1. Where We Are Now
1. In Spring 2020, the world was plunged into a new kind of crisis. This crisis necessitated a decision. The capacity of COVID-19 to inflict mass death, it quickly became clear, rendered comparison to SARs—or worse, the common flu—disingenuous. If nothing was done, millions would die unnecessarily. Yet while the risks of inaction were high, so too were the risks of action. What if pervasive economic shutdown were to founder an already fragile liberal order? And what if it were to prove to be a mere palliative, that would license economic erasure as an emergency response to a state of emergency that may never end?
2. In response to the pandemic, the political class cleaved into two camps. On one side were neoliberal centrists such as Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, who sought to temporarily implement emergency measures so as to expedite a return to normal capitalist relations. On the other were far right populists like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, for whom death is the natural cost to be paid for the unbroken reproduction of capital.
3. Conspicuously absent in most political discourse has been any serious discussion about why COVID-19 had such catastrophic effects. Years of underfunding of health services meant that few jurisdictions had the medical resources on hand to reckon with it. This problem was compounded by the priorities set by profit-making pharmaceutical companies, virtually all of whom had eschewed investing in research in infectious diseases due to the way these disproportionately affect poorer countries. Economically, the fact that contemporary capitalist economies are 70-80% driven by consumerism—a model that, furthermore, requires that turnover times be reduced to close to zero—rendered the repercussions of COVID-19 far more dire than they might have been otherwise. That the workers in these same economies have—in most cases—experienced a relative decline in real wages meant that many of them are unable to endure the burden of even short-term unemployment, having been forced to live paycheck to paycheck.
4. Under these circumstances, one could justly paraphrase Horkheimer—that whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should remain silent about the pandemic. But this is exactly what politicians and pundits have done. “We are at war,” we are constantly told, mantra-like. What no one will advance, let alone pursue, is a long-term strategy for winning a war against a virus that’s proliferation revealed in dramatic fashion the inadequacies of our regnant neoliberal capitalism. Nor how—if COVID-19 is a consequence of climate change, which seems plausible—we can mobilize our resources so as to combat its root cause. For to engage in such ambitious projects would require the remaking of the status quo, and the shunting to the side of much of the existing ruling class. Confronted by the capitulation of large swathes of the world in the face of the ascendant Axis powers, such drastic steps were taken in the Second World War. In America as elsewhere, the result was similar: the ratcheting up of public spending, the legitimation of redistributionist schemas, the paying off of the working class with a benefits package that has taken decades to claw back.
5. The sweeping destruction wrought by COVID, then, necessitates equally sweeping changes. Given the pharmaceutical industry’s relentless focus on short-term returns, now would be an opportune time for its nationalization. Just as it would be an opportune time to legislate a universal basic income, and to pursue serious actions against climate change. Such actions require the intervention of the state—as well as the willingness of national governments to work in concert with one another. But what our current political class has shown us since the outbreak of the pandemic is that, if they’re willing to do anything at all, it can only consist of piecemeal provisions. They will not abolish rentiers; they will impose a short-term amnesty on rents, to be repaid by the increasingly jobless poor at time of collection. They will not socialize big tech firms that have profited from the pandemic; they will litigate to break them up, swapping out monopoly for oligopoly. They will not build hospitals, or expand medical coverage, they will install understaffed testing pop-ups. The question that thus confronts us is how to bring about a reconstitution of the role of the state.
2. The Schism Over the State
6. Faced with this challenge, the left has mostly found new and unique ways to sink from it. Namely, by converting the question of how the state can be transformed into a referendum on the existing state. For those whose answer to the existing state is an emphatic “yes,” all that is required is to make use of parliamentary structures to pilot it—to parachute a hardened socialist into a petit-bourgeois political party, and voilà. For those whose answer to it is a defiant “no,” the best we can hope for is to safeguard our freedoms pending a messianic rupture that will render obsolete the use of sovereign power. Uniting both of these is the fear that a revolutionary politics of immediacy will necessarily terminate in “totalitarianism.”
