The Left, the Election Crisis, and the 'Elephant in the Room'

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.

The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.

This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.

This crisis has been building for a long time.  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.

What will the working class do?

The working class is the elephant in the room. In the past, when communist and socialist political parties were strong, especially in developed imperialist countries with large working classes, when a political crisis developed in the ruling class, the response by a militant communist would be: “What is the working class going to do about this?”  Communist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, or Harry Haywood would ask their comrades: “How can the working class intervene in this crisis to defend its own class interests?”

During the times when these noted revolutionaries were active in Germany, Italy, and the U.S., it was understood by all the cadre and militants in the working class that the working class was ultimately the only class that could change the big equation — and finally, end capitalism. Moreover, it was understood that if the working class did not intervene during a political crisis, something very bad might happen, like the faction within the capitalist class prevailing that was considering the desperate option of turning to fascism.

On the other hand, there was the prospect that if the working class intervened in the political crisis in a correct and strong way, the political crisis could be turned into a revolutionary crisis, meaning that the working class would exploit the differences within the capitalist class, as well as its instability and weakness, to  make a socialist revolution.

The expression “the elephant in the room” means that people are talking around the real issue because they don’t know what to do about that issue. Very few revolutionaries are asking what the working class will do about the current election crisis because the question seems irrelevant.

Notwithstanding the amazing work stoppages that many pandemic frontline workers have engaged in to protect their safety, and the many other signs that militants in the working class are pushing back and carrying out more strikes, the working-class movement as a whole in the U.S. is weak organizationally and politically.

Thus, the expectation is that the working class is not going to intervene in defense of its class interests beyond voting for the Democrats, with some even voting for Trump. Militants should be neither angry nor frustrated with workers for voting for Biden. The way that they see it, they don’t have any other choice.

For revolutionaries, the main political battle regarding support for the Democratic Party is with other forces on the left who say that they are socialists and are opposed to capitalism, but will find some rationale, mostly fear, for supporting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for Trumpism. The Democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them.

The only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the Democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. This is true, not only in relation to the electoral struggle, but even more importantly, to the full rebirth of the class struggle against capitalism. This rebirth is already underway. However, it will not advance to the next level without the intervention of revolutionary class-conscious militants.

There’s no end to the questions surrounding the election crisis. What’s going to happen before the elections? What’s going to happen during and after the elections? How can progressives and revolutionaries respond to any development? From the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the biggest question is still: What can be done to insure that the U.S. working class begins to do all that is necessary to intervene in a crisis? Not now when it’s too weak, but soon, and the sooner the better.

Even in countries where the labor movement is close to one of the capitalist political parties, or there is a social democratic party that mostly supports what the capitalists want it to support, if an attempted coup or a fascist attack occurs the labor movement calls a general strike.

The election crisis should serve as a wake-up call. Yes, the working-class movement is weak. But revolutionaries can no longer afford to use that as an excuse to remove the working class from the discussion. Once we do that, we have surrendered.  Whatever ideas or demands revolutionaries put forward, they are of only symbolic and educational value if there is no army capable of fighting and defeating the enemy. That army is the working class, and the battlefield is the class struggle.

It should come as no surprise that many people, especially women, are saddened by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and are worried about who Trump will choose to replace her. When the working class is not organized as a class to defend its own class interests, who else can the people turn to in order to defend themselves but politicians and important individuals?

How did this happen to the working class?

Over a long period that began after the U.S. established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the world, generally speaking, the leaders of the labor movement – who were once relatively militant, and some even anti-capitalist — underwent a transformation that rendered them in many cases little more than appendages to the capitalist system.

Explaining how this happened over the course of the past three-quarters of a century is too much to go over here. But make a note:  How this happened should be studied and discussed. It’s important for every militant to know what happened.

Also important to know is that appearing to become an appendage to the system and the status quo is neither a natural nor a permanent state for the organized labor movement. It is an aberration that must — and will – be reversed. The conditions that led to the conservatism of the labor movement no longer exist, and as such, their conservatism is going to be replaced with revolutionary class struggle.

It should be noted that by and large, most of the left, including organizations that consider themselves Marxist and even revolutionary, have tended to base themselves on movements and struggles that were incorrectly seen as separate from the working class and the labor unions. The reason for this is that the labor movement seemed dormant.

Organizing and activity that seemed friendly to anti-capitalist views and organizational recruitment existed in the antiwar movement — and to some extent in the anti-racist movement and the women’s and LGBTQ2S+ movements. In truth, all of these movements are different fronts of the working-class movement, although that is not how they are viewed in most cases.

This unfortunate view is a product of the political weakness of the existing working-class movement. It’s time for such narrow and exclusionary views to give way to more inclusive and revolutionary views of who and what make up the working class today.

To some extent, the origins of these narrow and false ideas about what the working class is and who is in the labor movement are products of a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) agreement that union officials and leftists made after the anti-communist witch hunt – which forced many communists and socialists out of the unions – began to lift somewhat in the early 1960s.

The agreement was this: Radicals must stay out of the labor unions and refrain from trying to influence the working class with their radical ideas.  In exchange for agreeing to stay away from the working class, progressives and radicals could organize against the war in Vietnam and around other issues, but apart from obtaining some labor endorsements and having a few labor speakers at a rally, antiwar organizers were to stay away from the workers.

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

The examples of professional athletes protesting racism by refusing to play, and health care workers, Whole Foods and Amazon workers, and other workers walking off the job to protest being forced to work in unsafe conditions, has ignited a new struggle within and outside the organized labor movement over the need to carry out more and bigger work stoppages, and bring back the general strike.

Around Labor Day, a group of about 40 regional labor unions representing millions of workers issued a statement calling for conducting mass, nationwide work stoppages in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. While no concrete plans or dates for these actions has been announced, this development is a clear challenge to the conservative top leadership of the AFL-CIO and the unions that formed Change To Win.

This is good news, and it’s about time. These developments in the labor movement must be supported, joined, and pushed strongly by everyone who considers themselves progressive. It is nothing less than scandalous — and unacceptable — that the AFL-CIO’s top leadership has done little more than release a statement or two in response to the worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May, and the murders of others like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.

How is it possible that millions of people could be marching in the streets day after day on every continent, and yet the leaders of the U.S. labor movement cannot bring themselves to organize a one-hour nationwide work stoppage in support of this uprising?

A strategy to fuse all movements into a new working-class movement

 The scope of the election crisis is too big.  The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic is too big.  The scope of the capitalist crisis is too big.  And the scope of the racist attacks, whether by the police, FBI, or fascists, is too big to be addressed without a serious strategy towards the development of a revitalized working-class movement.  The attacks on the working class that are already underway — with much more to come — are too big for anti-capitalist radicals not to have such a strategy.

No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles there may be, it is imperative that a fusion of the mass movement in the streets develop against racism and fascism, and that it include all sectors of the working class that are either not organized or are under-organized: migrant workers, incarcerated workers, gig workers, street vendors, sex workers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, the homeless, the most oppressed people — and the organized labor movement.

It should be understood that the global uprising against racism this past spring and summer was, at its root, a working-class uprising.  The participants may not have  been conscious of this — and the uprising was not called in the name of the working class. But that does not change the fact that it was the multinational working class protesting in the streets. Going forward, future uprisings will be more class-conscious, with more of the many sectors of the working class in motion.

This fusion must come from below, and must not be led by the Democratic Party, or any other organization that is tied to the status quo and is an obstacle to real struggle. It is not necessary, and, in fact, it would be a mistake for the movement in the streets, or any other section of the working class that is not in the organized labor movement, to subordinate itself to conservative labor leaders.

The goal of fusion is to expand the working-class movement, to tear down the boundaries and antiquated conceptions that limit and divide the working class, and to push the entire working class in a revolutionary direction.

The formation of Workers Assemblies and a Workers Assembly movement may prove very helpful in this process

Whatever happens on or after Nov. 3, organizing the working class is the prize we must work for and stay focused on. We should be confident about our victory.

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

Their Violence and Ours

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Capitalist politicians of all stripes are condemning “violence.” But they never mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are condemning resistance against state violence.

Bourgeois society has a very funny way of talking about violence. In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, as thousands poured into the streets to demonstrate their anger and demand justice, the bourgeois press was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Violence erupts in Minneapolis following black man’s death in police custody.”

What a strange formulation! Not only does the headline conceal how this “death” happened. Apparently it is not “violence” if a state functionary chokes a restrained man to death. No, “violence” only began after that. 

This bias underscores the way that bourgeois society operates. A Black man being murdered by the state is just a normal day; but people taking things from a Target store without paying is a catastrophe. People are expendable; but property is sacred. 

Indeed, capitalist society treats all kinds of systemic violence as so completely natural that it does not even deserve the term. A police murder in broad daylight might, if there are sufficient protests, be condemned as “excessive force.” But what about when police do follow all rules and regulations? When they evict a family from their home, for example — is that not violence? What about a store preventing hungry people from getting food? What about a government allowing 100,000 people to die of a pandemic? Is that not violence?

The German communist poet Bertolt Brecht put it succinctly: “There are many ways to kill. They can stab a knife in your guts, take away your bread, decide not to cure you from an illness, put you in a miserable house, torture you to death with work, take you to war, etc. Only a few of these are forbidden in our state.”

In response to the protests, bourgeois politicians are speaking out against violence. But of course they do not mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are not referring to the massacres committed by the U.S. military or the economic havoc wreaked by American corporations. No, their main concern, almost inevitably, is property damage.

The U.S. Representative from Minneapolis, the progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar, for example tweeted out on Thursday: “We should and must protest peacefully. But let us end the cycle of violence now.” Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said: “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.”

But what was the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.? He was not a socialist, but he understood that oppressed people must stand up to their oppression. For this, he was condemned by the powers that be for his supposed “violence.” On April 12, 1963, a group of eight clergymen called on King to cancel planned demonstrations for civil rights in Alabama. They called demonstrations “unwise and untimely” because they  “incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be.” They denounced the mobilizations as “extreme measures” and proposed that Black people should “peacefully obey” while relying on courts.

King, of course, did not follow this advice. He defended riots as “the language of the unheard” and went on to denounce the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. It was only after his murder that King was transformed into a harmless icon — an angelic figure who supposedly preached nothing but passive resistance

Progressive Democrats like Omar are not calling for peace — they are calling on people to peacefully obey the system that is murdering them. Omar wants the U.S. federal government to investigate police murders. Yet decades of police “reforms” have only shown that this institution cannot be reformed. The Minneapolis Police Department is headed by a Black cop who once sued the department over its racist practices. And yet: the capitalist police, even with the most enlightened leadership, can have no other function than protecting capitalist property. This means oppressing the poorest sectors of the working class, especially Black people.

As socialists, we do condemn violence — we condemn the violence that the capitalist system commits against billions of people every day. We do not condemn it when working-class and poor people begin to defend themselves against the system’s violence.

A riot serves to get the attention of the ruling class. It might even force them to make concessions. But a riot cannot end the system of oppression and exploitation. For that, we need to combine the rage on the streets of Minneapolis with socialist organization. Democratic Party politicians (even the ones that call themselves “socialists”) will always call on people to accept the institutions that oppress them. Real socialists, in contrast, want to build up organizations that are independent of the ruling class, their state, and all their parties.

A tiny minority of capitalists exploits the labor of the huge majority of people. In order to maintain their rule, they maintain an enormous repressive apparatus, including police, jails, armies, judges, etc. — that is their state. The capitalists are driving our entire civilization to a catastrophe. But they will never relinquish power voluntarily. Throughout history, no ruling class has ever given up without being toppled. As Karl Marx wrote, “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” This is why the working class needs to confront the capitalists’ bodies of armed men.

When working people set fire to a police station, the capitalists’ media will call this “violence” — but it is nothing more than self-defense against the daily violence perpetrated by capitalism. We must get rid of the capitalists’ state, and replace it with a society run by working people themselves. That is the essence of socialist revolution. And the fires on the streets of Minneapolis show that the deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing U.S. society just a little bit closer to that end.

Privatizing the Common Good: The 21st-Century Enclosures Are Here

[Pictured: Oscar Olivera, executive secretary of the Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers and spokesperson for the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, known as La Coordinadora, organizing with fellow Bolivians.]

By Ashley Dawson

Republished from Literary Hub.

Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.

