THE PATHOGENIC SOCIETY:
HOW STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE LED TO THE CURRENT PANDEMIC AND HOW STRUCTURAL CHANGE IS THE PATH FORWARD TO PUBLIC HEALTH
May 19, 2020
Una mattina mi son svegliato
E ho trovato l'invasor
la
canzone partigiana, "Bella Ciao"
The year of the rat indeed.
A pandemic is plaguing the world. We woke up to a foreign, merciless invader
that is infecting many and arrested the rest. We perceive that we are in a
crisis and on the cusp of catastrophe. Yet the etymology of the word "crisis"
is instructive. It derives from a medical term in Ancient Greek used by
Hippocrates, krisis (κρίσις), meaning the critical point of a disease in
which the patient either recovers or dies. To recover, we must not simply
address the symptoms, but the underlying cause of what has brought us to this
point. The pillage of the poor and of our environment has provided a fertile
ground for the mutation and transmission of zoonotic infections, including the
current pandemic. If we are to recover, public health policy must address the
health of our institutions which pervade and instrumentalize our lives and have
clinical physical and mental consequences. The pandemic has exposed and
exacerbated the inequalities and inequities in our society and it is also
caused by these. Municipal and international law have been the use of force in
masquerade, establishing and entrenching subject positioning while this
structural subjugation has masqueraded as the empowerment of individual rights.
Structural violence has left billions without proper sanitation, clean air and
water, housing, healthcare and education which even under putative democracies,
effectively denies them any civil and political rights. Yet even these dismal
civil and political rights, that are but words on paper if one does not have
the means to enforce them, may be lost as we divert our vision to the invisible
virus, away from the social pathologies that have caused this malady, which
during our diversion, may be exacerbated and fortified by it. The best way to
ensure we are not defeated is to politically unite and establish a system which
allows for a rights regime that is capacity-based and where economic and social
rights, including the right to health, are recognized as instrumental and
inseparable from civil and political rights. The only way we will survive is to
realize that public health and environmental health are inseparable and public
health requires sustainable environmental practices. Recovery or death.
We have sent to rovers to
Mars, created antibiotics, created vaccines for a number of diseases, spliced
the nuclei of cells to produce humans from three parents, developed the
internet, manufactured trains that run on magnetic levitation, rocket boosters
that return and teleported qutrits. To name but a trifle of humanity's
scientific achievements. Yet an invisible, passive organism is bringing us to
heel. However, just as our immune system's response is sometimes the reason for
our deaths from disease, for instance the "cytokine storm" from the
overproduction of immune cells in the lungs from various strains of the flu and
corona viruses, including SARS, MERS and now COVID-19; how we react to this
pandemic may be the real test of whether we survive this malady. The rampant
inequalities in our society have been exacerbated by the current pandemic and
have also contributed in on no small part to its cause both by the effects of
anthropogenic climate change and the stresses imposed on habitats as well as
the socio-environmental stresses upon the working poor. In order to survive, we
need to heed these lessons and inform our actions accordingly.
For hundreds of years we
have been practicing a protracted process of ecological suicide, rapaciously and
insouciantly plundering our environment to produce products that in turn cause
more destruction to our environment, as if we are not dependent on our
environment and exist outside of it. As we imperil ourselves and move the
planet into a heating feedback loop, some have already given up on our speck of
blue dust and have been smitten by our neighbour's crimson hue. Perhaps we can
terraform Mars, which of course would necessitate not only the engineering of
its climate and atmosphere but the production of a magnetic field in order to
protect these, while somehow not dying from radiation in the interim. We may
not achieve these necessary technological feats before we reach the point of
climatic calamity that may exterminate us. If we do, and Mars is the way to our
survival, at least for some time, it is in any case the survival of but a
privileged few. There is no Planet B.
We have known for decades
that climate change will lead to depleted freshwater sources, loss of land from
rising sea levels and food insecurity, increase in the incidence and intensity
of stochastic events, and increase in the incidence of disease. It is also
something that we no longer need to read papers on but can perceive with our
own eyes. Our national ecological treasures are being eviscerated so that they
will merely be stories we can tell our great grandchildren, who will stare
mesmerized at photos of the Great Barrier Reef as we ponder photos of Jupiter. My
sons have grown up in a climate sensitive world, in which our daily lives are
continually disrupted because of a climatic disturbance. Twice we've been
through periods in which we've stayed indoors and worn masks outside from
increased particulates in the air from vicious wildfires brought about by
California's drought. A few months ago, we were worried for our relatives and
friends across the Pacific as wildfires raged across Australia. My friends sent
me photos as they evacuated southern New South Wales, where Australia deployed
the navy to evacuate people from beaches, as the flames engulfed their towns. I
stood horrified. The photographs looked doctored, incredible, apocalyptic. A
scarlet sky as if a scar above the wound of a scorched earth, carnivorous
flames set to engulf it. Now we're in quarantine and my boys police the
quarantine shuffle of staying 6 feet away from others, pointing out people in
groups they've determined not to be a family unit and for my three year old,
"lasering the corona" from anyone he passes (much to my chagrin). Climate
change is not something that will happen, but that is happening. Granted
stochastic rates are not new and fires are seasonal. The Aborigines developed their
efficient back-burning method in Australia precisely because they dealt with
the peril of uncontrolled fire tens of thousands of years ago. In my childhood,
bushfire season was routine and numerous times we planned for evacuation any
moment – yet back then, fire was a contained danger. Now, fire season is
longer, the fires spark up in more places scorching more vegetation and burn
for far longer. And now we have a pandemic. This is not an unfortunate
coincidence, but part and parcel of anthropogenic ecological stresses.
Anthropogenic climate change
has caused a greater incidence of waterborne and vector-borne diseases through increases
in precipitation and temperature in certain areas increasing both the viral
reproduction rate and the seasonality and distribution of vectors, for instance
ticks and mosquitos. Climate change is exposing an additional five hundred
million people to mosquito-borne disease. West Nile fever is now a seasonal
scourge in Connecticut. Dengue fever is now present in New York. Urbanization, deforestation,
habitat destruction and agricultural intensification, including concentrations
of livestock have provided a favourable climate for zootonic infections by
providing several autobahns for microbial organisms and consequent
cross-species infection. More than 75% of all known viruses are from wildlife
and as concentrations of people encroach and destroy animals' natural habitat,
the viruses are presented with a new mode of transmission to humans.
Transmission can occur in numerous ways, from infecting livestock to infecting
humans directly, including by their faeces' drops or by being eaten. Zoonotic
diseases have quadrupled in the past fifty years and have been the cause of
major outbreaks in recent decades, including Ebola, SARS and COVID-19. Big Ag's
concentrated animal feeding operations pose significant danger in this regard
on multiple levels. Animals from different herds are placed in close proximity allowing
for ready transmission of pathogens to animals that do not share their herd
immunity, the animals are prone to infection by the environmental stresses
imposed on them which has led to a rampant overuse of antibiotics which in turn
flows into the human food chain and results in antibiotic resistance and
additionally, these operations result in significant environmental stresses on
other animals, both via air and water pollution and significant greenhouse gas
emissions, which in turn leads to animals migrating to where humans are
located, increasing human exposure to their infections (listen to Cristina
Stella's interview on the conditions and enviro-social consequences of CAFOs in
"The Slaughterhouse Straitjacket: How Big Ag Gags and Guts Our Speech").
Soderbergh's Contagion,
released in 2011 and finding a resurgence in popularity during this pandemic,
ends with a deforestation scene. The film's pandemic is based on a real virus,
the Nipah virus, named after Sungai Nipah in Malaysia, the site of the first
known outbreak in 1999. Like much of South-East Asia, the area was subject to rapid
deforestation for the planting of palm oil plantations, which monoculture leads
to decreased biodiversity and accelerates climate change (listen to Etelle
Higonnet's interview "The Rest Is Silence: How Commodity Agriculture Turns
Forests into Cemeteries"). Habitat destruction drew the bats to populated
areas where people raised pigs. As a line from the film states, "the wrong pig
met the wrong bat" (or something of the sort). NiV, which causes encephalitis
and respiratory failure, killed over 100 people in the first outbreak. There
have been several contained outbreaks of NiV in Malaysia, India and Bangladesh
since 1999. The vaccine for NiV is currently in human testing, but the virus
may mutate in the interim and in any case there are numerous viruses in bats
and rodents, another major reservoir species, and our increasing proximity to
them is imperiling our survival as a species.
The current pandemic is also
due to our ecological rampage. While there is focus on the wet market in
Wuhan as the possible epicenter of the current pandemic, little attention is
paid to Wuhan's proximity to the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest
hydro-electric project which displaced numerous species, including bats that
carried viruses and likely COVID-19. Moreover, the pangolin, the mammal which
is thought to be the possible intermediary between the transmission of the bat
virus to a communicable human disease is an endangered species and is the
world's most heavily trafficked animal. Environmental policy and public health
policy are inter-dependent and we require the advent of holistic,
inter-disciplinary policies.
Economic policy is also
inextricable from public health. It is not only the increased exposure of
humans to animals that has led to the incidence of infections, but the weakened
immune systems of the working poor that are consistently lambasted with
environmental pathogens. The environmental stresses imposed upon the working
poor of the world, including lack of clean water, sanitation, exposure to
pathogens at work, in their diet and domestic environment has contributed to
the reception of zoonotic infections. This is not new. Throughout history,
pandemics have generally started among the working poor and have always
trickled up until the government is marshalled to mitigate the circumstance.
London's cholera outbreak in the 19th century is instructive. The disease at
first affected the working poor in the East End who lived and worked together
in unhygienic and concentrated circumstances. The disease was thus thought to
be of moral character because it affected the poor who were thought to be poor
because of their lax morality (in a moral universe in which making a fortune of
others' misery was rather deemed a national service). Dr. John Snow
relentlessly researched the cause of the cholera outbreak in a double-blind
experiment leading to the discovery of the contaminated Broad Street pump. Dr.
John Snow confirmed that cholera was a contagion and that it was not a moral
disease. Rather, he analyzed, it was the squalid environmental conditions of
the poor, in particular the decreased sanitation services provided to them,
that predisposed them to both reception of the disease and increased rates of
mortality.
The environmental and social
conditions that have contributed to the current pandemic are not a consequence
of natural and immutable circumstances but have been generated by political
decisions. Habitat stress, increased exposure between humans and
animals and the environmental stresses on the working poor are all political
decisions of a pathological society that has maliciously and myopically placed
short-term profits of the few over our species' survival. The transmission
between animals and humans occurs when both the animals and the humans are
living under environmental stress. The animals have been forced out of their
habitat due to development policies and the humans are living in poor
conditions in close proximity to animals. In Wuhan, as in other Chinese cities,
the working poor, including rural migrants in search for employment live in
squalid and crowded conditions in proximity to animals which provide a perfect
environment for the transmission of zoonotic infection. These policies not only
directly contribute to the spill-over infection transmission to humans, but to
human to human transmission in this current and in prior pandemics.
The Spanish flu (named as it
was the first publicized infection spread in Europe, possibly due to Spain's
neutrality and the infection of its monarch, King Alfonzo XIII) was also a
zoonotic infection that is believed to have mutated from a benign seasonal flu
into its pandemic form in the stygian conditions of the French trenches in
World War I. The environmental stresses imposed upon the troops in the trenches
allowed for the ready mutation and transmission of the disease. The British and
French conscripted their troops across their empires so that men from all inhabited
continents converged into the abysmal conditions of the trenches in which
Allied Generals, looking at dry maps miles away, moved pieces on a board that
resulted in the sacrifice of young men's lives, claiming in the interest of
cloth, but one inch of mud. This Lost Generation inhabited the densely
populated trenches where they were exposed to each other's foreign pathogens
and the environmental stresses of the elements, poor diet and lack of sanitation
including the proximity of live animals and corpses, the latter, which were in
such abundance that rats left whole bodies untouched but for the liver. The
constant stress of war, Owen Wilfred's "shrill demented choirs", gas attacks
and injuries, provided ample opportunity for mutation and transmission. Men
sick with human disease, made susceptible to such sickness from the squalid and
stressful conditions they were thrust into, with lambasted immune systems, likely
became sick with both a human and pig strain of flu providing the viruses a
means to swamp genetic material, leading to H1N1. The vast majority of
Persching's men, for instance, died from the Spanish flu. The troops that
survived, carried the virus back with them to their respective homes all around
the world and led to the pandemic that killed tens of millions on every
inhabited continent in the world, despite the lack of mass international
transit.
Our stratified societies,
which cause crowded and unsanitary conditions for the poor amongst the globe and
increasing displacement of populations from climate change and wars, is leading
to large refugee populations interned in even more densely populated and
unsanitary camps which provides fertile ground for the mutation and transmission
of disease.
Environmental and public
health are inseparable and public health is dependent on our weakest link. If
we continue to impose continued exposure to pathogens on the working poor,
diseases will continue to flourish and the next pandemic may be more virulent
with a higher fatality rate. Thus, even those unpersuaded by the morality and
justice of a more equitable system, may perhaps be persuaded that this is
necessary for everyone's survival. It is for this reason that disease has been
termed the "great equalizer" because in a pandemic everybody is vulnerable. We
are all human and all susceptible to disease irrespective of our bank account,
social stature or celebrity. Yet, it is our social stature that affects our
exposure to disease as well as its affect- thus even if disease is a fervent
proponent of equal opportunity we do not provide an equal reception to it. We
are seeing this play out now. While we are all affected by the pandemic and the
attendant imposition of quarantine throughout the globe, we are affected in
unequal measure. This pandemic, as others before it, does not equalize, but
rather exacerbates inequalities.
While some people can work
from home, others cannot and will lose their livelihoods. Still others perform
jobs in essential services that necessarily demands that they have direct
contact with the infected (such as healthcare workers) or consistent contact
with the potentially infected (such as public transportation workers or food
delivery workers). Some people have cars, others are forced to commute in mass
transit, increasing their exposure to the disease. Some people are quarantined
in palatial estates with lush bucolic gardens and pools or have left their
luxurious inner-city apartments for their country estates, able to practice
social distancing with ease. Others are crammed in tiny crumbling apartments
(what in real estate lingua would be described as "cosy" with "old world
charm") in congested areas, increasing their exposure. Some do not have laundry
and must balance social distancing with hygiene. Some people are forced to
spend longer hours with their abusers, increasing their susceptibility to
abuse. Still others are told to "stay in shelter" but have none or share
toilets or water sources with their neighbours and are a forced to break
quarantine, which in some places leads to fines and others incarceration,
simply because they have to perform daily human functions to survive. Thus, the
risk of exposure is not the same. Nor may the effect of infection be the same.
