Mao Mollona, Goldsmiths College, London
One thing is sure. If just briefly, the pandemic struck at the heart of capitalism. It paralysed the economy, broke the bureaucratic machine of nation-states and forced conservative governments worldwide to pass quasi post-capitalist policies which, only a few months earlier, were considered too radical even for the radical Left. The renationalization of public utilities, the rolling out of universal basic income schemes, the debates on debt defaults, rent freezes, and recapitalization of the public sector, could be taken from the post-capitalist manifestos of Paul Mason or Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018).
As the top layers of the state fragmented, a new political economy of life appeared to emerge from gestures of radical care and commoning. The sudden de-growth, demonetization, and socialization of life opened up new possibilities for re-learning, regathering and redoing from below. The industries that greased the wheels of capitalism, forcing ‘economic subjects’ into hyper-consumption and household debts, were crumbling, for once. Retailers, car makers, real estate and the fashion industry closed down. Only “useful” jobs survived – the jobs of nurses, health workers, bus drivers, fruit pickers, and call-centre workers. The other engine of capitalism in old Europe, mass tourism, was temporarily out of action. The squares of Barcelona, Rome, Venice were empty. Locals reconquered their spaces again, if only fleetingly. Urban rents collapsed. Airbnb and booking.com nearly went under. Museums closed down.
Carbon emissions plummeted, the price of oil went negative for a while even, and the global economy contracted by 20 per cent. Britain registered the greatest recession since the Great Frost of 1709. The skies were clear. There were no airplanes. The sounds of the wind and birds were everywhere. I could feel the earth breathing. We spent much of our days hunting for food in supermarkets and cooking, and much less working, now from home. We have rediscovered an elementary buen vivir in the midst of capitalism. In a way we have become hunters and gatherers again, Marshall Sahlins’ Original Affluent Society (1972).
But capital’s loss of control was only temporary. Only a few weeks into the crisis, capitalism mutated with the virus, taking advantage of the new forms of sociability and the new economy of circulation and movement, the uneven boundaries, borders, and enclosures generated by the lockdown. Soon it became evident that the pandemic had accelerated and magnified the ‘externalities’ of late capitalism, as deaths and dispossession disproportionally fell upon working class people of color, women, and the elderly. The necro-politics of capitalist enclosures rehearsed its new powers in nursing homes, immigration camps, prisons, the meat industries and other production sites based on migrant labor, and patriarchal households. New technologies of immunization, isolation and extermination prefigured a biopolitical and anthropological regime-shift, unimaginable and unpredictable, and yet terrifying.
Here is one thing the accelerationists did not foresee: post-capitalism could lead to the reduction rather than increase of participatory democracy and even to the emergence of what E. P. Thompson (1980) once described as ‘state-exterminism’.
These are the signs:
- The consolidation of the monopolistic power of digital platforms is unfolding under our very eyes. New digital divides and invisible hierarchies are emerging through cyber-tracking, Zoomification of workplaces, and the invisible corporate infrastructures of smart cities (Kalb 2020a; Smith 2020; Klein 2020). Unicorns and venture capitalism are going under, the FANGs (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google) are becoming stronger, not only economically but also morally. People around the world look benevolently upon and even praising the role of surveillance capitalism. In the US, a long-awaited anti-trust investigation against Alphabet and Facebook was just put on hold.
- The trade-off between human lives and the economy, especially the ‘mathematics of black lives’ (McKittrick, 2015). The statistics are clear (ONS, 21 May 2020): the working class is more than twice as likely as the wider population to have died of C-19. In the UK and US, for example, there is a strong racial component. Black people are twice more likely as white to die from Covid-19 despite constituting only 12 per cent of the population. In the UK, the death rate for blue-collar workers is 45.7 per 100,000 compared to 5.6 per 100,000 for white collar workers. They are the nurses, the care workers, the cleaners, the taxi drivers, the bus drivers who keep goods and people in movement. They sustain and reproduce lives with their own bodies. I recall a passage from Joao Reis’ description of urban Bahia in 1857: “wherever there was movement of people or goods, there were slaves sustaining that movement”. In Brazil, thanks to Jair Bolsonaro’s denial of the lethal dangers of C-19, the virus is spreading in favelas and – history repeats itself – amongst indigenous communities (the death rate in the Brazilian city of Manaus is four times the national average).
