me first’, the golden rule of contemporary ideology, is in this case devoid of interest, provides no succour, and can even appear as the accomplice of an indefinite prolongation of the evil.

It seems that the challenge of the epidemic is everywhere dissipating the intrinsic activity of Reason, obliging subjects to return to those sad effects – mysticism, fabulation, prayer, prophecy and malediction – that were customary in the Middle Ages when plague swept the land.

As a result, I feel somewhat compelled to bring together some simple ideas. I would happily call them Cartesian.

Let us begin then by defining the problem, which has elsewhere been so poorly defined and thus so poorly treated.

An epidemic is rendered complex by the fact that it is always a point of articulation between natural and social determinations. Its complete analysis is transversal: one must grasp the points at which the two determinations intersect and draw the consequences.

For example, the initial fulcrum of the current epidemic is very probably to be found in the markets of Wuhan province. Chinese markets are known for their dangerous dirtiness, and for their irrepressible taste for the open-air sale of all kinds of living animals, stacked on top of one another. Whence the fact that at a certain moment the virus found itself present, in an animal form itself inherited from bats, in a very dense popular milieu, and in conditions of rudimentary hygiene.

The natural trajectory of the virus from one species to another thereby transits towards the human species. How exactly? We don’t know yet, and only scientific studies will tell us. Let us, in passing, revile all those who circulate typically racist fables online, backed up by counterfeit images, according to which everything stems from the fact that the Chinese eat bats when they’re still almost alive…

This local transit between animal species that eventually reaches human beings is the origin point of the whole affair. After which there simply operates a fundamental datum of the contemporary world: the rise of Chinese state capitalism to imperial rank, in other words an intense and universal presence on the world market. Whence innumerable networks of diffusion, evidently before the Chinese government was able to completely isolate the point of origin, namely an entire province with 40 million inhabitants – something it ultimately succeeded in doing, but too late to stop the epidemic from departing on the paths – and the planes, and the ships – of global existence.

Consider a revealing detail of what I call the double articulation of an epidemic: today, SARS 2 has been stifled in Wuhan but there are very many cases in Shanghai, in the main due to people, generally Chinese nationals, coming from abroad. China is thus a site in which one can observe the link – first for an archaic reason, then a modern one – between a nature-society intersection in ill-kept markets that followed older customs, on the one hand, and a planetary diffusion of this point of origin borne by the capitalist world market and its reliance on rapid and incessant mobility, on the other.

After which we enter the stage in which states try locally to stifle this diffusion. Let us remark in passing that this determination remains fundamentally local, while the epidemic is instead transversal. Despite the existence of some trans-national authorities, it is clear that it is local bourgeois states that are on the frontline.

We touch here on a major contradiction of the contemporary world. The economy, including the process of mass production of manufactured objects, comes under the aegis of the world market – we know that the simple assembly of a mobile phone mobilises work and resources, including mineral ones, in at least seven different states. And yet political powers remain essentially national in kind. And the rivalry between imperialisms, old (Europe and US) and new (China, Japan…) excludes any process leading to a capitalist world state. The epidemic is also a moment when the contradiction between economics and politics becomes flagrant. Even European countries are not managing promptly to adjust their policies in the face of the virus.

Prey to this contradiction, national states attempt to confront the epidemic situation by respecting as much as possible the mechanisms of Capital, even though the nature of the risk compels them to modify the style and the actions of power.

We’ve known for a long time that in the event of a war between countries, the state must impose, not only on the popular masses, as is to be expected, but on the bourgeoisie itself, considerable constraints, all in order to save local capitalism. Some industries are almost nationalised for the sake of an unbridled production of armaments that does not immediately generate any monetizable surplus value. Many bourgeois are mobilised as officers and exposed to death. Scientists work night and day to invent new weapons. Numerous intellectuals and artists are compelled to supply national propaganda, etc.

Faced with an epidemic this kind of statist reflex is inevitable. That is why, contrary to what some say, the declarations by Macron or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe regarding the return of the ‘welfare’ state, spending to support people out of work, or to aid the self-employed whose shops have been shut, demanding 100 or 200 billion from the state coffers, and even the announcement of ‘nationalisations’ – none of this is surprising or paradoxical. It follows that Macron’s metaphor, ‘we are at war’, is correct: in war or epidemic, the state is compelled, sometimes trespassing the normal run of its class nature, to undertake practices that are both more authoritarian and more generally targeted, in order to avoid a strategic catastrophe.

This is an entirely logical consequence of the situation, the aim of which is to stifle the epidemic – to win the war, to borrow once again Macron’s metaphor – with the greatest certainty possible, while remaining within the established social order. This is no laughing matter, it is a necessity imposed by the diffusion of a lethal process that intersects nature (whence the preeminent role of scientists in the matter) and the social order (whence the authoritarian intervention, and it couldn’t be otherwise, of the state).

That some massive lacunae appear in the midst of this effort is inevitable. Consider the lack of protective masks or the unpreparedness in terms of the duration of hospital isolation. But who can really boast of having ‘predicted’ this kind of thing? In certain regards, the state did not prevent the current situation, it’s true. We can even say that by weakening, decade after decade, the national health system, along with all the sectors of the state serving the general interest, it acted instead as though nothing akin to a devastating pandemic could affect our country. To this extent the state is very culpable, not only in its Macron guise, but in that of all who have come before him for at least the past thirty years.

But it is nonetheless correct to note here that no one had predicted, or even imagined, the emergence in France of a pandemic of this type, except perhaps for a few isolated scientists. Many probably thought that this kind of thing was good for dark Africa or totalitarian China, but not for democratic Europe. And it is surely not leftists – or gilets jaunes or even trade-unionists – who enjoy a particular right to hold forth on this point, and to continue to make a fuss about Macron, their derisory target for the last while. They too had absolutely not envisaged this. On the contrary, as the epidemic was already on its way from China, they multiplied, until very recently, uncontrolled assemblies and noisy demonstrations, which should disqualify them today, whoever they may be, from loudly condemning the delays taken by the powers that be in taking the full measure of what was happening. Truth be told, no political force in France really took this measure before the Macronian state. 

On the side of this state, the situation is of the kind in which the bourgeois state must explicitly, publicly, make prevail interests that are in some sense more general than those of the bourgeoisie alone, while strategically preserving, in the future, the primacy of the class interests of which this state represents the general form. In other words, the conjuncture compels the state to manage the situation by integrating the interest of the class whose authorised representative it is with more general interests, on account of the internal existence of an ‘enemy’ that is itself general – in times of war this may be a foreign invader, while in the present situation it is the virus SARS 2.

This kind of situation (world war or world epidemic) is especially ‘neutral’ at the political level. The wars of the past have only triggered revolutions in two cases, which may be termed outliers with regard to the imperial powers of the time: Russia and China. In the Russian case, this was because Tsarist power was in every sense, and had been for a long time, retrograde, including as a power potentially adapted to the birth of a genuine capitalism in that immense country. And against it there existed, in the shape of the Bolsheviks, a modern political vanguard, strongly structured by remarkable leaders. In the Chinese case, internal revolutionary war preceded the world war, and the Chinese Communist Party was already, in 1940, at the head of a popular army that had been tried and tested. By contrast, in no Western power did the war trigger a victorious revolution. Even in the country that had been defeated in 1918, Germany, the Spartacist insurrection was quickly crushed.

The lesson to be drawn from this is clear: the ongoing epidemic will not have, qua epidemic, any noteworthy political consequences in a country like France. Even supposing that our bourgeoisie – in light of the inchoate grumbling and flimsy if widespread slogans – believes that the moment has come to get rid of Macron, that will in no way represent any change worthy of note. The ‘politically correct’ candidates are already waiting in the wings, as are the advocates of the most mildewed form of a ‘nationalism’ as obsolete as it is repugnant.

As for those of us who desire a real change in the political conditions of this country, we must take advantage of this epidemic interlude, and even of the – entirely necessary – isolation, to work on new figures of politics, on the project of new political sites, and on the trans-national progress of a third stage of communism after the brilliant one of its invention and the – interesting but ultimately defeated – stage of its statist experimentation.

We will also need to pass through a stringent critique of every perspective according to which phenomena like epidemics can work by themselves in the direction of something that is politically innovative. Over and above the general transmission of scientific data about the epidemic, a political charge will only be carried by new affirmations and convictions concerning hospitals and public health, schools and egalitarian education, the care of the elderly, and other questions of this kind. Only these might possibly be articulated with a balance-sheet of the dangerous weaknesses on which the current situation has shed light.

In passing, one will need to show publicly and dauntlessly that so-called ‘social media’ have once again demonstrated that they are above all – besides their role in fattening the pockets of billionaires – a place for the propagation of the mental paralysis of braggarts, uncontrolled rumours, the discovery of antediluvian ‘novelties’, or even  fascistic obscurantism.

Let us not give credence, even and especially in our isolation, except to truths that are controllable by science and to the grounded perspectives of a new politics, of its localised experiences as well as its strategic aims.

Translated by Alberto Toscano

Sur la situation épidémique – Alain Badiou (fr)

27/03/2020; apparu dans « tracts de crise » chez Gallimard (voici le lien pour le téléchargement gratuit); english version here;

    J’ai toujours considéré que la situation actuelle, marquée par une pandémie virale, n’avait rien de bien exceptionnel. Depuis la pandémie (virale aussi) du Sida, en passant par la grippe aviaire, le virus Ebola, le virus Sars 1, sans parler de plusieurs grippes, voire du retour de la rougeole, ou des tuberculoses que les antibiotiques ne guérissent plus, nous savons que le marché mondial, combiné à l’existence de vastes zones sous-médicalisées et de l’insuffisance de discipline mondiale dans les vaccinations nécessaires, produit inévitablement des épidémies sérieuses et dévastatrices (dans le cas du Sida, plusieurs millions de morts). Hormis le fait que la situation de la pandémie actuelle frappe cette fois à grande échelle l’assez confortable monde dit occidental –fait en lui-même dépourvu de signification novatrice, et appelant plutôt des déplorations suspectes et des âneries révoltantes sur réseaux sociaux –, je ne voyais pas qu’au-delà des mesures de protection évidentes et du temps que mettra le virus à disparaitre dans l’absence de nouvelles cibles, il faille monter sur ses grands chevaux.

    Au demeurant, le vrai nom de l’épidémie en cours devrait indiquer qu’elle relève en un sens du « rien de nouveau sous le ciel contemporain ». Ce vrai nom est SARS 2, soit « Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom 2 », nomination qui inscrit en fait une identification « en second temps », après l’épidémie de SARS 1, qui s’était déployée dans le monde au printemps 2003. Cette maladie avait été nommée à l’époque « la première maladie inconnue du XXIe siècle ».  Il est donc clair que l’épidémie actuelle n’est aucunement le surgissement de quelque chose de radicalement nouveau, ou d’inouï. Elle est la deuxième du siècle dans son genre, et situable dans sa filiation. Au point même que la seule critique sérieuse adressée, aujourd’hui, en matière prédictive, aux autorités, est de n’avoir pas sérieusement soutenu, après Sars 1, la recherche qui aurait mis à la disposition du monde médical des moyens d’action véritables contre Sars 2.

    Je ne voyais donc rien d’autre à faire que d’essayer, comme tout le monde, de me séquestrer chez moi, et rien d’autre à dire que d’exhorter tout le monde à faire de même. Respecter sur ce point une stricte discipline est d’autant plus nécessaire qu’elle est un appui et une protection fondamentale pour tous ceux qui sont les plus exposés : bien sûr, tous les soignants, qui sont directement sur le front, et qui doivent pouvoir compter sur une ferme discipline, y compris des personnes infectées ; mais aussi les plus faibles, comme les gens âgés, notamment en EPAD ; et encore tous ceux qui vont au travail et courent ainsi le risque d’une contagion. Cette discipline de ceux qui peuvent obéir à l’impératif « rester chez soi » doit aussi trouver et proposer les moyens pour que ceux qui n’ont guère ou pas de « chez eux » puissent cependant trouver un abri sûr. On peut ici penser à une réquisition générale des hôtels.

    Ces obligations sont, il est vrai, de plus en plus impérieuses, mais ne comportent pas, du moins à un premier examen, de grands efforts d’analyse ou de constitution d’une pensée neuve.

    Mais voici que vraiment, je lis trop de choses, j’entends trop de choses, y compris dans mon entourage, qui me déconcertent par le trouble qu’elles manifestent, et par leur inappropriation totale à la situation, à vrai dire simple, dans laquelle nous sommes.

    Ces déclarations péremptoires, ces appels pathétiques, ces accusations emphatiques, sont d’espèces différentes, mais toutes ont en commun un curieux mépris de la redoutable simplicité, et de l’absence de nouveauté, de la situation épidémique actuelle.  Ou bien elles sont inutilement serviles au regard des pouvoirs, qui ne font en fait que ce à quoi ils sont contraints par la nature du phénomène. Ou bien elles nous ressortent la Planète et sa mystique, ce qui ne nous avance en rien. Ou bien elles mettent tout sur le dos du pauvre Macron, qui ne fait, et pas plus mal qu’un autre, que son travail de chef d’Etat en temps de guerre ou d’épidémie. Ou bien elles crient à l’événement fondateur d’une révolution inouïe, dont on ne voit pas quel rapport elle soutiendrait avec l’extermination d’un virus, dont du reste nos « révolutionnaires » n’ont pas le moindre moyen nouveau.  Ou bien elles sombrent dans un pessimisme de fin du monde. Ou bien elles s’exaspèrent sur le point que le « moi d’abord », règle d’or de l’idéologie contemporaine, ne soit en la circonstance d’aucun intérêt, d’aucun secours, et puisse même apparaitre comme complice d’une continuation indéfinie du mal.

    On dirait que l’épreuve épidémique dissout partout l’activité intrinsèque de la Raison, et qu’elle oblige les sujets à revenir aux tristes effets — mysticisme, fabulations, prières, prophéties et malédictions – dont le Moyen Âge était coutumier quand la peste balayait les territoires.

    Du coup, je me sens quelque peu contraint de rassembler quelques idées simples. Je dirais volontiers : cartésiennes.  

      Convenons pour commencer par définir le problème, par ailleurs si mal défini, et donc si mal traité.

     Une épidémie a ceci de complexe qu’elle est, toujours, un point d’articulation entre des déterminations naturelles et des déterminations sociales. Son analyse complète est transversale : il faut saisir les points où les deux déterminations se croisent, et en tirer les conséquences.

    Par exemple, le point initial de l’actuelle épidémie se situe très probablement sur les marchés dans la province de Wuhan. Les marchés chinois sont encore aujourd’hui connus pour leur périlleuse saleté, et par leur irrépressible goût de la vente en plein air de toutes sortes d’animaux vivants entassés. De là que le virus s’est trouvé à un moment donné présent, sous une forme animale elle-même héritée des chauves-souris, dans un milieu populaire très dense, et avec une hygiène rudimentaire.

    La poussée naturelle du virus d’une espèce à une autre transite alors vers l’espèce humaine. Comment exactement ? Nous ne le savons pas encore, et seules des procédures scientifiques nous l’apprendront. Stigmatisons au passage tous ceux qui lancent, sur les réseaux d’internet, des fables typiquement racistes, étayées sur des images truquées, selon lesquelles tout provient de ce que les Chinois mangent des chauve-souris quasiment vivantes…

     Ce transit local entre espèces animales jusqu’à l’homme constitue le point d’origine de toute l’affaire. Après quoi seulement opère une donnée fondamentale du monde contemporain : l’accès du capitalisme d’Etat chinois à un rang impérial, soit une présence intense et universelle sur le marché mondial. D’où d’innombrables réseaux de diffusion, avant évidemment que le gouvernement chinois soit en mesure de confiner totalement le point d’origine – en fait, une province entière, quarante millions de personnes — ce qu’il finira cependant par faire avec succès, mais trop tard pour que l’épidémie soit empêchée de partir sur les chemins – et les avions, et les bateaux — de l’existence mondiale.

    Un détail révélateur de ce que j’appelle la double articulation d’une épidémie : aujourd’hui, Sars 2 est jugulée à Wuhan, mais il y a de très nombreux cas à Shangaï, majoritairement dus à des gens, chinois en général, venant de l’étranger. La Chine est donc un lieu où l’on observe le nouage, pour une raison archaïque, puis moderne, entre un croisement nature-société sur des marchés mal tenus, de forme ancienne, cause de l’apparition de l’infection, et une diffusion planétaire de ce point d’origine, portée, elle, par le marché mondial capitaliste et ses déplacements aussi rapides qu’incessants.

