Write down yesterday's date: March 29, 2020. It is clear that no one will ever forget the period we are living in now, but yesterday's date should be especially remembered. Namely, yesterday British Prime Minister Boris Johnson via video message obrother to the public from - self-isolation. He is there because he is positive for the coronavirus. A short video created more or less as a thank you to the workers, especially health workers, on the front line of the battle, Johnson ended with the following words: the coronavirus proved that there really is such a thing as society.
Johnson, of course, refers to the famous statement of the notorious Margaret Thatcher from 1987, from which we learned that there is no society but only individuals and their families. That statement was considered a kind of founding act of neoliberalism and an elegant formula that explained everything: from complex economic models to moral principles. There are only individual interests, collective political projects are illusions. If society does not exist, if it is only the result of the actions of individuals, then public and social services are unnecessary.
However, it seems to exist. Johnson's opposition to his ideological and party antecedents says less about how crazy the times we live in than it is about how crazy the times leading up to this crisis were. So crazy that even the previous global recession didn't shake them. In which the prevailing attitude was that society does not exist. Perhaps all the dimensions of craziness are best represented by imagining everything as a drama, as a new breakthrough in the poetics of the theater of the absurd. The drama would be entitled "Neoliberalism". It would be created from one act, and it would look like this:
Margaret Thatcher: Society does not exist.
(the company has existed for 33 years)
Boris Johnson: Society still exists.
However, this "political fallacy" known as the offensive of the ruling class is not only a resource for the restoration of forgotten theatrical poetics. It is also the reason why we met the crisis that supposedly proved that society exists unprepared. Because we have gradually destroyed the institutions that make up society, all in order to prove Margaret Thatcher's point in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's why now that we have been confirmed that the society still exists, we must not fall for the wrong interpretation of that fact. It does not follow that we are all in this together now because the virus does not ask for class. It does not follow, as Angela Merkel says, the realization that we are all vulnerable. It does not follow that we all have to bear the burden of the crisis equally, as domestic economic analysts who observe the economy as trumpet these days zero sum game between workers in the private sector and those in the public sector. It follows from it: if there is a society, then there are also social classes.
And they are most visible in dealing with the challenges and demands of the crisis. It's like we're watching an extended version of Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, adapted for the pandemic period. In the words of a New York Times reporter, “A kind of pandemic caste system is developing very quickly: the rich are hibernating in their vacation villas; the middle class is stuck at home with restless children; the working class is on the economic front line, stretched to the limit between the demands of work and parental responsibilities, if there is work at all." Life records Oscar winners, and it's up to us to judge who is a parasite in the whole story. And who should bear the burden of this crisis. Neoliberalism may be dead, but capitalism is not.
Bilten.org
Bonus video:
