spreading or contracting Covid-19.
Does this mean that Giorgio Agamben was right when he rejected state-imposed lockdowns and self-isolation as measures that imply reducing our lives to mere existence—in the sense that, when we follow the lockdown regulations, we demonstrate that we are ready to renounce what makes our lives worth living for the chance of bare survival? Do we have to risk our lives (by way of exposing ourselves to possible infection) in order to remain fully human? The problem with this stance is that, today, the main proponents of abolishing lockdowns are to be found in the populist new Right: its members see in all similar restrictive measures—from lockdowns to the obligatory wearing of masks—the erosion of our freedom and dignity. To this, we should respond by raising the key question: what does abolishing lockdowns and isolation effectively amount to for ordinary workers? That, in order to survive, they must go out into the unsafe world and risk contamination.
This brings us to the key point: the contradictory way the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the economy. On the one hand, it has forced authorities to do things that at times almost point toward Communism: a form of Universal Basic Income, healthcare for all, etc. However, this unexpected opening for Communism is just one side of the coin. Simultaneously, opposite processes are asserting themselves violently, with corporations amassing wealth and being bailed out by states. The contours of corona-capitalism are gradually emerging, and with them new forms of class struggle—or, to quote Joshua Simon, writer and curator from Philadelphia:
US cities have seen the largest rent strike in decades, at least 150 worker strikes and walkouts (most notably by Amazon warehouse workers), and hunger strikes in refugee detention facilities. At the same time, research shows that US billionaires increased their collective wealth by $282 billion in just twenty-three days during the initial weeks of the coronavirus lockdown. We are forced to recognize the immense inequalities proliferating with the pandemic and lockdown, with people losing their jobs, with gigantic bailouts that overwhelmingly benefit the biggest corporations and the already extremely wealthy, and with the ways those deemed essential workers are forced to keep working.4
The main form of the new exploitation that characterizes work in the conditions of the pandemic (in the West) is, to quote Simon again, “the shifting of costs to workers. From people having no sick leave, to teachers using their broadband and laptops at home to teach, households are performing all reproductive and productive labour.” In these conditions, it is no longer primarily the capitalist who owns the means of production and hires workers to operate them: “the worker brings with her the means of production. Directly, this happens with the Amazon delivery person or Uber driver bringing to work their own car, filled up with gasoline, with insurance and driver’s license all taken care of.” Simon evokes the poster held by Sarah Mason at an anti-lockdown protest: “Social Distancing Equals Communism.” What we get when distancing is abolished is this apparent “freedom” of workers who own their means of production and run around on errands for the company while risking infection. The paradox here is that both of the main variants of the corona-economy—working at home in lockdown and running deliveries of things like food and packages—are similarly subsumed to capital and imply extra-exploitation.
So our reply to Sarah Mason should be: yes, and that’s why we need social distancing. But what we need even more is a new economic order that will allow us to avoid the debilitating choice between economic revival and saving lives.
2 2. https://www.ecowatch.com/greta-thunberg-2646241937.html
4 4. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/the-sign-language-of-the-tiny-hands-of-the-market/
4. WHY DESTROYING MONUMENTS IS NOT RADICAL ENOUGH
It was widely reported in our media how on June 21, German authorities were shocked over a rampage of an “unprecedented scale” in the center of Stuttgart: four to five hundred partygoers ran riot overnight, smashing shop windows, plundering stores, and attacking police. Police (who needed four and a half hours to quell the violence) ruled out any political motives for these “civil war-like scenes,” describing the perpetrators as people from the “party scene or events scene”.1 With bars and clubs remaining closed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, rioting broke out in public. Such incidents are not limited to Germany. On June 25, thousands packed England’s beaches, ignoring social distancing. As one news site reported, “The area was overrun with cars and sunbathers, leading to gridlock. Rubbish crews also suffered abuse and intimidation as they tried to remove mountains of waste from the seafront and there were a number of incidents involving excessive alcohol and fighting.”2 One can easily discern in such violent outbursts a reaction to the immobility imposed by social distancing and quarantine—it is reasonable to expect that more acts like these will follow all around the world, and one should not restrain oneself from voicing the suspicion that the explosive worldwide anti-racist passion, although it is not just an outburst of meaningless violence but an expression of a progressive cause, obeys a similar logic: thousands threw themselves into anti-racist protests with a kind of relief that they were again able to tackle something that is not a stupid virus but “just” a social struggle with a clear enemy.
We are, of course, dealing here with very different types of violence. On the beaches of Bournemouth, people simply wanted to enjoy their usual summer vacation and reacted violently against those who wanted to prevent this. In Stuttgart, the enjoyment was generated by looting and destruction, i.e. by violence itself—this was a violent carnival at its worst, an explosion of blind rage with no clear emancipatory potential (although, as expected, some Leftists tried to read into it a protest against consumerism and police control). The (largely non-violent) anti-racist protests ignored the orders and prohibitions of public authorities on behalf of their struggle for a noble emancipatory cause. (These types of violence predominate in developed Western societies—we ignore here the most massive forms of violence that are already happening and will certainly explode in Third World countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia. As the Guardian reported on June 27, “This summer will usher in some of the worst catastrophes the world has ever seen if the pandemic is allowed to spread rapidly across countries already convulsed by growing violence, deepening poverty and the spectre of famine.”3)
There is a key feature shared by the three types of violence in spite of their differences: none of them expresses a mini-mally-consistent socio-political program. It may appear that the anti-racist protests meet this criterion, but they fail insofar as they are dominated by the Politically Correct passion to erase traces of racism and sexism—a passion that gets all too close to its opposite, the neoconservative thought-control. A law approved on June 16 by Romanian lawmakers prohibits all educational institutions from “propagating theories and opinions on gender identity according to which gender is a separate concept from biological sex”.4 Even Vlad Alexandrescu, a centerright senator and university professor, noted that with this law “Romania is aligning itself with positions promoted by Hungary and Poland and becoming a regime introducing thought policing”.5 Directly prohibiting gender theory is of course an old part of the program of populist new Right, but it has been given a new push by the pandemic: a typical new Right populist reaction to the pandemic is that its outbreak is ultimately the result of our global society in which multiculturalism and
