Marxism and Racial Oppression - Historical Materialism

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EXCERPT OF SOME CHAPTER ABSTRACTS

Search for a New Mode of Public Power in Rojava

Huseyin Rasit (Sociology, Yale University), 

Alexander Kolokotronis (Political Science, Yale University)

Since 2012, the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria has attracted the attention of the

global Left with its peoples councils, economic communes, and radical gender equality.

Rojava has been so energizing for some that anarchists and Marxists from around the

world have traveled to the region to defend the revolution, creating a historical moment

resembling the Spanish Civil War. The fact that both anarchists and Marxists have run to

the defense of the revolution is not a historical accident. It is rather because Rojava offers

something to both sides since the system of radical democracy that the Democratic Union

Party (PYD) has sought to implement features both anarchist and Marxist elements.

Although this political project has been subjected to many analyses from different

political perspectives, there has not been a systematic analysis of the specific way it

brings together anarchism and Marxism. Rather than being a piecemeal mixture of

different ideological positions, we claim that Rojavas project constitutes a specific

convergence of anarchism and Marxism, resulting in a decentralist vanguard. Analyzing

the implications and tensions of such a praxis, we also claim that Rojava helps us to

openly face a problem that has plagued every revolutionary attempt: preserving

emancipatory ideals in the face of centralizing pressures. More than identifying the

problem, Rojava also offers a potential solution through its practices and institutional

innovations. This solution comes from the central position occupied by women within the

theory and praxis of the revolution. The combination of being identified as a central

constituency and possessing autonomous organizations confers upon women a specific

revolutionary role. We identify this role as becoming a democratizing middle stratum that

can disperse the authority of a would-be centralist vanguard while educating and

mobilizing the general public for revolutionary ideals. Such an institutional innovation

has the potential to offer a blueprint for revolutionary struggles elsewhere.

Global Right-wing strategies in the Global South:

Defending the Family in the 21st Century

Victor Hugo Ramirez Garcia 

(CRIDUP - Paris 1 Panthon Sorbonne)

Recently in a large number of countries in Latin America a movement has surged calling

for the defence of traditional values, and warning on the danger the so-called gender

ideology signifies to the family. Big campaigns supported by transnational firms and

NGOs have been enforcing a set of strategies against the little achievements of the

feminist and pro-equality politics and institutions. In the last decade alliances between

conservative groups and right-wing governments in the region have succeeded in banning

interruption of pregnancy in a large amount of States, but there is now one cause they are

focusing all their attention and effortson: Sexual education and the recognition of a right

to decide what to teach at schools on sexual issues, a right supposed to belong to parents.

Even if the ideology of traditional family remains as an important feature of hegemony

(Gramsci and Sacristn Luzn 2007) among the countries where these campaigns are taking

place (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru), different social

trends have transformed family structures and sexual roles in recent decades (Vigoya and

Rondn 2017); gender mainstreaming policies, and mostly legalization of same sex

marriage have caused a revival of the most controversial issues in the conservative

agendas. Since capitalism embraced nuclear family ideology (Olsen 1983), some gender

mainstreaming policies as well as some LGBTTTIQ policies mean no menace to the

moral economy (Thompson 1971) encouraged by capitalism; social reproduction and

patriarchy are safe in that those policies promote similar values through the assimilation

of different groups of population into traditional economic and lawful forms. On the

contrary, comprehensive sexual education programs might appear as a threat to

traditional representations of society on account of the diversity of sexual themes

presented to children. Being one of the regions most battered by neoliberal politics, Latin

America and its populations show particular configurations of moral economy,

sex/gender system (Rubin 1975), and alienation, but also innovative and revolutionary

projects of resistance. 

Revisiting Race and Marxism: A Conversation Between

Gramsci, Hall, and the Operaisti

Daniel Gutirrez (Freie Universitt Berlin, Graduate School for North American Studies)

In his 1983 lecture, Rethinking Base and Superstructure, Stuart Hall pushed against

theories that approached questions of race through strictly economic and class determinist

lens. At the same time, Hall urged that we not abandon the Marxian framework and note

instead the different levels or moments of analysis, proposing that Marxs Eighteenth

Brumaire is an exemplar work of conjunctural analysis that deploys multiple

determinants beyond the economic at the concrete, historical level. It is in the movement

from the abstract to the concrete where race comes into play. Following Halls insight, my

work proposes a schematic for moving from the abstract to the concrete. In this proposal,

I urge that we take up Gramscis framework of historical blocs in distinction to mode of

production, wherein a historical bloc signals the complex, contradictory and discordant

ensemble of the superstructures that defines a specific historical formation and its

historical (not logical) forms, alliances, signs, and strategies (Gramsci, 2014; de Smet,