Now, half of the residents of Highland Park had trouble paying their monthly electric bills, and a quarter had experienced a shutoff of gas or electricity—often during Michigan’s cold winter months. When DTE took the lights, Highland Park owed $4 million in electricity bills, a situation likely to be aggravated by the rate hikes the utility wanted to impose to support its existing coal-fired power plants, to build new fossil fuel plants, and to pay the utility’s chief executive his $5.4-million annual salary. The repossession of Highland Park’s streetlights was part of a broader crisis of public assets: across Michigan, communities struggled as control of key public infrastructure like the water department and the school system was stripped from them by undemocratic emergency-management czars.

The taking of the light in Highland Park is part of a new, global round of enclosures in which common assets are stripped from the public. For radical critics of capitalism such as the historians Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh and the geographer David Harvey, enclosures are one of the dominant forms of contemporary capital accumulation. According to these activist scholars, critics of capitalism have mistakenly followed Marx’s analysis of what he famously termed “primitive accumulation,” which sees enclosure as a kind of original violence that kick-started the capitalist system. Enclosure, Marx argued, was foundational to capitalism since it allowed powerful landlords to accumulate wealth by dispossessing the peasantry of the land they farmed collectively, replacing such feudal social relations with more lucrative forms of enterprise such as the production of wool.

As the 16th-century English philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas Moore put it, “sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” The accumulated capital produced by enclosure of common lands was used to support expansion of industrial production domestically and of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism abroad. Enclosure thus refers to a global process of violent extraction. But the key thing is that enclosure did not cease once common lands in Britain had all been opened up and capitalism had been established as an economic and political system.

Contrary to what Marx argued, the predatory stripping of common assets around the world never stopped. In fact, it has intensified. The neoliberal era that began in the 1980s has seen a massive expansion of attacks on the commons, both in the form of the shifting of formerly public assets such as school systems into the private sphere in rich countries, and through extensive land grabs in areas hitherto relatively autonomous from the capitalist world system such as parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Resistance to the new enclosures has become a central feature of social struggles over the last few decades. For instance, in 2000, the people of the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia rose up after the World Bank insisted that the government hand over control of municipal water supplies to Aguas del Tunari, a conglomerate controlled by the US-based multinational Bechtel Corporation. The new owner of Cochabamba’s water demanded steep and sudden rate increases of double or more for poor consumers in order to finance the double-digit profits demanded by the companies. The conglomerate even proposed to tax water that people caught in barrels as the rain flowed off their roofs.

A just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime.

The people of Cochabamba rose up in protest, occupying the center of the city and forming a grassroots participatory organization called the Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life that shut the city down and demanded a rollback of the water privatization measures. Under pressure from the water conglomerate and international authorities, the Bolivian government declared martial law and tried to suppress the protests with riot troops, measures leading to mass arrests, hundreds of injuries, and the death of a teenage boy as conflicts erupted on the barricades the citizens had set up around the city. Protesters held fast in the face of state repression, however, and on April 10, 2000, the Bolivian government reached an agreement with the Coordinadora that ultimately not only reversed the privatization of the city’s water but also catapulted Evo Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) into power in the country.

This victory for popular mobilization in Bolivia was a key moment in resistance to the new round of capitalist enclosures carried out during the age of neoliberal hyper-capitalism. The defense of the commons through new forms of participatory organizing resonated around the globe in the following years. In 2013, for instance, Turkish activists protesting government plans to pave over Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park described the park itself and various other urban spaces that the government’s neoliberal policies tried to confiscate for private profit as a “commons.” The Turkish activists called the form of self-government developed during their occupation of Gezi a “commune,” one that involved not just a sit-in but also food distribution, a medical center, and an autonomous media collective.

Grounded in a determination to defend common space from enclosure, the Gezi protest shared a commoning ethos not just with the Cochabamba Water Wars but also with similar movements around the world, from the resistance of the Zapatistas to the neoliberal tenets of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico beginning in 1994, to the Occupy movement that began in New York and spread across the United States, and to the Indignados movement in Madrid in 2011. In addition to resisting enclosure, these movements also experimented with new forms of popular sovereignty, animated by a fierce critique of the blindness to inequality that characterizes liberal democracy and the regime of private property rights on which it is founded. New structures of governance were developed in global movements founded on the idea of the people as an egalitarian collective with a mandate to rule in order to bring about social transformation.

These experiments reached their highest point with the emergence of what might be termed the social movement party in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil, but the effort to develop egalitarian, non-bureaucratic ways of organizing societies has been a key feature of the Left in recent decades. And, as feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici have documented, contemporary commoning movements crucially include the fight for communal, egalitarian control over material needs linked to social reproduction such as housing, food preparation, child rearing, sex and procreation, and even the reproduction of collective memories.

These radical experiments have exciting implications for the struggle for energy democracy. For example, when the power company came to strip them of their light, the residents of Highland Park took power into their own hands in ways that built on the logic of popular sovereignty developed in global commoning movements. DTE Energy had consistently used political donations (based on those elevated rates) and lobbying to stymie efforts to establish local ownership of clean energy in Michigan. Now it was taking away the power supplied by dirty coal plants.

Faced with this threat, citizens of Highland Park established Soulardarity, a community-based organization that fights for collectively owned streetlights, energy production, and equitable development. Soulardarity not only brings light back to Highland Park, it generates the power to run streetlights from the sun. Soulardarity produces what one observer calls “visionary infrastructure.” And it provides local folks with jobs building and maintaining this new solar infrastructure. Through the organization’s PowerUP program, the community is able to purchase solar power in bulk and at reasonable rates, and to deploy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of solar infrastructure in the community. But this is not just about transformation of the community’s physical infrastructure: it is also about broader social transformation in Highland Park.

Soulardarity is a democratic, community-governed membership organization that aims to educate Highland Park residents about what autonomous control of power or energy democracy should look like, and to advocate for community ownership, transparency, and environmental sustainability across the region. Soulardarity advocates for a Community Ownership Power Administration (COPA) as a vital element of a Green New Deal in the United States. Like the Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to farms across the country during the New Deal in the 1930s, COPA would provide finance and technical capacity to help local communities across the country make the transition to renewable energy. As Jackson Koeppel of Soulardarity explains, COPA would give municipalities, counties, states, and tribal authorities the legal authority and the funding mechanisms that would allow them to “terminate their contacts with investor-owned utilities, buy back the energy grid to form a public or cooperative utility, and invest in a resilient, renewable system.”

In the introduction to their collection of essays on the US movement for energy democracy, Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub contrast corporate models of decarbonization with the forms of renewable energy being fought for by organizations like Soulardarity. For Fairchild and Weinrub, the former are oriented around the growth imperative of capitalism and are characterized by “a transition to industrial-scale, carbon-free resources without challenging the growth of energy consumption, material consumption, rates of capital accumulation, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

The centralized nature of power generation and distribution in the era of fossil capitalism has not only led to significant waste, with average losses of 8 to 15 percent of power generated as a result of far-flung transmission lines. It has also helped to make energy invisible and unconscious for many ratepayers, while subjecting others to heightened environmental and health damages, harms that track closely along lines of residential segregation and racialized inequality in the United States. Corporate-owned renewable energy is not likely to challenge this history.

By contrast, Fairchild and Weinrub argue, the decentralized renewable energy model fosters community-based renewable energy development that “allows for the new economic and ecologically sound relationships needed to address the current economic and climate crisis.” Such decentralization of power, they suggest, is facilitated by the distributed nature of renewable resources: “solar energy, wind, geothermal energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, energy storage, and demand response systems are resources that can be found in all communities,” and consequently provide a foundation for “community-based development of energy resources at the local level through popular initiatives.”

Fairchild and Weinrub’s advocacy of decentralized renewable energy is thus predicated on both the material characteristics of renewable energies and the forms of radical democracy that they hope will facilitate and result from a just transition. For them, transition is about community empowerment rather than simply decarbonization of the grid, as important as the latter may be in the struggle to avoid climate meltdown.

The question of the energy commons is fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Writing in Fairchild and Weinrub’s collection of essays, Cecilia Martinez, director of the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy, argues that a just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime. Martinez suggests that energy democracy requires the construction of an energy commons. What models exist to support the institution and collective governance of such an energy commons, one that diverges radically from today’s private property–based regimes of energy control and ownership? For Martinez, the first step is to recognize that energy is not so much a physical object, but rather a “vast array of natural interactions and phenomena for societal use.”

While energy might derive from natural phenomena all ultimately grounded in the harnessing of solar power, it is inescapably rooted in the social forms and infrastructures developed by humans to exploit solar energy. It is about forms of collective power that are active: in other words, about commoning rather than about some pre-given and static commons. How might energy be regulated in a more egalitarian manner? Martinez alludes briefly in her essay to the legal structures created over the last few decades to establish a global commons outside the control of any particular nation: founded on centuries-old legal paradigms governing the high seas, today’s global commons also includes the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space.

Martinez also draws on the pioneering economist Elinor Ostrom to argue that diverse cultures around the world and across history have established institutions resembling neither the bourgeois nation-state nor capitalist markets to govern resource systems. Martinez points to indigenous governance models of commoning founded on reciprocity, cooperation, and respect not only between humans but also among humans and the more-than-human world.

What are the conditions for the creation of a new world based on the energy commons? The egalitarian governance systems and legal paradigms discussed by Cecilia Martinez are helpful here. The particular material characteristics of modern renewables such as solar and wind power distinguish them from fossil fuels like coal and oil, but to what extent do these specific material forms, which derive directly from solar power and its effect on atmospheric systems, make for a new, commons-based energy regime that might be termed “Solarity”? What forms of collective, egalitarian governance can the movement for energy democracy draw on as it seeks to challenge the centralized paradigms of energy generation and ownership of the fossil capitalist regime? Do legal paradigms already exist to help community-based organizations like Soulardarity escape from the clutches of fossil capital and adopt solar power on a mass basis? What are the limits of these legal paradigms and what juridical innovations might address these limits?

These questions all relate to much broader struggles to establish new, revolutionary forms of popular sovereignty to defend and extend the commons, but they have a particular import for the fight for energy democracy. The struggle for a rapid and just energy transition is at the core of broader struggles for an exit from today’s trajectory toward social degradation and planetary ecocide. The question of the energy commons is therefore fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His previous books include Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. His new book, People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons is available at OR Books.

What's Good for Tech Stocks is Bad for the Economy

By Contention News

Tech stocks deepened their recent skid this week, and the fear among market watchers right now is the bubble may have already burst. Investments that could do no wrong just last month now look somewhat suspicious.

What these observers don’t know is that things are actually much worse than they think. There is a deep and important connection between these high-flying tech investments and the crappy economy their shareholders hope to escape.

Drawing this out requires a big picture outlook, and connecting some dots in ways that Wall Street can’t.  

How society works

Let’s start as big as we can: all human societies have to constantly reproduce themselves to survive. Our society reproduces itself through a system of market exchanges. Each completed purchase validates the good or service exchanged as necessary for the reproduction of our society.

Investors use their capital to command some portion of society’s existing resources to produce something new they think society also demands. If they’re right, then the product will sell and they’ll get a return on their investment. If the new product isn’t socially necessary — i.e. valuable — it won’t sell, and they lose their investment.

Where investors gain value, and where they don’t

These investors don’t gain any additional value from the inputs they buy for their products. Buying these inputs just validates their necessity. To create new value the investors need to combine the inputs together to create new, value-added products, and this requires human input — labor.

Labor power is an exceptional input because the workers selling it can’t realize its value without the machinery, facilities, and other inputs owned by private businesses. This means those businesses get to buy labor power at a discount, and investors pocket the difference. 

This has an important implication: each enterprise is some combination of produced inputs and labor power. If the enterprise sinks a larger share of its investment dollars into inputs rather than labor, then over time they should return less investment. This is why labor-intensive “emerging markets” can have such extraordinary rates of growth as compared to capital-intensive advanced economies.

Why investors love “operating leverage”

This is the level where this impact emerges — in the aggregate, over time. At the level where equity markets operate — individual firms and sectors over short terms — a different perspective emerges.

There, “valuation” has everything to do with expected future cash flows. Operating income — the money left over after paying out all the costs of production and overhead costs of the business — is the name of the game. The more operating income a company expects, the more valuable its stock should be.

Every company delivers this cash flow differently. Companies with low variable costs (the labor and input costs of each unit produced) and high fixed costs (the administrative expenses necessary to keep the lights on) are said to have a high degree of “operating leverage.” These businesses are efficient at turning their revenue into operating income.

Why tech stocks look so hot

Tech companies tend to have high operating leverage. Each additional unit sold adds very little to their variable costs — Facebook can sell thousands of ads before they have to add any hardware or staff, for example — which means that for every percentage point of revenue growth, they get more than a point of cash flow growth.

So when the economy is growing — the norm for capitalist economies — rising sales mean growing revenue, which means even faster cash flow growth and equity value. Investment gets disproportionately drawn into high fixed-cost, low variable-cost firms.

But produced inputs don’t add value, remember, and yet these high fixed costs — attractive to investors — include only those inputs. Labor power does add value, but that’s covered in the variable costs they seek to minimize.

Bottom line: investments at the firm level favor a capital allocation that produces less value throughout the economy overall.

Where the zombies come from

And it gets worse: when sales drop, these companies’ high overhead costs put them at increased risk of default. Since they are also the ones with disproportionate levels of investment, leaders seek to bail them out, mainly in the form of interest rate suppression by central banks. The companies can borrow and issue bonds more easily, but this debt only adds to their fixed costs.

Soon you have an economy full of companies that make just enough to cover their debt service — so-called “zombie” firms.

So now we can connect the dots: high levels of operating leverage made tech stocks sexy investments for years, but this contributed to a capital-intensive economy with lower aggregate returns on investment. When downturns came, central bank rescues only created more long-term deadweight, hence the slow, sleepy growth of the last “recovery.”

Now that the recent speculative boom has paused, we’re left with a terrifying question: what do we do with an economy founded on a basis that can’t perform for the future, especially in light of all the debt — i.e. future earnings — that we’ve accumulated to build it?

One thing is certain: the leaders that can’t deliver a relief package everybody wants definitely can’t figure this one out either. Watch out for your own bottom line while they try nonetheless. 

Contention News produces original anti-imperialist business news every week. Read more and subscribe here.

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

Beneath Conspiracy Theories, the Class War

[Illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva]

By Aragorn Eloff

It is unsurprising that, as we confront the black swan event of the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in the spread of conspiracy theories. Historically, narratives around malevolent, all-powerful forces controlling reality in various ways have often emerged in times of social unrest and uncertainty, where large numbers of people find themselves socially adrift or unable to control fundamental aspects of their lives.

While the typical response to conspiracy theories is to view them as the product of ignorance or delusional thinking, this is complicated by the fact that history is full of many real instances of powerful people colluding in secret at the expense of society. The numerous price-fixing scandals uncovered in South Africa in recent years surely also constitute conspiracies, as do corporate cover-ups around the world, many of which we know about only as a result of people questioning the presentation of reality and correctly connecting the dots to map out underlying truths.

It is clear though that what we more commonly describe as conspiracy theories – exemplified in the current period by the linking of 5G networks to Bill Gates, vaccination and microchip implants, for instance – are markedly different from these real-world examples. As social and psychological research has shown, conspiracy theories of this kind are not amenable to empirical enquiry and subsist for long periods of time in the absence of any reasonable evidence. Those adhering to such theories tend to exhibit little interest in testing their underlying claims and will often simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories that outright contradict each other.

As The Conspiracy Theory Handbook published by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication observes, this suggests that conspiracy theories function in a similar way to ideology, with belief being more a case of underlying psychological motivators – dealing with feelings of powerlessness, coping with threats or explaining confusing events – than the result of careful research and reflection. If this is true, it becomes important to understand these drives and the social contexts within which they tend to arise. This is especially vital when we acknowledge that many conspiracy theories contain, albeit figuratively, a kernel of intuitive truth.

Indeed, as Marxist group Aufheben writes in an article titled “The rise of conspiracy theories: Reification of defeat as the basis of explanation”, conspiracy theory, like left politics, often has a sense “that the world is structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act in their own interests and against the interests of the majority”. Distinct from the kinds of concrete political analyses that are able to explain these unequal power relations in terms of complex dynamics involving myriad social, political, economic and historical forces, however, conspiracy theories operate with a highly simplified understanding of these aspects of social reality, turning social forces into individual Bond villains and systemic conditions into cabals of all-powerful evildoers. This simplified narrative structure, which tellingly reflects dominant modes of subjectivity and the cult of the personality that has arisen under neoliberalism, also partly explains the appeal of conspiracy theories for large numbers of people looking for a stable foothold in an increasingly complex world.

As simplistic as they may be, it is through empathetic and nuanced engagement with conspiratorial narratives that we can perhaps best grapple with, and nurture meaningful collective responses to, the problems conspiracy theories suggestively outline. For instance, while casting Gates as an evil billionaire who wants to control people with 5G networks via microchips implanted in their bodies through mandatory vaccination is clearly absurd, there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned by the technocratic and paternalistic approach of the Gates Foundation towards addressing malnutrition, malaria and viral pandemics in Africa and, more broadly, the lack of control we have over the actions of the plutocrat class.

Anxieties around being controlled by technology may also be based on intuitions about the extent to which states and big technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth – have infiltrated, influenced and benefitted from our private lives while remaining almost entirely unaccountable, something researcher Shoshana Zuboff explores in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Similarly, the recent fears expressed by people who are convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a nefarious plot by global leaders acting in unison to push agendas that diminish our freedoms have at least some basis in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. Here, we would be quite unreasonable if we weren’t acknowledging that numerous states and corporate actors have leveraged the crisis to push forward anti-social agendas, the recent spate of illegal evictions of shack dwellers across South Africa and the loosening of environmental laws around the globe being just two examples.

Covert agendas

More broadly, we can discern the vague stirrings of a genuinely radical politics in some conspiracy theories. As Aufheben observes, these theories often express a genuine sense of estrangement from – and dissatisfaction with – capitalism, the state and other dominant social forces. While the world is not, of course, completely controlled by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or lizard people, it’s not difficult to see the hints of a class analysis here. And when the staggering inequalities of wealth and power in the contemporary world have allowed the ruling class to live fantasy lives so utterly alien from our own, is it any wonder some of us have come to see them as almost inhuman?

Whatever truths they may loosely allude to, however, it remains the case that conspiracy theories, whatever short-term existential relief they may provide by assuring us that everything is easily understandable and under control, even if not in our interests, are deeply disempowering. If we set out with an incoherent understanding of how the world works, we quickly find ourselves unable to take much effective action to tackle its fundamental injustices or equalise its vast disparities of power, which is why the spreading of conspiracy theories usually results in apathy and fatalistic resignation.

More concerning, the same psychological drivers that make conspiracy theories so appealing also leave people susceptible to the influence of anyone – fascists, sociopaths, corporations and insincere spiritual gurus among them – offering an easy, comforting narrative that explains how things are and what we can do to make them better, usually in ways which, ironically, serve covert agendas.

Our approach to conspiracy theories should therefore be at least twofold. On the one hand, we can gently challenge the fallacious elements of conspiratorial thinking and encourage a more thorough interrogation of those aspects that correctly intuit real problems in the world. In practice, this takes the form of political outreach and radical pedagogy, the creation of collective spaces of learning and teaching through which we can tackle the problems we face at their roots without becoming tangled in them. The more we empower ourselves and each other with knowledge about how science, medicine, technology, politics and so forth function, the more we simultaneously hone our critical thinking skills, in turn cultivating personal agency – the sense that we can be meaningful participants in creating social change.

On the other hand, there is the more difficult task of offering assurance and support to those who find themselves drawn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a reality that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Here, we need to develop frameworks that offer sustainable forms of material, psychological and spiritual care. That the world is increasingly complex and uncertain means that very little is, or ever could be, orchestrated in the contrived ways conspiracy theorists propose, but it also means we have to become better equipped to deal with that complexity and uncertainty. While this may seem like a relatively solitary existential pursuit, a genuine sense of security is grounded in healthy, thriving communities of friends, lovers, families and comrades.

Building such communities is no simple task: they are at odds with the alienated and impoverished forms of social belonging that have become so prevalent in capitalist society and they require patient and careful interpersonal and political work. However, if we commit ourselves to learning more and communing more, we can slowly build herd immunity to the impoverished thinking of the present, whether it takes the form of conspiracy theories or dominant ideologies, and begin to cultivate something stronger than the multiple pandemics we currently face.

Covid-19 is a virus that attacks the lungs and many of those infected with it struggle greatly to breathe. Capitalism is an economic relation that attacks the social body and most of us forced to participate in it struggle greatly to live. The deep sense of existential disempowerment wrought by these conditions, especially when experienced together, renders us highly susceptible, however rational we think we are, to conspiratorial thinking and noxious ideologies.

When those around us fall prey to these insidious but increasingly endemic forms of magical thought we should, instead of ridiculing, judging or chastising them, remind ourselves that the word “conspiracy” comes from the old Latin term conspiraire, which means, simply, to breathe together. Breathing together, conspiring, we can create something far better than what currently passes for life.

This article was originally published at New Frame.

The Money Has Always Been There: Coronavirus Response Reveals Capital’s Lies

By Olivia Wood

Republished from Left Voice.

In the past weeks, companies and governments alike have begrudgingly been forced to provide minimal relief to workers suffering under the coronavirus pandemic. Inboxes are filled with emails from dozens of corporations about the steps they are taking to “protect” their employees and the public; these emails are nothing but damage control in the face of public demands. 

Corporations and governments of all sizes are realizing that under such extreme conditions, they cannot hide the disastrous consequences of their actions like they once could. The need to “flatten the curve” is of course vital to protecting everyone’s health, but the capitalists are only struggling to flatten the curve of suffering under their own hegemony in order to keep people from connecting the dots. The old arguments — blaming the working class for their own financial irresponsibility or lack of work ethic — don’t work as well when entire sectors are getting shut down. 

Already, we are seeing rapid changes in political consciousness across sectors. Many people now support measures — like free healthcare, guaranteed paid leave, and universal basic income — that they considered “too radical” only a few weeks ago. They are realizing that all people deserve more. And now they are demanding it. 

Just in the last few weeks, airlines have been repeatedly revising their refund policies. Employers have been allowing more and more people to work from home. Health care providers are beginning to offer telehealth, and insurance companies are starting to provide coverage for telehealth where they didn’t before. These changes didn’t come from the goodness of their hearts. They came in response to a rapid loss in profits, fear of public backlash, and mass public outcry, both through piles of individual complaints and mass organized actions. 

Many workplace protections that we are accustomed to today — such as the 8-hour workday, minimum wage laws, and unemployment and disability benefits —  as inadequate as they are, were won in the 1930s when mass movements and organized labor put pressure on the capitalist class. By offering small, affordable concessions now, subsidized by government bailouts, companies hope to appease the newly agitated workforce and foreclose the possibility of even stronger organized revolt. 

These concessions are not enough to prevent the serious physical, emotional, and financial harms that people around the country (and the world) are facing, but they do reveal just how many policies that were previously called “not feasible” or “too expensive” could have been rapidly implemented in our workplaces and in our lives all along. 

This partial list of concessions demonstrates that while there are no lasting solutions under capitalism, working people can still win valuable gains that improve their lives and strengthen their ability to fight for even more. 

Many of these items are courtesy of @frnsys‘s compendium of concessions that they shared on Twitter.

Workplace Benefits

• Some companies, such as REI, are continuing to pay their workers while stores are closed. At the same time, Congress has refused to provide paid sick leave for most employees, and other companies like Ann Taylor and American Eagle have failed to provide the paid leave they promised.

• Many schools and workplaces are now allowing students/workers to connect from home, even in cases where teleworking accommodations were previously denied to disabled students and workers because these accommodations were not considered “reasonable” under the ADA.

Economic Interventions

• Interest and payments on federally-subsidized student loans have been suspended.

• Some U.S. citizens — excluding gig workers, many college students, sex workers, and others– will receive a one-time check of $1,200, adjusted based on number of children

• The U.S. federal government is now subsidizing state-run unemployment insurance by $600 per week per person.

Shelter and Public Health Protections

• California is commandeering hotels to house the homeless and create extra space for COVID patients, as well as sending 450 trailers around the state to provide additional shelter. Notably, this is not the case in places like Las Vegas, where homeless people are in a “socially distanced” parking lot.

• Several municipalities have suspended evictions.

