Don Kalb, University of Bergen

At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if Covid was to come to the West it would be the end of capitalism. Wuhan was already in lockdown and a red alert was sounding for many other places in China, followed by South Korea and Iran.

Since they knew this was bluster, there was no discussion. Perhaps they agreed. Or maybe they just thought this was an interesting proposition. Many commentators and politicians in the West seem to have imagined Covid as a Chinese thing in China. Methodological nationalism goes deep, and severe disruption of everyday lives is anyhow too hard and too painful to contemplate, let alone to actively anticipate, as was clear from the total lack of intellectual, not to mention organizational preparation among the leading capitalist countries. This all-round unpreparedness was unashamedly on display even into early March when Italy went into nation-wide lockdown. Lack of readiness remains abundantly on show – with the UK and the US spearheading a much wider catastrophic phenomenon. This includes the globalized corporate sectors that have over the years been stripped off any fat, resilience, and versatility, including sufficient cash reserves. It also includes the public sectors, which have largely followed the corporate example of narrow bookkeeping, cost reduction and single-minded efficiency combined with the privatization of intellectual inputs, supply chains, and supplementary services. The sociological imagination of Western societies had for long been emptied by neoliberal reason.

Then, that Chinese thing turned out to be a capitalist thing (see also an early blog published by Chaungcn.or in 2020). What that exactly means remains not less difficult to imagine. The modal Western mind fed on the reigning economistic, sanitary, and indeed salutary, notions of what capitalism actually is remains oblivious to that thing, of course. Pundits kept complaining about the unfairness of an “economic crisis” that hit just when the growth machine hummed so well and secular stagnation talk since the last crisis could finally be obliterated. Yet, their “economy” is in fact a complex and dynamic global capitalist society founded on the variegated private exploitation and appropriation of labor and nature, ever more overlaid with variable forms of techno-financial rent taking, underwritten by states. This totality is difficult to see for publics raised on methodological nationalism and the usual liberal evasions around individual rights and freedoms. If Marxian type “hidden abodes” have proliferated well beyond the mere factory, they are no less obscured. Capitalism is a dynamic relational totality that systematically belittles and escapes the liberal gaze it feeds on.

Pandemics and epidemics in the 1990s and 2000s emerged from two combined capitalist processes that are as economic as social, political and ecological (see Wallace 2016; also Chuangcn.or 2020). First, the expansion of the system into ever more compressed co-habitats of man and animal in new zoo-biological milieus, in particular with bats and birds. Second, the ongoing subordination of ecologically diverse landscapes to capitalist chemical-industrial agriculture. Infectious diseases now follow the global trade routes that are spun by those advances in capitalism and have the potential to kill urban populations configured by those very forces. They do not kill equally. Those forced to share dense spaces, who keep the machine of the tangible and bodily economy running, the proles of Orwell’s 1984 and Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, are incomparably more exposed to death than those able to retreat into comfortable privacies. Crises and surprises, then–including their unequal social effects, all forcefully relegated to “an outside” or “the margins” by sanitized liberal knowledges–are scripted into the social logics of the growth machine.

As the 2008-2012 crisis, the present pandemic will not end capitalism. Instead, and in particular for digital techno monopolies, it was a marvelous opportunity. At best, the pandemic could alert us to possible endings, possibly of the type that Wolfgang Streeck (2014) expects: endings without a purposeful actor, without any design, capitalism merely succumbing to its own limits and contradictions and morphing blindly into something else, perhaps for the better, more likely for the worse. And some of those possible endings may well get stuck halfway, present themselves as mere transitions, interregnums. We should therefore be looking at forces that configure possible forks in the road. What might be the pointers on display right now? I single out a few and leave out many others.

Here is the most obvious: Pandemics and epidemics should finally be treated as an inseparable and recurrent part of the system in the 21st century’s capitalist system and as possible causes that will force it to morph into something else. As ever more humans are being pushed into ever newer zoological bacterial environments, and as ever more soils get seasonally inundated with bio-chemicals, new bacterial reactions will inevitably emerge, producing new and perhaps uncontrollable infections, creating cyclical pandemics and social crises. We also now know that the West is not exempt from that, which is a new awareness. Indeed, we know that the West may in fact be more vulnerable than non-core societies (as shown for example in the ‘good performance’ of Central and Eastern Europe and Africa; though it may be too early to say so for the latter). These viral, health, and social crises will combine with global warming and other ecological processes that the system will find very hard to deal with. Resilience has therefore become the talk of the day, combined with security, but there is nothing in 21st century capitalism that makes this an easy target. On the contrary, it is exactly what must systematically be undermined.

