Monthly Archives: April 2020

The Orb

Abolition of the Royal Familia (Cooking Vinyl)

For 32 years, Englands The Orb have been at the forefront of ambient electronic music. The lineup has long been fluid founding member and former Killing Joke roadie Alex Paterson is the only mainstay but the albums have rarely dipped under the self-set quality bar.

Of course, its easy to recall the glory years. The debutThe Orbs Adventures Beyond the Ultraworldalbum (opening with the genre-defining Little Fluffy Clouds) is the sole release from Paterson alongside former KLF brain Jimmy Cauty. For excellent sophomore effortU.F.Orb, Paterson was working with uber producer Kris Weston. From 1995 to present, Thomas Fehlmann has been in the ranks, though additional collaborators have come and gone.

Abolition of the Royal Familia is the projects 16th studio album in total, and it lands right in the middle of global chaos. To be honest, its impossible to listen to new music at the moment without contemplating the context of world events. With that in mind,Abolition is a wonderfully, terrifying, odd and soothing soundtrack to 2020.

Opening song Daze, with the prophetic refrain You can listen for daze, features a contribution from Patersons dog Ruby. Elsewhere, guests include Youth, Roger Eno, and Steve Hillageand Miquette Giraudy from Gong and System 7. All add to the overall sense of sensory stimulation and soaring, cinematic brilliance. Even Ruby.

As with previous Orb efforts,Abolition is a piece of work that needs to be heard in its entirety for full immersion. That said, Afros, Afghans and Angels, right on the middle of the album, is a clear highlight. Reminiscent of a sci-fi movie score, with a surprising hint ofQueens far-reaching Flash Gordon.

But again, you have to experience the whole thing. Just lie down while chaos reigns outside, close your eyes and allow The Orb to drip from the walls.

(Cooking Vinyl)

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Album of the Week: The Orb's Abolition of the Royal Familia - L.A. Weekly

Published: 4/3/2020 7:00:22 AM

Modified: 4/3/2020 7:00:10 AM

With coronavirus expected to peak in New Hampshire in late April or early May, the state is doing its best to ready itself for shortages in hospital space and ventilators. New Hampshire has a total of 1,000 ventilators and has ordered 45 more. Hotels and universities are offering to bridge the gap in needed hospital space.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has requested $44.5 billion for nuclear weapons in 2021. Thats an increase of $7.3 billion from 2020 and $9.4 billion more than was spent in 2019.

Lawmakers have defended massive expenditure on nuclear weapons for decades, touting the safety and security they are supposed to bring to the American people. But in the midst of a global pandemic it becomes painfully clear how hollow are promises of security based on threats to use weapons of mass destruction. A virus doesnt care how many nuclear weapons your country has. Every dime wasted on nuclear weapons could be better spent giving the American people a fighting chance against COVID-19.

This is not just a rhetorical argument. We did the math. Diverting U.S. spending on nuclear weapons for only one year would meet reported gaps in health care supplies and save lives.

Last year, the United States spent $35.1 billion in taxpayer dollars building and maintaining its nuclear warheads and missiles, planes and submarines. What could we have bought instead?

At an average cost of $37,500 a piece, the United States could get 35,000 more ventilators. At $25,000 per intensive care unit bed, the United States buys 300,000 more beds, meeting the reported nationwide gap. Doctors and nurses across the country are over-worked and exhausted. Instead of buying nuclear weapons, we could hire 150,000 nurses at an average salary of $75,000 and 75,000 doctors at an average salary of $200,000.

Thirty-five thousand ventilators plus 300,000 ICU beds plus 150,000 nurses plus 75,000 doctors is what we dont get due to a single year of spending on the nuclear arsenal. If these new supplies were distributed evenly across states, that translates to 700 additional ventilators, 6,000 more ICU beds, 3,000 additional nurses and 1,500 additional doctors for the state of New Hampshire. Which way do you want your tax dollars spent?

It is always shortsighted to waste billions of dollars on weapons of mass destruction that more than two-thirds of the worlds countries see as a threat to global security. But it is undeniably foolish to throw away money for needed resources to save American lives. COVID-19 is not the first and will not be last pandemic we face. We cant prevent all global diseases. But what we can do is spend our money wisely to prepare for them.

