<nettime> Ben Tarnoff: These Are Conditions in Which Revolution Becomes

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

THESE ARE CONDITIONS IN WHICH REVOLUTION BECOMES THINKABLE
BEN TARNOFF

4.07.2020

https://communemag.com/these-are-conditions-in-which-revolution-becomes-thinkable/

In a few months, Covid-19 has remade our political horizons entirely.

History moves slowly, then all at once. The coronavirus crisis
has catapulted us into the latter rhythm. The pace of events has
accelerated sharply; the course of events has become impossible to
predict. In retrospect, 2020 may end up being a 1968 or a 1917: a year
of leaps and ruptures, and a dividing line between one era and the
next. How might we characterize the new era? It’s difficult to draw
definitive conclusions about a period that is in the earliest phases
of its formation. Still, even in fast-moving moments, it’s possible
to work up a preliminary sketch. For such a sketch to be useful,
though, it must capture, albeit in rough strokes, the sharpness of
the break and the newness of the situation produced by it. As Stuart
Hall wrote: When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no “going back.”
History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment.
You have to attend, “violently,” with all the “pessimism
of the intellect” at your command, to the “discipline of the
conjuncture.”

A conjuncture is a thing made out of other things—literally, a
“joining together.” So a good way to start when trying to attend
to it is to attend to the various elements that combine to create it.
Ideally, this shouldn’t just be a laundry list of various things
that are happening but also an account of how they fit together, a
theory of the complex, contradictory whole that is generated by their
interaction.


--------------------

This is difficult work, and it requires a sustained, collective
effort. It’ll take a lot of people thinking and acting together to
make sense of our new terrain. What follows is an early contribution:
a partial inventory of circumstances in the US and a provisional
picture of how they fit together.

The economy is collapsing. Goldman Sachs economists have predicted
an annualized 34 percent decline in GDP in the second quarter of
2020—an implosion with no historical precedent. By comparison, the
worst annual decline on record is 13 percent, which happened in 1932
during the Great Depression. Goldman’s predictions for the rest of
2020 are somewhat rosier: a return to double-digit growth in the third
and fourth quarters, so that GDP falls by 6.2 percent for the full
year on an annual average basis.

These numbers may ultimately be too optimistic, however. They take for
granted that lockdowns and social distancing will be relaxed enough
towards the end of the year for something resembling normal life
to resume. By contrast, the economists Warwick McKibbin and Roshen
Fernando suggest, more plausibly, that the economic fallout from the
coronavirus crisis will be worse. They estimate that a pandemic that
lasts a year and kills a million people—well within the range of
current CDC projections, and perhaps too low given the current pace of
infection—would reduce GDP for the year by 8.4 percent.

But a precipitous drop in growth isn’t the only cause for concern.
We may also be facing another financial crisis soon, which would
make the situation considerably more painful. Corporate debt is
particularly vulnerable, partly as a result of how governments handled
the last financial crisis. To combat the 2008 meltdown, central
bankers made money cheap. This in turn encouraged companies to issue
bonds, largely to finance mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks.
Since most of these companies aren’t sitting on huge cash piles,
even minor disruptions may make it impossible for them to service
their debt. Given the immense volume of this debt—the global value
of non-financial corporate bonds reached $13.5 trillion at the end of
2019—a crunch could easily sink the financial system, freezing up
credit markets and leading to a wave of bankruptcies among employers.

It’s little comfort, then, that investors have been fleeing
assets of all kinds in recent weeks: not just corporate bonds, but
historical safe havens like gold and Treasury bonds. The Fed has
acted aggressively, using tools similar to the ones it deployed in
2008: slashing interest rates and buying up various financial assets,
including corporate bonds. Still, the ambivalent response of markets
to these moves suggests they may not be enough. Stocks rallied in
anticipation of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, and continued their
gains after the bill passed. But there is little doubt that more
upheaval lies ahead.


--------------------



If the swiftness of the economic contraction inflicted by the pandemic
is one feature that distinguishes our present crisis from previous
ones, another is the particular segment of the economy that will
suffer the most from that contraction: services. Services usually
don’t take the worst hit during recessions. That’s because they
can’t be stored, so they have to be consumed right away.

The coronavirus crisis may break this pattern, however. “This
will probably be the world’s first recession that starts in the
service sector,” the economist Gabriel Mathy told the New York
Times. In a pandemic, services are uniquely vulnerable. For instance,
people won’t go get their hair cut, either because they’re afraid
of being infected or because a government-mandated shutdown has
closed the barbershop. And because you can’t store the output of
services—a barber can’t stockpile haircuts in a warehouse until
demand picks up again—businesses quickly go bankrupt, and the
layoffs come hard and fast.

