The only way out of the coronavirus crisis is a new economics that doesn't choose between health and wealth

From today’s standpoint, as we enter July, the period of the first outbreak of coronavirus panic, some three months ago, now appears almost in an nostalgic light: true, we were in full lockdown back then, but we expected the quarantine to last for a month or two and that life would then return to some kind of normal. Even Anthony Fauci told Americans they should look forward to enjoying their summer vacations. We perceived quarantine as a limited time of exception, almost a welcome standstill in our too busy lives when we were able to afford some peace with our families, read books and listen to music, enjoy cooking our meals, knowing that it would be over soon.

Now we are in what some call the “whack-a-mole” stage. Clusters of contagion are constantly popping up here and there in every nation – not to mention countries like the US, Brazil and India, where they are exploding. Only now we are forced to accept that we are entering a new era when we will have to learn to live with this. The situation is open; there is no clear prospect of what direction the epidemics will take – or, as the German virologist Hendrik Streeck succinctly put it, “no second or third wave – we are in a permanent wave.”

We are still all too focused on Covid-19 statistics. Many of us are regularly checking the numbers of infected, dead and recovered on the Worldometer data service. This fascination by the numbers makes us forget the obvious fact that much more persons are dying every day from cancer, heart attacks, pollution, hunger, armed conflicts and domestic violence. If we the Covid-19 virus fully under control, the main cause of our troubles will disappear, but human life will remain full of miseries. In some sense, human life is a misery which ends in a painful way, often with meaningless suffering.

Furthermore, the link between the Covid-19 pandemic and our ecological predicament is getting clearer and clearer. We may yet get Covid-19 under control, but global warming will demand much more radical measures. Greta Thunberg was right when she recently pointed out that “the climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today’s political and economic systems.” The same global mobilisation that we were able to enact apropos Covid-19 is even more needed with global warming and pollution where millions die every year. Yet we continue not to act in this direction. Or, as Thunberg put it in a wonderful reversal of the title of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale: “The emperors are naked. Every single one. It turns out our whole society is just one big nudist party.”

Let’s just mention a case of global warming which should convince even the greatest sceptics: the prolonged heatwave in Siberia which caused wildfires, a huge oil spill and a plague of tree-eating moths. Russian towns in the Arctic circle recorded temperatures up to 30 degrees in early June, with thawing permafrost blamed for diesel fuel spill in Siberia, leading Russian president Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency. Just think about all the long-frozen bacteria and viruses waiting to be reactivated by the thawing of permafrost.

The same goes for the link between Covid-19 and the explosion of anti-racism protests. The only true answer to the ongoing debate about “black lives matter” (and the chorus of those who ask why should not rather say “all lives matter”) is a wonderfully-brutal photo-montage that now circulates in the US. It depicts Stalin holding a poster in his hands with the inscription: “No lives matter.”

The moment of truth in this provocation is that there are things which matter more than bare life. Is this not also the ultimate message of the protests regarding police violence against black people? People of colour, and those who support them, are not demanding mere survival, they are demanding to be treated with dignity, as free citizens fully equal to white people – and for this they are ready to risk a lot, including their lives. That’s why they gather to protest even if collective participation raises the risk of Covid-19 infection.

Does this mean that Giorgio Agamben was right when he rejected the state-imposed lockdowns and self-isolation as something that implies our reduction to bare life? When we follow this order, do we attest that we are ready to renounce what makes our lives worth living for the chance of bare survival? Do we have to risk our lives (by way of exposing ourselves to possible infection) in order to remain fully human?

The problem with this stance is that is that, today, the main proponents of abolishing lockdowns are to be found in the populist new right. Its members see in all similar restrictive measures, from lockdowns to obligatory wearing of masks, the humiliation of our freedom and dignity. To this claim, we should reply by raising the key question: what does abolishing lockdowns and isolation effectively amount to for ordinary workers? It means that, in order to survive, they have to go out into the unsafe world and risk contamination.

This brings us to a key point: the contradictory way the Covid-19 pandemic has affected our economy. On the one hand, it has forced authorities to do things which sometimes almost point towards communism – providing a form of Universal Basic Income, healthcare for all, and so on. However, this unexpected opening for such collective ideas is just one side of the medal. Simultaneously, the opposite process is going on with violence – states saving big companies, and big companies amassing further wealth. The contours of corona capitalism are gradually emerging, and with it new forms of class struggle.

I quote Joshua Simoniv: “US cities have seen the largest rent strike in decades, at least 150 worker strikes and walkouts (most notably by Amazon warehouse workers), and hunger strikes in refugee detention facilities. At the same time, research shows that US billionaires increased their collective wealth by $282bn in just 23 days during the initial weeks of the coronavirus lockdown. We are forced to recognise the immense inequalities proliferating with the pandemic and lockdown, with people losing their jobs, with gigantic bailouts that overwhelmingly benefit the biggest corporations and the already extremely wealthy, and with the ways those deemed essential workers are forced to keep working.”

The main form of the new exploitation which characterises work in the conditions of pandemic is “the shifting of costs to workers. From people having no sick leave, to teachers using their broadband and laptops at home to teach, households are performing all reproductive and productive labour.” In these conditions, it is no longer primarily the capitalist who owns the means of production and hires workers to deal with them. In fact, ”the worker brings with her the means of production. Directly, this happens with the Amazon delivery person or Uber driver bringing to work their own car, filled up with gasoline, with insurance and driver’s license all taken care of.”

Simoniv cleverly evokes the poster held by Sarah Mason at an anti-lockdown protest: “Social Distancing equals Communism.” What we get when distancing is abolished is this “freedom” of workers who own their means of production, running around on errands for the company and risking infection.

The paradox is here that both main versions of corona economy – working at home in lockdown, and delivering things like food or packages out of lockdown – are similarly appropriated by the capital and imply extra exploitation.

So our reply to Sarah Mason should be: yes, and that’s why we need social distancing – but what we need even more is a new economic order which will allow us to avoid the debilitating choice between economic revival and saving lives.