âA pandemic makes the slogan of solidarity literal: an injury to one is an injury to all. Thatâs why a pandemic also heightens the frantic wish to withdraw oneself from the web of interdependence and ride it out alone.â
[âŠ] The scramble reveals a class system in which a mark of relative status is the power to withdraw. [âŠ] People will be out every day, on the subways, at the gas stations, choosing between epidemiological prudence and economic survival, because they have no choice but to make that choice.
âWash your handsâ is good advice but also a poignant reminder that this is not the sort of problem that personal responsibility can solve. Epidemiology is a political problem. Itâs not hard to sketch the steps that would ease our cruel situation: a work stoppage, massive income support (unemployment payments with some universal basic income in the mix), a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures and evictions. Treatment for coronavirus and potentially related symptoms should be free and comprehensive, no questions asked (about immigration status, for instance), so that no one goes untreated because of fear or poverty. This is all, in the most straightforward sense, good for everyone. It is also how people look out for one anotherâs vulnerability and need when they see one anotherâs problems as their own.
Survivalism is so palpably desperate and elite-only that a pandemic also makes clear that we need the state if we are going to survive. Trumpâs clumsy cycling through his repertoireâEverythingâs fine! Itâs foreign! We are taking strong action!âshows once again that he has no real idea of how to use the state, except as a showmanâs platform and a bank account for grift. His class of late-capitalist oligarchs are too decadent, too thoroughly the products of their own stupid and selfish ethos, to have any instinct for what to do in a crisis like this one. But sharper minds will have plenty of ideas, many of them bad for many people.
[âŠ] An injury to one actually is an injury to all; it doesnât just sound good to say so. Even national-level responses to global ecological and epidemiological crises are stopgap mitigation. In this world, every country needs every other country to have a green energy system and infrastructure, an economy focused on health and social reproduction rather than precarious racing for the next gig. We need standing armies of green infrastructure workers and nurses more than we need the standing armies we have; and we need everyone to have them. The lesson of the climate crisis, that we can afford public abundance but the effort to have universal private abundance will kill us all, carries over to pandemic: we can afford truly public health, but if everyone is driven to try to stay healthy alone, it wonât work, and trying will kill a lot of us.
Is it impossible, too much to ask? Itâs worth remembering that our alone-together world of individualist ethics and material interdependence didnât just happen. It takes a vast and intricate infrastructure to keep us all running in one anotherâs service, and in the ultimate service of return to capital: from highways to credit markets to the global trade regime. The fact that these interwoven systems are tanking financial markets around the world at the prospect that people might need to spend a few months sitting at home rather than hurrying around exchanging money shows how finely calibrated they are to profit, and how totally lacking in resilience to shifts in human need.
The hands and minds that built up this order are not powerless to make one that puts health first, at every level: of individuals, communities, the land, and the globe. That is a different, deeper resilience, though to get there requires a political fight over the value of life itself, whether we are here to make profits or to help one another live.â
â Jedediah Britton-Purdy, âThe Only Treatment for Coronavirus Is Solidarityâ (March 2020) for Jacobin
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