Crisis are moments of disruption. They are the key moments in which subjectivity
and objectivity intersect. Krisis, the Ancient Greek noun, is derived
from krinó/krinein - a verb which means to separate, to choose, to
decide or to judge. Crisis thus designated the existence of a situation or
moment that showed a restriction of alternatives and called for a decision. The
use of crisis in its “natural scientific” form dates back to its medical
signification which prevailed since 5th century BC. Crisis denoted a turning
point of a disease, a phase of an illness, in which it is decided whether or
not the organism's self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery. The
illness, appears objective; as empirical deviations from the normal, healthy
state of the organism. The patient experiences his powerlessness vis-a-vis the
objectivity of the illness, a subject condemned to passivity and temporarily
deprived of the possibility of being a subject in full possession of his
powers. Crises are therefore associated with the idea of an objective force
that deprives a subject of one part of his normal sovereignty. (Habermas, 1975) We would not speak of a crisis
however, if death were certain. Crisis is thus never only an objective,
external process. In its medical form – like in its theological - crisis
designates a phase calling for an irrevocable decision. (Roitman,
2011)
Crises are moments of exception, the require exceptional measures. This
covid19 pandemic is an extreme example. The attempt to control the crisis
requires to stop the normal functioning of society, measures interrupted all
normal social interaction from young to old , from closing schools to
interdicting funeral rituals, they stopped and changed large parts of the
economy, closing commerce and obliging people to work from home, the foreclosed
most of public life and democracy, emptying the streets, imposing states of emergency,
forbidding strikes and postponing elections. It is very important to keep in
mind that states of exception and crisis are first and foremost political
processes – even when, or even just because, they apparently disrupt “normal”
politics.
In recent public interventions, Giorgio Agamben has warned for this
state of exception, which sacrifices not only our freedom in order to defend it
– like did the war on terrorism. According to Agamben, life is reduced to its
purely biological condition of bare life, losing all its political and human
dimensions. To control the effects of the virus, all other normal life is
suspended. Inspired by Foucault, Agamben claims this state of exception is the
confirmation of a historical trend that totally transformed modern politics into
a bio-politics in which biological life is the ultimate stake. Foucault’s
concept of Bio-power referred to scientific and expert-based policies which
were directed to the biological health of people. The Belgian paper De Standaard
recently featured a debate between several social scientists and philosophers around
the usefulness and validity of the concept of bio-power to address the
contemporary pandemic. Bert de Munck started the debate, arguing in an opinion
piece (data) for caution towards biopower and the danger of “science”
controlling our life and freedom. He pointed towards how decisions are taken
upon scientific data; and scientific data control our current life in
unimagined way, while there is even no scientific consensus about the data
regarding the impact of covid19 among scientists. He therefore called for a
political and moral debate about the measures. Blancke, Loobuyck and Boudry
reacted with an opinion article in which they argued that “playtime” is over. They
claim that informed policies are not the result of bio-politics but are based upon
the principles of democracy and a critical dialogue between policymakers and
scientists. They claim that the reliance on biopolitics is just an easy trick applicable
upon any political debate. They ask if Munck would apply the same principle to
the political question of climate change – calling climate policies a
“climate-dictatorship”, and conclude that the analysis of Muck only undermines
the much-needed trust in democracy and science itself. In the same way Agamben
was and is fiercely criticized for bringing these issues to public debate in
Italy. His ideas - effectively minimizing the numbers when he stated that so
far according to the official numbers only one in every 1000 Italians would be
infected - would create doubts into the scientific measures put in place to
control the pandemic and thereby would endanger tens of thousands more victims.
Was Munck right to warn about the lack of reliable data and deficient
statistics? The statistics are certainly debatable. There are various arguments
to question the actual impacts and possible trends of the covid19 pandemic in
every direction. The public data in the media rely on confirmed deaths and
confirmed cases, based upon tests – mostly rt-PCR tests, which search for
corona virus rna in swabs that collect saliva and mucous in nose and throat.
