The state sides with the virus
Social murder and the state on my mind again today. I was in a conversation with some coworkers and stuff related to this came up and I had a thought that I feel like I’ve maybe articulated before but maybe not satisfactorily and I’m not sure where or when. (I feel like a joke could be made here but I don’t know any jokes, certainly not any satisfactory one!) Okay so here’s the thought.
As I’ve tried to say before, social murder as I think of is a concept that operates at some degree of abstraction - it’s a ‘generally speaking, the social pattern is...’ kind of concept. It’s point is less to name instances, like ‘this death here, that’s social murder’ so much as it works to articulate why instances are artifacts of the general social pattern and are connected, like ‘this death here and that death there are connected in that they’re rooted in the fundamental elements of capitalist society, that’s social murder.’ And as I’ve tried to say before, my sense is that where Engels uses the term and where Marx writes about similar phenomena, the instances are localized in time and space: deaths in lace factories in this city, deaths of overwork in pin factories in that city, etc. This makes the covid pandemic a bit of an atypical case, in that covid is less localized, more present everywhere. (I rush to add that this isn’t quite right, covid being everywhere isn’t exactly true, it’s much more present in some people’s lives than others, along lines of race, class, specific occupations, etc etc, which means it’s still localized, but there are many, many such locations and they share some degree of relatively clear connection insofar as they’re all covid and of the pandemic.)
I’m aware that’s all pedantic hairsplitting in one sense but it has important ramifications I think in that a local problem is bounded or boundable for state or policy purposes in a way that a problem present everywhere is less so. That is, if there are, say, a thousand deaths in the factories of one industry per year, there’s a set of state capacities to intervene to lower that number, while if there’s a thousand deaths in every factory in every industry every year, there’s a smaller set of state capacities to intervene: the second sort of problem is too big to stop, to speak. Marx talks about capital as a circuit ever repeated, where capitalists swap money for a set of commodities (he abbreviates that as M-C, money exchanged for commodities), commodities of two basic types. One is means of production abbreviated as C(mp), meaning both relatively durable factors of production like buildings, machines, and tools, and less durable raw materials (a factory making tables out of wood will take in a lot of lumber that gets transformed and basically used up in production). The other is labor power, ie, employees, abbreviated as C(lp). The capitalist sets the employees to work with the means of production in a production process over time, abbreviated by the letter P with ellipses on either side (...P...) to indicate time passing outside of market exchanges. The result of production is a new commodity, indicated by C with an apostrophe, pronounced “C prime,” which is then sold for a sum of money greater than the initial outlay, indicated with the letter M with an apostrophe, “M prime.” So the full abbreviation is M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’. That’s capital, understood as a process. (Hereafter I’m going to compress the abbreviation to M...M’ to save time.) Crucially, it’s an ongoing and expanding process: the final M’ gets reinvested, starting the circuit again and over time the initiating M increases, the amounts of commodities bought and produced increase, and the M’ that temporarily concludes the circuit increases as well.
Most productive enterprises in capitalist society do this (I say ‘most’ because there are some public enterprises that are different to a limited extent and there are some small private efforts that don’t do this - arguably the newspaper put out by a union local, say, funded by members’ dues is producing something but not exactly being a capitalist enterprise). Those enterprises take in commodities that are the commodity outputs of other such enterprises and other paces take in their outputs. That is to say, there’s never just one capital: capital is a society of multiple capitals interacting, to an important degree competitively, and because so much social production is conducted this way the competition among them serves to make the circuit M...M’ dominant in society, setting the tone so to speak, importantly conditioning - shaping, setting limits on - all of social life in important ways.
Capitalism isn’t just a society with those capital circuits happening, it’s also a society with a state, a specifically capitalist state. The state manages social relations in general, which means it manages the set of enterprises doing M...M’, trying to deal with the various harms and effects generated by those circuits and capitalist competition and so on, and the state doesn’t necessarily distinguish between harms and collective action by or on behalf of people harmed: a bunch of dead workers and a bunch of striking workers opposing the killing of their fellow workers can both appear to the state as a problem to resolve in whatever way is most ready to hand given state capacities and ideological outlook. Often workers’ collective action has to make itself into a specific sort of problem - one that indicates some underlying social issue that can be addressed by policy - to get a state response other than ‘shut the fuck up and go back to work’ or whatever.