2017). Historical blocs are constituted out of particular combinations of struggles waged

between historically formed subjects specific to a social formation. As such, the 

segmented class compromise following the American New Deal constituted a specific

historical bloc, itself composed by particular forces and preferred particular social sectors

over others, and is distinct from that of the neoliberal historical bloc. Observing Halls

formulation that there have been many significantly different racisms - each historically

specific and articulated in a different way with the societies in which they appear (Hall,

2017, 146), I urge that each historical bloc has a particular formulation of racism that is

carried over (but distinctly recomposed) from the struggles of the previous bloc. This is

the first step in the movement from the logical to the concrete and conjunctural. In the

next step in the movement downwards towards the conjunctural, I propose deploying a

revised and expanded version of the class composition framework that the operaista

tradition provided. Here, I borrow the Class Inquiry Groups articulation of technical

composition and social composition (that provide the context of the specific material

relation of labor-power on the one hand and the field of social life outside the workplace

in the other) that combine to form the context from which political composition surges, in

a way that is autonomous and non-mechanical. However, in difference to the CIG, and in

order to understand the development of race, I propose a series of reformulations that

includes state formations in the technical sphere and subdivisions in the social field. The

motor of historical movement is, following Mario Trontis Copernican Inversion, the

struggle of the working-class against capital, but elaborated in historically specific ways.

Cycles of struggle give way to transformations in the different compositional fields, in the

institutions and apparatuses that compose them, and in the discourses that dominate these

circuits of power. Through such a framework, we can understand how and why such

transformations take place and what makes racism persistent across blocs and cycles,

why discourses (and their signifiers) shift and slide, and how some social sectors get

more privileges and others dont

What Are We For: Harry Hay’s Vision of Queerness as

Labor

Ben Miller (Freie Universitt Berlin / Humboldt Universitt Berlin)

This presentation, intended for the Sexual Violence, Discrimination and Oppression, and

Left Responses stream and adapted from a paper to be published simultaneously in

September in the peer-reviewed German journal Invertito and online in English on

OUTHistory, reexamines the theoretical contributions of the American gay communist

Harry Hay in light of his Marxism. In 1948, Hay co-founded the Mattachine Society in

Los Angeles, recognized as the first lasting gay organization in the United States. Ejected

from the leadership due to his history of Communist Party membership and activism, he

turned to theory in the 1950s and 1960s, laying out a highly individual view of the history

and possible future social roles of same-sex-loving people that fused Marxist analysis of

family labor with influences from esoterica, expressionism, and Native American

spirituality. This analysis became the basis of the Radical Faeries, an ongoing movement

he founded in the early 1970s that continues to this day. Hay identified the source of

liberation for same-sex-loving peoples as their socially productive contributions, in the

form of what we might now call affective labor. I identify the origins of Hays analytic

framework in the cultural anthropology of Ruth Benedict and others in the Boas circle, 

and the analysis of family labor and primitive matriarchal communism in Engels Origin

of the Family. Taking up Benedicts concept of the coconstruction of cultures and human

behavior and Engels view of a matriarchal primitive communism, Hay developed a

theory of same-sex love and gender non-conformity as a form of social labor

reproductive of what he called the internal life of the society cultural, spiritual, and

intellectual practices. Referring to these as children of the brain in context to the children

of the body produced and reared in heterosexual pair relations, Hay argued for the social

utility of a a broad variety of possible same- or similar-sex-loving relationship

configurations between subjects characterized neither as male nor female but instead

other.Hay is seen in many existing histories of gay liberation as an essentialist; while

recent scholarship has begun to examine Hays ideas more intensively, dominant accounts

of the history of American gay liberation misunderstand Hays ideas, remove them from

the genealogy in which they are best understood, and devalue the contributions of one of

the gay lefts pioneers and most interesting thinkers. Acknowledging and confronting the

settler-colonial and colonial contexts of both Hays own ideas and the intellectual tradition

in which he worked, I nonetheless seek to read Hay reparatively, to offer conclusions

about what kind of queer leftist praxis we might forge from Hays words, and identify

connections and comparisons in related areas of social movement history.

Corporeal Organisation: Marxs Analysis of the Human

Body

Soren Mau (University of Southern Denmark)

In the manuscripts known as The German Ideology, Marx states that the first fact of the

materialist conception of history is the corporeal organisation [krperliche Organisation]

of the human being. In this paper, I will attempt to clarify this overlooked concept and

demonstrate the centrality of the body in Marxs materialist social ontology. Marxs

analysis of the human body emphasises the importance of tools, which occupy a

ambiguous position on the threshold between the body and its surroundings. On the one

hand, tools are organs and an extension of the body, as Marx puts it in Capital. On the

other hand, they are much easier to separate from the rest of the body, than other organs.