7. The first tendency is exemplified by the “authentic” left movements that coalesced around figures such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Amidst the ongoing economic malaise that’s prevailed since 2007-08, these movements succeeded in ensconcing themselves in the parliamentary wing of various state apparatuses. Yet if their hoped-for political breakthrough never arrived, this is for a reason. Since the neoliberal revolution of the late seventies, establishment left parties have largely sworn off the advocacy of redistributive politics. This owed to—among other factors—the weakening of organized labour, as well as to the crisis of faith in Keynesian economics. The result was the transformation of these into vessels of what Thomas Piketty has termed the “Brahmin left”: essentially parties of educated, white collar middle classes.
8. The “authentic” left movements which flourished in this period set out to change this. Frustration with deepening wealth inequality and widespread unemployment, they reasoned, would spur the rise of a progressive populism, capable of re-centering economic concerns which had long since been downgraded in favour of cultural ones. Their decisive error was attempting to pursue this strategy deliberatively. To permit deliberation once one controls state power is often a salutary strategy—the ability of critics of the government to moan and complain often being a useful pressure valve for relieving anger with ruling forces. But to imagine that revolutionary change can be brought about through these means is to misunderstand their very purpose. If Roosevelt set out to implement the New Deal in the 1930s, this was not because of parliamentary opposition, but because the working class themselves had induced a near-revolutionary state with revolts and protests. Similarly, if communist parties played an influential if subordinate role in the post-war political systems of nations like Italy and France, this was because of the contribution of Italian and French communists to the armed defeat of fascism.
9. None of this is to say that parliamentary advocacy is not useful. But what the last few years have shown is that, absent the threat of force, such advocacy will be relentlessly recuperated by the establishment. Had the “authentic” left sought to align itself with those alienated from the system, to use electoral politics as a catalyst for a larger social confrontation, this could’ve been averted. Instead, it took the path of least resistance, catering to vaguely “left” college-educated voters when it should’ve been channeling the frustrations of a larger, less privileged (and often non-voting) demographic base.
10. The result of this was not just the re-entry of identity politics through the backdoor of upper-income, urban organizations such as the DSA and Momentum. It was also a refusal to challenge the exploitative basis of Western economies. The parasitism of U.S. finance upon the developing world was rarely spoken of—that money is earmarked for the social programs of the future, so critical commentary should be confined to condemning “expensive wars.” And when economic reform was discussed, it was always discussed not in terms of public control of production but “taxation”—the need, now screen-printed on overpriced t-shirts, to “tax the rich.” Yet is there not a connection between these two positions? To put an end to the dependency of Western economies on the Third World—the payment of workers in Shenzhen wages far below what they’d receive stateside for the production of iPhones—means re-awakening the industrial capacity of the West. A return to Fordism, of course, is not tenable. What is tenable is extensive investment in high-tech manufacturing, such as smart factories capable of greatly elevating labour productivity. This will not happen by itself. It requires that the state play an active role in forging a new industrial policy, of which public ownership must be an essential feature. In this sense the authentic left’s silence on imperialism—far from aiding its electability—was the flipside of its inability to channel the blue-collar nostalgia so central to the allure of the populist right.
11. What defined the authentic left was a fatal equivocation of content and form, in which the form of electioneering was mistaken for the content of class struggle. And, eventually, the absurd spectre of Syriza reneging on its own bailout referendum, or Bernie Sanders stumping for Joe Biden after having twice been undone by the Democratic establishment.
12. There is an irony to all of this. For years the “authentic” left has expounded its commitment to non-violent electoralism to anyone who would listen. This failed to have the desired-for legitimating effect. What it did succeed in doing was adjoining the left to the establishment in a way that rendered it unable to capitalize on the wave of public anger provoked by the pandemic. Reduced to a powerless rump, all its representatives can do now is urge public compliance with general protocols: take your vaccine, take your hundred dollars, don’t blare your conundrum too loudly. The biggest beneficiary of their passivity to the existing state is, without doubt, the far right.
