By Rowan Lubbock
Dr Rowan Lubbock is a Lecturer in International Relations and Development at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research centres on the intersections between International Relations, Latin American politics and Critical Agrarian Studies. He is currently writing a book on the politics of food sovereignty within Venezuela and the Latin American regional institution of the ALBA-TCP, to be published by University of Georgia Press.
David
Beaumont’s inaugural post in the Disorder of Things
coronavirus series is a welcome reminder of how the apocalypse will unfold: not
like a meteor out of the blue, but rather through a long, drawn-out
suffocation. In light of this (collective) death in slow-motion, Beaumont poses
a hypothetical question, likely on the minds of our descendants, that goes to
the heart of the COVID-19 crisis: “How did
humans manage to create a society so technologically advanced that they could
predict the apocalypse(s), develop the technology to stop it (them), yet
adamantly and proudly refuse to do so?”
There are several ways in which
this question can be answered, which Beaumont attempts to address in turn.
However, his own solution seems to rest on a problematic image of a society
that is “complicit” in the problem of under-preparation.
Veering towards a type of
electoral market-place explanation, Beaumont suggests that governments’
systematic disinvestment in disaster relief responses may due to the
disincentives faced by political parties vying for people’s votes: “The leader
who provides a pay rise will – ceterus paribus – defeat the leader who
invests in insurance for the rainy day.” Thus, politicians will attempt to gain
support through immediate benefits to the electorate, rather than bigger, more
intangible benefits like pandemic preparedness.
Yet even with this explanation
Beaumont proffers scepticism; after all, “states do also spend large
sums on one particular type of disaster preparation; one that has enormous
opportunity costs for society: Defence Spending.” He goes on to argue that the
flipside of military spending is the underfunding of “life-saving projects such
as disaster preparation.” But that doesn’t let the average joe off the hook.
Our continued electoral support for candidates favourable of nuclear weapons
puts us squarely in the dock for states’ neglect of other pressing security
issues (like COVID-19) – “They do it because we reward them.”
While it’s vitally important to
understand why states, societies, and individual voters make the choices they
do, Beaumont’s argument appears to overlook the very conditions that shape
those choices, and why a technologically advanced species can appear so
monumentally stupid.
Perverse
Incentives
Beaumont’s
insistence on explaining state failure in the face of COVID-19 as a result of
electoral incentives derives from his dismissal of “social-economic”
explanations. The problem for Beaumont is that by prosecuting social-economic
structures, “we may as
well prosecute ourselves: we [sic] all implicated by virtue of our
complicity in [capitalist] society”. Further, “humans have… fostered social
economic structures that do not only not incentivize preparing for disasters,
but activity work against such preparations.”
Nevertheless, as Beaumont further
argues, the inability of the market to prioritise public goods is irrelevant,
due to a state-funded public sector that makes up for private sector shortfall.
Thus, we arrive at the great “puzzle” – why do “developed” states fail to
secure public goods and craft life-saving policy “given this is supposed to be
a key job of the modern state?” Having discounted the most obvious solutions to
this puzzle, Beaumont is forced into a corner in which the electorate are
ultimately responsible.
But are we really the masters of
our representatives within the state? Somewhat surprisingly, Beaumont cites Carol Cohn’s article on nuclear strategic discourse as
evidence that “electoral politics” is somehow culpable for the prevalence of
such discourse. But this seems to miss the point of Cohn’s experience as a
college teacher submerged within the security community. As she recalls: “as I
learned the language, as I became more and more engaged with their information
and their arguments, I found that my own thinking was changing, and I had to
confront a new question: How can I think this way?” Cohn’s
self-reflection helps to frame the same process that shapes the very terrain of
“free” elections. The ability to shape the collective conversation, and to set
the agenda, confers enormous power on political elites to narrow the terrain of
possibility, and to engineer a type of “common sense” that in the end is
socially irrational.