They are a part of what Marx calls the inorganic body of the human being, i.e. that part of

the body, which is not a part of the body. Human dependency on tools reveals the original

porosity of the human body, and for this reason it also reveals something important about

how capital is able to reproduce itself by means of what Marx calls the mute compulsion

of economic relations, i.e. the abstract, impersonal and structural form of domination so

characteristic of capitalism. Marxs analysis of the corporeal organisation of the human

being explains why it is possible for the logic of valorisation to infiltrate our bodies by

inserting itself as the mediator of life and its conditions, and this in turn explains why it is

generally unnecessary for capital to rely on direct violence for its reproduction.

Furthermore, I will argue that Marxs analysis of the human body allows us to shed new 

light on the question of humanism and anti-humanism in Marxs theory. I will argue that

Marxs social ontology does include a theoretically significant (and transhistorical)

concept of the human being, but that this concept also implies that it can never have any

explanatory role in the analysis of specific modes of production, such as capitalism. This

also has the consequence that the concept of the human being can never be the basis of a

critique. Marxs analysis of the human being undercuts any romantic critique, since it

demonstrates that there is no such thing as a natural organisation of social reproduction.

There is no original unity of man and earth; rather, there is an original separation and

hence an original need for a social mediation of the metabolism of humans and the rest of

nature a mediation that is always irreducibly political

After Intersectionality: Aboriginal Labour,

Reconciliation, Social Replication and Totality

Jaleh Mansoor (Associate Professor, University of British

Columbia)

A recent mid career survey at the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia of the

practice of a Lakota Sioux artist emphasized her turn to the wage, or market-mediated

remuneration for labour, as a peculiarly contradictory form of capture on the part of the

settler-colonial apparatus that has systematically expropriated material resources under

cover of ideologically based denigration of the cultures from which it has most benefited.

Now it turns to those previously marginalized and oppressed indigenous demographics

for labour power rather than natural resources in an exponentially growing globalised

province. This shifts terms from oppression to exploitation. Taking up a lens based

conceptual practice situated in the paradigmatic legacy of Jeff Wall, who also explored

the visual economy of the image as an index of a historically specific metabolic of capital

in the 70s and 80s in Canada, Dana Claxton radicalizes the medium to query the

particular strategies of a racialized labour to capital relationship and the equally racialized

extraction of labour-power, to move past the impasses of intersectionality and to 

demonstrate the mutually constitutive operations of class and race, or rather the way in

which race is doubly coded by capitalist ideology to maximize the efficiency with which

the material extraction of labour and resources in specific tactical ways in the

contemporary political economic arena are effected. Through case studies, one based on

Claxtons etiology and one based on that of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra who stages

forms of exploitive remuneration to highlight the relationship between social

reproduction and growing surplus populations in the equally changing dynamic between

core and periphery, this paper will address the way in which discursive limits have

produced a mutual blindness on the part of Marxist analysis on the one hand and postcolonial and identity-oriented frameworks on the other, to delineate the way in which

capital doubly exploits, which is to say extracts labour power from, those it most

denigrates and devalues on a symbolic register. I examine the ideological apparatus by

which material exploitation is mobilized by capital as a means through which to procure

labour more cheaply, having denigrated its source.

To Abolish the Family: Communist Struggle and the

Working Class Family in Capitalist Development

Michelle OBrien (New York University)

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels speak of the “abolition of the family” as

the infamous proposal of the Communists. Following the Russian Revolution, Alexandra

Kollontai supported mass activity by women to collectivize unwaged reproductive labor,

andwith it the economic basis of the working-class nuclear family as a unit of

reproduction. In the 1970s, radical feminists and gay liberationists advanced a radical

manifold attack on the family as an institution of domination and sexual control. In each

of these moments of communist mobilization against the family, its meaning and content

took distinct and contrasting forms. Though consistently moving towards liberation and

the radical transformation of society, theabolition of the family as a vision in each

moment reflected the limits of the communist horizon. I offer a periodization to make

sense of the demand to abolish the family, and with it the emergence and decline of the

single-wage earner nuclear family as legitimating feature of working class reproduction.