Not only do the working poor
have more exposure to a pandemic but they are likely more vulnerable to its
effects due to the consistent exposure to pathogens and environmental stress. COVID-19
fatality rate increases with age but also comorbidities, including chronic
respiratory issues, hypertension and diabetes. Environmental factors, including
political decisions relating to urban planning and industrial placement,
combined with decreased access to healthcare and wholesome food, have
contributed to these comorbidities in the poor. Louisiana is a fine (and
shameful) example of how political decisions have led to deleterious impact on
public health. The heavily polluted area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge
has been termed "Cancer Alley" because of the abnormally high cancer rates in
the communities – working class and predominantly of colour – that are forced
to live among the highest concentration of industrial plants in the United
States. In 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency released the 2014 National
Air Assessment in which the town of Reserve, Louisiana is noted to have
numerous toxic chemicals in the air resulting in a cancer rate of 50 times the national
average. Shockingly, rather than remedying this situation, more plants are set
to begin production in the area and increase noxious emissions there. In
Lowndes County, the state has abdicated its government function and failed to
provide sanitation services leading to the incidence of hookworm, which if left
untreated, leads to impaired cognitive function and fatigue in turn leading to
impaired education and employment opportunity. Hookworm is both caused by and
entrenches one in poverty (for a more detailed look at the shameful state of
poverty across this "great" nation, listen to the interview with Philip Alston,
the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights in "The
American Illusion: Chained to Poverty in the Land of the Free").
COVID-19's fatality rate is based
upon the existence of comorbidities which in turn are in part caused by
environmental factors. Respiratory illness, hypertension and
diabetes all have contributing environmental factors, such as living under air
pollution, eating a poor diet and being denied proper and preventative
healthcare in order to curb the onset of chronic conditions. A recent study by
Yaron Ogen at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg shows correlation
between exposure to nitrogen dioxide, which has a deleterious impact on the
lungs and fatality from COVID-19. Out of 66 infected administrative regions
throughout Italy, France, Spain and Germany, 78% of deaths occurred in the five
most heavily polluted areas. In the United States, Chicago, Detroit and Los
Angeles have high fatalities and also high air pollution comparative to other
cities in the United States. This corresponds with studies of prior pandemics
which found correlation between air pollution and increased fatality. Dr.
Zuo-Fend Zhang from the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, found that
during the SARS epidemic in China, patients located in areas of high air
pollution were twice as likely to die as patients located in areas with lower
air pollution. A Cambridge University study found that there was an increased
incidence of fatalities from the 1918 pandemic in coal burning areas. Locations
with poor air and water quality are areas where the working poor live, and in
the United States, this is also racially demarcated in practice,
with this environmental
injustice imposed upon working class communities of colour. Numerous
occupations across diverse industries cause various chronic lung conditions,
including but not limited to miners, who are exposed to silica and coal dust,
workers in aerospace exposed to beryllium and textile workers exposed to nylon
fibers. Meatpacking workers hardly work in better conditions than those exposed
by Uptown Sinclair in his brilliant and heart wrenching novel of the conditions
endured by the largely immigrant workers of Chicago's meatpacking industry,
The Jungle. In the United States, fatality rates from New York City show
that the majority of deaths from COVID-19 are from poor parts of The Bronx,
Brooklyn and Queens. As class and race intersect in the United States, black Americans
are dying at much higher rates than their white counterparts, from NYC, to
Chicago to New Orleans. For instance, in Louisiana, where black Americans make
up 32% of the population, they make up 70% of COVID-19 fatalities. The Navajo
nation has the third highest infection rates in the United States after New York
and New Jersey despite mandatory lockdowns because of the poverty of its people
(a poverty caused by the colonists' manifest destiny and the Federal
government's current breaches of its treaty obligations), including congested
living conditions, the absence of running water and electricity and chronic
health conditions linked to environmental poverty markers, including diabetes,
obesity, respiratory illness and heart disease. Socio-economic circumstances
cause increased exposure to the disease as well as environmental markers of
poverty that have caused comorbidities thus providing for a ready reception of
the disease.
The pandemic is affecting
people unequally and some, sometimes catastrophically. Our most vulnerable,
people with health conditions outside of COVID-19, undergoing cancer treatment
or with chronic conditions requiring consistent medical care such as dialysis,
are not only more vulnerable to the infection itself, but may face problems from
attendant diversion of resources and staff to fighting the pandemic. People are
still giving birth, which has its own possible health complications which are
now exacerbated. Women give birth without their birthing partners and those
suspected of being infected must labour in masks. There are pregnant women
working in essential services, including medical personnel and nursing home
staff, who are still continuing to have contact with infected patients despite
compromised immune systems and decreased lung capacity, which is shocking and
shameful. Prisoners and immigrants in detention centres are at a heightened
risk of COVID-19 both from its spread in its contained and concentrated
environment and being immunocompromised due to the deleterious environmental
conditions of prison, including the containment, concentration, poor diet,
intense stress and inadequate access to medical care. In turn, prison and
detention staff are at a higher risk of exposure to the pandemic. For instance,
NYC has one of the highest rates of infection and Rikers had 7 times the
infection rate of NYC.
Some people have lost their
livelihoods and more than 36 million people have filed for unemployment in the
United States since the various quarantines have been imposed (and this is
likely to go well past 40 million). People that before were not even deemed
employees, such as food delivery workers, have now been considered "essential"
workers, which means they can continue to serve but they have not been provided
any protection against their continued exposure to the virus (which makes one
wonder whether "essential" is merely a euphemism for "expendable"?). Small
businesses in the service industry that rely on physical contact and/or
presence, including restaurants, bars, cafes, exercise studios, gyms, pools, yoga
studios, hair salons, to name but a few have to pay payroll and rent without
being able to provide services and generate income (and of course the burlesque
of CARES has resulted in a myriad of businesses being denied the loans they
desperately need to stay afloat). Some of these businesses are online and
retaining some customers, but others, such as pools, rely on their custom to
continue to pay membership fees without being able to utilize online services.
Schoolchildren and university students have lost a whole semester of learning.
Younger children in particular are forced to learn online with the help of
their beleaguered parents of which the majority are without childcare and
requested to juggle fulltime work and childcare from home. School closures and
online teaching has exacerbated the inequalities of the student body. Some
students only received fresh daily meals from their schools and do not have
access to computers and the internet in order to utilize online classes and are
drastically falling behind in their studies. School districts are attempting to
curb this divide by continuing to provide meals for pickup and loaning computers
to students in need, but this fails to address the needs of students that
cannot pickup meals, because they don't have the means of private transport,
nor does it address lack of internet services.
As school, work and even
medical care goes online, people living in underserved communities that either
do not have access to the internet at all or for instance, don't have
sufficient speed to meet the increased domestic demand, when parents and their
kids are all expected to be on various video conferencing platforms
concomitantly. The pandemic is thus exposing and exacerbating the digital
divide, with tens of millions of Americans left offline, impacting their
current and future education and employment.
Women are disproportionally
affected by the pandemic and inequalities may be exacerbated. According to the
UNFP, women make up seventy percent of the world's health and social sector
workforces. Women are thus disproportionality on the frontlines, as they work
in medical, palliative and homecare environments, which provide increased
exposure to the pandemic. They are also disproportionally in employment that
cannot be performed online and are more economically vulnerable. Additionally,
as both men and women who work full time are asked to perform their fulltime
jobs concomitantly with full time childcare and homeschooling, partners may
prioritize the job of the high earner, which continues to be for the majority
of households around the world, the male's employment.
The exposure of this rampant
inequality may however lead to a more equitable system. For one, while some are
more exposed than others, in the end, there is a trickle up effect and everyone
is exposed. If the people that grow your food and/or deliver your food are
exposed, they can infect you. The person delivering your mail exposes
themselves each day and by extension, may expose you. These people cannot
practice social distancing. Nor can the people across the world that have no
private access to water, a toilet or shelter.
We were already experiencing
a global pandemic of mental illness and this pandemic is only exacerbating
this. However, in a pathogenic society, where billions struggle to survive on a
global level while others are running a gauntlet without cease until they
expire, nobody is going to be mentally unscathed.
Eric Fromm theorized that societies can be ill and that nobody in an insane
society could be sane. Indeed, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and dementia
have plagued society. Mental illness allows for the ready reception of physical
illnesses, which exacerbates the effects of the mental illness and in turn that
of the physical illnesses. Mental illness causes physical illness and
schizophrenia has been linked to bacterial infection (so that we should treat
these diseases with antibiotics rather than anti-psychotics). Poor stomatic
health is in turn linked to lifestyle and access to healthcare. Mental and
physical health are determinates of each other, patients with mental illness
have two to three times higher the mortality and morbidity rates. There is
pervasive malaise in our society that at times turns, clinical. Many of us
wonder whether there is another realm of reality that we cannot perceive yet
have some visceral sense of. This turns many to institutionalized religion,
others to the thought that perhaps we are merely code in some future simulation.
Perhaps the feeling that we live in some superficial environment and yearn for
"reality" is the unconscious understanding that we have constructed a mediated
world of mediated relations and our wish to break free from the social
realities we have incarcerated ourselves in.
This current pandemic is
exposing our policy failures. While it may be logically circumspect to argue
that simply because something occurred it was therefore inevitable and obvious,
the world's virologists and epidemiologists have been sounding alarms that we
needed to prepare for a pandemic and this pandemic's consequences are exposing how
woefully inadequate our public health and socio-economic policies are. Numerous
countries have found themselves with inadequate medical equipment and personal
protective equipment, which has led to a catastrophic and inexcusable number of
deaths of patients, doctors and nurses. This is the result of policy choices
that used public funds elsewhere, including subsidizing polluting industries
that cause more stress on stripped healthcare services. If we cannot protect
the people that serve to protect us, who can we protect? Several nations are
struggling because of austerity measures imposed while others, like Iran and
Cuba are enduring the epidemic under economic sanctions that cripple their
capacity to address the pandemic (while Cuba, admirably, nevertheless has sent
its doctors around the world, including in Italy in international solidarity). This
underscores the injustice and inutility of these policies in the first place.
Austerity is purportedly meant to bootstrap these failing economies but leaves
them even more battered, while sanctions are meant to achieve regime change
even though they have shown repeatedly that they do the obverse. The cruelty of
sanctions fortifies a dictatorship's hold over its people by exposing Western
hypocrisy which in turn can be utilized in the service of the dictatorship's
propaganda. How did denying proper medical care to millions of Iraqi children
serve to protect the world's security interests? How is compromising Iran's
response to COVID-19 aiding the world's security interests now?
Then there is the recognized
problem of infection throughout the prison system and its spill-over into the
general population from staff and visitors. In the United States, numerous
states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons are scrambling to prevent COVID-19's
spread throughout the various systems by accelerating decarceration- too
little, too late. Many people are imprisoned in remand, awaiting trail,
due to discriminatory bail
policies that require payment and stable residency, thus incarcerating people
for being poor (and this is also overt, as many American cities have
criminalized homelessness). Other people are incarcerated because they have
accepted plea bargains in fear of the draconian minimum terms they face, others
because they live in over-policed neighbourhoods and are charged for crimes
that many people commit in the privacy of their own homes away from the police
(such as drug use). Most prisoners are thus caged by and in poverty.
Labor protections are not applicable in prison and provide labour that is not
subject to minimum wages and overtime, mandated breaks, occupational health and
safety regulations nor maximum hours and is contracted out in service to
private entities by UNICOR. These labor unicorns are exploited by fashion and
other industries, including military contractors, that deceptively parade that
they are making "U.S." goods which consumers may likely mistake as the company
supporting rather than under-cutting the U.S. workforce. Prisoners working for
the military and defense contractors not only assemble missiles but
decontaminate tanks from combat without sufficient protective gear to protect
against the toxic chemicals that they are exposed to, including depleted
uranium. Understanding the ripple effect of a pandemic and the wider
dissemination in the community from a prison epidemic, numerous systems are
letting people go but without any resources so that they are essentially being
dumped to fend for themselves on the street. To make matters worse, the police
are continuing to arrest people and retain them in jail. The NYPD is
aggressively policing (non-white) New York, ostensibly to ensure social
distancing, while not practicing social distancing themselves. These policies
make no sense and one may wonder whether it's stupidity or something more
sinister at work, as older, high risk prisoners are being dumped onto the
streets while younger people are being brought in to the prison system to
endure more time in remand as courts are adjourned, to preserve the prison
labour force (for a look at the injustices of our criminal law system and how
it is pervaded by institutional discrimination and serves to entrench
inequality, listen to the interviews, "Stifling Dissent: Activism Between
the Stick and Slap" with Rachel Meeropol, "Bars to Chance: A Nation
Caged Under a Criminal Justice System Without Justice" with Nazgol
Ghandnoosh, "Innocence Inviolate: The Menace of the Years" with Lisa
Starr and Todd Fries and "Juvenile Injustice: How the Juvenile Justice
System Reproduces and Entrenches Inequality" with Marsha Levick) .
COVID-19 will catastrophically
impact the poorest countries in the world which health systems are ill- equipped
to deal with the crisis and which have vulnerable populations due to the
prevalence of chronic environmental conditions and malnutrition. In prior
epidemics, including of Ebola, survival was correlated with a person's
preceding nutritional status. Hence malnutrition increases the risk of fatality
which is exacerbated by the fact that malnutrition exists in countries where
healthcare capacity is significantly strained. In
Yemen, the brutal civil war, in which the Saudi and Emirati coalition forces,
supported by the US and the UK, have attacked civilians, hospitals, water
facilities, mosques and UNESCO world heritage sites, less than half the
hospitals are functional. The UN has termed the malnutrition and cholera
epidemic in Yemen as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. COVID-19 has
started to spread in Yemen and the results could well be stygian (for a
detailed look at the consequences of the conflict in Yemen, listen to Radhya
Al-Mutawakel's interview "A People Fracutured: Shells, Strikes and
Starvation in Yemen").
In addition, the economic
effects of the pandemic will exacerbate food insecurity around the world. Before
COVID-19 became a pandemic, David Beasley, the Executive Director of the U.N.
World Food Program, informed the U.N. Security Council that 2020 would be the
worst food security crisis we have endured around the globe since World War II
due to environmental instability including the effects of natural disasters as
well as continuing armed conflict. Countries hit hardest
include Yemen and Syria, the latter being a decade long conflict which was in
large part caused by the environmental conditions of severe drought that
brought farmers to the city in search of non-existent work leading to protest
and brutal government opposition and finally, the enduring war (in no small
part as a result of upstream Turkey's Greater Anatolia Project with its 22
reservoirs and 19 hydro-electric projects decreasing and polluting flow
downstream). The UNFD has opined that the pandemic will exacerbate the food
insecurity of millions around the globe and will lead to a famine of "biblical
proportions" due to decreased humanitarian aid, loss of tourism and price
collapses of exported commodities (for instance, the negative price of oil,
which at first blush may appear as a dream for a greener future, has the
potential to cause great instability, and in countries such as South Sudan
where 99% of exports are from oil, may be horrific).
Refugees in congested camps
are inherently vulnerable to the pandemic and its effects, not only because
they live in such congested circumstances that there is little possibility in
adequate or any social distancing and rife transmission but due to inadequate
health services and the risk that states will reduce humanitarian aid for
refugees and close their borders to asylum thus rendering whole populations
imprisoned in pestilent purgatory.