13. On the other side of the pro/anti-existing state divide are those who see in its efforts to manage COVID only untrammeled oppression. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben for instance has argued that the pandemic is a quintessential “state of exception”: a dramatic event seized upon by the state power to transcend the rule of law, ostensibly in the name of the public good. In this context it does not matter whether the pandemic is real or simulated, any more than it matters who started the Reichstag Fire. What matters is that—by smothering collective assembly, and reducing individuals to bare life in need of constant oversight—the state has found a solution to an existential crisis. That is, of how to renew sovereignty against the threat of its usurpation by international capital.
14. The universal opprobrium of the left literati hasn’t stopped Agamben from garnering support from progressives. He has been associated with the anti-vax German Demokratischer Widerstand (democratic resistance) movement, and one needn’t do more than cursorily scroll through Reddit to see that his sympathizers do not solely hail from the right. We should not be surprised by this. Over the past several decades, the disillusioning failure of “actually existing” socialisms, coupled with the decline of the welfare state, has caused state power to be widely seen through a cynical prism. The same can be said of scientific expertise, so captured by capital that it seems unable to contribute to any kind of emancipatory project. It is in this spirit that in Agamben’s work a malevolent sovereignty is treated as ahistorical and omnipresent—as pervading every discourse, and as functioning in much the same way in imperial Rome as in the present. But doesn’t this—as Moufawad-Paul has pointed out—elide the historically specific character of capitalist sovereignty, thereby substantiating the far-right’s anti-statist claims? And how then should we think of anti-capitalist states?
15. To conceive of the state as necessarily a monstrous Leviathan, which devours those it’s meant to protect, might’ve been appropriate for the climate of 9/11. Less clear is how useful it is in thinking through the pandemic. This incompatibility can be discerned in Agamben’s own writings. On one hand, the pandemic appears for him as the consummation of the darkest designs of capital—of a world already foreordained by the diffusion of digital technology, in which workers will become automatons squirreled away in their homes. On the other, it appears as a fettering of capital—as an opportunity for sovereign states to re-assert the prerogatives denied to them by our dominant economic system. That states have, since the fall of the USSR or earlier, been so unambiguously in the thrall of capitalism means that this hybrid vision is not wholly devoid of reason (Agamben is fond of citing China as an example of the coming authoritarian capitalism). But what it fails to recognize is that it is not in the suspension of individual freedoms that states have revealed their complicity with capitalism. Rather, it is in their failure to transmute this suspension into a radical remaking of the state.
16. What we’re left with is a paradox. The state wants a short-term, commissarial dictatorship: to get people back to work, to get them back outside, for things to return to normal—save perhaps for the scrubbing of a few hard-earned freedoms. But if COVID-19 has shown us anything, it’s that a return to capitalist normalcy will not insulate us from the crises it’s created. Any more than it will insulate us from capitalist normalcy itself.
17. For Agamben, the ideal model of resistance is Bartleby the Scrivener—he who, through the simple utterance of the words “I would prefer not to,” remains obstinately in a state of pure indecision. But we should remember what happened to Bartleby: he died. And this story would be far less endearing if it wasn’t working Bartleby was de facto refusing, but saving the lives of others.
3. What We Must Do
18. The first important thinker for the radical remaking of the state is Carl Schmitt. Why turn to Carl Schmitt, the notorious ‘Crown Jurist’ of the Third Reich, to furnish us with the recipe for an emancipatory project? Especially considering his importance for Agamben? What Schmitt shows us is that, beneath every stable constitutional order, there exists a sovereign power capable of employing extra-juridical force in order to preserve it. This may seem a trivial point in an era in which cell phone videos are shared nonstop of police murdering civilians. But what the left affirms with its slogans, it denies with its tactics. For years a consensualist liberal fantasy has gripped it, according to which all we need to do to transform the state is to fill in our ballots—and to peacefully shake our placards. Not only are these strategies unimaginative. When subjected to the criterion of history, they are demonstrably wrong.
