immanence

The “reopening” of the world’s economies, locally and nationally, piece by piece, after the sudden and massive stoppage of the entire economic system, is raising important questions about whether the system can be put back into motion selectively and into a more viable direction than it had been moving beforehand.

Some observers have suggested, optimistically, that this pandemic has already heralded the end of the neoliberal era, or that at the very least it has provided death blows to a few of its key industries (such as oil and gas). Others disagree, and fear that the only reopening on the table is to an even more vicious “business as usual.”

Arundhati Roy’s call to arms, “Our Task is to Disable the Engine,” published last week on the web page of the Progressive International (an important new space for the growing movement of left-of-center eco-justice thinking), presents one of the more provocative and poignant volleys into this debate.

Arguing that “The coronavirus pandemic has brought the machine of capitalism to a grinding halt,” Roy warns:

The same formations of state power that have been indifferent to the suffering of poor people and have indeed worked towards enhancing that suffering are now having to address the fact that sickness among the poor is a veritable threat to the wealthy. As of now there is no firewall. But a firewall will appear soon. Perhaps in the shape of a vaccine. The powerful will elbow their way to the head of the spigot, and the old game will start up all over again—the survival of the richest.

Roy captures the global big picture exceedingly well (for such a short piece): the extractive capitalism that has got us to where we are, the rampant inequality that covers the planet both in its overarching sociopolitical contours and in nearly every single local and national instance, the “surveillance state” that seems to be enclosing us in the digital era, etc.

But in the monolithic grandness of the picture it presents, I’m not sure that it gives us any kind of concrete action plan to move on. She ends with a kind of call for revolutionary insurrection:

Pre-corona, if we were sleepwalking into the Surveillance State, now we are panic-running into the arms of a super-surveillance state in which we are being asked to give up everything—our privacy and our dignity, our independence—and allow ourselves to be controlled and micromanaged. Even after the lockdowns are lifted, unless we move fast, we will be incarcerated forever.

How do we disable this engine? That is our task.

And yet: if these constitute a single “machine,” how can they be taken on except by a global movement to put a stop to it all… in which case, we might wonder: Aren’t some people already trying to disable the engine of the “surveillance state”? (I’m thinking of the conspiracy theorists and the protesters in the streets of Lansing, Michigan, and other U.S. cities, resisting the lockdown so as to “get back to work” — but also potentially spreading the virus more widely.)

If there’s a benefit to seeing all these issues (inequality, capitalism, extractivism, racism, government surveillance, digital media) as interlocked, are there costs? Could we break “the machine” down into its parts so as to get a better handle on which of them need disabling, and which may need some retooling, redirecting, shifting gears, or something else?

Roy’s vantage point in India (as an educated, leftist intellectual in a complicated country) gives her insights we’re not as easily able to get in our own places. But how might the machine look different if you were in a hospital in NYC, or in an Indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest, or in New Zealand, Sweden, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria?

There are many concrete proposals being made right now about how to “reopen” a different kind of economy. And while many in my own fields (environmental humanists and other cultural scholars), like many people in general, are likely to prefer broad and general (if not revolutionary) calls-to-arms over wonkish discussions of policy nuances, I wonder if we need some of the insights from that wonkishness, too.

For instance, Dean Baker’s “Building an Economy that Works Again” focuses on some of the levers in the “machine” that could easily be tweaked or radically shifted if enough people knew about them. (His proposals focus on the U.S., but this country’s practices are still at the heart of the global “machine,” and changing them would have global implications.)

Baker starts from the insight that the kinds of vast inequalities decried by Roy are in no way “natural,” but are direct products of perverse incentive structures — patent and copyright monopolies and other “rigged” rules of the game — that were set in place as government policy with the (explicit or implicit) goal of allowing money to flow upward and be accumulated there.

Others have offered different suggestions. At the very least, we need a conversation around the options. Here are some possible starting points for such a conversation (this list may grow; suggestions welcome):

• D. Steven and A. Evans, “Planning for the world after the coronavirus pandemic” (World Politics Review)
• The Nation, How Not to Waste this Crisis
• Foreign Policy, How the World Will Look after the Coronavirus Pandemic
• Financial Times, Coronavirus: The World After the Pandemic (series)
• New York Times Editorial Board, “The America We Need“
• R. Baroud and R. Rubeo, “Will the coronavirus change the world? We must be very careful how we answer that question” (Common Dreams)
• A. Azmanova and J. K. Galbraith, “Disaster capitalism or the Green New Deal” (and see the other parts of the Progressive International’s “Blueprint“)
• Climate Interactive, “Green equitable recovery plans“
• D. A. Cohen and D. Kammen, “Climate crisis will deepen the pandemic: A green stimulus plan can tackle both” (The Guardian)
• Rob Hopkins, “What the Transition Movement can teach us about how to ‘bounce forward‘” (Resilience.org)
• Lola Seaton, “In the midst of an economic crisis, can degrowth provide an answer?” (Guardian)
• Daniel Herrigues, “You say you want a revolution?” (and other statements from the Strong Towns initiative)
• Anthony Flint (CityLab), “The coronavirus pandemic makes a case for megaregions“