COVID-19: Translating a pandemic politically (2)

The mass burial of coronavirus victims on New York City’s Hart Island

Arundhati Roy, in an eloquent article on the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in india, concludes by writing …

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. (Financial Times 03/04/2020)

How we walk through the portal then will determine our future, we are told. Those possible futures may be neatly separated into the “pessimistic” and the “optimistic”, a separation that cuts across the “right-left” political divide. And on the “left”, there is no shortage of enthusiastic anticipation of the brighter world to come.

… there will be those among us who refuse to return to normal, or to embrace the “new normal,” those of us who know that “the trouble with normal is it only gets worse.”

Already, in the state of emergency that the crisis has unleashed, we are seeing extraordinary measures emerge that reveal that much of the neoliberal regime’s claims to necessity and austerity were transparent lies. The God-like market has fallen, again. In different places a variety of measures are being introduced that would have been unimaginable even weeks ago. These have included the suspension of rents and mortgages, the free provision of public transit, the deployment of basic incomes, a hiatus in debt payments, the commandeering of privatized hospitals and other once-public infrastructure for the public good, the liberation of incarcerated people, and governments compelling private industries to reorient production to common needs.

We hear news of significant numbers of people refusing to work, taking wildcat labor action, and demanding their right to live in radical ways. In some places, the underhoused are seizing vacant homes.

We are discovering, against the upside-down capitalist value paradigm which has enriched the few at the expense of the many, whose labor is truly valuable: care, service, and frontline public sector workers. There has been a proliferation of grassroots radical demands for policies of care and solidarity not only as emergency measures, but in perpetuity.

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. The sweet taste of freedom ?— real, interdependent freedom, not the lonely freedom of the market ?— lingers on the palate like a long-forgotten memory, but quickly turns bitter when its nectar is withdrawn. If we do not defend these material and spiritual gains, capitalism will come for its revenge.

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 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. Around the world there has, over the past few years, been an unprecedented level of mobilization and organization of movements against revenge capitalism, sometimes around electoral candidates? ?— eg. Corbyn in the UK, Sanders in the US ?— but also around grassroots campaigns: strikes against necro-neoliberalism in France, anti-authoritarianism in Hong Kong, anti-corruption in Lebanon and Iraq, anti-austerity in Chile, feminism in Mexico, struggles against gentrification and urban cleansing in cities around the world, migrant solidarity in Europe, Indigenous struggles in Canada, the climate struggle everywhere.

These pre-2020 struggles, important in their own right, will, I think, be remembered as the training grounds for a generation to whom now falls the burden of one of those turning points of history. We have learned how to bring a capitalist economy to its knees through non-violent protest in the face of overwhelming, technologically augmented oppression. We are learning how to become ungovernable by either states or markets.

Equally important, we have learned new ways to care for one another without waiting for the state or for authorities. We are rediscovering the power of mutual aid and solidarity. We are learning how to communicate and cooperate anew. We have learned how to organize and to respond quickly, how to make collective decisions and to take responsibility for our fate.

Like the heroes of all good epics, we are not ready, our training was not completed, yet fate will not wait. Like all true heroes, we must make do with what we have: one another and nothing else.

As the world closes its eyes for this strange, dreamlike quarantine ?— save of course for those frontline health, service and care workers who, in the service of humanity, cannot rest, or those who have no safe place to dream ?— we must make ready for the waking. We are on the cusp of a great refusal of a return to normal and of a new normal, a vengeful normalcy that brought us this catastrophe and that will only lead to more catastrophe. In the weeks to come, it will be time to mourn and to dream, to prepare, to learn, and to connect as best we can.

When the isolation is over, we will awaken to a world where competing regimes of vindictive normalization will be at war with one another, a time of profound danger and opportunity. It will be a time to rise and to look one another in the eye.

Max Haiven, No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation (Roarmag 23/03/2020)

Without predictive or prophetic illusions, and without dismissing the many efforts at mutual aid (organised “politically” or not), these kinds of statements – and they are not uncommon – are expressions of a willful hope animated by myths of fate that have long ceased to seduce and persuade anyone (outside of religious communities); myths which capitalism itself has effectively buried.

For anti-capitalism to then fall back upon historical voluntarism – if we want the revolution strongly enough, it will happen -, is to fall into self-delusion, into the blindness that has so often condemned it in the competition for the mastery of progress.

Crises will most likely multiply and intensify in the wake of the pandemic, but these are crises which in fact already exist and which the pandemic has only served to unmask. In which case, the portal was already open and we had already walked through it. And what we have found – as revealed by the pandemic – is the barbarism of contemporary capitalism.

Giorgio Agamben, in a recent article, has turned our gaze to the present through a question …

I would like to share with whoever wants it a question on which for over a month now I have never stopped reflecting. How could it happen that an entire country has, without noticing it, politically and ethically collapsed in the face of an illness? The words that I have used to formulate this question have been carefully weighed one by one. The measure of the abdication of our own ethical and political principles is, in fact, very simple: it is a matter of asking ourselves what is the limit beyond which we are not prepared to renounce them. I believe that the reader who takes the trouble to consider the points that follow will not be able not to agree that — without noticing it or by pretending not to notice it — the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed.

In the name of an unspecified risk, we have accepted the separation from our dead without ceremony, the separation – through confinement – from our friends and loved ones, from the solidarity of others, the separation from vital experience, from life, beyond physical survival.

I know that someone will hasten to respond that we are dealing with a condition that is limited in time, after which everything will return to how it was. It is truly strange that we could repeat this other than in bad faith, since the same authorities that proclaimed the emergency never stop reminding us that when the emergency has been overcome, we will have to continue to observe the same directives and that “social distancing,” as it has been called with a significant euphemism, will be society’s new organizing principle. And, in every case, what we have accepted submitting to, in good or bad faith, cannot be cancelled.

I know that there will inevitably be someone who will respond that the sacrifice, which is of course serious, has been made in the name of moral principles. To them I would recall that a norm that affirms that we must renounce the good to save the good is just as false and contradictory as that which, to protect freedom, orders us to renounce freedom.

Giorgio Agamben: A Question (Quodlibet 14/04/2020//trans. Adam Kotsko)

The illusion of a hopeful left is that history and a future can be willed into existence – what politicised science and medicine today pretend to do in the face of the pandemic-, when whatever history can be made depends on a way of life rooted in a place and a present. And our present is the catastrophe of the loss of both.

The site, the Politics of COVID-19 maintains an expanding catalogue of readings on the pandemic.

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