Doctors around the world see no place for nuclear weapons in this world neither do most countries. In 2017, 122 countries adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the use, production and possession of nuclear weapons. The treaty will officially take effect once an additional 14 countries ratify it. Already, nine New Hampshire towns and cities have called on the U.S. government to step back from the brink and work toward worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons, including by joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons New London, Alstead, Dover, Durham, Lee, Peterborough, Portsmouth, Warner and most recently Barrington in addition to cities around the country like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Concord, as New Hampshires capital, must join them in calling for an end to nuclear weapons and investment in what really keeps the Granite State safe.

(Alicia Sanders-Zakre is a 2013 graduate of Concord High School and the policy and research coordinator of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.)

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My Turn: What one year of nuclear weapons spending buys in COVID-19 supplies for New Hampshire - Concord Monitor

The Verkhovna Rada has registered another draft resolution on the abolition of the decision of the Parliament of March 31 on the adoption of the law on the introduction of the land market.

According to the parliament's website, corresponding draft resolution No. 2178-10-P4 was registered by MPs from the Batkivschyna faction, Ivan Kyrylenko and Vadym Ivchenko. Thus, at the moment, five draft resolutions have already been registered in the Rada on canceling the decision to adopt a law on amendments to some legislative acts of Ukraine on the turnover of agricultural land, three of which were initiated by members of the Batkivschyna faction.

According to the established procedure, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada cannot sign the adopted bill until the deputies consider the draft resolutions on the abolition of the vote and decide on them.

As reported, on the night of March 31, the Verkhovna Rada at an extraordinary meeting adopted a law on opening the land market from July 1, 2021 with the restriction of its work in the first three years only to land plots owned by individuals with a maximum ownership of 100 hectares per capita.

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Five draft resolutions on abolition of adoption of land market law registered in Rada - Interfax Ukraine

IN early April, the United Nations General Assembly considered a draft declaration on the abolition of unilateral sanctions imposed by a number of states, primarily the United States, Britain and the European Union that bypassed the UN Security Council.

BY OWN CORRESPONDENT

The draft was co-authored by 28 states and its importance is determined by the need to unite the international community in the context of the coronavirus pandemic also known as Covid-19, which has infected more than a million people worldwide with over 54 000 becoming victims.

In this case, the unilateral sanctions imposed under various pretexts by western countries impose a threat to an assortment of supplies and equipment necessary to fight the deadly virus to countries that fall under their restrictive measures.

Countries such as Zimbabwe, Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, to mention but a few are under threat.

Despite the unequivocal importance and undeniable need for a declaration on the lifting of illegal, albeit unilateral sanctions, the draft was not adopted.

Opponents of the document, like many other humanitarian initiatives of the UN, have once again become the US, EU, Great Britain, Ukraine and Georgia.

Calls to abandon sanctions were also made in March at the G -20 summit held via video conference.

At that time, America once again kept itself aloof from participants who reaffirmed their commitment to solidarity between peoples and the search for common recipes to fight the new type of coronavirus.

The US did not hear the call to abandon sanctions and trade wars and give a green light to all countries that the access to food and medical supplies were necessary combating the epidemic.

According to the text of the draft declaration of the UN General Assembly considered this month , the document provided for the leading role of the World Health Organisation in combating the pandemic, the consent of states to cooperate with each other and with the WHO, including to develop ways to combat the spread and treatment of Covid-19.

It also called on countries to abandon trade wars and applying unilateral sanctions through the bypassing of the UN Security Council.

Apologists for countries that mantain sanctions policies were not ready to respond to the call of the UN Secretary General and were not able to sacrifice their politicised approaches and interests.

In such circumstances, it will be more difficult to give a global and joint response to the threat of a new pandemic.

And as a result of the short-sighted sanctions policy, the first violin, of which is Washington, a huge number of people can suffer, especially in developing countries.

The current situation shows that so far, not all countries have realised the seriousness of the situation.

The behavior of the US, EU, Britain, Ukraine and Georgia at the UN General Assembly shows that not everyone has realised the danger of the pandemic and continues to act as if nothing had happened.

In fact, a pandemic can be compared to a global war, and the whole world is waging a vicious fight against a common enemy-Covid-19.

Its time the world woke up to the fact that we need to forget about past grievances and work hand in glove, if not like tongue and saliva, to fight against the coronavirus.

But, as things stand, a number of countries are still preoccupied with some petty issues against the backdrop of the pandemic, making them appear insensitive and inhumane.

Countries that stubbornly support the preservation of sanctions are being too frivolous to approach the real threat of the extinction of mankind.

Should there be more victims for the US and its allies to finally wake up and smell the coffee?

After all has been said, there should be unity worldwide in fighting this global pandemic and break trade barriers to allow for the smooth and timely flow of supplies and equipment.

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Sanctions will not work in the age of Covid-19 - The Zimbabwe Standard

In the face of the COVID-19 tsunami, our lives are changing in ways that were inconceivable just a few short weeks ago. Not since the 20089 economic collapse has the world collectively shared an experience of this kind: a single, rapidly mutating global crisis, structuring the rhythm of our daily lives within a complex calculus of risk and competing probabilities.

In response, numerous social movements have put forward demands that take seriously the potentially disastrous consequences of the virus, while also tackling the incapacity of capitalist governments to adequately address the crisis itself. These demands include questions of worker safety, the necessity of neighborhood-level organizing, income and social security, the rights of those on zero-hour contracts or in precarious employment, and the need to protect renters and those living in poverty.

In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis has sharply underscored the irrational nature of health care systems structured around corporate profit the almost universal cutbacks to public hospital staffing and infrastructure (including critical care beds and ventilators), the lack of public health provision and the prohibitive cost of access to medical services in many countries, and the ways in which the property rights of pharmaceutical companies serve to restrict widespread access to potential therapeutic treatments and the development of vaccines.

However, the global dimensions of COVID-19 have figured less prominently in much of the left discussion. Mike Davis has rightly observed that the danger to the global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments, and left debates have been similarly circumscribed, with attention largely focused on the severe health care crises unfolding in Europe and the United States. Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world.

In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders.

As with all so-called humanitarian crises, it is essential to remember that the social conditions found across most of the countries of the South are the direct product of how these states are inserted into the hierarchies of the world market. Historically, this included a long encounter with Western colonialism, which has continued, into contemporary times, with the subordination of poorer countries to the interests of the worlds wealthiest states and largest transnational corporations. Since the mid-1980s, repeated bouts of structural adjustment often accompanied by Western military action, debilitating sanctions regimes, or support for authoritarian rulers have systematically destroyed the social and economic capacities of poorer states, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with major crises such as COVID-19.

Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral epidemiology and a lack of biological resistance to a novel pathogen. The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes.

One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public health systems across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 1520 percent of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the United States, and lies behind the strategy of flattening the curve in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity.

Yet, while we rightly point to the lack of ICU beds, ventilators, and trained medical staff across many Western states, we must recognize that the situation in most of the rest of the world is immeasurably worse. Malawi, for example, has about 25 ICU beds for a population of 17 million people. There are less than 2.8 critical care beds per 100,000 people on average across South Asia, with Bangladesh possessing around 1,100 such beds for a population of over 157 million (0.7 critical care beds per 100,000 people).

In comparison, the shocking pictures coming out of Italy are occurring in an advanced health care system with an average 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 (and the ability to bring more online). The situation is so serious that many poorer countries do not even have information on ICU availability, with one 2015 academic paper estimating that more than 50 percent of [low-income] countries lack any published data on ICU capacity. Without such information it is difficult to imagine how these countries could possibly plan to meet the inevitable demand for critical care arising from COVID-19.

Of course, the question of ICU and hospital capacity is one part of a much larger set of issues including a widespread lack of basic resources (e.g., clean water, food, and electricity), adequate access to primary medical care, and the presence of other comorbidities (such as high rates of HIV and tuberculosis). Taken as a whole, all of these factors will undoubtedly mean a vastly higher prevalence of critically ill patients (and hence overall fatalities) across poorer countries as a result of COVID-19.

Debates around how best to respond to COVID-19 in Europe and the United States have illustrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between effective public health measures and conditions of labor, precarity, and poverty. Calls for people to self-isolate when sick or the enforcement of longer periods of mandatory lockdowns are economically impossible for the many people who cannot easily shift their work online, or those in the service sector who work in zero-hour contracts or other kinds of temporary employment. Recognizing the fundamental consequences of these work patterns for public health, many European governments have announced sweeping promises around compensation for those made unemployed or forced to stay at home during this crisis.

It remains to be seen how effective these schemes will be, and to what degree they will actually meet the needs of the very large numbers of people who will lose their jobs as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, we must recognize that such schemes will simply not exist for most of the worlds population. In countries where the majority of the labor force is engaged in informal work or depends upon unpredictable daily wages much of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia there is no feasible way that people can choose to stay home or self-isolate.

This must be viewed alongside the fact that there will almost certainly be very large increases in the working poor as a direct result of the crisis. Indeed, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated for its worst-case scenario (24.7 million job losses globally) that the number of people in low- and low-middle-income countries earning less than $US 3.20/day at PPP will grow by nearly 20 million people.

Once again, these figures are important not solely because of day-to-day economic survival. Without the mitigation effects offered through quarantine and isolation, the actual progress of the disease in the rest of the world will certainly be much more devastating than the harrowing scenes witnessed to date in China, Europe, and the United States.

Moreover, workers involved in informal and precarious labor often live in slums and overcrowded housing ideal conditions for the explosive spread of the virus. As an interviewee with the Washington Post recently noted in relation to Brazil: More than 1.4 million people nearly a quarter of Rios population live in one of the citys favelas. Many cant afford to miss a single day of work, let alone weeks. People will continue leaving their houses . . . the storms about to hit.

Similarly disastrous scenarios face the many millions of people currently displaced through war and conflict. The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest forced displacement since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally displaced people as a result of the ongoing wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in refugee camps or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary rights to health care typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of malnutrition and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself.

One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by extreme poverty, poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use).

Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere.

The imminent public health crisis facing poorer countries as a consequence of COVID-19 will be further deepened by an associated global economic downturn that is almost certain to exceed the scale of 2008. It is too early to predict the depth of this slump, but many leading financial institutions are expecting this to be the worst recession in living memory.

One of the reasons for this is the near-simultaneous shutdown of manufacturing, transport, and service sectors across the United States, Europe, and China an event without historical precedent since the Second World War. With one-fifth of the worlds population currently under some form of lockdown, supply chains and global trade have collapsed and stock market prices have plunged with most major exchanges losing between 30-40 percent of their value between February 17 and March 17.

Yet, as Eric Touissant has emphasized, the economic collapse we are now fast approaching was not caused by COVID-19 rather, the virus presented the spark or trigger of a deeper crisis that has been in the making for several years. Closely connected to this are the measures put in place by governments and central banks since 2008, most notably the policies of quantitative easing and repeated interest-rate cuts.

These policies aimed at propping up share prices through massively increasing the supply of ultra-cheap money to financial markets. They meant a very significant growth in all forms of debt corporate, government, and household. In the United States, for example, the nonfinancial corporate debt of large companies reached $10 trillion dollars in mid-2019 (around 48 percent of GDP), a significant rise from its previous peak in 2008 (when it stood at about 44 percent). Typically, this debt was not used for productive investment, but rather for financial activities (such as funding dividends, share buybacks, and mergers and acquisitions). We thus have the well-observed phenomena of booming stock markets on one hand, and stagnating investment and declining profit levels on the other.

Significant to the coming crisis, however, is the fact that the growth in corporate debt has been largely concentrated in below investment grade bonds (so-called junk bonds), or bonds that are rated BBB, just one grade above junk status. Indeed, according to BlackRock, the worlds largest asset manager, BBB debt made up a remarkable 50 percent of the global bond market in 2019, compared to only 17 percent in 2001. What this means is that the synchronized collapse of worldwide production, demand, and financial asset prices presents a massive problem for corporations needing to refinance their debt.

As economic activity grinds to a halt in key sectors, companies whose debt is due to be rolled over now face a credit market that has essentially shuttered no one is willing to lend in these conditions and many over-leveraged companies (especially those involved in sectors such as airlines, retail, energy, tourism, automobiles, and leisure) could be earning almost no revenue over the coming period. The prospect of a wave of high-profile corporate bankruptcies, defaults, and credit downgrades is therefore extremely likely. This is not just a US problem financial analysts have recently warned of a cash crunch and a wave of bankruptcies across the Asia Pacific region, where corporate debt levels have doubled to $32 trillion over the last decade.

All of this poses a very grave danger to the rest of the world, where a variety of transmission routes will metastasize the downturn across poorer countries and populations. As with 2008, these include a likely plunge in exports, a sharp pull back in foreign direct investment flows and tourism revenues, and a drop in worker remittances.

The latter factor is often forgotten in the discussion of the current crisis, but it is essential to remember that one of the key features of neoliberal globalization has been the integration of large parts of the worlds population into global capitalism through remittance flows from family members working overseas. In 1999, only eleven countries worldwide had remittances greater than 10 percent of GDP; by 2016, this figure had risen to thirty countries. In 2016, just over 30 percent of all 179 countries for which data was available recorded remittance levels greater than 5 per cent of GDP a proportion that has doubled since 2000.

