We should follow Immanuel Kant here who wrote with regard to the laws of the state: “Obey, but think, maintain the freedom of thought!” Today we need more than ever what Kant called the “public use of reason.” It is clear that epidemics will return, combined with other ecological threats, from droughts to locusts, so hard decisions are to be made now. This is the point that those who claim this is just another epidemic with a relatively small number of dead don’t get: yes, it is just an epidemic, but now we see that warnings about such epidemics in the past were fully justified, and that there is no end to them. We can of course adopt a resigned “wise” attitude of “worse things happened, think about the medieval plagues...” But the very need for this comparison tells a lot. The panic we are experiencing bears witness to the fact that there is some kind of ethical progress occurring, even if it is sometimes hypocritical: we are no longer ready to accept plagues as our fate.
This is where my notion of “Communism” comes in, not as an obscure dream but simply as a name for what is already going on (or at least perceived by many as a necessity), measures which are already being considered and even partially enforced. It’s not a vision of a bright future but more one of ”disaster Communism” as an antidote to disaster capitalism. Not only should the state assume a much more active role, organizing the production of urgently needed things like masks, test kits and respirators, sequestering hotels and other resorts, guaranteeing the minimum of survival of all new unemployed, and so on, doing all of this by abandoning market mechanisms. Just think about the millions, like those in the tourist industry, whose jobs will, for some time at least, be lost and meaningless. Their fate cannot be left to mere market mechanisms or oneoff stimuluses. And let’s not forget that refugees are still trying to enter Europe. It’s hard to grasp their level of despair if a territory under lockdown in an epidemics is still an attractive destination for them?
Two further things are clear. The institutional health system will have to rely on the help of local communities for taking care of the weak and old. And, at the opposite end of the scale, some kind of effective international cooperation will have to be organized to produce and share resources. If states simply isolate, wars will explode. These sorts of developments are what I’m referring to when I talk about “communism,” and I see no alternative to it except new barbarism. How far will it develop? I can’t say, I just know that the need for it is urgently felt all around, and, as we have seen, it is being enacted by politicians like Boris Johnson, certainly no Communist.
The lines that separate us from barbarism are drawn more and more clearly. One of the signs of civilization today is the growing perception that continuing the various wars that circle the globe as totally crazy and meaningless. So too the understanding that intolerance of other races and cultures, or of sexual minorities, pales into insignificance compared with the scale of the crisis we face. This is also why, although wartime measures are needed, I find problematic the use of the term “war” for our struggle against the virus: the virus is not an enemy with plans and strategies to destroy us, it is just a stupid self-replicating mechanism.
This is what those who deplore our obsession with survival miss. Alenka Zupančič recently reread Maurice Blanchot’s text from the Cold War era about the scare of nuclear self-destruction of humanity. Blanchot shows how our desperate wish to survive does not imply the stance of “forget about changes, let’s just keep safe the existing state of things, let’s save our bare lives.” In fact the opposite is true: it is through our effort to save humanity from self-destruction that we are creating a new humanity. It is only through this mortal threat that we can envision a unified humanity.
This is where my notion of “Communism” comes in, not as an obscure dream but simply as a name for what is already going on (or at least perceived by many as a necessity), measures which are already being considered and even partially enforced. It’s not a vision of a bright future but more one of ”disaster Communism” as an antidote to disaster capitalism. Not only should the state assume a much more active role, organizing the production of urgently needed things like masks, test kits and respirators, sequestering hotels and other resorts, guaranteeing the minimum of survival of all new unemployed, and so on, doing all of this by abandoning market mechanisms. Just think about the millions, like those in the tourist industry, whose jobs will, for some time at least, be lost and meaningless. Their fate cannot be left to mere market mechanisms or oneoff stimuluses. And let’s not forget that refugees are still trying to enter Europe. It’s hard to grasp their level of despair if a territory under lockdown in an epidemics is still an attractive destination for them?
Two further things are clear. The institutional health system will have to rely on the help of local communities for taking care of the weak and old. And, at the opposite end of the scale, some kind of effective international cooperation will have to be organized to produce and share resources. If states simply isolate, wars will explode. These sorts of developments are what I’m referring to when I talk about “communism,” and I see no alternative to it except new barbarism. How far will it develop? I can’t say, I just know that the need for it is urgently felt all around, and, as we have seen, it is being enacted by politicians like Boris Johnson, certainly no Communist.
The lines that separate us from barbarism are drawn more and more clearly. One of the signs of civilization today is the growing perception that continuing the various wars that circle the globe as totally crazy and meaningless. So too the understanding that intolerance of other races and cultures, or of sexual minorities, pales into insignificance compared with the scale of the crisis we face. This is also why, although wartime measures are needed, I find problematic the use of the term “war” for our struggle against the virus: the virus is not an enemy with plans and strategies to destroy us, it is just a stupid self-replicating mechanism.
This is what those who deplore our obsession with survival miss. Alenka Zupančič recently reread Maurice Blanchot’s text from the Cold War era about the scare of nuclear self-destruction of humanity. Blanchot shows how our desperate wish to survive does not imply the stance of “forget about changes, let’s just keep safe the existing state of things, let’s save our bare lives.” In fact the opposite is true: it is through our effort to save humanity from self-destruction that we are creating a new humanity. It is only through this mortal threat that we can envision a unified humanity.
Slavoj Žižek, in "Pandemic, Covid shakes the world", pág.102-05, NY, OR Books, 2020
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