      Après quoi, on entre dans l’étape où les Etats tentent, localement, de juguler cette diffusion. Notons au passage que cette détermination reste fondamentalement locale, alors même que l’épidémie, elle, est transversale. En dépit de l’existence de quelques autorités trans-nationales, il est clair que ce sont les Etats bourgeois locaux qui sont sur la brèche.

         Nous touchons là à une contradiction majeure du monde contemporain : l’économie, y compris le processus de production en masse des objets manufacturés, relève du marché mondial. On sait que la simple fabrication d’un téléphone portable mobilise du travail et des ressources, y compris minières, dans au moins sept états différents. Mais d’un autre côté, les pouvoirs politiques restent essentiellement nationaux. Et la rivalité des impérialismes, anciens (Europe et USA) et nouveaux (Chine, Japon…) interdit tout processus d’un Etat capitaliste mondial. L’épidémie, c’est aussi un moment où cette contradiction entre économie et politique est patente. Même les pays européens ne parviennent pas à ajuster à temps leurs politiques face au virus.

         En proie eux-mêmes à cette contradiction, les Etats nationaux tentent de faire face à la situation épidémique en respectant autant que faire se peut les mécanismes du Capital, bien que la nature du risque les oblige à modifier le style et les actes du pouvoir.

       On sait depuis longtemps qu’en cas de guerre entre pays, l’Etat doit imposer, non seulement bien sûr aux masses populaires, mais aux bourgeois eux-mêmes, des contraintes considérables, et ce pour sauver le capitalisme local. Des industries sont quasiment nationalisées au profit d’une production d’armements déchaînée mais qui ne produit sur le moment aucune plus-value monétisable. Quantité de bourgeois sont mobilisés comme officiers et exposés à la mort. Les scientifiques cherchent nuit et jour à inventer de nouvelles armes. Nombre d’intellectuels et d’artistes sont requis d’alimenter la propagande nationale, etc.

      Face à une épidémie, ce genre de réflexe étatique est inévitable. C’est pourquoi, contrairement à ce qui se dit, les déclarations de Macron ou de Philippe concernant l’Etat redevenu soudain « providence », une dépense de soutien aux gens hors travail, ou aux indépendants dont on ferme la boutique, engageant cent ou deux cents milliards d’argent de l’Etat, l’annonce même de « nationalisations » : tout cela n’a rien d’étonnant ni de paradoxal. Et il s’ensuit que la métaphore de Macron, « nous sommes en guerre », est correcte : Guerre ou épidémie, l’Etat est contraint, outrepassant parfois le jeu normal de sa nature de classe, de mettre en œuvre des pratiques à la fois plus autoritaires et à destination plus globale, pour éviter une catastrophe stratégique.

    C’est une conséquence tout à fait logique de la situation, dont le but est de juguler l’épidémie — de gagner la guerre, pour reprendre la métaphore de Macron — le plus sûrement possible, tout en restant dans l’ordre social établi. Ce n’est nullement une comédie, c’est une nécessité imposée par la diffusion d’un processus mortel qui croise la nature (d’où le rôle éminent des scientifiques dans cette affaire) et l’ordre social (d’où l’intervention autoritaire, et elle ne peut être autre chose, de l’Etat).

    Qu’apparaissent dans cet effort de grandes carences est inévitable. Ainsi du manque de masques protecteurs, ou l’impréparation concernant l’étendue du confinement hospitalier. Mais qui donc peut réellement se vanter d’avoir « prévu » ce genre de choses ? A certains égards, l’Etat n’avait pas prévu la situation actuelle, c’est bien vrai. On peut même dire qu’en affaiblissant, depuis des décennies, l’appareil national de santé, et en vérité tous les secteurs de l’Etat qui étaient au service de l’intérêt général, il avait plutôt fait comme si rien de semblable à une pandémie dévastatrice ne pouvait affecter notre pays. En quoi il est très fautif, non seulement sous sa forme Macron, mais sous celle de tous ceux qui l’ont précédé depuis au moins trente ans.

    Mais il est tout de même correct de dire ici que personne d’autre n’avait prévu, voire imaginé, le développement en France d’une pandémie de ce type, sauf peut-être quelques savants isolés. Beaucoup pensaient probablement que ce genre d’histoire était bon pour l’Afrique ténébreuse ou la Chine totalitaire, mais pas pour la démocratique Europe. Et ce n’est sûrement pas les gauchistes – ou les gilets jaunes, ou même les syndicalistes – qui peuvent avoir un droit particulier de gloser sur ce point, et de continuer à faire tapage sur Macron, leur cible dérisoire depuis toujours. Ils n’ont, eux non plus, absolument rien envisagé de tel. Tout au contraire : l’épidémie déjà en route en Chine, ils ont multiplié, jusqu’à très récemment, les regroupements incontrôlés et les manifestations tapageuses, ce qui devrait leur interdire aujourd’hui, quels qu’ils soient, de parader face aux retards mis par le pouvoir à prendre la mesure de ce qui se passait. Nulle force politique, en réalité, en France, n’a réellement pris cette mesure avant l’Etat macronien.

    Du côté de cet Etat, la situation est de celles où l’Etat bourgeois doit, explicitement, publiquement, faire prévaloir des intérêts en quelque sorte plus généraux que ceux de la seule bourgeoisie, tout en préservant stratégiquement, dans l’avenir, le primat des intérêts de classe dont cet Etat représente la forme générale. Ou, autrement dit, la conjoncture oblige l’Etat à ne pouvoir gérer la situation qu’en intégrant les intérêts de la classe, dont il est le fondé de pouvoir, dans des intérêts plus généraux, et ce à raison de l’existence interne d’un « ennemi » lui-même général, qui peut être, en temps de guerre, l’envahisseur étranger, et qui est, dans la situation présente, le virus Sars 2.

    Ce genre de situation (guerre mondiale, ou épidémie mondiale) est particulièrement « neutre » sur le plan politique. Les guerres du passé n’ont provoqué de révolution que dans deux cas, si l’on peut dire excentriques au regard de ce qu’étaient les puissances impériales : la Russie et la Chine. Dans le cas russe, ce fut parce que le pouvoir tsariste était, à tous égards, et depuis longtemps, retardataire, y compris en tant que pouvoir possiblement ajusté à la naissance d’un capitalisme véritable dans cet immense pays. Et il existait par contre, avec les bolcheviks, une avant-garde politique moderne, fortement structurée par des dirigeants remarquables. Dans le cas chinois, la guerre révolutionnaire intérieure a précédé la guerre mondiale, et le Parti communiste était déjà, en 1940, à la tête d’une armée populaire qui avait fait ses preuves. En revanche, dans aucune des puissances occidentales la guerre n’a provoqué de révolution victorieuse. Même dans le pays vaincu en 1918, l’Allemagne, l’insurrection spartakiste a été rapidement écrasée.

    La leçon de tout cela est claire : l’épidémie en cours n’aura, en tant que telle, en tant qu’épidémie, aucune conséquence politique notable dans un pays comme la France. A supposer même que notre bourgeoisie pense, au vu de la montée des grognements informes et des slogans inconsistants mais répandus, que le moment est venu de se débarrasser de Macron, cela ne représentera absolument aucun changement notable. Les candidats « politiquement corrects » sont déjà dans la coulisse, comme le sont les tenants des formes les plus moisies d’un « nationalisme » aussi obsolète que répugnant.

    Quant à nous, qui désirons un changement réel des données politiques dans ce pays, il faut profiter de l’interlude épidémique, et même du – tout à fait nécessaire – confinement, pour travailler à de nouvelles figures de la politique, au projet de lieux politiques nouveaux, et au progrès trans-national d’une troisième étape du communisme, après celle, brillante, de son invention, et celle, intéressante mais finalement vaincue, de son expérimentation étatique.

    Il faudra aussi en passer par une critique serrée de toute idée selon laquelle des phénomènes comme une épidémie ouvrent par eux-mêmes à quoi que ce soit de politiquement novateur. En sus de la transmission générale des données scientifiques sur l’épidémie, seules ne garderont une force politique que des affirmations et convictions nouvelles concernant les hôpitaux et la santé publique, les écoles et l’éducation égalitaire, l’accueil des vieillards, et autres questions du même genre. Ce sont les seules qu’on pourra éventuellement articuler à un bilan des faiblesses dangereuses mises en lumières par la situation actuelle.   

    Au passage, on montrera courageusement, publiquement, que les prétendus « réseaux sociaux » montrent une fois de plus qu’ils sont d’abord – outre le fait qu’ils engraissent les plus grands milliardaires du moment – un lieu de propagation de la paralysie mentale bravache, des rumeurs incontrôlées, de la découverte de « nouveautés » antédiluviennes, quand ce n’est pas de l’obscurantisme fascisant.          N’accordons crédit, même et surtout confinés, qu’aux vérités contrôlables de la science et aux perspectives fondées d’une nouvelle politique, de ses expériences localisées comme de sa visée stratégique.

Réponse à Eduardo Jochamowitz

27/03/2020; Nelson Lerias réponse à ces remarques-ci et à ce texte-ci;

Cher Eduardo,

Merci beaucoup pour tes remarques, elles m’obligent à quelques précisions.

            Il faudrait peut-être essayer de préciser la notion d’actualité de notre époque en tant que crise, c’est-à-dire d’un côté mes mots laissent entrevoir que je conçois notre actualité comme crise, d’un autre côté je parle de crise de l’humanité (et non pas de « notre humanité », même si l’expression apparaît une fois) comme de quelque chose qui traverse les époques. Cette polarité entre ce qui est historique et ce qui est, pour ainsi dire, transhistorique, ce qui est contingent, et qui pourrait donc être autrement, et ce qui se répète nécessairement, à chaque génération, pour chaque individu, comme la peur de la mort, par exemple, est la polarité qui, telle que je la conçois, ou que je la vis, anime la philosophie elle-même, cette oscillation (qui n’est pas hésitation, mais mouvements d’aller et retour avec des intervalles, des interruptions, des tournants, des embardées et des dérives) est, pour ainsi dire, son souffle de vie, sa respiration. Si la philosophie se concentre seulement sur l’actualité ou seulement sur l’inactualité, disons-le ainsi, alors elle arrête de respirer.

            Ainsi, sans avoir une certaine notion de ce qui est une crise, nous n’arriverons peut-être pas à préciser la crise de notre époque en général (que l’on peut, tant bien que mal, appeler modernité) et la crise actuelle (celle épidémique), qui se croisent et s’entrecroisent. En accentuant que la crise actuelle est liée à la crise de la culture, on invite celui qui est submergé dans l’actualité à reculer d’un pas devant ses propres circonstances. Il se peut même que la tâche de la philosophie soit celle d’inviter les hommes à reculer d’un pas ou à faire un pas de côté. Ainsi, en renvoyant, à son tour, la crise de notre époque
à quelque chose comme l’idée de crise, l’invitation est alors celle de reculer non seulement devant le jour d’aujourd’hui, mais devant tous les jours.

            Par crise nous pouvons comprendre, d’un point de vue de la santé (ou de la vie), ce moment où l’on ne sait pas si le malade va survivre ou périr, s’il va guérir ou succomber à la maladie, un moment donc d’incertitude, un entre deux, la phase grave de la maladie. La notion de crise renvoie, pour ainsi dire, à des problèmes de continuité et discontinuité. Dans ce sens, la vie est toujours en crise et il n’y a donc pas de vie sans risque, pleinement sécurisée : on ne sait jamais en avance si elle va se perpétuer ou s’éteindre. On voit ainsi que le problème d’une culture vivante est celui de la transmission, autrement dit la condition critique de la culture est sa condition d’incertitude à l’égard de sa continuité ou discontinuité. Dans la mesure où, de manière très générale, la modernité signifie en partie une critique de la tradition, c’est-à-dire de la transmission, elle signifie une crise de la culture.    

            La notion de culture revêt du moins trois sens : 1) culture au sens, disons, agricole ; on peut parler de cultiver un champ, de culture intensive, de la culture des céréales, etc. 2) culture au sens de culture classique, notamment gréco-romaine ; on pouvait parler de quelqu’un cultivé, lettré. 3) culture au sens, pour ainsi dire, ethnographique plus récent où le mot renvoient à la pluralité des cultures, la culture française, inuite, baga, igbo, quechua, etc. On peut ainsi voir que, par analogie avec le sens agricole plus ancien (1), la culture, qu’elle soit classique (2) ou plurielle (3), implique un ‘‘labeur’’, un apprentissage, une formation, une éducation, qu’elle ne pousse pas spontanément, comme une fleur sauvage, c’est-à-dire elle implique transmission, continuité. Mais si la modernité s’est opposée et continue de s’opposer à la tradition, c’est-à-dire à la transmission, alors on voit que la culture moderne est dans un entre deux, dans un moment critique d’incertitude, on ne sait pas si elle va se perpétuer ou s’éteindre.

            Quand tu dis que « notre culture est la crise, la reproduction et la consommation de la crise », qu’est-ce que tu veux dire par là ? Je vois une espèce de feu qui se consomme et se consume.

            Je ne sais pas si mon propos était, comme tu dis, de lire le problème de la vie que Nietzche a mis en évidence à travers la culture et la forme/idéal de vie que nous poursuivons. En y réfléchissant, je pense que celui que tu mentionnes était tout à fait, en partie, mon propos, mais sans perdre de vue la situation actuelle et l’idée de philosophie, c’est-à-dire mon propos était d’emblée celui de réfléchir sur ‘‘notre’’ humanité (ce possessif est hautement problématique) ou sur notre déshumanisation. Celle-ci ne date pas de cette crise épidémique, mais elle relance, à mon avis, le débat sur l’humanitas, l’humanisme et la mort (ou la survie) de l’homme.

            Quand tu demandes pourquoi notre forme de vie et de culture est si réticente et résistante à la crise, est-ce que tu pourrais essayer de déterminer un peu comment tu conçois cette forme de vie et de culture ?

            Une autre incompréhension de ma part : comment distingues-tu une culture de la crise d’une culture en crise. J’ai quelques difficultés à les discerner. Si l’on remplace, comme expérimentation ou exercice herméneutique, un mot par un autre, le mot culture, en l’occurrence, par le mot, par exemple, liberté, qu’est-ce que cela donne ? Qu’est-ce que serait qu’une culture de la liberté qui ne soit, en même temps, une culture libre en acte (en supposant que « en crise » veuille dire que cette crise est une crise à l’oeuvre et donc en acte, c’est-à-dire critique) ? Essayons cet exercice de remplacement d’un mot par un autre mot, en quête de sens, avec le mot sport. Qu’est-ce que serait qu’une culture du sport qui ne soit, en même temps, une culture sportive en acte, une culture où l’on pratique effectivement des sports ?

            Il y a encore quelques points de tes très estimables remarques auxquels je n’ai pas donné d’écho. Ce n’est pas par manque d’intérêt ou d’attention, c’est seulement pour ne pas trop te surcharger. Excuse-moi, d’ailleurs, pour la longueur de ma réponse à tes remarques, mais je ne voudrais pas non plus être trop laconique.  

---

28/03/2020; Addendum sur les textes 1 et 2 d’Eduardo Jochamowitz

            Cher Eduardo,

            Laisse-moi partager avec toi quelques incompréhensions de ma part en lisant tes textes. Je sollicite à l’avance ta grandeur d’âme, cette qualité que l’on pourrait opposer, en temps de crise, à la simple survie, c’est-à-dire étant donné que la communication à distance, par écrit, ne pourra jamais remplacer le dialogue de vive voix, en présence de l’interlocuteur, qui est la véritable philosophie, je crains que mes incompréhensions ne soient confondues avec de l’animosité quand en réalité je ressens un arrière-fond d’affinité.

            « Tout est à l’arrêt », écris-tu. Et puis tu écris, entre guillemets, comme si tu citais une voix que l’on pourrait entendre, une rumeur qui circule, que tout est en train de changer. Il est difficile de ne pas se demander, alors, si tout est à l’arrêt ou si tout est en train de changer. Tout peut être à l’arrêt et, en même temps, en train de changer ? Il n’est pas impossible que cette formulation, à première vue aporétique, dissonante, ne soit l’expression exacte de notre embarras actuel, de l’antinomie même du présent : un sentiment contradictoire d’arrêt, pour ne pas dire marasme, léthargie, alanguissement, et de changement, pour ne pas dire bouleversement, inquiétude, affolement.

