The COVID Exposure

The pandemic exposes us all. The powerful links between disease, social class, healthcare, economics, and politics can no longer be concealed, so the underside of the American dream has been laid bare. Just as Marx explained 150 years ago, the ideology of the ruling classes operates to hide the contradictions between appearance and reality so that the odes to profit fit seamlessly into the rationales for freedom of the market and for the democracy of the rich. But this year you hardly need in-depth interpretation or ideological critique to expose the links. COVID-19 makes visible the long-standing racial disparities and social illnesses as vividly as the video tapes of the murder of George Floyd exposed the violent racism, the “knee on our neck,” that accelerate social inequality by manufacturing wealth for the few.

Of course, the autocrats on the right will try more than ever to send up the mendacious smokescreens, and Trump is the master of mendacity and media manipulation. Trump’s obvious character flaws make it impossible for him to deal effectively with the COVID crisis, but these traits should not just be seen as idiosyncratic aberrations from an otherwise friendly, Keynesian New Deal. Rather, they are symptomatic of major structural flaws in the world system of capitalism, endemic to its long history. In other words, Trump’s individual narcissism, mendacity, and racism are core elements of the ideological and material conditions for maximizing profits for the powerful. He is the ultimate capitalist guru, the embodiment of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and the billionaire class knows this only too well, even when they cringe at some of the more odious Trump vulgarities. Indeed, even if we get rid of Trump, his personal penchants for unbridled self-interest, racial intolerance, authoritarianism, and privatization can be seen for what they are: historically deep-seated social pathologies contributing to economic inequality, dangerous environmental degradation, and diminishing investment in human resources such as healthcare needed to preserve life during the pandemic. 

Let me begin by enumerating eight of the more obvious myth-shattering realities the virus has exposed. The first four are now facts visible every day on the media; the last four are also, even though they require a few more interpretive moves to reach those judgments:

• The white, wealthy, already sheltered-in-place in gated communities (or in private compounds surrounded by nine-foot walls [see Osnos]) have privately secured their relative health.
• The poor, homeless, elderly, racially segregated, contingent, part-time, gig, and poorly-paid wage labor forces are by far the most vulnerable; they account for by far the largest proportion of COVID victims as well as job losses; and those who had any health insurance to begin with have lost it about as fast as their health and certainly as fast as their jobs.
• The rule of autocrats shows up as the violence it really is (see Gessen) right on the TV and computer screens when Trump boasts about the “incredible success” of his COVID response, recommends toxic cleaning fluids to cleanse the lungs, and speaks of the “disappearing virus” even as the numbers and graphs keep exposing the administration’s lies.
• In times of pandemic crisis, even those on the political right who abhor big government slide into swoons about their voting for a strictly “economic” stimulus package ostensibly intended to protect the vulnerable even as they make sure that wealthy, corporate enterprises get billions of dollars from the handout.¹ 
• Healthcare, childcare, environmental care, elderly care, and educational care are not private privileges of the wealthy but universal human rights, and those populations being denied those rights are those most susceptible to the pandemic.
• Capitalism does not produce freedom and democracy for the many but only for the few.²
• Capitalism goes hand in hand with autocracy rather than democracy (like watching Trump cozy up to the autocrats around the world): when you suppress the number of people who can participate in important economic and political decision making, you can make sure the distribution of the surplus goes to the owners (how many corporations are structured as democracies?);³ so you suppress worker rights as much as voter rights.⁴ 
• If you have economic and political power, then truth, reason, and evidence can be shredded without any (or many) immediate consequences, especially for those who sustain your political base on the right, but the real consequences of the reign of misinformation, untruth, and deception are the corruption and disintegration of any socially viable form of democracy. In a truth-vacuum, fascism rises to limit viable ways to help the vulnerable in times of the pandemic.

Needless to say, many Americans still resist what they see with their eyes (especially points 5-8), and the roughly 40% base dedicated to Trump thrill at his trashing of every one of those exposures. But for a variety of reasons, I think Stacey Abrams is right that there is a kind of New American Majority, consisting of people of color, younger Americans, and moderate to progressive-leaning whites.⁵ Many people in these diverse constituencies are now more open to socialism, Marxism, communism, and other alternatives to the ruthlessness of transnational capitalism.

