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Title: What’s Worth Dying for? Author: CrimethInc. Date: April 21, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19 Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-28 from https://crimethinc.com/2020/04/21/whats-worth-dying-for-confronting-the-return-to-business-as-usual
Some things are worth risking death for. Perpetuating capitalism is not
one of them. Going back to work—at risk of spreading COVID-19 or dying
from it—so that the rich can continue accruing profits is not worth
dying for.
If the problem is that people are suffering from the economy being shut
down, the solution is clear. People were already suffering as a
consequence of the economy running. The inequalities it created are one
of the reasons some people are so desperate to go back to work—but in a
profit-driven economy, the more we do business, the greater the
inequalities become.
Practically all the resources people need exist already or could be
produced by voluntary labor on a much safer basis, rather than forcing
the poorest and most vulnerable to work for peanuts at great risk of
spreading the virus. Rather than going back to business as usual, we
need to abolish capitalism once and for all.
Supporters of Donald Trump are calling for the economy to resume
immediately at any cost: they are gambling that, like Rand Paul and
Boris Johnson, they won’t be the ones to die.
It’s easy to understand why the beneficiaries of capitalism would
welcome a pandemic that could kill off a part of the unruly population.
The distinction between “essential” and “inessential” workers has laid
this bare for all to see: a large part of the population is no longer
essential to industrial production and the logistics of international
distribution. In a volatile world, increasingly affordable automation
has reduced the angry and precarious to a mere liability for those who
hold power.
We are not yet desensitized enough to this notion that those who govern
us can speak openly about it, but there have been attempts on Fox News
to shift to a discourse that takes millions of additional deaths in
stride as a worthwhile price to pay to keep the economy functioning.
Aren’t we already desensitized to workplace accidents, air pollution,
global climate change, and the like?
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and
decrease the surplus population.”
—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
But why would workers call for the reopening of the economy?
If the logical result of a large part of the population being
superfluous to capitalism is a greater willingness among the ruling
class to sacrifice our lives, it is not surprising that workers who
cannot imagine anything other than capitalism would also be more willing
to see other workers die.
Discussing the economic impact of the bubonic plague in Caliban and the
Witch, Silvia Federici argues that “the scarcity of labor which the
epidemic caused shifted the power relation to the advantage of the lower
classes.” Federici meant to call attention to the powerful labor
movements at the end of the Middle Ages, but today we can derive grim
implications from this analysis. In the same way that bigots wrongly
imagine that shutting down immigration will secure high-paying jobs for
white citizens, they might conclude that the smaller the working class,
the better the deal for the survivors.
This is the same segment of the working class that has always welcomed
wars and championed unthinking obedience to authority—the ones who
accepted white privilege as a bribe not to show solidarity with other
workers. Lacking longstanding bonds or a deep-rooted tradition of
collective resistance, workers in the United States have always been
especially willing to play the lottery when it comes to questions of
survival and economic advancement. Many conservative whites seem to have
given up entirely on realizing the dream of economic security that their
parents sought, settling instead for seeing others suffer even worse
than them. As we argued early in the Trump era, Trump did not promise to
redistribute wealth in the United States, but rather to redistribute
violence.
This willingness to risk death in hopes of seeing other (likely less
privileged) workers die might be disguised as conspiracy theories about
the virus, or even as outright denial of its existence—but at base it is
schadenfreude of the worst kind.
Yet there is something else going on here, as well. To some extent,
those who have protested the lockdown over the past few days have
understood themselves as defending their “rights” as citizens—though,
senselessly, they are serving as shills for the reigning authoritarian
government of the United States to intensify the control via which it
will go on exposing them to risk. Their slogan might as well be “Kill
all the immigrants and prisoners—set yourself up as dictator in the name
of freedom—just let me die of COVID-19 in the comfort of my boss’s
workplace!”
In this regard, in a confused way, the protests against the lockdown are
part of a worldwide pushback against state authority in response to
lockdown measures during the pandemic.
In Russia, demonstrations in response to the quarantine conditions have
led to open confrontations, something rare indeed in Putin’s
totalitarian regime. In France, riots have broken out in several cities
and suburbs, such as in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, in response to the police
taking advantage of the lockdown to murder five people and injure many
more, the latest victim being a motorcyclist ; during the ongoing
repression, officers shot a 5-year-old girl with a LBD40 rubber bullet,
fracturing her skull. In Peru, police have attacked crowds of
impoverished refugees attempting to flee the capital to their home
villages, having run out of resources during the lockdown.
All of these examples show how poorly capitalist governments founded on
coercive violence are equipped to maintain the sort of quarantines that
can prevent a pandemic from spreading. In a society in which almost all
wealth is concentrated in a few hands, in which state edicts are
enforced by violence, a large part of the population lacks the resources
to ride out a disaster like this in isolation. Most people who have
maintained social distancing have done so out of concern for all
humanity, at great cost to themselves, not because of the force employed
against them by the state. State enforcement of the quarantine has been
uneven, to say the least, with the governor of Florida declaring
professional wrestling an essential function and police around the world
turning a blind eye to conservatives who flout the shutdown.
In the absence of a powerful movement against rising authoritarianism,
people who are concerned about the power grabs of the state may join
“protests” like the ones encouraging Trump to lift the lockdown. This is
one of the hallmarks of an authoritarian society: that people have no
options to choose from other than to support one of the factions of the
government, all of whom are pursuing totalitarian visions.[1] Rather
than choosing between subjugation under a technocratic state and risking
death to continue our economic subjugation, we have to pose another
option: a grassroots struggle against capitalism and authoritarianism of
all kinds.
To some extent, the protests in favor of reopening the economy are an
astroturf phenomenon, aimed at expanding the Overton window in order to
make it easier for Trump to restart the economy at whatever cost. Both
Trump and his Democratic rivals share the same fundamental program. They
only disagree about the details.
There was never any plan to protect us all from COVID-19. The Democrats
just wanted to pace the impact of the virus on healthcare infrastructure
for the sake of maintaining public order. They, too, take for granted
that the capitalist market must continue—even as it impoverishes and
kills us in greater and greater numbers. They won’t revolt against
Trump’s ban on immigration any more than Trump will object to the
surveillance measures they aim to introduce. Supporting either party
means accepting the arrival of a totalitarianism in which it will be
taken for granted that workers will risk death simply for the privilege
of letting capitalists earn a profit off their labor.
To protect our lives and the lives of our neighbors, to gain access to
resources, to attain freedom—there is only one way to accomplish all of
these things. We have to revolt.
Nothing matters to the market but profit. Forests only have value as
timber or toilet paper; animals only have value as hot dogs or
hamburgers. The precious, unrepeatable moments of your life only have
value as labor hours determined by the imperatives of commerce. The
market rewards landlords for evicting families, bosses for exploiting
employees, engineers for inventing death machines. It separates mothers
from their children, drives species into extinction, shuts down
hospitals to open up privatized prisons. It reduces entire ecosystems to
ash, spewing out smog and stock options. Left to itself, it will turn
the whole world into a graveyard.
Some things are worth risking our lives for. Perpetuating capitalism is
not one of them. If we have to risk our lives, let’s risk them for
something worthwhile, like creating a world in which no one has to risk
death for a paycheck. Life for the market means death for us.
[1] Proponents of rival authoritarianism seek to trap us in such binary
choices: for example, if we turn a blind eye to Facebook censoring the
pro-Trump “protests,” we can be sure that such censorship will be used
against our own demonstrations in the future.