The Shadow Dance

How coronavirus unmasks our social illusions

One could argue we live under two central social illusions. Their specific historical origins are more or less indeterminate, but it is hard to deny their present weight. The first is what Marx calls capitalism’s unsocial sociality. The second is the category-mistake of what we may call the Machine. Coronavirus, in turning state-capitalism upside down in a world-historical inversion, unravels the threads of their falsity.

‘There is no such thing as society’, Thatcher once notoriously declared, ‘there are only individuals and their families.’ A crystal-clear reflection of her ideological atomism, it was also a statement of intent. For the structural pillars of our reigning social formation — the firesale of public goods, gutting of progressive taxation, competitivisation of education, retrenchment of the welfare state — have held the production of the hard-nosed, self-contained, profit-maximising individual as the implicit unitary goal of public policy. They all, as it were, seek to bring about this fact of the atomised subject; one that denies our intrinsic sociality, abstracted from the web reciprocal obligations to a Crusoe’s Island of boot-strap success and one-up-manship. When Health Secretary Matt Hancock laments that the public is ‘very selfish’ in not heeding the governments (ill-defined, poorly disseminated and always seemingly one-step behind) advice, he might take a moment to reflect whether his party has had anything to do with producing such obtuse individualism.

But neoliberalism only amplifies capitalism’s essential features, core to which is its profound unsocial sociality. Its advent at once brought about a proliferation of communications and transport links and a growing interdependence of labor, both in their parcelisations and reunifications in rationalised management, as well as in the long chains of extraction and circulation in world markets; while at the same subjecting humans to novel forms of social dislocation and alienation. Instantiating a ‘cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,’ — as Marx put it in the Manifesto, predicting the cultural cross-pollination we consider intrinsic to globalisation — came at the cost of ruthless appropriation of collective labors, cleaving individuals from the communal rythyms of pre-modern life.

Of course — and this is precisely what is paradoxical about this condition — however much we would like to deny our constitutive interdepence, we cannot ever escape from it. Even relations of individualised competition are, principally and unavoidably, relations; we rely on other actors, interrelate with them. And this further begs the question — at base, the elemental one of politics — of whether one particular mode of relating is more or less beneficial. One would be tempted, quite rightfully, to presume that the oxymoronic quality of our present state — the unsocial-ness of its sociality — is not merely a linguistic one, and that the contradictions that emerge in the fact of a social group defined by its selfishness and lack of regard threaten its ability to reproduce itself. When collective-action problems arise (for instance, viral pandemics or ecological collapse), might it be that such a mode of relation must fall back onto another, indeed in some sense antagonistic, logic in order to allow the survival of its members? And what might this say about the system in question that it is inherently unable to sustain itself in such moments of crisis, be they of its own making or not?

On the one hand, you could reply that emergency times call for emergency measures, the efficacy of which comes in the fact of their temporary uniqueness. Gushes of water from a fireman’s hose is not a usual feature of an office building, and it would probably make life quite impossible if it were, and this peculiarity is precisely what makes it vital when the workplace is on fire. On the other hand, you could take the position that such crises moments expose and are catalysed (if not, in the case of climate change, actually generated) by underlying vulnerabilities and brutalities, whose glean of business-as-usual respectability is stripped away by the sudden infraction of the extraordinary. Perhaps the reason why the building is on fire, or why the conflagration is spreading so rapidly, is because it was fitted with flammable insulation and one is permitted to smoke under curtains and dot incense around as much as they so please.

First of all, then, it seems to me that, for perhaps the first times in their lives, cornoavirus is enabling people to palpably feel those relations to one another. When does anyone come to consider the complexities of global supply chains? How the fact you can even get food on your table is because it passes through the hands of East Indian laborers through Mongolian truck drivers up to Turkish port workers and so on and so forth, and therefore that the quotidian individual act of eating breakfast in the morning is dependent upon other countless interactions and tasks of faceless individuals, all imbricated in their own webs of legal and productive relations. Commodity fetishism, of course, consists in the fact that we simply do not think about these things. Loo-paper and hand sanitiser and tinned food simply exist as they are on the shelves, perennially stocked and affordable, abstracted from the emissions and exploitations constitutive of them. The only things we should know about them is their price and function to us; their pound sign and info-packaging. Indeed, many commodities depend on this lack of reflexivity: Boohoo’s profit margins would presumably not be so comfortable were their products attached to the severed fingers and spluttering lungs of underpaid laborers.