• Many health insurance companies are now providing coverage for digital medical care (telehealth) and teletherapy, regardless of the person’s previous coverage plan

Law and Order

• A county jail in Ohio released hundreds of inmates, although the terms of their release vary 

• The Portland police department is no longer responding to calls unless lives are in danger.

• Bexar County, Texas is officially suspending arrests for all minor offenses, and many other locales are informally changing their responses

• TSA has created an exception to rules regarding the amount of liquids that can be taken in a carryon bag to allow for large bottles of hand sanitizer. (Of course, this was already an arbitrary rule)

Services and Utilities

• Comcast and T-Mobile are lifting all internet data caps for 60 days

• Several municipalities have suspended utility shut-offs, and Detroit turned the water back on for families who had previously had their water service cut off.

• Cities like New York and San Francisco are implementing government-sponsored childcare

• Some internet service providers are providing free internet service for children who are now attending school from home. 

These concessions are not enough — not even close. We need to have universal paid leave, a quarantine wage, a layoff freeze, and the cancellation of rent and debt. These concessions are nothing but crumbs being thrown by the bourgeoisie in the hopes that it will be enough to quell our rage. However, these concessions do reveal that all of these reforms that governments and business leaders have for so long insisted are impossible to implement are, in fact, things that they always had the power to do. The money has always been there. 

More than 10 million people have filed new claims for unemployment benefits in the last two weeks alone. The crisis is only going to get worse, and we need massive changes now. The way that the necessary concessions will be won is not by sitting idly by and hoping that the capitalists will take mercy on us. As the price gouging around food and medical equipment, landlords’ insistence on continuing to collect rent, and the many employers forcing workers to labor in unsafe conditions demonstrate, capitalist pity is hard to come by in the face of profits. We need to have widespread collective action to win the things we need to survive the coronavirus crisis. We should look to the powerful examples of workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, and General Electric who, this week, walked off the job, went on strike, or staged protests in their workplace to gain safer working conditions or, in the case of GE, switch over production from airplane parts to the much-needed ventilators. 

It is important, as the crisis continues and worsens, to draw certain conclusions about what is happening and why. The concessions listed above are protections that could have always been in place, the bailout bill shows that there is always money, and the increased safety measures show that businesses always had the ability to improve conditions. These things didn’t happen before because they didn’t want to do them. They are giving us crumbs now because they are afraid; they are afraid of us. They know that we have the power to shut down production, to attack capital, and to take power for ourselves. They are hoping that if they give us some crumbs now, then we will forget and forgive them. But we won’t, and we can’t. These concessions should only add to our anger, because now we know, without a doubt, that they could have done this the whole time and chose not to. The money has always been there.

Why Coronavirus Could Spark a Capitalist Supernova

By John Smith

Republished from Open Democracy. This article is part of Open Democracy’s 'Decolonising the economy' series.

“Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of negative rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day,” tweeted Bill Gross, the ‘bond king’, in 2016.

This day has come closer. Capitalism now faces the deepest crisis in its several centuries of existence. A global slump has begun that is already devastating the lives of hundreds of millions of working people on all continents. The consequences for workers and poor people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be even more extreme than for those living in Europe and North America, both with respect to lives lost to coronavirus and to the existential threats to the billions of people already living in extreme poverty. Capitalism, an economic system based on selfishness, greed and dog-eat-dog competition, will more clearly than ever reveal itself to be incompatible with civilisation.

Why is supernova – the explosion and death of a star – an apt metaphor for what could now be about to unfold? Why could the coronavirus, an organism 1000th the diameter of a human hair, be the catalyst for such a cataclysm? And what can workers, youth and the dispossessed of the world do to defend ourselves and to ‘bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old’, in the words of the US labour hymn, Solidarity Forever?

To find answers to these questions, we need to understand why the ‘global financial crisis’ that began in 2007 was much more than a financial crisis, and why the extreme measures taken by G7 governments and central banks to restore a modicum of stability – in particular the ‘zero interest rate policy’, described by a Goldman Sachs banker as “crack cocaine for the financial markets” – have created the conditions for today’s crisis.

Global capitalism’s ‘underlying health issues’

The first stage of a supernova is implosion, analogous to the long-term decline in interest rates that began well before the onset of systemic crisis in 2007, which has accelerated since then, and which fell off a cliff just as coronavirus began its rampage in early January 2020. Falling interest rates are fundamentally the result of two factors: falling rates of profit, and the hypertrophy of capital, i.e. its tendency grow faster than the capacity of workers and farmers to supply it with the fresh blood it needs to live. As Marx said, in Capital vol. 1, “capital’s sole driving force [is] the drive to valorise itself, to create surplus-value… capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

These two factors combine to form a doom loop of awesome destructive power. Let us examine its most important linkages.

Many things both mask and counteract the falling rate of profit, turning this into a tendency that only reveals itself in times of crisis, of which the most important has been the shift of production from Europe, North America and Japan to take advantage of the much higher rates of exploitation available in low-wage countries. The falling rate of profit manifests itself in a growing reluctance of capitalists to invest in production; more and more of what they do invest in is branding, intellectual property and other parasitic and non-productive activities. This long-running capitalist investment strike is amplified by the global shift of production – boosting profits by slashing wages rather than by building new factories and deploying new technologies. This enables huge mark-ups, turbo-charging the accumulation of vast wealth for which capitalists have no productive use – hence the hypertrophy of capital.

This, in turn, results in declining interest rates – as capitalists compete with each other to purchase financial assets, they bid up their price, and the revenue streams they generate fall in proportion – hence falling interest rates. Falling interest rates and rising asset values have created what is, for capitalist investors, the ultimate virtuous circle – they can borrow vast sums to invest in financial assets of all kinds, further inflating their ‘value’.

Falling interest rates therefore have two fundamental consequences: the inflation of asset bubbles and the piling up of debt mountains. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin: for every debtor there is a creditor; every debt is someone else’s asset. Asset bubbles could deflate (if productivity increases), or else they will burst; economic growth could, over time, erode debt mountains, or else they will come crashing down.

Since 2008, productivity has stagnated across the world and GDP growth has been lower than in any decade since World War II, resulting in what Nouriel Roubini has called “the mother of all asset bubbles,” while aggregate debt (the total debt of governments, corporations and households), already mountainous before the 2008 financial crash, has since then more than doubled in size. The growth of debt has been particularly pronounced in the countries of the global South. Total debt for the 30 largest of them reached $72.5tn in 2019 – a 168% rise over the past 10 years, according to Bank of International Settlements data. China accounts for $43tn of this, up from $10tn a decade ago. In sum, well before coronavirus, global capitalism already had ‘underlying health issues’, it was already in intensive care.

Global capitalism – which is more imperialist than ever, since it is both more parasitic and more reliant than ever before on the proceeds of super-exploitation in low-wage countries – is therefore inexorably heading to supernova, towards the bursting of assets bubbles and the crashing of debt mountains. Everything that imperialist central banks have done since 2008 has been designed to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning. But now that day has come.

10-year US Treasury bonds are considered the safest of havens and the ultimate benchmark against which all other debt is priced. In times of great uncertainty, investors invariably stampede out of stock markets and into the safest bond markets, so as share prices fall, bond prices – otherwise known as ‘fixed income securities’ – rise. As they do, the fixed income they yield translates into a falling rate of interest. But not on March 9, when, in the midst of plummeting stock markets, 10-year US Treasury bond interest rates spiked upwards. According to one bond trader, “statistically speaking, [this] should only happen every few millennia.” Even in the darkest moment of the global financial crisis, when Lehman Brothers (a big merchant bank) went bankrupt in September 2008, this did not happen.

The immediate cause of this minor heart attack was the scale of asset-destruction in other share and bond markets, causing investors to scramble to turn their speculative investments into cash. To satisfy their demands, fund managers were obliged to sell their most easily-exchangeable assets, thereby negating their safe-haven status, and this jolted governments and central banks to take extreme action and fire their ‘big bazookas’, namely the multi-trillion dollar rescue packages – including a pledge to print money without limit to ensure the supply of cash to the markets. But this event also provided a premonition for what is down the road. In the end, dollar bills, like bond and share certificates, are just pieces of paper. As trillions more of them flood into the system, events in March 2020 bring closer the day when investors will lose faith in cash itself – and in the power of the economy and state standing behind it. Then the supernova moment will have arrived.

The left’s imperialism-denial, and its belief in the ‘magic money tree’

The gamut of the left in imperialist countries – the Jeremy Corbyn-led wing of the Labour Party in the UK; the motley crew of left-Keynesians such as Ann Pettifor, Paul Mason, Yanis Varoufakis; supporters of Bernie Sanders in USA – are united on two things: they all acknowledge, to one degree or another, that imperialist plunder of colonies and neocolonies happened in the past but do not acknowledge that imperialism continues in any meaningful way to define relations between rich and poor countries.

And they believe in one or other version of the ‘magic money tree’, in other words, they see the decline of interest rates into negative territory not as a flashing red light showing the extremity of the crisis, i.e. not as the implosion phase of a supernova, but as a green light to borrow money to finance increased state investment, social spending, a Green New Deal, and even a bit more foreign aid. In fact, there is no magic money tree. Capitalism cannot escape from this crisis, no matter how many trillions of dollars governments borrow or central banks print. The neoliberals rejected magical thinking, now they embrace it – this shows the extent of their panic, but it does not make magical thinking any less fantastical. The trillions they spent after 2007-8 bought another decade of zombie-like life for their vile system. This time they will be lucky to get 10 months, or even 10 weeks, before the explosion phase of the supernova begins.

Coronavirus – catalyst for cataclysm

The coronavirus pandemic occurred at the worst possible time: growth in the eurozone had shrunk to zero; much of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were already in recession; the sugar-high from Trump’s huge tax-giveaways to US corporations was fading; the US-China trade war was causing serious disruption to supply chains and was threatening to entangle the EU; and tens of millions of people joined mass protests in dozens of countries across the world.

Interest rates are now deep in negative territory – but not if you are Italy, facing an enormous increase in its debt/GDP ratio, not if you are an indebted corporation trying to refinance your debts, not if you are an ‘emerging market’. Since March 9, corporate interest rates have gone through the roof; in fact few corporations can borrow money at any price. Investors are refusing to lend to them. Corporations are now facing a credit crunch – in the midst of global negative interest rates! That’s why the ECB decided to borrow €750 billion from these same investors, and use it to buy the corporate bonds which these same investors now refuse to purchase, and why the USA’s Federal Reserve is doing the same on an even bigger scale. Italy’s (and the EU’s) fate now depends on the willingness of the Bundesbank to replace its private creditors. Their refusal to do this would be the final stage of the EU’s death agony.

During the middle two weeks of March, imperialist governments announced plans to spend $4.5 trillion bailing out their own bankrupt economies. An emergency online summit of the G20 (the G7 imperialist nations plus a dozen or so ‘emerging’ nations, including Russia, India, China, Brazil, and Indonesia) on 26 March, declared “we are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy.” These are weasel words; by ‘global’ they actually mean ‘domestic’! The response of the ‘left’ in the imperialist countries is to clap its hands and say, we were right all along! There is a magic money tree after all! – apparently not realising that this is exactly what happened post-2008: the socialisation of private debt. Or that, unlike post-2008, this time it will not work.

Yet, as imperialist governments belatedly mobilise – and monopolise – medical resources to confront the coronavirus crisis in their own countries, they’ve abandoned poor countries to their fate. The left in the imperialist countries (or we could just say ‘imperialist left’, for short) has also ignored the fact that there is nothing in these emergency cash injections for the poor of the global South. If you are an ‘emerging market’, well, fuck off and join the queue for an IMF bail-out! As of March 24, 80 countries were standing in this queue, waiting for some of its $1tr lending capacity. $1 trillion sounds like a lot of money, and indeed it is, but, as Martin Wolf, chief economic correspondent for the Financial Times, points out, “the aggregate external financing gaps of emerging and developing countries are likely to be far beyond the IMF’s lending capacity.”