Astonishingly, around one billion people one out of seven people globally are directly involved in remittance flows as either senders or recipients. The closing down of borders because of COVID-19 coupled with the halt to economic activities in key sectors where migrants tend to predominate means we could be facing a precipitous drop in worker remittances globally. This is an outcome that would have very severe ramifications for countries in the South.

Another key mechanism by which the rapidly evolving economic crisis may hit countries in the South is the large build-up of debt held by poorer countries in recent years. This includes both the least developed countries in the world as well as so-called emerging markets. In late 2019, the Institute for International Finance estimated that emerging market debt stood at $72 trillion, a figure that had doubled since 2010.

Much of this debt is denominated in US dollars, which exposes its holders to fluctuations in the value of the US currency. In recent weeks the US dollar has strengthened significantly as investors sought a safe-haven in response to the crisis; as a result, other national currencies have fallen, and the burden of interest and principal repayments on $US-denominated debt has been increasing.

Already in 2018, forty-six countries were spending more on public debt service than on their health care systems as a share of GDP. Today, we are entering an alarming situation where many poorer countries will face increasingly burdensome debt repayments while simultaneously attempting to manage an unprecedented public health crisis all in the context of a very deep global recession.

And let us not harbor any illusions that these intersecting crises might bring an end to structural adjustment or the emergence of some kind of global social democracy. As we have repeatedly seen over the last decade, capital frequently seizes moments of crisis as a moment of opportunity a chance to implement radical change that was previously blocked or appeared impossible.

Indeed, World Bank President David Malpass implied as much when he noted at the (virtual) G20 meeting of finance ministers a few days ago:

Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery ... For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.

It is essential to bring all these international dimensions to the center of the left debate around COVID-19, linking the fight against the virus to questions such as the abolition of Third World debt, an end to IMF/World Bank neoliberal structural adjustment packages, reparations for colonialism, a halt to the global arms trade, an end to sanctions regimes, and so forth.

All of these campaigns are, in effect, global public health issues they bear directly on the ability of poorer countries to mitigate the effects of the virus and the associated economic downturn. It is not enough to speak of solidarity and mutual self-help in our own neighborhoods, communities, and within our national borders without raising the much greater threat that this virus presents to the rest of the world.

Of course, high levels of poverty, precarious conditions of labor and housing, and a lack of adequate health infrastructure also threaten the ability of populations across Europe and the United States to mitigate this infection. But grassroots campaigns in the South are building coalitions that tackle these issues in interesting and internationalist ways. Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive political rhetoric of nativist and xenophobic movements a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with border controls, and a my country first national patriotism.

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This Is a Global Pandemic Let's Treat It That Way - Jacobin magazine

The global coronavirus pandemic has exposed a massive fissure in society, one between human life and economic value. Which do we value more? We certainly know where many politicians and titans of finance stand; hence the appeal from many of them to shorten the period of social distancing and send everyone back to work.

"Our country wasn't built to be shut down," said President Trump at a White House briefing, assuring the public that "America will, again, and soon, be open for business."

Senior chairman of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, a registered Democrat who recently announced that he would vote for Trump over Bernie Sanders, tweeted:

Extreme measures to flatten the virus "curve" is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.

Even more disconcertingly, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested on Fox News that it would be reasonable for the elderly to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the economy:

I'm not trying to think of it in any kind of morbid way, but I'm just saying that we've got a choice here, and we are going to be in a total collapse, recession, depression, collapse in our society. If this goes on another several months, there won't be any jobs to come back to for many people.

These kinds of callous remarks have been met with obvious outrage from workers who are being exposed to unprecedented risks on the job. But they've also provoked consternation from scientists and public health professionals, who are struggling to be heard over the clanging of the New York Stock Exchange bell. Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, told the New York Times: "You can't call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you're willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths."

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"Can't we try to put people's lives first for at least a month?" Caplan continued.

The vast majority of people are likely to agree with Caplan: putting people's lives first makes a lot of sense. Which raises the question: why is this even a matter of public debate? What kind of social system do we live in that forces us to ask whether we can put people's lives first, for a month?

That forces us to question what our society's underlying values really are. This is very relevant to the sudden shift in how we think about work. Suddenly, we're all questioning what kind of work is actually "essential" and what isn't that is, what kind of work we value as a society. Healthcare workers, those who give us access to necessities like food, toilet paper, and soap, all perform radically essential functions for our continued existence even if those who do this work are usually granted lower status than those who design smartphone games and engineer luxury vehicles.

