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Title: The Pandemics of Capital Author: Grupo Barbaria Date: March 27, 2020 Language: en Topics: spain, COVID-19 Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-30 from https://malcontent.noblogs.org/post/2020/03/27/the-pandemics-of-capital-grupo-barbaria/ Notes: Original in Spanish from http://barbaria.net/2020/03/20/las-pandemias-del-capital/.
It’s difficult to write a text like this one right now. In the current
context, in which coronavirus has busted – or soon threatens to – the
living conditions of many of us, the only thing you want to do is go out
to the street and set everything ablaze, with a mask on if needed.
That’s what it deserves. If the economy is worth more than our lives, it
makes sense to delay the containment of the virus until the last moment,
until the pandemic is already inevitable. It also makes sense that when
it’s no longer possible to halt the contagion and it’s needed to disturb
– to the bare minimum – the production and distribution of commodities,
it be us who are fired, who are forced to work, who remain confined in
the jails and the Foreigner Internment Centers, who are obliged to
choose between the sickness and the contagion of loved ones or dying of
hunger in quarantine. All of this with patriotic cheers and the call for
national unity, with social discipline as the executioner’s mantra, with
the elegies to the good citizen who bows the head and keeps quiet.
The Only thing that you want to do in moments like this is to smash
everything.
And this rage is fundamental. But what’s also fundamental is to
comprehend well in order to fight better, in order to struggle against
the very root of the problem. To comprehend it when everything explodes
and the individual rage converts into collective potential, in order to
know how to use that rage, to really put an end, without stories,
without deviations, to this society of misery.
Since its beginnings, the relationship that capitalism has with nature
(human and non-human) has been the story of a never-ending catastrophe.
It is in the logic of a society that is organized through mercantile
exchange. It is in the very reason for being of the commodity, in which
its natural, material aspect is of little importance, only the
possibility of obtaining money for it.
In a mercantile society, the ensemble of the species of the planet are
subordinated to the functioning of that blind and automatic machine
which is capital: the non-human natural world is no more than a flow of
raw materials, a means of production of commodities, and the human
natural world is the source of labor to exploit in order to get more
money from money. Everything material, everything natural, everything
alive is in the service of the production of a social relation – value,
money, capital – which has become autonomous and needs to permanently
transgress the limits of life.
But capitalism is a system fraught with contradictions. Every time it
tries to overcome them, it only postpones and intensifies the next
crisis. The social and sanitary crisis created by the spread of the
coronavirus concentrates all of them and expresses the putrefaction of
the social relations based on value, on private property and the State:
their historical depletion.
In the measure in which this system advances, the competition between
capitalists propels technological and scientific development and, with
it, an increasingly more social production. More and more, what we
produce depends less on a person and more on the society. It depends
less on local production, rooted in a territory, in order to become
increasingly more global. It also depends increasingly less on
individual and immediate effort and more on the knowledge accumulated
throughout history and applied efficiently to production. All this it
does, however, while maintaining its own categories: although the
production is increasingly more social, the product of the labor
continues being private property. And not merely so: the product of
labor is a commodity, meaning, private property destined for exchange
with other commodities. This exchange is made possible by the fact that
both products contain the same quantity of abstract labor, of value.
This logic, which constitutes the basic categories of capital, is put
into question by the development of capitalism itself, which reduces the
quantity of living labor that every commodity requires. Automation of
production, expulsion from work, a decline in the profits which the
capitalists can obtain from the exploitation of this work: a crisis of
value.
This profound contradiction between social production and private
appropriation is manifest in a whole series of derivative
contradictions. One of them, which we have elaborated on more
extensively in other moments, takes into account the role of the earth
in the exhaustion of value as a social relation. The development of
capital tends to create an ever stronger demand for land usage, which
causes its price – the land rent – to historically tend to increase.
This is logical: the more that productivity increases, the more the
quantity of value for each product unit declines, and therefore, the
more commodities that must be produced in order to obtain the same
profits as before. As there are increasingly less workers in the factory
and more robots, production requires more raw materials and energy
resources. The demand on the land, therefore, intensifies: mega-mining,
deforestation, and intensive extraction of fossil fuels are the logical
consequences of this dynamic. On the other hand, the concentration of
capital at the same time leads to concentrating great masses of labor
power in the cities, which pushes the price of housing in the cities to
permanently rise. From there follows the worst living conditions in the
metropolis, the overcrowding, the contamination, the rent which eats up
an ever larger portion of the salary, the workday which is indefinitely
prolonged by transport.