Furthermore, as Wolf suggests, the purpose of IMF loans is to help with “external financing gaps” – in other words, to bail out imperialist creditors, not the peoples of debtor nations; and they invariably come with harsh and humiliating conditions that add to the crushing burden already pressing down on the peoples of those countries. In this sense, they are just like the vast government bailouts of private capital in the rich countries – but without anything added on to finance welfare payments or partially replace wages. The aim of the latter is to purchase the docility of the working class in the imperialist nations, but they have no intention of doing this in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

On March 24, the United Nations issued an appeal for $2bn to fight the coronavirus pandemic in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This money, which the U.N. hopes to raise over the next nine months, is 1/80 of the annual budget of the U.K.’s NHS, and less than 1/2000 of the $4.5tr they plan to spend keeping their own capitalist economies alive. It is also less than 1/40 of the money which imperialist investors have taken out of ‘emerging markets’ during the first three weeks of March, “the largest capital outflow ever recorded,” according to IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva.

The maximum extent of relief for the collateral effects of the coronavirus epidemic on the peoples of poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America was indicated by World Bank president, David Malpass, who said after the G20 summit ended that his board is putting together a rescue package valued at “up to $160 billion” spread out over the next 15 months – a minuscule fraction of the economic losses that the coming global slump will impose on the peoples of the absurdly-named ‘emerging markets’.

“We have a revolutionary duty to fulfill" – Leonardo Fernandez, Cuban doctor in Italy

So, what is to be done? Instead of applauding the bailout of big corporations, we should expropriate them. Instead of endorsing a temporary moratorium on evictions and the accumulation of rent arrears, we should confiscate real estate so as to protect workers and small businesses. These, and many other struggles to assert our right to life over the rights of capitalists to their property, are for the near future.

Right now the priority is to do whatever is necessary to save life and defeat the coronavirus. This means extending solidarity to those who are most vulnerable to the pandemic – homeless people, prisoners, asylum seekers enduring ‘hostile environments’ – and to the dispossessed and victims of imperialism in the slums, shantytowns and refugee camps of the global South. Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Bank of India, points out that “pending a cure or a reliable vaccine, the world needs to fight the virus into submission everywhere in order to relax measures anywhere.” The Economist concurs: “If covid-19 is left to ravage the emerging world, it will soon spread back to the rich one.”

The coronavirus pandemic is just the latest proof that we need not so much an NHS, but a GHS – a Global Health Service. The only country that is acting on this imperative is revolutionary Cuba. They already have more than 28,000 doctors providing free health care in 61 poor countries – more than the G7 nations combined – and 52 in Italy, 120 more to Jamaica, and are helping scores of other countries to prepare for the pandemic. Even the far-right Bolsonaro government in Brazil, which last year expelled 10000 Cuban doctors, branding them terrorists, is now begging them to return.

To defeat coronavirus we must emulate Cuba’s medical internationalism. If we are to defeat this pandemic we must join with its revolutionary doctors and revolutionary people, and we must prepare do what Cuba did to make this internationalism possible – in other words, we must replace the dictatorship of capital with the power of working people. The coronavirus supernova makes socialist revolution – in imperialist countries and across the world – into a necessity, an urgent practical task, a life and death question if human civilisation is to survive and if the capitalist destruction of nature, of which the coronavirus epidemic is merely the latest symptom, is to be ended.

Thanks to Andy Higginbottom, Shih-yu Chou, and Walter Daum for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Engels on Nature and Humanity

(Pictured: A painting by English artist LS Lowry (1887 - 1976) entitled 'Going To Work')

By Michael Roberts

Republished from the author’s blog.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Marx and Engels are often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.

The charge is that other living species are merely playthings for the use of human beings.  There are humans and there is nature – in contradiction.  This charge is particularly aimed at Friedrich Engels, who it is claimed, took a bourgeois ‘positivist’ view of science: scientific knowledge was always progressive and neutral in ideology; and so was the relationship between man and nature.

This charge against Marx and Engels was promoted in the post-war period by the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxism, which reckoned that everything went wrong with Marxism after 1844, when Marx and Engels supposedly dumped “humanism”.  Later, followers of the French Marxist Althusser put the blame on Fred himself.  For them, everything went to hell in a hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped ‘historical materialism’ and replaced it with ‘dialectical materialism’, in order to promote Engels’ ‘silly belief’ that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.

Indeed, the ‘green’ critique of Marx and Engels is that they were unaware that homo sapiens were destroying the planet and thus themselves.  Instead, Marx and Engels had a touching Promethean faith in capitalism’s ability to develop the productive forces and technology to overcome any risks to the planet and nature.

That Marx and Engels paid no attention to the impact on nature of human social activity has been debunked recently in particular by the ground-breaking work of Marxist authors like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett.  They have reminded us that throughout Marx’s Capital, Marx was very aware of capitalism’s degrading impact on nature and the resources of the planet.  Marx wrote that 

“the capitalist mode of production collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance…. [It] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker.” 

As Paul Burkett says: “it is difficult to argue that there is something fundamentally anti-ecological about Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his projections of communism.”

To back this up, Kohei Saito’s prize-winning book has drawn on Marx’s previously unpublished ‘excerpt’ notebooks from the ongoing MEGA research project to reveal Marx’s extensive study of scientific works of the time on agriculture, soil, forestry, to expand his concept of the connection between capitalism and its destruction of natural resources. (I have a review pending on Saito’s book).

But Engels too must be saved from the same charge.  Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing.  While still living in his home town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), he wrote several diary notes about the inequality of rich and poor, the pious hypocrisy of the church preachers and also the pollution of the rivers.

Just 18 years old, he writes: 

“the two towns of Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of nearly three hours’ travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to shame for men’s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that, but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red. Coming from Düsseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.”

He goes on:

“First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. “

He connected the social degradation of working families with the degradation of nature alongside the hypocritical piety of the manufacturers.

“Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories — merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist’s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.”

Sure, these observations by Engels are just that, observations, without any theoretical development, but they show the sensitivity that Engels already had to the relationship between industrialisation, the owners and the workers, their poverty and the environmental impact of factory production.

In his first major work, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, again well before Marx looked at political economy, Engels notes how the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the degradation of nature go hand in hand. 

“To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” 

Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.

Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way.  And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature.

In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape into Man.”, he writes: 

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were … thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (my emphasis)

Engels goes on: 

“in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body. …”

Engels explains the social consequences of the drive to expand the productive forces.  

“But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. … When afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. …”

The people of the Americas were driven into slavery, but also nature was enslaved. As Engels put it:

“What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Now we know that it was not just slavery that the Europeans brought to the Americas, but also disease, which in its many forms exterminated 90% of native Americans and was the main reason for their subjugation by colonialism.

As we experience yet another pandemic, we know that it was capitalism’s drive to industrialise agriculture and usurp the remaining wilderness that has led to nature ‘striking back’, as humans come into contact with more pathogens to which they have no immunity, just as the native Americans in the 16th century.

Engels attacked the view that ‘human nature’ is inherently selfish and will just destroy nature.  In his Outline, Engels described that argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.”  Humans can work in harmony with and as part of nature.  It requires greater knowledge of the consequences of human action.  Engels said in his Dialectics:

“But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analyzing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.”

But better knowledge and scientific progress is not enough. For Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels said: “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.”  Science is not enough. “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.”  The ‘positivist’ Engels, it seems, supported Marx’s materialist conception of history after all.

COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital

By Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace

Republished from Monthly Review.

Monthly Review Editors: This article is the Review of the Month for the May 2020 issue. The print version will carry the same date at the end of the article as today, March 27, 2020. That we are publishing the Review of the Month online more than a month ahead of the publication of the issue as a whole is unprecedented for us and is testimony to the present emergency. We anticipate that minor updates will be added to the article when the entire magazine is posted online on May 1.

Calculation

COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and, one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought about by surges in patients.

China, its initial outbreak in contraction, presently breathes easier.1 South Korea and Singapore as well. Europe, especially Italy and Spain, but increasingly other countries, already bends under the weight of deaths still early in the outbreak. Latin America and Africa are only now beginning to accumulate cases, some countries preparing better than others. In the United States, a bellwether if only as the richest country in the history of the world, the near future looks bleak. The outbreak is not slated to peak stateside until May and already health care workers and hospital visitors are fist fighting over access to the dwindling supply of personal protection equipment.2 Nurses, to whom the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) has appallingly recommended using bandanas and scarves as masks, have already declared that “the system is doomed.”3

The U.S. administration meanwhile continues to outbid individual states for basic medical equipment that it refused to purchase for them in the first place. It has also announced a border crackdown as a public health intervention while the virus rages on ill-addressed inside the country.4

An epidemiology team at Imperial College projected that the best campaign in mitigation—flattening the plotted curve of accumulating cases by quarantining detected cases and socially distancing the elderly—would still leave the United States with 1.1 million dead and a case burden eight times the country’s total critical care beds.5 Disease suppression, looking to end the outbreak, would take public health further into a China-style case (and family member) quarantine and community-wide distancing, including closing down institutions. That would bring the United States down to a projected range of around 200,000 deaths.

The Imperial College group estimates a successful campaign in suppression would have to be pursued for at least eighteen months, carrying an overhead in economic contraction and decay in community services. The team proposed balancing the demands of disease control and economy by toggling in and out of community quarantine, as triggered by a set level of critical care beds filled.

Other modelers have pushed back. A group led by Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame declares the Imperial College model fails to include contact tracing and door-to-door monitoring.6 Their counterpoint misses that the outbreak has broken past many governments’ willingness to engage that kind of cordon sanitaire. It will not be until the outbreak begins its decline when many countries will view such measures, hopefully with a functional and accurate test, as appropriate. As one droll put it: “Coronavirus is too radical. America needs a more moderate virus that we can respond to incrementally.”7

The Taleb group notes the Imperial team’s refusal to investigate under what conditions the virus can be driven to extinction. Such extirpation does not mean zero cases, but enough isolation that single cases are not likely to produce new chains of infection. Only 5 percent of susceptibles in contact with a case in China were subsequently infected. In effect, the Taleb team favors China’s suppression program, going all out fast enough to drive the outbreak to extinction without getting into a marathon dance toggling between disease control and ensuring the economy no labor shortage. In other words, China’s strict (and resource-intensive) approach frees its population from the months-long—or even years-long—sequestration in which the Imperial team recommends other countries partake.

Mathematical epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace, one of us, overturns the modeling table entirely. Modeling emergencies, however necessary, miss when and where to begin. Structural causes are as much part of the emergency. Including them helps us figure out how best to respond moving forward beyond just restarting the economy that produced the damage. “If firefighters are given sufficient resources,” writes Wallace,

under normal conditions, most fires, most often, can be contained with minimal casualties and property destruction. However, that containment is critically dependent on a far less romantic, but no less heroic enterprise, the persistent, ongoing, regulatory efforts that limit building hazard through code development and enforcement, and that also ensure firefighting, sanitation, and building preservation resources are supplied to all at needed levels.…

Context counts for pandemic infection, and current political structures that allow multinational agricultural enterprises to privatize profits while externalizing and socializing costs, must become subject to “code enforcement” that reinternalizes those costs if truly mass-fatal pandemic disease is to be avoided in the near future.8

The failure to prepare for and react to the outbreak did not just start in December when countries around the world failed to respond once COVID-19 spilled out of Wuhan. In the United States, for instance, it did not start when Donald Trump dismantled his national security team’s pandemic preparation team or left seven hundred CDC positions unfilled.9 Nor did it start when feds failed to act on the results of a 2017 pandemic simulation showing the country was unprepared.10 Nor when, as stated in a Reuters headline, the United States “axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak,” although missing the early direct contact from a U.S. expert on the ground in China certainly weakened the U.S. response. Nor did it start with the unfortunate decision not to use the already available test kits provided by the World Health Organization. Together, the delays in early information and total miss in testing will undoubtedly be responsible for many, probably thousands, of lost lives.11

The failures were actually programmed decades ago as the shared commons of public health were simultaneously neglected and monetized.12 A country captured by a regimen of individualized, just-in-time epidemiology—an utter contradiction—with barely enough hospital beds and equipment for normal operations, is by definition unable to marshal the resources necessary to pursue a China brand of suppression.

Following up the Taleb team’s point about model strategies in more explicitly political terms, disease ecologist Luis Fernando Chaves, another coauthor of this article, references dialectical biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin to concur that “letting the numbers speak” only masks all the assumptions folded in beforehand.13 Models such as the Imperial study explicitly limit the scope of analysis to narrowly tailored questions framed within the dominant social order. By design, they fail to capture the broader market forces driving outbreaks and the political decisions underlying interventions.

