<nettime> Prisoners of the State

[Siraj Izhar | publiclife <s-i@publiclife.org>]

I have written this as a *preamble* for post-Covid scenarios, a sort
of reality check on the kind of world order that forms by the very
management of the pandemic. The preamble is of course is also for the
forms of agency dormant at present.

The online version is at: 
http://amplife.org/blog/prisoners_of_state_covid-19

Prisoners of the State:

We have all become prisoners of the State. Wherever we are across
the whole planet. It's a time like no other time in human history
or natural history. Is it a force of Nature as virus Covid-19 that
has brought this about; or is it something to do with the nature of
our State? In our near universal confinement we understand that it's
all for our protection. On that there is no argument here. We also
understand that just as the immune system in our own bodies produces
antibodies to protect us against an invading pathogen, so does the
State in its means of protection. But we know that by the reaction
of our bodies, it is our own antibodies that often kill us, not the
pathogen. The State also kills the same way. Both literally and in
spirit. That is the danger. That the State mirrors the pathogen. The
State becomes the pathogenic State.

If we take a look at the online portal set up by the WHO (World Health
Organisation) to monitor the Covid-19 pandemic, we see pale blue
circles each defined by a sovereign nation-state. Within each circle,
vast new asymmetries of power have grown out of this pandemic – some
in the most absolute sense as Viktor Orban's Hungary. And in-between
the circles is an intensification of an 'each one against the other'
– the fights between states over ventilators and protective masks
as nations block and hijack each others' shipments, their sealing of
borders, and so forth. At a transnational level it has been nothing
but a chain of reactive inflammations. Even when the spread of the
virus is still on the increase.

Behind all of this is a or, the reality that is being occluded; which
we can only see by an exercise of our imagination. That the viral
pandemic is in fact the one cloud that is migrating through the body
of the one species – the human.

This does not imply a proposition here for some post-national
border-less world. But given the way the pandemic in our globalised
times has forced almost every state to adopt the same measures to make
us universal captives of state (for protection), here is an enquiry
into what underlies the contemporary sovereign state.

By its scale of upheaval there has been much talk that this pandemic
takes us back to the end of World War Two whereby the universal
violence that killed over 200 million led not only to an unprecedented
level of financial investment to enable a post-war recovery but also
an unforeseen level of international law-making. This transnational
law-making we need to bear in mind today. With the end of the world
war came the “transmutation” of its violence into new regulations
and international law: the establishment of the United Nations
alongside global decolonisation, the principle of the sanctity of
sovereignty of each state symbolised by “a family of nations”
at the UN. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and
supporting transnational conventions like the 1951 Refugee convention.

However behind the narrative of a post-war new world, an order
remained through a specific form of sovereignty within which the
family of nations took its place and which prevailed. In their book
Empire Negri and Hardt describe it as a principle of sovereignty
by which “liberty is made sovereign and sovereignty is defined
as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of
expansion.” The critical combination here is of sovereignty,
democracy and expansion. What is expanding by this combination we
can of course understand as Capital; as well as the implications on
society and the planet's resources. But the combination prevails
because it renews its moral framework even when its maintenance
requires the practice of war, as the just war. How this is so was
well articulated by Robert Cooper, the special adviser on foreign
affairs to Tony Blair. In The new liberal imperialism (2002), before
the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq, Cooper wrote: “What is needed then
is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human
rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline:
an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and
organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle.”

The exercise of “voluntary imperialism” as listed by Cooper
was the use of the global economy, its International Financial
Institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank and, in a critical
choice of words,  the “imperialism of neighbours”. The
“imperialism of neighbours” created a chain of trickle-down
copycat imperialisms from great to small in the Darwinian
globalisation we live in today. Yet this chain is itself dependent
on the hegemon, the power that maintains the order either through
a policy of military interventionism or the exercise of unilateral
sanctions. This unilateral order, as the 'New World Order' (a phrase
we became familiar with at the very start of the 21st century)
underpins the contemporary sovereign state today; each state in its
place in the family of nations, including those as counter-hegemons
yet all a functionary in Empire. Empire itself is real yet intangible,
untouchable and beyond all contest. Or so it was until Covid-19
arrived.

The virus has hurt Empire and by that abruptly opened up this world
to new scenarios. That's why many analysts describe the crisis of
this pandemic as a 'conjunctural' point in history (that is a crisis
point within a greater history a longue durée that demands structural
change). A point in time that breaks the pattern. As we try to project
a post-Covid future, the practice of scenarios thinking comes to the
fore, now ranging from the utopian to the dystopian. Two examples can
serve to illustrate benign approaches: the French parliamentarians'
open consultation with 11 themes ranging from “a more open democracy
and how to share power” to “Our wealth is invisible: how can we
better measure the common good?” Or the philosopher Bruno Latour's
'little exercise' “to make sure that, after the virus crisis, things
don’t start again as they were before”.

