Another Empty Debate

With almost all of the states in the country reopening at least partially this past week, there has been much debate in the media about how best to restart the economy while minimizing the risks to public health. Unfortunately, for all this talk, nobody has seriously questioned the legitimacy of the autonomous economy that makes such a ridiculous opposition possible.

On one hand, you have the liberals, who, in their typical tone of intellectual superiority, claim to be taking the pandemic seriously, and want to keep the country locked down until almighty science can wave its magical wand and make the virus disappear. On the other hand are the “reckless” conservatives, who demand that governments lift certain restrictions immediately so that people are once again “free” to sacrifice themselves on the altar of valorization (Robert Kurz). While the flavors are slightly different, the Kool-Aid they drink is ultimately the same.

Liberals assume that government spending can sustain people who are out of work for months, ignoring the fact that money cannot be continuously pulled out of thin air without serious consequences. Imagining what would happen if the US Dollar were to enter an inflation crisis is extremely scary, but every dollar printed to stimulate the economy brings the numbers in our bank accounts closer and closer to irrelevance. In addition, liberals don’t seem to realize that capitalism requires infinite growth, and that disturbing this growth by keeping people out of work for months on end will inevitably lead to an economic crisis much worse than the one we are seeing now.

Conservatives, however, are acutely aware of these dangers. As apologists for capitalism, they consider these risks to be far greater than the risks posed by opening the country back up in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. Conservative thought is, in this case, quite clearly exposed as the ideological reflection of the structural imperatives of capitalist production. The capitalist economy is unable to account for public safety, for it knows only one logic: the ceaseless expansion of value. Similarly, conservatives minimize the threat posed by the virus, and insist that all will be well if we just go back to work. Of course to them, this is true, because in an era when more and more people are becoming “superfluous” as laborers, nothing would be better for capitalism than a purging of hundreds of thousands of people. After all, what are the sick and elderly in capitalism besides collectors of entitlement checks?

So here we are, trapped yet again in a theoretical debate that leaves capitalism unquestioned. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it abundantly clear that the existence we derive from the capitalist economy is simply a byproduct of the valorization process that reigns supreme. Once capitalism is unable to turn money into more money, the whole system grinds to a halt and we are left without food, water, housing, healthcare, and whatever else we need to survive.

We are in a situation that has caused and will continue to cause massive casualties, no matter what we do. The only potential silver lining would be the development of a movement that could potentially prevent this from ever happening again. “How should we open up the economy?” isn’t the question. The question is: “How should we overcome it?”