19. It is not without irony that, for all the talk of need for non-violence today, the first modern democracies were founded in it. In the United States this took the form of a brief, decisive war, which ended in the expulsion of royalists in favour of a slaveowners’ republic. In France it took the form of rolling waves of revolt, and the enlistment of the dregs of the Third Estate to violently quell the forces of reaction before their authority was rapidly rescinded. And in Haiti it took the form of the widespread slaughter of slaveholders, followed by the crippling imposition of colonial reparations. To speak of “democracy,” though, is only to tell half the story. When protesters in contemporary capitalist societies make their demands, they often do so in the name of the “middle class.” A “healthy” middle class, we are told, is the sine qua non of a functioning civil society. Yet where would our middle class be without the great proletarian revolutions of the twentieth century? If not for the threat of proletarian dictatorship announced by the Russian Revolution, the United States would never have pivoted towards dirigisme, supplying a model that soon became de rigueur elsewhere. Nor would it have elected to impose a new regime of civil rights—a move explicitly intended to curb communist dissent.
20. We cannot expect the revolution will come tomorrow—if for no other reason than one never expects revolution. COVID has simply created an opportunity. Before it, the unwillingness of states to redistribute the profits won by pervasive automation, the depreciations caused by this, had already created an unstable climate. Now, with millions having lost their faith in the system as surely as they’ve lost their jobs and homes, we can begin to see a pathway to the conquest of state power. To achieve this will require that we have a strategy.
21. First, we must show the real state of exception. Those politicians who support regulations to stave off the pandemic have so far done an enviable job presenting themselves as saviours of the public. Elided by this is that successive shutdowns have been instrumentalized for other, more insidious ends. Since Spring 2020, the working class has shed trillions of dollars. Home foreclosures have reached record highs, and the elimination of large numbers of jobs has depleted the savings of workers who were struggling even before the outbreak. The disproportionate losers of this have been members of groups precariously integrated into the capitalist economy: single mothers, young people, racial minorities—and especially, those who belong to more than one of these groups. But the pandemic has not been bad for all. Large firms, particularly those associated with big tech, have profited enormously from the rapid jettisoning of physical retail. Under these conditions one would expect a government interested in protecting the welfare of its citizenry to move to counteract this inequality (and indeed, this explains why China has dropped Jack Ma into the void, as well as kick-started a public-sector buying spree of private technology firms). Instead many have gone in the opposite direction, favouring financial asset purchases to buoy the stock market over the extension of assistance to those in need. Against the image of the pandemic as a protectorate of the people at large, its discriminate character must be relentlessly disseminated and exposed.
22. Second, we must create a state of civil war. Schmitt’s failure, the reason he eventually succumbed to Nazism, was because he was unable to countenance the coming proletarian violence in Europe. What he hoped for was the containment of national war from civil war: the organized exchange of violences and assets by sovereign-states. That he ended up throwing himself behind the regime which instigated the most violent war in human history showed there can be no turning back: bourgeois “civility” will not suffice to reverse the gains of the proletariat. And if the twentieth century was the most gruesome in history this is inextricable from the fact it was the most economically equal (at least so far as recorded history goes). Still, one must acknowledge that there is a difference. In the twentieth century, the dominant model of struggle in industrialized nations emanated out of the factory—out of pickets and strike lines, and the ability of the working class to pull the emergency brake on capital when needed. The decline of industry in these same nations has led to considerable anxiety about what the left should do next—are tech workers the new proletariat? Left-wing terrorists? Drag queens? Fortunately the last few years has seen the emergence of a powerful new model of protest, based on the primacy of the street. While this model has manifested itself in various countries, its archetypal expression is that of the gilets jaunes, who for a few weeks ran roughshod over French civil authorities. To the point where, for a passing moment, even the fate of the Élysée seemed uncertain.
