pandemics
The coronavirus pandemic has raised utopian hopes and dystopian fears about platform capital to new heights. Lockdown life is networked life, with a booming revenues and stock values for the great digital corporations. Confronted with a sudden constriction in the circulation of capital as Covid-19 reduced the availability of labour and paralyzed normal commodity consumption, governments have reached not only for the vaccines of Big Pharma but also for the devices of Big Tech as emergency solutions. Contact tracing apps are only the leading edge of a wave of promised techno-remedies ranging from intensified robotization to cities at once digitally “smart” and virally “clean”. In this context, apprehensions of a Big Tech “power grab” (Foer 2020) effected by imposition of a “screen new deal” (Klein 2020) jointly fashioned by government and business may be justified. What is yet to be seen is whether the crisis will provide impetus in a contrary direction, for public governance of networks now understood as essential services, the protection of the precarious gig-workers, or, more radically, to a levelling of the wealth disparities typified by the gulf between immortality-oriented. Big Tech oligarchs and the mass of a population struggling to avoid pandemic infection.
Autonomist Marxism and World-Ecology: For a Political Theory of the Ecological Crisis
The paper aims to articulate an "encounter" between Autonomist Marxism (AM) and World-Ecology (WE), that is, between two theoretical paradigms increasingly discussed at the global level, but so far never analyzed in close connection to one another. The aim of the paper is to show that, although the two perspectives relate to the question of the (ecological) crisis in a very different way, they can be effectively integrated if juxtaposed on a different level - that of the historico-political analysis of the question concerning the environment. Both approaches originally rework Marx’s crisis theory, but they do not completely avoid the polarization that marked its evolution: while AM tends to renew the tradition that sees the crisis as a moment of development, WE elaborates the so-called breakdown theory in unprecedented fashion. The convergence between the two paradigms, which is actually a rather demanding theoretical exchange, and as such requires some deep rethinking for both positions, can take place through a re-reading of the historical process of politicization of ecology (1968-1973).
Autonomist Marxism and World-Ecology: Nick Dyer-Witheford interviews Emanuele Leonardi
Nick-Dyer Witheford interviews Emanuele Leonardi
Against radicality: habit in care and crisis
Another day in the geopolitical hellscape, another think piece about radical care. There is much to be said about the value of mutual aid in a pandemic emergency. Americans are organizing rent strikes and food delivery in a context of social distancing and quarantine measures. At a state level, in 2020 Congress passed the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history. But such actions should occur in any functioning democratic society, regardless of whether a crisis is present. Democracy hinges on a framework of care that is part and parcel of a nation’s political and institutional fabric. Building on Elaine Scarry’s Thinking in an Emergency, this essay recognizes the co-development of technological and social infrastructure while centering the value of habit in approaches to care. Specifically, it considers the kind of care born out of automatic decision-making. As mutual aid efforts increasingly rely on digital labor, how might we rethink the value of inanimate, algorithmic thought processing? While problematizing algorithmic bias in the age of contagion, this inquiry also asserts that care shouldn’t be radical – it should be habitual.
Pandemic crisis and phase changes
Given the enthusiastic reception of Raffaele Sciortino’s “Neopopulism as a Problem: Between Geopolitics and Class Struggle” we are very happy to publish a second instalment of his work, “Pandemic crisis and phase changes”. This carries analysis of “neopopulism” into the era of coronavirus, dissects the contradictions unleashed by the viral crises, and eventually opens onto possibilities, however complex, fraught and hazardous, of intensifying conflicts between proletarian social reproduction—indeed, species-level reproduction—and the reproduction of capital. The essay was written before the second wave of the epidemic (and the subsequent contradictory political measures and social reactions in Europe) and prior to the US presidential election, but in paragraphs 4.3 and 4.5 make clear allusion to these two eventualities. We are, once again, deeply grateful to Steve Wright for his translation of this article.