In managing - a term I admit is vague here - that set of social relations, the state serves to discipline and influence both the working class and the capitalist class and it does so by acting on individual members or groups of members of each class. That is to say, the state doesn’t serve either class in any direct way, it serves the circuit from M...M’ as it exists in the form of the ensemble of productive enterprises. To put it another way, the state serves the general social relations, not any specific people or groups or arrangements, roughly speaking. That’s why the state will sometimes act against specific capitalists: it disciplines them into obeying the rules that make M...M’ possible. This can confuse people who think of the state as the tool of the capitalist class as a whole or as controlled by a specific sector of the capitalist class. (Those views aren’t entirely wrong insofar as they have some explanatory power in some contexts but they’re limited views.) I’ll add, in all of the above I’m paraphrasing the account of capitalism and the capitalist state in Tony Smith’s important book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism and to a lesser degree in Michael Heinrich’s important book on the three volumes of Marx’s Capital and broadly lots of things I’ve read by the late Simon Clarke.
What on earth does this have to do with social murder and covid being local-but-everywhere? Everything! (I talk about closely related stuff in my chapter on social murder in that edited collection on Marxism and the capitalist state that I’ve mentioned a few times; I learned a lot by writing that but it’s not my last word on anything.) If one factory is killing many workers every day, especially in a way that is causing problems for state personnel like bad publicity and militant collective action in response, it’s not a huge problem for the state to shut that factory down, it’s largely a matter of political will on the state’s part and that political will can be forced into existence by collective action from ordinary people. But if every factory is doing that, such that the only redress is to shut down every factory, well, shutting down every factory is so much larger of a problem but also in important respects a qualitatively different problem: shut down one factory making foodstuffs and other enterprises competing in that market might fill the gap sooner rather than later because there’s an opportunity to profit by doing so, and, not wanting to themselves get shut down, they might act differently. (To be clear I think this stuff rarely happens - occupational safety and health oversight is weak - but its not because it’s systemically impossible.) Shut down every factory making foodstuffs, however, that’s a different issue: there’s no more market then, and since the market predominates (ie, food’s generally a commodity, because goods and serves more often than not take the form of commodities in this society), then there are food shortages and further problems result. Furthermore, shut down only some factories and there’s a chance of accidentally shutting down a lot more because those capitalist enterprises hang together despite competing, because one enterprises outputs are another’s inputs and each is a source of money for others by supplying buyers: the ensemble of productive units is in one sense very resilient in that its grip on society is very, very strong and hard to shake, and the ensemble is in another sense very fragile, in that it’s subject to going into crises such that it uses its grip to pull a lot of people under the water. That’s all in part to say, from the perspective of the capitalist state, when a given social problem or harm-generating-process becomes pervasive enough and is rooted in the core dynamic of capital’s circuit M...M’ it becomes possible for the cure to be worse than the illness, so to speak, in the sense of being more disruptive.
That’s what I think is a big part of where we’re at with the covid pandemic. It’s gotten so pervasive that stopping it would mean so much social disruption that the state takes the disruption as a bigger problem than all the deaths.
If memory serves, the last time I was on the mighty Death Panel podcast we talked about some of this stuff, as concretized in a court case in California over workers’ compensation payments for workers and their families harmed by workplace infections. (I cringe at the memory insofar as I repeatedly said ‘respirator’ when I meant to say ‘ventilator’ meaning the machine that keeps you breathing in intensive case. That verbal tic aside, if this interests you, check out the episode, and in general Death Panel remains a rare voice right now, and I learned a ton from the conversation we had.) I mention this in part to note that powerful state actors and organized groups of capitalists recognize some of this stuff - the California Supreme Court all but said covid’s too big to fail now, and some employer associations filed briefs arguing to that effect.
This general issue is why the scale of the pandemic, the wonky pedantic stuff I started with - that covid’s everywhere in a sense, rather than localized like the deaths in the lace industry in one city - matters. That’s covid being in a sense too big to fail. In important respects, the state is on the virus’s side, and there’s a certain (evil, cruel, inhumane) rationality to the state siding with the virus.
This sounds pessimistic, like ‘can’t stop covid under capitalism’ so I want to be clear that I don’t mean that. I think we can still get a humane exit from the pandemic before the revolution comes (though it looks to be a while before the former - let alone the latter - happens, and in that period of time a lot of people will keep getting hurt and killed: after the exit from the pandemic and before the revolution we’ll still see the general pattern of social murder operating, such that instances of mass killing of working class people will continue). I’m just trying to draw out that efforts to create that humane exit are up against a pervasive logic, the working in tandem of the circuit M...M’ plus the tendency for the state to work as accomplice to instances of social murder at least when those instances become big enough. (I’ve previously talked about the state as accomplice to social murder insofar as the state keeps society capitalist in character and a society which is capitalist in character is a killing machine; thus since the state protects and repairs the death machine, the state helps kill. I stand by that, but that’s at a more general degree of abstraction, what I’m trying to get at here is why the state will act to rein in some capitalists and bring about mitigations in some specific instances of social murder while failing to do so in other, bigger ones. Of course political factors and collective action and so on, empirical matters, more concrete and at a lower level of abstraction are all really significant in all of that as well.) I think this ‘oh shit, the problem’s too big to fail now, the cure is worse than the disease’ is on factor in why the state has gone so hard on ideological obfuscation of the pandemic - minimizing, normalizing, etc. Another factor is that this obfuscation, and the patterned harm that the state attempts to so obfuscate, runs along tracks already laid down long ago, patterns of ablism, racism, etc, which are themselves hard to tear up without significant disruptions.