Due to margins of errors in those tests, they are often repeated twice or trice
for diagnosis. In case of death and a positive test, it is not easy to
determine if death was caused by the disease or by underlying conditions:
Portugal’s youngest victim so far, 14 year old Ruben Dias, died from organ
failure after contracting acute meningitis. He had a positive covid-test –
expectable because he lived in the quarantined community of Ovar where the
virus was believed to be widely spread -
but he was asymptomatic for covid19 symptoms and nothing indicated it to
be the cause of death besides the test.
Due to the limited number of tests, different testing policies and the
fact that the tested people do not represent a random sample of society, the
actual outcomes of those tests don’t say much about the prevalence nor
evolution of the corona-virus in our society, nor about the actual numbers of
deaths due to covid19 in our society, nor about the actual risk of death due to
covid19. Other data point to different directions: Iceland is the only country
which organizes random tests, and their data show a death-rate of 0,1 to 0,3%
of the infected – 1 to 3 times the usual flu-statistic. Belgian funeral
agencies reported no increase in deaths during the month of March, despite a
spike in the covid19-statistics. Spanish and Italian data on average
death-rates in the society at large, on the other hand, showed considerable
underreporting of covi19-induced deaths. They showed a significant increase of
deaths of affected areas which was 3 to 4 times higher than those accounted for
in the official statistics. On a yearly basis, overall national death-rates
nevertheless still seem to fall within the usual variations between years –
even if the pandemic continues its current course for a few more weeks.
Do the emergency-measures have an impact of the death-rates? Most
probably! But it is nearly impossible to calculate how much and what effects
without reliable data. We will probably have no reliable data until this crisis
is over. Prudence is a good advice in situations of high risks, but prudence
should not be an obstacle for thinking and critique… particularly in moments of
crisis. With capitalism on the brinks of collapse and its contradictions made
bare to everyone - with civil, social and political revoked - we should never
just trust technocratic policies. Crisis call for politicization and
alternatives.
Personally I don’t buy the concept of bio-politics advanced by Agamben
and Munck. It reflects a certain essentialization and reification of power and
the state – as if these would be single entities or defuse phenomena – as Foucault
would have argued. This approach to politics was only possible because of the
very specific, inter-class appearance of the state which had developed in the
West during the post-war period. In this period, the state – and science -
could gain the appearance of a class-independent bureaucratic institution that
spread its ever-bigger control over all spheres of life up to the biological
level of interaction between the social and the natural. With the collapse of
the welfare regimes and the emergence of neoliberalism, this kind of neutral
bureaucratic state has disappeared, and with it probably the usefulness of the
concept of bio-politics.
As a socialist and a Marxist I believe that the best approach towards
our contemporary debate about crisis and science is one of critique of the
political economy. Science is never neutral. And just like the state, "the truth" and "science" are historical products;
they are part of a prevailing hegemony and the fruit of class interests. Much
beyond the rational critique and method the positivists adhere to, scientific
truth is subject to political and social pressures and constantly changes. What
may be tomorrow’s truth, is not necessarily the truth today. Truth and science
are therefore political, or as Marx put it; the truth is the fruit of Man’s historical
praxis. Therefore a socialist or working class science can never be the same as
a capitalist science, and the scientific validity of the socialist perspective
on science will always be contested as unscientific as long as we live in a
capitalist political economy.
This principle does not mean that all elements
of the contemporary bourgeois scientific framework are considered false and
should be thrown into the dust bin, much like a thought-exercise on socialism
not necessarily eliminates all concrete material elements of capitalist
production methods. Probably "bourgeois measurability" and
"standardization" – products of 18th and 19th century capitalism will
remain very useful in socialist societies. Today's capitalist science is,
moreover, still a form of hybrid, despite the neoliberal revolution: It still
reflects a number of elements of socialist science, much of which are the
result of public research by states where the working class has or had relative
strong power positions. But in global terms, science is not class-objective: is
after all, most of the research and science, both in public and private sector,
is guided by principles of capitalist political economy and ideology, in terms
of methods, funding, priorities and frameworks.
