I’m pleased to finally have something positive to say about Coronavirus, the Tories, and our current political situation.
Only kidding! We’re f*cked.
Here’s why.
People ain’t realising sh*t. The idea that finally ‘the people’ would realise they have been had, and rise up against their capitalist oppressors, demand a universal basic income, a greener society, a decentred economy, and proper investment in public services – a sort of COVID Futurism – was always pretty far-fetched. Our societies, and their political ideologies, are very resilient. They’re designed to avoid change. Is global, untrammelled capitalism, which has long relied on ‘crisis capitalism’ to bolster itself, likely to survive 2 months of a half-arsed (in the UK and US) lockdown? Hmmm. Especially since at the moment the main thing on people’s minds is how soon they can get a perm and a Big Mac.
Those who dream of a return to a welfare state or a even universal basic income, by referring to the post-War welfare moment, are wrong. And I know you’re probably sick of hearing this, but here we go again. The parallels with the Second World War used on all sides of the debate are flawed in so many ways – that was nearly 6 years, with our infrastructure destroyed, and a society used to a militaristic lockdown with legal enforcement, and bombarded with daily ideology about a nation pulling together. Not just a few rainbows, and credulous dickheads banging pots in a doorway three months after voting for the privatisation of the NHS by a man who hid in a fridge. There was also the imminent threat of an alternative after WWII – countries going Red, with a massive military machine ready to support them, across the globe. That alternative made it pretty vital to the powerful that some change was made to avoid the alternative. Now, there is no alternative.
But haven’t people had to think about the importance of life and come together as one? Well, more on that shortly, but the sense of ‘all together now’ in the War was a) greatly exaggerated, and b) was hugely bolstered by mass deaths and visible destruction in WWII. There have been no bombs, no Blitz, no immediate and obvious daily threat to life. People who die, or even sicken, disappear into hospital, can’t even be visited. Or they avoid going to hospital and are never counted. The bodies are squirreled away without funerals. They may seem more like disappearances than deaths for those not intimately affected. When people come back from the brink, people wonder if this whole thing is a hoax. They didn’t do that when Fred Bagshaw had his legs blown off by a doodlebug. The sense of overwhelming change by an encounter with imminent mortality has not been forthcoming for most.
3. Things can change back SO easily. After WWII, women whose lives had changed utterly – working in factories, being the main breadwinner, joining the army, doing all sorts of jobs unimaginable before – thought their arguments had been won. Nope. Back in the kitchen with you. Massive ideological backlash, desperate to re-centre society on its previous models. Never underestimate how temporary social change can be.
4. The NHS mythology has largely worked. Even NHS doctors are getting f*cked off with it now, but nobody is listening. The NHS is already being further privatised. The switcheroo of clapping for pay, charitable donations and gratitude, in place of investment or PPE, has worked very well indeed. Congratulations to Dominic Cummings on that. Captain Tom and his cheerleaders at the Express and Mail have made the NHS a charity. The myth of the NHS has come to stand in place of the actual NHS.
What’s more, anything is now possible, because the Tories have realised what Fox News and the New Right have – that you can do anything as long as you say certain words. We are more in a post-truth world than ever before. The use of myth to replace reality has been discovered, again, as a winning strategy by the most immoral people who have ever ‘led’ us.
5. Democracy has been asleep, if not suspended. All of this is made easier by the fact that over the last two months, we have had no opposition, no democratic accountability, and news which has focused entirely on panic and drama rather than politics. I can hardly begin to think about all the horrific things we are going to find out the Government has done, over the next year or so. Contracts given to cronies, and Public Health functions destroyed deliberately by the Tories in 2010 being replaced by SERCO, will be the least of our worries. Remember that in the background there are silent preparations for Brexit happening, with legislative horrors being allowed to fly under the radar. And they have deliberately – yes, come on, deliberately – manoeuvred us into an now probably unavoidable Brexit crash out.
Furthermore, the terrifying thing is that this Government has been so laughably incompetent (literally going around spreading the virus by shaking hands in a hospital. You could not make this shit up). And indeed, every bit as bad as we feared. (Same with Trump.) And the problem is that they will realise that they can literally get away with, if not murder, the culpable homicide of many many thousands of people.
