a note on determinism and conflict
To a significant degree I think it was a foregone conclusion that covid and the social and political management of the pandemic was going to bring about lots of killing, disabling, suffering, and the best possible scenario in the relative short term was reducing rather than fully averting those harms. Covid zero wouldn’t have meant literally no covid harms ever, it would have meant maximum suppression of covid with some harms still occurring despite everyone’s best efforts. This can easily sound like fatalism, and there is a certain determinism to my thinking on the matter (though that determinism is correct in that capitalism is a deterministic social system), but there’s a huge span between pull out all the stops for covid zero and pull out all the stops for covid one hundred, which is closer to where we’ve ended up.
What I’m fumbling for here is that the systemic account identifies tensions and pressures and potential conflicts, and it identifies short to medium term ranges of possibility for controlling or mitigating how systemic tendencies play out, and it links that short to medium term to the need to oppose capitalism per se (because the best possible wins/the best possible scenarios under capitalism still involve awful harms). EP Thompson has a bit, he says it’s borrowed from Raymond Williams who I’ve not really read, where he says we should understand determination - in the sense of ‘the capitalist system determines that...’ - as the exerting of influences and pressures and the setting of limits. I think that’s right. Marxist analysis can pick out a range of possible outcomes in the system and speculate on their likelihood, and conflict of various kinds shapes which of those system-compatible outcomes happens.
Those conflicts include bottom up struggles of various types, which in turn tend to involve conflicts internally over political direction, as well as conflicts among actors higher up the food chain - conflicts between some capitalists and parts of the state, intraclass struggles among capitalists (capitalists’ normal mode of existence is a kind of simmering of conflict with each other, in the form of competition, though they tend to cooperate on other matters especially in response to serious bottom up struggle or efforts by parts of the state to change the concrete institutional organization of capitalist social relations), conflicts within the state and between states.
There’s also a degree to which each actor is pulled between incompatible priorities - I find contradiction-talk among Marxists confusing a lot of the time but it has a truth in that people and organizations often want things that they can’t have all of and so any decision involves downsides that aren’t especially acceptable. This relates to something I’ve tried to say before, that powerful actors including states are riding the tiger of capitalism’s troubling tendencies like the rest of us are (though of course they get far more of the good things in life than the rest of us and far less of the bad, and they exert significant control over how the rest of us try to ride the tiger and what the consequences are for the rest of us - a lot of what’s happened in the pandemic has been them tossing us into the tiger’s mouth and trying to rationalize and/or forget that). In doing so they’re pulled between priorities all of which are important to them and are always making the best of what is for them an imperfect situation. That’s not at all to sympathize with them, it’s to say that they’re an additional source of relative unpredictability as they move between different priorities - and do so in a shifting, tension- and conflict-laden social context.
I want to stress that while I think it was a foregone conclusion that there’d be a lot of harm - capitalism can’t stop producing social murder, it’s just part of what the system does - I do think there was a possibility of suppressing that maximally (and that possibility still exists though it’s not something that can be enacted instantly or quickly, unfortunately, lots of organization has to happen to make this possibility actual).
One more thought: I’ve written about how conflicts in response to social murder are in effect disorganized by and misdirected by the state. What I don’t know that I got into in enough detail is that there are processes that make the coalescing of struggle in the first place harder, less likely, and make them more likely to start off on the back foot, so to speak. All of the above are hard realities, it sucks so much, but I think they are the realities in the world and it’s important to understand them as part of opposing these realities - trying to fend off specific instances of social murder and claim resources for the victims thereof, and in the longer term, trying to contribute to ending capitalism. Getting back to the thing about determinism, what gets determined are harms and sites of potential conflict over harm, the point isn’t to give up because the scope of harm is predetermined and unchangeable, quite the opposite, the point is to try to understand and oppose the social production of harm in order in the short term in its concrete particulars and to tie that to anticapitalism in the long term.
(These are some thoughts I had while commuting to work that I wanted to type out so as not to lose them. This arose from me thinking about Marx talking about the production process as being both a labor process - making use values - and a valorization process - making value, facilitating the circuit of m-c-m'. They're not distinct processes, they're contradictory elements or tensions in the social reality of production in capitalism. The tension helps identify broadly, generally where and what sort of conflicts we can expect to see arise - and to explain actually existing conflicts that occur - with part of the stakes being which elements predominate to what degree and even more so being how these tensions eventuate in concrete practices and institutions.)