Nevertheless, there is a vast gulf between such "human values," and what constitutes economic value in a capitalist society. To understand how we came to live in a capitalist society that is poised to sacrifice millions for the sake of profits, it is always a good idea to look to capitalism's unparalleled critic, Karl Marx. "Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish," he famously wrote in an 1868 letter.

But Marx wasn't just making the basic point that we need labor in order for a country to function. Neoliberal ideology has made this seem like a radical claim today, but it was actually taken for granted by the dominant economic thinkers of the period.

Marx was trying to argue something much more specific about how labor happens, as he started to lay out in the next sentence: "And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society's aggregate labour."

In other words, different needs are met through different types and different durations of labor, which are all portions of the labor everyone has to do in society as a whole. Our society needs a certain amount of toilet paper, so a corresponding amount of labor time has to be devoted to manufacturing it. We need another specific amount of canned beans, which calls for another amount of labor time, so everyone's combined labor time has to be divided up accordingly. From the vantage point of meeting a society's overall needs, each individual labor process is best understood as a portion of this aggregate labor.

Finally, with an extremely dense sentence bear with me, we'll try to make sense of it Marx came to his central and original point: "the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products."

What does this all mean? Marx had presented the whole argument systematically in the first volume of "Capital," which he published the year before this letter. As we've just established, the reproduction of human life the meeting of people's subsistence needs requires people to perform labor. That labor has to be organized and allocated socially somehow; otherwise, people won't be able to coordinate to do all the different kinds of tasks that are required to meet the diverse needs of the whole society. The overall labor that everyone in society performs has to be distributed in proportions that correspond to the society's needs.

But in capitalist societies and here you have the weird and complicated reality Marx was trying to explain this doesn't happen as the result of a consciously determined plan (which might seem like an awfully good idea at the moment). It also doesn't happen on the basis of tradition, as it may have in pre-capitalist societies; e.g., my father was a blacksmith, so I too become a blacksmith. In capitalist societies, the allocation of labor is determined through the exchange of the products of labor on the market.

While the ideologues of capitalism would like us to see this as a natural condition, Marx showed that it's definitely not. It's specific to capitalist societies, because under capitalism people don't have direct access to the things they need to perform this labor: land, machinery, materials. These "means of production," as Marx called them, are owned by a small minority as private property. For Marx, the part of society that we might today call the "one percent" isn't defined in terms of its relative wealth or status, but in terms of its ownership of property..

In short, those of us who don't own the means of production which corresponds, more or less, to the "99 percent" are dependent on working for wages to get what we need to survive.

This is why Marx rejected the socialist slogan, which at first glance it might seem like he would agree with, that "labor is the source of all wealth and culture." Nature, he pointed out, is also a source of wealth, and to produce anything through labor, we need to have access to it in some way. But in capitalist societies, only some people are the "owners" of nature! The rest of us, Marx wrote in "Critique of the Gotha Program," "can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

Now, the pandemic is making a lot of people question this arrangement. How, exactly does society decide who does what job, and who makes what? Why are there so few ventilators, oxygen machines, masks and coronavirus testing kits being produced quickly in the United States?

The answer is that labor isn't allocated based on what is useful, but by competition on the market for profit. A huge number of ventilators and coronavirus testing kits would be very useful indeed right now, but the free market is having tremendous trouble allocating our labor to produce that kind of thing efficiently. Quite simply, labor isn't allocated based on human need; it is based on the market exchange of its products. And the goal of this exchange is the capitalist accumulation of economic value.

The fact that so much of the labor people normally do from day to day can now be deemed "non-essential" gives us a kind of illustration of how capitalists accumulate economic value. Only a small portion of the total labor done by society, as we're seeing now, is actually required for human survival. But we can't access the products of that labor without money. In other words, we're dependent on the market for survival. Employers need to pay us enough money so that we can access those products on the market and show up to work the next day. But they don't need to pay us any more than that. (That is, unless we demand that they do.) So when the capitalist economy is functioning normally, all of this extra, "surplus" labor we do gets churned through the process of commodity exchange and comes back to the capitalist as profit. This is Marx's theory of exploitation.

As many feminists have pointed out since Marx, this also applies to the kinds of work that might seem to be outside the capitalist job market. Housework and care work have traditionally been assigned to women, and treated as a gift from nature. But this has obscured the fact that these kinds of work also produce a commodity: the ability to work, or "labor-power," which is exactly what we sell to our bosses every time we clock in.