Agriculture and livestock production are faced with with these two big
competitors for the land, the sector linked to the utilization of the
land rent, and the one linked to the extraction of raw materials and
energy. If the agricultural or livestock farms are to be found in the
periphery of the city, perhaps their parcel of land would be more
profitable for the construction of a housing complex, or for an
industrial zone for which its proximity to metropolis is convenient. If
they are more far removed, but their piece of land contains minerals
that are useful and in demand for the production of commodities, or even
worse, some hydrocarbon reserves, they can’t be realized either in this
terrain which capital has destined for more succulent aims.[1] If they
want to remain in the same place and continue to pay the rent, they will
have to increase productivity like industrial capitalists do.
Furthermore they have the incentive of the incessant increase in urban
mouths to feed. The agroindustry is the logical consequence of this
dynamic: only by increasing productivity, using automated machinery,
producing in monoculture, making an ever greater use of chemicals
-fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture, pharmaceuticals in livestock
production-, even by genetically modifying plants and animals, can
sufficient profits be produced in a context where the land rent
increases unceasingly.
All this is necessary in order to enframe the emergence of pandemics. As
the comrades of Chuang explain well, the coronavirus is not a natural
occurrence removed from capitalist relations. Because it’s not just an
issue of globalization, meaning, of the exponential possibilities for
expansion of a virus. It is capital’s very form of producing which
fosters the appearance of pandemics.
In the first place, in order to be able to make agriculture and
livestock production more profitable it’s necessary to implant much more
intensive forms of production, much more aggressive for the natural
metabolism. When many members of the same species – like pigs, for
instance, one of the possible sources of COVID-19 and the confirmed
source of Influenza A (H1N1) which appeared in 2009 in the United States
– are crowded together in industrial farms, their living conditions,
their feeding and the permanent application of pharmaceuticals on their
bodies weakens their immune system. There’s no resilience in the small
ecosystem that constitutes a very numerous population of the same
species, immunologically compromised and crowded in confined spaces.
Furthermore, this ecosystem is a training camp, a favorable space for
the natural selection of the most contagious and virulent of virus. And
much more so if this population has a high mortality rate, as occurs in
the slaughterhouses, given that the swiftness with which it’s capable to
transmit the virus determines its possibility to survive.
It’s only a question of time that one of these virus manages to be
transmitted and persist in a host of another species: a human being, for
example.
Now let’s say that this human being is a proletarian and lives, like the
pigs in our example, crowded in an unhealthy home with the rest of their
family, goes to work in a train or bus where it’s hard to breathe at
peak hours, and they have a weakened immune system because of fatigue,
the poor quality of food, and the air and water contamination. The
permanent ascent of the price of living and transport, the increasingly
more precarious jobs, the poor eating, in short, the law of the growing
poverty of capital causes our species to have very little resilience.
The agriculture industry’s quest for a larger profit and competitiveness
in the world economy also has its effects in the proliferation of
epidemics. We have a good example in the epidemic of Ebola that spread
out throughout all of western Africa in 2014–16, which was preceded by
the implantation of monoculture for palm oil: a kind of plantation which
bats – the source of the strain that produced the outbreak – are very
attracted to. The deforestation of the woods, in virtue of not only the
agro-industrial exploitation but also the logging and mega-mining,
forces many animal species – and some human populations – to plunge even
deeper into the woods or to stay close to them, exposing themselves to
carriers of the virus such as bats (Ebola), mosquitoes (Zika) and other
reservoir hosts – meaning, pathogen carriers – that adapt to the new
conditions established by the agroindustry. Furthermore, the
deforestation reduces the biodiversity that makes the forest a barrier
for the chains of transmission of pathogens.