Consciously or not, the resulting projections set securing health for all in second place, including the many thousands of the most vulnerable who would be killed should a country toggle between disease control and the economy. The Foucaultian vision of a state acting on a population in its own interests only represents an update, albeit a more benign one, of the Malthusian push for herd immunity that Britain’s Tory government and now the Netherlands proposed—letting the virus burn through the population unimpeded.14 There is little evidence beyond an ideological hope that herd immunity would guarantee stopping the outbreak. The virus may readily evolve out from underneath the population’s immune blanket.

Intervention

What should be done instead? First, we need to grasp that, in responding to the emergency the right way, we will still be engaging in both necessity and danger.

We need to nationalize hospitals as Spain did in response to the outbreak.15 We need to supercharge testing in volume and turnaround as Senegal has.16 We need to socialize pharmaceuticals.17 We need to enforce maximum protections for medical staff to slow staff decay. We must secure the right to repair for ventilators and other medical machinery.18 We need to start mass-producing cocktails of antivirals such as remdesivir and old-school antimalarial chloroquine (and any other drugs that appear promising) while we conduct clinical trials testing whether they work beyond the laboratory.19 A planning system should be implemented to (1) force companies to produce the needed ventilators and personal protection equipment required by health care workers and (2) prioritize allocation to places with the greatest needs.

We must establish a massive pandemic corps to provide the work force—from research to care—that approaches the order of demand the virus (and any other pathogen to come) is placing on us. Match the caseload with the number of critical care beds, staffing, and equipment necessary so that suppression can bridge the present numbers gap. In other words, we cannot accept the idea of merely surviving COVID-19’s ongoing air attack only to return later to contact tracing and case isolation to drive the outbreak below its threshold. We must hire enough people to identify COVID-19 home-by-home right now and equip them with the needed protective gear, such as adequate masks. Along the way, we need to suspend a society organized around expropriation, from landlords up through sanctions on other countries, so that people can survive both the disease and its cure.

Until such a program can be implemented, however, the greater populace is left largely abandoned. Even as continued pressure must be brought to bear on recalcitrant governments, in the spirit of a largely lost tradition in proletarian organizing going back 150 years, everyday people who are able should join emerging mutual aid groups and neighborhood brigades.20 Professional public health staff that unions can spare should train these groups to keep acts of kindness from spreading the virus.

The insistence that we fold the virus’s structural origins into emergency planning offers us a key to parlaying every step forward into protecting people before profits.

One of many perils lies in normalizing the “batshit crazy” presently underway, a serendipitous characterization given the syndrome that patients suffer—proverbial bat shit in the lungs. We need to retain the shock we received when we learned another SARS virus emerged out of its wildlife refugia and in a matter of eight weeks splattered itself across humanity.21 The virus emerged at one terminus of a regional supply line in exotic foods, successfully setting off a human-to-human chain of infections at the other end in Wuhan, China.22 From there, the outbreak both diffused locally and hopped onto planes and trains, spreading out across the globe through a web structured by travel connections and down a hierarchy from larger to smaller cities.23

Other than describing the wild food market in the typical orientalism, little effort has been expended on the most obvious of questions. How did the exotic food sector arrive at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or in an alleyway. Think of the permits and payments (and deregulation thereof) involved.24 Well beyond fisheries, worldwide wild food is an increasingly formalized sector, evermore capitalized by the same sources backing industrial production.25 Although nowhere near similar in the magnitude of output, the distinction is now more opaque.

The overlapping economic geography extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness.26 As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands. As a result, the most exotic of pathogens, in this case bat-hosted SARS-2, find their way onto a truck, whether in food animals or the labor tending them, shotgun from one end of a lengthening periurban circuit to the other before hitting the world stage.27

Infiltration

The connection bears elaboration, as much in helping us plan forward during this outbreak as in understanding how humanity maneuvered itself into such a trap.

Some pathogens emerge right out of centers of production. Foodborne bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter come to mind. But many like COVID-19 originate on the frontiers of capital production. Indeed, at least 60 percent of novel human pathogens emerge by spilling over from wild animals to local human communities (before the more successful ones spread to the rest of the world).28

A number of luminaries in the field of ecohealth, some funded in part by Colgate-Palmolive and Johnson & Johnson, companies driving the bleeding edge of agribusiness-led deforestation, produced a global map based on previous outbreaks back to 1940 intimating where new pathogens are likely to emerge moving forward.29 The warmer the color on the map, the more likely a new pathogen should emerge there. But in confusing such absolute geographies, the team’s map—red hot in China, India, Indonesia, and parts of Latin America and Africa—missed a critical point. Focusing on outbreak zones ignores the relations shared by global economic actors that shape epidemiologies.30 The capital interests backing development- and production-induced changes in land use and disease emergence in underdeveloped parts of the globe reward efforts that pin responsibility for outbreaks on indigenous populations and their so-deemed “dirty” cultural practices.31 Prepping bushmeat and home burials are two practices blamed for the emergence of new pathogens. Plotting relational geographies, in contrast, suddenly turns New York, London, and Hong Kong, key sources of global capital, into three of the world’s worst hotspots instead.

Outbreak zones meanwhile are no longer even organized under traditional polities. Unequal ecological exchange—redirecting the worst damage from industrial agriculture to the Global South—has moved out of solely stripping localities of resources by state-led imperialism and into new complexes across scale and commodity.32 Agribusiness is reconfiguring their extractivist operations into spatially discontinuous networks across territories of differing scales.33 A series of multinational-based “Soybean Republics,” for instance, now range across Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The new geography is embodied by changes in company management structure, capitalization, subcontracting, supply chain substitutions, leasing, and transnational land pooling.34 In straddling national borders, these “commodity countries,” flexibly embedded across ecologies and political borders, are producing new epidemiologies along the way.35

For instance, despite a general shift in population from commoditized rural areas to urban slums that continues today across the globe, the rural-urban divide driving much of the discussion around disease emergence misses rural-destined labor and the rapid growth of rural towns into periurban desakotas (city villages) or zwischenstadt (in-between cities). Mike Davis and others have identified how these newly urbanizing landscapes act as both local markets and regional hubs for global agricultural commodities passing through.36 Some such regions have even gone “post-agricultural.”37 As a result, forest disease dynamics, the pathogens’ primeval sources, are no longer constrained to the hinterlands alone. Their associated epidemiologies have themselves turned relational, felt across time and space. A SARS can suddenly find itself spilling over into humans in the big city only a few days out of its bat cave.

Ecosystems in which such “wild” viruses were in part controlled by the complexities of the tropical forest are being drastically streamlined by capital-led deforestation and, at the other end of periurban development, by deficits in public health and environmental sanitation.38 While many sylvatic pathogens are dying off with their host species as a result, a subset of infections that once burned out relatively quickly in the forest, if only by an irregular rate of encountering their typical host species, are now propagating across susceptible human populations whose vulnerability to infection is often exacerbated in cities by austerity programs and corrupted regulation. Even in the face of efficacious vaccines, the resulting outbreaks are characterized by greater extent, duration, and momentum. What were once local spillovers are now epidemics trawling their way through global webs of travel and trade.39

By this parallax effect—by a change in the environmental background alone—old standards such as Ebola, Zika, malaria, and yellow fever, evolving comparatively little, have all made sharp turns into regional threats.40 They have suddenly moved from spilling over into remote villagers now and again to infecting thousands in capital cities. In something of the other ecological direction, even wild animals, routinely longtime disease reservoirs, are suffering blowback. Their populations fragmented by deforestation, native New World monkeys susceptible to wildtype yellow fever, to which they had been exposed for at least a hundred years, are losing their herd immunity and dying in the hundreds of thousands.41

Expansion

If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population centers.42 It is here, and along the way, where novel pathogens infiltrate agriculture’s gated communities. The lengthier the associated supply chains and the greater the extent of adjunct deforestation, the more diverse (and exotic) the zoonotic pathogens that enter the food chain. Among recent emergent and reemergent farm and foodborne pathogens, originating from across the anthropogenic domain, are African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola Reston, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, and a variety of novel influenza variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.43

However unintended, the entirety of the production line is organized around practices that accelerate the evolution of pathogen virulence and subsequent transmission.44 Growing genetic monocultures—food animals and plants with nearly identical genomes—removes immune firebreaks that in more diverse populations slow down transmission.45 Pathogens now can just quickly evolve around the commonplace host immune genotypes. Meanwhile, crowded conditions depress immune response.46 Larger farm animal population sizes and densities of factory farms facilitate greater transmission and recurrent infection.47 High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles at barn, farm, and regional levels, removing the cap on the evolution of pathogen deadliness.48 Housing a lot of animals together rewards those strains that can burn through them best. Decreasing the age of slaughter—to six weeks in chickens—is likely to select for pathogens able to survive more robust immune systems.49 Lengthening the geographic extent of live animal trade and export has increased the diversity of genomic segments that their associated pathogens exchange, increasing the rate at which disease agents explore their evolutionary possibilities.50

While pathogen evolution rockets forward in all these ways, there is, however, little to no intervention, even at the industry’s own demand, save what is required to rescue any one quarter’s fiscal margins from the sudden emergency of an outbreak.51 The trend tends toward fewer government inspections of farms and processing plants, legislation against government surveillance and activist exposé, and legislation against even reporting on the specifics of deadly outbreaks in media outlets. Despite recent court victories against pesticide and hog pollution, the private command of production remains entirely focused on profit. The damages caused by the outbreaks that result are externalized to livestock, crops, wildlife, workers, local and national governments, public health systems, and alternate agrosystems abroad as a matter of national priority. In the United States, the CDC reports foodborne outbreaks are expanding in the numbers of states impacted and people infected.52

That is, capital’s alienation is parsing out in pathogens’ favor. While the public interest is filtered out at the farm and food factory gate, pathogens bleed past the biosecurity that industry is willing to pay for and back out to the public. Everyday production represents a lucrative moral hazard eating through our shared health commons.

Liberation

There is a telling irony in New York, one of the largest cities in the world, sheltering in place against COVID-19, a hemisphere away from the virus’s origins. Millions of New Yorkers are hiding out in housing stock overseen until recently by one Alicia Glen, until 2018 the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development.53 Glen is a former Goldman Sachs executive who oversaw the investment company’s Urban Investment Group, which finances projects in the kinds of communities the firm’s other units help redline.54

Glen, of course, is not in any way personally to blame for the outbreak, but is more a symbol of a connection that hits closer to home. Three years before the city hired her, upon a housing crisis and Great Recession in part its own making, her former employer, along with JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo & Co., and Morgan Stanley, took 63 percent of the resulting federal emergency loan financing.55 Goldman Sachs, cleared of overhead, moved to diversifying its holdings out of the crisis. Goldman Sachs took 60 percent stock in Shuanghui Investment and Development, part of the giant Chinese agribusiness that bought U.S.-based Smithfield Foods, the largest hog producer in the world.56 For $300 million, it also scored out-and-out ownership of ten poultry farms in Fujian and Hunan, one province over from Wuhan and well within the city’s wild foods catchment.57 It invested up to another $300 million alongside Deutsche Bank in hog raising in the same provinces.58

The relational geographies explored above have circulated all the way back. There is the pandemic presently sickening Glen’s constituencies apartment-to-apartment across New York, the largest U.S. COVID-19 epicenter. But we need also to acknowledge that the loop of causes of the outbreak in part extended out from New York to begin with, however minor in this instance Goldman Sachs’ investment may be for a system the size of China’s agriculture.

Nationalistic finger pointing, from Trump’s racist “China virus” and across the liberal continuum, obscures the interlocking global directorates of state and capital.59 “Enemy brothers,” Karl Marx described them.60 The death and damage borne by working people on the battlefield, in the economy, and now on their couches fighting to catch their breath manifest both the competition among elites maneuvering for dwindling natural resources and the means shared in dividing and conquering the mass of humanity caught in the gears of these machinations.

Indeed, a pandemic that arises out of the capitalist mode of production and that the state is expected to manage on one end can offer an opportunity from which the system’s managers and beneficiaries can prosper on the other. In mid-February, five U.S. senators and twenty House members dumped millions of dollars in personally held stock in industries likely to be damaged in the oncoming pandemic.61 The politicos based their insider trading on nonpublic intelligence, even as some of the representatives continued to publicly repeat regime missives that the pandemic served no such threat.