- Authoritarianism, of the homophobic and racist kind, is on the rise everywhere (Kalb and Halmai, 2011) In Indonesia, the pandemic is a pretext for the government to escalate their attacks on leftist grassroots movements (Hornbach-Schönleber, 2020) . China has tightened its grip on Hong Kong. In Hungary the prime minister Viktor Orban rules by decree. Civil war is intensifying in Mozambique; the Muslim population is being attacked and persecuted in India. In Zimbabwe, people who spread false information about C-19 face 20 years in prison. In South Africa, the police shoot people in the street and even resort to sjambokking (the whip of rhinoceros or hippopotamus hide used by white settlers with cattle and indentured workers in South Africa during the apartheid era) to break public gatherings. LGBT shelters have been raided and activists imprisoned in Uganda. Domestic violence and indentured labour are also on the rise everywhere. The killing of women has doubled in the UK and US. Domestic workers and builders stuck in foreign countries are kept captives and abused by their masters.
But these exterminationist measures also reflect the fear among the rulers. For once, capitalism has been forced to a standstill. Some of the rich did not have the time to escape to their nuclear bunkers in Kansas, their farms in New Zealand, or their second homes in the countryside. They were stuck with the rest. Besides, for how long will the American government be able to justify its unhuman health system? Or, for how long can the Russian government cover up the extent of the pandemic and manufacture its statistics as food runs out in the supermarkets? Or, until when can Bolsonaro encourage mass gatherings amongst evangelical communities and in favelas when the bolsa familia will grind to a halt and the brutality of the Brazilian social system will emerge in full force? The pandemic has unleashed the anger of the ruled and the fear of the rulers.
As our dreams become more vivid and suffused with a magical realist sense of catastrophic ending reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s Love in The Time of Cholera (1985), we are told that we will have to adapt to the new normal.
Indeed, we do not want to go back to the old normality because normality was the problem.
As anthropologists we must use our radical imagination to build from scratch a new vocabulary and new practices of being in the world, new conceptual tools and modes of sociability for prefiguring sustainable and fair futures beyond the banal inequality and selfish imaginary of capitalism. We must keep our theoretical and political interventions focused on everyday class struggles and, at the same time, re-orient these struggles to the future (Kalb, 2020b).
Here are some key political contestations that should be important to follow for anthropologists of a political economic persuasion, in the UK and beyond:
Nursing homes, hospitals, busses and other public spaces have turned into deadly enclosures. We must go beyond the bourgeois public/private dichotomy and reconstruct the public, starting from the valorization of the grassroot practices of care and mutual support at the neighborhood level that have sprung across cities worldwide with the pandemic, led especially by the youth. We should consider instituting a new social income for neighborhood-based organizations providing grassroots care and support. In addition, the governance of the public sector, including National Health Services, museums and higher education institutions should be democratized and prison systems renationalized.
Unleashed by the ruthless exploitation of the environment, the pandemic has paradoxically led to an unprecedented 8 per cent drop in carbon emission – the equivalent of losing the entire energy demand of India. Yet, even with the estimated 20 per cent drop in GDP, the key climate target for 2030 will not be met. Governments must disinvest from fossil fuel, following the example of Norway, and resurrect the Green New Deal (Kalb, 2020a).
The rent and homeless crises unleashed by the pandemic have highlighted spatial segregation, privatization and land concentration. We must rethink urban spaces and economies, introducing rent caps, heavy fees for Airbnb and the like, and more affordable housing.
The GDP is an absurd measure of economic growth, which pits the economy against human lives. We need to think further about alternative measures of human value and wellbeing [for an assessment of the GDP in the light of C-19, see David Barnes’ report Tragedy of the Growth: “To protect well-being and avoid ecological disaster we must abandon GDP growth and transform our economic system” (Barnes, 2020)].
Some of the de-growth unleashed by the pandemic has been beneficial. Some jobs proved more important than others in terms of human wellbeing. Some industries more relevant than others. Some are notoriously irrelevant – do we need more cars or accountants? (Graeber, 2018) We have discovered that we can work less without getting depressed or emasculated. We need a permanent Universal Basic Income and a reduction of the working week.
As our lives are even more entangled within IT platforms and social media, we need to socialize and democratize platform economies and knowledge commons. We need to institute a global commission on cybersurveillance and on monopolies in the IT industry.
As we survived the lockdown by watching films, reading books and listening to music we have rediscovered the value of culture, which paradoxically is under threat by the same media and IT industries that provide the infrastructure for it. We need a national fund in support of the art and cultural sectors and taxes on immaterial and cultural rents.
Mao Mollona teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London. His last books are: Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning (2018; with Don Kalb, eds, Berghahn); Brazilian Steel-town: Land, Labour, Machines and Commoning in the making of the working-class (2020, Berghahn); ART/COMMONS. Anthropology Beyond Capitalism (2021, Zed Books).
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Cite as: Mollona, Mao. 2020. “Fully Exterminated Communism, or Anthropology in the Time of Cholera.” FocaalBlog, 10 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/10/mao-mollona-fully-exterminated-communism-or-anthropology-in-the-time-of-cholera/