6. Social distancing has allowed a new era of social atomisation of communities into individual consumers, with nothing left to connect us except arm’s length commercial transactions which no longer even have to be glued together by politeness, eye contact or a thank-you. Think about it: drive-in burgers, and occasional jaunts to the garden centre in our cars; manual labourers bringing you takeaways as you let in the cleaner via the ginnel, but they may not use the bathroom. Internet shopping and streaming media without any possibility of meeting others outside of those transactions – save through capitalist-mediated social media platforms harvesting your data. It is a neo-liberal wet dream. How easy it would be to continue it.
7. Social distancing has changed our psyche – which could be made permanent. Interpersonally, social distancing has created a crackle of deep animosity, fear, and loathing between human beings in the city, who eye each other suspiciously as spreaders of disease, or obstacles to obtaining resources. People fight over whether to wear a mask or not. People cough on each other to show dominance. The mental health toll of the crisis has left people withdrawn, less able to relate to each other in person. Indeed, I’ve heard many people saying they are anxious about socialisation again as it’s been so long. Essentially, Thatcher’s idea that there is no such thing as society, just collections of individuals – and consumers – is becoming the main achievement of Coronavirus. How easily will we go back?
And meanwhile, the ideology and myth of community and care has prevailed. ‘We’re all in this together’ TV ads by banks currently evicting people, or getting them into insurmountable debt. Cuddle emojis from Facebook, which would have the same chilling portentousness as if they had come from a python. And its worryingly fascistic public performed rituals (the clapping and rainbows). These have replaced the real thing of community with a grotesque marketised parody of itself. Saying we care about community and worrying about old people strangely goes hand in hand with stockpiling bogroll and hand sanitiser and price gouging on Ebay.
8. The economic fallout is just what the nastiest, most diabolical capitalist scumbags have long wanted. Of course it has also had very major negative effects on the economy for some, but very much not for others. Replacing some markets with alternative markets, and actively increasing consumption on some things, even as others lose their market, is the stuff of capitalist opportunism. This is the ‘disruption’ that the entrepreneurs/ exploiters of our age crave. Depressions are often just redistributions. The top 1% still thrive.
That will also sit alongside a new ability to realign rights and living standards to Victorian conditions that we are seeing in, say, the US in their rising unemployment, or in the UK with the manual labourers told to get the f*ck back on the tube. So we can look forward to an employers’ market to end all employers’ markets – a perfect storm for the scummiest scumbags to clean up.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, whose hedge fund has been pushing this as a fantastic opportunity for investors (which is probably true if they are new) will be tweaking his nipples and panting - after all, he is the son of the figurehead of crisis capitalism. As Guardian writer Andy Beckett noted, William Rees Mogg’s book ‘The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution and How to Survive and Prosper in It’, beloved of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the ERG, uses a quote from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: “The future is disorder.” To be clear, this is seen as a cause for celebration. For the Rees-Moggs, and many modern capitalists, their desired future of the world and their rightful place in it only comes after some kind of huge crisis, which concentrates all the more wealth into the hands of a chosen few and allows a new world order which they can control entirely from gated communities and strongholds in places like New Zealand. If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, well, okay, fine, but it’s not mine, and it’s not a theory. It’s actually just kind of… well… a conspiracy. Rees-Mogg’s dog whistles about Soros and international elites (nudge nudge) are nothing compared to the actual avowed plans and desires of his ilk.
So if you’re thinking that all of the Neo-cons are worried about this big fall in the economy, just remember – for every few Richard Bransons, there is a Jeff Bezos, whose fortune has risen by £40bn over the last two months – but still doesn’t want to pay sick pay for his US workers.
Meanwhile, his US employees of course have no chance of working elsewhere now there are 40m unemployed in the US, so they’re over a barrel.
Furthermore, if corporations cut their wage bill as well as their income, or even better, more of the former and less of the latter, this is a fantastic opportunity to increase their wealth, realign their market, and make massive increases in profitability. American billionaires, it has been reported, have made an extra £434bn during the crisis.
So Richard Branson and his sad whiny wheedling for a handout, or some overexpanded high street restaurant chains complaining about loss of covers, are small-fry compared to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc. It’s the hyper-wealthy who lead capitalism at this stage. The people who think they play with the big boys because they sell pizzas or fly a few jumbo jets are just nostalgic for the 20th century. Bankers get bailed out, not Boeings and burgers.