Beyond such crass smash-and-grabs, the corruption stateside is systemic, a marker of the end of the U.S. cycle of accumulation when capital cashes out.

There is something comparatively anachronistic in efforts to keep the spout on even if organized around reifying finance over the reality of the primary ecologies (and related epidemiologies) on which it is based. For Goldman Sachs itself, the pandemic, as crises before, offers “room to grow”:

We share the optimism of the various vaccine experts and researchers at biotech companies based on the good progress that has been made on various therapies and vaccines so far. We believe that fear will abate at the first significant evidence of such progress.…

Trying to trade to a possible downside target when the year-end target is substantially higher is appropriate for day traders, momentum followers, and some hedge fund managers, but not for long-term investors. Of equal importance, there is no guarantee that the market reaches the lower levels that may be used as justification for selling today. On the other hand, we are more confident that the market will eventually reach the higher target given the resiliency and preeminence of the US economy.

And finally, we actually think that current levels provide an opportunity to slowly add to the risk levels of a portfolio. For those who may be sitting on excess cash and have staying power with the right strategic asset allocation, this is the time to start incrementally adding to S&P equities.62

Appalled by the ongoing carnage, people the world over draw different conclusions.63 The circuits of capital and production that pathogens mark like radioactive tags one after the other are thought unconscionable.

How to characterize such systems beyond, as we did above, the episodic and circumstantial? Our group is in the midst of deriving a model that outstrips efforts by the modern colonial medicine found in ecohealth and One Health that continues to blame the indigenous and local smallholders for the deforestation that leads to the emergence of deadly diseases.64

Our general theory of neoliberal disease emergence, including, yes, in China, combines:

• global circuits of capital;

• deployment of said capital destroying regional environmental complexity that keeps virulent pathogen population growth in check;

• the resulting increases in the rates and taxonomic breadth of spillover events;

• the expanding periurban commodity circuits shipping these newly spilled over pathogens in livestock and labor from the deepest hinterland to regional cities;

• the growing global travel (and livestock trade) networks that deliver the pathogens from said cities to the rest of the world in record time;

• the ways these networks lower transmission friction, selecting for the evolution of greater pathogen deadliness in both livestock and people;

• and, among other impositions, the dearth of reproduction on-site in industrial livestock, removing natural selection as an ecosystems service that provides real-time (and nearly free) disease protection.

The underlying operative premise is that the cause of COVID-19 and other such pathogens is not found just in the object of any one infectious agent or its clinical course, but also in the field of ecosystemic relations that capital and other structural causes have pinned back to their own advantage.65 The wide variety of pathogens, representing different taxa, source hosts, modes of transmission, clinical courses, and epidemiological outcomes, all the earmarks that send us running wild-eyed to our search engines upon each outbreak, mark different parts and pathways along the same kinds of circuits of land use and value accumulation.

A general program of intervention runs in parallel far beyond a particular virus.

To avoid the worst outcomes here on out, disalienation offers the next great human transition: abandoning settler ideologies, reintroducing humanity back into Earth’s cycles of regeneration, and rediscovering our sense of individuation in multitudes beyond the capital state.66 However, economism, the belief that all causes are economic alone, will not be liberation enough. Global capitalism is a many-headed hydra, appropriating, internalizing, and ordering multiple layers of social relation.67 Capitalism operates across complex and interlinked terrains of race, class, and gender in the course of actualizing regional value regimes place to place.

At the risk of accepting the precepts of what historian Donna Haraway dismissed as salvation history—“can we defuse the bomb in time?”—disalienation must dismantle these multifold hierarchies of oppression and the locale-specific ways they interact with accumulation.68 Along the way, we must navigate out of capital’s expansive reappropriations across productive, social, and symbolic materialisms.69 That is, out of what sums up to a totalitarianism. Capitalism commodifies everything—Mars exploration here, sleep there, lithium lagoons, ventilator repair, even sustainability itself, and on and on, these many permutations are found well beyond the factory and farm. All the ways nearly everyone everywhere is subjected to the market, which during a time like this is increasingly anthropomorphized by politicians, could not be clearer.70

In short, a successful intervention keeping any one of the many pathogens queuing up across the agroeconomic circuit from killing a billion people must walk through the door of a global clash with capital and its local representatives, however much any individual foot soldier of the bourgeoisie, Glen among them, attempts to mitigate the damage. As our group describes in some of our latest work, agribusiness is at war with public health.71 And public health is losing.

Should, however, greater humanity win such a generational conflict, we can replug ourselves back into a planetary metabolism that, however differently expressed place to place, reconnects our ecologies and our economies.72 Such ideals are more than matters of the utopian. In doing so, we converge on immediate solutions. We protect the forest complexity that keeps deadly pathogens from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto the world’s travel network.73 We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent.74 We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time. Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by the market.

The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes, infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter time than the hundred-year lull since 1918. Can we fundamentally adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infections?

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist who has consulted with the Food and Agriculture Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alex Liebman is a PhD student in human geography at Rutgers University, with a MSc in agronomy from the University of Minnesota. Luis Fernando Chaves is a disease ecologist and was a Senior Researcher at the Costa Rican Institute for Research and Education on Nutrition and Health in Tres Rios, Costa Rica. Rodrick Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology of the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University.

They appreciate perspicacious comments from Kenichi Okamoto.

Notes

1. ↩ Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)—Statistics and Research,” Our World in Data, accessed March 22, 2020.

2. ↩ Brian M. Rosenthal, Joseph Goldstein, and Michael Rothfeld, “Coronavirus in N.Y.: ‘Deluge’ of Cases Begins Hitting Hospitals,” New York Times, March 20, 2020.

3. ↩ Hannah Rappleye, Andrew W. Lehren, Laura Stricklet, and Sarah Fitzpatrick, “’The System Is Doomed’: Doctors, Nurses, Sound off in NBC News Coronavirus Survey,” NBC News, March 20, 2020.

4. ↩ Eliza Relman, “The Federal Government Outbid States on Critical Coronavirus Supplies After Trump Told Governors to Get Their Own Medical Equipment,” Business Insider, March 20, 2020; David Oliver, “Trump Announces U.S.-Mexico Border Closure to Stem Spread of Coronavirus,” USA Today, March 19, 2020.

5. ↩ Neil M. Ferguson et al. on behalf of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, “Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand,” March 16, 2020.

6. ↩ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007); Chen Shen, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, “Review of Ferguson et al. ‘Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions,’” New England Complex Systems Institute, March 17, 2020.

7. ↩ NewTmrw, Twitter post, March 21, 2020.

8. ↩ Rodrick Wallace, “Pandemic Firefighting vs. Pandemic Fire Prevention” (unpublished manuscript, March 20, 2020). Available upon request.

9. ↩ Jonathan Allen, “Trump’s Not Worried About Coronavirus: But His Scientists Are,” NBC News, February 26, 2020; Deb Riechmann, “Trump Disbanded NSC Pandemic Unit That Experts Had Praised,” AP News, March 14, 2020.

10. ↩ David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan, and Michael Crowley, “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded,” New York Times, March 19, 2020.

11. ↩ Marisa Taylor, “Exclusive: U.S. Axed CDC Expert Job in China Months Before Virus Outbreak,” Reuters, March 22, 2020.

12. ↩ Howard Waitzkin, ed., Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).

13. ↩ Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, “Let the Numbers Speak,” International Journal of Health Services 30, no. 4 (2000): 873–77.

14. ↩ Owen Matthews, “Britain Drops Its Go-It-Alone Approach to Coronavirus,” Foreign Policy, March 17, 2020; Rob Wallace, “Pandemic Strike,” Uneven Earth, March 16, 2020; Isabel Frey, “‘Herd Immunity’ Is Epidemiological Neoliberalism,” Quarantimes, March 19, 2020.

15. ↩ Adam Payne, “Spain Has Nationalized All of Its Private Hospitals as the Country Goes into Coronavirus Lockdown,” Business Insider, March 16, 2020.

16. ↩ Jeva Lange, “Senegal Is Reportedly Turning Coronavirus Tests Around ‘within 4 Hours’ While Americans Might Wait a Week,” Yahoo News, March 12, 2020.

17. ↩ Steph Sterling and Julie Margetta Morgan, New Rules for the 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of Prescription Drug Policy in the United States (New York: Roosevelt Institute, 2019).

18. ↩ Jason Koebler, “Hospitals Need to Repair Ventilators: Manufacturers Are Making That Impossible,” Vice, March 18, 2020.

19. ↩ Manli Wang et al., “Remdesivir and Chloroquine Effectively Inhibit the Recently Emerged Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) In Vitro,” Cell Research 30 (2020): 269–71.

20. ↩ “Autonomous Groups Are Mobilizing Mutual Aid Initiatives to Combat the Coronavirus,” It’s Going Down, March 20, 2020.

21. ↩ Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Nature Medicine (2020).

22. ↩ Rob Wallace, “Notes on a Novel Coronavirus,” MR Online, January 29, 2020.

23. ↩ Marius Gilbert et al., “Preparedness and Vulnerability of African Countries Against Importations of COVID-19: A Modelling Study,” Lancet 395, no. 10227 (2020): 871–77.

24. ↩ Juanjuan Sun, “The Regulation of ‘Novel Food’ in China: The Tendency of Deregulation,” European Food and Feed Law Review 10, no. 6 (2015): 442–48.

25. ↩ Emma G. E. Brooks, Scott I. Robertson, and Diana J. Bell, “The Conservation Impact of Commercial Wildlife Farming of Porcupines in Vietnam,” Biological Conservation 143, no. 11 (2010): 2808–14.

26. ↩ Mindi Schneider, “Wasting the Rural: Meat, Manure, and the Politics of Agro-Industrialization in Contemporary China,” Geoforum 78 (2017): 89–97.

27. ↩ Robert G. Wallace, Luke Bergmann, Lenny Hogerwerf, Marius Gilbert, “Are Influenzas in Southern China Byproducts of the Region’s Globalising Historical Present?,” in Influenza and Public Health: Learning from Past Pandemics, ed. Jennifer Gunn, Tamara Giles-Vernick, and Susan Craddock (London: Routledge, 2010); Alessandro Broglia and Christian Kapel, “Changing Dietary Habits in a Changing World: Emerging Drivers for the Transmission of Foodborne Parasitic Zoonoses,” Veterinary Parasitology 182, no. 1 (2011): 2–13.

28. ↩ David Molyneux et al., “Zoonoses and Marginalised Infectious Diseases of Poverty: Where Do We Stand?,” Parasites & Vectors 4, no. 106 (2011).

29. ↩ Stephen S. Morse et al., “Prediction and Prevention of the Next Pandemic Zoonosis,” Lancet 380, no. 9857 (2012): 1956–65; Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

30. ↩ Robert G. Wallace et al., “The Dawn of Structural One Health: A New Science Tracking Disease Emergence Along Circuits of Capital,” Social Science & Medicine 129 (2015): 68–77; Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu.

31. ↩ Steven Cummins, Sarah Curtis, Ana V. Diez-Roux, and Sally Macintyre, “Understanding and Representing ‘Place’ in Health Research: A Relational Approach,” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 9 (2007): 1825–38; Luke Bergmann and Mollie Holmberg, “Land in Motion,” Annals of the American Association of Geographer, 106, no. 4 (2016): 932–56; Luke Bergmann, “Towards Economic Geographies Beyond the Nature-Society Divide,” Geoforum 85 (2017): 324–35.

32. ↩ Andrew K. Jorgenson, “Unequal Ecological Exchange and Environmental Degradation: A Theoretical Proposition and Cross-National Study of Deforestation, 1990–2000,” Rural Sociology 71, no. 4 (2006): 685–712; Becky Mansfield, Darla K. Munroe, and Kendra McSweeney, “Does Economic Growth Cause Environmental Recovery? Geographical Explanations of Forest Regrowth,” Geography Compass 4, no. 5 (2010): 416–27; Susanna B. Hecht, “Forests Lost and Found in Tropical Latin America: The Woodland ‘Green Revolution,’” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 5 (2014): 877–909; Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira, “The Geopolitics of Brazilian Soybeans,” Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 348–72.

33. ↩ Mariano Turzi, “The Soybean Republic,” Yale Journal of International Affairs 6, no. 2 (2011); Rogério Haesbaert, El Mito de la Desterritorialización: Del ‘Fin de Los Territorios’ a la Multiterritorialidad (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2011); Clara Craviotti, “Which Territorial Embeddedness? Territorial Relationships of Recently Internationalized Firms of the Soybean Chain,” Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 331–47.

