One of the purposes of this newsletter is to work through some theoretical materials to excavate whatever in them might be useful to developing a more sophisticated structural account of the failures of the COVID pandemic and response in the United States. To this end, I finally started reading Tony Smith's Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, a favorite recommendation of Nate's.
I don't think anybody is on the edge of their seat waiting for it at this point, but J*stin's and my planned book about COVID is not happening anymore. One of the rocks we dashed ourselves on is: what is the appropriate level of analysis of the general social structure as concerns COVID and the COVID response? He wanted to focus much more on a retelling of the Merchants of Doubt story, adapted to the pandemic, chronicling the corruption of various governments and scientific advisory bodies, the distortions of the scientific process and its outputs imposed by well-funded private interests, and how these things, combined with a lack of organizing among scientists and the susceptibility of the scientific community to reasonable-sounding bad ideas (like those advanced in the Great Barrington Declaration), ultimately undermined the pandemic response.
I, on the other hand and controversially (?), wanted to focus on the structural overdetermination of the failures of the pandemic response. By which I mean: by digging into the history of public health, its roots in the industrial revolution and its inseparability from the "abstract social logic of capital," its individualizing and managerial ethos, and how the structures and imperatives of capitalism shape knowledge production as well as the politics of social coordination and emergency response, I wanted to show how little there was (by way of some kind of robust, democratic organization of science at the societal level) to undermine. I wanted to show how the pandemic response was rotted from the inside out rather than subverted by a handful of malevolent actors -- in my view, this more than anything else explains how the Republican and Democratic presidents of two different administrations overseeing the pandemic response converged on essentially the same set of policy actions, just glossed with different rhetorics (but not that different, at the end of the day), although both stories are obviously true and complementary at different levels of analysis and different levels of social organization.
In any case, an interesting and not altogether encouraging thought struck me reading through Chapter 3 of Smith's book. This chapter is devoted to placing liberal egalitarianism and Marxian theory in some kind of dialogue or juxtaposition with each other to illuminate the mutual misunderstandings in each approach's view of the other. As Smith writes (p. 64):
Liberal egalitarians agree with many of Marx's criticisms of the social practices of his day. In their view, however, Marx illicitly jumped from a justified rejection of particular practices in a particular historical period to an unqualified condemnation of capitalist market societies in general... Marx was wrong not to consider the possibility that the social relations and practices of capitalism could be modified in a way that would make his criticisms inapplicable.
Smith discusses wage labor as an illustrative example. In the Marxian view, wage laborers are not "free" because of the coercion imposed on them by the wage relation itself, the necessity of acquiring money for the means of subsistence (this line of thinking will be familiar to anybody who read Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion, or my earlier newsletter post about it). Liberal egalitarians, on the other hand, believe that with the right sorts of "background conditions" and regulations appropriately institutionalized, there is no inherent reason the wage relation must be coercive, exploitative, or oppressive.
This made me think back to the hazy days of "peak pandemic" when I and a handful of others were trying hard to put the idea of a "paid temporary shutdown" into circulation in the discourse. By arguing so fervidly for a paid shutdown, we in fact adopted a left-liberal or liberal egalitarian view -- we were advocating for some social programming to ease the exacerbation of COVID spread incidental to the wage relation and the things it makes people do. I still think this was the right thing to do (and left-liberal or not, it placed us so far on the left end of the spectrum of acceptable pandemic discourse that we fell off) -- it would have worked at what we wanted it to work at, which was reducing transmission and deaths from COVID. But at the same time, I think some self-reflection is in order here; in the general discursive environment around COVID advocacy, I have noticed a pronounced tendency to glom on to some "if onlys" from bygone days and rehash them endlessly as if they can rescue us from our current situation.
Calling for a paid shutdown at any point after the winter of 2020-2021 is, I'm afraid, a tactical dead-end. I did not allow myself to acknowledge this and jettison the demand for too long because I was so personally invested in its rightness. But it's ultimately inadequate, for the simple reason that it didn't work; I think it didn't work for many reasons, not least because the argument we were really having was with the social form of capitalism itself, not its instantiations in particular policies. What we were really concerned with was the tendency of the wage relation to accelerate social murder in the context of an infectious pandemic. And even though everyone's fucking tired of it by now and rolls their eyes at the mystical Hegelian convolutions of Marxian theory, I think that remains the primary concern today.