The human toll of such layoffs will be immense, because the service
sector is where most Americans work. According to the latest estimate
by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of all non-farm payroll
employees—more than a hundred million people—are in the service
sector. Granted, services is a heterogenous category, encompassing
everything from stockbrokers to fast-food workers. But most of the
growth in recent decades has been on the lower end of the wage
spectrum, and this is also where most of the pain will be felt.

That pain is already being felt on a very large scale. In the
week ending March 21, 3.3 million people applied for unemployment
insurance. The following week, that number doubled to 6.6
million—nearly ten times the record set in 1982. The layoffs are
concentrated in the service sector, particularly its lower-wage
layers. The coming weeks will almost certainly bring more bad news.
Goldman expects the unemployment rate to hit 15 percent; the St. Louis
Fed says it could surge as high as 32.1 percent.

These numbers reflect the disintegration of a central pillar of the
US economic model. For decades, the service sector has played an
essential role in stabilizing the labor market. Because services are
more difficult to automate—it’s harder to automate the production
of a haircut than the production of an automobile—they have lower
rates of productivity growth, which means they need more labor. This
is what has enabled the service sector to absorb the workers that the
manufacturing sector began shedding in the 1970s as a global crisis
of overcapacity set in. Services can’t serve as the growth engine
that manufacturing did, as the worsening performance of the US economy
since the 1970s makes clear. But they have provided a steady supply of
jobs.

The pandemic shuts off this safety valve. With the service sector in
freefall, there is no longer anywhere for the surplus labor generated
by decades of economic stagnation to go.

Of course, some of those who were laid off will eventually find
new jobs, particularly if the post-crisis rebound follows the more
optimistic estimates. But the economy they return to will have
permanently changed. Small businesses, which currently employ nearly
half of the country’s private-sector workforce, will be decimated.
Giants like Amazon and Walmart will tighten their grip over consumer
spending.

Amazon and its fellow tech firms will also benefit from how the crisis
reprograms consumer behavior. The pandemic has already been a boon to
e-commerce, as people try to buy the things they need with a minimum
of social interaction. Amazon recently announced it would hire one
hundred thousand workers amid booming demand; Instacart, the online
grocery delivery service, is adding three hundred thousand. This trend
could very well become permanent. Consumers may come to prefer getting
their groceries delivered rather than going to the supermarket,
for instance, whether out of habit, convenience, or continued fear
of infection. The service jobs of the future, then, will likely be
concentrated in transportation and warehousing. A growing portion of
the US working class will make a (meager, precarious) living packing
and delivering the goods that people in extended periods of isolation
need to survive.


--------------------


The issue of survival brings us to another core theme of the
coronavirus crisis: social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to
the various systems—formal and informal, waged and unwaged—that
make capitalism possible by raising, socializing, educating, healing,
housing, and otherwise sustaining the workers whose labor power it
runs on. These systems have long been under severe strain in the US.
Stagnant wages and pitiful structures of social provision have placed
most of the US working class on the brink of bankruptcy or worse, with
nearly 80 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

The pandemic demolishes this rickety arrangement. Soaring demand for
unemployment insurance and food stamps is pushing the parsimonious
US welfare state well past the breaking point. Meanwhile, the
fragile condition of the country’s highly financialized healthcare
system—which has spent the last decade enriching executives and
investors in a mergers and acquisitions spree—has been cast into
stark relief.

But the pandemic isn’t just intensifying an existing crisis of
social reproduction. The pandemic is also being intensified by the
crisis. The poor quality of social-reproductive systems in the US
has created the ideal conditions for contagion. To take one example,
nursing homes emerged as hotspots early on. A large part of the blame
lies with a wave of private-equity investment in the nursing home
industry over the past decade, which has forced facilities across the
country to cut costs in order to shovel more profits upwards. Many
homes became extremely unsanitary as a result, with state inspections
uncovering appalling cases of abuse and neglect. Now they have become
major sites of infection.

A virus isn’t just a biological phenomenon, but a social one. The
vulnerabilities it exploits to propagate itself aren’t just the
properties of human cells, but how human societies are organized.
Societies that organize themselves around the accumulation of
capital—that is to say, capitalist ones—place themselves at
risk, especially societies like the US, where accumulation takes a
particularly brutal form.

There is a contradiction here: by undermining social reproduction,
capitalism undermines its own stability. Squeezing the proletariat dry
feeds the engine of capital up to a certain point—then it causes
the machinery to seize up, as the feminist theorist Nancy Fraser
has explained. The coronavirus crisis offers a vivid illustration
of this dynamic. The extreme pressure that capital has placed on
social reproduction in the US has produced a hospitable environment
for a pandemic that is destroying the economy. Those private-equity
capitalists, by strip-mining seniors for profit, have helped create a
situation in which many of their fellow capitalists will no longer be
able to set capital in motion.