Equally
problematic is Beaumont’s treatment of the state/market relationship. Is there
really no reason why “private commerce would necessarily hinder a
social-democratic governments’ preparations for a pandemic”? Not in any
simplistic sense, no. But the very fact that (some) states were painfully slow
to shutdown non-essential businesses, and seemingly uninterested in stockpiling
sufficient numbers of ventilators, needs to be read through the same lens.
Afterall, exactly what kind of state are we looking at when the first
sign of response takes the form of interest rate slashing or barbaric Malthusianism? And why, after decades of
austerity discourse espousing the virtues of “belt-tightening”, do we find
piles of cash ready and waiting to bail out the financial sector?
None of
these questions can be approached through a narrow electoral calculus,
precisely because the political economy of the apocalypse is deeply rooted in
social, economic and ecological crises that long predate the outbreak of
COVID-19.
Who is
this “We”?
“Humans”
did not build markets, any more than “humans” built the integrated circuit.
Both inventions emerged out of collective efforts spanning decades or centuries,
in which some actors were more implicated than others. But in both cases, we
can’t possibly understand their emergence by reference to the entire species. When historians sift through the raw material of
social and political life in order to understanding what came before, rarely to
they draw upon the actor-category of “humans”; more often we hear of states,
communities, classes, movements, and individuals. Unless we differentiate, we
cannot understand.
The value
of differentiation is not simply a means to identify an “elite” standing
against “the people”, as if markets were handed down from above. As Terrance
Byres noted, the transition to capitalism and the concomitant spread of market
relations can take place either “from above” or “from below”, affected by a the
contingent class relations and social struggles among a variety of different
actors.
However,
once markets become wide-spread they tend to take on a life of their own, so to
speak. Yes, people make markets tick, but they have next to no control over how
they function. As such, the people end up being dominated by the very thing
they created; set within a thick web of commodity relations and commercial
interdependency, political deliberation becomes usurped by the impersonal
domination of price signals. Of course, it’s not that prices dominate
people. Rather, people dominate people through the impersonal, unplanned, and
largely unconscious organisation of market society. So while only some
humans may be particularly implicated in the construction of markets,
eventually humans in general become ensnared within market logics.
Planning
the market
None of
this should be taken to mean that capitalist society is simply “unplanned”. On
the contrary, the very anarchy of the market fundamentally requires the
most sophisticated types of planning and organisation possible – from the
modern nation-state to the vertically integrated corporation. As with the
formation of markets, the consolidation of modern forms of organisation –
whether in the factory or society – were long-term processes responding to
unanticipated outcomes and crises. The whip of market competition led capital
to devise ever-more sophisticated means of extracting value form labour,
primarily through technological and organisational innovation. Such innovations
eventually led to a veritable “managerial revolution” that actively encroached
on the realm of market coordination. Rather than representing merely the
perfection of market-based practice, the emergence of modern managerialism was in essence a response to the
inefficiency in flows of information and the allocation of resources mediated
by market signals.
So why,
then, does a society so steeped in the complex arts of systems analysis and
scientific management so spectacularly fail to deliver when we need it most?
Clearly, the perverse incentives of the market play a part; as the story of Dr.
Peter Hotz reveals, when a potential vaccine
to coronavirus is pitched to the market, capital doesn’t see a public good, but
rather a sub-optimal investment. But market failure should not be separated
from the equally important phenomenon of state failure.
Electoral
processes are not unconnected to the story of state failure within “developed”,
or post-industrial, societies. But it shouldn’t be one in which voters simply
reward bad behaviour. The question comes down to why such behaviour has become
so universal in the first place, to the extent that voters end up having little
choice than to elect bad governments. As Mark Blyth and Richard Katz point out, the growth of party
‘cartelization’ has proceeded in step with the dynamics in globalisation.
Facing a circumscribed space of economic policy making – where states become
subject to “financial market beauty pagent[s]” – political parties have
simultaneously sought to lower voter expectations as to what they can achieve
at the ballot box. The scourge of “policy convergence”, and the concomitant
discourse of neoliberal common sense, can be seen as the political face of
globalising markets.