The framework of Marxist political ecology – which in the last decade
has gained considerable influence - offers us a more useful framework for this
crisis than the lens of biopolitics. Marxist political ecology considers
capitalism not just as an economic or social system, but as a socio-ecology (Moore, 2011). Clashing with his German
social-democratic contemporaries, Marx already pointed out that use value has
two sources: nature and human labour. The purpose of existence of capital is
profit. In the capitalist socio-ecology, capital accumulates through
exploitation – based upon a legal framework of wage labour – and primary
accumulation or expropriation – based upon the extra-legal framework of
destruction, colonization and violence of what is “naturalized”. Capitalism not
only structures relations between humans, but also between humans and nature.
The processes of capitalist accumulation have various contradictions which
create obstacles for capital accumulation and provoke crises. Some are in the
sphere of classic political economy, such as insufficient initial capital,
difficulties with the labour supply and resistance or inefficiencies in the
labour process, inappropriate technologies and lack of demand, (Harvey, 2010, p. 47) others are so-called natural limits
of the accumulation process, such as pollution, difficult environments,
depletion of resources or diseases. From socio-ecological perspective, we
cannot speak of a clear distinction between these natural or social limits of
capital, as all social limits have a natural component and all-natural limits
have a labour-component. Political ecology also this framework to tackle the
problem of “climate dictatorship” which uses depoliticized technocratic
frameworks to transform a scientific consensus on climate change into a form of
green neoliberal capitalism which financializes natural assents and carbon
emissions and thus opened new markets for accumulation. Diseases are a problem
for capitalism in so far as they destroy demand and disrupt the labour supply. Our
contemporary covid19-pandemic is such a crisis.
Let us now use this framework to address the present crisis. We could
have seen this crisis coming – and some have seen it coming. Pandemics and infectious
diseases are near-inevitable and recurring events in human history – as
episodes of pest and flu have shown us -, but socio-ecologic systems have very
important effects on the social consequences of those pandemics. Crises of
these systems are moments of politicization when long-term tendencies become
apparent and are attributed to a common enemy. Global capitalism has produced
and galvanized different of these tendencies. Among these tendencies: 1. Capitalist
globalization compressed time and space to such an extent that not only money
and goods, but also passengers and viruses travel around the globe much faster
than any time in the history of the planet. For the virus – in many cases
spread out by the white traveling cosmopolitan elite to such an extent that in
some African countries it has been designated as a disease of the riches - all
social and natural barriers – from borders to oceans – ceased to exist. 2. The
capitalist meat industry – producing cheap food for cheap labourers - is
commonly linked to the outbreak of pandemics. The concentration of too many
animals in closed unhealthy spaces creates the perfect breeding ground for
viruses which use this chain of transmission to jump from the animal to the
human world. 3. The neoliberal cuts in healthcare have drastically reduced the
infrastructure and available personnel to fight possible pandemics. One of the
basic needs for fighting pandemics is capacity, in terms of hospital beds, and
strategic stocks of basic hygienic material such as masks, disinfectants and
reagents for tests – all which were drastically reduced in the last twenty
years despite the huge growth of global financial wealth. 4. Privatized pharmaceutics
direct their investments towards the invention of new chemical substances that
treat diseases that are financially interesting and avoid research into
possible curative effects of chemicals without intellectual property rights for
diseases which target the poorest and most vulnerable in the world. Examples
are the lack of research into old anti-malaria drugs as Chloroquine and
Mefloquine - which seem to have some unconfirmed curative properties for covid19
– and the monopolisation of reagents for covid19-tests by the Swiss pharmaceutical
multinational Roche.
Crises play an important role for capitalism to renew itself, to
eventually overcome the barriers of accumulation. If the capitalist world-order
is not challenged, many of its contemporary tendencies will strengthen
throughout this crisis. Among the winners of this crisis will be the platform-economies
– such as Amazon, Uber and Glovo - the big retailers and large food industries.