As schools and other public services close due to the pandemic, this "reproductive" labor is expanding rapidly: people will have to spend more and more of their time looking after children and the elderly, cleaning and disinfecting every surface, and stockpiling groceries. If this doesn't happen, there won't be a labor force after the crisis. But capitalists don't expect to have to pay for this extra labor. Sometimes they're willing to let the state pay, in the form of welfare and public services; but they're also eager to find opportunities to privatize these services and make us pay for them ourselves. Fast food, for example, allows people racing between two or three low-paying jobs to substitute a portion of their wages for the time, which they have precious little of, that it would take to cook for their families. As Angela Davis argued, what this actually demonstrates is that we have the technological capacity to make the private burden of housework obsolete, if tasks like meal preparation, cleaning, and child care could be socialized and subsidized. Instead, they fall upon a super-exploited domestic workforce consisting largely of women of color.

You don't have to get through the three volumes of "Capital" to see that this situation is incredibly bizarre. It means that the performance of work which is required for our survival is only done so that those at the top, capitalists, can accumulate economic value.

This is a tricky definition, because "value" doesn't mean actual wealth as in more stuff, which could be useful in various ways. It's the pursuit of more wealth in the form of money which reaches absurd heights in the world of financiers, whose volatile fortunes end up determining our destinies.

The fact that this scenario is bizarre doesn't change the fact that it is real. In capitalist society, people need to be buying and selling commodities for the allocation of labor to take place. In this irrational order, it doesn't really matter whether you're doing anything useful for the world. If you're producing things that others buy, and generate profit for your employer in the process, you're performing labor that's necessary to create economic value. The "non-essential" labor is actually quite essential for the overall system.

In this context, the profit motive actually does determine whether we live or die. Because of market competition, the accumulation of capital requires constant growth and expansion. Capitalists are all in competition with each other, and any capitalist who fails to aggressively raise profits and increase productivity will be pushed out of the market by other capitalists. From the perspective of human values, the statement "life should take priority over profit" is sensible. From the perspective of economic value, life can only be sustained insofar as it facilitates the relentless drive for profits.

But this isn't just a lie that capitalists tell. It's actually the cruel and twisted reality of the system we live in: our needs are met only insofar as there's a favorable climate for the pursuit of profit.

This is what is so peculiar about this pandemic, how it is exposing the irrationality of this system. Even before the current pandemic, capitalism was constantly suffering crises because competitive accumulation leads to situations in which some industries produce more commodities than they can sell; or capitalists sink investments in machinery that quickly becomes obsolete; or people don't have enough money to buy the commodities they need; or financial growth leads to bubbles that inevitably pop; or the underlying infrastructural requirements for production like roads are not profitable to build. Or, in this case, a virus puts the very existence of human life into question.

This is why governments have to step in, to regulate industry and finance, provide effective demand through spending, build infrastructure, and so on. But they operate in a contradictory situation, because if their activity threatens capitalist profitability, the whole system that actually determines the way people meet their needs could collapse, and they could lose the tax revenue that allows them to fund their programs.

This is the contradiction we're seeing around the novel coronavirus. Social distancing is an absolute requirement for human survival. The labor we do to keep society working is impossible to perform if we're sick, not to mention dead. But at the same time, if the economic crisis continues to become more severe and accumulation grinds to a halt, so will the allocation of social labor. People will indeed lose their jobs. There will be a long-term depression.

The only way to resolve this contradiction within our current situation is for governments to mercilessly take measures that threaten the private property of capitalists and the "free market." The more they take control of the private property of necessary industries through nationalization, provide public services and cash payments, and displace market relations by social planning, the more likely it is that we will be able to mitigate the effects of the pandemic while still allowing people to meet their survival needs. In the absence of such changes, human values are powerless against economic value.

In other countries, these measures are being implemented with some success. But unfortunately, capitalist states especially ours are often reluctant to take these measures. Even where these changes are being made on a broader scale think of the nationalization of hospitals in Spain and Ireland and Denmark's measures against mass layoffs governments are thinking about restoring conditions for accumulation in the future, and imposing austerity to compensate for their temporary concessions. (Indeed, US states are already making cuts.)

In some cases, there are factions of the ruling class which are willing to threaten the short-term interests of capitalists in order to restore equilibrium: Bill Gates, for example, who advocates for an "extreme shutdown." Other factions of the ruling class, like those in power in Texas and DC, are willing to sacrifice our lives to preserve capitalist social relations. It is entirely possible that the faction of the ruling class which is willing to gamble on mass deaths in order to get the economy running again will succeed in sending people back to work.