With such a broader audience in mind, it seems to me that all of us invested in the discourses of the left should make sure we don’t lose this opportunity. So we need to simplify complex theoretical and ideological analyses with accessible translations in ordinary language open to the broadest possible audience with the greatest chance of moving political analysis into living praxis. Obviously, Marx was a genius at doing this, which is part of the reason he had such an effect in his own lifetime: he wrote not just complex theoretical works like Capital and the Grundrisse but a great deal of timely critical journalism. He knew how to carry his message to the people, the workers, the masses, just as he knew how to irritate the Trumps of his day. But regardless of whether you irritate them or not, the ruthless minority fights desperately to maintain their wealth and power, using all elements including violence, deception, mendacity, authoritarianism, Neo-Nazism, terrorism, religious intolerance, sexual intolerance, voter suppression, etc. These mostly white males resort to such desperate tactics partly because they fear that they are a dying minority whose lives are threatened by immigrant invasions.

How we promulgate a vision of a more socially just world is an open question, and there are an infinite number of possibilities. So besides the obvious tasks of participating, organizing, and contributing in whatever way we can to organizations, demonstrations, and movements, I am just going to suggest four areas that in this COVID-transformed era seem to me especially important to disseminate widely.

First, it is crucial that we put the social back in socialism and the commons back in communism. Even today, socialism and communism raise the hackles of too many US citizens, and the right-wing minority plays upon this fear all the time as a way to cut off progressive ideas. Bernie Sanders ameliorated this problem a bit, but just so we know what we’re talking about, here’s one recent example from the now seemingly mild-mannered Bush family. As he proclaimed on June 20, 2020, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, proudly announced, “President Trump is the only thing standing between America and socialism” (Levine). Obviously, nothing is going to change the mind of George P. and his far-right cronies who contend, against all the mounting evidence to the contrary, that “It’s clear, Republican policies are working.” But the point of citing far-right delusions is not just to note their absurdity but to recognize that George P. still voices the fear of socialism that runs very deep in the US population, including many in Abrams’s New American Majority.

We need to change that ahistorical and inaccurate blacklisting of progressive movements of all kinds. The problem remains acute because, historically speaking, the right wing, as a current political minority, has more or less won this battle even though, if Abrams is correct, they are becoming a demographic minority.⁶ Many Americans, including some people we might characterize as the New American Majority, view socialism and communism as a stand-in for oppressive, authoritarian, centrally-controlled dictatorships rather than as counter-movements concerned with principles of liberation, freedom, cooperation, mutual aid, democracy, and workers’ rights. These are dangerous yet pervasive misrepresentations of the movements most concerned with social life and with the importance of paying attention to the communal, the community-based, and the human commons necessary for a socially just political economy. These misrepresentation gained a theoretical foundation in 1944 when Friedrich Hayek wrote his terribly mistaken book, The Road to Serfdom, in which he equated socialism only with centrally-controlled, state-run economies rather than with worker-controlled economies; he argued falsely that socialism would have no markets. As Daniel Steadman Jones and Benyamin Applebaum have argued, it took decades for this seminal text to gain international status, but it gradually became a landmark justification for neoliberalism. We must carefully alter these fallacious misrepresentations.

When people are openly demonstrating in the streets for social justice, they tend to be more receptive to the view that freedom and democracy are central to socialism and communism, and that some widely-supported institutions such as Social Security are clearly based on socialist principles. But we have to concede that many of the nationally-based social experiments in state-run economies invariably slid into capitalist models of production. In most of the centralized, state-controlled communist or socialist nations, the surplus was still too often directed to the economic elite rather than peasants or workers – or to massive military industrialization (as Russia was forced to do prior to WWII). But these failures are partly the result of isolated nations struggling to establish alternative political economies yet having to compete in a world system of capitalism. The failures and limitations of these compromises are not endemic to but poisonous to the root goals of social justice for the many. As Richard Wolff has explained, socialism brings democracy to the workplace by, among other means, organizing production through Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE). We have to remember that, despite their later conflicts, Marx had been deeply influenced by Proudhon to the extent that the communist goal was the establishment of free associations of workers. In 1848, that view became central to the Communist Manifesto. And that view may now be much more attractive to those who have been forced into the false and precarious “freedom” experienced by poorly paid gig workers.

Second, we have to begin again to reshape the discourse about markets. Neoliberal versions of capitalism all invoke a paean to “free market” economies. But there’s no such thing as a “free market,” just as there is no such thing as a “deregulated economy” (which I will say more about in a minute). We certainly live in a market-based society, where financialized markets serve as the ultimate arbiter of all value, trumping social and communal values at every turn. But what markets will look like and how they function in alternative economies with improved social lives for all is the key question. Ever since hunter gathering tribes began to form settled communities, various kinds of markets have emerged to serve (or abuse) human needs. Marx understood this well because the way markets function depends upon the mode of production in any society. In short, any political economy, whether organized by agriculturally-based city-states, or by feudalism, or by socialism, or by capitalism, will have some kind of organized structures and expectations for the social markets where people meet to exchange goods and services. The pricing of goods entails far more than just supply and demand as dictated by markets left to themselves, unaided by the protocols and values of social life. Marx’s historical view of the complex transitions from feudalism to capitalism was no doubt based on the class struggles necessary to alienate the peasantry from the land in order to create markets in labor (a precondition for abstract labor). But he keenly recognized that those transitions also had to do with the way that new kinds of markets were set up and managed to serve different classes of people.