9. The environment may be even more f*ckeroonied. Everyone has been swooning about the sound of the returning birds (including me), and the peacefulness in the streets. I’ve been marvelling at the foxes and squirrels in my garden. Well, that has gone within a matter of days. (I worry about the many comments a few days ago about how quickly the environment recovered when we stopped polluting it for a couple of months. No need to stop, then!)
But also, it’s been made extremely clear that public transport is almost entirely off limits for quite some time. It’s only a matter of time before the next (corona?)virus hits. We are realising – as if we didn’t already know – that mass transit systems, especially in cities, are filthy disease-superhighway hellholes.
So what is the answer? On your bike and walk, says Boris Johnson, who works from home, lives five minutes from the Houses of Parliament, and gets a car anyway.
And how will one get to the newly reopened garden centre? One will drive the Jag of course.
How will one get to work, should one have to? Again, it’s going to be the car. As Gary Numan once predicted, the car may become ‘the only way to live.’
BUT WAIT! Won’t we all be working from home? Well, no, we won’t ALL. Who is going to do your perm or flip your burger or pack up your fuschias at the garden centre? But for those of us who do….
10. Middle class professionals’ working lives may get much much worse. Currently middle class professionals enjoy a level of autonomy in the workplace that working class people could not imagine. That is because they have generally so well-absorbed the prevailing economic ideologies that they can be ‘trusted’ to be ‘professional’. But working from home and its supposed ‘autonomy’ has given employers a fantastic opportunity to improve productivity, and get more out of people for less. They won’t need offices. People will work as well as live at home. They will start earlier and finish later. With no physical separation between work and home, the mental separation – and certainly communication separation – becomes even less.
Furthermore, with the increasing use of technologies like Slack and Zoom, we are now reaching a 100% surveilled, totalised workplace. Don’t answer your slack message within 30 seconds? Hmmm. Are you really working? Time for a Zoom call with HR.
Going out for lunch? No, meetings are scheduled at any time – simply because you have no excuse to not be there. Why aren’t you at your desk - it’s only 10 paces to the kitchen? A break at the water cooler? Leave those cats alone or your ‘Slack’ will give you away.
None of which is to say I don’t want to be able to work from home. But here is the problem - every opportunity for ordinary people to improve the quality of their lives is pretty much an opportunity for predatory market capitalism and its reigning oligarchs to steal it back. That is essentially what ‘profit’ is. Every advance or gain is stolen and turned into something for the few, not the many.
Not a conspiracy
Let’s be clear. I am not suggesting that any of these things are a conspiracy. I’m not suggesting that coronavirus was invented in a lab by Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove. Although frankly if they’d thought of it, they probably would. The point is Milton Friedman’s (and he is a pretty good source if you’e looking at how right wingers destroy the world, something about horses and mouths):
‘Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962
People who look for conspiracies in the production of crisis events are looking at the wrong thing. The problem is the ideologies and the power structures that pre-exist any crisis. Because those are what will determine the response, and the shape of the world that follows. The people who though that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ failed to notice that some shitty awful thing is always about to happen. The point is to be ready when it does. And that was what Rumsfeld, Cheney and co. did.
So
Here is the thing. People need to stop waiting for a ‘great realisation’ when we all come to consciousness and suddenly demand what is rightfully ours. It ain’t happening. And if anything, crises like these tend to hugely benefit those in power.
And here is the other thing. When these things happen, you need to have rulers who are in some way benevolent and not entirely selfish. Oopsy.
Saying that your government ‘will surely’ now ‘have to’ do X or Y ignores the fact that, once you have voted for them, they don’t have to do a damned thing. Your one choice is that moment you vote. After that, everything is at the whims of the people you gave absolute power. And if their whims are utterly selfish - well.
Now what?
So what are we going to do to make these things not happen?
I have two suggestions.
1) Destroy the 3 most virulent sources of right wing propaganda in the U.K. and the US. It’s 2 newspapers in the U.K. and a TV station in the US. They are far, far, more powerful than any political party in the world. Concentrating energy on them is a prerequisite for any lasting social change. To change them will change people’s perception of reality and open up the only possible source of change - the ballot box.
2) Support whichever left wing - even centre left - party is possible.
In that order.
More on which later. I need a drink first.