Pandemic crisis and phase changes
by Raffaele Sciortino
‘We, however, are wholly estranged from nature and therefore deeply unhappy’ – Leopardi, Zibaldone
‘What disturbs men’s minds is not events but their judgements on events’ – Epictetus, Enchiridion
This autumn-winter, faced with either a new pandemic wave or its waning, we will probably understand something more about the nature of COVID from the “medical-scientific” point of view (a very thorny matter, given the non-linear relation between techno-science, power, capital, information …). Yet, even if a relatively low mortality rate will hopefully be confirmed for the virus, none of this detracts from its impact as a social phenomenon of primary importance, tied to the structural insecurity of social existence within global capitalism – of which subjective perceptions of fear, like those conversely of scepticism and denial, are the objective manifestation. The pandemic – a social crisis that is not only global, but also simultaneous – has shown itself in fact to accelerate the particles comprising capitalism (particles that had already become crazed more than a decade ago, with the outbreak of global crisis). More than this, it reveals pathologies of capitalism at the height of real subsumption, while acting as a catalyst of deep social reactions – reactions that today manifest contradictory, co-present tendencies that in part clash, in part intertwine, with indeterminate results. What follows are some assessments that remain a work in progress, along with some interpretative hypotheses.
1. A dual crisis: deglobalisation, or a crisis of globalisation? the US/China; the EU’s change in gear; selective keynesianisms
A superficial interpretation might suggest that the coronavirus has been an exogenous shock. In reality, not only had the world economic system already been under considerable stress at the beginning of 2020, but the interweaving between economic-financial crisis and environmental upheaval should be understood as completely endogenous.
The systemic contradictions of globalised capitalism, including an increasingly destructive relationship with nature, are the deep wellsprings of the interweaving between the pandemic and the social-economic crisis which it has triggered. This latest phase – which only an inveterate economism could insist did not stem directly from “economic” processes – highlights the ever greater disconnect between the systemic reproduction of capital and social reproduction as a whole.
1.1. This does not mean that we should undervalue the use that supranational, state and sub-national powers can make – are already making – of this crisis, in pursuit of a broader control over populations, and/or to relaunch accumulation on new bases. At the moment, however, this seems to unfold above all as a crisis of political governance, albeit differentiated between countries and geo-economic areas in terms of scope and effect. The pandemic has produced a tremendous shock within a situation already characterised by multiple upheavals, forcing governments (and scientific communities, with significant internal differences) to react first with denial or scepticism, followed by surprise and panic.
1.2. In this way the pandemic has represented the trigger of what might be the second stage of the global crisis that broke out in 2008-9, at the intersection between contingency and inherent tendencies. The emergency has collided violently with the problems left unresolved by that crisis, which had been unable to create a generalised revival based upon a strong relaunching of accumulation. In more recent times, it is no coincidence that the world economy has become quite tempestuous, with the trade war between the US and China, the stock market falls of 2018 subsequently buffered through the injection of liquidity by central banks, the signs of recession in Japan and Germany, the enormous interventions in the repo market by the US Federal Reserve in late 2019, the latest round in the never ending war over the price of petrol, etc.