Even if we
are living in an age of “competition states”, that doesn’t mean that the
converse dynamic of planning and governance are correspondingly displaced.
Rather, the origins of globalisation, neoliberalism and policy convergence were
all, in effect, planned (if not evolving) strategies that sought to deal
with the fallout of capitalist crisis and popular revolts. The Trilateral
Commission’s 1975 report on the Crisis of Democracy interpreted the explosion of
citizen unrest as an “excess of democracy” across the industrialised world,
largely due to capital’s inability to adequately provide for society. In
response, the Commission’s underlying philosophy centred on the restoration of
market discipline specifically through the elevation of managerial expertise
and an ever-tighter integration of public/private networks.
The
Commission’s flagship report as, in many ways, the precursor to the rise of “disaster capitalism”, itself merely a contingent
expression of the neoliberal pattern of colonising public goods under private
corporate ownership. When eruptions to social order emerge – whether in the
form of anti-systemic struggles or natural disasters – the state-capital nexus
ensures pre-empts the kind of political deliberation necessary for the
resolution of such deep-seated crises, by appeals to “market rationality” for
processes that are, in effect, non-economic, state-meditated transfer of
resources to capital.
And yet, it’s
important to remember that there is no teleology to the market/planning
dialectic; indeed, as Kees van der Pijl notes, in the early days of global
governance, the Trilateral Commission occupied the same environment as the Club
of Rome, publishing its landmark report, ‘The Limits to Growth’, in 1971 as a
damning indictment of global capitalism and its systematic destruction of the
ecological base. Whether one set of planners prevails over the other can only
be understood through the contingent outcome of concrete political
struggles.
Living
in the End Times of Capital?
The
outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic should bring into sharp relief not simply
the barbarism of neoliberal governance, but the precipitating instabilities
embedded within the political economy of capitalism. The entire edifice of
capitalist organisation has come so severely under strain (and only in the initial stage of
COVID-19 outbreak), that we may be witnessing a mass “synchronous failure”: ever-increasing energy inputs,
ecological depletion, cheap credit, and debt-fuelled consumption interlock in
erratic and unpredictable ways. And the coronavirus pandemic only heightens the
underlying fragilities of global capital that have been building up over the
past two decades.
Whether it’s
the crisis of democracy, the market, or ecology, it’s during these moments of
re-organisation that the political terrain becomes (however temporarily) opened
up to new vistas of possibility. As it turns out, it’s the conservative forces
of neoliberal discipline have never let a crisis go to waste. But could we be
approaching an inflection point in which the entire raison d’etre of global
capital is seriously put into question? As fanciful as such a question may be
under normal times, this is hardly “normal”.
I agree
with Beaumont that, hopefully, a post-corona environment will produce a new
political will. But I don’t think we should rest on our laurels in the hope of
spontaneous “cross-party alliances”, or the more incomprehensible demand of
“depolitizising” the cost of public health. Yes, political parties will remain
important vehicles for democratic politics in the future, but leaving this in
the hands of established parties runs the risk of allowing them to regroup
under a new cartelization. The only way out of the morose of liberal democracy,
and the global crises it seems incapable of solving, is to radically
repoliticise the most pressing social questions.
The recent
strike waves ripping through corporate capitalism – from General Motors, to Amazon and Whole Foods – may lead to the renewal of such
politicisation. And it’s within these corporate behemoths that the material
conditions for socialism are being laid; as Leigh Phillips and Michael
Rozworski argue in The People’s Republic of Walmart, vast logistics infrastructures
and information networks connecting global commodity chains already contain the
kernel of socialist planning. What would happen if workers at General Motors
were able to directly manage such infrastructures, for the purpose of meeting
social need rather than pecuniary profit? Such struggles from below can only go
on to further push political elites into a direction they’re already heading,
whether through guaranteed wages or universal basic income. If this momentum
continues, perhaps the apocalypse can, in the end, be reversed.