The male-breadwinner, single-wage earner nuclear family as an accomplishment and

limit of the workers movement and the phase of capitalist development to which it

belongs. Drawing on the theory of the workers movement advanced by Theorie

Communiste and Endnotes, I argue capitalist dynamics from the 1890s to the mid-1970s 

enabled working class movements to pursue a vision of socialism as full

proletarianization, and an affirmation of working class rule. This builds on, but is in

tension with, Regulationist-informed periodization efforts of sexual minority identity,

most notably in Drucker (2015). For Marx and Engels, the nuclear family in need of

abolition was understood only as a bourgeois social form, not available to working class

people. The restructuring of industrial production and political gains of the workers

movement, particularly through the parties of the Second International, enabled a section

of the class to assert its moral and social legitimacy, through advancing the family wage

and the single-wage earner family. This offered a solution to the crisis of working class

social reproduction and accompanied sexual deviancy that had worried Marx and Engels.

This both offered a material and political gain for the class, and was advanced in direct

opposition to Black, queer and lumpen proletarian social forms. For the duration of the

workers movement, only through universal proletarianization could the exit from the

family be imagined. The gender and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s

struggled against the single wage-earner nuclear family as an oppressive system, and

against the limits of the workers movement. Ultimately, the central dependence on the

family for working class reproduction was replaced with intensifying dependence on the

wage. The working-class family as a dominant social form was abolished, not through

communist struggle, but through the violence of capitalist development, stagnant wages,

and expanding commodification of social life. The abolition of the family as a communist

demand today calls on a vision of the generalization of care and reproduction the real

human community, recognizing that queer and gender liberation must be freedom from

both the interpersonal domination of the heteronormative family and the the impersonal

domination of the wage.Email: michelleobrien@nyu.edu 

Marxs Concept of Permanent Revolution as a Philosophy of Absolute Negativity and a Transformation of Hegels Dialectic

Franklin Dmitryev (Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund)

How can Marxs ideas help us with the problem of how to make new revolutionary

beginnings in a time when the counterrevolution is ascendant, without losing sight of the

need to prepare for the equally crucial question of what happens after the revolution?

This paper, intended for the Marxism and philosophy stream, argues that answering this

question requires recognizing the centrality of permanent revolution to Marxs body of

ideas, and that it requires grasping the latter as a philosophy. The Marxian philosophy of

permanent revolution is rooted in Hegels dialectical philosophy and yet fundamentally

transforms it. The paper argues that, to comprehend the full significance of Marxs Capital

and the writings of his last years such as his Ethnological Notebooks and his writings on

Russia, it is necessary to understand them as developments of this philosophy of

permanent revolution. This is especially needed in working out how they are not simply

of historical interest but impact theory and practice today, and in helping us untangle

Marxs own ideas from what Raya Dunayevskayas Marxist-Humanism identifies as postMarx Marxism beginning with Engels. The Marxist-Humanist viewdeveloped in the 2018

volume Marxs Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day: Selected Writings

by Raya Dunayevskaya, edited by the papers presenterinforms our consideration of how

it speaks to the problems of our current moment of fascism, counter-revolution, and

revolt. The paper views Marxs explicit development of permanent revolution in his early

writings up to the March 1850 Address to the Communist League; how that concept is

involved in his 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and its consideration of second

negation or absolute negativity; its connection to the humanism and dialectic of Marxs

economic writings, including Capital; and its development on a new level with his late

studies showing a multilinear view of human development, including the Ethnological

Notebooks. The development of permanent revolution as a philosophy with many

theoretical ramifications illuminates the dual task of needed revolutionary

transformation–the destruction of the old (negation) and the construction of the new

(negation of the negation).

Value, Tribute and Capital: Empire and Merchants in the

Medieval Mediterranean

Lorenzo Bondioli (Princeton University), Nicholas Matheou (Institute for Historical Research)

In this paper we address the debate over the birth of value and the origin(s) of capitalism

by analysing the role of value production, circulation and consumption in the tributary

mode of production. Value is understood as the socially-recognised importance of social

action, as articulated within a total social system. Thus value is a useful framework for

understanding how configurations of social relations work, not a reified thing that really

entered the world at some point in history. Thorough analysis of the tributary mode, both

in formal political economy and historically, makes clear that tributary exploitations

disciplining of producers to the necessities of tribute demands, given then in the money

form, produces surplus value appropriated and circulated as tribute a process comparable 

if not identical to capitalist exploitation. This tribute is distributed and realised in the

reproduction of the tributary configuration and given historical imperial class, again

showing both resonances and differences with the dynamics of capital accumulation.

Perhaps most crucially, the analysis also demonstrates the necessity of merchant

capitalism within tributary configurations, circulating a certain amount of value as capital

so as to facilitate value in the money form getting into producers hands, from which it

can re-enter circulation as appropriated tribute. Thus there appears a foundational

contradiction in the tributary mode between value circulation as tribute, and value

circulation as capital, one we explore through the historical example of the empire of

New Rome (Byzantium) in the ninth to early thirteenth centuries, particularly its

eleventh-century fiscal crisis, and twelfth-century relations with the mercantile Republic

of Venice.

A Mode By Any Other Name: Marxist Historiography of the

Byzantine Empire, and the Lacuna of the Household

Jules Gleeson

This paper will explore existing Marxist historiography of the Byzantine Empire (or

‘New Rome’), with a particular view on divergences between active scholars, andthen

consider gendered perspectives on the household as an over-arching omission across this

existing body of historical materialist social history.I will introduce an on-going debate

around whether the Byzantine Empire conformed to a mooted tributary mode of

production. John Haldon (1994) has proposed centering the social reality of surplus

extraction, as a less problematic replacement of previous Feudal understandings of

Byzantine economic relations (Harvey, 1989). Jairus Banaji has challenged any such

sweeping view of pre-modern economies as the basis for comparative history, instead

identifying the logics of labour deployment, which he takes to be modally transcendent

imperatives (2010, 2013). For instance, farm labourers both prior and under capitalism

faced similar coercive techniques used by exploitative elites. I will provide a brief

account of the discrepancies, and apparent theoretical stakes, at play in these varying

scholarly accounts..As of today, historical materialist social history of the Byzantine

Empire has largely underplayed gender relations, rarely if at all treating these matters in

an extended fashion. To correct this, I will consider the ways in which Byzantine

households (both lay and monastic) clearly served as a key unit both economic

organisation (from surplus extraction to social reproduction). This insight is not an

entirely novel one, andbeyond Marxist scholarship Byzantine social history has provided

great theoretical insights to the Byzantineoikos as a key formal unit of the Byzantine

ruling class (Magdalino 1984, Neville 2004).But Byzantine gender history and historical

materialism have yet to be put into fruitful dialogue with each other. Considering legal

sources I will present cases from the everyday exploitation of peasantry by monastic land

holders, to exceptional figures such as patriarchal eunuchs, to initiate this necessary

exchange.

Islam and Pre-Capitalism: al-Ml, Social Class, and Technology in

the Pre-Alawite Maghreb

Joe Hayns (University of Oxford)

In 1510 Sufi leader Abu Muhammad ’Abd Allah al-Ghazwani (d. 1529) said to an

initiate, anxious at the desolation of the Marrakechi plains, ’it is here that you must 

establish your abode, and you shall, God willing, render this land fertile … Settle here!.

On those same plains, nearly 400 years later, a French-Morocco project to increase

agricultural productivity - hydro-power might have been used to extract 10% more oil

from the olive harvest - ended after only two seasons, due to ruling class opposition to the

innovation.This paper will argue that the second failure was in al-Ghazwanis inability to

transform the Maghrebian state from trade- to production-dependent, consequenting the

regions remaining exterior to capitalism until formal French imperialism.In Islam et

Capitalisme (1966), Maxime Rodinsons argued for a capitalistic sector across the Arabic speaking world after the 8th century AD, as based jointly on the existence of both

commercial and interest-bearing capitals, and his textual analysis of juridical and

religious rationalism in regards trade. More recently, Jairus Banaji has gone further,

arguing that the Arab trade empire from the 9th to the 14th centuries constituted a

tradition of capitalist activity.Capital-centric Marxism though claims capitalism as

defined not by the commodity form, profit-making, or even by the presence of wagedlabour-based commodity production towards profit, but rather by the dominant generality

of a social relationship between doubly free waged-labourers, and competing capitals,

with (therefore) the real subsumption of capital as defining aspect of this

system.Following this second intellectual tendency, this paper will argue that the non Ottoman Maghreb was resolved as pre-capitalist through the still-ruling Alawite dynastys

defeat of the socially and technologically progressive Sufi brotherhoods in the late 1500

to early 1600s. Debt, trade, and plunder characterised the state in subsequent period,

meaning that capitalism as a progressive social relationship appeared as an exogenous,

empire-enforced shock.

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE

Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic 

Cinzia Arruzza and Felice Mometti April 9, 2020

PDF

https://www.viewpointmag.com/

Käthe Kollwitz, The Mothers (plate 6) from War, 1921-22.

Striking for life 

On Monday March 29th, General Electric factory workers staged a protest against the thousands of layoffs announced by the company’s management, demanding the reconversion of production and asking a simple question: “If GE trusts us to build, maintain, and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?”

This was one among many strikes of varying shades of legality that workers across multiple sectors have staged around the globe. A wave of strikes in March forced the Italian government to stop non-essential production, though the battle is still far from being entirely won. Amazon and other logistics workers have staged protests and strikes in France, Italy, the United States and other countries to protest against unsanitary conditions and lack of personal protective equipment, while workers in non-essential production have walked off, sicked out, or simply not shown up to work, refusing to risk death in order to increase companies’ profits. As one of the organizers of the Staten Island Amazon protest who was later fired by the company in retaliation, Chris Smalls, put it in an open letter to Jeff Bezos: “because of Covid-19, we’re being told that Amazon workers are ‘the new Red Cross’. But workers don’t want to be heroes. We are regular people. I don’t have a medical degree. I wasn’t trained to be a first responder. We shouldn’t be asked to risk our lives to come into work. But we are. And someone has to be held accountable for that, and that person is you.” Workers in the healthcare, food, sanitation, retail and public transportation sectors increasingly resist being sent to slaughter and are staging various kinds of protests to remind the rest of the world that celebrations of the new working class heroes are not enough: they are no martyrs to be sanctified, they want protections and better working conditions and wages. 

Workplaces are not the only theater of struggle in these times of pandemic. Tenants, many of whom have lost income and jobs and live in areas with various kinds of shelter-in-place orders, are organizing to stop rent payments and resist evictions. Inmates are rioting and protesting, from Iran to Italy to the United States, in fear that prisons will quickly turn into death camps due to the virus. Mutual aid efforts and organizations are mushrooming, intensively using social media to coordinate efforts and cater to people in dire need. While some of these struggles and strikes have been staged or coordinated through pre-existing political and social organizations, many are in excess of the previous organizational infrastructure and are rooted instead in spontaneous behaviors of refusal, resistance and solidarity, and in the emergence of self-organization from below as a response to an unprecedented crisis. 

In the surreal, suspended atmosphere characterizing our current predicament, it would be easy to focus our attention only on the catastrophe unfolding in front of our eyes, on the relentless cry of sirens breaking the silence of our emptied cities, on the counting of deaths and contagion, and on the looming economic depression. But this strange, anxious time we are experiencing is also filled with struggles, acts of solidarity, and processes of class composition and self-organization. 

What all these struggles have in common is the simple refusal to let oneself or others die for capitalism, a refusal that lays bare what the Marxist Feminist Collective in a statement about the pandemic has labeled the contradiction between profit-making and life-making or social reproduction at the very core of capitalism.

By refusing to put profits over lives, these struggles are opening at least two main frontlines of confrontation. The first involves the immediate management of the pandemic and its class, racial and gender dimension; the second with longer-term social transformations. At a moment when a number of countries are putting in place some version or another of neo-Keynesian measures to avoid economic collapse and social unrest, the burning question we are facing is whether these measures will mark the definitive end of the neoliberal era and austerity or not: an outcome that will largely depend on political and social struggle. 

On the governance of the pandemic

The pandemic is creating a global conjuncture in response to which various forms of struggle are emerging and proliferating. At the same time, its management is far from being homogenous across national contexts: national political dynamics have their own specificities and generate significantly different contexts for processes of struggle and subjectivation, though against the background of a global conjuncture connecting us all. 

From this viewpoint, one of the main limits of the “state of exception” discourse, which focuses on the dangers of authoritarian political turns connected with the suspension of freedoms entailed by lockdowns, is that it simplifies the enormous complexity of the current situation into a night in which all the cows are grey. It also misidentifies the real terrain of struggle in many countries today.

First of all, it is not the case that governments rushed to adopt harsh emergency measures and to suspend liberties. The opposite is rather true: in many cases governments have hesitated and even initially refused to suspend what passes as capitalist normality. This delay is having dire consequences in Italy, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, among other examples. When executives did finally decide to institute lockdowns, they did so because they were pressured by healthcare experts, because of fears of the risk of a collapse of the healthcare systems (largely due to the depletion of the healthcare sector caused by decades of austerity cuts and privatizations) and because of protests from below, especially from workers refusing to go to work. In fact, the notion that capitalist states would have an overriding interest in keeping people at home is rather bizarre and factually contradicted by the numerous attempts to envisage a quick return to some form of “normality” that would allow people to go back to work (and to consume).