1.3 Behind these signals, precipitated in the shock to production and demand triggered by the pandemic, can be glimpsed an acceleration of the general tendencies that are already unfolding. The contraction in world trade, the fraying of global supply chains, the reduction in foreign investment, goes hand in hand with Washington’s geopolitical offensive against China and the at-least partial decoupling of the two economies. Are we now facing an inversion of the cycle, the beginning of de-globalisation? At present, it may be more appropriate to talk of a crisis of globalisation. The crucial point, in fact, is that globalisation is not primarily nor exclusively a policy that can be dismissed with impunity: it is, before anything else, a “stage” in the process of the affirmation of the world market. Certainly, in light of the interminable and foreboding nature of its explosive contradictions, that process could break down. Today, the manner in which the breakdown of globalisation could play out is largely a consequence of the conflict between the US and China. Washington needs to block and reverse China’s rise, while putting at risk its unity as a state, within the context of a program of global regime change in defence of the dollar’s worldwide hegemony. For its part, China is propelled by its own capitalist course towards a less subordinate position within the world market, given its current inability either to upset the existing order, or to become the dominant power (talk of the Chinese Century is laughable). Due to the growing contradictions within and without its global hegemony, Washington must bend that course to its own needs, pulling into line its European “allies” – starting with Berlin – and effectively acting as a revisionist country within the international order. At the same time, this is a process that contains volatile contradictions and notable obstacles of its own. To begin with, it still has to be seen whether the US multinationals are able to re-localise the fixed capital invested in China through which they have appropriated a large part of the surplus value extracted from the Chinese working class, while ensuring that the proletarian condition within the United States worsens to the point where it becomes worthwhile to relocate there. Secondly, there is the risk that the chaos following on from the resurgence of global crisis and geopolitical conflict might seriously undermine the dominance of the dollar before the Yankee strategy of seriously weakening China has succeeded. Thirdly, is a vigorous revival of accumulation possible only through increasing the extraction of surplus value on a world scale, or does it require the massive and systematic destruction of fixed and fictitious capital, with each actor doing their best to unload on partners and competitors alike? Either way – whether the US strategy succeeds, or if instead the international system drifts further towards disarticulation and military conflict (in the opposite direction, therefore, from the multi-polar hopes of many) – the world market remains the essential arena for the extraction and realisation of surplus value. This is the case even conflicts escalate, and in spite of sovereigntist illusions about the possibilities of restoring self-sufficient markets at the national or regional level. There is no turning back from this, save for a global military conflict that would render the world market impracticable for its duration – but would in the end lead only to a repartitioning of the world market itself.
1.4 In this context of disarticulation, other national actors (in part through pressure from their own populations) are pushing for a re-nationalisation of their own policies in the face of a US approach that is increasingly hostile towards rivals, and less and less palatable for “allies”. In particular, the EU is caught between the US-China conflict, and the need to play a global role in its own right. This explains, beyond the usual initial internal divisions over the coronavirus emergency, the phase change underway at the prompting of Germany. With the suspension of the stability pact and the launch of the Recovery Fund, which foresees a provisional and partial mutualisation of member states’ debts, albeit with conditions, there is concern about the social cohesion of those countries, in the EU’s south, that have been hit hardest by COVID. The broader picture here concerns efforts to reorganise European finance and production around the hegemonic German pole, so that these can improve their competitive performance within global markets. Berlin’s objective is to preserve and strengthen the EU and the euro, in order to remedy the increasingly hostile signals from the US that portend instead growing submission to Washington and the latter’s anti-Chinese and anti-Russian stance. More than this, the issue of community debt – and of green debt (sponsored by the likes of Greta Thunberg) – could attract capital to the euro at the expense of the dollar and US treasury bonds, and so counter the risky speculation already evident with the eurozone crisis from earlier this decade. Against this, however, there remain notable difficulties to overcome: divisions within Europe (exploited by Washington, which dominates the countries of Eastern Europe, and could play the southern EU states off against Berlin); hesitancy on the part of Berlin to break with Atlanticism and engender instead internal political conflict; the impossibility of the euro playing the role of global currency; the enormous accumulated delay in digital competition; the absence of a unitary imperialist policy; all in all, the necessity of introducing profound “reforms” are bound to shake social and political balances within countries as much as between them. The conflict between Berlin and Washington will proceed in any case, both in open and overt form.