Although the most probable source of the coronavirus is situated in the
hunting and selling of wild animals, sold in the market of Hunan in the
city of Wuhan, this is not disconnected from the process described
above. In the measure in which the livestock production and the
industrial agriculture spread, they push the hunters of wild foods to
penetrate ever more deeply into the woods in search of their
merchandise, which increases the possibilities of contagion with new
pathogens and therefore of their propagation in the big cities.
The coronavirus has stripped the king bare: the contradictions of
capital are seen and suffered from in all their brutality. And
capitalism is incapable of managing the catastrophe that derives from
these contradictions, because it can only escape them by resolving them
momentarily so that they break out with a greater virulence later on.
To identify this dynamic, essential to the story of capitalism, we can
place our gaze on technology. The application of technoscientific
knowledge to production is perhaps one of the features which has most
characterized this system. Technology is utilized in order to increase
productivity with the goal of extracting an above-average profit, in
such a way that the company that produces more commodities than its
competitors with the same amount of labor time can choose between
reducing the price a bit to gain market space or to keep it the same and
gain a little more money. However, insofar as their competitors apply
similar improvements and all have the same level of productivity, the
capitalists find that instead of obtaining extra profits, they have
still less profit than before, because they have more commodities to
place in the market – which in conditions of competition lowers their
price – and less workers to exploit in proportion. That’s to say, what
had been presented at first as a solution, the application of technology
to increase productivity, rapidly becomes the problem. This logical
movement is permanent and structural in capitalism.
The development of medicine and of pharmacology follows this same
motion. Capitalism cannot avoid, since its earliest beginnings,
sickening its population. It can only try to develop the medical and
pharmaceutical knowledge to control the pathologies that it itself
facilitates.
Nevertheless, in the measure in which the conditions that make us sick
don’t disappear, but even increase with the ever more pronounced crisis
of this system, the role of medicine is inverted and can function as a
fuel for sickness. The use of antibiotics, not only in the human
species, but also in livestock, fosters the resistance of the bacterias
and encourages the appearance of strains increasingly more difficult to
combat. Something similar occurs with the vaccines for virus. On one
hand, they often arrive late and insufficiently in the emergence of an
epidemic, given that the mercantile logic itself, the patents, the
industrial secrets and the negotiation of the the pharmaceutical
companies with the state delay their quick application to the infected
population. On the other hand, natural selection will cause the virus to
be each time more prepared to overcome these barriers, favoring the
appearance of new strains for which the vaccines are still unknown. The
problem, therefore, is not in the development of medical and
pharmacological knowledge, but in that while the social relations which
permanently produce the virus and facilitate its rapid expansion
continue to be maintained, this knowledge will only encourage the
appearance of increasingly more contagious and virulent strains.
In the same way that the technological and medical development conceal a
strong contradiction in capitalist social relations, so it occurs also
with the contradiction between the national and international plane of
capital itself.
Capitalism is already born with a certain global character. During the
Late Middle Ages, long distance networks of commerce were developed
which, added to the new pulse of the conquest of the American continent,
allowed the accumulation of an enormous mass of mercantile and usury
capital. This would serve as a trampoline for the new social relations
that were emerging with the proletarization of the peasantry and the
imposition of wage labor in Europe. The black plague that devastated the
European continent in the 16^(th) century was precisely a fruit of this
globalization of commerce, proceeding initially from the Italian
merchants coming from China. Logically, the immune systems of the
different populations in that era were less prepared to bear sicknesses
from other regions, and the tightening of ties at a global level
facilitated a spreading of epidemics as grand as the networks of
commerce were wide. A good example of that were the epidemics that the
colonists would bring which would finish off the majority of the
indigenous population in large zones of America.
However, these global networks of commerce would serve, in a paradoxical
and contradictory manner, to encourage the formation of national
bourgeoisies. This formation went hand in hand with the efforts over
many centuries to homogenize a single national market, a single state,
and with them two centuries in which one war after another would occur
without end, until the point where there were hardly any years of peace
in Europe during the 16^(th) and 17^(th) century. The global character
of capital is inseparable from the historical emergence of the nation,
and with it, from imperialism between nations.
