This is a response to the article Neither Idiots nor Sheep by comrade Sander. In it, Sander explores the impact that the virus has had on the economy and criticizes those, who, particularly in the left, essentially deny the reality of the virus by joining the no-vaxx camp, often mingling with reactionary forces on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Sander brings up the uncomfortable point that although capitalism will seize upon any crisis for its own ends, it is in the interest of both the ruling class and the working class to overcome the medical emergency. It is in the interest of the capitalists to have a “healthy” enough working class in order that they can continue squeezing profits in an uninterrupted process. It is also of course in the interest of the working class to have medical care against an objective life-threat. In this strained situation the polarization that has occurred fueled by conspiracies, misinformation and rightwing agendas seems to run contrary to a basic need for solidarity in overcoming an adversity which is social in nature.
I can find no fault at all with this criticism but I am left wondering in what shape this solidarity will manifest? Moreover, what political stance can be taken -if at all- as a response to the current pandemic?
SPECIES SOLIDARITY
It is quite true, as Sander mentions, that nobody has a purely individual relationship to a virus. Common sense tells us that in order to stop the spread of covid-19 humanity must react to such a stimulus in unison as a single biological organism. Solidarity would mean then that each individual act appropriately, according to his or her involvement with the species, in order to achieve herd-immunity. In this idea of solidarity, the social dimension of man is equivalent to the natural dimension of man, the specific unit of which is the individual biological organism. This type of social understanding of the human rests upon a naturalism in which the human is viewed primarily as a gregarious animal distinguished from other types only by its particular biological and genetic features together with the environment in which it lives. It is clear in context that even when we talk about the ‘social’ dimension of man, the focus is trained on those particular aspects, the understanding of which can only appear through the prism of natural sciences.
However, it is important to remember that the concept of the ‘natural’ expresses primarily the very society in which it appears. The laws of nature, Marx reminds us repeatedly, are only ever grasped through the historical conditions of their practice. Natural science has historically played an enormously important role in the shaping of the bourgeois ideology of its time. If we do not bear this in mind, then the image of the individual bodily shape -which is but an instance of its species- takes on a distinctly a-historical character. This does not mean that we must dismiss natural science, far from it. But it does mean that we cannot approach this scientific knowledge of humanity as if it did not come pre-cooked, as it were, by distinctly social features, features marked by the capitalist mode of production.
A young Marx once said that “Natural science will one day incorporate the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science” (1844 Paris Manuscripts). However, Marx’s dream of a single science, which embraces both knowledge of nature and knowledge of man, is as far away from us today as it was in his time.
Under present conditions the solidarity, which the individual finds with his species, is but the illusion of a common interest of all individuals. ‘Species’ is not an egalitarian and neutral term for each-and-every individual. Moreover, when species is viewed in such a-historical terms, it becomes complicit with the interest of the ruling class who exercise a mastery over biological reality and nature at large by securing its survival exclusively under the imperatives of value production. In truth, therefore, this type of solidarity is the private vision of a few, the reified ideology of current productive relations under conditions of real domination.
The only way for the social dimension of humanity and knowledge of the natural realm to combine, is by the overthrowing of the class relations of production and with it the monopoly over human achievements, medical or otherwise by bourgeois interests. These interests, which in the pandemic appear as the interest of the species, can, in themselves, represent only the interests of that class which is the enemy of humanity as a whole.
NATIONALISM
Since the spread of the virus, people have lived in a state of emergency existing in fear of impending infection. Some have even compared the pandemic to a new form of war. The reality of this threat is very real as can be evidenced by the death toll. It has pressured virtually everybody to react. In my estimate, this state of emergency calls upon revolutionaries to reckon urgently with the situation at hand. We must ask the question as to whether the virus should be dealt with before revolution is on the agenda and thus become allied with the nationalized forms in which the ‘appropriate measures’ appear, or, whether a response to the virus and a revolution should be considered hand-in-hand. There is of course no playbook by which to proceed, but what happens if we simply stand by and watch?
It is clear to me that the ‘scientific neutrality’ in which the virus appears is not neutral at all. Nowhere on planet Earth, has the virus appeared divested of its nationalized contours. Everywhere the state apparatus, altering the social significance of a natural disaster, has ‘mediated’ the virus. The global network of nation states has been utterly successful in defining the context in which the virus unfolds including the perception management of the very idea. Preventative measures are driven exclusively by class interest via infrastructures that endanger the poor. Distribution of the vaccine takes place from the top down. Mandates are implemented for the outright engineering of social behavior (with profitability in mind). Whether one brand of vaccine or another is recognized as socially legitimate has become a matter of national sanctions, since approval of scientific knowledge always passes through the state apparatus. It is clearer now than ever before that the state continues to be -at least in part- the armed manager of the competing interests of the bourgeois class as a whole. The state does not confront the human sickness in a direct and egalitarian manner; it does so according to the administrative functions that are fundamentally tied to accumulation imperatives. The nationalization of the measures adopted, as a response to the virus are in fact analogous to the forms of nationalism adopted in any ‘state of exception’, and nationalism is nothing but the last and formidable bastion of capitalism.