1.5 Europe no less than the United States appears to be experiencing a phase change in its economic strategies compared to the previous crisis. We are witnessing measures providing liquidity (through indebtedness) targeted not only at the financial sphere, but also the so-called real economy. On paper at least, these entail massive keynesian-style state interventions aimed in the first place at cushioning the employment crisis, and of preserving productive capacity with an eye to an (eventual) “revival”. More broadly, however, the goal here is to increase the real basis of value, so as to support (through renewed profits) both the enormous bubble of fictitious capital being fed by further state debt, and heightened global competition. Economies can expect to encounter further processes of restructuring and concentration at both a national and supranational scale, abandoning those zombie firms that had survived earlier, along with part of the workforce. Following the downsizing of the wages and savings of proletarians and the salaried middle classes, along with the downsizing and/or compression of a good part of the self-employed middle class, social structures will be devastated by a profound productive and social restructuring (digitalisation, automation, green reconversion, the reform of social services and welfare etc.). If this is keynesianism, then it is at every level an ultra-competitive and ultra-selective version that is far from painless for societies, seeing as debts must be repaid with interest. For the left, with its dreams of new, revitalised social spending programs, all of this will be like a cold shower.
2. Social reactions: China, the West
Social reactions to the pandemic, in their variety and changeability, represent the terrain upon which different classes in different geopolitical areas position themselves, in terms of the manifestation of some important dysfunctions (if not genuine structural limits) of the capitalist system – the fragility of value chains, irrational urbanisation, declining social infrastructure, hyper-accelerated and pathogenic rhythms of life, etc. The fact remains that health and education, which continue to be the pillars of what is left of the social compromise in the West, are amongst the services hit hardest by the pandemic – which helps explain those sparks of consciousness and mobilisation (however limited) that we have witnessed to date. If these reactions to the emergency have clearly been utilised from above, they indicate all the same a certain stirring within the previously stagnant waters of a society that has been traumatised by a decade of crisis. Classes may allow themselves to be “manipulated” so long as that entails the ordinary administration of a given social compromise, but they do not deceive themselves when crucial events pierce the filter of communication and daily life normally subsumed to the fetishes of capital.
2.1 China has been damaged both by the economic effects of the pandemic, and by its characterisation as the source of the outbreak. At the same time, the central state has shown itself to be quite capable at managing the crisis, and has deployed soft power to turn around in part some of the initial negative repercussions. One crucial factor has nearly always been overlooked in Western commentaries: the strong community reaction amongst the Chinese masses to news of the virus’ spread and to the local authorities’ incompetence. This push from below has been matched by Beijing’s decisive intervention, prompted by concern to underpin the legitimacy of the party and the State. This is just the latest instance of that democratic dialectic – understood in the sense of the material constitution of the relationship between proletariat, party and State – with the “people” placing pressure on the power structure, which has in turn launched a “people’s war”-style campaign. The latter is aimed not only at the virus, but also at the possibility that the West (and the US above all) might profit from the health crisis in a way that could undermine the rulers’ grip on the country. At the same time, as the virus spreads around the world, the Chinese model of intervention – obviously conditioned in its rigidity by serious deficiencies in the health infrastructure – has had immediate repercussions in the West in terms of relations between populations and their respective governments, coming close to setting a benchmark in the management of the pandemic crisis. (Italy, the first Western country to be hit hard by the pandemic, was also the first to adopt a rigid, if not total, lockdown). It’s as if China had launched a universalistic message – until now, the prerogative of the West – concerning not human rights, but rather the necessity to take decisive measures and to cooperate globally in order to overcome the pandemic. This, along with the provision of medical equipment, has revealed a political (and geopolitical) backdrop that has counted in terms of shifting the mood and reaction of public opinion in Western countries. In this sense, but only in this sense, the push from below for an effective struggle against the virus has alluded to the potentiality of proletarian action beyond national borders. On the other hand, Beijing’s response should not be overstated, given the extreme difficulties in which the Chinese economy – struggling to restore its value chains – now finds itself due to the virus. Unlike 2008-9, when its Keynesian measures helped to prevent the West falling into an economic depression, China today is now completely within the crisis, exposed to a growing indebtedness from decreasing returns. Not only can it not save the West, but it is now obliged to save itself. To do so, bearing in mind the economic war now unfolding with the US, it will probably need to save itself from the West. Its very social pact between State, middle class and proletariat, increasingly less practicable as a trade off between political stability and economic growth, will have to change, leading to greater internal and international instability (see the experience of Hong Kong).