This two-fold in permanent contradiction, the strengthening of the ties
at a global level with the national rootedness of capitalism, is
expressed in all of its force in the current coronavirus situation. On
one hand, globalization permits the pathogens of different origins to
migrate from the wildest isolated reservoirs to population centers all
over the world. Therefore, for example, the virus Zika was detected in
1947 in the Ugandan forest where it received its name, but it wasn’t
until the development of the global agricultural market, with Uganda as
one of its links, that Zika could arrive to the north of Brazil in 2015,
helped along without a doubt by the monoculture production of soy,
cotton, and corn in the region. A virus, with certainty, that climate
change – another consequence of capitalist social relations – is helping
to spread: the carrier mosquito of Zika and of dengue – the tiger
mosquito in its two variants, the Aedes aegypti and the Aedes albopictus
– has arrived to zones like Spain due to global warming. Furthermore,
the internationalization of capitalist relations is exponential. Since
the epidemic of the other coronavirus, SARS-CoV, between 2002 and 2003
in China and Southeast Asia, the quantity of flights coming out of these
regions has multiplied by ten.
Hence, capitalism promotes the appearance of new pathogens that its
international character extends rapidly. And nevertheless it is
incapable of managing them. In the imperialist dispute between the major
powers there’s no space for the international coordination that
increasingly more global social relations require, and even less, the
coordination that this pandemic already requires. The inherently
national character of capital, as globalized as you like, entails that
the national interests in the context of the imperialist struggle
prevail against every kind of international consideration for the
control of the virus. If China, Italy, or Spain delayed the taking of
measures until the last moment, as France, Germany, or the United States
would later do, it’s precisely because the measures necessary to contain
the pandemic consisted in the quarantine of the infected and, having
arrived at a certain level of contagion, in the partial paralyzation of
the production and distribution of commodities. In a context in which
the economic crisis that is now breaking out had been gestating for two
years, in an ll-out trade war between China and the United States and
during the course of an industrial recession, this stoppage could not be
permitted. The logical decision of capital’s functionaries was then to
sacrifice the health and a number of lives among the variable capital –
human beings, proletarians – in order to stick it out and maintain
competitiveness in the global market. That it has been revealed to be
not only ineffective but even counterproductive doesn’t exempt the logic
of this decision: from a national bourgeoisie, sensitive only to the ups
and downs of its own GDP, you can’t ask for international philanthropy.
That must be left to the discussions of the UN.
And this thing is that the grand contradiction which the coronavirus has
pointed out is this: that of the GDP, that of the wealth based on
fictitious capital, that of a recession constantly postponed on the
basis of liquidity injections without any material foundation in the
present.
The coronavirus has disrobed the king, and has shown that in reality we
never exited from the crisis of 2008. The minimal growth, the posterior
stagnancy and the industrial recension of the last ten years have been
no more than the barely noticeable response of a body in coma, a body
that has only survived thanks to the permanent emission of fictitious
capital. As we explained earlier, capitalism is based on the
exploitation of abstract labor, without which it cannot obtain profits,
and nevertheless by its own dynamic it is pushed to expel labor from
production in an exponential fashion. This extremely strong
contradiction, this structural contradiction that reaches its most
fundamental categories, cannot be overcome but by aggravating it for
later by means of credit, that is to say, the recourse to the
expectation of future profits in order to continue feeding the machine
in the present. The businesses of the “real economy” have no other way
of surviving than to permanently flee further on, to obtain credits and
to keep the shares in the stock market high.
The coronavirus is not the crisis. It is simply the detonator for a
structural contradiction that has come to express itself since decades
ago. The solution that the central banks of the major powers gave for
the crisis of 2008 was to continue to flee and to use the only
instruments that the bourgeoisie currently has to face the putrefaction
of its own relations of production: massive injections of liquidity,
meaning, cheap credit on the basis of the emission of fictitious
capital. This instrument, as is natural, hardly served to maintain the
bubble, given that in the face of the absence of a real profitability
the companies utilized that liquidity to reacquire their own stocks and
continue to put themselves in debt. As such, today the debt in relation
to the global GDP has risen by almost a third since 2008. The
coronavirus has simply been the gust of wind that has toppled the house
of cards.