The Gaza Strip, which
conditions have long been a humanitarian crisis and a cause of world shame, in
which nearly two million people have been congested in 365 sq. km. in environmentally
dangerous conditions, with contaminated water and an inadequate sanitation
system and has been under a blockade by Israel since 2007. More than 80% of
the population rely on humanitarian aid and residents rely on permits for entry
into Israel to secure adequate medical care as the Strip has grossly inadequate
health services with only 2,500 beds. There have already been confirmed
infections but even if Israel allowed all the infected to seek medical care in
Israel, this may not be enough because Israel does not have sufficient health
resources for even its own population. Israel must not allow its blockade to
prevent adequate medical supplies and other necessities to get to the
Palestinian population (for a detailed look at the situation in the Occupied
Territories, listen to the interview "In Exile at Home: Fifty Years of Human
Rights Abuses in the Occupied Territories" with Amit Gilutz).
Compound extremes will
affect us all and in particular those that inhabit areas at the frontline of
the environmental crisis. Stochastic events, which climate change has increased
the rate and intensity of, are not impeded by this pandemic. We
are entering flood and tornado season and will head into fire and hurricane
season. To "flatten the curve" we are told to stay in shelter and practice
social distancing but how are we meant to do this in the event of a natural
disaster that may take our home? Natural disasters cause people to lose their
homes and when this occurs, people are temporarily placed in communal shelters
and such communal surroundings are rife for viral transmission. We need to
be planning for mitigating the effects of as well as adapting to compound
extremes and existential threats, such as the eruption of super volcanoes. While
it's impractical to have, say Londoners and New Yorkers plan for mega-tsunamis
from a Plinian eruption of Cumbre Vieja, not having an intergovernmental policy
group in place to address this issue may result in the needless loss of whole
cities or much worse.
It's time to question our
misplaced policies that do not serve the public and perhaps, a time to unravel
the great Ponzi scheme that is our society.One cannot tout that
people are poor or unemployed by their own doing when the means of their employment
is forbidden. Hence, there is a putative rescue, albeit it serves corporate
interests more than the working poor. Something needed to be seen to be done. As
David Hume theorized, each ruling class is numerically inferior to the
subjected class and reliant on segments of the subjected class for their
protection, which requires social consent of their rule through the achievement
of a conforming hegemony. Our society has steadily grown more unequal. This is
in part due to globalization. As Karl Marx presciently theorized in Grundrisse,
an international system will lead to less protections of workers as they will
no longer need to be paid enough for disposable income in order to buy the
products they make (the capitalism espoused by Ford and his theory of mass
production and consumption). However, he did not predict the change from the
industrial phase of the economy to the information age, which has developed
automation which in the next coming decades will eviscerate a substantial
segment of jobs throughout numerous industries and the attendant need for the
mining of more behavioural data in order to augment and perfect artificial
intelligence. This has catalyzed the movement for a Universal Basic Income from
both the right and the left. On the former side, this would serve as a
counter-revolutionary need as well as "grow the economy" as if it were a plant
one had to nurture as opposed to our social structure and mode of production, which
means increasing the profits of those that benefit from the social relations we
have created. Aggregate demand has been slumping, hurting the economy and
economists tend to agree that the economy relies on people spending money, but
if people don't have enough for necessities, how are they going to splurge to
keep the economy going? The answer lies in an affordable UBI which will pacify
the population and increase demand to churn further production and profit.
Even Milton Friedman and
Friedrich Hayek, the great libertarians, were in favour of UBI understanding
its counter-revolutionary arsenal. Some may argue this stance is hypocritical,
but then libertarianism as a political philosophy is logically fallacious.
The linchpin of the so-called "free" society espoused by libertarians,
including Robert Nozick and Milton Friedman, is security. Libertarians
claim that taxation is tantamount to forced labour, because people do not
receive the full fruit of their labour (under the thinking that in their system
the market would dictate the true "full" price of everyone's labour). They
proffer a society in which there is no government, but rather essential
services such as garbage disposal, fire-fighting and notably, policing, would
be performed by private companies. No one will be forced to pay for these
services, but if they refuse to pay, they will also not be "protected" which is
merely a different shade of the mafia, camorra, ‘nd'gharata, yakuza etc or
whatever is your local flavour. As companies are jurisdictional creatures and
as in these free societies, people will continue to do business with each other
and gain and hold private property, there is a necessity for a quasi-legal
system of private arbitrators to settle disputes. Of course, settlement means
nothing without enforcement, so private arbitrators would have their own
security forces to enforce their decisions. As some of these security
syndicates will indubitably be more efficient in their enforcement methods than
others, libertarians admit this would tend toward a natural monopoly. Security
for some, means violence for others. Thus, the "free" society envisioned by
libertarians is one that is held together by violence.
Slavoj Žizek has analyzed
how physical violence linked to an identifiable perpetrator is easily
understood as violence but the structural violence of our economies and
societies, which Zizek terms "systemic violence" (and others term
"institutional violence"), in which some are sacrificed for others, is not
apparent or easily able to be addressed. For instance, it is
violent to throw a rock at an unoccupied car or other piece of property, but
the system of repression in which some are born without the means to access the
nutrition, medicine, nurture and education they require, perhaps the reason for
the protesting throw, is not.
Structural violence does not
require bombs nor bullets to subjugate and it is thus more powerful,
particularly because for one to rebel against a power, one must first recognize
it.
It is the structural violence of subject positioning both on a global and
domestic level that has led to the current pandemic. Our rapacious economy
is the real pathogen. It has resulted in the environmental stresses for
zoonotic transmission of the virus and its current communication. Public
health, both physical and mental, requires that we dismantle what Paul Farmer
termed "pathologies of power" that dominate and subjugate us. It doesn't serve
to personally attack billionaires for instance, they are as much moulded by the
system as the people that are struggling to survive. Some people indeed are
fervent impact investors and use their money to help others. This is at once
admirable as also worrying, for if we truly want to live in a democracy, it
should not be up to such private individuals to dictate what problems should be
tackled and how. We need a new positive conception of rights which takes into
account capacity and effectuation, both at the practical level and with respect
to access to the courts. Otherwise rights are just words on paper. Worse, they
operate to entrench subject positioning.
For instance, the 6th
Amendment, espoused domestically and across the world as the crux of the US
criminal system, in effect operates as a "trial penalty" leading to 99% of
cases being pleaded out. This in turn, as Michelle Alexander has so luminously
laid out in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness, leads to conviction rates that then allow for legal
discrimination and entrenchment of subject positioning of the convicted person.
The First Amendment appears laudable at first blush but its jurisprudence is a
trample of other rights in support of social stratification and commercial
exploitation, including protecting commercial speech and with it direct to
consumer drug advertising, hate speech and unlimited money in elections. The
Fourth Amendment has been nullified by our ready use of third-party platforms
which surveil and store our data for exploitation in predictive behavior
markets, which in turn allows a court to impute that we have no reasonable
expectation to privacy and allows the government to access this information. Our
system is inherently flawed as imposing meditation of equal abstract rights
onto a socially stratified society merely entrenches inequality and subject
positioning within it.
Aristotle, who lived in a
democracy in which the demos was a small section of the population
(excluding for instances the enslaved and all women, who were silent and
veiled), theorized that you cannot have political equality without economic
equality. The two are inseparable. The fault of our current rights' regime is
the fallacious conception of a dichotomy between justiciable negative rights
enforced against the state and non-justiciable programmatic social and economic
aspirations not considered rights. We are not disembodied rational actors
acting in a vacuum and to impose a neutral, de-contextualized system of
justiciability and violation is anything but neutral. For neutrality
imposed on intersecting inequalities of income, race and sex that in turn operate
and exacerbate each other, entrenches and fortifies the inequalities and
inequities in society. If we are all entitled to life, liberty and dignity,
then why do we neglect people to live on the streets? Where is dignity without
breakfast? Empty liberty is but a word. If we have a right to liberty, then it
is freedom to do something.
Isiah Berlin's fallacious
conception of liberty informs and governs our rights' regime. Under Berlin's
thesis, the enemy of liberty was the state, thus the system of rights functions
as system limiting state incursion. True rights are "negative" rights
preventing the state from imposing its will. This allows for rampant abuse by
private actors amongst each other. It also establishes a fallacious
positive/negative distinction. Under Berlin's conception of liberty, you cannot
be physically forced to dig a hole by a gun to your head. Digging a hole under
the compulsion of hunger, which is also a physical force, is however not an infringement
of your liberty. If we craft digging a hole under compulsion of hunger as a
choice one has made, then presumably, there are other choices available, yet we
understand that many people have no choice but to perform the jobs that they do
(or cannot find any jobs at all). This goes back to our inability to recognize
structural violence. In the first scenario, we have a definitive actor that is
threatening force. In the second scenario, the violence is structural and
therefore not recognized.
The distinction between
economic and social rights on the one hand and civil and political rights on
the other, is a fallacious dichotomy, with the refusal to recognize the former,
eviscerating the putatively legal regime of the latter. Economic and social
rights do not exist in a vacuum, just as they inform social and political
rights, they are determinatives of each other. For
instance, the right to sanitation, housing, food and education, in turn, inform
and govern our health. We are told that "health" is too complex to be
justiciable. Indeed, it is complex because it pervades all our policies, from
urban planning, to energy, to education, the economy, our criminal justice
system and environmental policy. Public health is the linchpin and
determinative of all effective public policy for the social good and it is
necessary that we look through each policy imitative through its lens and ask
how will this affect the public's health, both mental and physical? We need
to the political will to make these necessary decisions. This also includes
legislating for access to healthcare for everyone, both for treatments and for
preventative healthcare, including yearly checkups, or appropriate shorter
terms for those in risk groups. Many countries around the world already provide
for this to their citizens. For those that only see policy in monetary terms,
the American way is as grossly inefficient as amoral. We spend more on
healthcare than other countries but cannot provide healthcare for our people. Rather
than provide for better access to housing, we have criminalized homelessness,
even though prisons are more expensive than subsiding or providing affordable
housing, and this conviction for homelessness in turn prevents people accessing
government subsided housing (for a look across the United States at laws
criminalizing homelessness and food sharing, listen to Eric Tar's interview "Housing
Not Handcuffs, recorded a few years before Eric argued Boise v. Martin
920 F.3d 584 (9th Cir. 2019), the en banc decision which the Supreme
Court denied certiorari last year that rightly holds that it violates
the 8th Amendment to criminalize people from sleeping in public
places if they have no other choice, propelling a proposal in California's
senate to make housing a constitutional right in the state).
The great myth is that
economic and social rights can only come in the form of a repressive, all-
encompassing government such as the Stalinist state with its NKVD and that we
must give up civil and political rights in order to obtain a solid social net
for everyone. In the United States, "socialism" is equated in the political
mindset as the subversion of the individual. These "conservatives" who are
opposed to "big government" are however, rather in favor of big military
budgets, subsidizing polluters and bringing the government into the bedroom.
They are also the greatest proponents of the most egregious threats to
individualism by planning to eviscerate social programs that prevent choice and
autonomy for people, thus preventing them the ability to individualize. The
United States, the land of the "free" which has the highest rates of
incarceration in the world, high rates of maternal and infant mortality, shocking
underemployment and stunted social mobility, there is little choice for the
majority of the population. For every Oprah, there are millions that will spend
their whole lives struggling to survive day by day (in fact the system requires
an Oprah to perpetuate the myth that if she can do it and you can't,
it's because of your own faults, not your social predicament, so you must
work harder). For those that have sufficient material conditions to be able
to individualize, they are socially constructed and rather individualized by
insidious cultural forces that divert and distract them, moulding them into
ready subjects of power with created desires that entrench the status quo.
The theorists of the
Frankfurt School, including Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse
have well explicated how we are not individuals but rather individualized
by the cultural forces around us so that what is political is understood as
natural and immutable – and thus not politically challenged. Our
desires are informed by insidious cultural forces that divert and distract us
from political unity and change. Guy Debord's La Société du Spectacle
was prescient in its depiction of our current society in which we mediate our
relations through reproductions of ourselves, meticulously constructing the
appearance of a life lived rather than directly living it and having personal
relations. People tend to organize their lives and attend events so that they
take images of themselves at these and it this reproduction, this image that is
vital, rather than the actual experience, even though the experience is
nullified by its reproduction. How many parents have videotaped their
children's performance and watched them solely through the camera lens?
When our desires are constructed,
so is our desire for revolt which desire tends to fuel cultural production and
imagery which serve to reinforce our existing power structures by diverting
dissent into entrenchment activities. Capitalism is a medium of relations, not
a message and subverting or demistifying its message, to be sold and consumed
through capital exchange, merely supports the system by on the one hand,
diverting dissent to activities that do not threaten the system and on the
other, perpetuating the very exchange that solidifies it. The fetish of the
message fortifies the medium. Perhaps nobody put it more succinctly than Gil
Scott-Heron- "the revolution will not be televised".
Shoshana Zubanoff has meticulously
explicated in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a
Human Future at the New Frontier of Power how we have been turned into raw
resources for extraction of our data, or "behavioural surplus", not only for
advertising and the construction of artificial intelligence but for governing
our actions and informing our desires (has Google, for instance, ever asked you
to develop its machine intelligence by ostensible security questions that
require photographic subject identification?). We are living in Gilles Deleuze's
sociétie de contrôle, in which we are constantly surveilled and modulated,
"dividuals" lacking direction and decision but not being able to perceive the
snake that coils around us. We live in subservience to our "online" images,
in search of "likes" and in that process spend our disposable time and income
to the achievement of this imposed goal so that we do not question whether this
is a goal that serves us or is even our own. Zubanoff's prescient analysis of
this new mode of production, that of the incessant extraction of our data,
combined with automation (which is the real reason jobs are dwindling in
industry and agriculture, not because of immigration, which debate between the
Republican and Democratic parties seemed to entrench a policy paradigm so that
nobody would question the acceleration of automation which it appears the major
political parties have little answers for and understand doesn't serve the
polarizing function of immigration in an election year) is leading to new
economic relations. The call for UBI, which will likely occur, is in service to
the new mode of production which requires people to have some disposable income
and time to have the internet and use various applications and platforms for
the ready extraction of their data. It also serves to pacify the population.
You get free money to watch movies and post on Instagram and Twitter – what
else do you want?
Other people are shackled by
"golden handcuffs" in which they receive quite decent renumeration but in
exchange give up their lives for it, living to work rather than working to live
in a toxic corporate culture. Individualism requires choice and autonomy,
otherwise we are merely bees in a hive, working for the Queen and she in turn,
is subjected to recursive reproduction on behalf of the colony.
The atrophied, apocryphal
democracy of the United States is a great example that representative democracy
is merely a representation of democracy. People perceive the current
administration is somehow diametrically opposed to the previous administration.
Yet it is merely the rapid escalation of neoliberal policies. Obama was a
charmer, but a progressive he was not. Trump simply did away with the masquerade,
perhaps because he lacks the ability to perform it. People were appalled by
Trump's use of psychographics, but Obama did it first. People love to hate
Trump. To some extent this is a great failing because we fail to perceive the
structural elements that are at work, including how a failed real estate mogul turned
TV reality star could win an election. The two-party system has established a
political paradigm. Carter, for instance, is accepted as being diametrically
opposed to Raegan. Yet it was Carter that began rampant deregulation in the
United States that Raegan continued with a vengeance and it was Carter that
propped up the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, that led to the Islamic
revolution in Iran. Clinton ramped up incarceration, slashed welfare, continued
sanctions on various countries that denied vital medical aid, including Iraq
and committed war crimes by bombarding civilian populations, including with
cluster bombs that are indiscriminate and usually lead to the fatalities of
children. By limiting electoral choice to two parties, the system sets the
paradigm of debate and political contestability.
The constitution provides
cadaverous civil and political rights that are eviscerated by economic and
cultural subject positioning. Millions of people are
legally disenfranchised because they have been convicted of a crime (and which
due to prevalence of plea bargains they may even be innocent of), millions more
are effectively disenfranchised by gerrymandering laws, including the old trick
of utilizing populations ineligible to vote (such as prisoners) to prop up
electorates (just as people forced into slavery were counted as 3/5 of a person
so that the South could get more electoral clout without having to give people
their freedom) which serve to disenfranchise the poor communities, and even
more so poor black communities. Thus, as Michelle Alexander pointed out, black
Americans were denied the vote because they were enslaved, then because of invidious
polling taxes and other determinatives that were designed as and effectively
served as instruments of disenfranchisement and now insidious seemingly
race-neutral conviction disqualifications and identification barriers. Same
emperor, different clothes.
Corporations have lobbied
Congress and achieved subsidies and deregulation. Unlimited amounts of money
have been poured into the coffers of electoral candidates that pursue policies
favourable to their backers. And there is the revolving door. How can our
regulators effectively regulate companies that they later want to be employed
by? These are impediments to effective regulation and have led to politicians
championing self-regulation, which is akin to having a doctor that doesn't
believe in medicine in care of your health.As the Constitution
only regulates the government's powers, the government has found a loophole in
utilizing private industry to achieve what it could not. Zubanoff illustrates
how Congressional impetus towards privacy restrictions was shunted by the
attack on September 11, 2001 when the U.S. government realized they could partner
with Silicon Valley to gain information that they otherwise were prevented from
constitutionally obtaining on their own, with the CIA funding several Silicon
Valley startups. This election cycle has concentrated on our privacy incursions
by Big Tech, yet the pandemic has lulled these for we have a newfound need for
Silicon Valley for contact tracing. Admittedly the genius contact tracing being
developed by Google and Apple appears to be respectful of privacy, not merely
because it will be opt-in but because it doesn't track an individual's
location. However, one may wonder whether this is a diversionary tactic, a
means to obtain political goodwill and/or another acculturation, for what
cannot be achieved in one fell swoop can be achieved incrementally – are we
frogs in the pot?
Our current rights' regime
is the result of a particular tension in the mode of production in which the
mercantile class realized its power and wanted to establish both the right of
property as paramount to protect its interests as well as dismantle the old
aristocratic system. Hence, the rights are civil and political, meant to curb
the power of the monarchy in the social and economic interest of the mercantile
class. Americans tout their revolution as one of democracy, but the intent of
the revolution was merely to establish a republic to protect the system of
unequal property, which in 1776, included the de jure ownership of
people. The founding fathers grappled with the problem of universal (male)
suffrage and repeated the arguments made famous by the Putney debates in 1647,
in which the Levellers argued for universal suffrage and Oliver Cromwell argued
against it, fearing it would lead to the dismantlement of private property. Why
would men, being in the majority, not dismantle a system that subjugates them? James
Madison theorized that factionalism, including religious differences, would
ensure that the lower classes would not attain a majority and he was right. In
the United States, a racial bridge between the white poor and the white upper
classes has allowed for a racial politics in which the black poor continue to
be more intensely subjugated while the white and black poor fail to see their respective
material interest in collective action (as the venerable Martin Luther King
Jnr. was bent on revealing when he was assassinated to become a martyr of civil
rights). This is simply the old adage of divide and conquer.
As Marx theorized, the granting
of abstract equal rights upon a socially stratified society entrenched
inequality in actuality. Property was withdrawn from the suffrage as it was
withdrawn from the political "public" sphere and into the realm of the
"private", economic sphere, which is a fetishization of space that we accept as
natural and informs our actions within them. The legal geography of the
international space mirrors its municipal realm and is structured to impose and
entrench subject positioning (listen to Rachel López's interview "Grit and Gravity in
International Law"). International law has its origins in colonization,
developing rules to justify the conquest and genocide of whole civilizations,
for silver and gold in South America, rubber in the Congo and oil in the Middle
East and demarcate the various exploits between the European powers
(establishing borders that had little to do with the cultural differentiation
of the subject communities and everything to do with the Europeans' demarcation
of resources between them). When the League was established, mandate systems
were put in place to continue colonization's claws and when independence
movements finally gained legal independence for their states, the international
sphere was bifurcated into "public" and "private" spaces to ensure that the
colonial powers continued to have control over their resources under a legal
logic in which the colonized people had made enforceable and purely commercial
contracts for corporations to come in and plunder them. Bondage continued under
new institutions of debt for development of economies in the image of the
colonizers, who were now termed "peace keepers" and "capacity builders" and
when the rules of trade, written by the powerful states to serve their own
interests (such as the protection of agricultural subsidies), resulted in
inadequate payments, Structural Adjustment Policies were imposed, denying
people basic necessities and contributing to civil unrest. The rule of law
on both the municipal and international law fronts, has been the rule of force
in masquerade.
Our space is socially
structured, reified by cultural abstractions and we and our desires, are
constructed within it. It is a distinct and continuing
human trait that we allow abstract concepts that we have created to inform and
govern our actions. People speak of the "market" for instance as if it has
a life of its own rather than simply being a politically defined space of
social relations that we have created and thus, have the power to change. This
fetish of projecting mystical direction upon what exists merely through our
continued interpellation of its supposed qualities provides the very structure
of our society with its abstract entities, institutions, and spaces. It is
through this mediation and the reification of our roles that we perpetuate
injustice against each other. The head of one country is entrusted only to
care for his or her own citizenry and in this protective role, implements
policies that imperil the citizens of other countries. The head of a
corporation must make decisions to improve shareholder value and employment and
environmental policies are structured in subservience to this aim. The jurisprudential
creature of the corporation is the mechanism par excellence of mediated relations
by which we have absolved its members of personal responsibility and codified
psychopathy as not only a good but a duty. What we would never do person
to person, we commit against each other when we reify ourselves into these
roles. The sin qua non of our maladies has been mediation or rather
depersonalization, "it's nothing personal, it's just business" has been a
pernicious philosophy that has mired millions in misery. The only way to a just
society is to have more personal and less mediated relations.
Sigmund Freud theorized that
the evils of World War I occurred because of civilization's repression of our
natural sexual and aggressive instincts. Yet the massacre was caused and
perpetuated by the power politics of an extended family that had come to own
all of Europe (leading to the British royals deciding that their anti-German
propaganda would be better served under the name Windsor, discarding their
Germanic name, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) and the mechanics of bureaucracy. An arms
race, a system of alliances, railway timetables for mobilization and military
theory, primarily German's Schlieffen plan from 1905 which dictated that in any
perceived threat of war by France and Russia it had to strike a fast blow at
France first through Belgium, as well detailed by the famous historian AJP
Taylor, is what led to the First World War, not the assassination of Arch Duke
Franz Ferdinand, which merely precipitated these events when the expiring
empire of Austria (its wane so wonderfully and comically detailed by Robert
Musil in the first part of his genius and unfinished magnum opus, The Man Without
Qualities) decided it had to invade Serbia for its perceived obstinance. The
men that were sent to the trenches were informed the war would be quick and
that they would be home by Christmas. Historians debate whether the apocryphal
soccer game between French and German soldiers in the no-man's land between
their trenches on Christmas Day, 1914, occurred. However, there are primary
sources attesting to fraternization, dairy entries and photographs of French
and German soldiers sharing their cigarettes. Perhaps the game stands as a good
allegory for a soldier's part in the war, conscripted, following the rules of
the game, to be momentarily in competition with the other team. Yet the horrors
of war change people. It is not surprising that this fraternization was early
in the war and that it did not occur later once the soldiers reified the
opposing side as their nemesis, whom they perceived imposed them to suffer
through their stygian circumstance, rather than their own Generals.
The horrors of World War II
and of the Shoah, are less horrors of brutality unleashed than
depersonalization, the absolute denial of people's humanity. "Evil"
doesn't aptly connote the surgical sadism employed by the Nazis for their
methodical murders, meticulously noting in precise detail the personal
belongings and characteristics of people that they killed as if it were a
mechanical exercise. People stripped of their identities, their
communities, their relationships, their belongings taken, even the gold in
their teeth - and meticulously calculated while identification as if they were
property and not people, inked into their veins. Crimes against humanity
were committed in service to mathematical formulas that were dictated by hands
that signed papers signaling souls as mere numbers. For instance, under Unternehmen
Strafgericht (Operation Punishment), in occupied Yugoslavia, the Nazi
formula for addressing a resistance in an attempt to quash further mutiny was
simple mathematics. Fifty people were to be killed for every German injury and
one hundred people killed for every German fatality in any Partisan action. In
the town of Kragujevac on Monday, October 21, 1941, the Nazi quota in exacting
punishment for Partisan persistence was 2,300 deaths. In the service of one
equation, having more people to murder in order to achieve it, the Nazis permanently
interrupted a school and shot everyone in the football field (the setting of
Desana Maskimovic's Krvava Bajka (Bloody Fable)). Hannah Arendt well
describes the "holes of oblivion" of Eichmann and his counterparts – he was an
opportunist, a paper pusher, a rule follower, one that that even dared to
defend his duty as a Kantian exercise when he participated in one of the most
egregious violations of Kant's categorical imperative. Torture and mass
murder were effectuated by bureaucracy and to its apparatchiks, banal work.
King Leopold II was also
merely performing business when he killed ten to fifteen million Congolese in
his holocaust which for him was merely the business of obtaining rubber. Villages
in the inaptly named "Congo Free State" were set rubber quotas that if unfulfilled
were tied to various listed punishments, including arson, rape and amputation. As
Mark Twain's brilliant soliloquy of the king exclaimed in his ironic apologia
"circumstances make this discipline necessary", that of increasing the King's
coffers. The rest was just business.
It was also business when
the CIA carried out a coup d'etat in Guatemala to overthrow the
democratically elected social democrat Jacobo Árbenz Guzman which began a civil
war ending in the dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas and successive brutal
regimes. In this case it was a problem of bananas. Facing rampant poverty and
illiteracy, Árbenz passed Decree 900 which expropriated large tracts of
uncultivated land as well as forcing a buy-out of the United Fruit Company's
banana fields. Árbenz's compensation matched the United Fruit Company's stated land
value, but in an effort to pay less tax to Guatemala, the company's accountants
had severely understated its land's value which provided the company a great
grievance. The United States purportedly was running on its "domino theory"
which later led this arsenal of democracy to invade Vietnam to prevent
democratic national elections under which the national hero against the French
colonialists, Uncle Ho, was fated to win, in order to support Diem's southern corrupt
dictatorship where he was attacking Buddhists (the self-immolation of one
Buddhist in protest being one of the more known photographs of the 20th
century), in usurping Arbenz. However, the Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles and his brother, CIA Director, Allen Dulles, both had ties to United
Fruit and had sat on its board. They took umbrage at this attack on their
bananas, and ensured that while successive dictators brutalized the locals and
committed genocide against the native Mayans, the bananas and the profits of
United Fruit, would remain unscathed.
It's just business when
Nestlé and Cargill buy chocolate from farms in Côte d'Ivoire that use forced
child labour (to learn more on this travesty and the court case, listen to
Gravity's interview "Chained to Chocolate: Child Slavery in the Cacao
Industry" with Terry Collingsworth under the Alien Tort Statute) It's just
business when farms throughout the United States use child labour, due to the
agricultural exception under the Fair Labor Standards Act (listen to Zama Neff's
interview, "Of Strawberries, Cigarettes and Sorrow: The Prevalence of
Children Laboring in Our Fields"), which, along with the exclusion of
domestic workers, was a holdout by Southern Democrats to retain the indenture
of black Americans under Jim Crow, as they were mostly employed in the
agricultural and domestic sectors (this racial animus makes this exclusion
unconstitutional).
"It's just business" may
seem like there is nothing personal, but the very decision to decide that one's
impact on other people and the planet is not something to concern oneself with,
is a decision one has personally made. If we can't justify our actions eye to
eye, then we should not be able to justify them on paper. To
paraphrase a quote attributed to Stalin, who directed more people die in World
War II than even Hitler, "one person dead is a tragedy, one million dead is a
statistic". It is depersonalization, not our animal instincts, that has mired
us in misery and the path out is more personal relations. The paper is signed
and the order is executed by its working hands, for as Dylan Thomas best
expressed, they lack "tears to flow". It is only hands that Dr. Seuss
illustrates to represent the Once-ler and his family that are enslaved to
"biggering" their Thneed fabrication, polluting the environment to such an
extent that they destroy the natural habitat of all the animals that live there
and in the end even destroy their own business, for they cut down every single
one of the Truffula trees- claiming all the while to the Lorax that it's not
personal, just business – and business needs to "bigger". All but profit have
become mere externalities, which is a severely misanthropic (whether realized
or not) and myopic perspective.
Hence, while there is much
criticism of our society as too focused on the individual and not enough on
society, it appears the exact opposite is true. The
etymology of "individual" is instructive as it comes from the Latin individuus
meaning "indivisible". We are geared towards continuous divisions of ourselves
as we dissect ourselves into diverse roles that we then distance from in order
to deflect accountability. We are "divuduals", not merely because we are
meticulously monitored and modulated, but perpetually parceled. Progressive
politics is thus not merely an exercise in creating common spaces between the
"self" and the "other" but the nurturing of an internal holistic and
indivisible space in which we face the "other" in ourselves.
Depersonalization is what
fuels and entrenches the structural violence in our societies which effects are
no different than physical violence. In David Graeber's view, structural
violence should be understood not as the effects of exploitation but of the
constant, insidious and subdued- but nevertheless very real- threat of physical
violence. Take the issue of consent with respect to the police
asking to inspect your backpack (and concomitantly ponder that over-policed
neighbourhoods are overwhelmingly working class black neighbourhoods where this
is a common occurrence). If you refuse consent, you fortify the police's
suspicion and this may lead to the use of physical force upon you – what we
understand as violence. If you provide consent, then you have abdicated your
Fourth Amendment right from unreasonable searches and seizures and cannot
contest the search. Yet the consent was provided under the threat of physical
force, which in reality is no consent at all but is not recognized as such
legally. On the international plane, self-determination and democracy are
allowed so long as the decolonized don't ungraciously vote for leaders that
will put these policies into effect but simply continue their subjugation in
different fashion under a different cloth. Just ask Patrice Lumumba or Salvador
Guillermo Allende Gossens, two amongst many leaders that put their people in
front of Western corporations' coffers. Of course, you can't, because they were
assassinated precisely to be silenced, well before their time.