By drawing attention to our interconnections, then, the virus may also provoke reflection on the stark inadequacies of these interconnections. For as people drop-out of their social roles, the question of whether we should reconvene as if nothing happened cannot be avoided. In halting the machine of global production, the dark-orange miasma that thickens satellite imagery of China has more or less entirely dispersed. US researchers have estimated this temporary reduction in emissions has saved 50,000 Chinese lives; by comparison, COVID-19 has taken a mere 3,100. Despite the diseases emphatic danger, and the absolutely vital international coordination needed to contain it, it is dwarfed by the existential threat of climate breakdown. Civilisational collapse does not only take the immuno-compromised from us. And if we carry on as business-as-usual, all the present stockpiling and emergency powers and market nosedives are going to seem like one big chaotic dress rehearsal.

The parallels here, between the current efforts of virus containment and potential zero-carbon transition, are crucial to understand. Both expose the vulnerability of our systems to their own narrow (if present at all) normativity. That is, the unsocial element of our social interdependency, the lack of explicit ethical obligations beyond what the market deems most efficient in the near-term, and the unjust consequences of their absence. Inequalities in the labor market have been unmasked, with well-paid professionals comfortable in their remote working, cushioned by adequate sick pay, while precarious service workers must consider cutting themselves from any sufficient means to live. Stockpiling lets the pantries of the well-off build up and up, leaving those without disposable income to trapse round for scraps; indeed the logic of stockpiling itself — the mad dash to hoard as many resources as possible to oneself, all others be damned — bares a putrid correspondence to the neoliberal self. Globally, as Mike Davis writes incisively, “COVID-19 might take a different and more deadly path in the slums of Africa and South Asia,” writhing through the malnutrition and squalor of the world’s poor. The fact that the horsemen of the climate disaster — famines, droughts, sea level and temperature rise — cut across racial and class lines is a notion familiar to those versed in the critique of the anthropocene concept, naively lumping as it does the entirety of humanity into one undifferentiated mass burdened by equal shares of responsibility and consequences. And just as climate mitigation necessitates the transcendence of market-logics in forms of ownership, governance, and technology imbued with a democratic, egalitarian and — of course — sustainable ethos, the socio-political measures called for by coronavirus include seamless forms of (non-market) income replacement, amnesties on rent payment and evictions, and coordination of productive resources toward the public good. Denmark, South Korea, Italy, Spain — all are adopting at least some of these courses of treatment. Long-term, the question will be whether we can harness this sporadic outburst of ethical life so as to embed it, finding ways to live together independent of the amoral vacillations of the market.

Just to belabor this point: It is telling that the Americans needed a global pandemic to wake up to the importance of non-commodified healthcare. That one should have access to cheap medicine and free doctors visits suddenly becomes painfully obvious now that one’s own health is literally dependent on the next door neighbours. Of course — and this is the crucial point — such has always been the case. As Jedidiah Britton-Purdy puts in a piece for Jacobin, the most profound effect of the present crisis is in “making the slogan of solidarity literal: an injury to one is an injury to all.” That collective provision of vital goods and services to one another — be it education, healthcare, housing, or what have you — is valuable precisely because it helps others who could not have afforded it otherwise, and therefore that their self-development enabled therein helps ourselves, is not a particularly radical suggestion. It conforms to a basic evolutionary logic of mutual aid and co-flourishing, each individual’s freedom and potential actualised through the freedom and potential of the group. If it is the case that we are dependent on one another, and this is an inescapable fact of human life, why do we not recognise and nurture such relations as relations, rather than smothering them beneath narcissism and competition?

The answer to this relies on confronting the illusion of the Machine — the reality effect of social structures as independent and against us, unchanging and natural — making explicit that which has remained implicit in the effort of evaluation: society as constructed and thus open to re-evaluation and reconstruction. Society can be understood on some level as a grand amalgamation of different roles and the functions and expectations of those roles; a remarkably complex stage-play, effectively, with differentiation of status, centrality, agency, purpose, and so on. We could, as the anthropologist David Graeber remarked, just wake-up and stop making capitalism. Everyday we arrive at work and genuflect to our boss, everytime we buy and sell in market relations, we are reproducing those very relations. At least in principle, we could instantly stop doing so, and in some ways, this is what coronavirus begets. Indeed it seems to me that the task of logistical preparation that governmental and near-governmental agencies (multinational corporations, NGOs) alike are currently undertaking is precisely one of determining how to avoid such a fact, guaranteeing this interplay of roles without interaction of the physical, fleshy individuals that constitute them. The political response to this pandemic thus amounts to the conduction of a sort of shadow-dance. How can the flow of goods and services — that is, the circuits of capital accumulation — be sustained when their performers must drop-out? How can I get food on the table when there is no one to deliver or transport it? How can I sustain myself as an individual when all those intricate social relations — which till now have appeared to me only like the dark side of the moon, an omnipresent negation of the atomised self I prune and pluck, a background darkness against which myself becomes visible — suddenly appear bright and broken?