            Revenons sur l’expression « culture de la crise ». Quand on parle de la culture des céréales, par exemple, ce que l’on cultive, ce que l’on fait pousser, ce sont, évidemment, les céréales. Par analogie avec cette manière habituelle de comprendre les constructions du type « culture de… », on pourrait comprendre que la formulation « culture de la crise » signifie que ce qui est cultivé, ce que l’on produit, est la crise. À première vue, on ne détecte pas de dissonance. Or, si par culture on entend tradition et donc transmission et si par crise on entend péril de discontinuité, d’interruption de la transmission, alors on voit que, dans un certain sens, son sens le plus aporétique, l’expression « culture de la crise » signifie « permanence de l’impermanence », « continuité de la discontinuité », « dissémination de la stérilité », « propagation de l’extinction ». Autrement dit, aucune culture ne peut tenir, survivre, si elle n’a rien à transmettre, si elle ne se transmet pas elle-même. La culture n’est pas répétition de l’innovation, elle est transmission de préjugés. Une ‘‘culture de la crise’’ est, par principe, impossible, c’est-à-dire impuissante, inachevée, incapable de se réaliser. Il va de soi que ceci ne signifie aucunement une apologie de l’égypticisme ou la négation du changement des cultures et des valeurs. Une culture qui ne se transforme pas s’ankylose, excuse-moi la lapalissade, c’est-à-dire elle se condamne à disparaître, mais une culture qui ne serait que changement ne serait pas une culture. Dans la culture, comme dans la vie, on ne commence pas à zéro, on commence in medias res, les choses, les autres étaient déjà là avant nous.

            Aussi originale qu’elle se veuille, la modernité n’est pas uniquement l’époque où la crise devient l’état normal des choses, en dépit d’elle-même, elle porte en elle un héritage, c’est-à-dire si par crise on entend le moment critique entre la continuité et la discontinuité, mais que, sous le nom, par exemple, d’innovation, on accentue tout de même la discontinuité, tel qu’on le fait dans les temps modernes, alors il n’y a plus d’‘‘état normal’’ puisqu’il n’y a plus de norme, de normativité en vigueur. Cette éclipse de la normativité, cette pauvreté en termes d’héritage culturel, ne sont pas et ne peuvent pas être absolues. On peut néanmoins ignorer l’héritage que l’on porte en nous. Et on peut être culturellement pauvre, ou même indigent, et croire que l’on est très riche. Camões eût au XVIe siècle une intuition fulgurante : le changement lui-même ne changeait plus tel qu’il le faisait habituellement, le changement lui-même s’est mis à changer.

            Ayant parlé de « culture de la crise », et en parlant aussi de « crise totale qui mobilise notre totale attention », quand on lit que « notre forme de vie […] est énormément réticente et résistante à la crise », on est quelque peu surpris ou perplexe du point de vue logique. Peut-on être, en même temps, une « culture de la crise » et avoir une « forme de vie » qui « est énormément réticente et résistante à la crise » ? J’avoue une certaine incompréhension. Quoiqu’il en soit, quelques-uns parmi nous réussissent encore à ne pas se laisser totalement enrôlé dans la « mobilisation totale ». La poésie, par exemple, comme la musique, est possible non seulement après Auschwitz, mais même pendant.

            Encore un autre point. Si l’on met côte à côte deux autres de tes phrases : « nous révolutionnons désormais autour d’une idée fixe » et « ils [les États] doivent répondre à la crise dans sa totalité », on risque de ressentir à nouveau une certaine dissonance. Si cette idée fixe est l’épidémie, alors on comprend qu’on a une idée fixe, mais que les États doivent répondre à cette épidémie en répondant à la crise dans sa totalité, laquelle, pourrait-on se demander, n’est pas, à ton avis, uniquement épidémique. Je crois que ceci laisse entrevoir un des aspects de la modernité en tant que crise, laquelle est une crise de la norme ou de la normativité. Un autre nom pour cette désactivation de la normativité, disons-le ainsi, est la perte de centre, que l’on pourrait aussi appeler perte de l’unité, dispersion, fragmentation. Autrement dit, nous les modernes, nous n’avons pas (ou croyons ne pas en avoir) un centre, disons, agglutinateur, fédératif.

            Cette idée nous mène sur un dernier point que je voudrais soulever par rapport à ce que tu écris : « aujourd’hui le monde retrouve son unité grâce à la représentation de la crise sanitaire ». À vrai dire, le monde ne retrouve pas son unité grâce à la représentation de la crise sanitaire, c’est-à-dire la crise sanitaire (ou ses représentations, ce qui n’est pas la même chose), n’a pas réunifié le monde. Le virus s’est propagé parce que le monde est un et qu’il y a aujourd’hui, à cette époque que l’on appelle, tant mal que bien, de mondialisation et de globalisation, des liaisons, par avion, bateau, train, voiture, etc. entre ses parties, même éloignées les unes des autres, comme jamais on n’en a vu dans toute l’histoire de l’humanité. Les voyages et le commerce international ont permis l’épidémie, c’est grâce à eux que cette épidémie pourra éventuellement devenir un facteur de collaboration entre les nations et les gouvernements. Néanmoins, il y a quelque chose d’inquiétant, ou de terriblement naïf, à croire que l’unité du monde se fait, ou se fera, autour d’une épidémie (ou d’une pandémie, pour utiliser des termes plus techniques) et des réponses ‘‘politiques’’ que l’on est en train de donner. Si ces réponses ‘‘politiques’’ s’appellent mesures d’urgence (ou état d’exception), alors on peut déjà être certain a priori que cela ne constituera jamais l’unité de l’humanité.

Reflections on the Plague – Giorgio Agamben (en)

27/03/2020; first published here; italiano; francais; português;

The reflections that follow do not deal with the epidemic itself but with what we can learn from the reactions to it. They are, thus, reflections on the ease with which the whole of society has united in feeling itself afflicted by a plague, has isolated itself in its homes, and has suspended all normal conditions of life — work relationships, friendship, love, and even religious and political beliefs. Why were there no protests and no opposition, as was certainly possible and as is usual in these situations? The hypothesis that I would like to suggest is that somehow, albeit unconsciously, the plague was already present. Conditions of life had evidently become such that a sudden sign was all that it took for the situation to appear for what it was — intolerable, like a plague. In a certain sense, the only positive thing that might be gained from the present situation is this: it is possible that people will begin to ask themselves if the way in which they had previously been living was right.

We should also reflect upon the need for religion that this situation has made visible. This is indicated by the appearance of terminology from eschatology in the discourse of the media: the obsessive recurrence, above all in the American press, of the word “apocalypse” and other evocations of the end of the world. It is as if the need for religion, no longer finding any satisfaction in the Church, began gropingly to look for another place wherein it could consist, and found it in what has become the religion of our time: science. This, like any religion, can give rise to superstitions and fear — or at least can be used to spread them. Never before have we witnessed such a spectacle of diverse, contradictory opinions and prescriptions — typical of religion in periods of crisis — ranging from minority heretical positions denying the seriousness of the phenomenon (held by some prestigious scientists) up to the dominant orthodox position affirming it, and differing radically on how the situation should be handled. As always in these cases, there are some experts, or self-styled ones, who succeed in securing the favor of the monarchs who, as in the era of the religious disputes that once divided Christianity, side with one current or another according to their own interests and impose measures accordingly.

Another thing to think about is the obvious collapse of any conviction, or common faith. One could say say that men no longer believe in anything at all — except for bare biological existence which must be saved at any cost. But proceeding from the fear of losing one’s life can only result in tyranny, the monstrous Leviathan with his drawn sword.

Once the emergency, the plague, has been declared over — if it ever will— I do not believe that it will be possible to return to life as it was before, not for anyone who has maintained a modicum of clarity. And this is perhaps the greatest cause for despair (la cosa più disperante) — even if, as has been said, “Only for those who no longer have hope has hope been given.”*

*Walter Benjamin. The themes of despair/desperation and hope along with the same quote from Benjamin appear in “The Noonday Demon” in Stanzas.

Riflessioni sulla peste – Giorgio Agamben (it)

27/03/2020; pubblicato su questo sito; english; francais; português;

Le riflessioni che seguono non riguardano l’epidemia, ma ciò che possiamo capire dalle reazioni degli uomini ad essa. Si tratta, cioè, di riflettere sulla facilità con cui un’intera società ha accettato di sentirsi appestata, di isolarsi in casa e di sospendere le sue normali condizioni di vita, i suoi rapporti di lavoro, di amicizia, di amore e perfino le sue convinzioni religiose e politiche. Perché non ci sono state, come pure era possibile immaginare e come di solito avviene in questi casi, proteste e opposizioni? L’ipotesi che vorrei suggerire è che in qualche modo, sia pure inconsapevolmente, la peste c’era già, che, evidentemente, le condizioni di vita della gente erano diventate tali, che è bastato un segno improvviso perché esse apparissero per quello che erano – cioè intollerabili, come una peste appunto. E questo, in un certo senso, è il solo dato positivo che si possa trarre dalla situazione presente: è possibile che, più tardi, la gente cominci a chiedersi se il modo in cui viveva era giusto.

E ciò su cui occorre non meno riflettere è il bisogno di religione che la situazione fa apparire. Ne è indizio, nel discorso martellante dei media, la terminologia presa in prestito dal vocabolario escatologico che, per descrivere il fenomeno, ricorre ossessivamente, soprattutto sulla stampa americana, alla parola «apocalisse» e evoca, spesso esplicitamente, la fine del mondo. È come se il bisogno religioso, che la Chiesa non è più in grado di soddisfare, cercasse a tastoni un altro luogo in cui consistere e lo trovasse in quella che è ormai di fatto diventata la religione del nostro tempo: la scienza. Questa, come ogni religione, può produrre superstizione e paura o, comunque, essere usata per diffonderle. Mai come oggi si è assistito allo spettacolo, tipico delle religioni nei momenti di crisi, di pareri e prescrizioni diversi e contraddittori, che vanno dalla posizione eretica minoritaria (pure rappresentata da scienziati prestigiosi) di chi nega la gravità del fenomeno al discorso ortodosso dominante che l’afferma e, tuttavia, diverge spesso radicalmente quanto alle modalità di affrontarlo. E, come sempre in questi casi, alcuni esperti o sedicenti tali riescono ad assicurarsi il favore del monarca, che, come ai tempi delle dispute religiose che dividevano la cristianità, prende partito secondo i propri interessi per una corrente o per l’altra e impone le sue misure.

Un’altra cosa che dà da pensare è l’evidente crollo di ogni convinzione e fede comune. Si direbbe che gli uomini non credono più a nulla – tranne che alla nuda esistenza biologica che occorre a qualunque costo salvare. Ma sulla paura di perdere la vita si può fondare solo una tirannia, solo il mostruoso Leviatano con la sua spada sguainata. Per questo – una volta che l’emergenza, la peste, sarà dichiarata finita, se lo sarà – non credo che, almeno per chi ha conservato un minimo di lucidità, sarà possibile tornare a vivere come prima. E questa è forse oggi la cosa più disperante – anche se, com’è stato detto, «solo per chi non ha più speranza è stata data la speranza».

Nous révolutionnons désormais au tour d’une idée fixe

Eduardo Jochamowitz, 27/03/2020, Bruxelles;

« Parler de l’immédiat en termes immédiats, c’est faire un peu comme ces romanciers qui affublent les marionnettes qu’ils ont créées d’une imitation des passions d’autrefois comme de parures à bon marché et qui font agir leurs personnages, lesquels ne sont pourtant rien de plus que les rouages du mécanisme qu’ils ont mis au point, comme si ces personnages étaient en mesure d’agir en tant que sujets et comme si de leurs actions dépendait encore quelque chose ».

T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia.

En confinement depuis le 16 mars 2020. Le monde semble s’arrêter ou au moins un 1/7 du globe est chez soi. Après une réaction en chaine de peurs, les choses commencent à se calmer peu à peu et une question s’impose : quelle actualité sommes-nous en train de découvrir ? La réponse la plus immédiate : nous révolutionnons désormais au tour d’une idée fixe. Les bonnes sœurs fabriquent des masques, les voisins mettent en places des formes inconnues de solidarité, les individus se retrouvent seuls pour la première fois. Tout est à l’arrêt (les effets de la mondialisation) mais la vie singulière est piégée dans ce halte intempestif. La première semaine de la pandémie fut le chaos face à la machine à vapeur forcée à s’arrêter, maintenant ­nous sommes glissons sur un point mort, sur un élan matériel interrompu, coitus interruptus.

Quelle actualité d’ores et déjà ?  De façon négative ou régressive, celle qui voudrais capturer l’incertitude de l’avenir et de le reconduire dans un vocabulaire réconfortant : récession, crise économique, chute de PIB, renégociation des dettes, etc. Tous les effets inconnus seront traduits dans des projections bien connues et maitrisables ; aux citoyens revient la charge de payer la facture. D’autre part, un deuxième corps de réactions, positives et annonciatrices : tout est en train de changer, le monde sera autre après cette crise, la puissance de l’événement nous portera loin. Sur le terrain de l’incertitude l’illusion pousse bien. Mais quel est le point d’appui pour cet évangile ? Quelle ligne de fuite pourrait dépasser les dispositif réactif et protectionnistes que les états démocratiques mobilisent jour après jours ?

*

Combien de certitudes peuvent changer en deux semaines de crise ? Très peu (malheureusement ?). Je m’interroge sur ce mot d’ordre : tout est en train de changer/rien sera pareil après. Le moment de la crise, dans le vocabulaire des médecins de l’antiquité, voulait dire le moment définitif, soit de récupération, soit de dégénération de la santé d’un corps. La crise sanitaire a gardé ce sens-là, car la possibilité d’un système de santé collapsé est réelle.

Il faudrait peut-être essayer de préciser la notion d’actualité de notre époque en tant que crise, et le possible sens équivoque de la crise.

La modernité signifie, lorsqu’on fait l’histoire de la philosophie, une critique de la tradition, c’est-à-dire de la transmission de pratiques et dispositifs. Analytiquement, la modernité nous renvoie à une crise de la culture. Face à la tradition, gardienne de la stabilité, la critique serait une espèce de feu qui consomme et consume à la tradition. Le résultat serait notre l’actualité.

Mais je voudrais soutenir un point de vue différent : la modernité signifie une culture de crise. L’actualité de notre agir collectif est celle de la crise. Elle est l’habitat et l’horizon de notre humanité, c’est-à-dire de notre représentation du monde comme totalité. Cette thèse suppose donc que la modernité est l’époque où la crise passe à être l’état normal des choses. D’où le fait qu’aujourd’hui le monde retrouve son unité grâce à la représentation de la crise sanitaire, crise totale qui mobilise notre total attention.

Comment distinguer une crise de la culture d’une culture de la crise ? Notre forme de vie –comme une nouvelle forme de l’économie du mystère– est énormément réticente et résistante à la crise. Nous savons bien que la préservation et la continuation de nos modes de production, circulation et consommation sont vouées à s’effondrer. Personne s’en doute, mais nous continuons à hypothéquer l’avenir par un manque complet de pouvoir de décision, car l’impuissance de dire non à ce report de l’avenir est le signe distinctif de la crise transformée en actualité.

Mais la crise de nos gouvernements, la crise de l’emploi, la crise du capitalisme, la crise de notre mode de production sont-elles réelles ?

Les États sont en crise ? Les pandémies existent depuis toujours, la grippe espagnole est l’antéchrist à côté du covid19. Le fait d’être une culture de la crise (et non une culture en crise), le fait de finalement parvenir à l’unité du monde dans la pandémie, exige aux états une sorte de réponse qu’ils ne connaissaient pas. Chaque État est exigé de répondre non pas pour le nombre de malades/hospitalisés/morts, ils doivent répondre à la crise dans sa totalité : à la totalité de la planète en crise et à la peur d’une crise total. Leur réponse à la crise : bientôt tout ira bien.

Le capitalisme est en crise ? Difficilement, nous savons déjà que l’apparition d’une crise ne suppose pas une exception ou point aveugle dans son fonctionnement ; le capitalisme porte les conditions de la crise dans sa nature plus intime, comme un virus qui porte dans son ARN les instructions pour sa reproduction et propagation. Leur réponse à la crise : faire sortir du chapeau de milliards, billards ou de trillions, des chiffres qui excèdent à notre faculté de représentation.

