Pandemic! 2. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ that allow for the reproduction of daily life, is, as a rule, highly gendered, racialized, and ethnicized. This is the “new working class” that is at the forefront of contemporary capitalism. Its members have to bear two burdens: at one and the same time, they are the workers most at risk of contracting the virus through their jobs, and of being laid off with no financial resources because of the economic retrenchment enforced by the virus. The contemporary working class in the United States—comprised predominantly of African Americans, Latinos, and waged women—faces an ugly choice: between suffering contamination in the course of caring for people and keeping key forms of provision (such as grocery stores) open, or unemployment with no benefits (like adequate health care).¹

      This is why revolts recently erupted in the poor northern suburbs of Paris where those who serve the rich live. This is why, in recent weeks, Singapore has had a dramatic spike in Covid-19 infections in foreign worker dormitories. As one news report explains, “Singapore is home to about 1.4 million migrant workers who come largely from South and Southeast Asia. As housekeepers, domestic helpers, construction workers and manual laborers, these migrants are essential to keeping Singapore functioning—but are also some of the lowest paid and most vulnerable people in the city.”² This new working class was here all along, the pandemic just propelled it into visibility.

To designate this class, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz coined the term “geo-social class.”³ Much of this class is not exploited in the classic Marxist sense of working for those who own the means of production; they are “exploited” with regard to the way they relate to the material conditions of their life: access to water and clean air, health, safety, Local populations are exploited when their territory is used for industrial agriculture or intensive mining to feed exports. Even if they don’t work for foreign companies, they are exploited in the simple sense of being deprived of the full use of the territory that enables them to maintain their way of life. Take the Somali pirates: they turned to piracy because their coastal waters were depleted of fish by foreign companies’ industrial fishing practices. Part of their territory was appropriated by the developed countries and used to sustain our way of life. Schultz proposes to replace here the appropriation of “surplus-value” with the appropriation of “surplus-existence,” where “existence” refers to material conditions of life.⁴

As we are now discovering with the Covid-19 pandemic, even when factories are at a standstill, the geo-social class of caretakers has to go on working—and it seems appropriate to dedicate this first of May to them instead of to the traditional industrial working class. They are the truly over-exploited: exploited when they work (since their work is largely invisible), and exploited even when they don’t work, in their very existence.

      The eternal dream of the rich is of a territory totally separated from the polluted dwellings of ordinary people—just think about the many post-apocalyptic blockbusters like Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, set in 2154, where the rich live on a gigantic space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth that resembles an expanded Latin-American favela. Expecting some kind of catastrophe, the rich are buying villas in New Zealand or renovating Cold War nuclear bunkers in the Rocky Mountains, but the problem with a pandemic is that one cannot isolate from it completely—like an umbilical cord that cannot be severed, a minimal link with polluted reality is unavoidable.

      1 1. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/4/david-harvey-coronavirus-pandemic-capital-economy

      2 2. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/24/asia/singapore-coronavirus-foreign-workers-intl-hnk/

      3 3. See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335392682

      4 4. See Nikolai Schultz, “New Climate, New Class Struggles,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge MIT Press, 2020).

3. COVID-19, GLOBAL WARMING, EXPLOITATION—THE SAME STRUGGLE

From today’s standpoint (at the end of June), the initial two months of the Covid-19 panic appear in an almost nostalgic light: true, we were in quarantine, but we expected this to last for a month or two before life would return to some kind of normal—even Dr. Fauci, director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Americans they could look forward to enjoying their summer vacations. We perceived quarantine as a limited time of exception, an almost welcome standstill in our all-too-busy lives affording us some peace with our families, some time to read books and listen to music, and to enjoy cooking meals, in the knowledge that it will be over soon. Now, we are in what some call the “whack-a-mole stage,” with clusters constantly popping up here and there, not to mention the explosion of new outbreaks in countries like the US, Brazil, and India. Only now are we forced to accept that we are entering a new era in which we will have to learn to live with the virus. The situation is open, there is no clear indication of what direction the pandemic will take—or, as the German virologist Hendrik Streeck succinctly put it: There is “no second or third wave—we are in a permanent wave.”¹

But we are still all too focused on Covid-19 statistics, many of us regularly checking the numbers of infected, dead, and recovered on Worldometer. This fascination with the numbers automatically makes us forget the obvious fact that many more people are dying from cancer, heart attacks, pollution, hunger, armed conflicts, and domestic violence, as though if we get Covid-19 infections fully under control, the main cause of our troubles will disappear. Instead, human life will remain full of miseries and, in some sense, human life IS a misery that ends painfully, often with meaningless suffering.

      Furthermore, the link between the Covid-19 pandemic and our ecological predicament is becoming ever more clear. We may get Covid-19 under control, but global warming will demand much more radical measures. Greta Thunberg was right when she recently pointed out that “the climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today’s political and economic systems.”² The same global mobilization that we were able to enact in response to the Covid-19 crisis is even more necessary with regard to global warming and pollution, but we continue failing to act in this direction, or, as Thunberg put it in a wonderful reversal of the title of Andersen’s fairy tale: “The emperors are naked. Every single one. It turns out our whole society is just one big nudist party.”

Take a case of global warming that should convince even the greatest skeptics: the prolonged heatwave in Siberia that, in the first six months of 2020, caused wildfires, a huge oil spill, and a plague of tree-eating moths. As one news outlet reported, “Russian towns in the Arctic circle have recorded extraordinary temperatures, with Nizhnyaya Pesha hitting 30C on 9 June […] Thawing permafrost was at least partly to blame for a spill of diesel fuel in Siberia this month that led Putin to declare a state of emergency. The supports of the storage tank suddenly sank.”³ Just think about all the long-frozen bacteria and viruses waiting to be reactivated with the thawing of permafrost!

The same goes for the link between Covid-19 and the anti-racist protests erupting around the world. The only effective answer to the ongoing debate about the assertion that “Black lives matter” (e.g., why shouldn’t we instead say, “all lives matter”?), is a wonderfully brutal meme now circulating in the US, which depicts Stalin holding a poster that reads: “No lives matter.” (I leave aside here the polemics about Stalinist murders in Australia that gave birth to this version of the meme.) The kernel of truth in this provocation is that there are things that matter more than bare life—is this not also the primary message of those protesting police violence against Black people? Black people (and those who support them) are not demanding mere survival, they are demanding to be treated with dignity, as free and equal citizens, and for this they are ready to risk a lot, including sometimes their СКАЧАТЬ