The dystopian consequences of mass health scares, lock-downs, border closings, and police patrolled restrictions on sociality and urban-civic life are also obvious. Evidently, the dystopia will be a golden opportunity for techno-corporate capital to insert itself even deeper into intimate and everyday life (Klein 2020; Smith 2020), and further destroy the urban texture of shops, cafés, restaurants, schools, clubs, and civil enjoyment, including travel, that many experience as key to a life worth living. These collective enjoyments describe significant labor market segments that seemed to offer tiny freedoms from the clutches of corporate and bureaucratic capital, however precarious and vulnerable to capitalist expansion. The lively urban society liberals like to imagine as historically associated with capitalism is now unambiguously turning into a state-corporate technological complex driven by security, epidemiological and sanitary rationalities that cannot but be destructive of sociality, human pleasure, and human commoning. Imposed atomization is also likely to foster big man politics as the social infrastructure of what is left of democratic societies becomes sterilized. Instead of Stadtluft macht frei, the urban air we breathe is becoming infested by a politics of fear.

If so, that fear will in its turn magnify the space for a politics of blaming. Given where we are with the neo-nationalist ascendency in popular politics since the last crisis (Kalb 2020b; Bangstad et. al. 2019), this may come as new waves of nationalism, racism, and other forms of willful humiliation of ‘others’, if only by ostentatious self-celebration. This will work out internationally and domestically; and could be targeted at those who are perceived to endanger the health and security of others, but also at those who are perceived as undeserving, for any type of reasons, of public protection and support. The aggravating chill between the US and China is one obvious example on the international plane, the accelerating spats among members of the ever more fragmenting EU is another. The fate of precarious migrant workers under the Covid lockdowns from India to the West speaks for itself. Artists, musicians and any type of gig worker can tell their own stories. All this may put the concerted collective action that is needed, internationally and domestically, quickly out of reach in the name of self-imagined moralities and illusory sovereignties.

Here the issue of resilience returns with a vengeance. In part, that vengeance springs from the deeply financialized nature of capitalist growth since 1989. Richard Robbins (2020) has calculated that if the world population had to redeem current debts, and this stands roughly at 300 per cent of global GDP, an annual 15 per cent economic growth would be required for 30 years. That was before the Covid crisis. By the time capitalism might run at usual velocity again, let’s say by 2023, public and private debt will have further accumulated and we might need a rate of 20 per cent. The figures only serve as pointers. Apart from an obvious economic absurdity, the effort to get there would be a self-defeating human and biological atrocity.

Now, the trouble is, debt is anti-value (Harvey 2017). It weighs heavily on present lives and possibilities and forecloses futures, political choices and social alternatives (also, Hann and Kalb 2020). It demands that we keep doing what we already do, accumulating, but then more of it and faster. Is there a way to fight global warming and accelerating epidemics while driving ourselves and our planet towards maximal economic growth? Forget about it.

In 2019 the most intelligent political proposal was the Green New Deal. The idea was to repair social safety nets, create meaningful work, and invest in a green economy so as to actually put a brake on the global rise of temperatures and the rise of precarities. The plan was worth 2 trillion dollars (for the US part of what inevitably would have to be a global endeavor). This money would be created on the basis of Modern Monetary Theory in the form of a green and democratic variety of Quantitative Easing (see also Kalb 2020a). In other words, ‘printed’ by the Federal Reserve, just like all the fiat monies injected into the system in the preceding decade after the financial crisis, worth overall some 50 per cent of the combined GDP of the wealthy countries, a ‘political’ subsidy without which the system does not seem to want to work anymore, despite the usual denial and the ritual belief in a ‘return to normality’ (of which the German Constitutional Court judgment on the ECB of May 2020 is a powerful example). Of course, among the right, the plan was seen as a socialist conspiracy, which is correct to the extent that the money will no longer disappear within the asset inflation on which the 1 per cent thrives. Nor was it accepted in full by centrist Democrats. But note that for fighting the Covid emergency, the Trump government has now already signed off on more than $US3 trillion public support for the economy and incomes, the majority of which probably going to corporations and capital groups. The FED might inject another $US5 trillion into the monetary system this year. If you add up the amounts ‘printed’ by the other big central banks and governments of the OECD the total will reach more than 8 trillion by 2021.

Will there still be monetary ammunition left for that highly necessary Green New Deal after this pandemic? Do not count on it. That is not because of “economics” or because “we do not have that money”. The answer is entirely political, as the anthropology of money and finance, as well as Modern Monetary Theory would teach us (Kalb 2020a)–and as insightful commentators, including finance capitalists and Central Bankers, would currently agree. As long as we can contain high inflation, we have the collective sovereignty to do this. Financed by Central Banks these are debts to ourselves. We can just leave them in the basements of the Central Banks if we would choose to do so, shrug our shoulders and go on with life. Some of the capital might appear as ‘perpetual bonds’ borrowed from ‘the market’ against trivial interest rates, just to keep the 1 per cent happy and offer them some long-term security in what has become a very uncertain world. A combination of such financial streams might be invested in new democratic sovereign wealth funds so that we may all become a bit more like Norway.

