Is this the emergency we’ve been waiting for? The one that will wake us up and put us back on the right path to social democracy, climate justice, human rights, a good future, in a word, progress? The pandemic is already played out, we know what will happen. This crisis will not break capitalism. It will not lead to socialism. It will not solve climate change. It will not give people better wages, more unions, less hours, more safety, better jobs. It will not lead to universal basic income, free rent, free college, cancelled debt. It will not lead to affordable housing or public infrastructure. Perhaps a new subjectivity will emerge along with a new ethics, a new corona moralia, where sickness unto health is the path to redemption.
The longed-for normality will come again, but it will be a normality as sick as the one before. Disaster socialism, corona Keynesianism, mutant neoliberalism, state capitalism, covid communism—yes, please! Capitalism will adapt to COVID, and we will be no closer to the end of either. Perhaps we are suffering from a new stage of capitalist anti-globalization, a moment of capitalist globalization, in which a planetary sovereign arises who could declare the emergency and decide on the exception in the name of saving all. Arise ye corona leviathan and lead us to the promised land! But alas, not even that hell will come. On top of everything else, like Kissinger and the Queen, neoliberalism just won’t die.
There are no more prophets, no more vessels of the divine in earthly garb—but there is a voice that speaks through us, a voice that guides us even in the most inner parts of our soul. That voice of conscience is not god, or the superego, or the father—it is the mutilated screams of a billion price signals telling your synapses when to fire. You can’t call it identification with the aggressor when the aggressor is normality itself.
The eyes in the mirror are not your eyes, the words in your mouth are not your words. There is no face to the economy because everyone’s face is the economy. Capital speaks through us not like a ventriloquist through a dummy but like a script through an actor. Every performance is unique but only because all the words are the same. Freedom to choose how to act our part is our hard-won right and if they want it back they’ll have to pry it away from our cold, dead hands. To try and break free from the hostage situation of work would be madness, for how do you answer no to a question you can’t even formulate? In a mad world, a little madness might be a sign of sanity. The species, currently insane, will need to wield its insanity like a superpower in order to escape the panic room of capital. Splintering the syntax of survival alone is suicide, doing it together is liberation. But the leap across the abyss of collective action will not come from a pandemic or any other external shock unless it is the shock of seeing ourselves as the externality to business as usual.
The real subsumption of labor under capital did not just mean a reconfiguration of the labor process but a replacement of the soul itself. Maybe it was an improvement of the faulty one we had before, even so it is definitely time for a tune-up now. Yet all the shops are closed, all the struggles of yesteryear gone. New ones arise, like rent strikes and wildcats, walkouts and slow-downs—brave acts of collective self-defense against encroachments on one’s ability to survive. But is it possible to go from negated to negator, expropriated to expropriator in times of utter retrenchment? Some riddles of history can only be solved in practice.
Jacob Blumenfeld, Normality is Death (2020)