Graeber also analyzed how
the abstract quality of structural violence allows for a diffusion of
accountability. Mediation is the sin qua non of diffusing
accountability, which in turn allows for the ultimate rejection of
responsibility. The etymology of the word "bureaucracy" is
instructive. It is the Anglicization of the French bureaucratie which
literally translates to office power or rather table power, bureau being
the French word for "office" as the bureau was the office desk, with
drawers (with the term then also used for a dresser) and the French suffix in
turn developed from the ancient Greek suffix kratia, in turn developed
from the ancient Greek kratos (kράτος), meaning power. There is no
humanity in bureaucracy which seeks merely to compartmentalize complex
contextualities into conforming schematics. You are but a file to be placed in
the appropriate drawer in the desk. This process effects a dual dehumanization,
both of the person governed, who becomes a mere statistic as well as the person
at the desk who is so obliterated by their environment that they are reduced to
a desk, the carcass of what was once a living being. This reduction of
humanity to mere equations is being escalated by the imposition of supposedly
neutral algorithms that however will serve only to entrench and fortify
existing power structures by perpetuating systemic and institutional prejudices
via, for instance, selection bias producing confirmation bias and a
consequent feedback loop. In predictive policing, for instance, this merely
results in the over-policing of already over-policed communities. The seeming
neutrality of the algorithm combined with its lack of transparency, as it is
owned by private entities that secure their profits through the protection of
their trade secrets, further diffuses accountability – the algorithm has
calculated – emboldening our current power structures in what Cathy O'Neil has
termed "weapons of math destruction" (for how this exacerbates discriminatory
policing listen to the interview with Kristian Lum and William Isaac "Bytes
on the Beat: How Predictive Analytics Amplifies Discriminatory Police Practices").
Garry Kasparov, the grand
chess master that lost to Deep Blue on May 11, 1997, once quipped that
automation should be hardly a surprise because we have been training people to
work as machines and machines are better at being machines than humans. Automation
exacerbates our mediated affairs. It also allows for unprecedented surveillance;
a Panopticon such that Jeremy Bentham, and even the NKVD and the Stasi could
only marvel at. Private entities and in the turn the government have access
to our location, the news we read, the products we buy, the public image we
display on various sites to our friends and acquaintances, the private messages
we send our friends and family, our family videos and photos and even data that
we do not know about, including our heart rate. Numerous households have
invited Google or Amazon to their homes to be able to be privy to their most
intimate details for the sake of convenience. We are told that these devices
only "switch" on if they hear you call their name, but they must be listening
in the first place- to everything- to be able to be activated. The other eve,
in discussing the death of privacy with my husband and the possibility of Trump
utilizing the pandemic to create chaos and a power vacuum to usurp power, Siri
woke up and said "I couldn't hear you quite clearly. Can you repeat that?" Which
made us pause, even though Apple products putatively retain your information on
their devices only. "Smart" appliances certainly have their positive effects, for
instance, a device measuring your heart rate can discern when you are about to
have a stroke or heart attack before you are consciously aware of it and
perhaps may even call the ambulance so that you can get timely care at the
hospital. However, the more information you give up about yourself and the more
your outsource your decisions, for instance, a "smart" fridge which can tell
you when you are running out of necessities, or instantly calculating and
supplementing inventory – perhaps doing so from businesses which are co-owned
by the same company – the more information you give these parties for
persuading you to buy more from them.
First, our choices are
confined, then they are defined. In using more and more
devices for "convenience" to calculate and implement what we could easily do,
we are losing our ability to do these tasks. A recent study by Amir-Homayoun
Javadi has shown that utilizing GPS rather than our own spatial memory is
resulting in a decreased hippocampus, which use may be protective against
Alzheimer's disease. Anyone who has spoken another language knows that your
brain continually needs to train, if you don't use it, you lose it and a
language you were once fluent in, not spoken for years may lead to a sputter
and smatter of sentences that you can only cringe at. Simply put, we are
exchanging intelligence for convenience and in the end that is hardly
convenient and entrenches obedience.
This prison with its bars of
bytes and bits is one that we have putatively consented to in the United States
(of course in some states the government openly surveilles its population and
uses the surveillance as a means to imprison human rights activists, listen to
Scott Gilmore's interview "Bytes With Teeth: the Digital Dangers of
Repression and Resistance"). Yet I haven't met one human, including
lawyers, that have actually read the terms of privacy for the various sites and
applications they use. After all, everyone can discern these are unilateral
agreements and that there is no ability to negotiate its terms (so much so for the
fact that contracts are meant to be a meeting of the minds). There is always
the choice of not using a service, but the time saving factor for many services
– a created need from the fact that the vast majority of people work long hours
– tends to be primary. We are also being acculturated to accept constant
surveillance as something inevitable and therefore something that cannot be
changed nor questioned. Zubanoff well analyzes how when acculturation has not
worked as fast as companies have liked, they have turned to work uses, where
employees are forced to utilize these "convenient" surveillance devices that
once accepted as routine in the workforce can mission creep into the domestic
realm. Acculturation also needs to target the young. In watching one of my
kids' favourite shows, Space Racers, I was initially shocked to watch a
scene in which the computer informs one of the main characters that she is
always listening to them, even during their "private" and "embarrassing"
moments and that the character's response was but a shrug of acknowledgement – of
course that's the way things are. It couldn't be any other way. When
discussing the incursion of our privacy, I've noticed that many of my friends
that justify having Alexa/Echo or Google Home devices do so in exactly the same
way, bringing up two reasons, one of convenience, they work hard and manage
multiple children. Anything that makes life easier is accepted. Second, they
point out they have nothing to hide. This justification is said without a hint
of insinuation that anybody that chooses not have a surveillance device in
their home has something to hide, but I wonder at what point this is going to
change and it's going to appear at least a little suspect that you have chosen
not to open up your home, your car and the internal workings of your body to
constant surveillance. In such a state, there is no need for a secret
police, because we police ourselves, becoming self-correcting subjects
conforming to the norm, including using and buying surveillance devices to show
we are not a threat and have nothing to hide.
Michel Foucault paraphrased Carl
von Clausewitz when he stated "society is the continuation of war by other
means" understanding that power is not static or spatial but a relation between
people that is inherently fluid and productive. Foucault
analyzed how power creates resistance, for it creates the desire for the ruled
to rebel against their rulers. It also renders the relationship inherently vulnerable
and creates an anxiety in power for at any moment, subjects may rebel. This in
turn produces a need to discipline the subjects of power, including through demarcation,
surveillance and the production of desire, to render them docile and
rationalize their subjugation.
Frantz Fanon and Wendy Brown
have analyzed how the historically and politically contingent production of inherently
referential, reflexive and hierarchical identities entrenches the social
architecture by creating a divisive polity, in which people's non-material
interests are in competition preventing what has been termed "class
consciousness" but can simply be termed common interest. Subjects
perceive their positioning to be due to identity which produces a desire to
overcome this injury that reinforces subject positioning. For instance, Brown
wrote that the struggle for marriage equality entrenched the institution of
marriage. Fanon wrote how the subject of race, which is a social construction
(think of the fluidity of the racial class "white" which for instance, did not
include the Irish, until relatively recently), desires to overcome this subjugation
and can thereby become the perfect subject of capital. However, merely
because identities are social constructions and thus are a product of our
social relations, does not mean that they do not operate over social relations.
Rather, identities are both produced by and produce social relations to
demarcate and divide the polity. They have real consequences. Recently, in
California, a police officer beat a fourteen-year-old boy. The police officer
was white, the boy was black. This would be abhorrent whatever the race of the
police officer and the boy, yet we don't hear of black police officers
physically assaulting young white boys and we hear a barrage of brutality in
which white police officers beat and murder black people, including children. Across
the country, in Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five year old young man was
murdered by two strangers while out on a jog. The gun-toting strangers are
white, Ahmaud, black, and it appears his murderers assumed that a young black
man running through the nieghbourhood must have been running because he
committed crimes that they had apparently heard occurred in the area and took
it upon themselves to detain him. Such a deplorable assumption and its worse
consequence, the cold-blooded murder of a young man, evince how the social
construction of race and its consequent subject positioning continues to
pervade and pervert the American polity.
Subjugation occurs in a
multi-faceted form in which each socially constructed identity imposed upon a
person intersects and exacerbates the others, what Kimberlé Crenshaw termed
"complexities of compoundness". In order to adequately
address and redress the consequences of discrimination in our society, we must understand
and confront structural intersectionality. Take the issue of sex
discrimination. All women may experience sex discrimination in its numerous
forms but where and how they are discriminated and the consequences of that
discrimination operate differently and entrench the hierarchies within the
"female" subject. Take for example, the issue of abortion. If we viewed this
through the sexism lens alone, as a means for men to control the bodies of
women, we fail to address the fact that these restrictions, including the
targeted restrictions of abortion providers, operate to effectively deny these
to poor women. Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1971) was unfortunately decided
as a matter or privacy, rather than equality, allowing for the Hyde amendment to
be quickly inserted to prevent federal funding for Medicaid for abortions. This
restriction was relaxed slightly in 1994 to allow for abortions on Medicaid
when the procedure is immediately necessary to save the mother's life or in the
event of the pregnancy resulting from incest or rape. Hence, access to a
constitutional right depends on one's economic stance. It is also important to
note that women denied under the Hyde amendment are disproportionately black
(30% of Medicaid enrollees) and Latina (24% of Medicaid enrollees). Abortion,
thus, cannot be effectively analyzed and redressed without analyzing the
structural intersectionality of class and race.
Abortion is not a sui
generis example, but rather, an example of the normal operations of the
intersectional operation of the structures of subjugation. The effects of the
pandemic fall within this paradigm, disproportionally affecting women of colour,
with black and Latine (I agree with Terry Blas this is a much better gender-neutral
neologism than the lingual ligature of "Latinx") women both due to their race
and ethnicity.
Communities of colour have a
higher incidence of infection and mortality, including due to higher rates of
employment in "essential services" and pre-existing health disparities,
including the higher incidence of chronic conditions and decreased access to
healthcare. Black and Latine communities are also disproportionally being
policed under the lockdown. A recent report in ProPublica stated that in New
York City, 68% people arrested have been black but black people only make up
24.3% of the population. The article quoted the Brooklyn DA's released
statistics of arrests through May 4 for violation of the lockdown, as published
by ProPublica, and out of 40 people arrested, 35 were black, 4 were defined as Hispanic
and 1 was white. This is not an isolated example but is the norm. For instance,
in Toledo, Ohio, where black people comprise 27% of the population, they
comprised 78% of arrests – but not one white armed protestor has been arrested.
Hence, the effects of the virus, the lockdown and the policing of the lockdown
disproportionally affect communities of colour.
Women, and in turn women of
colour, disproportionally work in health care and social services, including
childcare, which have been deemed essential industries and which therefore
impose a higher risk of exposure to the virus, with women of colour
disproportionally represented comprising 30.3% of workers. Women, and in turn
women of colour, disproportionally worked in affected industries and lost their
employment – women account for 53.8% of workers in food services and
accommodation industries and women of colour are disproportionally represented
comprising 24.3% of the workforce. The increased risk of exposure to the virus
and its economic effects is compounded by the economic and familial situation
of women of colour who are disproportionally the breadwinners of their families,
with 67.5% of black women being the primary earner in their families and 41.4%
of Latinas according to data analyzed by the Center for Progress from the U.S.
Census Bureau of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This financial vulnerability
is compounded by the fact that women of colour earn the lowest wages and have
the lowest amount of savings and net worth. School closures have in turn
compounded this as women are forced to home school or find childcare while
somehow maintaining their family's income. Additionally, with millions of out
of work and looking for employment post-pandemic and decreased jobs on the
market, women of colour may face discrimination in finding new employment.
Intersectional redress is
thus a necessity. However, it is not sufficient. While
classical Marxist theory has lost much its utility (including because there is
more of a heterotopia respecting class, with people able to be both "upper" and
"working" class, both the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time), its
resounding impact and continued relevance is the understanding that the mode of
economic relations is the base of a society and that the superstructure, what
we may term our law, culture, religion and politics, is subject to service of
the base. Put simply, we cannot have non-exploitative social relations if
labour relations continue to be exploitative for it is the demands of the
latter that produce the demarcations of social division and hierarchy. Identity
as a polarizing and positioning classification can be seen by consistency in
the boundaries speaking to a history of subjugation or dominance. Why
should not my interest in abstract art and absurdist literature not demarcate
my identity rather than my race, ethnicity, sex, gender and sexual orientation?
Why should not someone's proclivity to gymnastics be their identity? This is
because "identity" says little about the individual compared to what it
speaks socially – to be identified and compartmentalized in the pecking order.
Stavros Stavrides in his
thoughtful book The City of Thresholds points out that identities, which
express, diffract and conceal social relations must of necessity require
distance. The "other" is necessarily foreign. Familiarity breeds intimacy and
denies the Manichean distinction between the "self" and the "other". Yet Stavrides
warns that the dissolution of the "other" can lead to homogeneity, with the
"other" being subsumed into the prior dominant demarcation. Intimacy warrants
some space. The etymology of "familiarity" is instructive on this point,
for it derives from the Latin familia meaning the household, which is in
turn derived from the Latin famulus, meaning servant. A homogenous
culture will necessarily be stunted and less rich of human experience and may
deny individual growth. We need to creative spaces of conversation which allows
us to develop concomitantly as individuals and as a community.
For years, I've been
infatuated, thanks in no small part to the legendary Goran Bregović (whom I
have introduced to my various neighbours in gradients of gratitude and grimace)
with "Bella Ciao" la celebre canzone della resistenza. Perhaps it
has a visceral allure due to my childhood indoctrination in which I would sing
songs against fascism in preschool, smrt fašizmu/I sloboda narodu death
to fascim/freedom to the people. Perhaps because unlike the more lugubrious
partisan songs, such as "Non ti recordi mamma quella notte", beautiful
in their melodies and in the truth of their tragedies, it has an easily
accessible and energized beat. A bandiera for diverse progressive
movements. There are versions in multiple languages, including by Chia Madani
and even recently in English by the legendary Tom Waits. Its origins are
virulently disputed by ethnomusicologists, with some theorizing it was a
post-war construct. Whatever its origins, it has a lasting enchantment over the
progressive movement and continues to be current, from the Kurdish struggle to
the Movimento delle Sardine in Emilia-Romagna. One origin theory,
whatever its veracity, is instructive. This theory is that the partigiani
utilized a song composed by female labourers in the rice fields. Whatever the
chronology and association of the two songs, one is a song by a partigiano, the
other is a song delle mondine– one against fascism, the other against
back-breaking, soul-stifling and little paid rice weeding women, whom dealt
with the dual persecution of being poor and female. The themes of the songs are
merely gradients on a plane, for fascism is capitalism on steroids, with both
denying people's humanity in the service of their interest.