Should the factual feasibility of such sovereignty give us more hope? Resilience is not a capitalist value, nor is democratic control over capital. These “luxuries” will inevitably appear in capitalist accounting only as a cost, private as well as public, no matter the long-term gain. Will we be scared by “the costs”? With these levels of indebtedness and anti-value, and with the neoliberal sensibilities and natural modes of governance of the last decades still “dominant (but dead)” (to paraphrase Neil Smith 2008), will capitalist societies on an increasingly rough ride to nowhere have the stamina to face down their worst ghosts and step over their own shadow? Or will they choose to obsess about debts that must be repaid, economic growth that we cannot do without, and “money that we don’t have”; and get fierce with some petty politics of merit and moral hazard among the 99 per cent, about the boundaries separating the deserving and the undeserving, about, as always, certainly in Europe, Schuld and worthlessness.

We enter once more a cycle of intense worldwide contestations; about inequality, moral worth, merit, deservingness and undeservingness, labor, class, money, public goods and private wealth, credit and debt, and about the new forms of social life that an uncertain and deeply divided humanity may choose in the years ahead. The war of competing narratives will be on, and it will not be just a cold war. We enter this new cycle while counting the deaths, shaken by public fear and uncertainty.

Some, in particular in the Anglophone media, are optimistic. They point at 70 per cent of European respondents in a recent survey being in favor of Universal Basic Income, for example (Garton Ash 2020). Quite a few others are saying that inequality and unfairness have been so exposed that something will have to give. Economists already anticipate an inflation we have not seen in two or three decades as they anticipate the pro-labor, protective, and redistributionist measures that “will have to be taken” (for example Plender 2020). We should beware of daydreaming and romances with idealism and culturalism. Similar thoughts circulated in 2011 and after. The fact is that this new cycle in capitalist accumulation would start at a moment when right wing nationalism has clearly established itself as the winner of the last round of contestation in many places (Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb and Mollona 2018). The dazzling, accelerating, and ongoing fracturing of the EU in the preceding decade at the hand of forces unwilling to support larger collectivities, indeed eager to punish them, and in denial about the larger logic they are in, should be a warning. No outcome is self-evident.

Ultimately, these are open contestations about the big choices that are becoming ever less escapable as time passes by, for or against a more equal, democratic, and sustainable system, for or against a more hierarchical and punishing one. Whether the turbulent capitalist equation will sponsor the forces for the former or the latter is an open question, even though its continuation on the path it has set itself is ultimately not a possibility.

Anthropology specializes in the ethnography of observable moments within this fight, situated in defined places within the global maelstrom. In the 2010s an anthropological political economy has re-emerged that dares to take on the big issues while not forsaking its grounding in situated ethnographic reality. For this combination of big and small to come together, intense collaborations at the level of ideas and research are a sine qua non. My concern is that we should not leave the big picture to the schematic brilliance of the Piketty’s and the Scheidels. We should be warming up again for some anthropological collective action, once more.

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Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen where he leads the Frontlines of Value project. He is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog.

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References

Ash, Timothy Garton. 2020. “A better world can emerge after Coronavirus. Or a much worse one.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/may/06/better-world-coronavirus-young-europeans-democracy-universal-basic-income

Bangstad, Sindre; Bjorn Enge Bertelsen; Heiko Henkel (eds). 2019. “The Politics of Affect: Perspectives on the far right and right wing populism in the west.” Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 83: 98-113 https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaal/2019/83/fcl830110.xml

Chuangcn.org 2020: http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

Hann, Chris; Don Kalb (eds.). Financialization: Relational Approaches. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books: 11-64.

Harvey, David. 2017. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile Books.

Kalb, Don. 2020b. “The Neo-Nationalist Ascendency: Further Thoughts on Class, Value, and the Return of the Repressed.” Social Anthropology (forthcoming)

Kalb, Don. 2020a. “Introduction: Transitions to What? On the Social Relations of Financialization in Anthropology and History.” In Chris Hann, Don Kalb (eds.). Financialization: Relational Approaches. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books: 11-64.

Kalb, Don; Gabor Halmai (eds). 2011. Headlines of Nation; Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don; Massimiliano Mollona (eds.). 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Klein, Naomi. 2020. “How Big Tech Plans to Profit from the Pandemic.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic

Plender, John. 2020. “Fears of Japanification spreading are misplaced.” https://www.ft.com/content/b2a7dede-9aa7-11ea-adb1-529f96d8a00b

Smith, Gavin. 2020. “Re-reading Marx on Machines in the time of Covid-19.” http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/05/15/gavin-smith-rereading-marx-on-machines-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

Smith, Neil. 2008. “Comment: Neo-liberalism – Dominant but Dead”. Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 51: 155-57.

Streeck, Wolfgang. 2014. “How will capitalism end?” New Left Review no.87: 35-64.

Robbins, Richard. 2020. “Financialization, Plutocracy and the Debtor’s Economy: Consequences and Limits”. In: Chris Hann and Don Kalb (eds.). Financialization: Relational Approaches. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books: 65-92.

Wallace, Rob. 2016. Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2020. “Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations.” FocaalBlog, 1 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/