Within this context, the pandemic has indeed been the occasion for some authoritarian-leaning governments to further concentrate powers within the executive, as is happening in countries like Israel, Hungary, or India. But even this is not a linear and automatic process that applies to all countries governed by an authoritarian far right. In Brazil, Bolsonaro is sticking to denialist positions, even as he is increasingly politically isolated as a result and spurring regional appropriation of emergency powers. In the United States, Trump refused to declare a federal shelter in place order and is insisting in granting gubernatorial autonomy and flexibility in deciding what measures to adopt. China is a case apart, as the management of the pandemic relied on the mobilization of an already existing authoritarian power apparatus. 

Rather than imposing abstract formulas upon a complex reality, it is more useful to pay attention to the experimentation with diverse forms of governance, both novel and ageold, in the management of the pandemic. For example, the current undeniable concentration of powers within the executive in Italy or Germany is causing tensions with the executives of regions and Länder, and both of them are in a tense relation with European transnational institutions. In the United States, not only is there no significant transformation in the distribution of powers among federal institutions, but state administrations’ policies differ among each other and are at times in tension with the Federal administration’s incoherent approach. One notable example are the several clashes between Trump and the governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, who has risen to the status of Trump’s counterpart, in spite of not being the Democratic candidate to the Presidency. Several European states and the United States are adopting forms of governance that include specific stakeholders in decision making processes: sectors of the national scientific community, big corporations, financial institutions and national business councils. The pandemic has also presented the opportunity for the United States and China to pursue and redefine their geopolitical strategies. It has become an occasion for the Trump Administration to push for regime change in Venezuela and ratcheting up the already abominable sanctions in Iran. China, meanwhile, is adopting a soft power strategy that aims at expanding its international hegemony, sending much needed medical supplies and experts to dozens of countries, an initiative the United States are now eager to imitate: Trump has boasted that he would send Italy $100 million worth of medical supplies even while the United States struggles to find basic face masks for its frontline healthcare workers.

But even these experiments in governance are not going smoothly, challenged by the continuous antinomy between normality and exception: the normality of the working of a mode of social production and the exception imposed by the pandemic upon the social reproduction of life or the normality of the circulation across public spaces – which cannot be entirely eliminated – and the exception of the immobility within private spaces. These experiments in governance are continuously changing, having to face the limits of the current welfare systems, healthcare first of all, and having to navigate the articulation between local, national, and transnational powers. An example is the way in which the autonomy of U.S. state governors is amounting to them bidding against one another for ventilators. Competitions for resources are also taking place in Italy among regional governors. It is impossible to predict now how these experiments will evolve, for the variables at play are numerous, from the conflict between different state institutions to the level of intensity and reach of social conflict from below.

The staggering rise in unemployment, the disruption and delinking of global value chains, and the necessity of reorganizing social reproduction have forced the U.S. and E.U. institutions to take massive economic measures in order to avoid not only economic collapse, but also the explosion of social unrest in response to the looming depression. The features these measures have in common could be defined as a sort of provisional and very partial Keynesianism or “Keynesianism with an expiration date.” As Bue Rübner Hansen wrote: “These policies are ad-hoc and designed to be short term measures, like the doctor of Hippocratian medicine whose decision (krino) acted on the turning point (krisis) in the patient’s health. However, in all likelihood, Covid-19 isn’t a temporary exogenous shock.” 

For example, in his daily briefing on Friday April 3rd, Trump declared that the Administration is planning to use money from the stimulus package to pay for the costs of the hospitalization of COVID-19 patients without insurance coverage, rather than extending coverage or reopening enrollment in Obamacare markets. Meanwhile the large majority of the Democratic establishment, including the leading primary candidate, Joe Biden, continued to dismiss Medicare for All even in the face of the epidemic. The $2 trillion of the U.S. stimulus package and the 750 billion Euro allocated by the European Union with the subsequent addition of $100 billion to supplement workers’ incomes are measures that, in spite of their astonishing magnitude, do not challenge the neoliberal framework. In addition to this, no significant provisions are being made for victims of domestic abuse for whom sheltering in place is not synonymous with safety; nor is the increased burden of domestic labor for women being addressed in any way. Moreover, these interventions are often predicated on anti-immigrant and closed border policies, and nothing is being done to free detainees in migrants detention centers and refugee camps where access to healthcare is close to zero and the virus could take thousands of lives. 

The clear aim of these measures is the reconstitution of the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and certainly not their radical transformation. An intervention in the Financial Times by the former President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, may be taken as an illustration of the logic behind this massive cash give away in the United States and the European Union. According to Draghi, the current crisis is not cyclical but rather due to exogenous factors. Hence, his proposed recipe is to increase national debt in order to allow big private companies to weather the emergency and then get back to business as usual. And in fact, most of the funds will go to private companies, but without any serious policy in place to save jobs and avoid layoffs, for the mistaken assumption is both that companies will avoid layoffs if they get the cash and will recreate lost jobs once the emergency is over. This is also the logic of the temporary suspension of the Eurozone Stability Pact, which the German government, among others, does not want to become a precedent for a structural transformation of the economic policies of the Eurozone toward the abandonment of neoliberal austerity. Whether the aim of reconstituting the conditions of capital’s reproduction will be achieved or not will depend on a number of factors, including political dynamics and social power relations. 