Fascism has
been a word that has come back in vogue, yet historians have not been able to
construct a firm ideology. The Axis powers all had their distinct versions of
fascist regimes and the term fascismo was constructed by Mussolini, who
was at first putatively a socialist and the editor of Avanti! but ever a
political opportunist, to denote the fasces from Ancient Rome. It
originates from the Latin fascis, meaning "bundle" for the bundle of
sticks and axe that was a metonym to denote the power of the Roman magistrates
who just like most things that we perceive as quintessentially Roman was taken
from somewhere else (even the Romans realize this for in their mythology, their
father is a Trojan and their mother is a Latin), in this case purportedly from
the Etruscans. The only things fascism in all its variants has in common are
the political use of unmasked force, consequent jingoist foreign policy and
production on steroids. Before its darkness was revealed by Italian planes
gassing villages in Ethiopia, people would marvel that trains in Italy ran on
time. People were expected not to question and to labour. "Work shall set you
free" seems like a fitting slogan for the ills of capitalism and its
discontents. It is also the slogan that marked the entrance to Auschwitz and
other concentration camps, Arbeit Macht Frei. Capitalism is fascism
in masquerade and fascism is simply capitalism donning a black shirt and
taking out the club.
Fascism feeds off and
requires social and economic rest which is a prerequisite for it in order to
reconstruct social values to its form. Throughout history people have been
drawn to "extreme" politics during extreme economic turmoil. In
July 1932, for instance, hyper-inflation and its dire consequences led to the
Nazi and the Communist parties having the most votes in the Weimar election, (with
the Nazis, albeit having more votes, unable to form a majority via the election
alone). The confusion and disturbance we are experiencing now is rife for
such elements – and this is not a perversion of capitalism but its natural,
unimpeded progression. Fascism still requires the consent of the majority –
through active or silent complicity. Will the pandemic be our Reichstag fire?
It is instructive to note
that capitalism has always been a pejorative word to criticize
liberal-bourgeois economic relations (its proponents tend to use terms such as
"free market economics" which readily obfuscates the fact that markets are
constructed spaces and not a natural environment) and presupposes a system of
exploitation in which the few enjoy wealth that creates more wealth on the
labour of others, who are denied the means to enjoy the wealth they produce and
is geared towards creating artificial demand for recursive production. The
etymology is from the Latin capitalis, meaning head and later property,
with the French version being chatel and in English becoming "chattel",
which was used to denote personal property, including slaves. The United
States, the quintessential capitalist state, became an imperial power due both
to its aggression outside its borders as well as its oppression of people
within its borders, including its profit from cotton from the labour of generations
of people enslaved and then indentured, even under a constitution which paraded
that all men were free and equal. Much has been written on the fact that de
jure emancipation was eviscerated by the express exception of criminal
conviction in the Thirteenth Amendment. People convicted of even petty crimes
could not afford the array of fines that were levied on them for utilizing the
justice system, were sentenced to imprisonment and leased out for hard labour
to corporations, including to work in mines. The end of slavery brought about
mass incarceration. Today, people are jailed under penal codes that deny bail
without payment of a fee and that impose punishment as either a fine to be paid
or imprisonment, which imprisons those that cannot pay. Same emperor, different
clothes.
Yet there is also something
else striking expressed in the Thirteenth Amendment. It expressly excepts "voluntary
servitude". Nobody can be compelled to work. Yet, there is no need to compel
somebody to do something by law that they are forced to do in practice. People
that received de jure emancipation in the South had to eat and freedom
didn't come with bread, let alone forty acres and a mule. As equals before the
law, the emancipated slaves owning nothing and their former plantation-owning masters,
entered into contracts of
"voluntary servitude". These sharecropping contracts were for a pittance and
allowed the free and equal labourer to take an advance which he was compelled
to do under misfortunates of weather to survive which mired people in debt to
their former "owners" and was thus no different in practice than slavery. The
Anti-Peonage Act of 1867, passed under the enforcement power of the Thirteenth
Amendment, rightly prohibited this vassalage. However, Southern states which
economies were dependent on this cheap labour found new creative loopholes,
including "criminal sureties" in which black men were cited for petty crimes
the fines for which their employers paid and for which they had to work to pay
off the debt or be subject to yet another criminal penalty – perpetuating a
cycle of servitude. In U.S. v. Reynolds 235 U.S. 133 (1914) the Supreme
Court rightly held that these criminal surety contracts are a form of debt
peonage violated the Anti-Peonage Act of 1867 and the Thirteenth Amendment. The
crux of the question presented according to Justice Day, who wrote the majority
opinion, was that the labour was performed "under such coercion as to
become a compulsory service" [emphasis mine]. And herein lies the
quintessential contradiction in our system. The law constantly has to walk
a tightrope between on the one hand recognizing and ameliorating the worst
effects of the contextual coercion of our economic system that subverts and
perverts our laws in practice and concomitantly deny that coercion is a
visceral and inextricable part of our economic system. For "voluntary
servitude" is oxymoronic. This inherent contradiction is what props up our
economic system in which people work to survive by menial labour, expose
themselves to pathogens and carcinogens and take out usurious pay-day loans. It's
also why there's a constant battle over the counters of coercion in the courts.
Debt bondage was recognized as unconstitutional, but are not payday loans a
form of debt peonage? The counters of coercion respecting the provision of
capital and imposition of debt can be tested but never invalidated in court.
Debt bondage is unconstitutional yet criminal fines, cash bonds system and
imprisonment for contempt of court abound. People that can't pay their
insurmountable pay-day loans or medical debts can be imprisoned for not showing
up to court for breaching their obligations and as these are civil charges, do
not have the right to representation under the 6th Amendment.
The inherent contradiction
between liberal democracy and capitalism and its continuing tension is evinced
by self-effacing clauses present in the constitutions of liberal democracies in
which exigent circumstances that threaten the social order allow for derogation
of citizens' rights.
While in liberal theory, the
raison d'etre of the state is the mediation of its citizens' rights and
the citizenry is sovereign, the inherent derogation clauses in times of
emergency, which include public rebellion, evidences that the true power of
this polity lies not in the public, but in those who decide the exception. Gorgio
Agamen has well detailed and analyzed that all human rights instruments and
historically, the constitutions of all liberal democracies, contain express
derogation and deviation clauses in their constitutions in times of emergency
and have been repeatedly enacted such that the exception has become part of the
normal political paradigm. The most notorious example is Article 48 of the
Weimar Constitution which allowed Hitler, utilizing the Reichstag fire to label
his main opposition, the Communist Party, as a national security threat to
enact the Enabling Act and with it to dismantle the Reichstag and assume
dictatorial power. International and regional human rights instruments, with
the sole of exception of the African Charter (which however expressly allows
for limitations of rights to such an extent that the absence of derogation is
moot) expressly include derogation in times of proclaimed public emergency
which threaten the state. Article 4 of the International Covenant of Civil and
Political Rights allows for derogation as well as expressly limits the
derogation outlining numerous non-derogable rights under Article 4 (2). In a
public emergency the government may not arbitrarily deprive people of their
life, torture them, enslave them, imprison them for failure to pay contractual
obligations, remove their right of recognition before the law and prohibit the
right of thought, conscience and religion. The latter right however, under Article
18, is already sufficiently limited to render its non-derogation moot, for the
right to thought or faith are under Article 18 (3) limited by the law and as
necessary to "protect public safety, order, health or morals or the fundamental
rights and freedoms of others", which necessarily would be further limited in a
state of public emergency. Despite the politics of Carl Schmitt, who utilized
his legal theories as an apologia for the Nazi state and died unrepentant, his analysis
that sovereignty lies in the ability to decide the exception, is infallible. The
state of exception allowing for the decimation and derogation of rights is
decided by the state on behalf of its compelling interest to continue its rule.
Agamen's historical detail evinces that the state of exception, also termed as
an emergency decree or the state of siege, has been readily utilized by
governments to suspend liberties in times of both war and economic crisis. The
inherent and express derogations in liberal constitutions evince that there is
no effective sovereignty by the people under political systems that deny the
people the power to participate in government. When those in power equate their
political preservation in the state interest, l'état c'est moi, they
utilize the state of exception to indefinitely preserve their power.
While most people do not
think that the Queen is in practice wielding power over her dominions, the
constitutions of the Commonwealth provide for reserve royal power. This "royal
prerogative" which is of nebulous expanse, is the sovereign power that can be
utilized by the Commonwealth to wield emergency powers and even suspend
parliament and call for elections to suspend a troublemaking Prime Minister, as
was the case of Australian Prime Minister's Gough Whitlam's demise in 1975. The
Republic of the United States of America hardly fares better. The very first
article of the United States Constitution expressly suspends habeas corpus in
cases of "rebellion" or "invasion". Moreover, and perhaps more surreptitiously,
is the terming of what should be an inalienable right as a "privilege" – it is
but a definition, but in law, definition is everything. American jurisprudence has
been a history of the encroachment of the executive on Montesquieu's balance of
power between the three government arms, including with the development of the
political question doctrine in which certain decisions of national security and
foreign policy are deemed to be non-justiciable (because one can never
challenge executive discretion, only executive power). National security has
been utilized to curb constitutional rights, including the First Amendment's
right to free association which is the sin qua non of the polity. Widespread
limitations on the Communist Party during the Cold War continue, including
preventing naturalization of Communist Party members (those that have been
naturalized may remember that during their green card and naturalization
interviews they were asked whether they are or were members of the Communist
Party) and state laws, such as in California, where joining the Communist Party
subjects one to dismissal from state employment. In United States v.
Robel, 389 U.S. 258 (1967), in which the Supreme Court affirmed the
dismissal of an indictment on First Amendment grounds, Chief Justice Warren
stated that the government could not use its war power to indiscriminately
penalize all forms of association with groups linked to Communist "action" and
stated that it would be "ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction
the subversion of…freedom of association- which makes the defense of the nation
worthwhile". In his dissent in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214
(1944), which dealt with an American born citizen of Japanese ancestry who
refused to leave his residence in San Leandro and go to an internment camp,
Justice Jackson, who would later prosecute the Nuremberg defendants, noted that
the judiciary's rationalization of a military order during an emergency as
conforming to the Constitution "for all time has validated the principle"
behind the order, in that instance, outward racial discrimination. Jackson
warned "the principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand
of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.
Every repetition imbeds {sic} that principle more deeply in our law and
thinking and expands it to new purposes". U.S. Presidents from Abraham Lincoln
during the Civil War, to Woodrow Wilson in World War I, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
during World War II and the Great Depression to George W. Bush have
commandeered their authority as the Commander in Chief to utilize war powers
and abrogate rights. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, which as Gore Vidal well pointed
out that time, was hardly written in the few weeks after the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001 but was laying in waiting for an opportune moment, was
passed into law- with none of our representatives having read it- as an
exception during "the war against terror". Except that such an amorphous enemy
allows for its ready continuation. While set to expire on December 31, 2005, it
is still law. It has become normalized.
The pandemic is a public
emergency and an opportune time for further abrogation of our rights under
emergency decrees that once accepted may become the new norm. The plenary
police power of states is above all, the power to protect public health and
impose quarantine. Foucault beings his chapter on Panopticism relating the
confinement of a plague- stricken town, the surveillance and confinement of its
citizens the par excellence of disciplinary government. In these exigent
circumstances, most of us understand and agree to greater government control to
protect the public's health. Yet while exigent circumstances may warrant
emergency powers, we run the risk of these emergency powers being normalized.
Rights once given up are harder to regain. We adjust to the new normal and
habituate to horror. My cousin joked that we could be like the protagonists of
Kusterica's masterpiece Underground, being told the virus or some other
virus is out there for years to come, warranting our continued social
distancing and in some states, martial law.
We are already seeing how
the pandemic is providing opportunists to push through and cement their
puissance. Hungary's Viktor Orban swiftly cemented his rule by emergency decree
to remain undisturbed as long as the pandemic continues, which it appears will
continue as long as he is of the opinion it does. There will be no elections
and "fake news", for instance, one may suppose an article that the pandemic has
ended and thus his plenary powers, will be punishable by 5 years' imprisonment.
The Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte also wider powers to attack people spreading
"fake news" over a country under lockdown and people seemingly violating the
lockdown are shot in the street. COVID-19 is another elixir for the modern
Lazarus, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career somehow never dies. Even
amongst a failed election and corruption charges, he nevertheless continues to
be Prime Minister under what Haaretz has described as an "alliance of
scoundrels" that seek to pervert Israeli democracy (does anyone really see
Netanyahu rotating the office to Benny Gantz in 18 months?). Netanyahu utilized
the pandemic to shut down the economy and all non-essential court proceedings
on the cusp of his criminal trial, which included his own corruption trial,
which is now scheduled for May 24, but may be delayed again. Israeli Supreme
Court did not take lightly Netanyahu's deployment of the ISA, or Shin Bet, the
Israeli intelligence agency for surveillance of the population for contact
tracing and ordered the government to cease surveillance on April 30 but as
surveillance of the population also entrenches Netanyahu's power, it is
unlikely this will in actuality stop and that legislation will be enacted to
let it continue in conformity with a legal loophole in the court order. Narendra
Modi, the Prime Minister of India and the former Chief Minister of Gujarat, who
in 2002 stood by heinous unspeakable crimes perpetuated against the Muslim
community, notified the people of India at 8 pm on March 24 that a strict
lockdown would go into effect at midnight. This caught millions of migrant
workers with no shelter in the cities with no choice but to walk home, many
brutalized by the police and some stopped from entering their home states due
to border shutdowns. While the federal and state governments have vociferously
denied this claim, there are reports that a government hospital in Ahmedabad,
Gujarat, is segregating Muslim and Hindu patients while there is rampant vilification
of Muslims, with "CoronaJihad" trending on Twitter, a boycott of Muslim food
stalls in Uttar Pradesh with a militant Hindu group, the RSS, strong-arming
Hindu sellers to hoist a saffron flag to be easily identifiable and violent
attacks on Muslims, under the guise of causing and spreading the virus in
India.
In the United States, the
Clown in Chief, has declared numerous times he is a "war time" President and
that we are waging war against the virus. Our kakistocractic government is commandeering
the President's Commander in Chief authority and his non-justiciable powers
that are deemed "political" and not subject to judicial review. In late March
of this year, the Justice Department was already exploring the
constitutionality of deeming the virus an "invasion" to allow the suspension of
the writ of habeas corpus. One wonders whether the attacks on the
accuracy of mail-in voting (which 13 states including California allow
routinely with no necessity for an excuse) and the concomitant decimation of
USPS (which relies on its sales to stay afloat and has not received government
funding in years) are connected in an effort to delegitimize the results
fearing Biden's victory. Or perhaps the intent is to delay the election –
something only Congress can do- ostensibly to protect the public health in an
effort to create utter chaos? It would be catastrophic because whatever the
result, there is no clear constitutional answer which would delegitimize the
acting government, perhaps paralyze it and such internecine rivalries may in
turn further delay holding elections – or worse.