2.2 The West was at first disconcerted by the fact that the potentially lethal unknown virus could not be confined to the global periphery. Above and beyond a range of quite different attitudes, what emerged is that for broad sectors of the population, the Western daily routine was no longer perceived as secure. This entailed the interplay between a deep and overarching uncertainty – the product of ten years of crisis – and a less positive (if not always totally negative) attitude towards the effects of globalisation. On these bases – which are not simply subjective, since uncertainty has now become a structural condition – the virus continues to have a notable social impact, with effects that still remain to be calculated (and despite a mortality rate that has proved to be lower than was first feared). This situation has induced panic amongst proletarians and the middle classes, and might yet prompt unexpected demands. A recognition of the disastrous state of health systems; the perception of the growing neo-malthusian climate towards the elderly, and the sick in general; the fracture within the world of those whose living is dependent upon their own labour; doubts as to whether the “plural” and “democratic” power system truly serves the community; the distinction drawn between “essential” and other services; the question of what things are essential to produce, and how to distribute them without risking people’s health: all of these issues relate to important aspects of the relation between social reproduction, and the reproduction of the capitalist system itself. In turn, this raises the related demand from below that those most in need receive an income from accumulated social capital – in a monetary form provided by the state, and thus still completely within the capital relation – rather than leaving the production of necessary goods and services completely to the market. Here we find, in nascent form, a series of demands that at least partially contradict capital as it has been structured in recent decades. As such, they signal in a latent sense a class instance that is not at all obvious, in light of the proletarian internalisation of the “naturalness” of capitalism, and in particular of the superiority of “business sense”. At least during the time when the perceptions of health risks was at its height, the general (minimal) practices and moods from below was enough to pressure the State to protect collective health, or to mobilise when governments did not meet such demands, in a sort of emergency crude “socialism”. All of this was accompanied in some private firms by spontaneous strikes to defend workers’ security and a push for working from home amongst broad sectors of the salaried middle class in the public sector and elsewhere. In other words, while the virus has laid bare some of the pathologies of our society, dominated as it is by the industrialisation of life, the emergent social responses in a proletarian sense have triggered – in a confused way, and not without sufferings and contradictions bound up with the restriction of individual liberties and the increased burdens of reproduction placed upon women – a need for community that has deemed the economy, even if only for a short period of time, as secondary to life itself, prioritising the reproduction of the species over the mere reproduction of labour-power.
3. Yet more neo-populism?
Social reactions to the pandemic represent a marked shift, even if the latter does not spell out an unmanageable crisis for capital. In so far as the pandemic does not disappear anytime soon, this situation will only become more exacerbated. In what direction will such reactions head? In some ways, the situation in the West seems to confirm the imposition, within the imperialist countries struggling with the global crisis, of the emerging neo-populist dynamics.[1] This is the new terrain of class contradictions, now that the classical workers’ movement has exhausted itself – provided that we focus not on contingent organisational expressions, but rather on its con/fusion of class and national-communitarian instances, expressed variously in “citizenist” or sovereigntist senses, a sign of the profound transformation in class relations. Indeed, in the unprecedented context of a dual, economic and epidemic crisis, we can review these instances in all their ambivalence:
the demand for sovereignty over life: health versus economy, at a community rather than individual level, that pressures the State to discipline private egoistic interests and, in doing so, to become the bearer of the needs of social reproduction – in the ambivalence of citizens’ demands for a State for everybody;
the distancing in behaviours, while partial and provisional: from the individualisation of risk – the neo-liberal apparatus of discharging social responsibilities upon the isolated individual – that has reproposed the bond of a common responsibility. Dramatic circumstances have demanded action not by the individual, but by individuals in the plural. This is the premise for an unexpected countertendency to the hitherto unchallenged process of atomisation, albeit not without the dangerous trade off of control delegated to state power, which is at best an illusory surrogate for community;
the class dynamic that has seen (minority) sectors of the proletariat in manufacturing and the service sector make themselves heard – including through strike action – in opposition to their employers’ contempt for people’s lives, and in the face of the virus’ differentiated incidence and mortality rate according to class and race. This has taken place within the clearly perceived contradiction between their own reproduction as a class and as members of the human species, and the diktat of the economy that presides over their own immediate reproduction in monetary terms;
the cross-class common sense of common defence against the virus, albeit within a growing differentiation between various sectors and interests of “the people” (see point 4 below);
the growing intolerance within broad strata of the European population for the United States, Trump’s denialism, the arrogance that Washington has manifested on all levels – but also the resurgence of anti-EU sovereignty faced with the absence, on the part of the European technocracy, of any common strategy for dealing with the initial phase of the epidemic (but also the probable pro-EU realignment amongst popular sectors following anticipated “aid” will discount the fact that Brussels’ “turn” is the direct consequence – beyond the exceptional circumstances of the situation – of the populist moods that the Italian and French governments in particular have harvested in support for a better deal within the EU apparatus).
These expressions – partly spontaneous pressures, partly explicit instances – confirm the presence of a new social camp, unforeseen and incomprehensible to the “left”, that goes far beyond its temporary terms of representation and organisation. These neo-populist expressions remain, in any case, fundamentally reactions. Unlike working class reformism, which existed within a capitalism marked by broad spaces of expansion (along with its crises and disasters), these expressions are unable to incarnate any overarching alternative social model within the destructuring of capitalist society that is presently underway.
4. Slippages: new fault lines; a second phase of neo-populism?
The slippages and discontinuities are likewise significant. Rather than developing in a linear fashion, the pandemic has brought new variables into play. Beyond those factors of globalisation and casualisation, new fault lines come into view, harbingers of potential antinomies. To name only the most clamorous: the defence of health versus the primacy of the economy; working conditions that are more versus less “protected”; generational differences. The pre-existing social and political camps find all this disconcerting.
4.1 The clearest line of demarcation is between, on one side, those sectors (largely proletarian, but also the salaried middle class in the public sector) that prioritise their personal wellbeing over working for others, and on the other, proletarians in small and medium enterprises fearful of losing their jobs, those “self-employed” who provide services to companies and individuals, part of the productive middle class who face the possibility of an increasingly precarious and dependent accumulation while seeking to retain their “independence”, and who are opposed therefore to restrictive measures that impede their activities or make them more difficult. It is within these sectors that – already during or immediately after the most acute phase of the pandemic – the narrative of the lockdown (real or presumed) as an unjustified healthcare dictatorship favouring the “privileged”, the state etc. found consensus (only then to demand state support themselves at community expense, for the most part in the form of subsidies and tax cuts). It is a fact that the two sectors not only find it difficult to link up but – in approaching the nexus between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of their own lives in quite opposite ways – find themselves, at the moment, on counterposed fronts. Their respective stances are qualitatively different, with the latter sector characterising itself by its absence of a community instance, the illusion of being able to return to a lost “freedom” and a logic of self-entrepreneurialism while holding a grudge against big capital, which dominates market share at the expense of the little fishes. The pandemic crisis, in other words, accelerates the decomposition of the middle classes, and the detachment of some of them to the proletariat. All the same, the cross-class perspectives particular to neo-populism do not give ground on the proletarian front to “pure” class positions, but rather reconfigures them. It will not be insignificant, therefore, to see, if only for a brief moment, the re-emergence of the proletariat’s crucially important location within production, which holds the potential to block capital’s entire reproduction.
