If We Can Have Disaster Capitalism, Why Can’t We Have Emergency Marxism?: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II

In the first part of 'Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics', I argued that the anti-liberal right have been so successful in using the possibilities created by the new postdigital communication technologies to tap into those affective forces – those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to become part of a group such as ‘the people’, that they have been able to completely transform the political landscape. 

Nasa maps show falling levels of nitrogen dioxide this year over China

Of course, the left has its own affective-emotional themes and tropes. (When it comes to theory you just have to say words like ‘commons’, ‘collaborative’, ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environment’, ‘material’ or even ‘affect’ at an arts event such as Transmediale to realise this.) Yet whereas the right has succeeded in using affect as a mobilizing political force, the left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into actions that are compelling enough to make different people, especially those in the mainstream of society, want to constitute themselves as a group – a ‘we’, an ‘us’ – around issues such as community and the commons. Sure, prior to the coronavirus outbreak a spate of large-scale youthful protests unfolded in places such as Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Barcelona, orchestrated by ‘the children of the financial crisis of 2008’, as some are calling them. Little of this rebellious energy has fed into a mainstream political change of the kind the populist right have achieved, though. (Research shows that far right parties in Europe have tripled their share of the vote in the last three decades, with one in six choosing them at the polls.) Even the impact of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests, Greta Thunberg and the global wave of Friday school climate strikes have so far been mainly cultural. XR has yet to achieve its goals of getting the U.K. government to tell the truth about the climate emergency, commit to reaching zero net carbon emissions by 2025 and set up a citizens assembly. Nor have the school strikes translated into ‘real action’ from governments, according to Thunberg. In effect they have ‘achieved nothing’, she insists, greenhouse gas emissions having actually risen 4% in the four years since the 2015 Paris accord was signed. (Again, it’s going to be interesting to observe what if anything changes in this respect following Covid-19, given the reports that pollution levels have dropped dramatically in cities such as Bankok, Bejing and Bogotá, thanks to the lack of traffic and closing of industry and airports during lockdown.)

Don’t get me wrong: the left has its memes. Witness the one-time popularity of the ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ chant in the U.K., and the fact terms like ‘gammon’, ‘centrist dad’ and ‘bullshit jobs’ have now entered the language. The pink pussy hats, Handmaid’s Tale-style cloaks and Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) performance piece adopted by various groups of feminist protestors around the world (see below) are also worth mentioning in this context. Still, there’s arguably been no really successful progressive equivalent of the kind of forceful play found on ‘White Boy Internet’ platforms such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit. (It seems significant that the #MeToo movement has not led to considerable reforms of the law, for instance.) The democratic left has been conspicuously lacking in such politically effective ‘meme magic’.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Generally speaking, the left is less concerned about the kind of extremes of emotion that drive the reactionary right, and more about social justice, hospitality and mutual aid. Besides, societies are so diverse, pluralistic and fragmented these days it’s far easier to unite people around what they are not than around what they are. The protests in Hong Kong, for instance, after initially calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill introduced by China, were widened to a demand for democratic reform. The demonstrations in Chile, however, started after an increase in metro fares and subsequently took in a broad range of demands for ‘better pensions, education, health, a minimum wage; but also water rights and action on environment degradation’. Meanwhile, those in Tunisia and Algeria were about price and tax rises, and those in Beirut about a tax on users of messaging apps such as WhatsApp. In Barcelona, the protests were different again: there they were about independence for Catalonia from Spain. The problem is, unless these different passions, and the heterogeneous demands and conflicts they give rise to, have a legitimate democratic means of expressing themselves – which is precisely what did not happen in the period of austerity, during which many social groups felt ignored and ‘left behind’ by the city-dwelling liberal elites – there is a danger that a ‘confrontation between essentialist forms of identification or non-negotiable moral values’ will take their place, with all the attendant negative consequences. The latter is what we have seen of late with the rise of populist right-wing political figures and parties in many countries: not just Trump in the U.S. and Johnson in the U.K., but Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in France, Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement in Italy, along with Matteo Salvini, former deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League there. Indeed, radical right politicians now lead three of the world’s four largest democracies: the U.S., Brazil and India. They are also at the head of two members of the European Union: Poland and Hungary. The third largest parties in a further two – Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and Vox in Spain – are also far right. 

Each of these contexts is of course different and needs to be analysed in its specificity. Authoritarian nationalism is certainly combined with neoliberalism in some more than others. We also need to remain alert to the difficulty those of us who are European have with reading any political script other than the one with which we have traditionally translated the world. It’s a trait that often leaves us blind to the need for a new political language and ‘radical transformation of the regime of knowledge’ when it comes to understanding events outside of the ‘Global North’. (I’m placing this term in quotation marks as I’m aware it’s not without its problems.) Nevertheless, I want to take the risk of saying that something of a global trend does seem to be at play here. For these are all parties and politicians that by one means or another are placing liberal democracy under threat, along with its values of truth, civil rights and rule of law. Taken together, what this shows is that the election of Boris Johnson in the U.K. cannot be attributed simply to the shortcomings of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party (e.g. the supposed failure to deal with anti-Semitism, to unite both the left and centre of the party, or to a form a collation with the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP): the phenomenon is larger and more international than that. Could we even go so far as to suggest that those on the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, ironically, by acting as many on the progressive left say people should: that is by operating as cosmopolitan communities with the shared goal of collectively redistributing knowledge and ideas? While there is not just one form of populist authoritarian response to Covid-19 anymore than there is a just one form of populist authoritarianism, there was nevertheless a period in which Trump, Salvini, Farage and Steve Bannon all seemed to be working to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic onto the Chinese government. It’s certainly interesting that, almost in a reverse of the situation with New Labour under Blair and the Conservatives under Cameron, many of these governments are combining right-wing cultural polices with left-wing economic ideas such as nationalisation and welfarism. This is true of Poland’s Law and Justice party, and is increasingly the case with regard to the Johnson government in the U.K.. And that was before Sars-CoV-2 rendered uncontroversial the kind of state interventionism and general veneration of the public sector and welfare that would previously have been condemned as Marxist.