Under Article II Section 1
Clause 6 the U.S. Constitution allows Congress to make laws regarding succession
in the event that the President and Vice President cannot serve. The current
law in effect is the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 which provides for the
Speaker of the House to act as President. However, particularly in our
politically polarized environment, Nancy Pelosi has two issues. The first is
that many constitutional scholars argue that the Presidential Succession Act is
unconstitutional. There are numerous arguments as to why, including that it
violates the incompatibility clause under Article I, Section 6, paragraph 2,
clause 2 which prohibits a person from simultaneously holding offices in both
the executive and legislative branches. There is also the argument that the
succession clause which allows for Congress to make laws for an "officer" only
means a person holding an office of the executive branch (the prior Succession
Act of 1886 did just that), for instance, the Secretary of State. The other
issue Nancy Pelosi will have is that if there is no election, she will not be
an officer at all as her term expires at noon on January 3, 2021 (this is
however unlikely to occur as California has routine mail voting, albeit perhaps
she will not be elected). So while one can argue that Nancy will not be in
breach of the incompatibility clause, her appointment would be in breach of the
succession clause as she will not be an officer. Setting aside issues with the
incompatibility clause, the next person in line would be the president pro
tempore of the Senate, currently held by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley from
Iowa who is not up for reelection. However, the post is chosen by Senators and
has customarily been the most senior person (in terms of their senate posts) in
the majority party. More Republican senators are up for election this year than
Democratic senators, which may result in Timothy Leahy, a Democrat from
Vermont, being the current senate president pro tempore emeritus (a recent
ceremonial position of the most senior member of the minority party having
previously been a president pro tempore) – which of course, is subject to
legitimacy arguments on numerous levels. If the election is not delayed, but
only some states vote, neither Biden nor Trump may achieve sufficient votes in
the electoral college or they may, but the other side will protest the
legitimacy due to the fact that not all states participated. The Supreme Court
would again have to resolve the legality as it did in Bush v. Gore 531
U.S. 98 (2000) but in this more polarized environment, one wonders whether its
decision will be accepted as legitimate or may lead to perilous polarizing
politics. We are nearing what may be in plain terms, a constitutional
clusterfuck.
Chaos and calamity provide
fertile ground for seismic social shifts. Naomi Klein's seminal work on the
shock doctrine years ago is instructive. When there is collective shock,
whether from a natural disaster or war, companies have used this distraction
for massive privatization and reallocation projects. Pandemics are the perfect
disaster for such pernicious policies. Not only are we distracted,
struggling whether financially or compelled to work as an essential worker with
no protection and wondering whether showing up to work to survive is a death
sentence or even balancing being a full-time employee and parent at home, but
we are forbidden to associate and protest.
The Big Grab is already
occurring. The CARES Act was purportedly meant to support small
businesses with less than five hundred employees but provided an exception for
restaurants and hotels (an industry in which the President has numerous assets),
which was readily utilized by large and public companies, for instance Ruth's
Chris Steakhouse and Shake Shack (which took and then under public pressure
returned $20 million and $10 million respectively). Without proper management
of loan applications to businesses that were struggling to stay afloat due to
the pandemic and could not find financing, numerous biotech companies for which
the pandemic is providing a catalyst for growth applied for and received what
may be essentially free public money money in order to grow their business,
rather than stay afloat and thereby decrease the pot for businesses in dire
need. Other profitable companies applied for "small business" payment
protection programs, such as the LA Lakers, that employs around 300 people and
received a $4.6 million loan (they returned this money after purportedly
discovering that the funds had run out). The second round of funding crashed
the system on Monday as nearly 30 million businesses applied for loans. If
anyone knows a small business, they would likely hear that they the owners have
spent hours trying to apply for loans and have received numerous emails
notifying them of the receipt of the application without receiving the
processing of their application and the required funds. Most small businesses
that are on the brink of bankruptcy require emergency injections in the tens of
thousands rather than the millions and needed these funds – yesterday. One
wonders whether processing loans through the SBA is a means to appear as if
something is being done, without actually doing what is needed. Surely there
was a more efficient method but then efficiency depends on your intent.
The economic rescue package
that purportedly is aimed to help businesses that have been impacted by the
current pandemic has snuck in large tax breaks, estimated at $179 billion, which
are not specifically aimed at the small businesses that are trying to survive
the crisis but large businesses, including the undoing of numerous limitations
in the tax breaks of 2017. Public Citizen and The Intercept has
documented how the lobbyists in D.C. are now lobbying to ensure that in a new
relief package the trade associations they work for are allowed payroll
protection, including lobbyists of the fossil fuels industry. In addition, the
Fed has announced a revamped financing program which would allow the fossil
fuels industry to borrow money at low rates and refinance their debts and thus
support an industry that we should be focused on supplanting. It is little
surprise that Ted Cruz, the Republican Senator from Texas (and the prior
Attorney General for the state who whilst in office thought it was wise to
spend state funds on litigating to prevent the sale of sex toys) has been
pushing this agenda.
While Trump vacillated over
using the Defense Production Act to produce personal protective equipment and
ventilators, he wasted no time in utilizing the Defense Production Act to keep
meat processing facilities open that were going to close because of outbreaks
in the workforce. Even worse, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
has issued non-binding guidelines for worker safety while informing the meat
processers that it will not penalize them for breaching occupational health and
safety regulations if they were breached because they were "not feasible". That
is an utter abdication of its role, following the Environmental Protection
Agency. The EPA's memo on March 26 notified the public and industry of its
retroactive policy effective from March 13, with respect to the its enforcement
discretion during the exigent circumstances of the pandemic, including
under-staffing of its regulated entities. The EPA considers the current
pandemic a force majeure and will not penalize entities for failure to
provide integrity testing and compliance reporting if the failure was due to
documented under-staffing. The memo does not apply to court enforced consent
decrees but the EPA has stated that defendant entities should provide force
majeure notices and consequently will not oppose any such claim made by a
defendant for lack of compliance. This is not a carte blanche respecting
pollution, but the relaxation of standards may encourage entities to not comply
when they otherwise would have. A precautionary approach may have been a
lock-down of non-necessary industry. The most worrisome part of the memo
however is the lack of a definitive temporal period. While we do not know how
long the exigent circumstances will continue, clear time-lines for reviewing
the continued application of the policy rather than the establishment of a new
policy that will be in effect indefinitely until further notice was warranted
to ensure strict temporal and application limits. These indefinite exigent
policies can become the new normal – which would be calamitous.
California's Geologic and
Energy Management Division, which mandate is to protect public and
environmental health in its oversight of the oil, natural gas and geothermal
industries issued 24 permits for fracking on April 3, after Governor Newsom,
quietly, ended the moratorium on fracking in our state in early March.
A number of U.S. states, including
Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia are shamelessly
utilizing the pandemic to elevate their fight against women's reproductive
rights claiming the right to terminate is an "elective procedure". This
imperils the mental and physical health of women that are forced to seek later
term abortions. Unfortunately, the 5th Circuit has recently- and
wrongly- upheld the Texas ban (which applies to all chemical and procedural
abortions not necessary to immediately protect the life of the mother) (for
more information on abortion restrictions in the United States listen to the interview
"Gone With the Wind: Reproductive Rights in Retreat" with Jill E. Adams
and Melissa Mikesell).
Perhaps one of the worst
examples of utilizing the distraction of the pandemic has been by Alberta's
Premier, Jason Kenney, the former Immigration Minister under the Harper
government, to pass legislative amendments to deregulate the oil and gas
industry. Reporting and monitoring requirements have been suspended, workers in
the industry have been deemed "essential" and new and publicly disfavoured
pipelines are being constructed. Kenney has been so brazen to even use Federal
money meant for pandemic relief to subsidize the industry, including an
investment of $1.5 billion in the Keystone XL pipeline, which is environmentally
disastrous (for more information on the Alberta tar sands and its impact on the
environment and indigenous communities, listen to the interview with Robert
Janes and Karey Brooks, "A Crude Affair in Canada: The Alberta Tar Sands and
First Nations").
The most foretelling,
however, may be Andrew Cuomo's big power grab in New York. Cuomo, who acted too
late in New York but due to Trump's farcical "leadership" has witnessed his
popularity rise even for calls for him to run for President, utilized the
pandemic to hold the New York Senate hostage by declaring he would shut the
government down, including the Department of Health, if his budget on back-room
deals was not approved. The new budget signed into law by Cuomo on April 3
provides Cuomo power to slash the budget from once a year to any time during
the year and rolls-back much needed- and public approved - bail reforms which
eliminated the cash requirement for bail for most offences (in other words the
requirement that keeps people in jail for being poor). While New Yorkers are
understandably panicked under the pandemonium and peril of the pandemic, Cuomo
has provided New Yorkers with what Naomi Klein, writing for The Intercept,
has termed a "Screen New Deal" in which New York's public education system is
set go online and public health moves to telehealth, increasing inequities due
to the continued prevalence of the digital divide and increasing surveillance
of the population. New York's civic life is being remodeled with partnerships
with Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet owned company. Big Tech was already
signifying to us that the technological future they had envisioned was manifest
destiny and the pandemic has provided the perfect precipitant for it.
Technology has no intrinsic
qualities. It is what we make it. We can use artificial intelligence to print
new organs and provide clean energy or we can use it for control, surveillance
and war. In the late 19th century, railroads between
states were hailed a miracle and this new connection between people was deemed
to mean the end of war. Instead, the Kingdom of Prussia utilized railroads
effectively to bring France to heel and allowed Otto von Bismarck to declare a
German Empire in la galerie des Glaces at Versailles, deeply humiliating
the French (so much so that the French ensured that the Germans signed the
armistice of World War I, agreeing to reparations, in the same salon). It is
not technology that needs to be changed or its development stopped, but its
control. It should be remembered that the Luddites were not protesting
technology on any other grounds but the insecurity of their employment. In the
coming years, tens of millions of people- if not much more- around the world
will have their jobs automated. This is not necessarily bad. After all, if a
factory job can be done by a machine, perhaps it was never meant to be
performed by human day in and day out who yearns viscerally for creative
stimulation and development. Automation only becomes an issue if it denies the
people that used to be employed, employment rather than offering an opportunity
to do something that is stimulating for the individual and productive for the
social good.
Cash has been slowly
receding in commerce and this pandemic may provide the catalyst for its final
curtain call. If this occurs, the anonymity of cash exchange will not exist
which has certain social benefits but of course leads to greater surveillance. It
will also exacerbate inequality. In 2017, I noticed that a few cafes,
restaurants, bars and food trucks were going cashless in San Francisco and New
York City (where the same locales refused to accept anything but cash until
recently). In 2018, cashless custom spread like a contagion in these cities and
indubitably in others. Now, shopping with masks without disposable bags, all
our local shops have gone cashless and I doubt that they will return to
accepting cash. While the government has to accept all legal forms of money,
including cash, private businesses, if they have legitimate businesses reasons,
can limit what they accept. There are certainly legitimate reasons to go cash
free. It's more hygienic, its more secure for the owners as all money in and
out is documented and its more secure for the workers as there is no target
cash-register for robberies but it also denies people who are deemed
undesirable custom, service. Not everyone has access to a credit card or even a
bank account, yet these people may at times have enough cash to splurge on a
morning latte – but will not be able to do so because no business will take
their money and allow them to sit in the café. Of course, we can redress the
issue by other means, such as addressing why people don't have enough money to
open and retain bank accounts in the first place but removing cash in the first
instance will only exacerbate inequality and entrench segregation between the
rich, not-so-poor and the starving.
The end of cash will also
allow for greater surveillance and control of the population, removing the
anonymity of cash exchange. My credit card says a lot about me and as I am a
creature of habit, it even reveals my routine (outside of the current
quarantine). If you had my history, you would know I patronize a certain café
on a certain day and you would find me there. Of course, my phone can tell you
that too because my phone is always on me. My Amazon account probably tells you
a lot about me and even my children. My Google history would reveal what
journals I read, what I'm interested and probably that I'm a hypochondriac and
shocking speller (I tend to search for words to clarify the spelling). Imagine
having access to someone's credit card history, Amazon purchase history,
Netflix/Amazon/other streaming service history, location from your phone and
car, Google or other search history and their health apps where people
volunteer a disturbing amount of health history and that's without access to
their email or anything they say at home with Alexa an earshot away. You would
be able to pinpoint someone's routine, where they are at any given time, where
they may likely stand on issues presented to them, where they would have
obtained their information from in order to inform their opinions and perhaps
even their emotional state. Women have found it convenient to use menstrual
applications and while it's convenient to understand your cycle, even if you
are not concerned about pregnancy, these applications are voluntarily fed the
most intimate details of a woman's life – from emotional state, to pain levels,
to stress (which may result in irregular cycles) to when a woman has had sex. And
this of course provides a fertile opportunity for marketing products,
particularly if the woman inputs details, such as consistently having sex
during her fertile time, that she wants to get pregnant. This is a bonanza to
the fertility industry (for a deeper dive on Big Fertility and the lack of
regulation in the industry listen to the interview "When the Boardroom
Enters the Bedroom: The Art of Profit and Predation in the ART Industry"
with Naomi Cahn and June Carbone), which is booming and "biggering" and also to
parties that are focused on products and services for pregnant women and
babies. This information is usually not protected by HIPAA, as these health
applications are generally not "covered entities" (health care providers and
clearinghouses) or even "business associates" (engaged to help covered entities
operate) and thus not regulated under HIPAA.
The choice currently is not to
use an application and not have the convenience of and the power of knowledge
about your health, for instance, and the ability to share with your medical
professional who is bound by confidentiality, or to utilize an application and
retain its benefit while allowing its owner access to intimate details that it
can sell to third parties to sell their products to you. We need a third
option, one that prevents the use and sale of our information and not merely
without illusory consent.
It is shameful that we have not
yet learnt our lesson and are thus, as George Santayana warned, are doomed to
repeat it. It's a testament to our cognitive dissonance. We've known that we
were committing ecological suicide for decades, yet we continue to imperil
ourselves, through fires, cyclones, even fracking induced earthquakes, depleted
freshwater sources and now, this pandemic. Perhaps however we can change and
form a more equitable and just society. One under which justice is not
personified as a blind-folded woman wielding a sword but one that has her eyes
open and hands extended.
Pandemics perhaps expose
most acutely that we cannot live in isolation and that we do not want to. We
are social creatures. The pandemic exposes how connected we are and how our
actions affect others. Each person infected affects others so that the
communication rate is exponential. There is an old Indian legend of a king
playing chess with a visiting sage (who is Lord Krishna in disguise). When the
king wanted to award the sage, the sage merely asked for a grain of rice on one
square of a chessboard to be doubled on each square. Simply doubling a grain
leads to the loss of a kingdom and a debt that cannot be repaid. Likewise,
communicable disease, particularly a disease such as COVID-19 which has a
relatively long incubation period and where it appears nearly a quarter of the
infected can be asymptomatic, allows for exponential infection. It was out duty
to act fast and forcefully to protect the public. The states that did that,
suffered little, including foremost Taiwan and New Zealand. Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern has yet again shown she is an effective leader, one that acted
quickly to protect the people's health, including by closing borders to
non-residents and imposing a strict lock-down (albeit later that most countries
chronologically but not respecting the rate of infection) which prohibited both
association and recreational activities that may divert health and rescue
resources but did so through consistent and open communication, including live
chats from her home and now as COVID-19 has been deemed to be currently
eliminated in New Zealand, lockdown restrictions are being slowly relaxed. Part
of the reason that New Zealand did so well (apart from the geographical
benefits of having a small and uncongested population to start with which makes
it far easier to navigate and control a pandemic than for instance, NYC) was
that, apart from a few hiccups, including by the Health Minister, Kiwis
generally agreed and complied with Ardern's "go hard and go early" policy.
Partly this was because Ardern's compassionate and transparent leadership style
has solidified trust from her constituency, including calling her citizens a
"team of five million people". It is also of course because Ardern and her
government don't just use words to make their policies pliable. Understanding
that people are asked not to work but still need to eat, the government has
provided billions in wage subsidies to protect its people.
The legendary Arundhati Roy
has written that the pandemic is a portal and that we can choose to walk
through it with our current prejudices and inequities or re-imagine the world. By
exacerbating current inequalities and stratifications, the pandemic can either
fortify these or by showing a mirror to our ills, allow us to recognize that we
want to see ourselves in a different way.Most people have
understood the need for lockdowns and have cooperated under the common
understanding that we are in this together. We are more attuned to how our
interactions ricochet across rivers and ravines, let alone our neighbourhoods. We
have not descended into the brutality and blindness of the brilliant José Saramagio's
Ensaio sobre a cegueira.
Our great ethnographic experiment
has also doubled as an environmental one with some promising results. The
International Energy Agency has estimated that global greenhouse emissions
could drop by 8% this year due to the pandemic (in April average global daily
emissions were 17% lower than that of 2019, according to an article published
in Nature Climate Change). The ESA's tropospheric monitoring from its
Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite has shown that air pollution over Hubei and
northern Italy markedly dropped when lockdowns were put into effect, in
particular nitrogen dioxide levels, which have a severe respiratory effect and
contribute to shortening life spans and child mortality. Within just one week
of the lock-down, Aclima's monitoring of the Bay Area's air showed promising
data that correlates the lock-down with marked decreases of air pollutants.
Aside from ozone going up (+11%), air pollutants have substantively decreased:
nitrogen dioxide (-20%), black carbon (-29%), particulate matter (-16%) and
carbon monoxide (-16%). Data from the Central Pollution Control Board of
India's Environment Ministry showed that nitrogen dioxide dropped 71% in Delhi
in just one week of lockdown. The environment is resilient. It's not too late
for a cleaner future and we should not be apathetic. The pandemic has exposed
both its causes and its consequences in misplaced environmental policy, which
in turn has its roots in misplaced economic policy. Milan, which suffered
greatly, has learnt its lesson and has endeavoured to embark on urban planning
that will reduce air pollution, including designating 35 km of road for
pedestrian and cyclist use. London is also unveiling plans for the largest
car-free zone in the world to ensure its denizens continue to have better air. Hopefully
these policies will be replicated throughout the world as is warranted by public
health. Local initiatives, however, are necessary but insufficient and we need
new energy policies that favour clean energies to support public health.
While all political theories
have their upsets, for as Jacques Derrida has so well explained, all our
information is propped up by infinite regressions, the pandemic and its effects
may be fertile ground for the resurgence of Millsian utilitarianism for we can
readily perceive how connected we are to other people. Aren't
we always in it together? "I" presupposes a "you". Who am I apart from
my interactions with people which interactions inform and develop me?
Instituting John Stuart Mill's
harm principle as a primary policy directive would respect individual space
until the individual's activities encroach upon another individual's space. Environmental
destruction harms everyone and is the greatest harm, for its claws clasp future
generations. Limiting harm and promoting the general good requires a robust
public health system, one in which everyone has access to adequate healthcare and
in which we understand that public health is not merely an industry in itself,
in which we focus on regular check-ups and access to testing and treatments but
a holistic view which understands that public health must of necessity pervade
all policy, from urban planning to energy. To fail to do this is to promulgate
and exercise pathogenic policies.
As John Donne wrote, "no
man is an iland, initre of itselfe" – our actions have consequences beyond
ourselves. While some people scoff at pejoratively
termed "paternalistic" policies, such as the rule of wearing a helmet on a bike
or motorcycle and choosing to protect their brain over their coiffure, these
policies prevent these capillary catastrophes from harming people around them.
Not wearing a helmet causes much social harm, including use of health
resources, diverting people and family members to care for the injured person
and psychological harm imposed on all those involved in the accident and consequent
care. Failing to vaccinate likewise is not an individual action. Not only are
parents risking their children's health but impeding herd immunity and imposing
a greater risk on people with compromised immune systems that cannot be
vaccinated. The Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts 197 U.S. 11
(1905), upheld a Massachusetts law on compulsory vaccination, reasoning that
the state had the right to protect the public health through vaccination and
that its citizens could not "freeload" on herd immunity refusing to be
vaccinated. Organ donation is another area that should have radically different
policies, for currently the rights of the dead are respected over those of the
living. Some people have understood that their religion forbids them to donate
organs (based on texts written thousands of years ago when the people writing
such texts could not have foreseen organ donation but could comprehend
infection from cadavers, which texts in other sections assert the preeminence
of helping your fellow human beings) and to vaccinate or accept blood
transfusions and other life-saving treatments. Yet refusing a blood transfusion
imposes the harm on oneself, refusing to vaccinate and not donate organs at
death, on others also. Apart from religious views, there are people that have
an aversion to utilitarian policies in general and to organ donation and
vaccination in particular due to fear. People fear that vaccines are harmful to
health and only serve the profit of pharmaceutical companies (however vaccines
are but a blip relative to lifestyle drugs) and that doctors will not work to
rescue them in an emergency because they will care more for obtaining organs
for interminably long donor lists. It is tempting to scoff at these views as
ignorant and selfish and fail to address the underlying fear that drives both
these aversions. For we live in a stratified society and the fear that the
common good is interpreted as one to retain the stratified status quo per se is
not illogical. If we had a more participatory government, in which people had
more control and transparency into the workings of our society and there was
clear accountability for decisions, we would garner trust in our institutions
and have less opposition to socially-minded policies. In the interim, we can
nudge people to take decisions for society's benefit. People tend to conform to
default settings, so changing the choice architecture for organ donation or
even contact tracing during this pandemic, for instance, from "opt in" to "opt
out" will result in a dramatic increases in donation and participation as
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein have written in Nudge: Improving
Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.
Participatory democracy is
the only way to ensure that utilitarian policies will serve the common good for
otherwise it would just be donning on a different suit of subjugation.
What purported to be communism in the 20th century was nothing
communal. In the Stalinist U.S.S.R., you had no freedom of movement, no right
to question the government and no food. Yet the Politburo chiefs had their
dachas and their stocked-up stores. Only with participatory democracy, can
we ensure that policies are transparent, accountable and in accordance with the
social good – for what is the social good but not the sum of its individuals? Active
political participation may seem idealistic, yet all the reasons people propose
against it evidence the problems of our current political model. For instance, the
complaint that people have no time to engage in public policy. This speaks more
to our current social stratification and ill-conceived mores of recursive
production, with people working three jobs to make ends meet while others, no
matter their millions, are gutted to a gauntlet in order to ensure they are
continually producing, with few genuinely happy. Perhaps if automation results
in computers eviscerating more of our jobs, this is not something to be feared,
but welcomed, for it allows for space for other projects, including political
debate and participation. Another castigation is that people are too ignorant
to be able to vote on legislation. One can argue the obverse, that policy
makers are too removed from the circumstances on the ground to make effective
policy so that unintended consequences can pervert the legislative initiative.
Excoriating direct political participation by stating that people are too
ignorant of policy says more about our current education system than anything
else. It also speaks to the pressures imposed on parents, who may not have the
time and energy after work to nurture their young kinds to engage in critical
thinking at the critical time of their major brain development before school
officially starts. Another complaint is participatory government is
impractical. Yet technology has made it practical. Our legislators are voting
remotely due to the pandemic, why can't we electronically participate and
engage in debate and vote on legislation? Participatory government would ensure
that special interests do not fill the coffers of candidates and they would
obviate the problem of the revolving door. What else is a "government of the
people, by the people, for the people" but one where people actively debate public
policy and participate in their government?
It is my hope that
post-pandemic, once we come out of this global ethnographic experiment, we will
see the way to a future for us all is with us all. We need to move towards a
pluralistic, polyphonic, participatory and proactive polity. We need to implement
holistic, multi-disciplinary approaches to policies, understanding that due
to the complex nuances of our modern life, unintended consequences and the
ripple effect may not always reap the best results– but we will have
accountability and transparency of both how we developed policies and how we
monitored policies so that we can readily mitigate and adapt ill consequences.
We will garner a more equitable and open society and transparency and
accountability in government. We have the technology to do it. We spend a lot
of time on social media already, perhaps we can devote this time to actively
debate policies and vote on legislation. Rather than the dystopian
technological future that pervades our predictions, perhaps we need to propel
this vision – that this future is inevitable. Context and capacity must
inform and govern our law and our rights so that laws purporting to solve a
problem do not end up exacerbating it, such as the prior entrenchment of equal
rights on a stratified society. Justice cannot be blind.
Albert Camus wrote La
Peste, which I brought off the shelf to re-read during this pandemic as
many indubitably have, during and right after the WWII. The plague is as much a
book about disease as it is about war and the plague is a metaphor for war. Its
relevance continues to resound, particularly in this pandemic. Camus well notes
how both instances of war and plague, though common throughout history, take
each population by surprise. We continue to have the impenetrable faith of
self-denial against existential threats. War and plague happened back then,
they occur over there – the bell never tolls for us. This cognitive
dissonance against the rational signs of existential threat, which are present
in our inability to institute necessary and substantive socio-economic changes to
avoid climatic catastrophe, is concomitantly our gravest impediment to survival
and the means of our survival. It is what allows us to be caught in the
quagmire of quotidian quests, quelling compelling questions concerning our
community and confining others to the mere quixotic. Camus is not the only
author to explore this human trait. It proliferates in literature. Yet his
stark expression resonates. Eugène Ionesco's Le Rhinocéros is another
brilliant political satire which explores people's refusal to accept a paradigm
shift and their subsequent rationalization and acceptance of it. In Ionesco's
play, vocal opponents of the malignant metamorphosis become its proponents and
join the crash just as quickly and as vociferously as they initially opposed
their stampeding invaders. Political contagion can be as pestilent and spread
as exponentially as the plague.
In the novel, the town of
Oran was a bustling burgh bent on "business", so much so that there was no
shortage of making business out of the plague on the black market during the
quarantine (which just like ours, lasted a lot more than the forty days of its
Venetian origins). Yet the plague also tears at the town's social tapestry and
with impending death, the characters come alive. The reader wonders whether the
softer characterizations of minor characters at the end of the novel has as much
to do with their personal growth through communal suffering as well as the
narrator's expanded empathy. Rambert stops attempting to escape and understands
he "belongs" to the city due to his identification with communal suffering and
his attendant recognition that he must do what he can against the pernicious
pathogen. This a fine narrative of identity, which is a marking of socially
constructed and historically contingent stratification and suffering. Grand's ambition
to write a novel is stunted at the first sentence which he recursively
rewrites. His struggle is reminiscent of the rivalries of the Left that lost
the Spanish Civil War and laid the way for fascism in the 1930s which is the
political context in which the novel was written and which the novel retells
through its narrative of disease. The Left's self-laceration continues today. Despite
much talk of solidarity, ideological differences have prevented a solidified
progressive polity and an ossification of debate proliferating in the past few
years. Biden may not be the most progressive candidate and the electoral system
in the United States has many impediments but it is what we have at this moment
and every progressive must vote for him or we face another four years of Chump
– and then work to make the electoral system more democratic in the future
(including by instituting preferential voting and later direct participation in
government). Grand's struggle for the stellar sentence exemplifies the tragic
irony of humanity and our Sisyphean struggle for transcendence. Yet as Grand
does, perhaps we can be at peace with the fact that all we can do is strive. Dr.
Rieux, the narrator, exemplifies the importance of praxis and the inherent
contradictions of any theory. Not being able to save his spouse, he resigns
himself to what he cannot change and focuses on what he can, tirelessly working
to heal as many people as he can. One day at a time, one patient at a time. The
novel ends with the end of the epidemic, yet the reader is warned that the
plague is merely dormant. Tarrou, the character who eschewed his family's
privilege as it was built on rational murder, his father having prosecuted
death penalty cases, which exemplifies that the state is not inherently opposed
to violence, committing murder itself, but seeks to monopolize it, warns the
reader that we are all infected with the plague. Indeed, in an ill society, we
are all infected and none of us is immune from its disease. As Martin Luther
King Jr. warned, "silence is betrayal".
We are now at a precipice. The
current pandemic, caused by social inequity, is exacerbating it and
precipitating the advent of the military-technological complex. We are
distracted and our energy is depleted. During this constellation of chaos and
calamity, we must ensure that democracy, as limited as it is currently, does
not drown into the abyss. Drowning, for all its theatrical display of
splashing, is in reality, silent and quick. The person lacking air, does not
have the energy to splash let alone call out and dies in seconds. This is an
opportune time for the ruling elite carve out and contain greater power – if we
let them.
Yet it is also an
opportunity for a more open, equitable society where no child breathes miasmic
air, lacks sufficient access to clean water, lacks housing, healthcare,
education or goes to bed hungry. We can move from an apocryphal, representative
democracy to a more equitable and pluralistic, participatory democracy. In
which we understand that we are not disembodied rational actors that operate in
a vacuum. In which we understand that codified civil and political rights are
mere words without the economic and social rights to effectuate them. That we
are not individuals if we have no choice nor autonomy. That we are not
individuals if we are divisible into reified roles. That reification reduces
and diffuses responsibility and that mediation has allowed for the grave
injustices we have perpetuated against each other. That the individual requires
a community and that a community is nothing if not a composition of individuals.
That the individual and the community are complementary and not in opposition
to each other. That we cannot externalize our environment but are dependent on
it and impact it. That we cannot be sovereign unless we govern.
We didn't wake up to find an
invader, we woke up and looked in the mirror.The pestilence was
always there in our pathogenic society. It is time to change ourselves so that
we can look into the mirror and like what we see. And how do we get there? With
a step in the right direction- the determination to start a new, just and equitable
world. The Zapatistas said it best – we don't impose, but rather, preguntando caminamos.
This essay was intermittently written from March 19 through May
19, 2020. For updated facts, see https://ourworldindata.org/