The question of 'so things don’t start again as they were before'
returns me to a World Social Forum workshop in Tunis in March 2013
presented by the Marxist economist Samir Amin in which he introduced
the idea of a new International for the 21st century, a global accord
of people as workers – given that more people than ever before now
work for a wage. Amin elaborated further on this in the years before
his death. But we do not need to be a Marxist like Amin to consider
the utter implausibility of such an accord at this moment of an
universal crisis or any possibility of space for the question. Why
this is so, and to this absolute degree, Amin (in Monthly Review)
explained by the new nature of capitalism: the extreme centralisation
of Capital today. That is, we should no longer see Capital as islands,
centres of capitalism in different places or states e.g. Wall Street,
Dubai, mega-factories in China etc. but in an integrated system that
controls the largest to the smallest everywhere - including the
“peripheries”. This of course is Empire but Amin's work describes
it by how centralisation depends on social disintegration as it grows.
He called this lumpen-development. To quote, “lumpen-development
is the result of accelerated social disintegration connected to the
model of “development” with “the dramatic growth in survival
activities (the so-called informal sphere), in other words, by
the pauperization inherent to the unilateral logic of capital
accumulation.”

In easier language, a simple picture out of this would be: the extreme
centralisation of Capital alongside the extreme fragmentation of
peoples and workers. For scenarios thinking for a post-Covid world
the picture can help, in particular as its symptoms are openly
manifest. Life as mass precarious existence both in the advanced
economies as in the peripheries alongside ongoing forced migration
and displacement. But the danger is how already these very symptoms
are being exacerbated (and yet covered up) in the management of the
pandemic. Unreported mass deportations of migrants using emergency
measures outside of rights conventions, refugee boats left adrift
in the seas, and other untold tragedies. The power imbalances of
lockdown – for women in abusive relationships, domestic workers in
alien households etc.. And in the rich nations, the informal workers
– the cashiers, cleaners, drivers who must work during lockdown
to keep things going till everyone else returns. And alongside on a
vast scale in the poor, the majority of the world today who survive
by the daily wage now stripped of their means of survival, yet
politically voiceless. State by state the lockdown has involved mass
silencing. Behind it what is happening is incalculable, unimaginable
and unaccounted.


Of course this is simultaneous with efforts of revival, to prevent
a global crash through as Foreign Policy magazine states, “the
largest combined fiscal effort launched since World War II”. In
this unparalleled scale of fiscal injection, of some $8 trillion
and counting (IMF blog) the exercise of  'voluntary imperialism'
is being made bare naked. We see how the financial institutions of
the World Bank and IMF from the onset exclude certain states (e.g.
Cuba, Venezuela, Iran) from any loans in their struggles against the
pandemic whilst providing discretionary debt relief (Reuters) to
others. And within them the disparities, of uneven interest rates,
and whose interest they serve to consolidate. On the question of an
outcome in a post-Covid order, if anything the current order being
reinforced through crisis.

To reconsider the practice of scenarios, let us recast our minds back
to the end of World War Two. Let us not forget that many at the time,
like Hannah Arendt in her book on Totalitarianism warned that the new
international laws or conventions would provide inadequate protections
against the spectres of either Imperialism or Fascism. And that the
formulation of the State and human rights would leave too many at the
mercies of state or in a no-mans land. Equally in how the European
colonies folded at the end of the war, Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of
the Earth questioned the process; in his words, the “quick, quick,
lets decolonise... for god's sake, lets decolonise quick...”. Fanon
noted: "Gabon is independent, but between Gabon and France nothing has
changed; everything goes on as before."

If anything the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed how much we are hostage
to the last century, its state and financial institutions and how they
shutter the windows of change today. Because as it stands another
Darwinian world order begins to form by the very management of the
pandemic. In defeating the pandemic we play our part, we stay indoors,
we are incapacitated. But in the meantime Empire moves relentlessly.
The wounded Empire becomes the revanchist Empire. We see images of the
desperate Italian businessman (Il Tempo) down to a last Euro beating
at the gates of the bank. We see the desperation in the mass stampede
in India (BBC) as migrant workers try to escape lockdown which to them
means absolute poverty. We see how the State is both helpless and an
author of the desperation. And yet we have become prisoners of the
State. By that, it is most telling that, unlike 1945, no significant
thinking about new transnational institutions or law-making for a
post-Covid world appear on the political horizon today. We can ask
why.


#  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: