When is a virus more than a virus?
There is one virus, the novel coronavirus that is leaving thousands of dead in its wake. This is the physical virus at the base of the bigger crisis now emerging across the globe.
The other virus is more abstract. It is the effect of this pandemic on human populations, on bodies, on selves, dissolved into the abyss of mortality. It is the social virus, the virus disrupting the social and economic system in which we live and move and have our being. It is virus-as-crisis, the limits of the system of social relations now being tested to their breaking point. It is manifested in the chaotic events of each day, when hospitals are overwhelmed, normal life is disrupted by social distancing, and the stock market crashes in a drama dwarfing 1929. This is the broader crisis, the Crisis. The one which defines the entirety of our lives and the future of our species. It is a crisis of capitalism as a set of social property relations, as a means of governing populations, as a means of determining what is and is not meaningful.
This is demonstrated quite clearly in three relations which define our species: our relation to nature; our relation to our own labor; and the diversification of that “species,” the relation of individuals to individuals, groups to groups, and so forth.
Concerning labor nothing could be clearer than the simple truth that labor power and the earth itself are the source of value in the economy, both in an abstract sense involving the world of money, rent, stocks, capital—and in the concrete sense involving human persons making things that human persons need and use to survive and thrive. These two confront one another in an eternal dance of contradiction driving each other forward, for the abstract cannot live without the concrete, but it resents its limits and dreams of permanent advancement into the realm of pure spirit, the realm of abstraction building abstraction.
All at once, everywhere, at precisely the moment when a long and anemic recovery in stocks was beginning to sputter out, we are all frozen in place. Supply completely evaporates overnight, first in China, then spreading across the globe along the path of the infections. Right wing commentators and big corporate interests insist that the risk to workers from the virus is nothing compared to the risk of continuing this state of affairs. Freezing production, though in concrete terms threatens no one as we only have to determine how to move forward with distribution according to a common plan, can simultaneously be seen as a death sentence in abstract terms. Profits cannot be made. Capital cannot be accumulated. The entirety of the system seizes up in this state of affairs, this deep freeze.
The corporate media discuss “stimulus” packages but these are nothing of the sort, they are rather basic disaster relief. The damage is near incalculable. Records, of unemployment, of stock crashes and rises, are all scratched beyond repair. We see the centrality of labor, the superfluity of most of what it is aimed at, and the outlines of an emergent system aimed at maximizing the development of concrete labor for the sake of the common good. This emergent set of social relations prioritizes healthcare workers, grocers, sanitation workers, artists, and so forth as opposed to the parasitic, abstract sectors bent on accumulating capital in order to accumulate power.
Labor is not the sole source of value, however, as a wise commentator noted in the 19th century. It is rather mixing labor with nature that produces value. We work on the world and make something of it, combining artifice with the riches of a deep history that measures its increments not in millenia, but in eons. The slow, inexorable process of life’s emergence on this planet has laid the conditions for our very existence. The testimony is written into our very DNA, but it is not some simple mechanism just given to us, rather it is a complex and diverse system of assemblages setting the boundaries of the possible. Our evolution is woven into the process of our status as a laboring species, as our central nervous system has responded (and made possible) the complex workings of our opposable thumbs.
But our relationship with nature is in deep crisis. It has been defined by metabolic balances and rifts, culminating in the great ongoing rift of the past 500 years. The relative equality of exchange between ourselves and the world around us has disappeared, and instead our social system devours living nature at a rate higher than it can reproduce itself. Our system turns living nature into dead commodities, creating an unsustainable metabolic rift. This rift has manifested in a particularly horrifying manner, as a side effect of our energy consumption has been the rapid warming of the planet and concomitant transformation of the climate, undermining the very climatic stability that characterized the necessary conditions for the rise of what we call “civilization.” The emergence of the novel coronavirus is a reminder, an awakening, that beneath our noses—just as above our heads—there is an infinite power that can rapidly dissolve the conditions of our existence. We have also witnessed in recent days the dramatic evidence that, yes, we are capable of action to mitigate the damage done by such natural unfolding by way of large scale collective action. Which leads us to the final relation.
The final relation is that between each other. The relation to our own self, to one another, to the broader groups to which we belong, and finally to the species as such. Now we see representatives of old ways of thinking eschewing the scientific consensus and gathering together—for worship or profit or both—which is resulting in unnecessary deaths. We are faced with everyday dilemmas concerning the ethics of human lives in our immediate vicinity: should someone die as a consequence of a cognitive error in judging the warnings of trusted medical authorities to be nothing more than conspiracy?
“Commute w/ Invisible Monsters,” drawing and digital collage provided by the Born Again Labor Museum.
We simultaneously find ourselves enraptured by tales of sacrifice and courage on the front lines by nurses and doctors who fall by the dozen to the very disease they aim to protect us from, but we also know very well the consequences of hoarding and the interpersonal paranoia emerging from a new way of relating to one another as potential carriers, as potential dangers. We see wildcat strikes emerge in car factories and pizza delivery places because workers are asking why they should risk their lives for starvation wages and no benefits. Mutual aid groups arise in every city to help the most vulnerable. Family units are drawn inward, magnifying patterns of abuse, but also magnifying relations that are not based on egotism but mutual cooperation for the flourishing of one another according to a relationship that is not narrowly economic and instrumental in nature.
In short we face a crisis of the totality of human society. The crisis is now manifest as a social crisis, now as an economic crisis, as an ecological crisis, a political crisis. Like all crises before it, it carries with it the promise of revolutionary transformation, but also of the renewal of the capitalist social order. Crises do not automatically resolve into something better, they are carried forth until the ruling factions manage to establish a new homeostasis. Today’s crisis, though, does share some unique characteristics with larger crises of the past that resolved into the breakdown of entire social systems, such as the Black Death and its concomitant class struggles culminating in peasant revolts, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rise of the absolutist state and capitalism, and the burying of feudalism in the good Earth.
This is a profoundly paradoxical situation. This is a crisis that is utterly universal, impacting each individual on Earth with the threat of mortality or the mortality of those we know and love, yet we experience this anxiety on a deeply individual and local level. Even denial of this situation involves a decision, as we are necessarily implicated in this. It interpellates us into its order and we are accordingly subject to a particular psychological process: grief. We grieve for the dead, the potential dead, but most immediately for the normalcy we had grown accustomed too. Even those of us involved in life and death situations now must submit to a new regime, the regime of plague and prevention, whether we like it or not. This is illustrated in Albert Camus’ The Plague:
‘…and there can’t be any question of allowing them to leave it [the port town afflicted with plague].’
‘Even supposing they haven’t got plague?’
‘That’s not a sufficient reason. Oh, I know it’s an absurd situation, but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.’
‘But I don’t belong here.’
‘Unfortunately, from now on you’ll belong here, like everyone else’-The Plague, Albert Camus, p 79, Modern Library College Edition
That is the feeling we all have at some point in such a crisis: “But I don’t belong here.” And yet, we are here, and we belong no matter how we respond. We are condemned to this state, and thus responsible for how we act and react in this brave new context.
The paradoxes are maddening. A universal plague experienced by most through the experience of intense individual isolation. Social distancing which is coupled with extreme social media, thus giving a new sense to the situation that is more akin to “physical distancing with novel forms of social interaction.” The crisis demands that we reduce our activity to the bare essentials, and yet in this situation those of us who are freed of wage labor are permitted to engage in creative self-directed activity. In fact artists are one of the vital forces for managing ourselves during this pandemic: music, television, film, books, the more tactile arts, and more are all getting us through the dark nights.
This utterly international event necessitates the closure of borders and limitations on movement in a manner that simultaneously buttresses the political right and engages the solidarity ethic at the basis of the political left. Politicians who try to turn the virus into an ethnic-racial stigma must simultaneously learn techniques of mitigation and suppression from those they incite hatred against. We are left in a situation of utter locality even as we become more dependent on bodies larger than we can fathom, from national governments to international organizations like the World Health Organization.
These paradoxical unfoldings, what some might call inflection points of a dialectical tension in which a thing is always becoming its opposite in an immediate sense, are in a way signs of what is upon us. This is an event in the truly historical sense of the term. No one can turn away, we are all implicated. We are all, as it were, already sentenced to be in this crisis. It might be the case that the reality that preceded it was not as distinct from the current state of affairs that we have been plunged into as we’d like to believe, but that matters little on the other side of this event. For some the event is still far off—but it is coming, as sure as the necessary relations between mathematical abstractions, it is coming.
What will become of us? We cannot know this, there is too much in the air. Too many systems in crisis. Too many flows of goods and services disrupted. Too much pain and suffering. Too much of everything for us to begin to calculate what it will look like on the other side. Perhaps we will come away with a global early warning system coordinating health systems across borders. The United States might come away with a strong argument that private healthcare is a joke when tens of millions are suddenly thrown into unemployment in the midst of a rapacious viral pandemic. We might find that empirical science has a renaissance of global importance, and more and more we will begin to conform our activity to the—always tenuous and in motion—findings of that work. Perhaps we will come away with a sense of solidarity that cannot be conquered by bullets or threats of stock market collapses, a solidarity that will unleash general strikes that bring the whole thing tumbling down.
“Worker's Argus Panoptes,” fictional drawing and digital collage provided by the Born Again Labor Museum.
Or perhaps the nastier elements will prevail. Walls will be thrown up. Racism will accelerate. Scientific knowledge will be rejected. Violence will become more normal. But this fantasy I think is often mistaken in that it refuses to acknowledge that this “State of Emergency” is already the norm for 3/5ths of humanity—at the very least. I am, paradoxically—or dialectically—a bit more optimistic about the long run of this crisis. The short and medium run will be hell. Literally in that the tormenting horrors of pandemics have long colored the visions of hell espoused by religious visionaries. The talk is of The Greater Depression, or perhaps mitigating it to become merely The Greater Recession.
Yet in the long run what happens to the arguments against action to stop global warming when we’ve already experienced the Greater Depression they warn us will follow a Green New Deal? What happens to the argument that we, as a species, could not possibly collectively act on the scale necessary to address this vast and mortal ecological crisis when we are already acting en-masse? We’ve already seen that we can survive, even thrive, under conditions in which the concrete material of our economy remains intact even if the abstract stuff of money evaporates into thin air. Might we not see the disappearing plumes of carbon dioxide and other pollutants as a challenge… a series of general strikes could, in a coordinated fashion, begin to chip away at the accumulation of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere…
I am dreaming, certainly. But I know little else to do when we are facing a nightmare.
Jase Short is a writer and activist studying philosophy at the New School For Social Research. Their most recent writing for Red Wedge was “The Formless Monstrosity: Recent Trends in Horror.”