Contrary to what social-democracy proclaims, according to which we would
find ourselves in this situation because neoliberalism has give a free
pass to the greed of the speculators on Wall Street, the emission of
fictitious capital – that is to say, of credits that are based on some
future gains which will never come about – is the necessary organ of
artificial respiration for this system based on work. A system that,
nevertheless, through the development of an extremely high level of
productivity, has increasingly less need for work to produce wealth. As
we have explained earlier, capitalism develops a social production that
collides directly with the private property on which mercantile exchange
is based. We have never been a species as much as we are now. We have
never been so globally linked. Humanity has never recognized itself as
such, has needed to as much at a global level, independently from
languages, cultures and national barriers. And nevertheless capitalism,
which has constructed the global character of our human relations, can
only confront it by affirming the nation and the commodity and denying
our humanity, can only face the constitution of our human community by
means of its logic of destruction: the extinction of the species.
A week before this text would be written, in Spain they decreed a state
of emergency, the quarantine and the isolation of us all, save for if
it’s to sell our labor power. Similar measures were taken in China and
Italy, and they have already taken at the moment in France. Alone, in
our homes, at a distance of one meter between every person that we meet
in the street, the very reality of the capitalist society is made
present: we can only relate with others as commodities, not as people.
Perhaps the image that best expresses this are the photographs and the
videos that have circulated on the social networks at the beginning of
the isolation: thousands of people crowded into train and metro
carriages on route to work, while the parks and the public streets are
closed off to anyone that can’t present a good excuse to the police
patrols. We are labor power, not people. The state has that very clear.
In this context, we have seen a false dichotomy appear based on the two
poles of the capitalist society: the State and the individual. First of
all was the individual, the social molecule of capital: the first voices
that made themselves heard facing the alert of the contagion were those
of every man for himself, those of let the old die and to each their
own, those of blaming each other for coughing, for fleeing, for working,
for not doing so. The first reaction was the spontaneous ideology of
this society: you can’t ask a society that is constructed on isolated
individuals to not behave as such. On the basis of this and of the
social chaos that was being produced, there was a general relief at the
appearance of the State. State of emergency, militarization of the
streets, control of the routes of communication and of transport except
for what is fundamental: the circulation of commodities, especially
including the commodity labor force. In the face of the incapacity to
organize ourselves collectively against the catastrophe, the State is
revealed as the tool of social administration.
And it doesn’t cease to be that. An atomized society needs a State to
organize it. But it does so by reproducing the very causes of our
atomization: those of profit against life, those of capital against the
needs of the species. The models of the Imperial College of London
predict 250,000 deaths in the United Kingdom and up to 1.2 million in
the United States. The predictions on a global level, accounting for the
contagion in the countries which are less developed and with a much more
precarious medical infrastructure, will arrive foreseeably to many
millions of people. The coronavirus epidemic, nevertheless, could have
been stopped much sooner. The States that have been the center of the
pandemic have acted in the way they had to: placing business profits
above all during at least a few weeks more, at the cost of millions of
lives. In another kind of society, in a society ruled by the necessities
of the species, the quarantine measures taken at their due time could
have been punctual, localized, and rapidly superceded. But it is not so
in a society like this.
The coronavirus is expressing with all of its brutality the
contradictions of a moribund system. Out of everything that we have
tried to describe here, this is the most essential: that of capital
against life. If capitalism is rotting because of its incapacity to
confront its own contradictions, only us as a class, as an international
community, as a species, can put an end to it. It’s not a cultural
issue, of consciousness, but of a pure material necessity that pushes us
collectively to struggle for life, for our life in common, against
capital.
And the moment to do so, even if it’s just the beginning, has already
begun. Many of us are already in quarantine, but we are not isolated,
nor alone. We are preparing. Like the comrades that have risen up in
Italy and in China, like those that have been on their feet for some
time already in Iran, Chile or Hong Kong, we are going towards life.
Capitalism is dying, but only as an international class, as a species,
as a human community, can we bury it. The coronavirus epidemic has
toppled the house of cards, has disrobed the king, but only we can
reduce it to ashes.
[1] The substitution of fossil fuels for renewable energy doesn’t
resolve the problem, all to the contrary: the renewables require much
wider surfaces in order to produce inferior levels of energy.