« Tout est en train de changer/rien sera pareil après », cela veut dire que notre horizon et notre représentation du monde est en crise ? Au contraire, les critiques qui annoncent tout sorte de rupture nous rendent aveugles à la crise. Je garde cette conclusion de Abi Wilkinson : « Eventuellement, la crise actuelle passera, mais ce serait une énorme erreur si nous essayons de retourner à une ‘normalité’. (…) Que pouvons et devons nous faire différemment, maintenant que nous savons que faire les choses autrement est possible ? ».

« Eventually, the current crisis will pass, but it will be a huge mistake if we attempt to return to “normal.” The issues we’ve been forced to confront have lasting implications. Namely, if foundational economic principles must be abandoned when things get tough, does this system really serve our needs? If rapid, radical change is possible when circumstances demand it, what excuse is there for failing to act with similar urgency to prevent cataclysmic climate change? What can and should we do differently, now that we know doing things differently is possible? ». [1]

D’un coup on était en crise, tous les aspects de nos modes de production, circulation et consommation se sont vu menacés par…. un virus ? ou par notre incapacité de faire une véritable critique de nos modes de production, circulation et consommation ?

---

[1] https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-covid-19-capitalism-crisis-herd-immunity

This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It – Costas Lapavitsas (en)

27/03/2020; first published here;

The coronavirus shock has shaken the world’s stock markets, imposing the need for massive state bailouts. But the measures to deal with the crisis risk spurring an authoritarian controlled capitalism — one that protects corporate interests while offloading the costs onto the rest of us.

The COVID-19 public health emergency has rapidly turned into a crisis at the core of the world economy, which also threatens developing countries in the periphery. It has changed the balance between state and market, once again exposing the emptiness of neoliberal ideology. This economic crisis casts a harsh light on contemporary capitalism — and is likely to prove even more important than the blow to public health.

Indeed, this crisis has deeper roots, in the diseased workings of financialized and globalized capitalism over the past decade. The Great Crisis of 2007–9 brought an end to the 1990s-2000s “golden era” of finance, and the years that followed were marked by poor growth at the core of the world economy. Profitability was weak, productivity growth was low, and investment showed no dynamism at all. Finance was also in trouble, exhibiting lower profitability and none of the extraordinary dynamism of the previous decade. Where the historically unprecedented crisis of 2007–9 marked the peak of financialization, the equally novel coronavirus crisis crystallizes its deterioration.

Of course, the immediate spur for the crisis owed to nation-states’ actions faced with the epidemic. Having initially ignored the medical emergency, several states then frantically locked down entire countries and geographical areas, restricting travel, closing schools and universities, and so on. This hit hard the already weakened core economies by inducing a wholesale collapse of demand, disruption of supply chains, falling production, millions of worker layoffs and loss of corporate revenue. All this spurred an unprecedented nosedive of major stock markets and panic conditions in the money markets.

It is as if the Black Death of the fourteenth century had staged a return, and twenty-first century societies responded with a similar mix of blind fear and isolation of communities. Yet the plague killed a third of Europe’s population back when its states were poor and backward feudal monarchies. In contrast, the coronavirus appears to have a low mortality rate and has struck advanced capitalist states of peerless technological accomplishments. There is already an intense debate among epidemiologists on whether wholesale lockdown was an appropriate and sustainable response, or if states should instead have focused on intensive testing of the population.

It is not for political economists to assess epidemiological policies. But there is little doubt that several states’ reactions and the ensuing collapse of economic activity are of a piece with the fundamentally flawed nature of neoliberal financialized capitalism. An economic system based on competition and naked profit-seeking — both guaranteed by a powerful state — proved incapable of dealing calmly and effectively with a public health shock of unknown severity.

Several advanced countries lacked the basic health infrastructure to treat those who became seriously ill, while also being short of equipment to test the population on a large scale and to protect those most likely to catch the disease. The lockdown and wholesale isolation of huge sections of society are, moreover, likely to have very severe implications for wage workers as well as the poorest, the weakest, and the most marginal layers. The mental and psychological repercussions will also be devastating. The social organization of contemporary capitalism was shown to be dysfunctional even from an engineering point of view.

Equally striking, however, have been even powerful states’ actions after the magnitude of the unfolding economic collapse became clear. In March, the central banks of the United States, the European Union, and Japan engaged in massive liquidity injections and brought interest rates down to zero, attempting to stabilize stock markets and assuage the shortage of liquidity. The US Federal Reserve, for instance, announced that it would buy unlimited volumes of government bonds and even freshly issued private corporate bonds. Governments in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere, meanwhile, planned massive fiscal expansions, taking the form of loan and credit guarantees for companies, income subsidies for affected workers, tax deferrals, social security deferrals or subsidies, debt repayment holidays, and so on.

In an extraordinary move, the Trump administration announced plans to provide $1,200 per adult, or $2,400 per couple, with additional payments for children, starting with the poorest families. This disbursement was part of a package which could exceed $2 trillion — roughly 10 percent of US GDP — further providing $500 billion of loans to stricken businesses, $150 billion to hospitals and health care workers, and $370 billion of loans and grants to small and medium enterprises. In an equally extraordinary move, Britain’s Tory government declared its intention effectively to become the employer of last resort by paying up to 80 percent of workers’ salaries, if companies kept them on their payroll. These payments would be worth up to a maximum of £2,500 per month — just above the median income. Not content with this, the British government also effectively nationalized the railways for six months and there was talk of nationalizing airlines.

Just days earlier, even left-wing academics would have considered these measures to be radical. The shibboleths of the neoliberal ideology of the last four decades were rapidly swept aside, and the state emerged as the regulator of the economy commanding enormous power. It was not difficult for many on the Left to welcome such state action, thinking that it indicated the “return of Keynesianism” and the death knell of neoliberalism. But it would be rash to come to such conclusions.

For one thing, the nation-state has always been at the heart of neoliberal capitalism, guaranteeing the class rule of the dominant corporate and financial bloc through selective interventions at critical moments. Moreover, these interventions were accompanied by strongly authoritarian measures, shutting people inside their homes en masse and locking down enormous metropoles. The state has also demonstrated its vast power to police society by collecting information through big data. For instance, Israel’s right-wing government approved the tracking of cell phones by the security police with the aim of messaging people who had unwittingly come into contact with confirmed coronavirus patients. Not only do we know where you are, but we know better than you whom you have met.

This authoritarianism is fully in line with the dominant neoliberal ideology of the last four decades. State fiat is combined with the fragmentation of society as people are shut in their own homes and huge stress is placed on the “individual responsibility” to maintain social distancing. At the same time, large numbers of people are still required to go to work using public transport, while working rights are demolished, not least as layoffs rocket without concern for due process and as remote working destroys all limits to the working week.

It thus remains unclear what direction global capitalism will take as it reels under the shock of coronavirus — even as we still endure the long aftermath of the Great Crisis of 2007–9. The colossal power of the state and its ability to intervene in both economy and society could result, for instance, in a more authoritarian form of controlled capitalism in which the interests of the corporate and financial elite would be paramount. This demands that socialists assess carefully and critically the actions that states are taking to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

The Crisis So Far

The first step is to have a simple analytical summary of the course of the crisis so far. Crises are always highly concrete historical events reflecting the institutional development of capitalism. The major steps in the coronavirus crisis can be gleaned from a raft of (sometimes rapidly outdated) publications by multilateral organizations, the press, and elsewhere. Thus:

1. COVID-19 emerged in China in late 2019, but the response of the Chinese state was initially slow, which could perhaps be ascribed to lack of knowledge about the severity of the virus. However, other states were slow to respond even after the full eruption of the epidemic in China. Until early March 2020, for instance, the number of daily confirmed cases in the United Kingdom was in the low double digits. Yet even with the Chinese experience to draw on, the UK government did next to nothing.
2. Eventually the Chinese state locked down huge areas of the country, and other states followed with their own lockdowns, restricting the movement of hundreds of millions of people. Demand for tourism, air travel, hospitality, restaurants, and pubs, collapsed totally. Demand for food, clothing, household goods, and so on, was also significantly affected, although the overall impact is still unclear. The uncertainty created by the retreat of consumption inevitably hit investment plans but, again, it is impossible to assess the overall impact at this early stage.
3. The lockdown and the restricted movement of workers severely disrupted supply chains, initially in China, which provides a large volume of production inputs across the world, and then in other parts of Asia, Europe, and the United States. Together with the blow to demand, this led to the curtailing of production.
4. Falling production, shrinking demand, and growing uncertainty destroyed company revenues. A wave of bankruptcies loomed. The jobs of millions of workers came under threat, especially in the service sector, and millions were laid off in March. Loss of employment worsened consumption and further undermined production. As revenues declined, enterprises became less able to pay their debts, trade credit vanished, and by mid-March liquidity (that is, hard cash) was at a premium. The crisis acquired a severe credit dimension, further compounding the effect on production and output.
5. A taste of the potential economic devastation can be gained from China. According to official statistics, value added in production in January and February dropped by 13.5 percent compared to the same period in 2019 (manufacturing declining by 15.7 percent). Moreover, investment, exports, and imports fell by, respectively, 24.5, 15.9, and 2.4 percent. The Chinese contraction alone would have had a severe impact on the world economy. With many other core countries in effective lockdown, the fallout will be huge, particularly in sectors like airlines and tourism.
6. The repercussions on working people will be shattering. Especially vulnerable are the sections weakened by years of neoliberal policies, for instance, those on flexible contracts, informal workers, and the self-employed. Also vulnerable are highly indebted workers (or those with no savings) who have limited access to benefits and public services. Women will probably be affected worse because they are overrepresented in those groups but also because of the increased care work that comes with health distress, children not going to school, and so on.
7. Global conditions worsened further as the crisis triggered a gigantic stock-market collapse. For years the main stock markets across the world had been greatly inflated, and the risk of a severe crisis became apparent already in 2018. The coronavirus shock led to a spectacular fall of more than one-third from February to March. The result was a dramatic tightening of liquidity that spurred a money-market crisis in the United States, the center of world finance, by mid-March. The shock had morphed into a full-blown capitalist crisis.
8. As fear gripped world markets, the flow of capital across borders, especially from the core to the periphery of the world economy, was also affected. Existing evidence does not allow for firm conclusions, but there is a distinct possibility of a “sudden stop” that would make developing countries unable to pay for imports and service debts, thus raising the prospect of currency crises. Amidst the turmoil, an unfolding price war among oil producers brought the price of Brent crude down by roughly 50 percent from late February to late March. This gigantic fall directly threatened the viability of a raft of producers across the world, including in the US fracking industry.

This chain of crisis phenomena makes analytical sense only within the aftermath of the Great Crisis of 2007–9. In the wake of that crisis, financialized capitalism lost dynamism in core countries, though it continued in subordinate form in developing countries. Our estimates based on World Bank data suggest that average growth rates in 2010–19 were at their lowest for forty years: 1.4 percent in Japan, 1.8 percent in the European Union, 2.5 percent in the United States, and 8.5 percent in China (where growth weakened strikingly in the second half of the decade). These rates point to the exhaustion of the driving forces of capitalist accumulation particularly during the last decade. To gain insight into the deeper roots of the crisis, therefore, it suffices to consider some key aspects of the performance of the US economy — the mother lode of globalization and financialization.

Weak Accumulation

The simplest way to sum up the underlying performance of US capitalism is to consider the profit rate of nonfinancial enterprises, shown in Figure 1:

Fig. 1   Profit rate of nonfinancial enterprises, US, 1980–2018

Source: Author calculations; BEA, NIPA data.

The trajectory of the profit rate was strongly cyclical and broadly in line with the overall fluctuations of the US economy. After the Great Crisis of 2007–9, the profit rate recovered weakly, peaking in 2014, and then declining. Clearly, the coronavirus shock hit the US economy at a time when it was already weak, and accumulation showed signs of exhaustion. The underlying weakness is also apparent from a variety of other data. Thus, after 2007–9, labor productivity grew at barely 1 percent per annum; investment remained flat and low at around 18 percent of GDP; and the real capital stock shrunk.

Instructive, here, is a comparison with China, the world’s second-largest economy. After the 2007–9 crisis the estimated average profit rate in China rose for several years but began to decline in 2014. The underlying weakness of accumulation also appears in other data, though China’s performance remained substantially stronger than that of the United States. Thus, after 2007–9, labor productivity rose at around 7–8 percent per annum, investment was broadly flat at 45 percent of GDP, and industrial-capacity utilization fell rapidly. The coronavirus hit the Chinese economy at one of its weakest moments since the start of its capitalist transformation.

Comparison with the European Union, which is collectively larger than China but smaller than the United States, adds further insight. After 2007–9 productivity growth was worse than in the United States, particularly for states in the European Monetary Union (EMU), with the leading countries hovering below 1 percent per annum (Poland, which is not in the EMU, stood out with productivity growth above 3 percent). Industrial production increased substantially in Germany, despite its weak productivity growth, as capitalists continued to take advantage of the competitive edge gained from a long period of wage suppression. However, in 2019 it fell, revealing Germany’s underlying weakness.

The European Union, weighed down by the austerity framework of the euro, was lodged in stagnation during the last decade. During the same period a new industrial complex began to emerge in Eastern Europe, as in Poland, closely associated with German industry. The labor share of GDP remained stagnant as capital defended its interests, except for Germany, where wage growth was significant for the first time in decades. Given the absence of sustained productivity growth, German competitiveness declined. All in all, coronavirus has thus hit the European Union at a time of great economic weakness.

The roots of the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus lie in the weakening of capitalist accumulation in the preceding period, which is evident in the United States, China, and the European Union. The impact of the crisis will, moreover, probably be very different in these economies because of their different structures. China has become the workshop of the world, with value added in manufacturing accounting for roughly 30 percent of GDP — the corresponding figure for the United States is just over 10 percent. Value added in services has risen substantially in China as the economy has become more mature, but it is still only at 50 percent of GDP, while in the United States it is above 75 percent. Since the shock of the lockdown falls disproportionately on services, it is likely that the United States will be worse affected than China, at least in the first instance.

The same holds broadly for the European Union, whose economy is heavily based on services, particularly in southern-periphery countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece which have weak industry and are dependent on tourism. The shock will probably be even greater for Italy, which has been stagnant for two decades, and since 2010 never far from defaulting on its debt. The EU leadership are thus right to perceive the coronavirus crisis as an existential threat. That is the reason for the European Central Bank’s (ECB) massive intervention, but also the actions of several nation-states, whose crisis expenditure has in practice lifted the iron cage of austerity over Europe.

The Travails of Finance

The weakness of financialized capitalism in the United States can be further gauged by considering the profit rate of US commercial banks in Fig. 2:

Fig. 2 Rate of profit of commercial banks (return on equity), US, 1980–2018

Source: Author calculations; FDIC data.

The profitability of US commercial banks — the pivot of the financial system — reached historic highs from the early 1990s until shortly before the crisis of 2007–9. This was the “golden era” of US financialization. Two factors explain the banks’ exceptional profits: first, their ability to secure a sizeable spread between the interest rate on loans and the interest rate on deposits, and second, their ability to earn large fees and commissions by mediating financial transactions among enterprises, households, and other financial firms. After 2007–9, bank profitability never reached the same heights. This was because the Federal Reserve drove interest rates close to zero, thus compressing bank spreads, and also because income from fees and comissions declined as the volume of financial transactions declined. Bank profitability had a brief spurt in 2018 but that was mostly due to the Federal Reserve gently raising interest rates in 2017–8.

Further light can be cast on the decade after 2007–9 by considering the trajectory of debt in the United States in Fig. 3, split into the debt of i) nonfinancial enterprises, ii) households, iii) government, and iv) domestic financial enterprises, all relative to GDP:

Fig. 3 US Sectoral Debt to GDP

Source: Author calculations; St Louis FRED data.

US private debt (in proportion to GDP) fell after 2007–9, contrary to much breathless commentary about a “debt explosion.” Mortgage debt declined substantially as households were badly hit during the Great Crisis. Debt among domestic financial enterprises also declined, thus leaving less scope for banks to earn fees and commissions. In contrast, the debt of nonfinancial corporations began to rise in 2015, eventually exceeding its previous peak before the Great Crisis. The rise in corporate debt has facilitated the survival of a multitude of weak enterprises with low profitability which are very vulnerable to shocks. These “zombie firms” were estimated in 2017 to represent 12 percent of all companies in fourteen developed economies. It remains to be seen how the coronavirus crisis will affect their ability to service their debts, bearing in mind that zero interest rates bring down servicing costs.

The real increase during this period, however, was in state debt, leaving the US government more indebted than at any time since World War II. Financialization after the Great Crisis, insofar as it showed any dynamism at all, became a process of exploding state indebtedness that was also connected to enterprise indebtedness in open financial markets — including the stock market.

The Role of the State and the Bursting of the Stock Bubble

After the Great Crisis, the US government stepped into the breach and used its massive strength to defend financialized and globalized capitalism. Above all, it run a large fiscal deficit throughout the decade — but especially in 2009–2012 and again in 2018–19 — thus supporting GDP growth, while enormously increasing its debt. The rise in public debt made it possible for the Federal Reserve to sustain a tremendous bout of money creation, while keeping interest rates close to zero. The money supply (M3) increased from 50 percent of GDP in 2007 to 70 percent in 2017–19.

Low-interest rates and abundant liquidity allowed non-financial enterprises to borrow cheaply in open markets and engage in the classic financialization game of “share buy-backs,” securing high profits for shareholders and pushing up stock prices. With money easily available, other stock-market operators, above all, Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and Hedge Funds, also expanded their activities. The result was a sustained and gradual rise in the stock market, with the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) index rising from 735 in February 2009 to 3,337 in February 2020. In short, after 2007–9, the US state’s intervention to buttress financialized capitalism led to a stock-market bubble that bore no relation to the underlying weakness of profitability, growth rates, productivity growth, and so on.

All this makes the financial shock caused by coronavirus easier to understand. It was apparent already in 2017–18 that the stock-market bubble would not last, as the Fed began to raise interest rates slowly above zero, attempting to retrieve more normal conditions in financial markets. In December 2018 the S&P index collapsed briefly to 2,416, but the Fed rapidly reversed the increase in interest rates, and the bubble resumed. For reasons already explained, however, the coronavirus struck a blow of a quite different order and the stock market collapsed spectacularly, dropping to 2,237 on March 23 2020. The Trump administration’s subsequent announcement of a huge fiscal intervention led the S&P to bounce back, though volatility remains very high.

The stock-market collapse revealed further speculative operations that dramatically worsened conditions in the financial markets.[1] Plummeting prices put enormous pressure on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and Investment Funds, forcing them to seek hard cash to meet their obligations. It then transpired that speculative chains had been set up whereby these Funds borrowed in the repo market (the main market for liquidity among financial institutions) by selling US Treasury Bills and then used the money to buy Treasury Bills in the futures markets, thus profiting from minor price discrepancies. The sums were huge. As stock prices collapsed, the Funds sold Treasury Bills increasingly desperately, and in effect drove up interest rates.

The Federal Reserve was thus confronted with the bizarre situation of a rapidly developing shortage of liquidity and rising interest rates in money markets, even though the US economy had been flooded with dollars for more than a decade. Capitalist absurdity has rarely been more vividly demonstrated. The Fed had to intervene urgently by promising to buy unlimited volumes of public bonds and even private bonds, thus further increasing the supply of money. Its massive intervention was soon matched by the equally massive fiscal package of the US government. Once again, the US state put props under collapsing financialized capitalism.

It is important, in this connection, to note the difference between the USA and the EU. The Commission has tacitly allowed member states to ignore the Stability and Growth Pact, while the ECB has abandoned its bond buying rules in an effort to avoid an Italian default, which would immediately catalyze a new crisis for the euro. These are important actions which have allowed EU nation-states to operate without unnecessary hindrances. But there has not been any coordinated fiscal intervention by EU institutions that is remotely comparable to the USA, or even the UK.

In effect, the crisis has forced the EU to engage in economic policy that side-steps its own rule book. Nation-states have been doing the running so far, with very little cooperation or mutual discipline. The long-standing problem of conflicts and hierarchy among them has not gone away, and that is why proposals to issue EU “coronabonds” to fund fiscal expenditure are meeting with strong resistance. If money is to be made available to stricken states, it might be through the European Stability Mechanism, with various conditions attached. There is simply no comparison with the response by the US state.

What Next?

The coronavirus crisis represents a critical moment in the development of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, the crisis has longer to run — and its full impact on the USA, the EU, China, Japan and developing countries remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that it has posed the threat of a massive depression across the world economy. The systemic failures of financialization and globalization were starkly revealed by the public health emergency, and the state has become ever more implicated in sustaining this failing system. However, the character of its interventions give no reason to think that there will be a transformation at the top of the political and social hierarchy resulting in policies that favor the interests of working people.

The US government’s decision massively to augment its deficit — and thus its borrowing — while simultaneously expanding the supply of money and driving interest rates to zero, is essentially the same as after 2007–9. Even if a depression is avoided, the medium-term results are also likely to be the same, since the underlying weakness of capitalist accumulation is not confronted. But there will certainly be political contradictions arising from defending the neoliberal order, not least given the demonstration of nation states’ power to intervene in the economy. These will be particularly important in the EU, where the fiscal and health-emergency response to the crisis has so far come from individual nation-states rather than the collective institutions.

Casting a harsh light on the inadequacies of neoliberal capitalism, this crisis has directly posed the issue of democratic reorganization of both economy and society in the interests of workers.  There is an urgent need to confront the chaos of globalization and financialization by putting forth concrete radical proposals. That also requires forms of organization capable of altering the social and political balance in favor of working people.

The pandemic has brought to the fore vital issues of social transformation.   It has vividly illustrated the imperative of having a public health system that is rationally organized and capable of dealing with epidemic shocks. It has also posed the urgent need for solidarity, communal action, and public policies to support workers and the poorest faced with lockdowns, unemployment, and economic collapse.

More broadly, it has reasserted the historic need to confront a declining system that is locked in its own absurdities. Unable rationally to transform itself, globalized and financialized capitalism instead keeps resorting to ever-greater doses of the same, disastrous, palliatives. The first requirement, in this respect, is to defend democratic rights from a threatening state and insist that working people have a powerful say in all decision making. Only on this basis could radical alternatives be proposed, including large-scale measures such as designing industrial policy to address the weakness of production, facilitating a green transition, dealing with income and wealth inequalities, and confronting financialization by creating public financial institutions. The coronavirus crisis has already transformed the terms of political struggle — and socialists must urgently respond.

Réflexions sur la peste – Giorgio Agamben (fr)

27/03/2020; italiano; english; português;

Les réflexions qui suivent ne portent pas sur l’épidémie, mais sur ce que nous pouvons comprendre à partir des réactions des hommes à celle-ci. C’est-à-dire qu’il s’agit de réfléchir sur la facilité avec laquelle une société entière a accepté de se sentir pestiférée, de s’isoler à la maison et de suspendre ses conditions vie normales, ses relations de travail, d’amitié, d’amour et même ses convictions religieuses et politiques. Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas eu, tel qu’il était pourtant possible d’imaginer et comme souvent il arrive dans ces cas, des protestations et des oppositions ? L’hypothèse que je voudrais suggérer est que d’une certaine manière, fût-il inconsciemment, la peste y était déjà, que, évidemment, les conditions de vie des gens étaient devenues telles qu’un signe soudain a été suffisant pour que celles-ci apparaissent telles qu’elles étaient – à savoir intolérables, comme une peste, précisément. Et celle-ci, dans un certain sens, est l’unique donnée positive que l’on puisse retirer de la situation présente : il est possible que, plus tard, les gens commencent à se demander si la manière dont ils vivaient était juste.

Et ce sur quoi il ne faut pas moins réfléchir est le besoin de religion que la situation fait apparaître. L’indice, dans le discours répété des média, en est la terminologie empruntée au vocabulaire eschatologique qui, pour décrire le phénomène, a obsessionnellement recours, surtout dans la presse américaine, au mot « apocalypse » et évoque, souvent de manière explicite, la fin du monde. C’est comme si le besoin religieux, que l’Église n’est plus en mesure de satisfaire, cherchait à tâtons un autre endroit où se tenir et le trouvait dans celle qui désormais est devenue de fait la religion de notre temps : la science. Celle-ci, comme toute religion, peut produire de la superstition et de la peur ou, en tout cas, être utilisée pour les propager. Jamais comme aujourd’hui on a assisté au spectacle, typique des religions dans les moments de crise, d’avis et prescriptions différents et contradictoires, qui vont de la position hérétique minoritaire (quoique représentée par des scientifiques prestigieux) de ceux qui nient la gravité du phénomène au discours orthodoxe dominant qui l’affirme et, néanmoins, diverge souvent radicalement quant aux modalités de l’affronter. Et comme toujours dans ces cas, quelques experts ou qui se disent tels réussissent à s’attirer les bonnes grâces du monarque, qui, comme aux temps des disputes religieuses qui divisaient la chrétienté, prend parti selon ses propres intérêts pour un courant ou l’autre et impose ses mesures.

Un autre chose qui donne à penser est l’écroulement évident de toute conviction et foi communes. On dirait que les hommes ne croient plus en rien – à l’exception de
l’existence biologique dans sa nudité [nuda esistenza biologica] qu’il faut à tout prix sauver. Mais sur la peur de perdre la vie on ne peut fonder qu’une tyrannie, que le monstrueux Léviathan avec son épée dégainée. Pour cela – une fois que l’urgence, la peste, sera déclarée finie, si elle l’est – je ne crois pas qu’il sera possible, du moins pour qui a conservé un minimum de lucidité, de vivre à nouveau comme avant. Et telle est peut-être aujourd’hui la chose la plus désespérante – même si, comme on a dit, « seulement pour les désespérés nous a été donné l’espoir ».

Traduction de Nelson Lerias

Reflexões sobre a peste – Giorgio Agamben (pt)

27/03/2020; italiano; english; francais;

As reflexões que se seguem não dizem respeito à epidemia, mas ao que podemos compreender a partir das reacções dos homens a esta. Trata-se, pois, de reflectir sobre a facilidade com a qual uma sociedade inteira aceitou sentir-se pestífera, isolar-se em casa e suspender as suas condições de vida normais, as suas relações de trabalho, de amizade, de amor e até as suas convicções religiosas e políticas. Porque é que não houve, como no entanto era possível imaginar e como de costume acontence nestes casos, protestos e oposições? A hipótese que gostaria de sugerir é que de certo modo, mesmo que seja inconscientemente, a peste já aqui estava, que, evidentemente, as condições de vida das pessoas tinham-se tornado tais que bastou um sinal súbito para que essas aparecessem tal como eram – isto é, intoleráveis, como uma peste, precisamente. E este, num certo sentido, é o único dado positivo que se possa tirar da situação presente: é possível que, mais tarde, as pessoas comecem a perguntar-se se o modo em que viviam era justo.
E aquilo sobre o qual não é menos preciso reflectir é a necessiade de religião que a situação faz aparecer. É disso indício, no discurso martelante dos media, a terminologia tomada de empréstimo ao vocabulário escatológico que, para descrever o fenómeno, recorre obsessivamente, sobretudo na imprensa americana, à palavra «apocalipse» e evoca, muitas vezes explicitamente, o fim do mundo. É como se a necessidade religiosa, que a Igreja já não está em condicões de satisfazer, procurasse às apalpadelas um outro lugar onde se constituir e o encontrasse naquela que agora se tornou de facto a religião do nosso tempo: a ciência. Esta, como todas as religiões, pode produzir superstição e medo ou, pelo menos, ser usada para difundi-los. Nunca como hoje se assistiu ao espectáculo, típico das religiões nos momentos de crise, de pareceres e prescrições diversos e contraditórios, que vão desde a posição herética minoritária (embora representada por cientistas prestigiosos) de quem nega a gravidade do fenómeno ao discurso ortodoxo dominante que a afirma e no entanto diverge muitas vezes radicalmente quanto às maneiras de afrontá-lo. E, como sempre nestes casos, alguns peritos, ou que tais se dizem, conseguem cair nas boas graças do monarca, que, como nos tempos das disputas religiosas que dividiam a cristandade, toma partido segundo o seus próprios interesses por uma corrente ou pela outra e impõe as suas medidas.
Uma outra coisa que dá que pensar é a derrocada evidente de toda a convicção e de toda a fé comuns. Dir-se-ia que os homens já não acreditam em nada – excepto na nua
existência biológica que é preciso salvar a qualquer custo. Mas com base no medo de perder a vida pode fundar-se apenas uma tirania, apenas o monstruoso Leviatã com a sua espada desembainhada. Por isso – uma vez que a emergência, a peste, for declarada finda, se o for – não creio que, pelo menos para quem conservou um mínimo de lucidez, seja possível voltar a viver como antes. E isto talvez seja hoje o mais desesperante – mesmo se, como foi dito, «só para quem já não tem esperança foi dada a esperança».
Tradução de Nelson Lérias Pereira Marques

Communovirus – Jean Luc Nancy (en)

27/03/2020; first published here; version francais ici;

An Indian friend of mine tells me that back home they talk about the ‘communovirus’. How could we not have thought of that already? It’s so obvious! And what an admirable and complete ambivalence: a virus coming from communism, a virus that communizes us. That is much more fertile than the derisory ‘corona’, which evokes old monarchical or imperial histories. And ‘communo’ is good for dethroning ‘corona’, if not decapitating it.

This is what it seems to be doing in its first meaning, since it comes from the largest country in the world whose regime is officially communist. It is not just officially so: as President Xi Jinping has said, its management of the viral epidemic demonstrates the superiority of the ‘socialist system with Chinese characteristics’. Though communism consists essentially in the abolition of private property, Chinese communism has consisted, for many years now, in a careful combination of collective (or state) property and private property (apart from land ownership). [1]

As we know, this combination has led to remarkable growth in China’s economic and technical capacities and its global role. It is still too soon to know how to designate the society produced by this combination: in what sense is it communist and in what sense has it introduced the virus of individual competition, even its ultraliberal extreme? For the time being, the Covid-19 virus has enabled China to demonstrate the effectiveness of the collective and state aspect of its system. This effectiveness has proved itself to the point that China is now coming to the aid of Italy and France.

Of course, there is no shortage of comments on the enhanced authoritarian power that the Chinese state is currently enjoying. In fact, it is just as if the virus appeared at the right time to shore up official communism. What is irksome is that in this way the meaning of the word ‘communism’ gets ever more blurred – and it was already uncertain.

Marx wrote very precisely that private property had meant the disappearance of collective property, and that both would be replaced in due course by what he called ‘individual property’. By this he did not mean goods owned individually (i.e. private property), but the possibility for individuals to become properly themselves. One could say: to realize themselves. Marx did not have the time or means to take this line of thought further. But we can at least recognize that it already opens up a convincing – if very indeterminate – perspective on a ‘communist’ proposal. ‘To realize oneself’ does not mean acquiring material or symbolic goods: it means becoming real, effective, existing in a unique way.

We need then to dwell on the second meaning of ‘communovirus’. In fact, the virus actually does communize us. It essentially puts us on a basis of equality, bringing us together in the need to make a common stand. That this has to involve the isolation of each of us is simply a paradoxical way of experiencing our community. We can only be unique together. This is what makes for our most intimate community: the shared sense of our uniquenesses.

Today, and in every way, we are reminded of our togetherness, interdependence and solidarity. Testimonies and initiatives in this sense are coming from all sides. If we add to this the decline in air pollution due to the reduction of transport and industry, some people already anticipate with delight the overthrow of techno-capitalism. We should not scoff at this fragile euphoria, rather ask ourselves how far we can better understand the nature of our community.

Solidarity is called for and activated on a large scale, but the overall media landscape is dominated by the expectation of state welfare – which Emmanuel Macron took the opportunity to celebrate. Instead of confining ourselves, we feel confined primarily by force, even if for the sake of our own welfare. We experience isolation as a deprivation, even when it is a protection.

In a way, this is an excellent catch-up session: it is true that we are not solitary animals. It is true that we need to meet up, have a drink and visit. Besides, the sudden rise in phone calls, emails and other social flows shows a pressing need, a fear of losing contact.

Does this mean we are in a better position to reflect on this community? The problem is that the virus is still its main representative; that between the surveillance model and the welfare model, only the virus remains as a common property.

If this is the case, we will make no progress in understanding what transcending both collective and private property could mean. That is to say, transcending both property in general and what it designates in terms of the possession of an object by a subject. The characteristic of the ‘individual’, to speak as Marx did, is to be incomparable, incommensurable and unassimilable – even to themselves. It is not to possess ‘goods’. It is to be a unique, exclusive possibility of realization, whose exclusive uniqueness is realized, by definition, only between all and with all – also against all or in spite of all, but always in relation and exchange (communication). This is a ‘value’ that is neither one of the general equivalent (money) nor, therefore, one of an extorted ‘surplus-value’, but a value that cannot be measured in any way.

Are we capable of thinking in such a difficult – and even dizzying – fashion? It is good that the ‘communovirus’ forces us to ask ourselves this question. For it is only on this condition that it is worthwhile, in the end, working to eliminate it. Otherwise we will end up back at the starting point. We will be relieved, but should be prepared for other pandemics.

[1] The published text has here ‘individual property’, which seems accidental in view of the author’s use of the term below [Translator].

Philosophy in times of crisis – Nuno Venturinha (en)

26/03/2020; first published on this page;

In recent weeks we have been confronted with an absolutely exceptional situation. When the first cases of the new coronavirus, baptised SARS-CoV-2, were identified in China at the end of 2019, few expected that it would spread through the world so quickly. The Chinese authorities acted swiftly and imposed severe restrictions on people living in the city of Wuhan – which has a population greater than that of Portugal – and on the province of Hubei – with a population almost as large as Italy. Restrictions were also put in place in other parts of the country. As this was occurring, the Western world looked on, undaunted and passive, without seriously considering adopting extraordinary preventative measures such as impeding the circulation of travellers from that part of the world. After all, we have to keep the global economic machine running. But the crisis is showing that the global character of our time, the connectivity we cherish, is not limited to instant communication, online business or massive tourism driven by low cost airlines and local accommodation just a click away. Like the butterfly effect, the suggestive image used by Lorenz in propounding chaos theory, the new strain of coronavirus is thought to have begun with a person tasting a pangolin infected by bat droppings sold at a Wuhan market and then rapidly spread throughout the world.

As the virus advanced beyond China’s borders the governments most exposed to the contagion took up different stances. In South Korea and Japan there were appeals to the spirit of sacrifice of their populations, who for the most part obeyed and endeavoured to avoid the worst. To date, according to the World Health Organization [1], South Korea has recorded 9,137 cases, of which 126 have resulted in death. In Japan, the number of cases stands at 1,193, with the death toll at 43. The Chinese themselves, despite reaching 81,848 cases and 3,287 deaths, seem to have managed to stop the spread of the disease, reporting few or zero domestic cases for several days. In other parts of the world things went differently, as might be expected. It is not easy to change mentalities, especially when it comes to losing liberties.

As things stand right now Italians, Americans, Spaniards and Germans appear just behind the Chinese in terms of confirmed cases. A table in which no one is proud of occupying the top positions. Italy has so far had 69,176 cases and 6,820 deaths, more than double the number in China. The United States is in third place, having recorded 51,914 cases, which have already resulted in 673 deaths. Spain is in fourth place, with 39,673 cases and 2,696 deaths. Germany is in fifth, with 31,554 cases and 149 deaths. These four countries, taken together, have so far had more than twice as many cases as in China and more than three times as many deaths. The comparison is more shocking when one considers that the Chinese population is about 1.4 billion, compared to a total of 515 million in Italy, the US, Spain, and Germany. Globally – and the numbers climb with each passing day – there are already over 414,000 infections and more than 18,000 people have lost their lives.

The recognition that this was a pandemic necessarily required exceptional political measures. Although some have been slow to react, governments have faced up to this silent enemy as if it were a war. Declarations of states of emergency, with the inevitable suspensions of rights and freedoms we are used to, have been put into place in many democracies for the first time. Commercial and industrial activities considered non-essential have been stopped. Schools and universities have been closed, and face-to-face teaching has been replaced by virtual classes and other forms of distance learning. Millions of people have been placed in social isolation. If these measures are already serious in the immediate future, the seriousness of government resolutions becomes even greater when one realises – and one does not have to be a finance wizard to comprehend this – the economic impact they will have. Such decisions were not taken lightly. Few political times have been as bad to govern as the one we are in. When the health storm passes and the economic dust settles, voters will remember above all who launched them into a crisis that will certainly be more violent than that of 2008.

In addition to exceptional political measures, this pandemic has also required the joint efforts of various people in the social sphere, namely that each one should continue their work in such adverse circumstances, supporting the others. Doctors and other health professionals have been asked to fight the disease on the front line. But their effort would be in vain if the production and transport of basic necessities, as well as their trade, did not continue, or if there was no one who ensured the collection of domestic waste, telecommunications, policing the streets, etc. etc. Today there are those who, from their homes, applaud doctors and nurses, but those who with tenacity and without all but the most basic protection continue their work in a supermarket or in a garbage truck also deserve such praise. We are all needed, that is the lesson.

I am not a politician, or an ambulance driver, doctor, health technician or nurse. Nor am I a baker, businessman, butcher, driver or fisherman. I don’t collect rubbish, work in telecommunications, or in the security forces. I am a professor of philosophy at a university. Since its closure, I have been teaching my classes virtually and maintaining my usual research activity. A philosopher does not need much to do what he does, which is to observe what is going on around him, reflect on it and write. I am convinced that the pandemic could allow us to think about a more sustainable society and provide us with an opportunity to reassess many of our practices. This is what, in my opinion, should be expected of philosophy in times of crisis: a constructive contribution, which can help us all to have a better life. If philosophers do not put their thinking at the service of society, in line with the challenges of the moment, it will serve only to please themselves and the restricted circles surrounding them.

But this is not the way all philosophers think about philosophy’s role. In a series of texts published on the website of the publisher Quodlibet, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben interprets what is happening in a very idiosyncratic manner. His first text concerning the spread of coronavirus was entitled “The invention of an epidemic” (L’invenzione di un’epidemia) and dates from 26^th February 2020 [2]. On that day, according to the WHO [3], there were already 322 identified cases and 11 deaths in Italy, in addition to 78,191 cases in China, with 2,718 associated deaths. However, this world-famous thinker had no shame in devaluing the situation, speaking of a “supposed epidemic” and accusing the media and the Italian government of “spreading a climate of panic, causing a real state of exception”, something that results in a “real militarisation”, which Agamben envisioned would soon encompass the entire country. According to him, worse than the attempt made by the state to remove citizen’s rights and freedoms was the fact that nowadays “the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security”. You might think, “it was February 26^th and there were not that many cases or deaths, and so maybe Agamben wasn’t seeing how serious the problem was and it really makes sense, in the context of contemporary Italian and European politics, to be alert for any authoritarianism”. Indeed, even with Matteo Salvini out of the government, some caution is needed.

However, let us consider the second text that Agamben published on this topic, entitled “Contagion” (Contagio), on 11^th March 2020 [4]. On this day, the WHO recorded [5], in addition to 80,955 cases and 3,162 deaths in China, the following figures from Italy: 10,149 cases and 631 deaths. It is no small thing, let’s face it. And what does this philosopher say to us? He draws our attention again to a “panic that they seek to spread by all means in Italy”, lamenting the distance that we must keep from other, including our family, as well as the closure of educational institutions and the adoption of virtual teaching, something, in his opinion, long sought by the politicians who govern us. In the same sort of way he raises the suspicion that the government’s determination that “we stop getting together and talking for political or cultural reasons” and limiting it to sending “digital messages”, is in line with a desire that our leaders have had to replace what is characteristic of human labour with the work of the machine. Is it credible to imagine that floating around in the head of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, grappling with absolute chaos in his health care system, was the idea that this was a good opportunity to prevent people like Agamben from meeting and talking about politics or culture? Is it imaginable that people from different political backgrounds such as Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, António Costa, Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias, have conjured up this cunning plan with Conte?

Let us look at the last text, entitled “Clarifications” (Chiarimenti), dated 17^th March 2020 [6]. While China, according to WHO [7], recorded on that day 81,116 cases and 3,231 deaths, in Italy the numbers rose to 27,980 cases and 2,503 deaths. Just prior to the publication of Agamben’s last article, on 16^th of March, Paolo Flores d’Arcais published an article in the magazine MicroMega with the title “Philosophy and virus: the delusions of Giorgio Agamben” (Philosophy and virus: le farneticazioni di Giorgio Agamben) [8], and so one could expect that these “Clarifications” would clear up any misunderstandings. However, in the article we are again confronted with the idea of a “wave of panic that paralyzed the country” and with criticism of his compatriots for being “willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships, affections and religious and political convictions in the face of the danger of becoming ill”. Italians have forgotten their roots and have therefore given themselves up to “survival”. The greatest danger we face, according to Agamben, is not the virus but dehumanization and the possible loss of our “free society”. And Agamben concludes by repeating claims from “Contagion”: that it is possible that when all this is over, political leaders will try to keep educational institutions closed and that “we will only take classes online”; that “we once and for all stop getting together and talking for political or cultural reasons”, limiting our communication to “digital messages”; and that, when the right moment arises, what is specific to the human will be transferred to the machine.

It is very interesting that Agamben places so much emphasis on what he already believes to be a sign of dehumanized man, that acceptance of “a purely biological condition”, and that in his appeal to the affective side, which undoubtedly marks our nature, he does not have a single point to make about the thousands of lives that this virus has already taken away. It is very interesting that Agamben draws so much attention to the dehumanizing distancing from those close to us and that he does not have a single word for health professionals who, endangering their own lives, for hours on end struggle to save those who they may well not know at all. It is very interesting that Agamben is so concerned with the current restrictions on face-to-face classes and meetings of a political and cultural nature without, however, showing signs of understanding that, at this conjuncture, which can only be compared with the two great wars, what matters is that there is food in supermarkets, that there is water, electricity, telecommunications, that there is security, that there is garbage collection. What Western society does not need is philosophers who present themselves as enfants terribles, ready to question any order for the sake of a libertarian ideal that, if followed, would lead us to the civilizational abyss. That the threat of this abyss hangs over us is evident. But the answer to environmental, macroeconomic or epidemiological problems cannot come from a paranoid distrust of our governments. In times of crisis, philosophy, like any other human activity, must be at the service of the solution and cannot irresponsibly contribute to amplifying the problem.

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200325-sitrep-65-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=2b74edd8_2

[2] https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia

[3] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200226-sitrep-37-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=2146841e_2

[4] https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-contagio

[5] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200311-sitrep-51-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=1ba62e57_10

[6] https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-chiarimenti

[7] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200317-sitrep-57-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=a26922f2_4

[8] http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/filosofia-e-virus-le-farneticazioni-di-giorgio-agamben/

Courir après le jour ou la poursuite du vent

26/03/2020, Nelson Lerias; réponse à l’article de G. Agamben du 26/02/2020;

« Falsch und niedrig ist der Satz, daß Dasein höher als gerechtes Dasein stehe, wenn Dasein nichts als bloßes Leben bedeuten soll […] Der Mensch fällt eben um keinen Preis zusammen mit dem bloßen Leben des Menschen » [1]
Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt

« Nietzsche called himself a moralist, and no doubt he was; but to establish life as the highest good is actually, so far as ethics are concerned, question-begging, since all ethics, Christian or non-Christian, presuppose that life is not the highest good for mortal men and that there is always more at stake in life than the sustenance and procreation of individual living organisms. » [2]
Hannah Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy

Rien de nouveau sous le soleil, ce qui fut est, ce qui est sera, put-on penser, avec Qohelet, il y a un mois, au début de la prise de conscience de la propagation du virus corona, c’est-à-dire dans les premiers jours de la rumeur il fut dit que ce virus et ses symptômes ressemblaient à ceux d’une grippe normale et à sa réapparition périodique, plus ou moins virulente, chaque année, qu’il n’y avait donc pas de raison de s’inquiéter et que la panique que l’on voyait imprégner de plus en plus le coeur des hommes (accompagnée, bien entendu, par des manifestations d’insouciance), n’était pas sensée – elle ne serait en fait que l’effet du sensationnalisme des moyens de communication de masse, lequel se propage de manière plus épidémique que le virus le plus mortel. Quelqu’un du gabarit intellectuel de Giorgio Agamben est allé, à l’étonnement de certains, jusqu’à intituler son article du 26 février « L’invention d’une épidémie ».

Relire son article un mois plus tard, à l’heure où, seulement en Italie, le nombre de cas dépasse les 70 000 et le nombre de décès dépasse les 7000, peut éveiller des sourires – ou provoquer même des réactions de féroce indignation, laquelle n’est sans doute pas le signe d’une capacité de discernement hautement développée et d’une volonté de comprendre à l’oeuvre. D’une manière plus sereine, on pourrait être tenté de lui reprocher tout au moins un certain manque de prudence, même si Agamben partait des déclarations du CNR, le Conseil national des recherches italien, une institution donc sérieuse, reconnue, que l’on ne soupçonne pas de propager des fake news ou des infox (comme on dit maintenant en bon français), et même si Agamben écrivait, noir sur blanc, dès le deuxième paragraphe : « Si telle est la situation réelle ». Si. La situation réelle pourrait donc être une autre, différente, contraire. Son raisonnement garde, subtilement, une certaine teneur hypothétique. Et l’on sait, en plus, que même en partant de prémisses discutables (ou d’informations erronées), on peut par la suite arriver à dire quelque chose de vrai ou de pertinent. Cela n’infirme pas la vérité de ce qui est dit, mais la validité du raisonnement.

Néanmoins, qui oserait dire, publiquement, à l’heure actuelle, que le virus corona ressemble à une grippe, que les mesures prises par l’État italien (ainsi que d’autres États) et les réactions de panique chez la population (comme, par exemple, vider les rayons des supermarchés, ne pas laisser son conjoint rentrer à la maison par peur d’être infectée ou demander à l’infirmière habitant le même immeuble de quitter l’immeuble) sont des comportements disproportionnés face à la situation ? Ce que l’on entend dire, le bruit qui court, c’est que ces mesures, et des mesures encore plus implacables, adéquates à une situation de guerre sanitaire, auraient dû êtres prises avant même le moment où elles le furent, que le moment opportun était passé, que les choses étaient déjà hors contrôle, qu’il était déjà trop tard. Qui oserait dire, à l’heure actuelle, que cette crise fut provoquée par le sensationnalisme des média et les techniques de gouvernement de l’État ?

Si l’un des traits caractéristiques de celui qui est épris de clarté, qui s’attache à la recherche, le philosophe, est celui de se rendre compte de son ignorance, d’être conscient que la quête de la vérité n’est pas la possession de la vérité, comme une soif inassouvie, un désir inconsumé, inconsumable, alors la situation actuelle peut lui servir, entre autres, à ce qu’il se rende compte qu’il ne sait pas, par exemple, qu’est-ce qu’un virus, qu’est-ce qu’une épidémie, qu’est-ce qu’un État de droit ou un état d’exception (et que les journalistes qui en parlent ne le savent pas non plus). Il se peut même qu’il se rende compte qu’il ne sait pas qu’est-ce que la philosophie, l’activité à laquelle il se dédie, qu’elle est sa nature et quels sont ses objets. L’actualité n’est-elle pas en fin de compte une chose de journalistes ? Les virus ne sont-ils pas une affaire de médecins et de scientifiques ? La politique et le droit ne sont-ils pas pour les politiciens et les juristes ?

Or, cette prise de conscience de sa propre ignorance ne signifie aucunement une dépréciation de l’exercice de l’activité de penser (et de la faculté de juger), même si cela se prête, évidemment, à la raillerie de la part de ceux qui sont moins familiarisés avec la matière, quand cela ne se prête pas à l’autodérision. « Je sais que je ne sais rien ». Qui se moque de qui ? À une époque de circulation épidémique de l’information à l’échelle planétaire, de manière presque instantanée, ou d’ailleurs à n’importe quelle époque, la tâche du philosophe pourrait être, non tant fournir des recettes, comme un cuisinier, mais rappeler, comme un frelon qui bourdonne à l’oreille, qui pique l’esprit, qui perce l’épiderme de l’âme, que l’information (ou l’opinion) n’est pas le savoir (et moins encore l’éducation) et que le savoir n’est peut-être pas la sagesse, c’est-à-dire arriver à formuler les questions (même sans y répondre), voir le problème (même sans le résoudre) n’est pas le plus infâme, ou le plus inoffensif, des efforts (n’oublions pas que Socrate fut condamné à la peine de mort – et qu’il n’en eut pas peur : l’amour de l’âme, ou de la vie, φιλοψυχία, était, parmi les Grecs, synonyme de lâcheté). Et si le nom du sophiste, aujourd’hui, était journaliste ? Les informations et les reportages de Fox News, de RT (connue auparavant comme Russia Today), de VTV (Venezolana de Televisión), ainsi que les informations et reportages de plusieurs autres chaînes, semblent le montrer. Qu’est-ce que, alors, un régime politique (qui s’appelle, dans certains cas, démocratie) qui repose (ou prétend reposer), comme un de ses piliers, sur le journalisme, si le journalisme repose à son tour, du moins en partie, sur des intérêts privés et sur la publicité et ne se distingue pas toujours avec clarté de la propagande ou de la simple émission d’opinions ? Le journaliste court en fait après le jour, comme qui court après le vent. On sait lequel est le plus rapide et qui ne pourra faire autrement que de boîter. Or, si le philosophe se met à courir après le jour, qu’est-ce qui le distingue alors du journaliste ? Il se peut que la voie sinueuse pour arriver jusqu’au présent, que l’on croit illusoirement être devant nous, soit en fait derrière nous, qu’il faille brosser l’histoire à contre-poil et provoquer, éventuellement, un véritable état d’exception. Walter Benjamin savait quelque chose à ce sujet.

Revenons sur les mots d’Agamben, apparémment polémiques, du 26 février. Sommes-nous capables de comprendre ce qu’il voulût dire ? Voulons-nous seulement le comprendre ? Agamben, dans son petit texte, pointe vers une disproportion et deux facteurs qui peuvent contribuer à la comprendre. La disproportion est celle entre la supposée épidémie, comme il l’écrit, et les mesures d’urgence [misure di emergenza] employées pour y remédier, lesquelles, en concurrence avec la diffusion d’un climat de panique, donnèrent origine à un état d’exception (ou état d’urgence, Ausnahmezustand dans la terminologie allemande).

Le recours de plus en plus habituel à cette technique de gouvernement (qui date de la Première Guerre mondial, son laboratoire, et renvoie jusqu’à la Révolution – ou jusqu’à l’iustitium romain, son modèle en miniature) est un des facteurs signalés par Agamben, c’est-à-dire on assiste (ou l’on n’assiste pas, puisque, précisément, on ne voit pas ce qui est devant nos yeux) à une normalisation de l’exception. Autrement dit, l’exception est en train de devenir la règle, elle est déjà la règle. Le pouvoir exécutif absorbant en lui le pouvoir législatif, et rendant ainsi caduc le principe de séparation des pouvoirs, véritable pilier de la démocratie, les mesures d’urgence décrétées ouvrent, pour ainsi dire, ou littéralement, une no man’s land entre démocratie et absolutisme, un champ d’indétermination entre le fait et le droit où l’on peut penser que le fait dicte le droit : la norme en vigueur n’est pas appliquée, elle est suspendue, au risque d’être abolie, et des actions en marge du droit, ou carrément illégales, apparaissent, au nom de la sécurité (sanitaire, en l’occurrence), sous l’aura de la légitimité. On y fait appel à la nécessité erronément pensée comme situation objective. La contingence, ce que l’on ne peut pas prévoir, calculer, et la décision, laquelle contient en elle une part d’arbitraire, d’incommensurabilité, se masquent sous l’apparence de la nécessité, ce qui ne peut pas être autrement (ce qui ne cède pas, étymologiquement parlant). Or, la politique est la sphère de la contingence, il n’y a pas, en réalité, de mesures nécessaires. Le « il faut », le « il n’y a pas d’alternative », le « on n’a pas le choix », expressions verbales de cette équivoque, sont, en politique, des infections plus morbides, plus létales que, dans un corps, un virus, fût-ce le corona.

Agamben dit encore que l’invention de l’épidémie peut offrir un prétexte idéal pour élargir l’état d’exception au-delà de toute limite une fois épuisée la lutte contre le terrorisme en tant que justification de l’implémentation de telles mesures : interdiction de déplacement (une limitation de la liberté), suspension des activités scolaires, etc. Le leurre est ici celui de croire qu’une fois passée l’épidémie on reviendra à la normalité, à une situation identique à celle d’avant, comme si l’usage de ces mesures n’allait pas avoir de suite ou de répercussions sur nos formes de vie. Les expérimentations avec la surveillance de la population et la transmission d’ordres (ou de commandements) de la part de la police ou des forces militaires à travers l’usage de drones équipés de haut-parleurs, par exemple, sont déjà en marche. On ne pourra pas, après l’épidémie, appuyer sur le bouton rewind.

L’autre facteur dont Agamben parle est la peur, laquelle, dit-il, s’est évidemment propagée dans la conscience des individus ces dernières années. Cette peur va de pair avec un désir de sécurité. Outre l’idée de fabrication de l’épidémie exposée dans le titre même de son texte, et fabrication sonne ici comme invention, mensonge, manipulation, voici que Agamben expose, en une phrase, un des aspects les plus controversés de sa vision des choses : ce désir de sécurité fut induit par ces mêmes gouvernements qui interviennent à travers des mesures d’urgence pour le satisfaire, un cercle vicieux pervers, écrit-il. Autrement dit, on nous prêche l’enfer pour ensuite nous vendre le paradis et nous imposer, sur terre, le purgatoire.

Et si Agamben avait raison ? Au contraire de ce que l’on pourrait croire, la question n’est pas rhétorique. Peut-être que la prudence herméneutique enseigne à partir du principe que l’autre (l’interlocuteur vivant devant nous ou l’autre dont on n’a que la parole écrite, laquelle, Platon l’avait déjà vu, ne sait pas se défendre) a raison, qu’il est en train de voir quelque chose que je ne ne vois pas, qu’il sait quelque chose que je ne sais pas. Si bonne volonté herméneutique il y a, peut-être que cela signifie essayer d’aller à la rencontre du point de vue de l’autre. Kant parlera, dans la troisième Critique (§40), de erweiterter Denkungsart, de manière de penser élargie – ou d’homme d’esprit ouvert (par contraste avec celui qui est étroit d’esprit), selon la belle traduction d’Alexis Philonenko.

À la place de réagir avec indignation, ou avec un sourire sournois de qui connaît déjà la réponse (et même sans nécessairement consentir à la conception selon laquelle on est face à l’invention d’une épidémie), on pourrait essayer de trouver, en discutant de vive voix ou par écrit, des critères (ou des règles) selon lesquels décider de la proportion ou de la disproportion entre ce qui est en train d’arriver et les mesures politiques (ou anti-politiques, illégales et illégitimes) prises face à ce qui est en train d’arriver. Qu’est-ce que en fin de compte signifie agir politiquement ? Il se peut, d’ailleurs, que nous ne sachions pas dire ce qui se passe, décrire la situation actuelle. Il se peut qu’elle échappe à nos récits, comme le sable du désert entre les doigts.

L’activité politique est, entre autres, un exercice de notre faculté de juger. Cependant, certains talents particuliers (ou dons naturels) ne peuvent pas être appris, dirait Kant : si le bon sens (ou l’ingéniosité naturelle, l’habileté innée de l’esprit, Mutterwitz) est absent, aucune école ne peut le suppléer. Ce manque s’appelle sottise, stupidité [Dummheit], un vice pour lequel, comme pour certains virus, il n’y a pas de remède (cf. KrV A 133 / B 172). Une des disgrâces de notre époque n’est-elle pas, précisement, l’incroyance au bon sens et le suicide du sens commun ?

Agamben lui-même se réfère, de manière critique, à la question du jugement chez Kant lorsqu’il traite du problème de l’application de la norme juridique à un cas (État d’exception, 2.4). Il est néanmoins discutable que, chez Kant, la relation entre cas et norme se présente, dans tous les domaines (l’art, précisément, n’est pas un domaine d’objets), comme une opération simplement logique. Il faudrait montrer que chez Kant la référence à la réalité, ou la relation entre le langage et le monde, se réduit à une opération logique, qu’elle n’est déjà pas toujours une activité pratique (comme si, d’ailleurs, la fonction énonciative pouvait ne pas tenir en compte ou se substituer à la validité logique). Sans vouloir aucunement mettre de côté l’acuité, ou l’argutie, agambiennes, il ne serait pas infructueux, par rapport à ce problème, de confronter ses remarques avec celles de Hannah Arendt, que Agamben, du reste, ne connaît que trop bien. Par exemple : « Le jugement, et spécialement les jugements de goût, réfléchit [reflects] toujours sur d’autres [personnes] et leur goût, il prend leur jugement possible en considération. Ceci est nécessaire parce que je suis humain et je ne peux pas vivre en dehors de la compagnie des hommes » [3]. On voit bien que le jugement n’est pas une affaire simplement logique et que la privation de la compagnie des hommes, comme dans le cas de l’actuel confinement obligatoire par décret, signifie la privation de notre humanité et donc notre déshumanisation (cf. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, disponible en français sous le tire Juger, 11e leçon).

En tout cas, une seule page d’Agamben, aussi discutable soit-elle, est en général plus méritoire, plus recommandable, plus éclairante, plus féconde que les tonnes et les tonnes quotidiennes d’encre que les journalistes font couler, comme une pestilence noire, ou que les mots qu’ils déversent, illusoirement en direct sur l’écran, comme une cacophonie de perroquets déplumés, incolores, putrescents. Il n’est d’ailleurs pas impossible que Agamben sache se dédire ou redire les choses autrement.

Et qu’arriverait-il, alors, si seulement on éteignait, pendant quelques jours (ou pendant quelques mois), la télévision ? Et si, à la place de regarder la télévision ou de lire le journal, on profitait du temps de ce confinement obligatoire déshumanisant pour étudier des oeuvres d’Agamben telles que l’État d’exception, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, Moyens sans fin, Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue ? Peut-être que l’on comprendrait un peu moins mal ce qui se passe aujourd’hui, la confusion du présent, la poursuite du vent. « Il va vers le sud et il tourne vers le nord, il tourne, il tourne, il va, le vent, et sur ses tours il retourne, le vent », (Qohelet, 1,6).

---

[1] « Fausse et basse est la proposition selon laquelle l’existence est au-dessus de l’existence juste, si l’existence ne doit signifier que la vie brute […] L’homme ne coïncide à aucun prix avec la vie brute de l’homme »

[2] « Nietzsche s’appela lui-même un moraliste, et il en était sans doute un ; mais instituer la vie comme le souverain bien est en réalité, en ce qui concerne l’éthique, fallacieux, puisque toute éthique, chrétienne ou non-chrétienne, présuppose que la vie n’est pas le bien souverain pour les hommes mortels et qu’il y a toujours plus en jeu dans la vie que la subsistance et la procréation des organismes vivants individuels »

[3] Arendt écrit, en anglais, que le jugement « always reflects upon others », que l’on pourrait aussi traduire, outre à ce qu’il réfléchit toujours sur d’autres personnes, qu’il se reflète toujours sur d’autres personnes, qu’il les affecte, qu’il a des répercussions sur elles.

« A vrai dire.. »

26/03/2020, Eduardo Jochamowitz; réponse à cet article de 22/03/2020; suivre la discussion dans la ´réponse;

« À vrai dire, la crise n’est pas pour l’humanité un état d’exception, elle est, de génération en génération, et pour chaque individu, sa condition naturelle, elle est, pour ainsi dire, son habitat.

(…)

La crise de l’humanité est donc une crise de la culture. 

(…)

Nous ne pourrons pas répondre à ces questions sans réfléchir parallèlement, inextricablement, à la question du meilleur gouvernement ou du meilleur État. Il se peut néanmoins que l’État moderne soit le plus grand ennemi de la culture. »

Cher Nelson, dans ton texte tu soulignes une idée qui est très importante pour mon travail, celle de la crise. Nous partageons la prémisse suivante : l’actualité de notre époque est la crise, elle est l’habitat et l’horizon de notre humanité. Mais après tu fais une affirmation que je ne partage pas : la crise est celle de la culture. J’aurais dit : notre culture est la crise, la reproduction et la consommation de la crise. D’où le fait qu’aujourd’hui le monde retrouve son unité grâce à la représentation de la crise sanitaire, crise totale qui mobilise notre total attention.

Je sais que ton propos était de lire le « problème de la vie » que Nietzche a mis en évidence à travers de la culture et de la forme/idéal de vie que nous poursuivons. Mais ma question va dans une autre direction : pourquoi notre forme de vie et de culture est si réticente et résistante à la crise ? Pourquoi elle s’aveugle et au même temps nourrit sa propre crise ? Si la culture est en crise, pourquoi les états seraient ennemis de la culture, or ils trouveraient les meilleures justifications pour agir ?

De mon côté, je pense que cette crise sanitaire se prouve comme une crise pour les états à partir du moment où nous avons développé une énorme soif de crise. Je m’explique un minimum. Les pandémies existent depuis toujours, la grippe espagnole est l’antéchrist à côté du covid19. Le fait d’être une culture de la crise (et non une culture en crise), le fait de finalement parvenir à l’unité du monde dans la pandémie exige aux états une sorte de réponse qu’ils ne connaissaient pas. Chaque état est exigé de répondre non pas pour le nombre de malades/hospitalisés/morts, ils doivent répondre à la crise dans sa totalité : à la totalité de la planète en crise et à la peur d’une crise total.

Un abrazo !

Eduardo

Pandemic Insolvency – Bue Rübner Hansen (en)

26/03/2020; first published here;

Why This Economic Crisis Will Be Different

Many states – now including the UK and US – are beginning to act in ways that contradict not just the neoliberal script, but the crisis management strategies of the global financial crisis. Bue Rübner Hansen asks why.

Things are moving incredibly fast. A week ago, Denmark’s Social Democratic government announced it would cover 75% of the wages of workers who would otherwise be laid off. I had hoped it would give ammunition to those trying to put pressure on the social Darwinist Conservative government in the UK. But I don’t think anyone expected the UK to announce, just a few days later, a policy that would cover 80% of the wages of workers who were about to be sacked.

What the hell happened? To put it briefly, the sight of governments bailing out not only banks but also consumers and mortgage holders isn’t a sign they have grown soft, but rather a sign of the kind of crisis we are entering. This crisis is very different from the last, and it’s likely to reshape politics and economics across the Global North for years to come.

A greater depression.

How bad is it exactly? Economist Nouriel Roubini, famed for predicting the last financial crisis, puts it boldly: “The risk of a New Great Depression, worse than the original – a Greater Depression – is rising by the day.”

The financial behemoths JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have predicted US GDP in the next three months to fall 14% and 25% respectively. They optimistically predict a fast rebound, but it’s hard to see how there’s a quick way back from a crash that will force millions of firms and individuals to default on their debts and rental payments. But predictions are always hard, and these days they are much harder than usual. But we can discern the outline of the crisis we’re now entering and how it’s different from the great financial crisis of 2007-08.

Financial markets are acting weird on a level not seen since 2008. Money is flowing out of stocks – but without flowing into more secure assets like bonds or gold as they usually would. But if money isn’t flowing, it’s not because money is tied up in investments or stuck in savings. The problem is that money simply isn’t there. In other words, this isn’t a crisis of liquidity, but of solvency. The number of companies, workers and consumers unable to pay their debts and expenses is rising rapidly.

Pandemic insolvency.

This makes the present crisis a very different beast from the mostly financial liquidity crisis that started in late 2007. Of course, the latter was rooted in a narrower solvency crisis among subprime mortgage holders, rooted in extraordinarily high oil prices, but this time the problem of solvency is ubiquitous.

Now, the generalised condition of insolvency has created the conditions for a radically different political response than in 2008-2010. In 2008 liquidity froze up as financial firms became unwilling to lend and invest. Now, no matter how many trillions the US Federal Reserve and other central banks pump into the feverish economy, it will not magically make up for the work hours that are not happening and the goods and services that are not being produced and consumed right now. In the words of James Meadway: “There is no amount of money that can simply conjure products into existence.”

To understand this crisis of supply and demand, and ultimately of solvency, we have to look at the lockdowns, the resulting labour scarcity, and the pre-existing weaknesses of the global economy.

Quarantined labour.

The initial shocks came from the lockdowns in China, which hurt global commodity chains. With just-in-time management, companies don’t have inventories that can make up for even temporary work stoppages be they from strikes or mass contagion. Now, an increasing number of cities, regions and countries – including India with its 1.3bn population – are attempting to shut down ‘non-essential’ parts of the economy (As always the poorest will be least able to find security, and more likely to suffer). People have stopped going to cafés, bars and restaurants, cinemas, cruises and holidays. Most have stopped flying. Quarantined or laid-off workers are consuming less, and will soon be struggling to pay rents or mortgages.