23. It goes without saying that these new movements are extremely ideologically amorphous. Comprising far-right and far-left elements, as well as the generically discontented, the gilets jaunes were unable to translate their activism into tangible demands. This brings us to our third point—the need for a party. Not a party that recoils in the face of the demands of the establishment. Rather a party that, surveying the progress of this storm, places itself at the centre of it, transforming vague ‘anti-political’ platitudes into a program for socialist governance. A party, in other words, prepared for the confrontation with—and assumption of—sovereign power. As Lenin—the other paradigmatic thinker of our present moment—writes in What Is To Be Done?:
It is often said that the working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily, provided, however, this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, provided it subordinates spontaneity to itself […] The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree.
Lenin’s claim that workers will not “spontaneously” gravitate towards socialism has often been criticized as elitist. For it is on this basis that he insists upon the indispensability of the intelligentsia, first responsible for introducing Marxism to Russia. Yet this works both ways. If the workers cannot transcend “spontaneism,” this is not because of their inherent limitations as a class. It is because intellectuals are too beholden to the status quo to seize upon the latent radicalism that resides within them, helping clarify and enunciate the sources of their frustration. Instead they obstruct it, demonizing positions which deviate from dominant class decorum. Can’t the same be said of our situation today? When the privileged mouthpieces of democratic socialism condemn the Capitol Hill attack for being an attack, rather than for its repulsive ideological content, they open up a rift between themselves and the radical energies they urgently need to repurpose. And when they deride a thinker like Adolph Reed for his supposed “class reductionism” and inadequate sensitivity to racial issues, they undermine the class politics capable of uniting workers across racial lines.
24. We are fortunate that the generalization of education over the past century has left us with no shortage of intellectuals. Indeed, it is no longer only the wealthy who can attend university—and so the class combinatory prescribed by Lenin is decidedly more fluid. We are likewise fortunate the flourishing of digital technology has engendered new and novel ways of organizing. But for each of these advantages we are confronted by new difficulties. Decades of Cold War propaganda has done much to erode the link between intellectuals and the working class. And decades of neoliberalism has done much to erode the working class. What we are left with is a sea of intellectuals, almost none of whom are capable of reaching the shores of the proletariat. Those who do must supply the guideline upon which a new party, and by extension a new kind of state, will be created.
25. And what if we should win? For our critics, the reconstitution of the state can mean nothing other than the reconstitution of class society. This is not untrue: as Lenin writes, “the state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.” But the onus is not on us to show how the abolition of classes can be achieved in the short-term by the conquest of sovereign power. It is on our critics to show how, absent such a conquest, they hope to pose any challenge at all to class society—and with it, the state. For both Agamben and Schmitt, sovereign power has no history: it stretches out endless into the past and future. While disagreeing with this, we acknowledge that sovereign power is too entrenched to say when the proletariat can pass through a pinhole into heaven. What we can say is that, to get beyond sovereignty, the state must address the economic conditions which create it.
26. These same critics will likely allege that we have rejected democracy—that all this talk of violence betrays a secret fascist impulse. But when did democracy become so easy? If what we call “democracy” exists, it is because of the willingness of those who believed in it to deplete and destroy those who stood for less. To reduce it to a formal mechanism is to cede it to the reformists, who have deprived us of the resources we need, or the far right—for whom if most people are racist, this is proof of the democratic nature of racism.
27. In truth we should say that democracy, like the goddess Hecate, has three faces. There is the democracy of the past—the ability to, as Benjamin states “awaken the dead.” There is the democracy of the present—the assertion of the voice of the demos in the current moment. And there is the democracy of the future—the creation of the conditions whereby the demos is expanded. It is the challenge of our time to assimilate to the demos not just the oppressed, but also the natural, microbiotic world they depend on. One could instead cling to the democracy of the present. But they might wish to heed the cold, clinical consul of Machiavelli: that if you wear someone else’s armor, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t fit.