Subjectivation and self-organization in a time out of joint

The present conjuncture is filled with tensions and contradictions. Time is out joint, both dense with events and suspended. Contradictions and ambivalences also characterize forms of sociality, combining social isolation with a surplus of connectivity and communication through an array of social media. We cannot predict now how social life will be transformed as a consequence of the pandemic, but it is entirely possible that forms of what Foucault would label “technologies of the self,” of subjectivation, and of communication will become even more hybrid than in recent times, in the direction of a greater convergence of “real” and “virtual” encounters and languages. 

These forms of sociality within the context of the macro-dynamics at play and described above could also have effects on a potential new class composition. To name just a few salient factors: rising mass unemployment; fear of contagion in the workplace and spontaneous behaviors of refusal; the increasing visibility and social recognition of low-wage, racialized and gendered service workers; social isolation; and the blurring of the lines between production and reproduction for those who work from home and have to jostle between increased domestic burden, cramped living spaces, and the times and constraints of waged work. 

In this context, diverse processes of struggle and political radicalization are starting to take place. But there are no easy recipes on offer for how to exploit these potentialities opened by the new conjuncture. Lockdown measures themselves pose new challenges to organizational processes and demand the ability to reinvent ways of organizing, protesting, and being effective: how can we make social protest visible at a moment in which traditional ways of doing so – mass marches, rallies, etc. – are out of the question? How can we connect the new wave of legal and wildcat strikes to other forms of resistance and conflict, such as rent strikes and the organization of mutual aid and alternative forms of social reproduction? How can these social struggles become increasingly politicized, rising to the level of the current challenge, which means confronting the power of the state and of transnational institutions? 

Inquiry into the new potential processes of subjectivation and struggle would be a first step for trying to give an answer to these burning questions and avoiding the mechanical re-proposition of old organizational models and political strategies which do not take into account historical discontinuities and variables. Inquiry here should be understood not merely as a sociological investigation, but as a process of self-knowledge, self-organization, politicization, and common creation of a new shared understanding of who we are, and why and how we are fighting back. 

This is an urgent task for being able to address both frontlines of struggles mentioned above, namely immediate management of the pandemic and long-term transformation of social relations of production. As argued by Rob Wallace and others, modelings of the virus and predictions concerning the duration of suppression measures, such as the report by the Imperial College – which has become the point of reference for the United States and the United Kingdom – are predicated upon the implicit assumption that the neoliberal frame cannot be challenged. As they write: “Models such as the Imperial study explicitly limit the scope of analysis to narrowly tailored questions framed within the dominant social order. By design, they fail to capture the broader market forces driving outbreaks and the political decisions underlying interventions. Consciously or not, the resulting projections set securing health for all in second place, including the many thousands of the most vulnerable who would be killed should a country toggle between disease control and the economy.” Yet, it is precisely this frame that needs to be overcome, with two goals: limiting as much as possible the number of lives that will be taken by the virus, and opposing the strategy of “Keynesianism with an expiration date,” fighting instead to end neoliberal austerity and to transform altogether the capitalist relation between production and social reproduction, which subordinates people’s lives to the accumulation of profits.

One of the memes circulating on Italian social media during the long weeks of lockdown was: “We’re going to be fine.” While this is an understandable wish, it is precisely nothing more than that. Moreover, it implicitly takes the status quo before the pandemic as the normality to which we should aspire to return. Let us be honest: there is no certainty that it’s going to be fine, and the way we were living before the pandemic was neither fine nor “normal” at all, for the current crisis is a consequence of capitalism as a form of social organization and life. 

We may yet end up being fine. But that will depend on us, on our ability to prevent a return to business as usual. If the task sounds daunting, and it is, we might remind ourselves that we are not entirely powerless. As Chris Smalls said with absolute clarity: “And to Mr Bezos, my message is simple. I don’t give a damn about your power. You think you’re powerful? We’re the ones that have the power. Without us working, what are you going to do? You’ll have no money. We have the power. We make money for you. Never forget that.”

Cinzia Arruzza is a member of the editorial collective at Viewpoint Magazine and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a feminist and socialist activist. She is the author of the author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism.

Felice Mometti is an independent researcher.