There are several explanations for why the British government has decided to ease lockdown measures despite our curve barely flattening: that the country is run by of a bunch of incompetent toffs who no longer have any upwards to fail; that they planned a May exit from the beginning and refuse to be put off by the mere detail of how it’s actually going; or that their friends in Capital want to start making money again, and their families want their middle-class lives to return to normal, so working class people get to go back to work regardless of the safety conditions, while they all work from home or on their golf swing. Of course, multiple can be true at the same time.
But in a broader historical context the lockdown hokey-pokey may be understood differently. It may come to be seen as a dry run for how much mass death the State can get away with.
There has been a noticeable cycle these past few weeks in which policies, rather than being formally announced, are merely floated in a press leak; the public react, on some scale between strike threats and conga lines, and then an entirely different policy is actually implemented. It is as if they want to gauge to what extent people will go along with whatever the State says; how far along the authoritarian personality project is. It is not hard to imagine Dominic Cummings conceiving of the State as a giant laboratory for testing his docile population. (The objective conclusion of positivism is not science but administration. It greases the slope from liberalism to fascism.)
Specifically what the State can be pictured as preparing itself for is the second global catastrophe which looms over the 21st century: Climate Breakdown. Capital, as it has in the past, will try to retain power amid economic, political and ecological crises through a massive expansion of State surveillance, a brutalised and atomised workforce, a nostalgic nationalism, racialised scapegoating, and the detention and murder of the millions of migrants the system produces. The ideological groundwork for this is being laid in both the New Right, but also, typically, within liberalism itself.
It is, of course, hardly an insight that the pandemic is in some ways a watered-down version of what is to come: a global natural crisis of mass death and economic wreckage. The people who really run Britain are, sadly, not the buffoons they hand out Cabinet positions to. They know that Climate Breakdown is coming. They fully intend for the Conservative Party to be in charge before, during, and after it. And what their response to the current crisis is producing is a political/cultural compact that anticipates and perhaps even experiments for the one to come. Particularly in the following four ways:
The Interior. The government’s relaxing of lockdown measures has created a sharp division between those who must leave the home in order to work and those who need not. This is of course a class divide. In this way the lockdown policy has returned the Interior to its Benjaminian origin; as a dreamworld exclusively for the bourgeois. We return, not to the 1930s, but the 1830s. Indoors, the middle classes can convince themselves that anything they like is happening outside their window; universally safe working conditions on construction sites, for example. It is, as Benjamin says, ‘a phantasmagoria… in it, the bourgeois assembles the distant in space and time[1].’ The exterior, meanwhile, has become a kind of dreaded purgatory characterised by fear and disconnection. It is the world of the delivery driver and the luxury flat constructor. A world of precarious, unsafe work, and frontline horror: strictly nothing else. Such a division is of course very welcome to the State. The workforce is cowed, and the bourgeois way of life protected. Suffice to say, the revolution will not be videoconferenced. This is what we can expect from Climate Breakdown. The hardening class divide between administrators and workers will be enforced spatially. The exterior will become the scenes of floods, tsunamis, heatwaves. Homelessness will massively increase. The middle and upper classes will retreat to their interiors, protected by surveillance and a police state. At the extreme, the rich will retreat to country mansions and luxury bunkers, as they have during the pandemic. The last human will die not in the street but in the living room.
The Blitz Spirit. The only thing worse than the situation on the ground is the media and online discourse, which has been mind-numbing. But it’s not merely stupid. It is calculated. When Climate Breakdown is too obvious to deny, the government will ask the Nation to pull together to defeat this evil like we did the Nazis. We’re all in it together. We have seen that essentially this allows the State to get away with absolutely anything, because any excess death or deprivation becomes a heroic sacrifice to the cause. We now have the highest death total in Europe, despite having advance warning of the virus compared to, say, Italy. That figure does not even include the devastating loss of life in care homes[2]. And yet it seems to have no consequences for the government’s approval ratings. We are being immunised to mass death. What’s produced is a cult of heroism; only in which the heroic act is to mitigate government failure. And a cult of death in which the death is utterly pointless. Of course, this is barbaric, because what we’ll be fighting is not Nazis but the consequences of government policy. And the solution to the crisis will be mass social provision and system change, not business as usual but with a stiffer upper lip. In the use of Blitz Spirit and World War 2 rhetoric today, the language is honed, instilled, reified. A new generation needs recruiting. A historic defeat of fascism will be used to install it.
Racialised nature. It feels like a long time ago, but the first example of changes in social behaviour in response to the pandemic was that people stopped going to Chinatowns. This phenomenon occurred across the Western world. It was utterly preposterous and racist, of course. Very early on Trump was labelling COVID-19 the ‘Chinese virus,’ and the sentiment has slipped into British discourse as the need to deflect from our own government sharpened[3]. The virus is a natural phenomenon, biologically at least affecting us all equally. Yet the ease and speed with which we racialise a global natural emergency should terrify us. We take an event which affects us as a species and divide us into Us and Them, even as They die. When Climate Breakdown hits, it will surely be blamed on the Chinese and their fossil fuel production. Not to mention the migrants who will be fleeing destruction. They will be contaminated, they will be to blame, they will be threatening our battle against it. This will be of no benefit to actually tackling the devastation, but will precipitate mass violence towards racialised minorities. The Nation of the Blitz Spirit requires an Other.
The Border. The British government announced last week that it would finally be enacting stricter rules around entering the country[4]. Britain has actually been an outlier in how open it’s kept its border. Trump of course needed no excuse. But the British border remains one of the most violent in the world, and our anti-immigration fanatics smell an opportunity[5]. Any tightening now will be used for normalisation in the future. Where Climate Breakdown will differ most from Coronavirus is the migration. Bluntly: the foremost site of politics in the 21st century will be the border; and the future of humanity will be defined by rich countries’ response to mass migration caused by Climate Breakdown (which they themselves caused). Either we radically re-envisage the subjects of community, and open borders to provide sanctuary to all according to need; or we police the border with detention, concentration, and mass death and deprivation. There will not be a third way. It is internationalist socialism or ecofascism.
The four illustrations are obviously not exhaustive. They are intended to contribute towards the preparation of the left. It must picture what the right intends to do. And it must be resolute against liberals who in the name of moderation would accelerate the extreme.
There is no solace or consolation to be found in what is happening in Britain, and around the world, right now. It is dire. But it does give us advance warning of what is to come. Our enemies understand that this is just the beginning; and we must as well.
[1] https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/benjaminparis.pdf pp. 83
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/coronavirus-real-care-home-death-toll-double-official-figure-study-says
[3]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/29/michael-gove-appears-to-blame-china-over-lack-of-uk-coronavirus-testing
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/coronavirus-weaponised-way-to-be-openly-racist
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/09/two-week-coronavirus-quarantine-to-be-announced-for-uk-arrivals
[5] https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1259536484341895169
mini moralia 