2020 and the New Spirit of Capitalism - by ghostofchristo1
In two books written in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Slavoj Žižek suggested that a new “Communist prospect” was in the process of emerging. Extrapolating from the emergency measures being put in place in early 2020, Žižek foresaw the rise of a new worldwide political struggle. In falling back on their own resources and refusing contact with outsiders out of the fear of contagion, nation states risked reverting to simple “barbarism.” Only by adopting “something very much like communism”—foreswearing the market, suspending national interests and synchronising activities across state borders, globalising healthcare, and embracing a new ethos of collective solidarity—could humanity hope to get through the crisis. 1 This was not a crisis that capitalism could address on its own terms. Instead, “the global capitalist system” was facing a “perfect storm,” one in which the “health crisis” joined forces with the “economic and ecological crises” and the global anti-racist protests then underway. For the revolutionary-minded observer, recognising how all of these “struggles” were aligned in unison against capitalism could have “an immense emancipatory potential.” In the process, Žižek wrote, “we will have to rethink everything.” 2
Expanding on the themes of Žižek’s first pandemic book shortly afterwards, the British sociologist Mark Featherstone largely endorsed its diagnoses. There seemed to be three possible paths ahead for nation states in the pandemic era. They could either plunge their citizens into an all-encompassing, Chinese-style biopolitical authoritarianism, insist that the accelerating, crisis-prone “business as usual” of late-2019 global capitalism was somehow capable of controlling this new crisis (and in doing so finally discredit themselves), or else find their way to something like Žižek’s “spirit of communism.” This final state of being would be a new economic settlement grounded in collective solidarity, an acknowledgement of human vulnerability, and a new respect for planetary resource limits and carrying capacities. 3 If this had all seemed impossibly utopian before the virus, it was now just about imaginable due to the pandemic’s sudden and miraculous-seeming suspension of the pre-existing state of affairs.