The only way we know to ensure that the outcome is one which protects the vast majority of the population which works for a living is to engage in class struggle. This isn't the same as defending human values, which are meaningless in a society governed by economic value. Despite our recognition of what kind of work is really necessary for human life, capitalism is indifferent to this realization; neither capitalists nor the capitalist state will be moved by it. We have to actually disrupt the efforts of the ruling class to control our lives and put us at risk. Appealing to the values of politicians and capitalists won't get us anywhere.

Social distancing appeared, at first, to be a kind of passive, potential "general strike": a situation in which many people across industries stopped working and brought the economy to a halt. Since capitalism depends on the exploitation of labor for accumulation, this kind of mass refusal to work poses a fundamental threat to the system.

General strikes, as an active tactic of class struggle, have happened before throughout U.S. history. W.E.B. Du Bois famously described, during the Civil War, a "general strike" of enslaved peoplewho, in one of the most significant events of self-emancipation in modern history, left the plantations and refused to work, forcing the escalation of the war towards the abolition of slavery.

In Seattle where the US coronavirus outbreak began and where Amazon is now poised to reap record profits from the pandemic, owing to the continued labor of its workers in dangerous conditions a general strike shut down the city in 1919. This was the year after the Spanish flu epidemic, which had already led to a major shutdown of the city. Starting in the shipbuilding industry and spreading across trades, people all over Seattle refused to work, demanding higher wages. But they also engaged in careful planning to ensure that everyone's survival needs would be met through mutual aid hospitals would remain open, milk would be delivered, and garbage would be collected. They were not only demanding better working conditions, but were taking back control of their lives from capital.

The Seattle general strike provoked a strong anti-communist reaction, stirring up fears that had been raised by the Russian Revolution two years earlier, and the city government was prepared to use police and military repression to bring it to an end. Ultimately, the strikers found themselves in a stalemate. They had to either escalate their struggle to challenge the dominant political power, or retreat. Union bureaucracies began to withdraw their support. Slowly, people returned to work and the general strike came to an end.

Recently, we appeared to be on the verge of being forced into a general strike by the pandemic, but it quickly became clear that such a measure is a serious threat to the capitalist system. The ruling class now wants to put a stop to the general strike. To preserve social distancing means extending and prolonging the general strike, as Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods workers are announcing this week. Workers at General Electric are reviving the practice of combining the strike with the principle of mutual aid. These workers normally produce jet engines, but management, citing the effect of the pandemic on the aviation industry, recently announced mass layoffs. In response workers at the GE plant in Lynn, Massachusetts walked off the job and, standing six feet apart, demanded that the plant be repurposed for the production of ventilators. In the context of the irrationality and harmfulness of capitalist production, it's the workers who are stepping up to impose rational and life-saving measures.

However, as the 1919 Seattle general strike illustrates, there are strategic problems that any strike will encounter. Disruptions like strikes happen throughout the history of capitalism, and often spur the system to develop and adapt in new ways. Struggles over the length of the working day, for example, forced capitalists to develop technologies that made labor more productive, and generated a leap in development.

It's impossible to say what kind of "leap" may take place today. It may be quite ugly, and will likely involve the transfer of the greatest costs of the crisis onto the most vulnerable of our population. So far, this is exactly the plan. As Naomi Klein recently said, "Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis [are] their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world."

For the refusal of work to actually change the underlying structure of society, there has to be a passage to the political level of organization. There has to be some kind of independent organization which challenges the existing structures of political power and channels the refusal of work into the demand for an entirely different system.

This kind of organization used to be the political party, but it isn't clear what it will look like now. We don't have the mass political parties that existed before the crisis situations of the 20th century revolutions, and the political parties that are part of our existing governments are totally bureaucratic and top-down, and resistant to change. The challenges by figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders have been systematically shut down by elites.

So we need to figure out how to build new organizations that can facilitate and advance the necessary class struggle. Indeed, in this pandemic moment, millions are suddenly realizing how irrational our economic system is. It's inevitable in this moment that we will all be thinking about what an ethical system of values would look like, and how that would determine our response to the pandemic in a more rational world. But for that kind of thinking to be anything more than speculation, we have to first recognize that this can never be realized within the capitalist system, and we have to start to think politically about what it would take to change the system.

The rest is here:

A general strike could happen in the US. But what comes after could change everything - Salon