Capitalism, Communism, and the COVID-19 crisis

Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World

The pre-COVID condition is supremely unprepared to handle crises on the level of global pandemics. This statement seems entirely uncontroversial: everyone from rational capitalists to undergraduate revolutionaries agrees we need to change something to address the massive scale, unbound by national borders and economic theory. Exactly what change must occur, though, remains subject to high debate. And the virus continues spreading, while humans keep talking.

Anglo-Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek avoids the common trap of getting prescriptive, demanding innovations that look good on graph paper. Instead, he looks at what political leaders and economic drivers are doing right now to improve, or fail to improve, the situation. (In this case, “right now” means late April and early May of 2020.) Žižek finds plenty of reason to hope, but he acknowledges the accomplishments of this controversial season are still ours to lose.

Two threads alternate in Žižek’s accounting of the COVID-19 crisis. First, his fellow philosophers discuss the crisis in solemn tones, failing to agree on premises, much less meaningful solutions. Giorgio Agamben, for instance, thinks the crisis mentality creates a counter-revolutionary mentality that allows government power grabs by creating permanent emergencies. Benjamin Bratton thinks we mainly need a vocabulary shift, not a truly new paradigm.

Second, Žižek describes actions which powerful people and organizations have already undertaken, or talked about undertaking. These actions often correspond, he notes, with the Five Stages of Grief: including Denial, where national leaders dismiss the threat altogether; Anger, like the famous video of wrathful Italian mayors; and Depression, where communities and economic actors simply surrender to existential dread and paralysis. We haven’t, Žižek says, reached Acceptance yet.

Much of our problem, Žižek believes, stems from the radically individualistic responses we’ve seen to the issue. Demands that people wash their hands and wear masks, demands easily circumvented by petulant people, shift the burden for dealing with the crisis onto individuals while leaving dysfunctional systems intact. This toxin permeated our nations, Žižek says, because our institutions were unprepared. Unless our institutions evolve appropriately, nothing will ultimately get better.

Slavoj Žižek

A longstanding Marxist himself, Žižek claims we’ll only successfully address this crisis by adopting “a form of Communism.” He repeatedly stresses, however, that he doesn’t mean Twentieth Century capital-C Communism. State control in China handled the original Wuhan outbreak poorly, censoring the first whistleblower doctor and condemning him to die of his own disease. The Maoist desire to restore pre-crisis economics then pushed bureaucrats to falsify reports of supposed recovery.

Rather, Žižek believes we’ll need a small-C communist revolution, an outbreak of communitarian feeling and dedication to shared values of interdependence and confraternity. We must relinquish our principles of individualism (though not individuality) in favor of cooperation and collaboration, placing the common good above our personal acquisitiveness. We must stop believing we’ll personally get rich, and instead dedicate ourselves to lifting everybody up together. This is an excessively brief paraphrase.

For what it’s worth, Žižek’s precepts sound nice, but remain reliant on a centralized decision-making authority, which makes me squeamish. The massive technical complexity of post-human capitalism is totally dependent on so many moving parts that a very tiny interruption can destroy the whole mechanism. Žižek himself acknowledges this by comparing COVID to the Icelandic volcano that grounded the entire European airplane fleet: late capitalism makes us more vulnerable to nature, not less.

Writing about a world-shifting historical event, while that event is still occurring, creates possibilities for rift. Žižek describes the heights of COVID-19 as Italy being functionally shuttered, an event which seems impossibly distant now. He also cites evolutions in conservative capitalism, highlighted by President Trump moving to push the Defense Production Act to produce medical necessities like ventilators. Trump talked about doing this, but never actually did it.

We cannot help changing when faced with global scale catastrophe. As Žižek acknowledges, we can either amend our actions, with an increased reliance on cooperation, or stay the course, a choice which dooms part of society to death. Do we believe, he asks, that our choices can improve human circumstances? Or do we preserve economic continuity, at the cost of the defenseless among us? “But we not only have a choice,” he writes, “we are already making choices.”

Žižek sees the present as an opportunity. We can shed our illusions, embrace change, and thrive— though he admits he doesn’t know what that will look like. Or we can continue denying and bargaining, at vast human cost. Žižek remains guardedly optimistic. He just wants us to consider our options carefully.