Seven Ethics Against Capitalism. Oli Mould
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there are some ‘ruptures’ in the world that may have equally devastating effects, but are not events. For example, while 9/11 was a catastrophic, unexpected event (at least outside of the small group of terrorists who perpetrated it) and instilled shock and terror on a whole new scale, it served only to shore up existing geopolitical injustices; indeed it catalysed them. It foregrounded a renewed military expansion in the Middle East, and justified invasions that were more about securing oil production than bringing down dictatorial regimes. It ossified American imperialism in both geopolitical and economic terms. Crucially, then, an event cannot be known in advance, and it is only thought of as such retrospectively. And make no mistake; we are potentially living through what we may eventually conceptualize as an event.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the relatively smooth functioning of contemporary capitalism has severely ruptured. In the process, many different ‘realities’ are coming to the fore. First and foremost, we have seen the increased prominence of distinctly state-led programmes of emergency response that have gone against the grain of the capitalist policies that characterized governance structures pre-pandemic. Socialist-leaning policies have been imposed, such as universal basic income (which has been implemented to varying degrees in Spain, Germany and the UK), the rapid acceleration of the greening of our urban spaces, the championing of nationalized infrastructure programmes such as broadband internet for all, and, most importantly, the massive swelling and pedestalling of nationalized healthcare. Debt has been cancelled, and reparations to the global south have been forwarded. Also, we have witnessed the swift rebuttal of the unjust characteristics of corporate capitalism; for example, the clamour for the super-rich not only to pay their fair share of their staff’s wages as they all had to go on furlough, but also to pay more tax in general. (This has been a long-standing demand, and has gained substantial traction in mainstream narratives and political discourses.)32 The failure of just-in-time production to cater for emergency food provision in supermarkets across the UK led to food shortages. These shortcomings were then redressed by the explosion of mutual aid programmes, which also occurred across Europe and the US.33 Street homelessness in the UK was reduced to nearly zero in the space of two weeks as those on the streets were hurriedly given shelter in empty hotels and hostels (this after years of different governments trying and failing to reduce homelessness via various different housing policies). This surge of progressive and common politics evoked communist and anarchist tendencies that are bringing to life revolutionary paradigms of societal organization that are being championed as real alternatives to the capitalist system. As the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote (in the Financial Times of all places), the pandemic is a
portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.34
Hence the pandemic could well be an ‘event’ because everything about the current status of the world is rupturing; the horizons of infinite possibilities are opening up. The virus supposedly came from capital’s continual intrusion into the ‘natural world’,35 and cares not if the victims are billionaires, homeless, the president or a prisoner. Viruses are neither dead nor alive; human nor nonhuman. A global pandemic has been foretold for many years, but nothing like this, with its global reach and rupturing force on the contemporary socio-economic fabric, has been felt before. As such, there has been an outpouring of empathetic responses, mutual aid networks, community action, the denouncement of anti-immigrant sentiments and a broader questioning of what was previously seen as the immutable status quo of capitalist realism; indeed, the activist Rebecca Solnit wrote that ‘the impossible has already happened’36 and that for the first time in a generation, we can begin to hope for a life beyond the injustices of capitalism.
Events therefore open up, rather than shut down, voices that have been marginalized by the hitherto prevailing order of life – capitalism. More importantly, all these empathetic responses have been examples of commoning in action. It is people – from the margins and the centre of capitalist society – sharing resources, free from the lure of capital and markets, to meet the specific needs of the vulnerable, and these responses are creating a commonwealth that is in direct contrast to the privatized world of capitalism. They are attempts to level up the injustices of the capitalist world. The outpouring of community care, mutual aid and solidarity in response to the coronavirus pandemic came about precisely because capitalist structures were so ill-equipped to do so. The Covid-19 rupture in the human and the nonhuman world is an opening up of a portal to the potential of a more just, equal and common world.
However, events are also events because everything new is realized, including unspeakable things. As such, this rupture in the capitalist Pandora’s box has also released untold horrors onto the world. Far right populism, peddled by a techno-fascism, is morphing into state authoritarianism and taking hold in previous Western bastions of (neo)liberal and parliamentary democracy. Even before the pandemic, horrific narratives that were considered unspeakable decades ago are now almost mainstream again, with openly fascist, racist, eugenicist and genocide-evoking rhetoric creeping back into view via social media, riot-inducing presidents and click-baiting news outlets. Throw into that potential climate catastrophe and ever more-sophisticated artificial intelligence that threatens to outstrip human ingenuity, and there is violent turbulence in the world.
In response to the coronavirus, some right-wing commentators have questioned whether taking such a massive economic hit is worth the lives of a few thousand old people.37 The then-US president Donald Trump repeatedly attempted to argue, against scientific evidence, that people should ‘go back to work’, because the cost of the prevention of coronavirus (i.e. a massive economic recession due to the lockdown) was worse than the cure. Full-on authoritarian dictatorships, such as Orbán’s Hungary, have risen up in the bastion of neoliberal democracy, the EU. In Israel, the courts were shut down.38 Police forces in the UK and US have been accused of using new government legislation to over-enforce and release their more oppressive tendencies onto the population. National policies of increased surveillance and the subsequent further erosion of civil liberties under the guise of ‘contact tracing’ have been implemented in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel.39
But these lurches to the right are to be expected. When the prevailing order of capitalism ruptures, those in control and who benefit from its smooth functioning will do all they can to attempt to re-establish the status quo, and deny the new emancipatory realities from becoming pervasive. Put bluntly, those in power who benefit from capitalism will not want to see more equality, and therefore fight to maintain the standard of living they have become accustomed to.
And this is where ethics come back in. For ethics do not presuppose an externalized or marginalized ‘other’ to be somehow ‘reclaimed’; it is not a case of positioning one form of society over another. In rebuttal of those who attempt to re-establish a totalizing narrative of capitalist realism, in remaining faithful to the emancipatory truths of radical equality that the pandemic has unleashed, we are being ethical. Simply put, ethics are mindsets and ways of thinking, behaving and acting within society that help us to resist those who look to maintain the totalizing metanarrative, and in turn help us maintain fidelity to the truth released by the pandemic event.
Where does this situate the commons? If ethics thought of in this way rebuke any kind of totalizing force, then surely the commons is just another universality to be resisted? This may well be the case if the commons becomes an extension of the capitalist state system via annexation, co-option, enclosure or adaption; or if it is a totalizing view of the world. Critically, then, any expression of the commons as a superior form of organizing society embodies the very kinds of ideas that are to resisted.
And this is why the planetary articulation of the commons – with its focus on the continual co-constitutive adaption of resource and community – is ethical. It foregrounds continual and infectious exploration of more justice, more equality, more emancipatory potential. The political scientist Glen Coulthard has always maintained that any version of ‘reclaiming the commons’ is fraught with colonial overtones, and argues