Again, all very abstract for better and for worse, I assume more for the worse. ("Here I stand, I can do no other.") There’s also an account to be given, as I sort of tried to say above, in more concrete terms, more blow-by-blow and detailed, this politician, that initiative, this consultant, that report, etc etc. That’s real and important stuff to be able to sift through and with real stakes at a human level - the perpetrators have names and faces as do their victims - and at the level of explanation: I haven’t checked in a while but last time I did the US and UK had far higher covid death rates per capita than a lot of countries Americans and Brits take as relative peers. (I'll add that while I think the US ruling class are some deeply evil motherfuckers, in important respects when it comes to covid it's arguable the UK ruling class are even more so because the NHS there provides an infrastructure that the US lacks and couldn't build overnight even if it wanted to. That the Tories let so many people die despite UK institutional capacity strikes me as arguably even more barbaric than the Trump and Biden administrations doing similar here where there is, I think, in the short term less institutional capacity - due, obviously, to long term policy decisions and priorities here.) Those differences are not explicable solely via accounts of capitalism in general.
The two degrees of abstraction - capital-theoretic, let’s call it, and journalistic-historianly, let’s call it - should work in tandem in mutually enriching ways, though easier said than done. Big go-to works for me that combine those two impressively, in my humble opinion, are Simon Clarke’s book Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State, and Jack Copley’s Governing Financialization. Copley in particular does really well at showing how individual concrete people populating the state are constrained by the social dominance of the circuit M...M’, they react to and navigate that constraint in the specific locales in which they live their lives, like all of us do. (‘The state’ is an abstraction, though a useful one for thinking with; the actual state is made up of concrete persons organized in specific ways - this county’s health commissioner, that city’s building inspector, etc etc - all of whom themselves have to navigate the world we’re in, as do individual capitalists and everyone else.) So it’s not that a general account of capitalism explains all the empirical particulars without empirical inquiry, it’s that the general account informs how we understand the results of empirical inquiry into the particulars and what it all means ultimately.
Much of this goes for climate change too. In important respects the state is on the side of planetary heating because heating the planet is a problem that’s too big to fail. I have friends - dear, smart ones who I respect tremendously - who think climate change can only be stopped with communist revolution. I disagree with that. I think harm to nonhuman nature and harm to people mediated by harm to nonhuman nature (ie, when a storm resulting from human-created-climate change kills people, that’s some people killing others through the medium of that storm), will not end until capitalism ends. But I also think specific sources of or forms of that harm, like planetary heating can be ended short of ending capitalism. Or at the very least, there’s nothing in the basic logic of the system that requires it to heat the planet: the system’s basic logic means it will generally harm humans and non-human nature, but that general pattern doesn’t have to take any specific form. With sufficient resistance, a non-planet-heating capitalism could be created (one which would be differently harmful, to be clear). It could well be that ‘sufficient resistance’ here is so large scale that it’d bring about a revolutionary situation, such that ending climate change is practically speaking basically the same as creating a communist revolution. I’m open to that view but it’s a different reason for linking climate change and revolution than an insistence that capitalism must always be planet-heating.
With both the climate and the pandemic, put very simply, the system and the state needs a big thump from massive collective action to knock it off the current specific track it’s on and onto a different track - that’s what I meant above by ‘humane exit’ though I’d also want to qualify the degree of humane-ness given that social murder as a general tendency will continue. This is probly obvious but 'thump' and 'different track' are a shorthand for collective action against the state's siding with the virus and planetary heating: the circuit M...M' pushes the state to protect harms by protecting the circuit. We need to collective raise the consequences of that to either get the state to act against the virus and the heating or shove the state to one side and rein in the infection- and heating-promoting tendencies of the current versions of capitalism we live in.
That’s what we’re up against I think, that’s the task, creating a movement, a network of efforts I guess, lots of little thumps adding up virtuously even if internally conflicting (I’m thinking again of Anton Pannekoek’s essay Party and Class about how the path forward from the present to a better future is one of not only conflicts between classes but conflicts within classes and among comrades, because this shit is hard and complicated and high stakes so of course we’re gonna disagree and often heatedly). Another way to say this: there’s no real fix to any of this via the normal institutional processes of the capitalist state and liberal democracy; those processes may be able to provide fixes for localized instances of social murder but when the problem hits too big to fail level, I suspect the only fixes can come from actions outside the bounds of those institutional processes. Getting there’s gonna be hard, take a while, and involve important costs, all of which is hard to really sit with.