Month: March 2020

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.

You can’t evaluate the Coronavirus bailout unless you understand the government’s role in our nation. If you try to evaluate the bailout without this understanding, your judgment will be grounded in arbitrary and capricious feelings because you won’t know what the bailout is supposed to do. Your judgement will be emancipated from a reasoned understanding of how and why governments secure freedom. This gut-based sensibility will make you ripe to be exploited by fear or flattery or otherwise manipulated by someone who knows exactly what the government’s bailout ought to do for them.

How this works:

Under the rule of law, governments secure rights. What are rights? They are externalizations of a person’s freedom. What’s a person’s freedom? A person’s freedom is her respected capacity to make and enact plans for her life, as long as these plans are carried off in way that enables everyone else to make and enact like plans for their lives. By the way, that’s what separates rights from privileges. Rights can be universalized for everyone; privileges are exclusively restricted to a few. The government, through it’s control of guns, money, and culture, confers to all citizens objective certainty in their exercise of their rights. To appreciate what this certainty means, consider the following:

If I want to take your car, I can, indeed, take your car. I can formulate a plan and take your car as you are getting out of your car. You would be very sad. You can even show me your registration and title as I steal your car. And then you’d have to ask yourself, “Well, if Irami can just take my car whenever he wants, did I really ever own it?” Sure, you could have had plans for your weekend trip or to drive to work, but your plans were always liable to whether I felt like respecting your claim to your car. In this way, the answer to whether you owned that car would be, “kind of, but not really.” Since it wasn’t objectively certified by the governing body that can effectively enforce your ownership, there is a way in which your car  ownership is all in your head, without any objective certainty. I could wake up in the morning and decide to steal your car in the afternoon because absent government, it was only ever quasi-yours to begin with.

 However, one reason that I am not free to take your car is because my capacity to take your car is not respected by the governing body. In fact, your capacity to plan on retaining ownership of your car, even when it’s not in your immediate possession, is respected as a right. In this way, you have a right to your car, and you are free to leave your car in the parking lot with a kind of certainty that nobody will take it, and if someone does take your car, the government will use its full might and all of its guns to retrieve your car.  That’s what makes it objectively your car.

The government confers certainty to your rights, and not just property rights. A good government will secure your plentitude of rights, including your employment rights. You can make plans for what to do with your next paycheck, and if your employer refuses to pay you, in a well-ordered world, the government would be triggered to step in and extract and deliver your wages. But this certainty isn’t always secured by government guns. You are allowed to be certain that the food you buy from Kroger won’t kill you, not because of market pressure from competitors like Publix, but because the FDA and regulatory agencies.

The government secures your capacity to make and enact plans for your life, and since you get your identity as a self-determining creature through the plans you make and enact, the government is also securing your identity, allowing you to be certainty of who you are. This is also what government confers in marriage. I wrote a bit about that here:


 Do you really own the car if nobody is going to step in and secure your property rights against a would-be thief? I don’t think so, and you can’t be certain.  Are you really free in a failed state, where none of your rights are secured? What can you build? I’ve argued elsewhere that this is the life of The Purge.


At the next level, the answer to the question of when the government should use its guns to step in and certify someone’s rights claim is not obvious. That’s why we have courts to contest these rights claims. The question is, “Are you really free if you don’t have access to lawyers?” Here, Peter Thiel, the billionaire who founded Paypal, is admitting that single digit millionaires do not have access to the legal system. Which means that anyone worth less than ten million dollars cannot really contest and press their rights, and if they cannot contest and press their rights through the recognized channels, do they really even have rights? I do not believe so, and that’s why I’m convinced that the next step in the march towards freedom is securing single-payer legal care on the model of single payer healthcare.

How does this concern the bailout? More than convenience or relief, the government confers certainty, and the question you should ask yourself, working people, is whether you think the bailout enables you to make certain plans for your life, or do you still think you are subject to political forces that are not under your control determining which plans you can make and enact?

When Trump says that he is going to make sure that cruise ships and hotels get bailed out, he was letting it be known that executives for those industries would not have to worry about the plans they’ve made and enacted for their lives. He was securing their freedom and giving their plans as aspirations certainty.

When you look at the provisions of the bailout, ask yourself, does this convey to me and anyone who may mean me harm, that the US government certifies the validity of my plans and my ability enact them?

The question you should ask yourself is whether the government is committed to secure your plans as much as it is organized to secure the plans of the head of your bank.

The second question you should ask yourself is whether the government is committed to secure your bank head’s plans, when the head’s plans are to run over you.

Rather than a one time 1,200 dollar check, I’d much rather see a Federal Job Guarantee at $20 an hour with 100% replacement pay as we remain in quarantine until we get called up. With a Job Guarantee, no matter whether I lose my job, I know that the government is providing another, secure and compensated role in civil society. I’d also like to see federal payroll infusions to private companies so that “essential workers” in high contact spaces are earning a minimum of 30 dollars an hour.

All of this in addition to universal testing.

Those provisions convey to me a sense of certainty and knowledge that the government is objectively certifying my ability to make plans and enact them. Every citizen should have the certainty Trump has granted to the hotel executives because make no mistake, asymmetrical governmental security will be weaponized by the most secure against the most vulnerable.

Folks are running out of money. But not just money, they are running out of the productive infrastructure to be useful to our market and civil society in general. This is terrifying, especially in a private sector that was already capricious and with the security and power of organized labor at a low.

If this were merely a matter of cash, we could just give everyone 1,000 dollars a month and be done with it, but we are talking about an industrial civil society with global supply chains, so we have to ask ourselves whether and how we stock the stores and warehouses if there is no internal mechanism for production. How do we have the interactions that secure meaning in our lives in the time of social distancing?

We should be asking ourselves first whether these global dependencies for production are really the most effective way to secure self-determination. The fact that we are having a hard time producing enough Covid-19 test kits suggests that we may need more national control over our supply chains.

Should we nationalize Zoom or SKYPE? Or just send everyone a voucher to get teleconferencing premium services, and also devices and internet service.

Productivity is a matter of structuring power certain kinds of interactions. These interactions take a physical infrastructure. I am lucky enough to be able to move my video studio into my house, which means I have a big enough house and ready access to the technology and internet.

In terms of cultural infrastructure, there is a learning curve to learning how to use all of the gear I have for my minor videos. And I don’t even know how to administer zoom, and it took a LONG time to hook up my cameras and sound equipment so that it works with skype in a way that’s not a horrible experience.

I filmed this segment on Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti this weekend:

But we should look into the production and distribution of devices to facilitate remote interactions because one-sided actions alone are not sufficient; rather, we need a physical and cultural infrastructure for secured, quality interactions. But that entails an infrastructure and systems of accountability.

Remote, productive interactions are not impossible, but we need to start thinking about setting up the required infrastructure to facilitate quality interactions, with an emphasis on both quality and “inter-” in quality interactions.

This is only one sort of industrial production. The service industry in the time of Covid-19 is a different political struggle, but one we are up to tackling if we put our minds and political will to it.

If you are at all curious about democratic socialism, please take the time to read this piece.


https://medium.com/@iramioseifrimpong/rights-and-democratic-socialism-14d5688062ce