This new form of nationalism has also been successful in dictating the contours in which struggle takes place. By harnessing their monopoly on scientific knowledge, each nation has perpetuated in the masses different ideas of species-solidarity and individual freedom. This is achieved by fabricating new forms of behavior in connection with different presentations of the scientific understanding of the virus. In countries in which skepticism of the media is a formidable factor in mass consciousness (like America), scientists are portrayed as being in competition over ideas, and celebrities who venture to comment on the pandemic gain equal status of opinion. Countries who have stronger ties to mass propaganda and can speak in a more unified voice present solidarity in yet a different light.
For instance, in China, solidarity takes on a militarism compatible with well-known strategies of bio-power and population control, i.e. the ‘momentary’ suspension of individuality for national security. In European democracies, solidarity has meant the further alienation of individuals, new forms of identification and surveillance and the ‘market freedom’ to partake in the promise of a return to normality (while neglecting basic health for the ‘necessary’ workforce). Otherwise, struggles have taken on the deplorable idea of an “individual sphere of autonomy” and abstract individual rights, perpetuated by an egotistical and atomized vision of humanity. The emancipation that these individuals seek from the state who they see as their oppressor does not in fact pose a real threat to the state. By achieving an autonomy from the state in the form of individual rights and supposed liberation of their bodies, they reaffirm the autonomy of the state thus granting it a renewed authority over civil society while simultaneously exonerating the state from any responsibility.
Within these National contours, any solidarity is expressed divided between nations or within nations between groups with different interests and the rule of divide and conquer holds sway over the dispossessed and the soon-to-be.
THE EXTINCTION OF THE IMAGINATION
Marx said, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only if we have it” (1844). This one-sidedness and stupidity has been exasperated with the appearance of covid-19. Biology has become the dominant image and internal self-representation of the social subject. Thus, individuation occurs coordinated with the image of humanity that the natural sciences have provided. This self-representation has gripped people’s imagination to such an extent that when faced with a state of emergency their focus turns almost exclusively to the survival of their individual body, to the most basic reproduction of their subsistence. Even when cloaked as altruism the ethical party line is ‘In order to save the others, I must first save myself’ (isolate). It is no surprise then, that humanity has become overwhelmingly divided and catalogued along biological factors, by age and by immunity, i.e. by one’s proximity to death. In this vision, the idea of ‘humanity’ shrinks to the individual’s possession of his or her own life subsistence. The only thing that I own is my body. This biological qualification of an individual’s humanity, or biologization, not only allows for a deepening of proletarianization by reducing workers to the only ‘thing they own’: their labour power; but also and more importantly extinguishes the individual’s imagination of his or her own humanity, by severing the individual’s access to humanity’s achievements at large.
The real wealth of all of culture created by the laboring masses is a wealth that appears as the exclusive property of those private individuals and corporations who make up the ruling class. But no individual in any society who appropriates the riches of culture does so alone. They do so only through a material division of labour. We do not owe these riches either to a biological nature, even less to a supernatural force; all of culture, knowledge and wealth is owed to humanity at large. The nationalization of the state of emergency, the commodification of science, the privatization of mental labour and the biologization of the wage laborers; all these have engineered a desperate complicity of the working class in tightening their own chains and has blinded many individuals from imagining a world to gain and their true humanity to inherit.
SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
Faced with a pandemic it is clear that humanity is pressed with real needs. However, humanity also has real abilities. These abilities need to be yoked to the imagination of the collective worker, by a ‘socialized’ division of labour. To co-operate in a pandemic means abolishing the idea of an atomized humanity and proceeding from a point of social co-operation. As Marx says, when men co-operate, they strip off the fetters of their individuality to develop the capability of the species. But this species is not merely a collection of individuals united by their common genes, it is rather that aspect of humanity engaged in the production of real wealth, which becomes nothing more than the objective totality of human knowledge and of creative capacities at the service of all.
The world is in a state of unrest and the social subject is beginning to react spasmodically. Revolutionaries all over are searching for ‘kernels of truth’ in all different forms of protest. It is admittedly only through the experience of struggle that the radical subjectivity of the collective worker can coalesce; but bringing forth a communist world and the true socialization of human ability will not proceed from a biological and atomized vision of humanity nor through a militarized one. A new form of co-operation is needed that will push beyond national and private boundaries where knowledge, especially in the hard sciences, can be shared freely and new forms of creativity can replace the old. The idea of ‘essential worker’ needs to be rid of, for the essence of man is not to scrape by on bare necessities but to strive for his or her infinite freedom, for true community. The ‘essential worker’ is a branding of the private interests of profiteers worldwide who desperately need mindless consumption to continue taking place. Only a form of social co-operation and collective solidarity that responds to the needs of humanity at large can do away with the nationalism and state power in its multifarious forms that still holds a monopoly on violence, knowledge and social mechanisms of organization.
S.Y.