The chain of production and exchange subjected to variable markets can, of course, be very intricate so that, as Marx explained, basic use-value gets converted almost completely into market exchange-value. But those complications can be simplified by asking three basic questions. The first two pertain to the organization of production: (1) Who makes decisions about how things get produced and exchanged? and (2) What are the working conditions and human relations of those most directly involved in producing and exchanging those goods? The third crucial question has to do with the surplus: (3) How is the value added to the products distributed among the workers and the population? That is, decisions about production and market exchange in any society can potentially be widely and democratically shared by all those participating in the production of the goods; or decisions can be made exclusively by small groups of powerful individuals. Likewise, the surplus can be widely distributed, or it can be appropriated by a few who control production, thus creating exploitative economic and social hierarchies. Those historical and political conditions can be altered by class struggle. These basic principles now call for reiteration.

Especially during the coronavirus pandemic, the historical counter-movements of socialism and communism provide many positive examples that can aid anyone trying to envision new kinds of markets. It is not all that difficult to imagine alternative markets and workplaces that are far more beneficial to most people than the corporate models of Exxon, WalMart, or Amazon, to say the least. We now need to reach more people who might be receptive to these non-monetary ways of thinking about markets.

Third, and directly related to the discussion of markets, we must clarify and debunk the widespread myths about regulation and deregulation. The most pernicious myth is the main tenet of neoliberalism: that regulating markets is the province exclusively of state-controlled, price-setting, totalitarian regimes. The truth is that markets have always been regulated, but it has always been a question of who has regulated them to serve which class of people. 

We just need to ask who is set free by what kinds of regulations? This simple question exposes what should become more widely obvious: that neoliberal myths about “free markets” always neglect to mention that freedom for the owners of capital came about by placing severe regulations on workers’ rights to organize, demonstrate, and strike. It would be hilarious if it were not so painful that “Right to Work” states prohibit unionized workers from having much of a right to work. Decisions about work and production conditions directly affect what shows up at the market. Jeff Bezos didn’t get to be the richest person in the “free market” world by deregulating the limitations and unfreedoms of his workers.

The capitalists forever invoke Adam Smith’s iconic term, the “invisible hand,” to champion the myth of “self-regulating” markets that will achieve some miraculous balancing act through unfettered self-interest alone. But the truth is that the “invisible hand” metaphor occurs only once in his 1200-word tome, The Wealth of Nations, about halfway through, and within the next few pages Smith goes on to make many qualifications about the likelihood of a peaceful equilibrium actually being achieved. He acknowledges that regulations regarding military products for the nation fall within those instances where “it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign” imports (586), and in other instances tariffs “may be good policy in retaliations” (587) against foreign aggressions. He worried that monopolies could disrupt the open market and brutally lower wages below subsistence levels for workers. He worried a great deal about the “mean rapacity” of the still protean capitalist class, who “neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind” (quoted in Heilbroner, 68). Smith also explicitly acknowledged that the government would have to invest in projects and institutions such as roads and education that would be ignored by private industry. And, finally, Smith actually advocated that government should subsidize new and emerging industries until they could become profitable on their own business terms. In short, the “invisible hand” becomes sometimes very visible in terms of state regulatory policies, up to and including socialized, state-run, start-up enterprises. Were he alive today, Smith would have been one of the first to point out the contradiction that the free-market fundamentalists have required all kinds of national regulations such as regressive taxation, restrictions on collective bargaining, reductions in social services, and massively complex international regulations, even as they also depend on public expenditures for highways, water supply, and military forces, all of which favor the creditor nations over the debtor nations. In short, the pandemic has exposed the realities hidden by the mythical invisible hand.

Marx described the many ways that capitalist states regulate markets perhaps even more severely than socialist states, through tax breaks for the rich, low wages and long hours for workers with no job security, controlling the maldistribution of the surplus, defunding of human resources for the many, and manipulating currency rates to benefit the owners rather than the workers, just to mention a few. For much of the population, there is not a lot of freedom in the mythical “deregulated” economy with its lucrative “free markets.” Freedom of “choice” in the selection of private healthcare is anything but free for those who cannot afford it. A lot more people may now be more receptive to these simple points.