34. ↩ Wendy Jepson, Christian Brannstrom, and Anthony Filippi, “Access Regimes and Regional Land Change in the Brazilian Cerrado, 1972–2002,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 1 (2010): 87–111; Patrick Meyfroidt et al., “Multiple Pathways of Commodity Crop Expansion in Tropical Forest Landscapes,” Environmental Research Letters 9, no 7 (2014); Oliveira, “The Geopolitics of Brazilian Soybeans”; Javier Godar, “Balancing Detail and Scale in Assessing Transparency to Improve the Governance of Agricultural Commodity Supply Chains,” Environmental Research Letters 11, no. 3 (2016).

35. ↩ Rodrick Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection (Basel: Springer, 2018).

36. ↩ Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2016); Marcus Moench & Dipak Gyawali, Desakota: Reinterpreting the Urban-Rural Continuum (Kathmandu: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition, 2008); Hecht, “Forests Lost and Found in Tropical Latin America.”

37. ↩ Ariel E. Lugo, “The Emerging Era of Novel Tropical Forests,” Biotropica 41, no. 5 (2009): 589–91.

38. ↩ Robert G. Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, eds., Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm (Basel: Springer, 2016); Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control; Giorgos Kallis and Erik Swyngedouw, “Do Bees Produce Value? A Conversation Between an Ecological Economist and a Marxist Geographer,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 29, no. 3 (2018): 36–50.

39. ↩ Robert G. Wallace et al., “Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests Produce a New Niche for Ebola?,” International Journal of Health Services 46, no. 1 (2016): 149–65.

40. ↩ Wallace and Wallace, Neoliberal Ebola.

41. ↩ . Júlio César Bicca-Marques and David Santos de Freitas, “The Role of Monkeys, Mosquitoes, and Humans in the Occurrence of a Yellow Fever Outbreak in a Fragmented Landscape in South Brazil: Protecting Howler Monkeys Is a Matter of Public Health,” Tropical Conservation Science 3, no. 1 (2010): 78–89; Júlio César Bicca-Marques et al., “Yellow Fever Threatens Atlantic Forest Primates,” Science Advances e-letter, May 25, 2017; Luciana Inés Oklander et al., “Genetic Structure in the Southernmost Populations of Black-and-Gold Howler Monkeys (Alouatta caraya) and Its Conservation Implications,” PLoS ONE 12, no. 10 (2017); Natália Coelho Couto de Azevedo Fernandes et al., “Outbreak of Yellow Fever Among Nonhuman Primates, Espirito Santo, Brazil, 2017,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 23, no. 12 (2017): 2038–41; Daiana Mir, “Phylodynamics of Yellow Fever Virus in the Americas: New Insights into the Origin of the 2017 Brazilian Outbreak,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017).

42. ↩ Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York: New Press, 2005); Jay P. Graham et al., “The Animal-Human Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production: Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment,” Public Health Reports 123, no. 3 (2008): 282–99; Bryony A. Jones et al., “Zoonosis Emergence Linked to Agricultural Intensification and Environmental Change,” PNAS110, no. 21 (2013): 8399–404; Marco Liverani et al., “Understanding and Managing Zoonotic Risk in the New Livestock Industries,” Environmental Health Perspectives 121, no, 8 (2013); Anneke Engering, Lenny Hogerwerf, and Jan Slingenbergh, “Pathogen-Host-Environment Interplay and Disease Emergence,” Emerging Microbes and Infections 2, no. 1 (2013); World Livestock 2013: Changing Disease Landscapes (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013).

43. ↩ Robert V. Tauxe, “Emerging Foodborne Diseases: An Evolving Public Health Challenge,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 3, no. 4 (1997): 425–34; Wallace and Wallace, Neoliberal Ebola; Ellyn P. Marder et al., “Preliminary Incidence and Trends of Infections with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly Through Food—Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, 10 U.S. Sites, 2006–2017,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 67, no. 11 (2018): 324–28.

44. ↩ Robert G. Wallace, “Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of Offshore Farming,” Antipode 41, no. 5 (2009): 916–51; Robert G. Wallace et al., “Industrial Agricultural Environments,” in The Routledge Handbook of Biosecurity and Invasive Species, ed. Juliet Fall, Robert Francis, Martin A. Schlaepfer, and Kezia Barker (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

45. ↩ John H. Vandermeer, The Ecology of Agroecosystems (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2011); Peter H. Thrall et al., “Evolution in Agriculture: The Application of Evolutionary Approaches to the Management of Biotic Interactions in Agro-Ecosystems,” Evolutionary Applications 4, no. 2 (2011): 200–15; R. Ford Denison, Darwinian Agriculture: How Understanding Evolution Can Improve Agriculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Marius Gilbert, Xiangming Xiao, and Timothy Paul Robinson, “Intensifying Poultry Production Systems and the Emergence of Avian Influenza in China: A ‘One Health/Ecohealth’ Epitome,” Archives of Public Health 75 (2017).

46. ↩ Mohammad Houshmar et al., “Effects of Prebiotic, Protein Level, and Stocking Density on Performance, Immunity, and Stress Indicators of Broilers,” Poultry Science 91, no. 2 (2012): 393–401; A. V. S. Gomes et al., “Overcrowding Stress Decreases Macrophage Activity and Increases Salmonella Enteritidis Invasion in Broiler Chickens,” Avian Pathology 43, no. 1 (2014): 82–90; Peyman Yarahmadi , Hamed Kolangi Miandare, Sahel Fayaz, and Christopher Marlowe A. Caipang, “Increased Stocking Density Causes Changes in Expression of Selected Stress- and Immune-Related Genes, Humoral Innate Immune Parameters and Stress Responses of Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss),” Fish & Shellfish Immunology 48 (2016): 43–53; Wenjia Li et al., “Effect of Stocking Density and Alpha-Lipoic Acid on the Growth Performance, Physiological and Oxidative Stress and Immune Response of Broilers,” Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Studies 32, no, 12 (2019).

47. ↩ Virginia E. Pitzer et al., “High Turnover Drives Prolonged Persistence of Influenza in Managed Pig Herds,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 13, no. 119 (2016); Richard K. Gast et al., “Frequency and Duration of Fecal Shedding of Salmonella Enteritidis by Experimentally Infected Laying Hens Housed in Enriched Colony Cages at Different Stocking Densities,” Frontiers in Veterinary Science (2017); Andres Diaz et al., “Multiple Genome Constellations of Similar and Distinct Influenza A Viruses Co-Circulate in Pigs During Epidemic Events,” Scientific Reports 7 (2017).

48. ↩ Katherine E. Atkins et al., “Modelling Marek’s Disease Virus (MDV) Infection: Parameter Estimates for Mortality Rate and Infectiousness,” BMC Veterinary Research 7, no. 70 (2011); John Allen and Stephanie Lavau, “‘Just-in-Time’ Disease: Biosecurity, Poultry and Power,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8, no. 3 (2015): 342–60; Pitzer et al., “High Turnover Drives Prolonged Persistence of Influenza in Managed Pig Herds”; Mary A. Rogalski, “Human Drivers of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics in Emerging and Disappearing Infectious Disease Systems,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 372, no. 1712 (2017).

49. ↩ Wallace, “Breeding Influenza”; Katherine E. Atkins et al., “Vaccination and Reduced Cohort Duration Can Drive Virulence Evolution: Marek’s Disease Virus and Industrialized Agriculture,” Evolution 67, no. 3 (2013): 851–60; Adèle Mennerat, Mathias Stølen Ugelvik, Camilla Håkonsrud Jensen, and Arne Skorping, “Invest More and Die Faster: The Life History of a Parasite on Intensive Farms,” Evolutionary Applications10, no. 9 (2017): 890–96.

50. ↩ Martha I. Nelson et al., “Spatial Dynamics of Human-Origin H1 Influenza A Virus in North American Swine,” PLoS Pathogens 7, no. 6 (2011); Trevon L. Fuller et al., “Predicting Hotspots for Influenza Virus Reassortment,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 19, no. 4 (2013): 581–88; Rodrick Wallace and Robert G. Wallace, “Blowback: New Formal Perspectives on Agriculturally-Driven Pathogen Evolution and Spread,” Epidemiology and Infection 143, no. 10 (2014): 2068–80; Ignacio Mena et al., “Origins of the 2009 H1N1 Influenza Pandemic in Swine in Mexico,” eLife 5 (2016); Martha I. Nelson et al., “Human-Origin Influenza A(H3N2) Reassortant Viruses in Swine, Southeast Mexico,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 25, no. 4 (2019): 691–700.

51. ↩ Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, 192–201.

52. ↩ “Safer Food Saves Lives,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 3, 2015; Lena H. Sun, “Big and Deadly: Major Foodborne Outbreaks Spike Sharply,” Washington Post, November 3, 2015; Mike Stobbe, “CDC: More Food Poisoning Outbreaks Cross State Lines,” KSL, November 3, 2015.

53. ↩ Sally Goldenberg, “Alicia Glen, Who Oversaw de Blasio’s Affordable Housing Plan and Embattled NYCHA, to Depart City Hall,” Politico, December 19, 2018.

54. ↩ Gary A. Dymski, “Racial Exclusion and the Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis,” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 149–79; Harold C. Barnett, “The Securitization of Mortgage Fraud,” Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance 16 (2011): 65–84.

55. ↩ Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz, “Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress,” Bloomberg, November 21, 2011.

56. ↩ Michael J. de la Merced and David Barboza, “Needing Pork, China Is to Buy a U.S. Supplier,” New York Times, May 29, 2013.

57. ↩ “Goldman Sachs Pays US$300m for Poultry Farms,” South China Morning Post, August 4, 2008.

58. ↩ “Goldman Sachs Invests in Chinese Pig Farming,” Pig Site, August 5, 2008.

59. ↩ Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism,” New York Times, March 18, 2020.

60. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin, 1993), 362.

61. ↩ Eric Lipton, Nicholas Fandos, Sharon LaFraniere, and Julian E. Barnes, “Stock Sales by Senator Richard Burr Ignite Political Uproar,” New York Times, March 20, 2020.

62. ↩ Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani et al., “ISG Insight: From Room to Grow to Room to Fall,” Goldman Sachs’ Investment Strategy Group.

63. ↩ “Corona Crisis: Resistance in a Time of Pandemic,” Marx21, March 21, 2020; International Assembly of the Peoples and Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, “In Light of the Global Pandemic, Focus Attention on the People,” Tricontinental, March 21, 2020.

64. ↩ Wallace et al., “The Dawn of Structural One Health.”

65. ↩ Wallace et al., “Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests Produce a New Niche for Ebola?”; Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control.

66. ↩ Ernest Mandel, “Progressive Disalienation Through the Building of Socialist Society, or the Inevitable Alienation in Industrial Society?,” in The Marxist Theory of Alienation (New York: Pathfinder, 1970); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004); Del Weston, The Political Economy of Global Warming: The Terminal Crisis (London: Routledge, 2014); McKenzie Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2017); John Bellamy Foster, “Marx, Value, and Nature,” Monthly Review 70, no. 3 (July–August 2018): 122–36); Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM, 2018).

67. ↩ Butch Lee and Red Rover, Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain (New York: Vagabond, 1993); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation(New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Anna Tsing, “Supply Chains and the Human Condition,” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2 (2009): 148–76; Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Leandro Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism (London: Zed, 2014); Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018).

68. ↩ Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).

69. ↩ Joseph Fracchia, “Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the ‘Human and the Animal,’” Monthly Review 68, no. 10 (March 2017): 1–17; Omar Felipe Giraldo, Political Ecology of Agriculture: Agroecology and Post-Development (Basel: Springer, 2019).

70. ↩ Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014); Wark, General Intellects.

71. ↩ Rodrick Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luke Bergmann, and Robert G. Wallace, “Agribusiness vs. Public Health: Disease Control in Resource-Asymmetric Conflict,” submitted for publication, 2020, available at https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr.

72. ↩ Robert G. Wallace, Kenichi Okamoto, and Alex Liebman, “Earth, the Alien Planet,” in Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis, ed. Daniel Bertrand Monk and Michael Sorkin (New York: UR, forthcoming).

73. ↩ Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control.

74. ↩ Wallace et al., “Industrial Agricultural Environments.”