Pandemic politics, oligarchic times and the idiotic subject of ‘freedom’ – Open Democracy

For, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, no dignity can possibly exist without a public realm, but only price and servitude; if you cannot afford it, bad luck, because you will be left to die. Nor should you think yourself fortunate if, through a charitable donation, those who consider themselves masters and the fat cats pretend to save your life, because you are to live if you happen to save yourself with your servitude intensified and they with their domination recognised.

Why is the Right, i.e. the political forces which represent and defend the bourgeoisie, and the oligarchic strata with an even greater determination, so nervous and agitated (e.g. in Spain), and why is it so shaky and zigzagging after having boasted to subdue, or at least bully, the world (as is the case in the UK)?

The reason is that the Right has bumped into a real problem, namely, that the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly dissipated the smokescreens which usually pervade normal times, and has forced practically everybody to see and live in their own flesh the deathly consequences of the criminal politics the same Right has carried out against public health and public services, especially over the last ten years.

Furthermore, the pandemic compels almost everyone to truly realise, at least for a moment, about the absolutely vital importance of the public realm (including public services), that is, of that which belongs to everyone, in exactly the same measure and without exception indeed being self-constituted and not granted (by whom?), it is the nemesis of any kind of concession or donation. In other words, the existence and the very meaning of the public realm lie precisely in the guarantee it provides that no one, either individual or institution, will arrogate the power to grant or deny any portion of what is common that common which constitutes us as society to anyone.

This is the crucial point: the flash that reveals the unquestionable value of the public realm. It is also the best moment to underscore the fact that capitalism is not in crisis the world is, a world whose tragic fate seems to be that it cant be imagined otherwise than as a capitalist world. Indeed, the world may be falling apart, but capitalism continues to be open for business as usual, and profiteering and profiting more than usual.

We cannot pretend to be surprised, let alone shocked, to see that hedge funds [are] raking in billions during coronavirus crisis, or that the private firm running UK PPE stockpile was sold in middle of pandemic, or that hedge funds and Brexit supporter hedgies determine crucial aspects of the means to control the pandemic, and so on and on and on no surprise then, although I do reckon the unavoidable half-smile breaking through our faces when those servants of domination whose business is to defend capitalist practices regardless offer us headlines like this, hedge fund kings betting against our firms, as though there could be an our for capitalism other than in the well-known forms of exclusionary, classist, racist, misogynist in brief, criminal our.

It is the capitalist bourgeoisie, or rather oligarchy, which, despite the appearances (Americas super-rich see their wealth rise by $282 billion in three weeks of pandemic), has a cold, although a considerably annoying and potentially dangerous one should that possibility hinted at by the pandemic become articulated into a clear political disjunction between, on one side, the public realm and the mutual solidarity, fraternity and sorority that constitute it, and, on the other, alms or charitable donations and all they imply in terms of domination, brutal inequalities and foolish individualism.

This is a real contradiction, for a public realm, that is to say, the existence of a central aspect of social life which is ruled by principles and values, is the very nemesis of capitalism and what the capitalist logic does not tolerate. We will see in a moment that it is also what the capitalist oligarchies, chief carriers of that logic, are bent on destroying and appropriating, including at the level of an incipient global public realm to fight against the pandemic, as this shows: push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs.

It remains to be seen whether the massive popular support for the NHS as a public health system, and more generally for public services, will be articulated into an effective political force able to reclaim the public realm and institute some basic principles of collective life. What is certain is that this can hardly happen if there is no clarity about the current political conjuncture and orientation about how to act in it.

This article is a contribution to that labour of clarification and orientation, and this precisely in a moment when the Right and its lethal wealth defence industry are working hard to cover up, obscure, obfuscate and disorient. The task that emancipatory (or progressive, if you want) political forces have to confront requires them not only to sustain the flash revealing the decisive import of the public realm, but make people see the absolutely imperative necessity of taking a further step, the decisive one, and defend it actively as the most precious treasure of collective life, at least of a dignified collective life, in the Kantian sense of dignity, as reads the epigraph at the beginning of this article.

This is the only alternative, there is no other. But it can be said in different ways: Either dignity, or charity. And also: Either freedom, or servitude. We have to take sides, indeed everyone will take sides, whether we want it or not, for not taking sides amounts to taking the side of the powers in place, that is, of domination, and therefore of servitude. It goes without saying that the oligarchy and the political forces at its service have their side clear, in truth they do not need to take it because they are already there, they have always been there.

In other words: the Right needs not even think about this because it acts by instinct: the instinct of the owner who becomes at once convinced that possessing wealth and money is an automatic qualification for human excellence and for domination indeed, they go to enormous lengths to have this recognised, to the point of calling freedom the blatant assertion of the flurry of whims, appetites and desires that wealth unleashes, but this is obviously a big misnomer for something whose proper and only name is oligarchic instinct. This instinct is a full-fledged subjective disposition which, as Marx shows in his analyses of class struggles in times almost as thickly oligarchic as ours, is not a mere effect of the structure of the world but is itself a powerful maker of the world. The latest historical articulation of that instinct, the one suitable for capitalism and the capitalist oligarchy, was provided by the doctrine called with a certain exaggeration liberal for liberal it is, but only with capital, so we have here a second, closely related, misnomer.

Now, of the two sides of the liberal doctrine, let us start with the donations because they may be deceptive, while the appropriations, which we will address in a moment, are in principle straightforward. Of course, all oligarchs are liberals. Contrary to what we often hear, there are no bad (e.g. libertarian) and good (liberal) oligarchs, they are all of the same kind and the differences between them are only of degree. The central importance of charitable donations to maintain domination can be gathered by the bustle we are observing during the lockdown, with several donations announced urbi et orbi practically on a daily basis, and news outlets describing all the details (who, how much, to whom) and providing large lists of donors, there are even billionaire trackers.

Of course, billionaires very theatrically donate a fraction of what they used to give back in taxes, making sure to generate maximum publicity for their actions. This is certainly true. And yet, important as this may be, the point is not about how much the oligarchs donate, or about how loudly they blow (or rather have others blow) their own trumpet, nor is it about how generous they are, and this not only because poor people as is well-known donate infinitely more than the rich in relation to what they have, but because generosity is totally at odds with the logic on which voluntary and charitable donations are inscribed but to explain that logic in all its lethal simplicity, something that is rarely done, we need to return to Adam Smith, the father of the modern liberal regime.

Originally posted here:

Pandemic politics, oligarchic times and the idiotic subject of 'freedom' - Open Democracy