Social reproductive: Millions of workers deemed “essential” in this country aren’t getting hazard pay or even basic personal protective equipment. In the sphere of social reproduction, teachers, transit workers, nurses, and janitors are testing positive for Covid-19 at alarming rates, but all of these workers remain outrageously underpaid and in sectors that have been systematically hollowed out over the past four decades. The very infrastructures of care required for us to survive this crisis have been first on the chopping block, with the American health care system reduced to its core profit-making function. ICU beds have disappeared systematically since the HMO revolution of the 1990s (“managed care” indeed!), and reports of EMTs who cannot themselves afford health care continue to proliferate. Just two months ago we were told that Medicare for All was unaffordable, but now it’s suddenly on the table – but only for now, only for this affliction. Cancer and heart disease are not putting the brakes on profit-making, but the coronavirus is. The patient turns out not to be one of us, but the economy itself. As soon as it’s nursed back to health, the rest of us should feel free to die.
Racial: In Louisiana, 70 percent of Covid-19 deaths have been Black residents – more than double their percentage of the population in that state. Roughly comparable figures are available in Chicago, and in Michigan, Black deaths are nearly triple their percentage of the population. In St. Louis, every single death recorded at the time of writing is of a Black resident. The notion that the coronavirus is a “great equalizer” is ludicrous in a society in which Black people are systematically excluded from access to health care and stuck in precarious employment. Of course, this is also the predicament of much of the working class, but in the US, Black, Latinx, Native American, and Southeast Asian residents are at substantially higher risks than their white counterparts. In other words, these disparities didn’t originate with the virus but were exacerbated by them. (Though this would be news to the US Surgeon General, who blamed the racial disparity on behavior: “Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,” he instructed Black Americans from the White House podium.) The coronavirus is refracted through an already racist system in which residents of color are more likely to live in overcrowded housing and less likely to be able to work from home. The same is true globally. As the virus makes its way through cities of the global South, racialized populations living in precarious housing situations and lacking the ability to isolate are sure to be the most susceptible to infection and yes, death. This certainly gives Ruthie Gilmore’s widely cited definition of racism a new gloss: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
Ecological: If this is how they react in the face of a novel virus scare, imagine what climate change is going to look like. As Sanders proposed a Green New Deal, Joe Biden sported a D- on environment from Greenpeace. He’s now up to a B, thanks to a revamped climate program, but carbon trading will no longer do the trick. As Antarctica experiences rare summer days and hurricanes continue to decimate Caribbean islands, fires rip through the Amazon and the Outback. We may bemoan a snowless winter or a frigid fall here in the US, but “climate refugee” is now in the standard vocabulary of most of the world, and it’s coming to a city near you soon.
Ideological: If 2008 was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin of neoliberalism, we needed a better hammer. Cost-cutting is still the mantra of the day, with Biden pushing to privatize social security as recently as last year, and Andrew Cuomo slashing $400 million of state funding from hospitals amidst the corona scare. Trump celebrates every “regulation” he removes, as if he’s reading from some Hayekian instruction manual, and free marketeers continue to dominate the op/ed pages. Even the token Keynesian dissenters like Paul Krugman advocate blind faith in the Fed and rabidly oppose social spending plans. We all have some intuitive sense that neoliberalism is on the wane, but what will replace it?
We’ve all heard about the surveys: millennials love socialism, as do Texans apparently. The Cold War is in a museum somewhere, and socialism is back on the agenda. Workers threaten strikes in Amazon warehouses in multiple countries and public schools in multiple states. Wildcats rock workplaces from the University of California to Fiat-Chrysler, and that’s just here in the US. In Italy, unions are building for a general strike, shutting down workplaces where the government and capital refuse to do so. Similar developments are emerging in France and Hong Kong, and we should hope they encircle the globe in the virus’ wake. Workers have taken the lead in their response to the abject failure of capitalist states to protect their populations. Here socialist politics aren’t some abstract program or logical set of ideas; they’re the real movement of the working class in the face of capitalist abandonment.
A politics adequate to this moment of organic crisis is desperately needed, lest we anxiously thumb our revolutionary rosaries, or else project all of our hopes onto a leader instead of a class. We urgently need a venue for discussing, debating, and reconstructing a way forward in this uncannily contradictory moment – a moment in which darkness is a constant, but in which glimpses of light seem to be more recurrent than we’re used to. We don’t want to fall back into failed models, and certainly we must let the dead bury their own dead. But we also need to remain skeptical of the resurgence of old-school reformism, repackaged as a novelty but typically redolent of experiments past.
We’re living through a bizarre political moment. Racist attacks are on the rise, as are fortified borders, assaults on reproductive autonomy, and countless other forms of oppression. Here at Spectre we refuse to dismiss these as so-called “fringe issues.” These are precisely the problems afflicting the global working class. As fans of Marx, we know all too well that abstract modes of domination can only ever be experienced concretely, and this means that not every worker is going to experience the organic crisis in the same way. But rather than attempting to paper over these divisions with a one-size-fits-all solution we call “socialism,” we take these differences as its point of departure. If capital differentiates the working class, as we well know, what does this mean in practice? How can we capture this in all its complexity without falling into the trap of simply re-describing what exists? And most importantly, what sorts of political interventions might help us think about particular and general struggles as two sides of the same coin? If challenging racism, heteropatriarchy, and so forth is impossible without challenging capitalism, doesn’t this mean that anti-capitalism shouldn’t be posited as an alternative to anti-racism, but instead as its sine qua non?
That’s the thing about an organic crisis: it’s hard to figure out where to even begin to make an intervention. With so many interwoven crises, all of them politicized, it’s an overwhelming scene, a game of communist mole-whacking in which for every advance made, two more crises rear their heads. But we mustn’t recoil in frustration, insisting that the universal is the only terrain upon which progress can be made. Capitalism may be “out there,” but it only exists insofar as we experience it. This is why we need to strategize in the realm of everyday life. If we truly aim to build a mass movement, we can only do this insofar as people feel invested in this struggle. And to do this, we need to understand the dynamics of the organic crisis, tracing the ways in which people’s chief concerns become politicized and ultimately, linked together.
Zachary Levenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is a contributing editor of this blog, as well as an editor at Spectre.