This quarantine is a national draft.
We’ve been conscripted into factory work. What product do we produce? Safety. Our national duty has become to operate a safety factory for the war effort.
It’s a just war. COVID-19 is the enemy, and the nation is duty-bound to combat it to secure our way of life. However, the safety we’ve been tasked to produce is not merely personal safety. I’m not worried about COVID-19 for myself, but my nation calls on me to produce safety for other people, and do it without having a fair say in negotiating my wages and working conditions as part of the safety factory. Make no mistake: we are on active duty. We are actively at work sheltering in place for the national interest.
Yet the nation has very little interest in securing workers’ way of life or antecedent plans. Congress has shown major interest in securing the way of life of industry executives and major stockholders. A 500 billion dollar slushfund that can be leveraged 10 to 1 is the equivalent of giving corporate leaders an infinite amount of money.
Unfortunately, this puts their workers in an even more vulnerable position. The asymmetry in who’s risk the government backstops allows the people at the top to take more risks in trying to extract goods and services from those at the bottom of themarket. Remember, it is their fiduciary responsibility to make a profit, not secure good working conditions for their employees.
The trillion dollar question is how do working people get the government to secure their plans and way of life as if these working stiffs were major stockholders and corporate executives?
It could be through our elected representatives, but our elected representatives do not seem to respect everyday working people as they should, or we would have:
1) Hazard pay for workers in high contact work environments. This could mean a government payroll subsidy to get wages up to $30/hour, starting.
2) A Federal Job Guarantee for those who aren’t working, with $20 an hour work replacement income while quarantined. This could be managed directly through the Federal Government. ( You have to know that New Deal created 200 million
3) Healthcare.
4) 900 per month per child credit.
The only way any of this happens is if we show that we can negate our corporate government’s aspirations. Because if citizens can’t do that, then citizens are revealed to be merely natural resources to be tended by overseers like sheep, occasionally slaughtered or sheared, but always at the shepherd’s unilateral discretion. You don’t have the power to negate your opponent’s aspirations, you are just their tool.
Breaking quarantine is the only leverage working citizens have to negate the aspirations of an American government that is emboldening those financial powers who would exploit us. The Left needs to talk about strategically breaking it, because others will use the fear of mass infection as a cover for a power grab over your world. Once quarantine is over, the new political regime will be calcified, designed by those at the top, while everyone else was being manipulated into fretting over toilet paper. Many will not mind. Those people were never your allies, and at best, they were feckless naive ones.
There are romantic notions of a general strike, but people are already prepared for production to slow. Furthermore, face to face organizing is frowned upon in the time of social distancing, unless we get serious about breaking quarantine. I worry that the armchair Left fantasizes over a general strike because it doesn’t call on them to do anything except talk about a general strike. It pushes the risk and the vulnerability to those who are already the most precariously situated.
However, we can look at what every citizen is actively producing, and organize to withhold that to great political effect. We are actively producing safety by quarantining, and we need to be willing to withhold that production if we want legislation in our favor.
We are looking at 32 percent unemployment. This means that if you survive, your life starts over from nothing. Meanwhile, the head of your company’s life starts with an infinite amount of government loan money. This is not a recipe for just working conditions.
I personally think that we need to plan a march on Washington in the middle of the quarantine. While I appreciate the spirit of those arguing for a general strike, there are no choke points, and the government has agreed to give corporate leaders any amount of money to wait it out.
We are not in this war against COVID-19 for the sake of life. If we cared about life, we would lower the speed limit to 10 miles an hour because car accidents take 1.25 million lives every year. Our political life has never been about mere life. Instead, we seek the good life, which means accepting some measure of preventable deaths for the sake of securing individuals in the nation a meaningful, self-determining life.
The political economy of the country fell apart, and the corporatists risked all manners of unpopularity and other people’s lives to put it back together in their image, while liberals and the Left were busy literally and figuratively washing their hands.
Liberals: We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure nobody outside of prisoners and grocery store clerks suffer and die.
Right: We’ll live with a few extra people suffering and dying if that means we get to seize power.
Are you really surprised that the Right wins? The Right is more courageous than the Left. Forget about Right’s willingness to risk life, their own and others, liberals and the Left won’t even risk friendships. If you are trying to keep all of your friends, and they don’t care about keeping theirs, they are going to win.
They know who their enemy is. It’s not COVID-19; it’s those who stand between them taking control of our social and political world. There won’t be backlash to the corporatist takeover. This is not the 1930s. We’ve developed a century’s worth of psychology and marketing techniques. There will be enormous and effective propaganda training people on blaming themselves, or driving them to feckless solutions.
Or we can fight now and talk about how and when to break quarantine, not for life, but to secure the conditions of our self-determination.