4.2 Another fault line, which for now is flying below the radar, is the one that divides generations: in particular, within an increasingly neo-malthusian climate, that between youth and those adults who have been affected only marginally by the risk of virus, and older adults who either have the possibility of protecting themselves, or have been impelled to (self) isolate. In effect, the mass attitude of young people towards the pandemic – oscillating between a “sense of responsibility” towards the more vulnerable, and rigorously “liberatory” behaviours (rigorously as individuals, or with friends) as part of “breathers” or “time outs” from their work schedule / student job / alienated life – does not signal a rethinking of their own wretched circumstances in this society (caught between membership of a casualised reserve army of labour and consumers of useless or destructive commodities), or of possible alternative forms of sociality. Instead, their imaginary seems still to be tied to expectations of being “a middle class in formation” – you can be anything you want to be – with easy credit and affordable riches thanks to the meritocracy of intelligence. The education system continues to feed this imaginary, thanks also to the self-defeating subordinate function of teachers, who for some time have built their identity upon an illusory role as irreplaceable (?) vectors of their students’ social mobility (?). Hopefully the pandemic crisis will begin to undermine all this. Certainly, the curt order from the business sector – for whom mass education exists, beyond all the rhetoric about learning, as a parking lot for the younger generation’s labour-power – to “open” the schools whatever their level of safety (or otherwise) – says a lot about what capital is preparing more generally for the salaried middle class of the public infrastructure. Besides, the overall worsening of workers’ conditions – what better occasion than a crisis due to “natural” causes ?! – is the objective of a possible capitalist use of the generational fault line, with the young being hurled against the “old and privileged”, in an effort by companies to revitalise themselves through new, low cost labour-power reserves. This is a form of generational “dumping” from a society that not only wastes and burns the energy of youth, but also its hidden latent potential.
In a more confused manner, the gender contradiction also stuck its head out. The defence of health and of life through measures restricting individual freedoms, often borne by the reproductive work of women, has inevitably reactivated suffering and contradictions linked to gender inequalities. Women have often had to bargain between old (family care) and new (home-office) domestic work. Beyond the mellifluous rhetoric about being smart, the further intertwining in a capitalist environment between domestic space – already largely invaded by digital devices – and the workplace can only be at the expense of female subjects. This signals a crucial point: the defence of the reproduction of the species must include and be able to activate the energies inherent in social reproduction.
4.3 It is in this sense that the limits of the reactions also play out of those – for the most waged – who have tried to oppose the “arguments” of business and the social-darwinism of some governments:
this does not go much beyond the immediate defence of health, in the widespread illusion of being able to return to “how things were before” – or, at least, of being able to minimise the damage through purely economic, sector-specific demands (which also represents the limit of the unions’ perspectives);
the same subject that has pushed for restrictive measures, may push or is pushing now for the reopening of the economy, whether due to the impact upon employment or to some changed perception of the health risks (“we have to learn now to live with the virus”);
there is a strong delegation to the State in terms of minimising health risks and providing income support. Even if there is not yet a call for a “strong power”, governments know how to utilise such legitimation in support of the inevitable socialisation of losses based upon everyone having to share in the sacrifices;
there is no clarity around the clearly social cases of the pandemic, tied to the capitalist mode of production.
All of this could once again propel that part of the proletariat still tied to what remains of the social compromise into passivity – or worse, towards the more concentrated sectors of capital, which have sought to use the pandemic emergency as a trampoline to launch shock economic recipes, even as less “protected” sectors have, with their more limited power to impose their own interests, found themselves at the mercy of the sovereigntist perspectives (which in Europe, at least for now, are more pro-American and cosmetic) of the petty bourgeoisie facing ruin at the hands of big capital.