A crucial thing to consider with this, though, is the brittleness as malleability. If it is something that can be broken, whose parts can no longer work mechanically as they should, then it is also something that has been made and, in extension, something that can be re-made. By bringing us out of our social roles, it brings us out of the conceit that they are natural and fixed, able to reflect on them as contingent, open to revision. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the cracks in our social formation when we’re forced to make all its nodes and linkages, its whole sickly assemblage, explicit in order to stop it from falling apart.

Such an effort goes some way toward shattering our current reality effect. China, a country with a population of over 1.3 billion people, stretching over nearly 10 million square kilometers, took just 7 weeks to reverse the spread of COVID-19. Citywide lockdowns of 60 million, stadiums converted into quarantine facilities, complex systems of virological testing and resource allocation; all these conspired to produce “the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” as the WHO celebrated. The state’s capacity to coordinate socio-economic life, derided for the past 40 years as horrifically inept and redundant, is demonstrating its latent power. Education, transportation, production and consumption: all can be stopped or reformulated with the flick of a pen and a few weeks of logistical management. The Leviathan wakes, and it appears considerably more nimble than our habituations would have us believe.

In this context, to suggest that the Herculean structural shifts necessary to avoid climate disaster are beyond the realms of feasibility is fundamentally unserious. Just as the government is immediately directing manufacturers toward rapid production of ventilators and respirators, nationwide coordination for green technology (battery storage, solar cells, wind turbines, electric vehicles, insulation) could begin tomorrow, leaving the viscous time-bomb of fossil fuels in the last decade. As the left rarely tires of stressing, our limits to action have never been physical, nor economic; they’ve always been political. Just last thursday (March 12th), the Federal Reserve clicked their fingers and conjured $1.5 trillion to funnel into financial markets. Of course, such a hit will not suffice to avert the impending depression. Directed by a system concerned with more than pathological accumulation, such a sum is enough to change the course of human history; under capitalism, it’s barely enough to keep the DOW above 23,000 points.

So, then, why don’t we act? Compare the threats in the case of coronavirus and climate change. Despite initial presumptions, they are not of the same organic category. What we are fighting in the latter case is emphatically not natural systems: the Greenland ice sheets, the El-Nino southern oscillation, the phosphorus cycle or what have you. These only come to be considered as disrupting actors precisely because another has disrupted them. That other is rather the dark, heaving, whirring heart of the social machine itself: fossil capital. A more formidable challenge, yes, and certainly very different — but it is far from insurmountable. The structural shifts needed are clearly visible and more or less immediately implementable. We know, and indeed people have mapped, the political actors arrayed in its defence: Exxon executives and BlackRock managers and dark-money think-tanks. Exactly when one adopts the vision of society as stage play, the machine as little more than the supervention of differentiated roles and associated powers, the gigantic menace of fossil capital comes to appear considerably more manageable. The actors appear before us, the necessary script changes eminently distinguishable. Our sense of powerlessness, that the machine can do nothing but carry on churning, is an illusion. There is no machine, independent and against us. Such is the magic trick of social structures, the sleight of hand the the virus has illuminated: despite the magnetism of habituation, the sense that there does exist something uncontrollable or unchangeable called a state, or an economy, or fossil capital, is only the product of the different tenors and textures of our role-formations; contingent forms of temporal and spatial coordination, hierarchical coordination, formal and informal norms, and so forth. Strictly speaking, they do not exist. They are, as theorist Timothy Mitchell put it, structural effects. We are the cause.

Marx once spoke of capitalist society as “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Such a flourish pertains to one sense of alienation in Marx’s theory; that when, broadly put, the products of one’s labors returns to them as an alien thing, imposing and estranged. “Although they have been created,” Erich Fromm writes, “he no longer feels himself to be their master but their servant.” Such ‘objectified relationships’, the sedimentation of self-created social forms, comes to resemble “a giant machine that prescribes the direction and tempo of his life.” An adequate metaphor up to a point, capturing as it does the perceived reification and hypostatisation of social relations, for our purposes we might wish to return to and expand the notion of a shadow dance, which now draws together both illusions into one refutation. Alienation more resembles a trance to the shadows on the wall. Shadows which inevitably emerge from us come to appear as if they have their own agency, existence, beyond our choreography, but they cannot exist without that which casts them. And such shadows — just like our roles and the structures which cannot capture our proper needs and capacities — are distorted and flattened; the present relation is defective.

Marx’s theory of exploitation illustrates such defection by narrating the conduction of a brutal shadow dance — interplay and manipulation of roles abstracted and distorted from the actual individuals which constitute them, a process which is of course always and constitutively incomplete. For goods to be exchangeable, they must be commensurable in some sense, whilst radically unlike in another; it is a process of making unlike things alike. This commonality is that they are all products of labor, but not — and this is central — the actual, embodied, particular labor process, but the abstract labor process. In other words, the role-function of labor power in abstraction. In capitals practical imaginary, it is only the maximisation of this role-function — extracting surplus-value from abstract labor power — that is visible. The most horrific workplace abuses, then, which before Marx had been moralised in precisely those terms, can thus be seen as cold consequences of market pressures and capitals profit-oriented rationality meeting with the actual reality of the biological humans occupying the labor-role. When the overworked “die off with strange rapidity; but the places of those who perish are instantly filled, and a frequent change of persons makes no alteration of the scene,” as he puts it in Capital, what is betrayed is the fatal inadequacy, distortion, of those social roles, unable to accomodate our full humanity. In this case, the exploitation of abstract labor power not accounting for the most basic biological needs of the literal, flesh and blood laborers. We exist in this structure only as production units, to be slotted in and out, rapidly replaceable and eminently disposable. It is a shadow dance to the death.

Do we not find the same thing in different magnitudes in every social relation uncovered by COVID-19’s spread? Unable to meet the real human needs of sick pay, of taking one’s foot off the gas in times of crisis, the structures of the gig-economy and precarious employment now metastasise into COVID-19’s co-conspirators as frontline workers choose between poverty or infection. Rent amnesty’s are necessary only because of the role-position of human beings not as requiring a roof over their head as an intrinsic need, the most primitive foundation from which to flourish, but as replaceable income sources for the passive owners of capital, able to be turfed out as soon as the extraction of wealth is disturbed. The perversity of privatised healthcare, which debases the desperate into the ‘consumer’, purchasing one’s salubrity as if it is just another trivial commodity, can no longer be hidden as instantaneous, universal testing and treatment becomes a matter of collective survival (as, indeed, it was all along). And indeed, the convulsions of the financial markets, our entire economy strapped to them, ignoring that there is more to human social life than the perennial, uninterrupted, exhausting sprint of capital accumulation. It is no accident, of course, that the same ignorance lies at the very core of our climate disaster too.

That many of us are one missed paycheck away from catastrophe is a fact not conducive to the needs and capabilities of human subjects. Coronavirus, by plunging us so much of us into this position at once, exposes the social vulnerability that now exacerbates and encompasses our public health vulnerability. It is in this sense, then, that the virus does not inaugurate the shadow dance; it reveals it. The struggle to conduct the role-performances of production and consumption power now engages in is the same one it always does. In fact, It is only with the virus — that most insidiously biological of threats — that the actuality of the real corporeal humans, coughing and breathing and intermingling, exchanging saliva as well as money, reappears. To arrest it’s spread, our structures are forced to engage with the bodily humanity it’s abstractions mystify. The granting of concessions – free testing, basic income, immediate homes for the homelessness – represent a momentary inclusion of the human, market abstraction subordinated to ethical considerations. But the fact remains that access to needs, providing for conditions of mutual flourishing independent of market caprices, is always a necessity. Capitalism denies this fact because its rationality demands it. It is only role-manipulation for profit — extraction, exploitation — that it recognises. Everything else, at least in times of stability, is incidental.

According to the historian Walter Schneidel, in our near past there have only been two instances where inequality was dramatically reduced, both exogenously caused. The first was the bubonic plague, the human scarcity produced therein reversing the profound inequity of the medieval period by increasing the price of labor. The second was the ‘Great Compression’ between the first world war and the collapse of Keynesianism: the dual pressures of communism to the East and war at home produced a distinct sense of social solidarity welded to the planning successes of wartime economies, undergirded by bourgois fear of revolution driving them to concessions. We need not accept Schneidel’s thesis that such ‘Great Levellers’ — war, natural disaster, etc — exhaust the conditions of possibility for radical social change to concur that they nonetheless present remarkable opportunities. The British welfare state was born from this confluence of explicit ethical obligations, a community spirit forged in the fire of war, and the associated tearing up of the laissez-faire truisms of right and proper economic management, channelled through militant popular mobilIsation. If the Left is sufficiently organised to take advantage of COVID-19s propitious, and irreducibly political, chaos, we may witness another diversion of human history, right at the crucial moment in our struggle against climate collapse.

The pandemic has broken our rythyms, interrupted our repetitions and habituations. Despite Johnson’s sanguinity, this will not be over any time soon. Our attention, though, must turn to what comes after. Will we indeed act as if nothing happened, no truisms shattered nor injustices unveiled, and snuggle back into the death-grip of late capitalism? Or will we heed the words, projected onto a Santiago apartment block in the midst of Chile’s remarkable uprising late last year: ‘No volveremos a la normalidad porque la normalidad era el problema.’ We will not return to normal, because the normal is the problem.