The crisis and the imposed quarantines strengthen their positions, instead of
being halted, their capital accumulation spiked. In the meantime, their small
scale alternatives, small local commerce dependent on direct interaction with
costumers and limited access to new digital technologies will see a destruction
of their capital and will have enormous difficulties to survive.
Capitalism most often relies upon the states in such times of crisis,
and states have demanded exceptional measures to control the crisis. Schmitt
famously stated that sovereignty is defined by the one who rules in the state
of exception. While governments quarantined entire populations and robbed them of
their social, constitutional and political rights, it provided a ventilator for
Western Capitalism - provided by US treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank (1700
billion $), the European Central Bank (870 billion €) and the German (1000 billion €) government - that
cost at least 3.500.000.000.000 Euro – the equivalent of roughly 700 million
real ICU ventilators.
It is nevertheless exceptional that capital eventually accepted and
imposed the contemporary lockdowns. Conservative leaders such as Trump,
Bolsonaro, Johnson and Trump initially played down the possible impacts of the
pandemics and argued that the economies shouldn’t stop, but they lost their
plea. A few weeks later, the majority of the world’s population - including most
of the value-producing working class - finds itself in a situation of lock-down
that affects all the continents. It would have been expectable that capitalism
would not stop the global economy to save a few hundreds of thousands of lives
from covid-19 (at this moment the official global death-toll is around 50.000),
taking into account that none of such measures had been taken for AIDS for
example, which still kills around 800.000 people/year. One explanation is that
some mighty sectors of high tech capital saw potential profits in the crisis
and the state of exception. Another is that the disease first spread massively
in the core capitalist countries, transforming Europe, and later the United
States, into hotspots of the disease. It affected countries with “less disposable”
people, people which still had a right to healthcare, whose healthcare systems
came to the brink of collapse and whose revolt would be more dangerous to the
survival of capitalism, provoking unforeseen containment strategies.
It is important to always emphasise that we are not “all together in
this”. While states try to save capitalism, the pandemic – through its direct
biological consequences and/or the capitalist management of it – will
inevitably cost the lives and living conditions of the most vulnerable, not
only the old, sick and poor but also the workers and their families that lose
their jobs, salaries and freedoms. Workers – particularly those who are working
in non-essential sectors like in industries and call-centres – get the feeling of
being sacrificed, literally, for the continuity of capitalist normality. The
contemporary crisis exposes the weaknesses of capitalism and disrupts the hereto
existing common senses: nationalizations of private healthcare and banks are back
on the agenda, even some industrial production is taken over by forms of state
planning to prioritize socially essential production. Healthcare, food
sovereignty and solidarity have resurfaced as essential elements of human
survival. The crisis showed the importance of workers in the production of
socially necessary value for the running of every aspect of economy and
society, while managers and privileged actors of spectacle capitalism - such as
celebrities and sport-stars - have become nearly irrelevant. Workers, even in
precarious sectors such as call centres and logistics, have rediscovered their
power to strike in order to guarantee the safety and payment of their labour.
In the Italian Bergamo area, only strike-action was able to halt non-essential
industries.
In the contemporary state of exception of disaster capitalism, the
workers have the possibility to become again the historical political subject
that can provide the much necessary systemic alternative, as the leading force
to overcome not only the perils but of capitalism as such. Like in any crisis,
this is not a given – it will be a matter of consciousness and political
organization. Other, reactionary subjectivities loom around the corner. The
crisis has also provoked a surge in anti-Asiatic xenophobia and racism in the
United States and Europe. Nationalists have seen opportunities in appeals to
close borders and the suspension of universal social and political rights. Many
poor in the neo-colonial world see the quarantine measures as a privilege of
the rich North, of those who still have a privilege to have a home in which
they can remain, and state benefits that can buy them food to survive. A
unified humanity does not exist at the moment, it can only be a political goal,
reached upon the universality of working class against capitalism.
. 