4.4 Other slippages instead prefigure – at least for now in Europe – potential but not insignificant steps forward in clarifying class relations and the proletariat’s relative positioning:
whereas, during the first phase of neo-populism, conflict unfolded between globalists and citizen-sovereigntists (and even this was largely a matter of electoral behaviour and mood), the dual crisis currently underway raises the necessity of sharp measures at the national level, while simultaneously making clear that the decisive terrain for matters – or at the very least, one of the fundamental terrains, especially with the pandemic – is the international one;
an important shift is emerging within neo-populist unrest. What had until recently been largely political, expressed as the revolt of citizens against “crooks” and supranational power structures, is now focused on the functioning of society and the economy;
above all, an unravelling is underway between impulses from below and institutional political organisations, which to date have presented themselves as representing the losers of globalisation. Even if today we don’t have an open class conflict – such as, for example, the mobilisation of the French Gilets Jaunes, which has placed in crisis the new version of Le Pen politics and the pretence of its populist credentials – the hold of the sovereigntist axis (so-called right wing populism) on the people has been put to the test. The upshot of this can only pose serious questions, in particular on the proletarian side, above all in light of the substantial denial of the epidemic by “right wing” sovereigntist advocates, forced by events to reposition themselves on the terrain of enterprise freedom and the unrestrained defence of property rights (the Lega in Italy, the AfD, Brexit conservatives etc.), despite the not-always outlandish positions against “surveillance capitalism adopted by the “anarcho-capitalist” fringe of this political spectrum. Then again, so-called “left wing” populism (M5S, Podemos) has fared little better, having become ensnared in the bedrock of centrist and Europeanist institutional politics, losing in the process every possibility of its future manoeuvrability.
4.5 The dynamic in the US is even less linear. The COVID crisis, managed by the Trump administration in the manner we all know, is intertwined not only with serious unemployment, but also the antiracist mobilisation that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. With the virus continuing to inflict damage along class and racial lines, the question of race has become key to the wider social unrest. Social existence as a whole has shown itself to be less and less acceptable for a growing number of (not only) black exploited people, facing a war against the poor and a war amongst the poor. Thanks to participation, sympathy or even just attention shown within white proletarian sectors – including some of those who voted for Trump four years ago – antiracist mobilisation has begun to create difficulties for Trump’s sovereigntism, which in its proletarian base was aligned with the prospect of the return to industrial primacy and savings on armaments production for far away wars. It must also be said that it is difficult to move beyond this first, very important step if attention remains fixed upon anti-Trumpism or this fundamental antiracist struggle, as is evident in the Democrats’ ability to recuperate matters in terms of identity politics that by definition rule out carrying the conflict onto a class terrain (which is the only one able to engage with exploited whites, who – like it or not – remain decisive). Trump has been able to redress his lines, with a somewhat less “class”-based bent, in terms of “law and order” and a call to arms against China (a position shared by the Democrats and – as a sentiment – by a large number of voters), after having resorted to significant economic subsidies against unemployment (the helicopter money so loved by many on the left). The possibilities of right wing sovereigntism are therefore far from exhausted – just as US imperialism is hardly at the end of the rope. The presidential elections, following some international “incident” against Beijing or Teheran, could yet hold surprises – but none of this detracts from the importance of this blowout [? scesa in campo] that reveals the contours (however ill-defined so to date) of a potential class war in the heart of the imperialist beast.
4.6 However tortured its progression, the situation as it develops could point to a (confused, “dirty”) second stage of neo-populism that, in moving well beyond the electoral stage that it has privileged to date, would see the dissolution of some ambivalences in favour of deepened proletarian class instances as well as the radicalisation of sovereigntist-nationalist positions, putting each on a potential collision course destined to pulverise any intermediary positions. In the short to medium term, this does not mean the possibility of a proletarian revival on its own basis. Beyond specific situations, the big challenge facing a swerve away from neo-populism by the proletariat lies in the difficulty of creating a general movement that, while starting from a particular terrain and sector, is able to make its own problem a vital concern for broad sectors of the exploited. In other words, a movement with contents that are at least implicitly political (but not institutional), along the lines of the Gilets Jaunes. Nor can the eventuality of a war of all against all be excluded – a civil war (subterranean or open) without class war, fomented by various power rackets – in which national contexts exploded for economic, geopolitical or social reasons. There is great disorder under heaven … Much will depend on the tortuous developments of a sawtooth crisis, which continues to go up and down (albeit without catastrophic outcomes to date): the evolving geopolitical conflict between the US and China; the development of a more autonomous repositioning by the EU (even as it drags along more Eurosceptic sectors within itself); finally, the outcome of the profound capitalist restructuring that is already underway.