Fourth, we must help heal the nation from socially produced historical amnesia. This is a big and sweeping umbrella topic that certainly includes the three previous points. It remains a constant project for anyone concerned with inequality and injustice, so I am just opening the issue here without the details it calls for. The irony is that America is often championed as if it were founded on careful historical reflection about the common pattern of democracies devolving into tyranny. For example, in his brief book, On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder argues that “the precedent set by the Founders demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny (13).”

But that is misleading. The Founders certainly did not do a very good job of examining the history of slavery, for example. And the dominant discourse of capitalist America has long maintained power precisely on the deliberate production of historical amnesia so as to conceal rather than expose those “collateral” atrocities, sufferings, and violations of human rights that otherwise appear as no more than the inevitable “externalities” of the world economic system. This amnesia has dominated our educational system (see Loewen), as well as our cultural and political discourses. Many of the historical deceptions and omissions have to do with concealing the truths of class struggle, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. But in order to do that, the dominant discourse in our nation has also misrepresented or simply omitted any accurate historical accounts of the counter-movements of socialism, anarchism, and communism. That is what ideology is meant to do; and that is also, of course, what ideology critique needs to expose. Now that the coronavirus has done some of the exposure of the contemporary injustices, there is a vast amount of historical work still left to do despite the fine work being done now by many progressive historians and journalists such as Ibram X. Kendi, Masha Gessen, and others.

The problem is that it is more difficult to tell the truth under the current US political regime, especially since the function of the Fourth Estate, the free press, has been continuously undermined as the “fake news” industry whenever any reporting contradicts Trump’s relentless tweeting. But COVID is not fake, any more than the George Floyd video, and this undeniable historical evidence has empowered a new willingness to look back and see what was often kept behind the smokescreens of capitalist ideology regarding individualism, privatization, and self-regulating markets. The brutally unjust practices of imperialism and colonialism have been a key part of the history of the US., and these factors must be confronted by larger segments of the population if we hope to live in a more just world. As the late, great sociologist, Erik Olin Wright put it in his last book, “another world is possible” and “it could improve the conditions for human flourishing for most people” (3).

If there is any truth to the Reverend Al Sharpton’s memorial speech for George Floyd where he reiterated the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3.1,”There is a time and a season,” and if there is any hope that the oppressors might “get your knee off our necks,” those hopes will also depend on our ability to get much larger segments of the population open to the possibilities of socio-economic transformation. As Sharpton put it, we “need to know what time it is.” The ancient Greeks called it “kairos,” or “timeliness,” times in personal or social history when difficult actions and changes become more possible.

No longer are many Americans willing to join Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas, when he proclaimed his willingness to die “in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves” (quoted in Lueders). After the COVID exposure, an increasing number of US citizens do not just want to go back to the old America with its rampant racism, escalating inequality, and broken healthcare system. Rather than a momentary turbulence that will subside when the deadly pandemic recedes, it should be a time when we can work for more than just a few Keynesian-like measures to provide temporary harbors from the relentless ruthlessness of the autocrats. Indeed, if there is a time when we do not need more bandaids, that time is now.

Just look at what happened after the murder of George Floyd during the frightening stages of the surging US pandemic. We all witnessed the longest, most sustained protest in American history. Our kairos has arrived, even in these dark times of crisis. This is a teachable moment; this is a moral moment; this is a political moment; this is an economic moment; and this is certainly a racial moment. Let’s not drop the ball. Recall the famous eleventh of the “Theses on Feuerbach” where in 1844 Marx said it so simply: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (McLellan 173).

Works Cited

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Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. U of Chicago P, 1962.

Gessen, Masha. Surviving Autocracy. Riverhead Books. 2020.

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Jones, Daniel Stedman. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton University P, 2014.

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Bold Type Books, 2016.

Lueders, Bill. “Trump’s Pandemic of Ignorance.” The Progressive. June/July 2020: 6-7.

Levine, Sam. The Guardian. “Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote.” Online. Theguardian.org. March 30, 2020.

Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Reprint edition. The New P, 2018.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. 2^nd ed. Oxford UP, 2000.

Osnos, Evan. “The Greenwich Rebellion.” The New Yorker. May 11, 2020: 28-39.

Pizzigati, Sam. “The Corona Class War.” The Progressive. June/July 2020: 23-27.

Rugaber, Christopher. “Kanye West? The Girl Scouts? Hedge funds? All got PPP loans.” The Boston Globe. Online: bostonglobe.com. July 6, 2020.

Sharpton, Al. “Reverend Al Sharpton Eulogy Transcript at George Floyd’s Memorial Service.” Online: Rev.com. June 4, 2020.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. Bantam Books, 2003.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017

Wolff, Richard. Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Haymarket Books, 2012.

Wright, Erik Olin. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21^st Century. Verso, 2019.