Most importantly, quarantines, illness and lockdowns are withdrawing a great mass of labour power from workplaces. Wildcat strikes by workers unwilling to work in hazardous conditions add to that number. Many are working from home with their children, unproductively when looking after them and painfully when ignoring them. Border closures hamper international trade and flows of migrant labour, which is essential to food production and the health and care sector in many countries.

In short, Covid-19 has given global capitalism a labour scarcity shock, which is hitting demand and supply simultaneously. Workers cannot work during quarantines and lockdowns, and so firms cannot produce and workers cannot consume*. Capitalists and workers are becoming insolvent simultaneously. The 2007-08 mortgage debt crisis was exceedingly narrow compared to the generalised debt crisis which is on the horizon.

The result is the destruction of a huge amount of value. The destruction of the value of debt repayments will be felt first of all – while the depreciation of capital stocks and ‘human capital’ will unfold more subtly – as production lines gather dust and rust, and routines and skills atrophy. In short, pandemic insolvency signals a full blown crisis of capitalist and social reproduction.

Previous ailments.

In infecting the global economy, Covid-19 found an already weakened victim. Thus the effects of the lockdowns are greatly amplified by the longer-term decline of profitability and growth. Moreover, the immune response to the last crisis – unprecedented amounts of cheap credit – has created a huge number of zombie businesses who only survive by constantly replacing old debt with new. Over the coming weeks and months, innumerable companies will be incapable of rolling over their debts. Indebted and with slim bottom lines, companies and worker-consumers have long been unable to make buffers out of savings. The system was already vulnerable to shocks.

In some ways the situation is analogous to the crisis of post-war capitalism, which was given a fatal blow by the 1973 oil shock precisely because it was already weakened by falling profits and unsustainable debts. Just as that crisis gravely harmed the prestige and utility of Keynesianism, the present crisis is pushing policy makers to look for tools beyond the neoliberal playbook, as they had already started doing in 2008. The crisis of neoliberalism is most obvious when we look at those who stick to it, by reaffirming the private responsibility of health care, and, necropolitically, by forcing workers to work at the risk of the mass death of the immuno-compromised, the already sick, and the old.

Work and let die.

The latter path was has partially been taken by Italy, the UK and the US, which have attempted to maintain industrial production despite the lockdown in order to keep the economy running. In Italy, the confederation of industrialists, Confindustria, has lobbied to define a vast range of industries as ‘essential’ – including call centres and Sports Direct, and the government, facing the third largest per capita debt load in the world and growing bond yields, had been compliant until recently. Only after surpassing China in total dead count, and under threats of wildcat strikes at Fiat and whispers of a general strike from trade unions, has Italy begun to shut down industry.

The UK, meanwhile, is facing Brexit and led by a prime minister whose concern for life isn’t much greater than the Viceroy of India in times of famine. Now, the strategy of herd immunity and “taking it on the chin” has been replaced by a reluctant lockdown, after it became clear that this line of action would result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. In the US, the general incompetence of a decadent empire is on full display. The lockdowns, often initiated by state rather than federal authorities, have happened at a later point than in most other countries.

So far, the UK and US are on a trajectory to overtake Italy in both case counts and deaths per capita. Will workers there be willing to sacrifice their health and the lives of their parents, grandparents and vulnerable friends and relatives for the sake of the economy? The arguments for such mortal requests are already being floated. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM,” tweeted Trump, while Thomas Friedman asked in the New York Times: “Is our fight against the coronavirus worse than the disease?” The most frank example of this reasoning came from Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, who told Fox viewers that grandparents would be willing to die to save the economy for their grandchildren. (Whether they will sacrifice wealth to help save the planet remains to be seen.)

Such crass social Darwinism has long been applied to the Global South in defence of structural adjustment programmes that would sacrifice public health care for the sake of economic growth (in this respect, neoliberalism never was that different from the classical liberalism of Herbert Spencer and the Late Victorian Holocausts). But politically and economically, it is more difficult for governments to apply necropolitical abandonment to their own populations. No matter how great the desire to avoid labour scarcity and an insolvency crisis, there currently seems to be no politically palatable way to avoid lockdowns.

Breaking with the script.

Historian Adam Tooze has noted that Covid-19 has put economic rationality in second place, as countries shut down economies in the name of public health. But just as importantly, it is reshaping our ideas of what economics is. As East Asian countries soften measures, it is likely that the countries that crashed their economies most resolutely will have a greater chance of weathering both the economic and epidemiological storms. In the pandemic, the biopolitics of populational health fares better than the necropolitics of abandonment and private health insurance, even if there is no way around the destruction of value.

Moreover, while many of the economic measures like sick pay and quarantine transfers may look like pure public health spending to encourage observance of the quarantine, these are also designed to address pandemic insolvency. Thus we are seeing mortgage and eviction moratoriums (but no rental holidays yet) in Italy and the UK, and extraordinary extensions of sick pay in Ireland. In the US, the Democrats are adopting policies previously only defended by the left wing of the party. These policies aim to enable people to comply with public health measures, as well as to prop up the economy.

The crisis has renewed the importance of the contingency measures invented to deal with the last crisis, and brought with it new ones. Most dramatic is the US Federal Reserve’s policy, announced on 23 March, to buy up unlimited amounts of corporate bonds. Large sums are thrown directly at companies, workers and consumers. Neoliberal poster-boy and French president Emmanuel Macron has extended unemployment benefits significantly and suspended gas and electricity bills. Donald Trump is toying with a basic quarantine income and the UK will now cover up to 80% of wages of employees threatened by layoff. Benevolent as they are, compared to the austerity regime of the last decade, the money involved will mostly go to keep companies, landlords and mortgage owners afloat.

Flooding markets with cash while output declines may seem like a recipe for stagflation, but a decade of below-target inflation has put aside such fears. These measures ignore classical neoliberal obsessions with public debt and inflation, expressing a class politics that has no essential loyalty to any school of thought or mode of governance.

The logic of what governments are now forced to do is not just different, but contrary to much of what they have practiced and preached over the last decades. Whereas crisis management after 2008 was concerned with liquidity, the key concern is now solvency. And this generalisation of bailouts and ‘helicopter dumps’ of money – however uneven and unequal they are – makes for a very different crisis in political and moral terms.

A new terrain of struggle.

In many countries, media and opposition parties have so far held back criticisms of governments, prioritising national unity and coordination. However, as the crisis starts to bite and lockdowns become economically unsustainable, conflict is certain to increase. Who will pay the inevitable costs of the lockdown and ensuing crisis? Will efforts to sacrifice people on the altar of growth be successful, and how many workers will volunteer for this treatment, when they can no longer pay their bills and feed themselves? Much of this depends on the policies that are currently being enacted to deal with public health and the worsening recession.

Pandemic insolvency presents us with a different terrain of struggle from the morality play of bank bailouts and austerity we’re familiar with, although bailouts (most egregiously of batshit industries such as airlines and shale gas) are part of the deal. Governments are scrambling to find ways to avoid economic collapse, and they are improvising without much experience.

These policies are ad-hoc and designed to be short term measures, like the doctor of Hippocratian medicine whose decision (krino) acted on the turning point (krisis) in the patient’s health. However, in all likelihood, Covid-19 isn’t a temporary exogenous shock. With the pre-existing economic weaknesses and the bankruptcies and mass unemployment that are beginning to unfold, a quick bounce-back may be impossible. If the patient recovers from Covid-19, it will be in a much weakened form.

And perhaps crisis – the need to decide on matters of life and death – isn’t a phase, but our condition. Many of those who have found themselves abandoned by the state, or, conversely, suddenly given rights that hitherto belonged in the domain of the impossible, may refuse to go back to normal. Life and our awareness of it has changed. More radically, there may be no normal to return to, given the scale of the economic, political and social crises.

Under such conditions, short-term measures from state subsidies to unprofitable labour to new measures of surveillance and control are likely to persist for better or worse. But the economic collapse may render corporatist responses unsustainable, and Leviathan is often inept. The state of exception isn’t some total condition turned on by a switch. Biopolitics can also be democratic. Both are contested, and depend on institutional capacities and political competence, and measures of popular consent.

In Spain, where housing rights, feminist and municipalist movements grew massively in the ‘great recession’, the state of exception has played out quite differently than elsewhere. For instance, in Barcelona where I am quarantined, private hospitals have been taken over by the PSOE/Podemos government, migrants have been released from crammed detention centers, and the city of Barcelona is aiming to temporarily abolish homelessness by transforming the city’s convention centre into living space with individual bathroom facilities, and taking over 200 tourist flats to host victims of gendered violence.

Livelihood or health.

The leverage of labour has increased with its scarcity. Some workers have been officially declared essential: nurses, doctors, care workers, supermarket and logistic workers, cleaners and sanitation workers, etc. In northern Italy and Austria, a very large proportion of the eastern European care workers who keep the care sector together both in elderly homes and as live-in carers have gone to their home countries, and are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future. Now they’re scrambling – and failing – to find staff and volunteers locally (itself a risky effort given the low capacity for testing even of workers who will care for vulnerable people). In the UK, Brexit-induced scarcities of medical staff, cleaners and farm workers has been further exacerbated by the virus.

All this creates space for unions, social movements and the left. Mutual aid initiatives are appearing, spreading experiences and ethics of solidarity, creating trust and reshaping expectations. While the material capacity to organise and protest is severely limited by the shut-downs, strikes of labour and rent remain options for many. Wildcat strikes have already swept northern Italy, and in the US, the number of workers walking out is on the rise.

Soon, for many, the refusal of rents or work will not be matters of choice, but necessity. If such needs are organised, they can become a mighty force facing a vulnerable system and elites divided between abandoning their failing policy script or doubling down on murderous negligence. But the window of opportunity is brief. Just as many types of labor are being recognised as essential, a great mass of workers are about to be thrown into unemployment.

When the reality of unemployment sets in, workers will face a contradiction between health and livelihoods. If the moment is not seized, social Darwinism will begin to gain support among those who may have little choice but to work and become carriers of death. The challenge for unions is to act now, while the management of the crisis of health and economy calls for policies that soften the threat of unemployment and enable people to quarantine.

After death, purgatory or paradise.

The coronavirus is likely to pass through the global population for a long time coming, with great human and economic consequences. Destruction of wildlife habitats and industrial animal farming are certain to bring about new epidemics. Droughts, floods, fires, ocean acidification and ecosystem collapse related to global warming and capitalist extractivism will continue to add to the instability of our newly multipolar world. Under these conditions, economic and public health planning becomes both more pressing and more difficult.

Crises like these call for an interventionist state to keep the system together, or for mutual aid and solidarity, especially among people abandoned or targeted by the state. In some countries, the legitimacy of state administration and planning will grow, in others political legitimacy will fall precipitously, leading not just to mutual aid networks, but to attempts to build dual power.

What economic paradigm – if any – may become dominant isn’t clear. The prestige of Chinese-style state capitalism is growing. Keynesian and Modern Monetary Theory economists will find jobs in high places, and market socialism-with-nationalisations will continue to strengthen its position as the dominant economic doctrine on the left.

However, the economic and ecological unsustainability of growth will raise hard questions of how to distribute or redistribute the losses in a non-growth world. Fascism and populist welfare chauvinism will offer the false security of disaster nationalism, national hoarding and resource wars. Degrowth’s offer of a planned and willed exit from growth will continue to gain followers, and communist strategies will grow in importance, as the surpluses that can be divided between contending classes shrink. Ecological breakdown and an absence of growth will pose questions that are already imposing themselves in the intense isolation of the lockdown: what are the joys of deceleration, what to do with an abundance of time and interdepence? And, more forcefully, it will radically narrow the space for social and political compromise.

Struggle is unavoidable. The question is who will organise it and how.

What will and can happen varies, as always, with context. Much will depend how the economic, ecological and public health crises unfold and intertwine. The relations of political, organisational and class forces all matter, and so does the quality and strength of intellectual interventions. In other words, the outcome of the coming years will partly, and perhaps largely, depend on what we do in the coming months.

*Thanks to Nic Beuret for insisting on the centrality of the problem of labour scarcity to capital in this crisis.

The Losers Conspiracy – Paul B. Preciado (en)

26/03/2020; Paul B. Preciado on life after COVID-19; first published here;

I GOT SICK IN PARIS on Wednesday, March 11, before the French government ordered the confinement of the population, and when I got up on March 19, a bit more than a week later, the world had changed. When I went to my bed, the world was close, collective, viscous, and dirty. When I got out of bed, it had become distant, individual, dry, and hygienic. During the sickness, I was unable to assess what was happening from a political and economic point of view because the fever and the discomfort took hold of my vital energy. No one can be philosophical with an exploding head. From time to time, I would watch the news, which only increased my discontent. Reality was indistinguishable from a bad dream, and the front page of the newspapers was more disconcerting than any nightmare brought on by my feverish delusions. For two whole days, as an antianxiety prescription, I decided to not visit a single website. I attribute my healing to that and to oregano essential oil. I did not have difficulty breathing, but it was hard to believe that I would continue breathing. I was not scared of dying. I was scared of dying alone.

Between the fever and the anxiety, I thought to myself that the parameters of organized social behavior had changed forever and could no longer be modified. I felt that with such conviction that it pierced my chest, even as my breathing became easier. Everything will forever retain the new shape that things had taken. From now on, we would have access to ever more excessive forms of digital consumption, but our bodies, our physical organisms, would be deprived of all contact and of all vitality. The mutation would manifest as a crystallization of organic life, as a digitization of work and consumption and as a dematerialization of desire.

Those who were married were now condemned to live twenty-four hours a day with the person they had wedded, whether they loved each other or hated each other, or both at the same time—which, incidentally, is the most typical case: Couples are governed by a law of quantum physics according to which there is no opposition between contrary terms, but rather a simultaneity of dialectical facts. In this new reality, those among us who had lost love or who had not found it in time—that is, before the great mutation of COVID-19—were doomed to spend the rest of our lives totally alone. We would survive but without touch, without skin. Those who had not dared to tell the person they loved that they loved them could no longer make contact with them even if they could express their love and would now have to forever live with the impossible anticipation of a physical encounter that would never take place. Those who had chosen to travel would forever stay on the other side of the border, and the wealthy who went seaside or to the country so as to spend the confinement period in their pleasant second homes (poor them!) would never be able to return to the city. Their homes would be requisitioned to accommodate the homeless, who, indeed, unlike the rich, lived full-time in the city. Under the new and unpredictable form that things had taken after the virus, everything would be set in stone. What seemed like a temporary lockdown would go on for the rest of our lives. Maybe things would change again, but not for those of us over the age of forty. That was the new reality. Life after the great mutation. I therefore wondered if life like this was worth living.

The first thing I did when I got out of bed after having been sick with the virus for a week that was as vast and strange as a new continent, was to ask myself this question: Under what conditions and in which way would life be worth living? The second thing I did, before finding an answer to that question, was to write a love letter. Of all the conspiracy theories I had read, the one that beguiled me the most is the one that says that the virus was created in a laboratory so that all the world’s losers could get back their exes—without really being obliged to get back together with them. 

Bursting with the lyricism and anxiety accumulated over a week of being sick, afraid and uncertain, the letter to my ex was not only a poetic and desperate declaration of love, it was above all a shameful document for the one who had signed it. But if things could no longer change, if those who were far apart could never touch each other again, what was the significance of being ridiculous in this way? What was the significance of now telling the person you love that you loved them, all while knowing that in all likelihood she had already forgotten you or replaced you, if you would never be able to see her again in any case? The new state of things, in its sculptural immobility, conferred a new degree of what the fuck, even in its own ridiculousness.

I handwrote that fine and horribly pathetic letter, I put it in a bright white envelope and on it, in my best handwriting, I wrote my ex’s name and address. I got dressed, I put on a mask, I put on the gloves and shoes that I had left at the door, and I went down to the entrance of the building. There, in accordance with the rules of confinement, I did not go out into the street; rather I headed toward the garbage area. I opened the yellow bin and I placed the letter to my ex in there—the paper was indeed recyclable. I slowly went back to my apartment. I left my shoes at the door. I went in, I took off my pants and I placed them in a plastic bag. I took off my mask and I put it on the balcony for it to air out; I took off my gloves, I threw them in the garbage and I washed my hands for two unending minutes. Everything, absolutely everything, was set in the form it had taken after the great mutation. I went back to my computer and opened my email: and there it was, a message from her entitled, “I think of you during the virus crisis.”