5. Capitalist restructuring
One fundamental variable concerns the course and rhythm assumed by the capitalist restructuring triggered by the dual crisis: what will be its outcome, and how will which classes react, and in what manner? Its necessity had seemed mandatory even before the pandemic’s outbreak, given the slowdown of production in its two motors (China and Germany), which had hitherto sustained global accumulation. The new situation represents the perfect occasion for some shock therapy based on automation, artificial intelligence, generalised digitalisation through “platform capitalism” transforming processes of production (where even the house becomes a place of production), logistics and reproduction (schools, health, public administration, public order etc.). A future that has already been proclaimed, and so not an absolute novelty: one which has been prepared for some time through the socialising and addictive deployment of computing devices, crossing generational and geo-economic divides. And it is not certain that, in counter tendency to what we have seen to date, the transformation of another consistent slide of activity into directly digital labour will not arouse a greater awareness of the expropriation and impoverishment underway, and so some reactions in terms of struggle.
In the meantime, the processes of capital centralisation – with Big Tech and Big Pharma taking the lead – are proceeding apace, putting weaker competitors out of business and subordinating less concentrated capitals. These are processes that intersect with exacerbated geo-political tensions (see 1.3-4). Through the application of new technologies – the classic extraction of relative surplus value – labour processes are intensified decisively. In the West as well, many jobs are rendered redundant, others are deskilled, remixing hierarchies of management and control in the process of reconfiguring technical roles. Not only the proletariat, but also middle classes, will find their circumstances changing for the worse, as such reserves as they have accumulated dwindle away. The more urban spaces and real estate income are reconfigured, with consequences for urban and suburban lifestyles and sources of income, so the economic crisis facing cultural consumption and events serves to undermine globalist narrations that were hardly in good health to begin with.
Not by chance, the more “progressive” political class and bosses envision forms of compensation such as a universal basic income alongside the generalisation of (poorer forms) of welfare provision, alongside migration polices aimed at providing a bigger supply of low-cost labour-power. Whether this is enough to go beyond so-called post-fordist arrangements in stabilising a new global standard of value without a consistent destruction of fictitious and physical capital, remains to be seen …
6. Concluding reflections
Against the backdrop of a genuine crisis of industrial capitalist civilisation, the COVID experience seems to prefigure – in however confused a manner – the conflict between two parties (in the “historic” rather than “formal” sense): the economic-neo-malthusian party against the party of the social individual, which champions the primacy of the reproduction of the human species. The first of these, the bourgeois party subordinate to valorisation, is for now well-embedded in power, while being shot through with increasingly disruptive (internal and other) contradictions that are destined only to grow with the blockage to accumulation. The second, now that the parabola of the workers’ movement has exhausted itself, remains in a molecular state, fragile, within a broader and still confused social environment. All the same it has shown signs of life, and already amounts to something, above all in two specific ways. Firstly, through the instinctive reaction of a part of the exploited and oppressed class against the subordination of life to the rationale of capital. While this has been a minoritarian experience to date, it has been sustained by a rather broader common sense. It has not fought for particular interests, but rather has in certain ways struggled against itself as an element of capital. In the process it has counterposed, however unconsciously, social reproduction against systemic reproduction. It has clashed unwittingly with the limits of its own particular proletarian condition, internal to capital, as limits to the reproduction of the human community. Secondly, it has demonstrated that it has known how to disconnect in a concrete manner, even for a brief moment, the reproduction of life from the reproduction of capital.
Will it be possible for the masses to take note of the crisis of overall social reproduction, including nature, impacted as it is by the increasingly destructive limits posed by the systemic reproduction of capital? That all this might occur through economic-social and environmental catastrophes and wars, is unfortunately in the nature of things. Capital is like a vampire: the more its grip tightens upon the weakest, the more frightened and ill the living become. But this too must pass, and it is not necessarily the case that fear – one of the most fundamental of the human passions – must always give rise only to regressive responses. Nothing human is alien to me …
Turin, September ‘20
[1] See R. Sciortino, Neopopulism as a Problem, https://projectpppr.org/populisms/blog-post-title-one-jzade.