For accumulation to resume its normal course, the virus must be
contained: the robustness of the Chinese response, for example, is
motivated not just by the desire to preserve the political legitimacy
of the Communist Party but to restart industrial production. In the
US, returning to business as usual will require, among other things,
modest increases in public support for social reproduction. This may
explain how Congress managed to pass a bill mandating ten days of paid
sick leave for a subset of US workers so quickly in the first week of
the pandemic. Letting workers get sick and die is acceptable; letting
workers get sick and threaten the accumulation process is not.

In the industrial era, labor won concessions from capital because of
a basic dependency: capitalists needed workers to run the factories.
The economic slowdown since the 1970s has diminished this dependency,
with the decline of manufacturing inaugurating an era of stagnation
characterized by persistently low demand for labor, tilting the
balance of power to capital’s advantage. The pandemic has the
potential to partly reverse this development. Workers may hold less
leverage over the accumulation process as workers, but they can now
endanger that process as vectors of viral transmission. Perhaps this
offers a new basis on which to win concessions.

Of course, workers can also make trouble the old-fashioned way:
by engaging in disruptive action in their workplaces and their
communities. The space for such action is likely to grow dramatically
in the coming weeks and months. Imagine a near future of 30 percent
unemployment, widespread food and housing insecurity, and millions
dead from the pandemic and from the increased mortality of an
overwhelmed healthcare system. These are essentially wartime
conditions. They are the conditions under which revolution becomes, if
not likely, at least thinkable.


--------------------


In a crisis, the parameters of political possibility expand. Dozens
of municipalities have halted evictions and utility shutoffs. Trump
has instructed HUD to suspend foreclosures and evictions of homeowners
with mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
California plans to move thousands of homeless people into hotels, in
some cases buying the hotels outright. New York City, Houston, and
Detroit have made local bus service free.

But this is the only beginning. With pressure from below, these
cracks in the common sense can be widened; indeed, the survival
of a significant number of people probably depends on it. Towards
that end, Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to send every
household $2000 per month, invoke the Defense Production Act to force
private firms to produce critical goods like masks and ventilators,
and institute a national moratorium on evictions, foreclosures, and
utility shutoffs, among other measures.

Given the pace of events, however, even these demands may look
moderate within a short period of time. Among socialists, the crisis
has spurred renewed calls to nationalize various sectors. Healthcare
seems like an obvious candidate, particularly given the coming flood
of hospital bankruptcies, the need for rational coordination of the
kind that markets can’t provide, and the moral imperative to care
for the many millions of Americans who are uninsured or underinsured.

Yet a concrete analysis of the concrete situation also requires
something more. A perennial temptation among socialists is to
pick up models from previous eras of struggle and apply them,
without modification, to the problems of the present moment. This
temptation grows in times of crisis, as a weakening of the status
quo creates opportunities to put old socialist ideas into wider
circulation. But times of crisis are also opportunities to generate
new socialist ideas: new modes of organizing, new horizons for social
transformation. The socialist tradition is a valuable source of
inspiration and insight. It also does not hold the answers to every
question posed by every conjuncture, for the simple reason that every
conjuncture poses different questions.

Marx believed the answers to such questions must be found in the
struggles of the working class. The working class was not just the
only social force capable of constructing socialism—it was also
the only social force capable of determining what socialism would
look like. This process would be advanced through practice; that
is, through the innumerable collisions and resistances of class
struggle. Communism, he and Engels famously wrote, is not “an
ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” but “the
real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” The
task for socialists today is to locate the tremors of that movement
and draw out its implicit content: to refine its raw materials into
new strategies and programs and possible futures. There will soon
be no shortage of materials to work with, as the pandemic spins up
a cycle of proletarian self-activity. Workers everywhere now have
an urgent issue to agitate around—their health—and are already
organizing on that basis. Wildcat strikes have broken out among
garbage workers, auto workers, poultry workers, warehouse workers, and
bus drivers. Amazon has seen a wave of militancy, forcing management
to promise better health protections and to extend paid time off to
its entire workforce. Instacart and Whole Foods workers have staged
labor actions. Unionized nurses have rallied to protest shortages.
Workers at GE have demanded repurposing jet engine factories to make
ventilators. Mutual aid groups are emerging to coordinate grocery
deliveries and childcare. Tenants across the country are organizing
rent strikes. In Los Angeles, homeless families are seizing vacant
homes.

These are strategies for survival but they are also, possibly,
the seeds of a new world: sites of social power where people can
collectively provision the resources they need and participate
directly in the decisions that affect them. It is in these places
and practices that the outlines of the next socialist project will
be found. For this project to be credible to the people on whom it
depends, it must be equal to the radicalism of our reality. It must
offer a socialism that is not a branch of progressivism or a wing of
the Democratic Party but a truly anti-systemic alternative, one that
promises, however improbably, an end to the death cult of capital and
the elevation of human health, dignity, and self-determination as the
supreme organizing principles of our common life.

BEN TARNOFF

Ben Tarnoff is a founding editor of Logic.


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: