Mask Off: Crisis & Struggle in

the Pandemic1

Richard Hunsinger & Nathan Eisenberg give an in-depth analysis of the current
crisis where economic breakdown, pandemic, and mass revolt collide into a
historic conjuncture that will forever shape the trajectory of world events.

1
Originally published by Cosmonaut

1
2 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

Disruption
We are running out of places to keep the bodies. In Detroit, a hospital resorted
to stacking up the dead on top of each other in a room usually used for sleep
studies. In New York, the epicenter of the pandemic where, for a week in April,
someone died of COVID-19 every 3 minutes, a fleet of refrigeration trucks is
enabling interment in parking lots for overcrowded hospitals. The chair of
New York’s City Council health committee, publicly stated that they were
preparing contingency plans, per a 2016 “fatality surge” study, to dig mass
graves in a public park. The resulting moral backlash prompted Mayor de
Blasio to deny any such plans would be carried out, but he would go on to
emphasize the necessity for mass graves on Hart Island, an old potter’s field
in the Bronx long home to the unclaimed corpses of the indigent, which has
quintupled its monthly intake of bodies. As is protocol, the excess demand
for the work of burying bodies on the island is being met with the use of
prison labor from Rikers Island, which itself has the highest infection rate in
the world. The situation in private funeral homes is similarly dire. Dozens
of corpses were recently found rotting in U-Hauls outside a funeral home in
New York. In Ecuador, there are cases of bodies being wrapped in plastic and
left on the sidewalk for days before strained hospitals can send an ambulance,
prompting engineers in Colombia to come to their aid by developing hospital
beds that transform into coffins. Mass graves are cropping up across the world,
in Ukraine, in Iran, in Brazil. A man in Manaus, Brazil, interviewed by a
Guardian reporter while watching his mother’s coffin be lowered into a trench
alongside 20 others, despaired, “They were just dumped there like dogs. What
are our lives worth now? Nothing.”

Such macabre undertakings point to a sense that this pandemic is unmasking

the real immanent content of capitalist society in all its uncaring austerity
and banal cruelty. The simple fact, now visible to anyone forced to work
without PPE or handing over rent payments from dwindling savings with
no horizon of replenishment, is that capitalist social relations cannot sustain
human life, that their own perpetuation requires our mass endangerment. The
DISRUPTION 3

exceptional nature of these present circumstances show the degree to which

basic subsistence has been whittled down through protracted class struggles
to the point where it is more or less precisely calibrated to merely maintain
bare social coherence, leaving the system in a place where it cannot endure
significant disruption. This fragility, which routinely exposes proletarians to
the most brutal deprivations, is now generalizing across previously secure
populations, emanating directly from capitalism’s constitutive contradictions,
contradictions between the human fabric that serves as labor-power inputs and
the circuitous process of capital accumulation that it animates. All creative
activity is organized for this end, no matter the consequences. In the current
moment, an accumulation of consequences, previously arrested and deferred,
are now spilling forth all at once, like a burst clot. Blood is pooling in the
tissues of the social body; the airways are blocked.

If we seek to give an honest diagnosis of the injury and trace the symptoms
back to determining conditions, we find an advanced necrosis. This necrosis has
many appearances. Capital overaccumulation, taking the form of frantic and
increasingly fictitious credit-money markets, on the one hand, and a build-up
of industrial capacity far in excess of what is profitable to operate, resulting in
chronic overproduction, on the other. Intertwined with this surplus capital are
the masses of surplus populations, an explosion in the landless proletariat in
absolute numbers colliding with depressed capital that can profitably exploit
only a relatively waning subset, rendering the remaining masses superfluous
and subject to the diverse tortures of increasing lumpenization. The declining
social wage fund that results from this is managed and calibrated with pro-
tracted disinvestment in public welfare infrastructure, now most spectacularly
in the arena of public health, constituting an outright abandonment of social
reproduction. The result has been a managed decline, never so precipitous
as to descend fully into social chaos or break the holding pattern, except in
punctuated moments that have proven containable in time. While these morbid
symptoms of the capitalist mode of production sputtering under its own weight
metastasized, the rot was allowed to fester through a palliative nurturance
4 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

designed to mask it.

We are now witnessing a precipitous collapse of some kind, novel in many of

its features, even if it is not yet recognizable as the eschaton many communists
(at least implicitly) imagine. Several prominent left-liberal commentators have
formed a chorus, which always seems to be at-hand during such a spectacle,
theorizing the transformative potential of the pandemic, tending to speculate
with unwarranted utopian optimism. Slavoj Žižek activated his Verso show-
erthought pipeline to crank out a book of impressionistic digressions on the
virus, musing that coronavirus is a “perfect storm” that “gives a new chance to
communism.” Of course, this would not be the “old-style communism”, but
rather the communism of the World Health Organization, where we “mobilize,
coordinate, and so on. . . ”; in other words, the banal mechanisms of liberal
governance (though as we will see, even this is too much to ask anyway). He
makes a vaguely humanist point about how our shared biological vulnerability
generates some basic solidarity, citing how even the state of Israel “immediately”
moved to help Palestinians, following the logic that “if one group is affected,
the other will also inevitably suffer.” This claim is, of course, absurd, as a
cursory glance at recent news reveals: Israeli police shut down a testing clinic
set up by the Palestinian Authority in East Jerusalem, settler violence against
Palestinians in the West Bank increased 78% in late March, house seizures and
IDF abuses only worsened and plans to annex the West Bank continue unin-
terrupted. In a significantly more sober and careful appraisal of the situation,
looking at India, Arundhati Roy still characterizes the pandemic, in a turn
of phrase reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s Janus-faced figure of a historical
juncture, as a portal through which we might step into a better world. The
environmental economist Simon Mair finds hope in the revelatory nature of
the crisis, as the failures of “market neoliberalism” are bared for all to see, and
maps out four futures after the pandemic, the boldest horizon of which is a
program of nationalization plus “new democratic structures.” This “democratic
antidote” appears frequently in a context notably distanced from the violence
of the present. In a call to “socialize central bank planning,” Benjamin Braun
DISRUPTION 5

writes on behalf of the “Progressive International” of a democratic vision for

finance. Amidst the muddled juggling of abstractions, democracy, capitalism,
and technocracy are posited in an assumed possibility of harmonious balance; a
goldilocks-esque treatment for reinvigorating capital accumulation. Echoing the
wonkish dialect of Elizabeth Warren, Braun writes: “indeed, the left’s capacity
to develop sophisticated, actionable economic policy blueprints is growing fast.
TINA (”there is no alternative“) was yesterday — today, progressives ‘have
a plan for that.’ ” For the supposed strength of this ideology of “the plan,” a
plan of any sort is nowhere to be found outside of these aimless gestures at a
remote possibility. Most importantly, the class struggle required for even these
tepid evolutions is conspicuously unmentioned.

For all the aspirations to a “radical reform” embedded in the slew of prescrip-
tions, these supposedly “realistic” invocations of new horizons of possibility
continue to ring hollow. The immediacy of crisis is inevitably lost in the
wish-lists of those that appear merely disappointed in power. The rose-colored
glasses of the “democratic” path see opportunity conveniently devoid of context.
Begging sobriety, it is critical to acknowledge that no matter where we go from
here, it is in the wake of unfathomable loss. Such is the ritual of capital, a
totalizing directional movement based on a logic of infinite expansion, only
realized through the domination of the living by the dead in a process existing
purely for its own sake. While it is true that with crisis comes contingency, and
thus new possibilities, these only emerge under certain determinate conditions.
In the last instance, it is in the terrain of economy, by which we enter into
relations independent of our will and become bound to the social productive
forces of material existence, that we ascertain the most pronounced objective
shape to history. This edifice, however, merely appears objective, as an undead
automaton distorting time and space at a steady interval. Our lives, the time
we breathe into them, are rendered unconscious non-events by the mechanical
operations of capitalist reproduction. Despite the novelty of this present crisis
and the rapid pace of developments, there are trends and outcomes we can
begin to apprehend with relative confidence. Critically engaging this material
6 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

substratum of the economic, the fundamental base of society’s reproduction,

presents us with a range of interpretation. Our intention is not to speculate or
to anticipate what new reality will emerge out of this situation, but rather to
demonstrate that the events and ensuing struggles of the present, despite their
unprecedented scale and intensity, have clear origins. For us, this is the best
way to interpret the present crisis: in context.

For the crisis at hand, to merely meditate on the apparent ruptures will not
suffice. Despite this particularly catastrophic iteration of the onset of crisis,
it fundamentally cannot be divorced from the prior dynamics of capitalist
development. The pandemic acts as both disruptor and accelerant, imposing
strains on an already struggling and weak global economy. Both the imminent
threats of recession and pandemic having long before been present and dire.
The failures of the present order bring the world as it was before into a new
clarity. Necessity invigorates demands that may prove to undermine capitalism’s
conditions of possibility. Social relations previously taken as fixed begin to
reveal that their rigidity was in fact fast-frozen movement. The roles played in
mediating these contradictions, the bourgeois classes, revealed as nothing but
mere figures carved of wood: mocked-up subjects performing an empty ritual, a
mockery of life largely reliant on birth lottery and sycophantic power games. It
is ironic, then, that the very moment that we may not enter the world without
a mask, these character-masks of our era would begin to show signs of slipping.
In light of this, simply anticipating a return to “normal” seems premature.
It is only through the impacts of emergent struggles that we will know what
becomes possible at this juncture.

It is here that we must speak of another potential unmasking. Marx theorizes

class in the abstract as defined by one’s relation to production, a crucial element
of which is the functional role thus performed within the circuit of capital
accumulation. Marx referred to such reified social roles as “character-masks”
(Charaktermaske), which is frequently translated into English as “bearer”:
subjects who are compelled to carry the process of capital accumulation forward.
With the original wording, the emphasis rests more on an external construct
DISRUPTION 7

that comes to displace the interiority of the subject: as one assumes the mask,
so they assume the character. Capital, as the dominating logic of society,
is otherwise indifferent to the lives of its subjects beyond adherence to this
character-mask, a hazard true for any specific members of the bourgeoisie. And
so he writes “As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul
of capital.”2 This near-total identification is no natural relation, of course, but
a contingent one existing in a continuum of ceaseless struggle.

Of course, the two character-masks in this process, the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, are not static structures, two opposites with parity, but mutually
contradictory social forms locked into an antagonistic dialectic between the
owning class and the class which owns nothing that has yet to be resolved.
In this way, we can understand class as a matter of material compulsions
embedded within the general problem of social reproduction. The proletariat is
maintained as such in order for it, as a class, to fulfill its role selling labor-power,
the exploitation of which is the foundation of capitalist society. Capital is more
forgiving of the proletariat: if they fail to sell any labor-power, and are thus
relieved of this function, they remain a proletarian. The immiseration of their
position is a given in their role. The strictures of performance, however, are
much more severe for the bourgeoisie. The extent to which one personifies this
role in relation to production, how successfully one allows their social behavior
to be subsumed into the dictates of capital, determines one’s ability to stay a
member of the capitalist class. If one is caught off guard, either by allowing
their workers to slack off or neglecting the growth of their profits, then one is
promptly expelled from the class by their competitors, expropriated and ruined
like any proletarian.

Such purges are cyclical within capitalism, as recurring economic crises brush
aside the low-performing capitals and pave the way for concentration, thus
allowing capital as a totality to maneuver out of its convulsions and establish
accumulation anew. This secular process of consolidation brings with it quali-
tative shifts, such as the late-19th century emergence of monopoly capital that
2
Marx 1976, Capital Vol. I, p. 342
8 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

Lenin and Hilferding identified as the driver of imperialism, resulting today

in substantially internationalized capital blocs. The exact social geography of
these particular capital blocs was laid down through the bloody history of our
long epoch. In Capital, Marx methodologically distinguished between “capital
in general” and the operation of “many capitals”, analyzed in Volume I and III
respectively (though one implicitly containing the other from the beginning),
the former a logical structure and the latter taking a concrete appearance
more sensitive to history. But this is no relation of accident, with the essence
towering above, the weight of ontology behind it, and the appearance flitting
across the surface, a mere virtuality. Capital as an abstract logic works itself
out through the activities of its constituents, the “universal drawing itself out of
a wealth of particularity,” as Jairus Banaji put it.3 Capital in general develops,
clashing against itself, as the froth of many capitals.

The centripetal force here is competition. Capitalism is a society without

guarantees. As with the interchangeable exchanges of a commodity-producing
society, all positions are, strictly speaking, precarious relative to the individual.
These different layers of mediation imply within them a whole grid of conflicts,
as particular capitalists compete to better exploit fractions of the working
class and workers externalized from reproduction compete with each other in
the market in order to be exploited, resulting in a violent fragmentation that
obfuscates the relations of production, substituting instead diverse outward
manifestations as members of the bourgeoisie compete to install themselves
behind the character-masks of different capitals. This struggle to realize a
contradictory totality, capital in general, leads to a succession of ill-fitting masks.
“The fact that the movement of society is full of contradictions impresses itself
most strikingly on the practical bourgeois in the changes of the periodic cycle
through which modern industry passes, the summit of which is the general
crisis”.4 The destabilizing onslaught of crisis forces this contradictory totality
to the extremes of its formal coherence. The antagonistic relations of social

3
Jairus Banaji, “From the Commodity to Capital: Hegel’s Dialectic in Marx’s ‘Capital’ ”
Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, ed. Diane Elson, p. 80
4
Marx, Postface to the Second Edition, Capital Vol I, p. 103
DISRUPTION 9

reproduction are revealed here in an abstract social totality often assumed

universal amongst the classes, while the concrete particularity of need violently
asserts itself, inflamed by the way the crisis intensifies the disparities in their
relative degrees of externalization from reproduction. Conflict first appears
over this asymmetrical distribution amongst class fractions, but often reveals
its roots to be found deeper, in the fundamental relations of production, whose
forces ultimately determine this reproduction.

Though the class structure may be submerged under this fragmentary ap-
pearance, these social relations appearing as fetishized fragments themselves
constitute the actuality of capitalist society. Class position is never separate
from the spontaneous and cultivated ideologies that crisscross social existence.
Though embedded in the general cognition of its subjects, which always exists
in excess of social formations, ideology follows closely behind the material
recomposition of individuals out of self-consciousness of their class, dependent
on all manner of “exterior” relationships ranging from the spurious to the
deeply felt, into an infinite variety of social interest groups. Such mediations
can be very intensive, dissolving wayward subjects within powerful structures of
feeling, and able to appear as authentic products of one’s individual will. This
is entailed by the specific fetish-structure of the capitalist social form, in which
everyone is classified individually as commodity-sellers, merely distinguishable
quantitatively. All are equal under bourgeois right, in a liberal harmony free
from the materiality of systematic exploitation. In this sense, ideology emerges
“spontaneously” from the social relations of capital. But fragmented identi-
fications can also be cultivated, drawn out through deliberate attempts at
“non-class composition”, in which ideological formations push people towards
the liberal-democratic imperative to gain representation within the body politic
(or attempt to commandeer it, as the case may be). Politics dominates class
in capitalist society, displacing it in the appearance of an endlessly speciated
but classless citizenry, as they variously campaign, petition, assemble, protest,
advertise, analyze, persuade and sell to each other ad nauseum like carnival
barkers.
10 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

The proliferation of ideological incoherence that we see in this moment, and

its intensification over the turbulence of the preceding decades, reveals the
extent of the crisis of bourgeois society today. The social logic of capital
must be imposed and perpetuated within concrete circumstances, and so,
while the circuit of capital accumulation can be grasped in abstraction from
human particularity, its practical existence depends crucially on such situated,
“extra-economic” ideological arrangements to tamp down class struggle, extract
submission to hegemony, discipline capitalists who disrupt the balance, or keep
people going to work when material compulsion is not enough. It must also
gravitate towards the production of particular commodities, using particular
technologies for particular markets. Capital would be content to produce
qualityless widgets at ever-increasing scale indefinitely, but it is consigned to
always stand in some bare relation to the social reproduction of those who bear
its character-masks. We can refer to this kind of historicized picture of the social
environment conducive to capital accumulation as a conjuncture, a joining
together of incidental human concerns in a subordinate and form-determined
manner, based upon the prevailing balance of class forces.

Though the exhaustion of economic growth is systemic and global, it is not

necessarily the case that the potential depression we face will constitute an
existential crisis for the capitalist system. Indeed, economic crashes tend to
facilitate capitalism’s longevity through the concentration and rationalization of
the surviving capitals. The global proletariat is too dispersed and disorganized
to mount a significant enough challenge when the decisive moments will call
for it. But in order to successfully reorganize and perpetuate capitalist social
relations for another business cycle, the entire ensemble of political, ideological,
and proprietary relations might have to undergo seismic adjustments before
resettling into a stable regime of accumulation. Masks will fall away. Class
contradictions will become unbearable, straining, and tensing to breaking points.
Even if not quite an existential crisis, we may be in the midst of a conjunctural
crisis, a disruption that brings these relations within the contradictory totality
into sharper relief through the struggle between classes, an explosive struggle
DISRUPTION 11

of content within form.

In the following sections, we will elaborate some of the causes and consequences
of the conjunctural crisis that is developing. In the section below, we will
attempt to provide a basic etiology of several of the morbid symptoms that
are starting to present themselves. We will set the current stimulus bills and
monetary measures in the context of the chronic overleveraging of the credit
system that has accompanied the global slump in production. It becomes clear
that such maneuvers are first and foremost attempts to preserve the existing
complex of asset titles and price levels in order to maintain the volume of
financial claims on surplus value produced around the world that are at the
core of contemporary imperialism, and only as a secondary matter provide scant
relief for masses of workers at the hard edges of unemployment or infection
risk. In section three, we examine the recent collapse of employment, widely
posited as a temporary predicament but likely to leave long-term scars on the
labor market, against the wider global patterns of underemployment and the
consequences this has had for the social reproduction of the proletariat. In the
final section, we will look at some of the political conflicts and class struggles
that have exploded as a result of the pandemic crisis. Certain terrains of
struggle are expanding, while others are closing, possibly pointing to the shape
of class compositions to come. The fascistic ideological passions, particularly
conspiracism, which have been enervating the right since 2008 are coalescing
into organization and action in the service of big capital, while the tensions of
the present begin to erupt as well in a new cycle of riots over police executions,
exposing the sharp contradiction between our economic dependence on business
as usual and the bodily vulnerabilities of we who bear it. These are just
preliminary outbreaks, but they are worth tracing, as the abyss looming over
future capital accumulation will continue to intensify such conflicts.

The prefiguration of even modest utopias then offers us nothing but a disen-
gagement from examining the particular tendencies that overdetermine the
present. Any move to preserve the stability of the present totality forestalls
the possibility of its abolition. Likewise, the means of achieving this cannot be
12 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

prefigured but must be derived from a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.

The crisis maneuvers undertaken to date appear both unimaginable without
such devastation, and yet also the bare minimum tolerable to assure that de-
mands will not exceed the capacity of bourgeois will. We have yet to see the full
scope of the developing economic crisis of capital, its exact depths and contours
are still in indeterminate flux. Taking shape amidst this crisis-in-formation
are political subjectivities emerging in the struggles born out of necessity. The
renewed importance of political expressions reveals that history is not content
to allow itself to appear as the indefinite neutral passage of time. It is this
subjective, conscious action upon the objective, material factors of the present
that determine if we will, in fact, be living through history. More than anything
else, bourgeois society fears history.

Necrosis
“Capitalist production constantly strives to overcome these imma-
nent barriers, but it overcomes them only by means that set up the
barriers afresh and on a more powerful scale.” – Marx 1981, Capital
Vol. III, p. 358

This eternal fear of history leads to a tendency to distort time. The long
crisis we are in presents itself as an indefinite series of small disasters that
occasionally escalate into catastrophe. But their pattern and distribution
reveals subterranean faultlines. Every successive business cycle follows the
narrow conditions of profitability, and state policy follows the path of least
resistance to ensure the bare minimum of capital accumulation, a process
itself increasingly disjunct and subject to violent, incomplete cycles. Cyclical
invigorations of economic activity in the advent of crisis has led to an indefinite
state of debt-led growth regimes, forever deferring the arrival of the present by
constantly hedging the future, only ever capable of momentarily extending the
cheap credit lending and borrowing conditions necessary to reestablish a sense
of general equilibrium, serving to make the barriers to reproduction increasingly
NECROSIS 13

insurmountable with every business cycle.

The latest iteration of this crisis management, the $2+ trillion CARES Act
stimulus effort and the measures of the US Federal Reserve and Treasury
Department, are fated to the same eternal return. While the bill is touted
for its scope, every declaration that “this will save Main Street” reads as an
insincere cliche. In practice, the stimulus package is already revealing itself
to be a glorified bailout, a scaling up of now routine monetary practices that
have kept capital afloat since the post-2008 “recovery” and determined by
the crises preceding it. The dysfunctions in the implementation of the still-
growing stimulus efforts reveal that much of the targeted elements serve only
to give the appearance of a state apparatus that can adequately respond to the
economic strains on the broader population. In truth, it’s all about keeping
open lines of cheaply available credit to forestall the evaporation of fictitious
investments heretofore unable to be realized through productive investment.
It is life support for the existing arrangement of capitals. The collapse of
smaller business capitals and the centralization of capital in more intensely
concentrated industries remains an underlying dynamic crucial to capital’s
survival at present, and therefore an inevitability.

The cracks in the foundation are becoming more and more visible as the
expressed goals and concrete execution of the stimulus spending diverge. The
initial $350 billion allocated in funding Payroll Protection Program (PPP) for
small business lending was rapidly grabbed up, prompting an additional $320
billion in congressional funding allocation (and possibly more to come), as
well as new guidelines from the Small Business Administration (SBA) on who
qualifies, as large chain restaurants, hedge funds, and private equity firms had
all applied for and acquired loans, meeting with public outrage. The new rule,
however, does not prevent private equity-owned firms from applying for relief
as long as applicants certify that “current economic uncertainty makes this loan
request necessary.” As of April 20, 45% of the initial $350 billion went to larger
companies who were borrowing more than $1 million, while merely 17% went to
those applying for loans of less than $150,000. On a volume basis, those small
14 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

businesses accounted for 74 per cent of the funds’ recipients. Following the
racial composition of prior proletarianization in the US, black-owned businesses
have suffered a disproportionately faster rate of closures and less aid. After
public outrage, of the 234 public firms that received PPP loan funding, only 14
had promised to return the money.

The $50 billion Payroll Support Program for airlines has also proven itself a
simple matter to circumvent, as United Airlines received $5 billion from the
US Treasury to retain staff, but is still cutting the hours of 15,000 workers.
Despite the 120-day ban on evictions of tenants that reside in properties that
receive federal subsidies or have federally-backed mortgages, these landlords are
still executing evictions, and tenants in the rental market at large are left to a
patchwork of state and municipal level measures of varying efficacy, themselves
subject to even less capacity for enforcement. The only saving grace in many
municipalities is that the courts have been closed, stalling what will become a
wave of eviction filings. The temporary expansion of unemployment insurance
benefits will likely never get to the mass of unemployed, as governors are cutting
off new unemployment benefits before many applicants have even received their
first checks, following the stresses to reopen their economies from the federal
government, protests, and budgetary strains from the loss of sales tax revenue.
Stimulus checks being sent to dead people offer an almost too poetic reflection
of reality in this naked redistribution of social wealth to capital. Whatever
might have remained of America’s mythic Main Street before this, it is surely
now nothing more than an empty shell, upon which political parties will still
hang their banners in the months to come.

Even as we watch stimulus efforts turn into a life support system for capital,
turning our attention to the scale of response on the part of the US Treasury
Department and Federal Reserve should relieve us of the illusion that they
could be anything but. While central bank intervention and the stop-gap
measures of governments have taken center-stage in the whirlwind timeline
of the pandemic’s economic fallout, it must be remembered that these direct
measures of intervention returned months before the pandemic. In September
NECROSIS 15

2019, the unexpected spike in overnight money market rates led to a liquidity
crisis in the repurchase agreement (repo) market, prompting swift intervention
by the US Federal Reserve. The immediate trigger for this was the quarterly
corporate tax payment deadline on September 16 leading to a high volume of
withdrawals from bank and money market mutual fund accounts into the US
Treasury’s account at the Federal Reserve, leaving bank reserves $120 billion
light and unable to match the volume of repo market agreements in Treasury
securities that required financing the next day. The resulting inflexibility in
banks to increase lending from their thinning margin of excess reserves, in part
due to reserve requirements imposed after the 2008 financial crisis, led to more
loan requests from US financial institutions to the federal funds market, as
banks resorted to Federal Home Loan Banks over interbank lending, leading
to a decreased supply in federal funds lending and an excess demand among
banks and financial institutions. Initial Fed intervention in September offered
up to $53 billion in additional reserves and led to a decline in interest rates
for lending, and the effective federal funds rate was lowered to stay within
a stable target range. By mid-October, it appeared that this would not be
enough to address the extent of the liquidity problem, as trade disputes signaled
the possibility that the securitized loans at the base of this liquidity market
might become non-performing, and the Federal Reserve announced it would
be engaging in overnight repo operations of up to $60 billion a month. Over
the course of 2019, the Fed cut the interest rate 3 times, almost down to zero,
to stabilize reserves for lending in money markets, with plans to reassess in
January 2020.

But the hopes for a resurgence of economic vitality were dashed by the begin-
ning of the year, though these emergency actions themselves, implemented to
counteract a turbulent environment for liquidity operations, should already
have been a massive clue that this would be the case. In the bailout effort from
the 2008 crisis, the quantitative easing operations undertaken by the Treasury
and Federal Reserve, to keep markets solvent and credit available for lending
through asset purchases, saw the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet expand by
16 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

$4.5 trillion from 2010 to 2015. Furthermore, it cannot be forgotten that much
of the global economy after the 2008 crisis was further bolstered by China’s debt
stimulus fueled infrastructure projects, running a debt-fueled growth regime of
roughly $586 billion USD. It was only by 2018 that the Federal Reserve began
attempts to deleverage, though the gradual offloading of $800 billion in assets
was met by stock market volatility and by September 2019 immediately met
with this liquidity crisis set off in the repo markets.

By early 2020, the emerging disturbances in Wuhan, the manufacturing

metropole in the Hubei province of China, started roiling supply chains and
put many key industries in danger of financial insolvency, thwarting the Fed-
eral Reserve’s expectations of rolling back its efforts and prompting escalated
intervention in money markets and repo operations. The months of February,
March, and April 2020 saw an unprecedented scale of operations, an expansion
of the Fed’s repo market operations and a reintroduction of quantitative easing
up to hundreds of billions of dollars in a whirlwind series of overnight decisions
as global stock markets plunged. From February 24th to April 27th, the Federal
Reserve expanded its balance sheet by $2.6 trillion to a total of roughly $7.1
trillion. These trends, having already been in motion, should sufficiently deflate
any notions that the so-called fundamentals of the distant bourgeois god known
as “the economy” were at all strong even months before the pandemic. The
circulation of money capital itself appears incapable of operating without a
ventilator.

Now, as part of stimulus efforts undertaken to avoid a depression at all costs, the
Federal Reserve enters into new territory, the consequences of which remain to
be seen. The precedent set by the government bond purchases that characterized
the Federal Reserve’s post-2008 quantitative easing policy has left little terrain
of movement than what is currently underway: the introduction of a wide
variety of programs and lending facilities to directly purchase assets, now notably
including corporate debt, via direct lending, buying bonds, and buying loans.
What has rightly prompted even more concern about the possible outcomes of
this hail mary is the Fed’s purchases of high-risk, high-yield corporate debt,
NECROSIS 17

known as junk-rated bonds, which could put what is effectively the world’s
central bank towards a point of no return. This is all occurring with the
facilitation of $2.3 trillion in credit lines opened through the newly fashioned
lending facilities, and interest rates set almost at zero with speculations of
going negative. In addition to the $3 trillion added to Fed capacity for liquidity
support in the current quarter, largely from the stimulus efforts, the US Treasury
expects to borrow a further $677 billion in the three months before September.
Having already borrowed $477 billion in the first quarter of the year, it would
bring the total amount to more than $4 trillion for the full fiscal year. As if the
thin veil covering the obvious bailout underway was not enough, all pretense is
stripped as a division of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has been
hired by the Federal Reserve to act as the investment manager for three of the
newly created lending facilities: two Fed-backed vehicles that will buy corporate
bonds, and a program that will buy mortgage-backed securities issued by US
government agencies. Furthermore, BlackRock can direct the Federal Reserve
to purchase their own assets, including their own junk-rated exchange-trade
fund (ETF) bonds, and BlackRock employees involved in this effort can use
the knowledge they gained as advisors for trading purposes that benefit their
own firm after a mere 2-week “cooling-off” period.

Lest we make the mistake of thinking the Fed has merely gone rogue, let’s
briefly consider the doctrine of negative interest rates recently implemented
in the turbulent economies of other capitalist powers. Setting central bank
deposit rates negative effectively charges a fee for storing money-capital, forcing
banking institutions to dump their holdings into whatever asset markets seem
remotely viable, thus “growing” the economy. Even before the US repo market
liquidity crisis of September 2019, the European Central Bank (ECB) had
dropped the deposit rate to -0.5%, the lowest on record, and initiated a new
quantitative easing program of €20 billion per month in asset purchases, for
the third time in a decade. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) followed suit, cutting
rates in multiple rounds. The ECB and BOJ had both experimented with
negative interest rates previously: the ECB in 2014 to shake off the slump
18 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

from the 2011 sovereign debt crisis and at a time when the unemployment
rate in the eurozone was ~12%; Japan in 2016 in a desperate bid to combat
deflation. Though neither case worked as intended in the first iteration, each
central bank sought this time to go even more negative to inject some activity
into undeniably sagging growth. That the largest currency zones in the world
all engaged in periodic and escalating programs of severe interest rate cuts and
massive asset buyouts throughout the 2010s, and with little success, suggests
not so much an extremist interpretation of mandate on the part of central
banks, as some post-Keynesians accuse, but rather an expression of structural
decrepitude.

A cursory overview of Federal Reserve policy over the past few decades reveals
that these new drastic measures actually reflect the limited range of motion
available to mitigate crisis while still maintaining the reproduction of capitalist
relations. The Volcker shock of 1979, in the unprecedented raising of interest
rates with the intention of curbing inflation, set off a wave of unemployment in
the US and cemented the finance-dominated global restructuring of industry
that was progressively taking shape throughout the 1970s, ultimately meeting
its own fate once again in the 1987 crash of the high-risk, high-yield junk bond
market that fuelled the financial means of this global expansion. The ensuing
neoliberal regime of accumulation from 1982-1997 unleashed growth in the
expansion of industrial capital further into the Global South and peripheries,
bolstering rates of profit, but nowhere near the highs prior to the downturn
of the 1970s. Following the 1987 junk bond crash, the Federal Reserve of
the 1990s, under the tenure of Alan Greenspan, saw the official onset of such
practices dubbed by Robert Brenner as “asset price Keynesianiam,” cementing
as official policy market capitalizations of publicly traded companies through
direct liquidity support via lowering the Federal Funds Rate. This effectively
freed up credit to stimulate asset price inflation, and with it an illusory “wealth
effect” in which personal fortunes and GDP alike depended on low-interest rates.
The rise in pension funds and the doctrine of shareholder value, now with official
backing in Federal Reserve policy, left the US economy perpetually subject to
NECROSIS 19

and ultimately dependent on the inflation of asset bubbles. This culminated

first in the chain of events set off by the East Asian crisis of 1997, itself the
cumulative effect of the Japanese banking crisis of the 1980s that would domino
into a real estate bubble in Thailand by the early 1990s, resulting in a series
of chain reactions throughout the region that spilled over into the Western
economies through the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management Hedge
Fund in 1998 and the dotcom bubble crash of 2000. Asset price valuations
have long been the driving force of the projection of vitality for capital, not the
expansion of production, which has long been redundant and overproducing
due to a high organic composition of capital. The terrain of expansion is
increasingly insufficient relative to the mass of capital valuations it requires.
Expansion must take the shape of an upward ticker in stock market activity.
Anything else would be effective suicide. The 2008 housing bubble that ripped
through the credit-reliant construction and real estate industries prompted the
Federal Reserve to respond with both lowering rates and direct asset purchases
in quantitative easing.

While private capital requires a relatively autonomous state to assist in guaran-

teeing reproduction, these roles have increasingly become intermeshed, forming
neither a state takeover of the free market, as bemoaned by devotees of the
invisible hand, nor the gutting of the state, as often decried by left critics
of “neoliberalism”. What we see is rather a reflection of the growing central-
ization of capital and its concentration within specific spheres of industry, in
this case, the banking and finance sector involved in controlling circulatory
flows of money-capital, drawing the international state system into a more
coordinated global regime of accumulation that cannot cohere due to global
overaccumulation of capital. The instance of BlackRock’s direct involvement
in directing Federal Reserve corporate debt purchases reveals that the world’s
most powerful central banking institution’s status as “lender of last resort” has
been resorted to so frequently in recent history that it has effectively displaced
the executive as the central “committee for managing the common affairs of
the whole bourgeoisie.” Financial accumulation to this degree has meant that
20 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

global manufacturing overcapacity and declining output can only be continually

managed by an ever more swelling and carefully attenuated market regime,
a regime where accumulation primarily occurs through the cornering of mar-
ket shares through appropriations of the flows of realizable surplus value via
property-based mechanisms of capital acquisitions that consolidate firms. We
see here the rise of multinational conglomerates with massive asset portfolios
that allow them to dominate the labor of large swaths of the global working class
in both direct and indirect ways. Due to the decline in complete accumulation
by means of reproductive expansion, credit becomes increasingly important to
maintaining the continuity of economic functions, and thus the appearance of
capital writ large as profit-making via price speculations and fictitious profit
generation.

Now that the future is arriving, decades of political imperatives to buttress risk
at all costs in order to maintain dominance has left too many landmines. The
federal government’s insurance of risky corporate debt poses a new problem,
of which the outcome is still unknown. The IMF raised the alarm over a $19
trillion corporate debt “time bomb” in its Global Financial Stability Report in
October of 2019. Tobias Adrian and Fabio Natalucci, two senior IMF officials,
said of their findings, “We look at the potential impact of a material economic
slowdown [that would trigger said "time bomb"] – [requiring only] one that is
half as severe as the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Our conclusion is sobering:
debt owed by firms unable to cover interest expenses with earnings, which we
call corporate debt at risk, could rise to $19 trillion. That is almost 40% of total
corporate debt in the economies we studied.” To place this alarming conclusion
in the present context, the impact of the present crisis in the lockdown periods
results in a global average rate of GDP growth of -3.0%, as estimated by the
IMF. For further context, the impact of the Global Financial Crisis of 2009 was
-0.1%. Two trillion dollars of corporate debt is set to be rolled over this year,
and according to findings from the OECD, more than half of all outstanding
investment-grade corporate bonds have a BBB credit rating, just one grade
above junk status. If we want to understand why such intensive measures
AMPUTATION 21

are being taken by central banks at the present moment to keep credit lines
open and available, there it is. To date, US companies have continued to take
on debt, borrowing a year’s worth of cash in the past 5 months alone. Here
we find something of the double edged sword of liquidity. Everything may
be done to maintain the circulation of money-capital in hopes of realizing a
prospective value, but circulation itself yields nothing. Merely adding to the
money supply might throw things into a sense of motion, but it may still do
so with no traction. Now, as the threat of hyperinflation looms, Goldman
Sachs has begun establishing short positions on the US dollar, anticipating the
currency’s devaluation and preparing to make a profit on it. For all that is
made of the Federal Reserve and its role, it is clearly only buckling under the
pressure of what is required to maintain capital at present, and that is cheap
credit and viable conditions for lending by any means necessary.

Amputation
“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent
and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass
of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is
the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the
expansive power of capital, also develop the labour power at its
disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus
increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this
reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is
the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in
inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form
of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the
working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official
pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation.” – *Marx 1976, Capital Vol. I, p. 798

Meanwhile, unemployment has skyrocketed with no end in sight, stimulated

22 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

by the shelter in place orders instituted around the country. The official count
of unemployment insurance filings are, as of the time of publication, roughly
40.8 million since mid-March, adding to the existing 7.1 million already on UI,
with the US real unemployment rate in April reaching a post-WWII high of
14.7%. The measurement that month for the U6 rate, which includes workers
precariously employed and involuntarily part-time for economic reasons and is
by definition higher than “real unemployment,” was at 22.8%. Given that data
collection for the most recent surveys are affected by the pandemic, these figures
are underestimations of the actual number of people suffering significant cuts
to their income. At the beginning of June, the financial press and the state’s
economic advisors touted a success in an apparent employment resurgence,
as 2.5 million jobs were “created” and the unemployment rate fell to 13.3%.
U6 only dropped down to 21.2%. While temporary lay-offs declined from 18.1
million to 15.3 million in May, the number of permanent job losses increased
from 2 million to 2.3 million. Furthermore, the US Labor Department already
conceded making errors in the employment classifications of the May report,
including counting 4.9 million temporarily laid-off people as employed, revealing
that any “impressive” numbers are in fact quite deceptive.

It appears quite clear that this, rather than a resilient economy arising like a
phoenix from the ashes of its immolation, is more likely a reflection of just how
weak efforts to reopen have been thus far. While leisure and hospitality services
appear to be hailed as a sector surging back to work, the unemployment rate
for this sector is still at 35.9%. Government unemployment is also continuing to
surge, as 1.6 million were unemployed in this sector the last two months alone,
following the contours of austerity we can expect in any attempts at “recovery.”
We still have yet to see the full effects on long-term unemployment that the
threats of a second wave of COVID-19 infections may have, and further what
will happen to economic activity once additional funding for unemployment
relief halts in July, should a stimulus effort here not be repeated. It is now
still estimated that at least 42% of recent layoffs will result in permanent job
loss. In the US, it is also clear that this wave of unemployment is cutting along
AMPUTATION 23

prior racializations of labor precarity, with hispanic and black workers facing
disproportionately higher rates of unemployment than white workers. Globally,
the International Labor Organization estimates that 1.25 billion workers, 40%
of the total global workforce, are employed in sectors vulnerable to cuts in
hours due to expected declines in output. Counted in lost hours, we can expect
the equivalent of 305 million full-time jobs to disappear, constituting 10.5%
of the worldwide total work hours in the last pre-crisis quarter, suggesting
underemployment will far outstrip the unemployment numbers alone. In the
vast informal sector in which 60% of workers eke out a living, there was a 60%
decline in earnings in the first month of lockdowns, and as high as 81% in
Africa and Latin America. Since a missed day’s work means missed income
full stop, informal workers will, in the words of the ILO, “face this dilemma:
die from hunger or die from the virus.”

At the end of their recent report linked above, the ILO advocates strong
“labor market institutions” and “well-resourced social protection systems” to
ensure a “job-rich recovery.” This comes off as idealistic and naive when set
against the context of the global slump of the last few decades, in which
the fundamental reproductive institution for proletarians, wage labor, has
increasingly given way to the uncertainties and tribulations of wageless life. The
growth of informality itself is a consequence of the rising organic composition
of capital, a tendency where the double bind at the core of the capitalist
value-form – between socially necessary labor-time, the first determinant of
the value that can be realized on the market given prevailing technical and
social conditions of production, and surplus labor, which marks the proportion
of this value which can be appropriated by the capitalist above the costs of
production – ratchets production in the direction of secular, systemic and often
“premature” deindustrialization, permanently expelling millions of workers from
manufacturing in several rounds of restructuring since the end of the post-war
boom. There is a persistent decline in labor demand and in labor share of
income, as the capitalist class reorganizes the labor process, suppresses wage
growth, and opens barriers to capital, yoking workers of the world into a
24 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

single giant labor market exploited as nodes in logistics chains increasingly

stationed in exurban peripheries, still dependent upon the social wage fund,
but perpetually underemployed. The “working class” strives daily to survive
but less and less of this work itself is integrated into the circuit of valorization
of capital.

The incapacity of the global economy to adequately generate jobs is evidenced

in the travails of youth unemployment. As new entrants into the labor market,
young workers are subject to whatever potential economic growth may or may
not contain for the reproduction of the working class intergenerationally and
as such give us a glimpse of future trends. In the months before the pandemic,
youth unemployment (ages 15-24) was at 13% globally, and up to ~40% in the
Middle East and North Africa, a steady rise from 2008. In addition to the
more temporary unemployment rates, youth labor force participation is at an
all-time low, with 21% of young people fully disengaged from the economy or
education. Of those working, 80% of young workers around the world are in
informal work, as opposed to 60% of older adults. And young workers have
to travel farther to find the work they do have: 70% of labor migrants are
under the age of 30. There are several reasons for this dismal state of affairs.
First, there is an increase in early school dropouts, due to precarity at home
and the need for children to labor, usually either to take over housework for
an older caretaker who is out earning money or to join the informal workforce
themselves, often permanently barring them from ever obtaining stable, formal
employment. Simultaneously, there are diminishing returns on higher education,
with longer transition times between school and work, and for consistently
less compensation relative to costs and time spent in education, with these
transition times increasingly uncorrelated with education level, instead reflecting
job availability. This latter fact can perhaps be accounted for by the overall
trajectory of work composition, with semi-skilled jobs evaporating in favor
so-called low-skilled (that is, low-paid) work. Entry-level jobs are becoming
less compensatory on average, and often lead only to a quagmire of dead-end
work – nearly 40% of youth fail to transition to stable jobs even when they
AMPUTATION 25

are older, a phenomenon referred to as “scarring” by the ILO to describe how

failed labor market integration in youth follows workers around for many years
into their adulthood.

The rhetoric of scarring suggests a kind of stigma that marks each worker
as they travel through life, euphemizing and obscuring what is actually a
structural inability of developing economies to adequately absorb new workers.
This is especially egregious when considering that job prospects are so stagnant
compared to population growth that the global economy will need to generate
5 million new jobs each month just to keep unemployment rates constant, a
veritable pipe dream now. Finally, young workers are especially vulnerable
to long term scarring from the pandemic crisis. They are generally more
sensitive to recessions, experiencing steeper inclines in the unemployment rate
as they are laid off before older coworkers. In addition to the aforementioned
overrepresentation in informal work, young workers are more likely to have
precarious job arrangements, such as gig work, and make up the primary
workforce for the retail, hospitality, and food service industries that are most
affected by the lockdowns. Jobs among youth are composed of automatable
tasks at a higher rate, leaving them uniquely susceptible to automation-based
job loss, both historically and in the future as companies seize the vacuum
left by the pandemic to rationalize their production costs. The very ability
of capitalism to sustain the bare reproduction of the proletariat within the
exigencies of accumulation is receding over the horizon.

This dialectical process of subsuming creative labor-power, replacing it wherever

possible with machinic repetition of motion and cutting the human being
loose (so fundamental that Marx referred to it as the general law of capitalist
accumulation) is exacerbated by a parallel bloodbath in which masses are
newly proletarianized in droves. Between 1980 and 2000, the global workforce
doubled in size, before adding a further 1.3 billion workers by 2019. These
increases came from the absorption of workers following the full integration
into global capital of the USSR and China (who were not previously counted),
but significant segments came from a wave of land grabs, from agribusiness
26 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

and extractive industries, and debt traps, where subsistence peasants forced
into the market take out loans and microfinance to counteract losses from
intensified global competition, effectively abolishing the smallholding peasantry
as a significant class, pushing them to the margins of the market in labor-
power as new proletarians. That capital is little prepared or interested in
incorporating the swollen ranks of the reserve army of labor is evidenced in
the massive growth of exurban slums and crowded megacities, with hinterlands
many hours from the new factories. Any given person may cycle through
a job relevant to the production of value for a time, but each individual,
especially in the age of longer, more treacherous and more frequent migrations,
is strictly expendable. The condition of dependence on the labor market for
bare subsistence is generalized, but the labor market is everywhere shedding
labor to cut costs.

These are the material circumstances that overdetermine possible economic

recoveries from recessions, which have been increasingly jobless, with the
restoration of employment levels to pre-recession rates taking longer in each
of the last five recessions, lagging behind other indicators. Returning to the
US, the Great Recession took a full ten years to recover in this sense, and
even this has been uneven, with unemployment rates officially higher than
before 2007 in more than 90% of metro areas. But more significant than the
literal number of jobs is the stagnant wage level, which was flat between 2002
and 2014, only recently producing modest gains. Labor force participation
has declined absolutely from ~66% in 2008 to ~63% in 2019, causing long
term unemployment to creep up as a proportion of total unemployment. At
least 1.5 million adults had effectively dropped out of the workforce, and
therefore unemployment rate statistics, by 2017. There were also significant
shufflings, as jobs permanently shifted from some sectors to others. New jobs
tended to be paid less, receive less benefits, have less long-term prospects and
schedule less hours. Ninety-five percent of jobs created since 2005 have been
independent contracting, temporary, part-time or on-call. Indeed, some of the
most visible and celebrated innovations of the new “recovery economy” were
AMPUTATION 27

gig platform-middlemen like Uber, lauded for “disrupting” and redefining work
itself. The average tenure at these shit jobs has dropped to 4.4 years, and the
rates of switching jobs, endlessly churning over in the vain search for better pay,
hopped to record highs amongst the growing proportion of low-wage workers
as of 2019. In short, the capacity of the economy to support wage growth in
proportion to productivity growth, to proffer the expected quality of life from
the postwar boom that both left and right nationalists nostalgically yearn for,
is severely truncated as the dynamics of accumulation place hard limits on
profitable exploitation. Meanwhile the remaining “decent” jobs are left to get
cyclically hollowed out as the political consensus has converged on a program
of constantly escalating the gutting process.

Against these dwindling fortunes, the severe contraction in income seen in the
last two months will rip holes in the tattered safety net of private household
finance. Earlier this year, the Fed found that 39% of Americans could not cover
an unexpected $400 expense without going into debt, if at all. Ten percent
already could not cover existing bills. This is a small wonder when 58% have
less than $1000 in savings at any one time. Many have become dependent
on side hustles to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the costs of living have gone
up. Transportation costs have grown 54% as average commute times have
lengthened, which can be correlated with housing prices, now accounting for
9.2% of total household expenditures. Food expenses as share of income have
remained steady at 10%, except for the lowest quintile of households, where it
has grown to 35%.

After $19.2 trillion in household wealth completely evaporated with the 2008
mortgage and subsequent retirement savings crisis, homeownership, long a
mainstay in the US middle-class reaction formation, has increasingly given
way to renting, with the renter population growing 10% between 2001 and
2015, primarily among older people. Median rent has gone up 32% over the
same time period, as median income has fallen 0.1%. Thirty-eight percent of
renters are rent-burdened, forking over at least 30% of their monthly income to
their landlords, and 17% severely so, paying over 50% of their income. Of this
28 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

severely rent-burdened population, the Pew Research Center found that over
half had less than $10 in liquid assets in 2015. This bleeding out of savings
quickly began to hemorrhage with the onset of the pandemic. On April 1, just
two weeks after the initial spike in unemployment, 31% of renters did not pay
their landlords. This dropped down to 20% in May, mostly due to the arrival
of the one-time stimulus checks. Some percentage of this constitutes a newly
politicized bloc of rent strikers and tenant unions, a trend that we will return
to below, but the vast majority must be understood as the disorganized fallout
of the abrupt plunge into wagelessness – especially when considering that 19%
already missed rent every month before the pandemic.

For homeowners, the situation is also grim. In the largest single-month gain
on record, US home loan delinquencies surged by 1.6 million in April. The
proportion of loans over 30 days delinquent rose to 6.45%, with 3.4 million
loans delinquent and another 211,000 properties now scheduled for foreclosure.
While federal relief efforts aim to address this and avoid the foreclosure wave
following 2008 that is seared into the collective memory, the sum total of these
efforts are a forbearance program to delay payments for a six-month period
without penalty, which assumes a sharper rebound in an economic recovery
than any forecast can yet foretell. As of May 12, 4.7 million borrowers are in
forbearance on their loans. As for businesses, commercial mortgage backed
securities (CMBS) are in a severely precarious position, as it was announced
that $45 billion of loans bundled into US CMBS were overdue and entering
“grace periods” in April. Of these, the Mall of America’s $1.4 billion mortgage
is now delinquent, sending the threat of a ripple of contagion throughout the
rest of the market. To complicate the perils of the US CMBS market and
fallout effects on retail further, a whistleblower in 2019 revealed systemic efforts
to inflate profits and wipe losses from the records of these loans, adjustments
that served to continue CMBS lending and inflate the valuation of these sectors
so that borrowers appear more creditworthy and credit can be extended. A
familiar scenario. Facing risks of default exacerbated by the contraction in
activity in hotels and retail, the potential fall in the wake of this bubble is
AMPUTATION 29

all the more precipitous. This will necessarily also foreclose employment for
millions more, and those home loans in forbearance may require more than six
months to avoid delinquency.

This disparity is made up for with debt. Peaking in 2008, the US household
debt to GDP ratio has settled around 76%, while the debt to income ratio
was at 96%, as of 2017. Auto lending in particular has taken off, 20% of
which are subprime loans made secure to the lender with the implementation
of remotely-controlled devices that the lender can use to interrupt the car’s
starter when the loan is delinquent. Severe delinquencies (90+ days without
payment) have doubled for both auto and student loan debt since 2004, the
latter being the fastest growing type of household debt. Credit card debt was
actually decreasing over the last few years, until March of this year, when it
spiked 23%, presumably as people scrambled to hold their lives together in the
absence of real income. We can expect this trend to worsen.

Observing this ongoing breakdown of the wage relation’s legitimacy in guar-

anteeing reproduction, we can apprehend the trajectory of its deterioration
through the concept of a “social wage fund.” We can define the social wage fund
as the aggregate of personal wage compensation, benefits spending, and state
expenditures on public infrastructure, social welfare and common resources; in
short, the general costs of production in variable capital and business operations
taxation that capitalists must forfeit for purposes of general social reproduction
and which impinges on the rate of profit. As the rate of profit and the rate of
accumulation slug downwards, there is a struggle over the value of labor-power
as capitalists tighten the vice grip it holds over this fund, both at the point of
origin in the diminishing payouts received by proletarians for their labor and
through intensified recuperation with the privatization and commodification of
everything possible. This leaves the totality of social reproduction in an increas-
ingly fragile and vulnerable state, with more and more people being expelled
from the material community of capital to attempt to survive in abjection. We
have already covered the decline in real wages and wage-labor conditions at
some length, but to really understand what is at stake in the downturn and
30 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

subsequent intensification of class warfare we will cursorily detail the pattern

of deterioration of social infrastructure, which has many manifestations too
numerous to fully expand on.

We will briefly summarize the nature of the class conflicts over healthcare
insurance in order to demonstrate the particular limits that healthcare imposes.
There is an intrinsic relation between the declining investments of variable
capital that compose the social wage fund, and the process of externalizing costs
of labor’s reproduction in the capitalist subsumption of healthcare services.
In the production process, the value of labor-power constitutes a diversion of
the quantity of value expropriated by the capitalist, primarily in the form of
reluctantly doling out wages. The value of labor-power is defined by Marx as
the sum of values of the necessary goods which go into the reproduction of the
worker. The ratio of this to the total value formation, as set by the socially
necessary labor time of the commodity, brackets the entirety of surplus value,
the increase of which is the sole aim of capital, and the necessary condition for
its material reproduction. As the socially necessary labor time of commodities
generally drops, the value magnitudes obtainable from the market drop as well,
reflected in the volatile movement of prices outside of various special conditions.
This constitutes a perennial and even existential problem for capital that
underlies the tendency for the fall in the rate of profit, driving it along a
winding, nonlinear path towards the breakdown of reproduction. If the value
of labor-power were fixed in place, this would constitute a severe problem
for capital accumulation, and indeed it did as the growth engine of postwar
expansion dwindled to a low hum in the mid-1970s, crashing into the floor set
by a historic height of wage levels in the imperial core that reflected the balance
of class forces rising from the corporatist union-mediated labor accord. The
struggle over the value of labor-power has been central to a countertendency to
this crisis, through labor market arbitrage, wage suppression, and the “organic”
decline of the value of labor-power, as necessary goods cheapen due to the
improvements in necessary labor times mentioned above. Having once been
necessitated by the Great Depression, the persistent escalation of conflict pushed
AMPUTATION 31

by the proletariat and the resulting conjunctural crisis of the interwar period,
the succeeding interregnum saw the progressive deterioration of proletarian
class composition, midwifed by ruthless anti-communist containment worldwide
and bureaucratic anti-militancy in the labor movement. This set the conditions
for the boss’s offensive and neoliberal restructuring that enabled a minor but
insufficient rally in the rate of profit between 1982 and 1997 before exhausting
itself into the slump we are in today.

An apt metonym for the effect that this process has had on the extreme and
preventable fatality rate of COVID-19 in the US might be the recent flash
floods in Midland, MI, as two dams burst, forcing 10,000 people to evacuate
and flushing a Federal superfund site near the Dow Chemical plant into the
watershed. The dams are privately owned, by Boyce HydroPower, who bought
the dams but refused to finance their retrofitting and maintenance, leading to
their inability to withstand high water flow. Over half of the dams in the US
are privately owned by energy companies, large landowners, and private equity
firms in an increasingly crowded “public infrastructure market”. Reconfiguring
basic infrastructure as a new revenue-generating asset class has only intensified
a long pattern of systematic disinvestment, leading to pronounced physical
degradation. The private companies investing in them often have their profits
secured through predatory contracts with municipalities which guarantee that
any losses are covered through taxes, leaving little interest in that wasteful and
unproductive enterprise of routine maintenance. The incremental excision of
all state expenditure on public goods, in waves of austerity forced through over
a decimated workers’ movement, has affected nearly every facet of life. Similar
patterns of privateering and disinvestment, with the added dynamic of ruthless
rent-seeking at every access point, has left the medical system with enough
cracks in it to buckle against the floodwaters of infection.

There are a number of components that make up the blanket healthcare system
in the US, each subsumed by capital in their own way, contributing to an
infrastructure defined by extremely patchy coverage, absurd costs and declining,
uneven quality. The dilemma for capital, starkly revealed now by the willful
32 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

sacrifice of thousands of lives a day, is between, one the one side, allowing
for the expansion of the social wage fund that robust public health measures
would require, and thus cut into the already suffering rate of profit, and, on
the other, letting the general health of the populace decline to the point where
it cuts into productivity. Historically, the US capitalist class has opted to
thread this needle very close to the bare minimum, foisting more miseries and
indignities onto the working class as increasing portions come to contribute to
the economy not primarily as labor-power, but as “medical consumers.” The
private healthcare industry has a unique position within the wider historical
process of declining profitability and the suppression of the social wage fund.

We relate this to the long-term deterioration of the public health and healthcare
system in the US, constituting a kind of class-based triage, which underlies the
current difficulties it faces with COVID-19 and going some way to explaining the
unique severity of the pandemic here in the US. Generally, we can characterize
the trend in healthcare profiteering as one of partial subsumption which,
though this situation would normally hurt the growth of an industry, has
been circumnavigated with the ability to exploit the inelastic demand of a
captive market, due to healthcare’s place as a central pillar of necessary social
reproduction. Marx used the example of the architect to explain how our
cognitive capacities enable us to change our environment, and therefore our
own natures, but a more fitting example might be the physician, fundamentally
transforming the ways we inhabit our bodies.

Capital progressively subsumes social life into relation with it. Social repro-
duction as a real category, that is, as a series of concrete activities oriented
towards the maintenance of populations, is itself a consequence of this process
of subsumption, as capital institutes a rigorous separation between work and life
activities. The inclusion of public health and healthcare within social reproduc-
tion means that it is organized out of the social wage fund, and represents a cost
within the value of labor-power. It is unsurprising then that the first battles
over the funding source and method of distribution emerged as dependence
on the wage became generalized at the turn of the century with the rise of
AMPUTATION 33

US industrial prominence. Struggles over the definition and administration of

public health measures emerged directly out of the work of reformist leagues
attempting to sanitize urban slums and agitation on the part of workers to
improve their working conditions in the first decades of the 20th century. The
hazards of life for industrial workers lead to the development of a hodge-podge
of illness, accident and death insurance plans, originally created to overcome the
chronic unemployment that would leave them wageless to fend for themselves.
Such plans were often perpetually low on funds, with premiums still too high
for many workers, in part from strict price controls for drugs, hospital care and
medical services maintained by reactionary professional lobbies that functioned
as cartels at the time, such as the American Medical Association and American
Hospital Association.

More important than these plans were the union-sponsored clinics, attempts
by workers to directly organize medical services in conjunction with medical
professionals, some of which still exist. The first insurance benefits offered
by employers were specifically to attack these meager but autonomous worker
organizations while undermining unions generally, a reaction to the balance of
class forces shifting in the direction of labor that had been building with the
union movement. The 1930s saw the widespread adoption of the hospital model
of distributing care, as they became attractive “cost centers,” stimulating the
parallel growth of the private voluntary insurance industry. As the network
of independent worker clinics was displaced by the hospital system, the battle
lines moved and workers began to fight for insurance plans and other forms of
payment support rather than for direct control over the care itself. In other
words, they increasingly had to accept the terms of commodification. But the
inadequacy of union insurance plans and the conditional nature of employer
plans, based on the principle of “cost-sharing,” lead to agitation for publicly
funded coverage. The American Federation of Labor of Samuel Gompers, its
latent conservatism coming to the fore as the wave of interwar class struggles
began to crest in the early 1930s, opposed universal coverage on the grounds
that it would counteract the unions’ appeal, as it would cover union members
34 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

and nonmembers alike.

Within this struggle, workers attempted to connect public health with working
conditions, pointing to occupational hazards, chronic conditions and illnesses
plaguing the industrial labor force by exerting influence primarily through
control over the shop floor. As the Depression plunged millions into poverty,
there was a rash of lawsuits over workplace injury and disease seeking remu-
neration from employers. The climate of ascendant labor struggles pushed
the courts in a direction more sympathetic to labor and the framework for
worker’s compensation policies began to emerge from this era of case law. But
as shop-floor control was wrested away with the move from militancy towards
normalized business relations, worker’s compensation became the official so-
lution to dangerous and harmful work environments, not autonomy in the
workplace enabling improved conditions. The labor movement, having initiated
the first organizations of mass healthcare and public health, was outmaneuvered
and had forfeited its conflictual and definitive place within the management of
social reproduction for a position firmly outside of it, consigned to negotiating
for access from across the counter. In the midst of these battles, both unions,
with massively expanded memberships beyond the administrative capacities of
the old clinics, and the bosses, eager for cheap concessions that would not give
in to unions and lessen their domination, increasingly began to turn towards
private, third-party insurance schemes.

With the Federal government guaranteeing industrial profits with the “cost plus”
financing plans during WWII, more companies bought plans for their employees.
This generalized in the post-war period, with coverage for unionized workers
expanding from 625,000 beneficiaries to 30 million between 1945 and 1954.
This new paradigm gave ample room for expansion. Hospitals, traditionally
treated as community utilities, were becoming high-tech complexes with large
staffs and overheads. Nurses and other hospital workers began to unionize
themselves, driving their wages up. Hospital services went up in cost, which
insurance companies made no attempts to negotiate back down, preferring
to raise premiums. Meanwhile, though union involvement in medicine had
AMPUTATION 35

its origins in coverage for the unemployed, healthcare access had become
a matter conditional on employment and union representation. The social
forces were growing for another push at universal healthcare, as reformist
organizations joined with unions to mobilize the uninsured. They struggled to
manage benefits for retiring members, particularly the elderly, culminating in
the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. These proved to be the high watermark,
incomplete as they are, in the aborted project of constructing a national health
insurance. These programs became frequent targets for irate conservatives or
slick neoliberals looking for governmental bloat to trim in times of austerity,
as the program funds were increasingly eyed as a revenue source for insurance
companies.

The relatively lucrative balance of class forces in the immediate postwar period
that was produced by labor struggles started to unravel in the general conjunc-
tural crisis of the 1970s. A severe depression, coming in two waves, inaugurated
the long descent of the general rate of profit, as new global competition in
trade and industrial overcapacity killed the engine of growth. This had two
major impacts on public health. First, as stated above, the share of value
diverted to the social wage fund for the maintenance and social reproduction of
living conditions began to exert a pronounced strain on the total formation of
value, and therefore on surplus value. This is a constant tension, experiencing
perpetual movement, and depends on the overall balance of class forces, but
is exacerbated during declines in profitability. In short, the capitalist class
supports a high quality of life, both in terms of wage growth and in terms of
political support for public benefits, when they can afford to, when it serves
their interests and, especially, when the working class has the organizational
strength to push demands. When they cannot afford it, the need to recuperate
costs overdetermines the ground for any such capitulations, and, when the
working class is weakened, such progress can be reversed. As a widespread
boss’ offensive kicked off in the 1970s and 80s, union membership declined and
real wages were forced into a perpetual stasis, cutting off avenues to healthcare
for many workers, fundamentally altering the course of public health. Second,
36 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

as US capital progressively deindustrialized, it entered the current period of

high “financialization,” in which accumulation was systematically oriented
towards firms that manipulated the global circulation of capital to extract
profit. This process facilitated massive bubbles of surplus capital with low
rates of accumulation, i.e. declining reinvestment into valorization activity,
that flowed into many non-marketized areas, precipitating massive pressures
of privatization. A wave of mergers and acquisitions followed, concentrating
capital and “juicing up” the rate of profit, to a slight degree, between 1982 and
1997. This era saw the infusion of capital into the medical industry in a project
of restructuring the entire apparatus of public health. The net effect of this
has been to severely limit access to healthcare for large swaths of proletarians,
at a multitude of access points.

Medical conglomerates, encompassing hospitals and care facilities, private

practices, pharmacies, insurance, research, and pharmaceutical companies, were
structured to extract as much profit as possible out of the business of care.
Outside of the production of drugs and equipment, healthcare companies are
not engaged in directly valorizing value (that is, “producing capital”) in the
traditional sense. Rather, they are more akin to landlords and other rentiers,
creating gated access to a necessary resource for which they charge admission,
ultimately deriving their incomes by capturing circulating surplus value in
finance and, more to our point, predating upon the social wage fund. Such
rentier capitalists actually stand to gain from increasing the portion of capital
that goes towards the social wage fund, and therefore stand in competition with
industrial capitalists who instead seek to suppress this to maximize their share
of surplus value. But this division between the interests of healthcare rentiers
and that of industrial capitalists is not so clear-cut when placed in the context
of class struggle and the long downturn. As already discussed, third party
insurers and private hospitals provided a means for capitalists to recuperate
their upperhand in workplace conflicts over worker control of the shop and
union-run clinics. Furthermore, the commodification of medicine facilitated
the envelopment of healthcare and wellbeing into the wage itself, rather than
AMPUTATION 37

in a social form that would be less easily subsumed and more ambiguous
with respect to the value-form, like independent, universally accessible clinics.
Because workers had to purchase care as a set of services and products on the
market, a minimum standard of health could not be universalized or maintained
but instead became incidental, a consequence of choices and the “anarchy of
the market,” an externalized cost burden outside of capital’s concern as soon as
paychecks were issued, perhaps with a deduction for the employee contribution
to medical insurance.

The history of healthcare in the US up to this point can be viewed in retrospect

as a period of potential alternative paths that, through union forfeiture and
accommodation, became a patchy system begging for reform. The politicization
of medicine had returned in the 1960s ready for another fight, but it had run
head-long into the conjunctural crisis of the 1970s and, already vulnerable,
became fertile ground for commodification. But as we stated, healthcare is only
partially subsumed and is in fact inherently resistant to subsumption, due to
a particular tension arising from its concrete qualities. Unlike manufacturing,
the labor of caring for human health is subtle, complex and requires significant
attention and is therefore not easily rationalized or automated. This is true
of many services, but is subject to even more limitations than, say, retail.
The “raw material” being “worked over,” so to speak, is the human body,
not a substrate that is malleable in the hands of labor. Revolutionizing the
production process to raise productivity rates and relative surplus value, the
primary tool of capitalists to increase their profits, is not so much an option
for capitalists wanting to make money off of medical services. This core
contradiction, which is an aspect of the contradiction between human social
reproduction and the expanded reproduction of capital, drives many of the
trends within healthcare, exacerbated in the US due to a special political
unwillingness to shield healthcare from the dictates of capital. Care labor
productivity is fiddled with through various managerial schemes over the work
process, technological assistance and expanded division of labor (the usual
mechanisms) but it is nonetheless persistently sticky and productivity gains are
38 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

largely static. Capitalists cannot opt out of seeking profit, however (and even
nonprofit institutions have been known to turn a profit), and as a result must
pursue margins by driving down wages, diversifying revenue streams, raising
prices and lowering the cost of care (and therefore also its quality).

Obamacare fits into a genre of schemes euphemized as “managed competition,”

a highpoint in the feckless loyal opposition of the Democratic party, a perfect
mix of corporate write-offs that could still be decried as socialism by the
right. This paradigm, first developed by RAND Corporation logistics analyst
Alain Enthovan, emphasized the reorganization of medicine into managerial
sponsors who would choose from competing health plans on behalf of patients,
supposedly optimizing based on abstruse cost-benefit models. This structure
ensures that private insurance companies can harvest pre-set capitation fees
from publicly administered trust funds, employers and individuals, which, unlike
fee-for-service payment structures used previously, ensures a much more stable
revenue stream that can be used as capital for these companies to diversify
investments. Managed competition was rejected by the Carter Administration
in 1977, but was subsequently promoted in countries in the Global South by the
World Bank, and has served as a means of plundering the public sector social
security funds in Latin America, Asia and Africa by private insurers, mostly
based in the US. Hilary Clinton headed a task force in the 1990s, which helped
jump-start her later political career, devising healthcare reform legislation
based on managed competition, which was not passed by Congress. It later
cropped up in Massachusetts in the form of Romneycare. After receiving the
largest campaign donation from the private health insurance industry to any
candidate in history, Obama adopted a managed competition reform plank,
moving away from his previous support for a single-payer plan. The result,
after endless tortured floor debate, was the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which
actually increased insurance company profits directly from increased Medicare
capitation fees.

Obamacare stopped short of, and in fact never aimed at, abolishing for-profit
insurance and healthcare provision; as such, its structure, written with the help
AMPUTATION 39

of insurance lobbyists, is sensitive to the kinds of distortions that profit creates.

While many private insurers still derive most of their income from contracts
with big employers, there is still a tendency to avoid the ACA “marketplaces”
and managed care organizations (MCOs). Nonetheless, like elsewhere, the
public money pot, here in the form of pre-negotiated capitation fees, has proven
to be quite lucrative. Public hospitals that historically have provided the safety
net for the remainders and margins of capitalist public health, such as the
beleaguered county hospitals, now compete directly with private companies for
public funding. This has prompted budget cuts and reductions in services, and
even set off a wave of closures. Obamacare was intended, at least nominally, to
plug the holes and provide coverage for the 40 million uninsured Americans.
To this end, it defines a minimum benefits package mediated by the MCOs in
order to provide the floor for coverage, purposely allowing room for a variety
of tiering schemes for those able to pay more. This way insurers and providers
could avoid the burden of actually providing universal coverage through a
labyrinth of hedging strategies, all of which tend to reduce quality and restrict
access.

There are three ways to look at healthcare spending: unit cost of service, unit
price of service, and the quantity or rate of utilization, which are, of course,
interrelated. For providers, keeping costs low, prices high and utilization
frequent ensures maximum profitability; for insurers, not wanting to pay for
such mounting costs, the incentive is to negotiate the unit price down – or
push this cost onto the insured and do what they can to manage utilization.
The cost structure in medical care is complex, but generally providers, like any
business, want to suppress their own operation costs. Corporate restructuring of
medical provision has tended to integrate both vertically, in the steadily rising
rate and size of mergers and acquisitions, and horizontally, in the centrifugal
sprawl of out-patient clinics, at-home services, nursing homes, urgent care
centers, radiology, and lab testing companies, therapy centers and private
specialist practices, referred to as the “care continuum.” Many of these are
their own companies, rent-seeking around the edges of the continuum, but
40 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

many of these smaller facilities are owned by growing hospital conglomerates

that are increasingly absorbing these smaller practices, to the point where
more physicians are employed by a provider network than operate their own
practices. The composition of physicians has decisively shifted, following the
incentive structures of private healthcare which emphasizes expensive post hoc
diagnoses and procedures rather than preemptive and lifestyle care: primary
care physicians, the frontline of any public health system, make up just 12% of
medical doctors, 85% some kind of specialist or subspecialist. This has been
accompanied by a decline in people who receive primary care, especially in
rural areas and urban centers, and lowered life expectancies. Such consolidation
offers more opportunities to transition to contract labor and temporary staffing.
The division of labor in clinical settings has shifted as well, with nurses taking
on more tasks in direct patient care, leading to higher workloads, higher
burnout and turnover, and more fatal malpractice. There is a global nursing
labor shortage, especially in developing countries, which has contributed to
such workload stress. This tight labor market has been capitalized on by
nurses’ unions to agitate for higher pay and better working conditions, but
hospital employers have responded in turn by transitioning to contract labor
and temporary staffing, such as traveling nurses and temps. Temporary staffing
enables providers to cut costs and bust unions. The extensive and increasing
casualization of nursing is a desperate attempt to produce fungibility in an
extremely tight labor market. Radiating out from centralized hospitals, into
the care continuum, we find even lower wages. In short-term clinical services,
such as running lab tests, phlebotomists, who draw blood samples, make a
median salary of $35,510 per year. Workers at LabCorp, a private testing
company with massive contracts, even managed to successfully unionize to
combat dismal wages. In Long-Term Services and Support, where 8.3 million
people, a majority of annual patients receive services from various assisted
living programs, 71% of staff are low-waged direct care workers (DCW) who are
mostly women of color. Still, an estimated 85% of long-term care is provided
by unpaid family and community. Most DCW are certified nursing assistants,
for whom wages have lagged behind inflation, 15% of whom live below the
AMPUTATION 41

federal poverty line and 13% of whom are themselves uninsured. Without
worker organization this is likely to improve as, unlike the labor shortage
amongst nurses, direct care workers, taken together, are among the fastest
growing employment sector in any industry, due to the rapidly aging population.
Certification and even training requirements for DCW are lax and inconsistent,
constituting a deprofessionalization and even deskilling of nursing. This effect
can be seen in the dilution of Advanced Cardiac Life Support, a protocol for
dealing with cardiac arrest, which now is excised from many nurse training
programs. Despite early success in a unionization drive by Service Employees
International Union, union-busting efforts are aggressive and well organized.
The Trump Administration passed a rule that prohibited home care workers
from paying union dues with paychecks issued using Medicare funds, causing
an 84% drop in union membership.

All of the above personnel decomposition allows big providers to lower their
operating costs. However, other factors push in the opposite direction. Admin-
istrative overhead, due to an increasing tilt towards management over medicine
in hospitals and the expanding science of claims engineering, has come to take
up 34% of healthcare costs, amounting to $2500 spent annually per person
on administration cost alone. The overreliance on managers to streamline the
efficiency of care service has not met as much success, as mass casualization
actually lowers productivity. Attempts to make doctors work faster and see
more patients, by shortening the time they see patients and relying on nurses
for everything else, have worked to some extent, but it gets tripped up under
its own complexity. Lean techniques strive to reduce “wasteful” allocations,
creating untenable rhythms and pacing. When services become spread across
many providers, either subsidiaries of a conglomerate or separate companies
networked together in an MCO, care becomes “fragmented” both raising the
utilization rate and lowering the efficacy and quality of the care. Fragmentation
does not follow differing regional health needs, but rather reflects the constraints
of business strategy. The practical deconcentration but financial conglomeration
of care services also allows these massive companies to reap the rewards of this
42 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

increased utilization, but it comes with costs as well. To overcome this barrier
to coordination, providers have implemented a much-hyped new paradigm
called Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. But EHR, now a $23.6 billion
dollar industry, seems to have actually reduced productivity, diverting time
spent with patients to filling out documentation, causing medical practitioners
to see fewer patients than before. The interfaces are counterintuitive, making
it difficult to actually track down much-needed information for physicians to
get a holistic profile of patients. The data entry follows a series of prompts
that don’t reflect medical priority, but rather itemization to optimize billing.
EHRs, despite their big data allure, often suffer from interoperability issues
caused by proprietary boundaries, causing lossy transfers, formatting errors,
and excessive human error. Nonetheless, this is a growing industry and one
being pushed by hospital administrators to accommodate the paradigm of the
“patient-centered medical home,” which is no kind of home but rather a bundle
of patient information that changes hands in large clinical teams managed under
a single physician; in other words, the institutionalization of personnel changes
described above. These EHR systems are costly, based on proprietary software,
in a medical tech industry that increasingly resembles the kind of overvaluation
bubbles of the rest of the tech industry. Medical equipment is the 4th largest
category of capital investment, 40% of which is leased, making it a $200 billion
a year industry. The regulatory environment is extremely lax, and so leasing
contracts are rent-seeking at their finest, with the proliferation of “per click”
arrangements, which charge providers based on use and just-in-time hospital
management. To keep equipment costs down, providers have shifted over to
“just-in-time” hospital supply chain management, in which inventories are kept
low and calibrated to demand with heavy use of data. All the same, costs
have steadily risen, even if not to wage growth, but providers have managed to
keep unit cost growing at a slower pace than unit price, effectively capturing
more shares of the social wage fund. Unit price growth is the single primary
driver of increasing expenditure, over rising chronic disease rates, and increased
system usage, growing at 150% the rate of unit cost. By dominating provision
markets with a high pace of mergers, providers have been able to negotiate
AMPUTATION 43

higher commercial claims disbursements from insurers.

Insurers do not bear this burden alone, and in fact manage to reap incredible
profits. They too consolidate in order to obtain regional monopoly, which
allows them to jack up premiums with little limitation. There are various ways
for insurance companies to pass these high claims onto patients. Total out-of-
pocket spending has risen 54% between 2006 and 2016. Premiums have risen
55% between 2007 and 2017, rising faster than wages. In addition, for market
insurance, the method of payment for medical service itself sneaks in hidden
costs. The US predominantly relies on fee-for-service line-item billing (FFS),
in which individual services are priced separately. Of all the types of billing
structure in healthcare systems around the world, FFS squeezes the most out of
patients, shunting the risk of business onto them, as providers can recuperate
costs through increasing the variety of unbundled billable services. For MCOs,
which use capitation billing (pre-negotiated lump sums), they structure their
plans into a series of tiers. A “Bronze” plan, the lowest tier that qualifies as
a coverage floor, is advertised as covering 60% of in-network expenses. This
percentage reflects the total payout for all beneficiaries with Bronze plans, so
an individual recipient may end up paying much more than 40% of costs in
a year, in co-payments, deductibles, fees for dependents, tiers for pharmacy
coverage. Various other plans – Silver, Gold and Platinum – justify higher
premiums with less point-of-service and deductible cost-sharing, but all plans
leave out-of-pocket expenses for the patient. Limited physician, pharmacy and
hospital networks allow companies to charge penalties for going out-of-network.
Co-payment increases of even $1 have been shown to turn the poorest patients
away from seeking care, leading to preventable health deteriorations requiring
emergency room visits and costlier procedures. Deductibles, effectively forcing
patients to pay their own way for most routine health services by front-loading
more costs, have grown to half of total cost-sharing payments, exceeding $1200
on average. In addition, fewer payments can be applied to deductibles to draw
them down; copays and monthly premiums leave them untouched. Plans are
constantly restructured once a patient begins to pay in, allowing incremental
44 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

reapportionments of cost. These plans rely heavily on “healthcare rationing”

with the use of utilization management, in which an external reviewer influences
healthcare decisions on behalf of the MCO or private insurer, often over the
patient or doctor, potentially leading to the denial of coverage for recommended
treatments, depending on cost metrics. While ACA outlawed denial for pre-
existing conditions, an endemic problem before, insurers still denied 18% of
in-network claims between 2015 and 2017, with huge variation between insurers
(<1% to 40%). These claims denials patterns have even opened up opportunities
to game the system. A rash of “surprise billings” hit patients, as they went to
an in-network facility which then quietly contracted out-of-network specialists
who charged full rate; an estimated 40% of procedures come with such surprises.

Adjusted for inflation, healthcare spending increased by an average of 9.9%

every year between 1960 and 2006. This is twice as fast as the GDP growth rate
over the same period, driven almost entirely by unit price increases in physician
services, hospital costs and pharmaceuticals. Throughout the 1990s, healthcare
prices rose at double the rate of inflation, and was already expected to again
this before the onset of the pandemic. Per capita spending on healthcare
expenditures compared to income can vary widely depending on coverage and
health, but can go up to 14% of income for households below the poverty
line, and 18.5% if at least one family member has health complications. At
the current growth rate, healthcare spending as a share of household income
is projected to equal median total income by 2033. Nationally, the costs of
healthcare, from hospital stays to insurance premiums to clinical services, are
unilaterally rising, with total expenditure equaling 17.7% of GDP, predicted to
rise to 20% in 2022, and averaging $10,000 per household, far in excess of other
OECD countries. Spending has grown substantially since 1970, outpacing the
rate of growth of GDP and much faster than the rate of inflation, over 50% of
this driven by high pricing rather than the quantity of provision. Forty-two
percent of Americans have some amount of medical debt, contributing to the
general condition of indebtedness for the working class described above. Medical
debt is especially burdensome, accounting for 66.5% of bankruptcies and often
AMPUTATION 45

requiring dips into retirement savings or forgoing necessities, and dangerous,

with half of cancer patients reporting that they delay medical care to avoid
costs, a common sacrifice which regularly leads to unnecessary hospitalizations
and even premature deaths. This massive process of restructuring leads to
a system of extraction operating in layers. As each and every component of
the healthcare system is privatized and attempting to profit off each others’
expenses, costs are pushed ever upwards. These are then compensated with
suppressed wages and price gouging, pushing the burden first onto insurers and
MCOs, who in turn construct arcane hedging methods to loot the pockets of
patients less and less able to pay.

The frailty and inflexibility of the US healthcare system is thus a direct result
of the industry’s ongoing subsumption into increasingly profit-driven modes of
organization confronting the particularity of healthcare labor processes. The
outcome is a rigid and unresponsive infrastructure more capable of rentier
extraction than dynamic movement when facing immediate crises. The con-
vergence of these accumulating instabilities produces the novel extremes of
this pandemic and the economic maneuvers required by capital to weather its
consequences. The de facto public health system, distributed across the market
and subject to the distortions of rent extraction, was a poorly tended-to dam,
privately operated, waiting to catastrophically burst with any excessive strain.
With nearly 2 million positive COVID-19 cases, as of June 4, we can safely say
the flood came. Twenty-eight million Americans still entirely lack healthcare
coverage. As COVID-19 spread to the US, many low-wage workers, lacking
paid sick leave, continued to act as vectors against their will. One in seven
workers said they wouldn’t seek care for COVID-19 due to prohibitive costs.
It’s a small wonder: one uninsured person said her treatment for COVID-19
cost $34,927. While governments have promised to cover the expenses of testing
and treatment, the fragmentary and disorganized healthcare system allows
plenty of room for insurers to stick patients with exorbitant costs. In a stark
demonstration of the structural pressures toward austerity, the US has repeat-
edly defunded pandemic preparedness programs for over two decades, leaving
46 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

hospitals to weather the surge without much coordination or reserves. The

paradigm of just-in-time supply chain management and lean operations has
left the hospital system extremely vulnerable to being overwhelmed, quickly
stretched beyond capacity and forced to “ration care,” restricting treatment for
“non-emergency” conditions. Even Bain Capital reversed its earlier advocacy
of lean supply management. Shortages of ventilators and personal protective
equipment made headlines, and led to bidding wars between states and shady
acquisitions, but all manner of care was subject to restriction, from medica-
tions to organizational capacity. Healthcare shortages are predicted tolast long
afterthe end of the pandemic. Electronic Health Records systems immediately
became an obstacle to epidemiological tracking, designed as they were for billing
rather than health profiles, with the low interoperability causing opacity in the
data, and the pathwork system too convoluted to roll out software updates
in time. Hospitals, whose revenues depend on high-price special procedures
and treatments, not routine care or emergency services, have tapped out their
cash flow, in some cases furloughing health workers, reducing salaries or even
filing for bankruptcy. Unemployment for healthcare workers is at 9.5%, in the
midst of a severe labor shortage. In a perverse actualization of the euphemistic
“patient-centered medical home” concept, some hospitals with no bed vacancies
scrambled to make up for it by using patients’ houses. Meanwhile, patients,
COVID-19 or otherwise, turned away from needed care lead to a severe spike
in the rate of people dying at home. Home care, staffed by underpaid and
deskilled direct care workers, have been forced to pick up the slack of the failing
hospital system. Nursing homes and other outpatient facilities are COVID-19
super-spreaders. Direct care workers, unable to socially distance from patients
they care for and who, again, are primarily women of color, work in facilities
that are tied to 20% of all COVID-19-related deaths. Healthcare workers, in
general, are extremely vulnerable, accounting for 11% of total infections, with
over 9,000 documented infections in the US and 300 deaths. To address the
shortages, Congress exempted healthcare workers from the paid leave expansion
in the CARES Act. Meanwhile, nurses’ unions have taken various labor actions
to fight for better conditions. Healthcare workers have been the ones who have
AMPUTATION 47

had to square the circle of the public health crisis, practically navigating the
equipment shortages, lack of protection and low staffing with work speedups,
longer hours and high-stress loads. This kind of strain, in the context of a
horrorshow of thousands of deaths a day, watching patients and colleagues
die and everyday feeling the obvious abandonment and callous disregard from
hospital managers and governments, is traumatizing and would lead anyone to
despair. To date, two emergency medical workers overwhelmed by the tragedy,
John Mondello and Lorna Breen, have committed suicide.

The inability to respond adequately to the scale of social need is a result of

the accumulated necrosis which has plagued the system. In order to overcome
barriers to its reproduction, capital has, in the past, resorted to a program of
amputation, coordinating within the capitalist class to ensure that it is only
living labor that is severed, deferring the re-emergence of a communist horizon
but exacerbating the build-up of dead capital. The proletariat, suffering from
its own advanced decomposition, has so far been largely ineffective at routing
this onslaught. This dynamic of defeat, which has structured the last 50 bleak
years, and the current move to sacrifice thousands of lives a day to maintain
economic normality, suggests that we can expect more bloodletting in our future.
But the exact extent of social decay that is currently being unmasked, and
the depth of our current plunge, is unknown. The social arrangements which
enable such a state of affairs to perpetuate in spite of the material requirements
of reproduction are possibly running into real limits, pushing us further into
an exceptional situation. These measures may only ensure a more destructive
manifestation of the economic crisis going forward.

This most recent phase in the crisis of capitalist reproduction is still taking shape,
and following along the lines of a consistent historical trajectory. Prospects
for recovery and the future behind it look bleak and few are willing to predict
otherwise. “Growth” in GDP in advanced economies is projected to be -6.1%
by the IMF, -5.9% in the US, a roughly 10% decline from before. Emerging
market and developing countries, a bourgeois euphemism for the imperial
peripheries, are expected to “grow” at a collective rate of -2.2%, excluding
48 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

China (along with India, one of the few countries expected to have positive
growth, 1.2% and 1.9% respectively). Goldman Sachs corroborates these figures.
The UN reports an overall 15% contraction in world trade in 2020. But these
already dire estimates presume a tapering off of the pandemic; indeed, some
of them forecast positive growth by the end of the year and ample rates of
~5.8% in 2021. But the very real possibility of a second pandemic wave is
looming, with the UN projecting a possible -0.5% GDP growth rate in 2021
in this case. Given that it will likely take 18 months to bring a vaccine from
development to distribution, we still know very little about COVID-19’s true
virulence or symptom etiology, and the consensus that recovery means putting
people back into the workplace, a second or prolonged initial wave is the likely
scenario. Now, the stock market surges against all indications that the fabric of
capitalist society is disintegrating, the Nasdaq is recovering total yearly losses.
The continuity of accumulation merely exists in the hopes of the market’s
futures and the “investor confidence” in recovery. According to Moody’s chief
economist, this speculative surge (which doesn’t reflect real profits or growth,
but the willingness of possessors of fictitious money-capital to continue to
circulate and trade) is attached to expectations of a “V-shaped” recovery, that
is, a sharp return to the prior trajectory of growth. Given that the recovery
from 2008 was “L-shaped” – recovering the same relative slope of growth, but
not to the same levels – an economist at St. Louis Fed proposed that we finally
pull the trigger andimpose negative interest rates in order to obtain the sought
after V curve.

Regardless, the long-term scarring is likely to plague the world economy for
many years to come. The World Bank, looking ten years ahead, posits a
number of deep adverse effects from the pandemic, focusing on long-term
slowed growth in “emerging markets and developing economies,” particularly
in China, which has thus far this century been the veritable heart of world
accumulation. They predict damage to productivity growth, as forms of social
distancing will become widely adopted as regular health and safety practice
in many workplaces, straining the primary tool capital has for improving
AMPUTATION 49

productivity: the concentration of workers. Output growth will fall even faster
than it already has been, especially energy output as the rickety price structure
of oil collapses. Most interestingly, they predict that capital capacity will be
severely underutilized, reflected in the previously mentioned productivity and
output rates. This means that an extremely high percentage of the accumulated
productive forces would hum at lesser rates or outright lie fallow, producing more
disused rust belts. This is exacerbated by the particular geographic distribution
of the productive forces, organized into a global accumulation regime wholly
dependent upon a stratified and deconcentrated industrial archipelago oriented
for exports and trade. Given the unique nature of pandemics, it is this structure,
so essential for propping up the rate of profit, that is especially vulnerable to
long-term disruption, as countries are forced to institute export controls to
stem the spread of the virus. Since the global industrial apparatus is already
at severe overcapacity, due to a high organic composition of capital, these
circumstances will only render this crisis tendency all the more intractable. We
can expect a dip in total value formation and the capacity for valorization,
and thus the rate of accumulation, the proportion of profit that goes back
into production. As the World Bank notes, investment will have to continue
innovating other pathways for accumulation, primarily in financial instruments
or real estate, doubling down on the existing debt bombs. We can expect more
financial asset crashes and more currency crises to hit a spiraling dollar reserve
value-measure system.

We are certainly not looking at a coming boom. Large scale opportunities for
profitable investment are increasingly non-existent. There will be no period of
profitable reconstruction of productive capital, infrastructure, and housing, as
there was in the ruins of Europe and East Asia after WWII; the virus alone will
leave the industrial rustbelts, empty malls and overleveraged unfinished con-
struction projects intact. The technological revolutions that once had massive
effects on increasing employment have long failed to deliver on productivity or
output increases, lead to persistent declines in capacity utilization, and have
bottomed out in employment. Technological developments have only grown to
50 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

increasingly expel labor-power from the point of production, simultaneously

rendering null the very element of the expansion of value. When conditions
for productive investment decline, money-capital that cannot be valorized is
instead diverted to financial investments fundamentally rooted in the sphere
of circulation, affecting the rate of capital accumulation and leading to the
formation of unproductive hoards which become increasingly susceptible to
speculative activity. Capital hedges on a future that material reproduction
does not allow.

Barring the absence of political feasibility for the massive destruction of capitals,
any semblance of recovery only becomes possible, as before, through the main-
tenance of the conditions for credit creation and lending capacity of financial
institutions. The accumulation of money-capital swells and the reproduction
of private capitals increasingly becomes a matter of redistributions of claims
on future surplus value. Cornering market shares through centralization of
capital and concentrating holdings becomes the sole measure of success, and
the fetish of money-begetting money takes hold as the flows come in, divorced
from their connections to material expansion. In this environment of growth
hinging on credit availability, the “zombie firm” becomes an apt symbol of the
crisis in value. Overleveraged corporate debt burdens weigh heavily on the
potential for productive growth in the coming future of industry, and this dead
weight requires that the well of liquidity and credit continue flowing, lest it
bring it all down again. The expansion of value, now petrified in dead forms,
is only reproducible if this gradual means of intensifying the appropriation of
surplus labor can be posited towards a future valorization of capital. As the
base for this grows increasingly narrow, this surplus labor capacity implied by
productivity growth manifests as an absolute surplus population proportional
to the growing masses of unrealizable surplus capital. Capital finds itself then
in a double bind, reproducing the social relations that form the content of value,
but as these relations are increasingly running out of steam and becoming
materially untenable. The predatory appearance of the appropriation of surplus
increasingly takes on rentier forms as the nets are cast wider and hooks deeper
AMPUTATION 51

into the externalized costs of labor-power’s reproduction, shaking extra coin

out of any nook it can find. The spatial fix of deindustrialization produces a
mutable terrain of capitalist production infrastructures, moving more and more
into hinterland regions as a buffer from proletarian access and struggle over
the very wage-relation that structures their subsistence, even in its absence.
This crisis in the wage-relation serves only to further foreclose the mutual
reproduction of the class relation, producing instead fragmented subjectivities
bent on the destruction of the present order instead of a mere share in its
plunders.

It is this very rigidity in the face of exceptional situations that reveal to us

the ultimate necessity of superseding capitalist social relations, whose image
of wealth necessitates mass privation. It remains to be seen what a new
order would consist of, though it is now struggling to emerge out of the
present crisis. There is no guaranteed immediacy of revolution from capitalist
breakdown all on its own; we must content ourselves with a turbulent and
ambivalent intensification of conflict which may shift the balance of class
forces and help realize our revolutionary aims. The bourgeois response to
contemporary crises are desperate, state-led attempts to preserve the existing
equity systems of national capitals in the face of the centralizing pull of the
crisis. Capital can reconstitute itself, but the great upheavals required would
yield an unrecognizable landscape. It is not totally unreasonable to anticipate
the possible reorganization of nation-states into new clusters and axes, the
dissolution and swallowing of entire parties and parliamentary apparatuses, and
new class compositions emanating from employment arrangements favorable to
the capital leftover in the struggle to consolidate. We can detect the embryonic
forms of these circumstances coalescing in the world today; they just need to
“make their break” and therefore require some sort of occasion. In the past,
this has meant war.
52 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

Death-Masks

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on

the brains of the living.” – Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The specter of war hangs heavy over the present conjuncture. Given the degree
of instability at present and the flailing attempts by the institutions of capital
to mitigate the crisis, it appears the question of war is merely one of which
kind. In the heat of the pandemic a number of struggles have taken hold,
and the conflicts of the years preceding are inherited and intensified by the
newest threat to a global order of capital that is already under severe strain.
In the deepening crisis of capitalist reproduction there lies an intrinsic tension
between particular proprietary relations that serve to buttress a given national
bourgeoisie, particular bearers of the character-mask, and the reconstitution of
capital in a more globally-integrated, de-personified and concentrated iteration.
Ensuing struggles might not exactly follow obvious pro-capital and anti-capital
interests, but instead find themselves mediated by intra-class rivalries inflicted
onto the respective national working classes. Revealed here is the dialectical
relationship between functionalist notions of state and capitalist institutions
and the compositions that the classes are constituted as at any particular
moment. Fractions of each class coalesce into ideological affiliations and interest
groups vying for political power, but these are fetishized forms, more specifically
the fetishization of form, following a class polarization intrinsic to processes of
capital accumulation, increasingly pursuing a fragmentation into innumerable
surface antagonisms. The class binary of capitalist production is counteracted
by this process of fragmentation and emergent antagonism. This is the actual
concrete terrain in which capital moves and within which the proletariat must
move to achieve liberation.

Compacts between different fractional compositions stabilize in a given con-

junctural arrangement, but, as seen with events throughout the still-developing
pandemic contraction, this base moves so rapidly that the numerous scattered
fragments, each with their own force and velocity, are falling into the chasm,
DEATH-MASKS 53

producing the appearance of social chaos. The constant heat of agitation

begins to overtake the pressure of its containment and threatens an explosive
transition. As is seen in the case of the right-nationalist protests demanding
economic reopening, it is possible for this unconstricted agitation to still be
politically useful for capital. Antithetically, there appears an immanent opening
for a war of position with the advent of the “essential worker,” contemporary
development which suggests a possible resuscitation of a proletarian movement,
drawing from the workplace and tenant struggles that are unleashed by the
present instability and struggle over reproduction. In absolute terms, however,
the prospects of a prolonged crisis in unemployment and the massive asymmetry
in organizational capacity make it such that workers are more replaceable than
ever. At the very moment that we must be intransigent, we are exceedingly
solvent. The sharpening of these contradictions are fertile ground for the
struggles over rents and a wave of wildcat strikes and actions unmediated by
unions, but note that these contradictions, while sharp, are not yet our tools
and are likely to cut away at us if we do not master them strategically. We
already live in amputated social conditions.

Of importance is the ongoing struggle of the condition of surplus population,

the growing mass of externalized surplus labor capacity increasingly spatially
disembedded from the concentrations of production while also far removed from
the spillovers of concentrated social wealth. These struggles take on the most
violent and fragmentary extremes of capitalist domination, as superfluity robs
the proletarian subject of reliable leverage in negotiations, while simultaneously
rendering this subjectivity one that is exposed to the total and impersonal
domination of military policing and surveillance in a reproduction increasingly
dominated by informal economic relationships structured along the outskirts
of the social wage fund’s circulation. This acts as a central location of the
ongoing reproduction of racialization processes in contemporary capitalism, the
exploitation of racial differentiation for wage stratification and labor arbitrage
(“last hired, first fired”) giving way to various forms of overt carceral domination
as surplus labor runneth over. The intensification of carceral regimes, the
54 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

widespread distribution of military surplus to even the smallest municipal

police departments and the formalization of predominantly racialized extra-
judicial killings speaks to the development of a sprawling apparatus for the
management of capital’s crisis of reproduction. As this crisis proceeds, we will
see the limits of prison society’s capacities tested.

Identifying these fault lines remains the work of any conscious action against the
reconstitution of capital. These fragmentations in the assumed class binaries
of capitalist production compose this dialectic of abstract and concrete, the
actuality of class and politics and the retrofitting of the state to reflect the trans-
formations that national capital has necessarily undergone with imperialism and
globally-integrated production and trade. There is a growing tension between
capital as a real abstraction – pure surplus value accumulation indifferent to
who makes up the capitalist class and where anything takes place – and capital
as the proprietary means for a particular group in a particular place to maintain
their ownership relation to production. Intra-capitalist competition remains a
factor, as does the question over whether capital as a totality can successfully
reorganize production to perpetuate itself, and whether this restructuring will
leave the same old bourgeoisie and nation-states in place. Is it a choice between
the hegemony of US and Western capital and the entire mode of production?
To what extent is a pivot to East Asia as the center of accumulation overdue,
and how does this dynamic play into the manifestation of this particular crisis?
Are the character-masks which have come to dominate through a cunning of
history now forming a phalanx of death-masks for the reigning order, appearing
more as obstacles to capitalism’s reconstitution than guarantors, waiting to
be swept to the side? This struggle is what makes it a conjunctural crisis,
in which all the social institutions which support a regime of accumulation
enter into a violent flux. When combined with the accumulating instabilities
that accompany the growing surplus populations, this moment contains the
possibility of resolving itself through the confrontation of these antagonisms
into something qualitatively distinct from the preceding period. We will now
look to the finer details of some of these recently escalating fault lines.
DEATH-MASKS 55

The current ecosystem of reaction is a contradictory outcome of the nonexistence

of a nation as such, in old terms, and the failure of global integration to stave
off crisis. This has produced intense nostalgia for past national might as both
an organic expression and a manufactured political fringe. This is seen in the
US most prominently in the Reopen protests, a series of efforts that began in
mid-April and have developed in various forms, beginning with the primary
impetus moving forward with plans to end lockdown measures to contain
infection spread, famous for their disregard of “social distancing” measures and
health protocol. There currently exist theories, plenty supported by convincing
evidence, that these indeed are composed of a coordinated effort from special
interest groups and coalitions that built connections during the Tea Party
formation of the contemporary right-wing surge. Coordination alone, however,
does not explain participation. In coverage of those involved, some divergence
of interest and political motive can be discerned. There appear to have been
disputes over method and urgency of reopening, some willing to adhere to
cautious timelines and others largely organized around memetic incarnations
of support for Trump and his interests, the anti-lockdown protest merely
another site in the ongoing culture war. What appears consistent, however, is
a high-degree of involvement and expression of business-owner, petty-capitalist
interests in the displays, as the disruption of normative exploitation here can
be a greater hindrance to subsistence than for larger capitals. It is in these
circles that outright denials of COVID-19’s existence or severity are found,
as conspiratorial thinking is anything but foreign to the contemporary US
right-wing.

A political tension clear in these mobilizations is that between the reopening

timelines set by states and the demands being placed on ensuing economic
activities from the Executive branch, the current regime’s sensitivity to stock
market volatility not being lost on anyone. Much of this has already manifested
in conflicts over PPE pipelines to states, where Federal agencies have acted to
intercept and requisition supplies procured by state governments, forcing many
to resort to covert forms of smuggling. States have worked over the past few
56 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

months to form and operate within regional pacts to strategize reopening on

their own terms, regardless of Executive wishes. Past statements of ominous
portent from Trump and leading media figures on the right have gestured at
the possibility of popular mobilization as a tactic to deploy in order to grease
the wheels of a political impasse. A key element of that degree of enforcement
capability in Trump’s base of support on display in the Reopen protests is
the far-right militia movement, an armed presence with Confederate or Nazi
flags being a common fixture at these demonstrations. Another element within
these formations to note is the invocation of the Boogaloo meme, a right-wing
shibboleth referring to the apocalyptic desire and supposed readiness for a
sequel to the American Civil War, presumably along much the same factional
lines considering the neo-Confederate elements involved. The most notable
escalation out of these has been the events surrounding the protests that moved
successfully from the lawn to the center of the Michigan State Capitol. Armed
protestors made it into the Capitol building on April 30 in a standoff with
police inside, attempting to make their way to the legislative chambers housing
the Governor and other state representatives. By May 14, two weeks later,
the state government announced it would be closing the Capitol building and
appears to be suspending certain sessions, in an attempt to avoid further clashes
and armed escalations. During the protest on the day closure was announced,
only 75 to 200 people were in attendance at any given time. This shows the
striking ability of armed factions of the right-wing in the US to concentrate
and deploy force to exploit crises, though contingent upon the sites where this
promises to be most effective.

The synchronization of interests with armed right-wing militants and the Trump
administration still appears one of mutual convenience, as the character of
this intra-class fraction is one of opposing visions for the future of anti-social
organization, but both converge on the maintenance of the reproduction of
capitalist social relations at their respective levers of exploitation. While
Trump remains inextricably bound by a reproduction of US capital that is
reliant on global-integration and maintaining the US’s particular hierarchical
DEATH-MASKS 57

position atop the organization of global value chains and trade arrangements,
the militia movement is a product of the immiserating hinterland regions of
systemic deindustrialization and exurbanizing poverty, led primarily by the
petty-capitalist and wealthier landowners emerging above the overall historical
trajectory of abjection. There is in these groups a defense of capitalist relations
founded through an anti-globalization bent, placed at the forefront of their
political commitments. A demonstration of this in the present instance can be
seen in the voluntary protection of businesses opening in violation of state orders
by armed militia groups, the more militant of them placing themselves “beyond
left and right,” in an ultimate goal of autonomous territorialism founded on
various forms of ethnic homogeneity or kinship in survivalism. The alliance
with Trump in these instances are pragmatic maneuvers from groups that
have a well-incorporated theoretical grounding in the exploitation of crisis to
advance their particular interests by destabilizing state institutions in certain
regions. The reaction in these incarnations of the right is such that these are
ultimately movements that realize their ends through exclusionary methods
backed by force, the vocal disdain for infection containment in the protests
itself a manifestation of this anti-politics, where obfuscation and conspiracy
cloud the terrain for the opposition, a phenomenon akin to a smoke grenade in
combat.
58 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

A crisis of state legitimacy is not merely the terrain of reaction here. The
unemployment wave and subsequent hit to the maintenance of relations of
exploitation that keep economic activity moving has produced the discursive
turn to the desperate and hollow celebration of the heroism of those workers
endangering their lives, through the “essential worker” classification. For every
DEATH-MASKS 59

instance that the “essential” distinction appears to outline the actual contours
of necessary reproductive labor in society, such as nurses, even more are plainly
obvious to be merely necessary for the functions of realizing exchange values
and preventing total economic collapse. For those attaching hope to the
apparent sacrifices made of the so-called “essential worker,” are they not buying
the boss’ propaganda? It is entirely questionable which of these labor tasks
would even remain in a social reproduction that becomes emancipated from its
subsumption by capital. The cyclical employment of surplus populations into
an industrialized consumer and service-heavy economy is revealing of the crisis
of surplus capital today. The unrealizable surplus of potential capital values and
commodity outputs must be either pushed to the extremes of realizing value in
the social processes of exchange, or constrained in output and thus consistently
exert an overleveraged burden on the costs of enterprise. Our employment
in society is increasingly meaningless, increasingly only existing to serve the
maintenance of the waning abstraction of value and thus perpetuate the class
domination which serves and is reproduced by it. It is then unsurprising to
see where these sites of proletarian struggle in the US have broken out in the
present conjuncture. The strange desperation of the “essential worker” ploy
then deserves some broader contextual grounding in the composition of this
particular historical instance of widespread wage precarity.

The mass precarity implied by the chronic underemployment and untenable

costs of living detailed above are not a result of rampant greed but instead the
terminal arc of necessary restructuring within global capital. The composition
of the labor market in the US and many other imperial core countries is directly
tied to the increasing superfluity of labor relative to valorization, leading to
deep polarizations in the geography of production and consumption. There
has been a wholesale reorganization in the global division of labor towards
integrated and stratified value chains cutting across borders, with workers in
several countries linked into a single process of capital turnover, the lowest-
waged workers producing goods to be shipped, warehoused, handled, retailed
and delivered by a vast services stratum in the Global North, elongating the
60 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

circulation time of the commodity before it reaches its terminus in consumption.

The form this takes is a product of history. The so-called service economy of
the Global North sediments the historic defeat of the working class, shattering
the politicized composition of the class in the imperial cores and dispersing
the most labor-intensive links in the increasingly transnationalized productive
forces to dominated peripheries outfitted with debt-funded infrastructure and
liberalized export practices. To be clear, most “services” are actually located
in the Global South, in the informal work it takes to survive in slums, but
the formal “service economy” that is now theorized in bourgeois economics
to mark the most mature stage of development is distinguished by what it
indexes underneath: the spatial concentration of consumption, forming a
complementary half in world reproduction. The complexities of this historic arc
are too numerous to fully explore here, but it suffices to say that new geographic
sectoral concentrations emerged, with new producing and consuming countries,
after the smoke cleared from neocolonial beach-heads in the 1970s and 80s.

This has a few relevant consequences for the present moment. The majority
of European and American workers perform services. The proximity that
these services have to production, in the form of scientific and technological
development, or to the circulation of commodities, such as transport, retail,
and marketing, may mark them as relatively “productive.” But large swaths
are not strictly involved in the circuit of capital valorization. Nonetheless,
the populations of the imperial core are responsible forthe majority share of
consumption, though these are skewed to the very top income strata. But this
usurpation of manufacturing by the periphery has only resulted in extreme wage
suppression and the distribution of goods out of those countries, contributing
little in material improvement to their lives. Indeed, production in the periphery
is increasingly tilted towards exports, as the export share of the world GDP has
more than doubled between 1975 and 2018, from 13.6% to 30%. The export
orientation and consumer product light industry emphasis of development was
superintended through the loan and structural adjustment programs of the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World trade Organization, from
DEATH-MASKS 61

the late 1970s and, later, by the China Development Bank, and facilitated bythe
proliferation of free trade agreements. The fragmentation of the production
process, in which the various steps of initial parts manufacturing through
assembly and final packing occur at numerous sites across the world, facilitated
by a logistics and shipping revolution, with multiple points of exchange in
intermediary circulating capital, has enabled surplus value produced all down
the line to funnel and concentrate in the final sale price, effectively distributing
value upwards into the core, amidst a net transfer of plundered wealth. The
material edifice of extraction through value chains underlies the outrageous wage
differentials seen between OECD and developing countries. This arrangement
has been necessitated by the spiraling development of contradictions in the
value-form, a countertendency to the fall in the rate of profit to export damage
from the imperial core to the periphery.

Diminishing prospects for capital to reproduce value directly follows the nar-
rowing conditions for increasing or even maintaining the rate of profit. Tech-
nological advancement in processes of capitalist production develop means
for the automation of labor tasks, increasing the efficiency in exploitation of
each individual labor input in production, ultimately requiring less labor-power
and the disembedding of proletarians from the point of production. However,
as this increases the productivity of labor in theory, thereby increasing the
rate of exploitation and thus the rate of surplus value, an increasing share of
value in capitalist production is tied up in the fixed capital values that only
reproduce the same magnitude of value through the course of the turnover time
that encompasses their wear and tear and eventual obsolescence. While this
increases the exploitation of each unit of labor-power, it progressively dimin-
ishes the base of a capital value’s expansion, i.e. valorization, in the production
process. Rates for productivity growth thus decline. Intensified output capacity
of industrial capital and the ongoing reduction in ability to profitably exploit
productive labor capacities lead this excess capacity to become increasingly
susceptible to crises of effective demand due to chronic overproduction. Con-
sumption must then be proportionately integrated into the reproductive circuit
62 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

of value, leading to a rise in service sector employment: an industrialization

of consumption. Stagnating output following this bind of overcapacity leads
to an imperative to lower the costs of production to the absolute floor. There
are significant wage differentials between workers in the core and periphery,
which are structurally required for capital reproduction, as they form the base
of mass consumption which enables these value chains to be realized within the
borders of the Global North. But, as the progressive immiseration described
in section 3 demonstrates, we are approaching real limits in the capacity of
this form of globalization to successfully realize the values latent in the global
productive forces, as wages stagnate in the Global North and workers are beset
on all sides with predatory capitalists cutting away little pieces of flesh.

With this understanding, it becomes more clear the exact nature of the fear
lying behind the rushed calls to resume normal economic functions than the
largely performative demonstrations of the Reopen protests: the entire edifice
of world accumulation depends on every knick-knack making its way from the
periphery through the Amazon warehouse into the hoards of merchandise we
call homes in the imperial core. The backdrop in the rise of the “essential
worker” reveals a widespread wave of actions taken by workers on their own
initiative to combat the clear and present dangers to their health by being
forced to continue work in the pandemic. Between March 1 and April 28, there
were at least 151 wildcat strike actions, as can be examined in this essential
COVID-19 strike wave map from Payday Report. The planned strikes and
walkouts in Amazon fulfillment centers have been well-documented, from an
instance on April 21 where 300 workers called out of shifts at 50 fulfillment
centers, to the May 1 strike plan joined by Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target
workers, demonstrating emergent coordination taking shape among workers
in retail, distribution, and shipping centers within the industrial sector across
capital owners. This is a strength in the present moment, as these are precisely
those sectors increasingly prominent in labor market activity in the ongoing
trajectory of the US as a highly-financialized service-heavy economy. Within
the distribution and transportation industries, multiple instances of truckers
DEATH-MASKS 63

taking the tactic of“slow roll” actions to protest dropping wages and low freight
rates by either disrupting traffic on interstates to a crawl or encircling capitol
buildings, as in Phoenix, AZ and Austin, TX. Public transportation workers and
bus drivers have also demonstrated, as in a bus driver’s strike in Birmingham,
AL, and a transit workers’ walkout in Greensboro, NC after coworkers tested
positive for COVID-19. Not all of these escalations in worker militancy are
proceeding unopposed: sanitation workers in New Orleans, all hired through a
temp agency, who went on strike to demand hazard pay, sick leave, and proper
safety equipment were all fired and replaced with prison labor making $1.30 an
hour.

Industrial manufacturing sectors have also seen their fair share of struggle.
Between March 19-20, workers in an automobile manufacturing plant in Detroit,
MI shut down operations after infections emerged in the workplace. In this
mainstay of the Rust Belt, hundreds of FCA Mack Engine Plant workers
also walked out on the job over safety concerns, and on March 18 in nearby
Sterling Heights, MI workers at a Chrysler plant went on strike over the same
concerns. On April 20, workers at the Boeing factory in Renton, WA refused to
show up to work, surely a detriment to a cornerstone manufacturing company
for US capital that in recent history has seen ongoing problems of stymied
growth beyond the 737 Max crisis of last year. In other production spheres
of the domestic economy, a fixture of the present configuration of relative
social stability has been the food sector, most notably that of meatpacking and
slaughterhouse workers. COVID-19 has been found to spread twice as fast as
the national average rate in US counties with major meatpacking plants. These
counties accounted for 10% of all new cases reported from April 28 to May 5,
primarily affecting rural regions where many of these plants are concentrated,
away from the initial urban outbreak epicenters, affecting regions notorious for
high poverty rates well above the national average and inadequate healthcare
infrastructures. In one of the only actual invocations of the Defense Production
Act to date, on April 28 Trump signed an Executive Order to keep meatpacking
plants open and workers active in the facilities in order to mitigate potential
64 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

disruptions to food supply chains.

Prior to this, workers in meatpacking plants across the US engaged in conflicts

to deal with the health hazards of their environments. As early on as March
23, non-unionized workers at a Perdue Chicken plant in Kathleen, GA went on
strike, with employee Kendaliyn Granville saying of the situation, “We’re not
getting nothing — no type of compensation, no nothing, not even no cleanliness,
no extra pay — no nothing. We’re up here risking our life for chicken.” In
Greeley, CO, on April 1 approximately 1,000 workers, largely migrant laborers,
walked off the job at a 4,000 person JBS processing facility. On April 15, Tyson
Fresh Meats workers in Waterloo, IA staged a sick-out where hundreds refused
to work. In response to the Executive Order, workers have been responding as
needed. On May 1, a Tyson plant in Dakota City, NE had to slow production
down due to a high degree of absent employees. Workers are quitting en masse
at Smithfield Foods Inc.’s meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, SD, following a
wildcat strike by 50 workers at a Smithfield plant in Crete, NE on April 28, the
day of Trump’s order. In response to the potential unrest and risk of infection,
Nebraska state health officials decided to simply stop reporting case numbers
as they arise. Just recently on May 14, a Tyson chicken processing plant in
Wilkesboro, NC has been forced to shut down twice in one week due to high
rates of absenteeism.

It is easy to see then how crucial economic reopening, ensuring a “normal” state
of exploitation, is for the maintenance of capitalist reproduction at present,
already taking a hit that will endanger it in the future in a still-to-come full
realization of the general crisis. There is evidence of endemic misreporting and
manipulation of data on negative tests, both at the CDC and in many states,
to paint a portrait of successful containment and encourage reopening. The
appearance of worker actions in these spheres are very much undertaken out
of the immediate necessity of maintaining health in the face of endangerment,
but could quite easily spill over into a generalized awareness of the capacity
of an embedded workforce to bring capital to its knees, should the need arise
in the future. This still, however, remains a resurgent front of the worker’s
DEATH-MASKS 65

movement completely contingent upon the instability of the present situation,

and cannot yet be said to be the only front important to the development of
the struggle to come as the crisis develops. Before inessential businesses are
allowed to resume operations, “essential workers” constitute a possible strategic
bottleneck, a fact recognized and taken into account in the current strike wave,
with many workers using the boss’s propaganda against them. But the high
degree of unemployment guarantees an opportunity for capital to liquidate
troublesome workers, and the possibility that unemployment could stay high
for some time with little promise of future relief from federal funds signals an
extremely competitive situation for workers to stay “essential,” lest they be
expelled once capital regains its footing. These are not the only sites of struggle,
however, as things heat up in the now-vast sphere beyond the workplace.
66 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

Tenant struggles here can be seen as a site of struggle for both those with
“essential” jobs or are still working from home and for the masses now rendered
jobless, as many of the nearly 40 million unemployed are still expected to
pay rent for shelter. With grim prospects of a job market recovery in the
near future, the downward pressure this will exert on wages will manifest as
deeper rent burdens for many. The tenant movement is having a clear moment
in the inability of municipal, state, and federal governmental authorities to
sufficiently mediate the class conflict between the proprietary appropriation of
surplus by capital through landlording and the inability of laid-off tenants to
pay rent, lest they forego feeding themselves and their families. This faultline
DEATH-MASKS 67

really exposes the central contradictions of capitalism: because the danger

of spreading infection is so severe, people are unable to work which, under
capitalism, means they can no longer afford housing, at precisely the moment
when society as a whole needs to be sheltered. While the inability to pay rent
poses a challenge to the traditional strategy of a rent strike, where the tenant
organization’s leverage is withholding the rent with ability to pay, organizations
across the US, largely in urban centers, have mobilized and worked with tenants
to strategize coordinated strike actions.

The Autonomous Tenant Union Network quickly released a pandemic-specific

organizing toolkit, as did some of its largest bastions, the Philly Tenants’ Union,
LA Tenants’ Union and SF Bay Area Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which
are both COVID-19-related and generally applicable. These autonomous tenant
unions have recently grown very fast. One of us organizes with Bay Area TANC
and we can confidently say that our membership has quintupled since March.
New autonomous unions have sprung up in a number of cities; individuals
we’ve been in contact with have initiated unionization campaigns in new cities,
laying the seed for an eventual grouping. New councils of tenants who all
share the same landlord have formed within the unions and existing ones have
been reinvigorated. Many of these groupings are in the process of organizing
fellow tenants, agitating against their landlord, and openly struggling to extract
demands from landlords such as protection from eviction, rent reductions,
and full rent cancellation. Many state and local governments have passed a
patchwork of injunctions, perhaps freezing evictions or allowing tenants to
delay their rent for a range of months, all contingent on a hopeful but likely
delusional scheduled return to normalcy sometime this next summer. As of
writing, no jurisdiction in the country has moved to fully cancel or forgive
rent for the period of the state of emergency, the only measure that will keep
people securely housed long-term. And many existing measures are rather weak
protections, requiring all sorts of means-testing and documentation, relying on
court systems being dormant due to COVID-19 rather than explicit legislative
language, or building in backdoors and loopholes for landlords to evict or take
68 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

action to collect on rent by turning it into debt subject to collections agencies.

In truth, the protections are quite uneven, which has granted room to maneuver
in some areas, such as Alameda County in the Bay Area, but much less so
in others; this crapshoot of legal relief has as much effect on the success of
organizing as anything else. These measures are all temporary and will likely
require extending as the economic and health crisis surely will not be resolved.
However, which states and localities actually grant the extension is up in the
air, and likely the kinds of measures and extensions adequate to deal with the
precarious situation so many find themselves in will depend on the organized
pressure that such tenant unions can exert. While this growth is encouraging,
this iteration of the tenant movement is still very nascent and finding its legs.

This new emergence is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is little
in the way of existing bureaucracies mediating the activity of the “rank and
file” as in the labor movement, which have proven time and again to be timid,
conciliatory vehicles that are often outright obstacles. Without such an ossified
husk of previous struggles standing in the way, the nascent tenant movement can
grow on terms set by tenants themselves, including more flexible autonomous
structures, resembling more the “earlier” stages of workmen’s associations but
with the benefit of hindsight. On the other hand, the crisis of rent defaults is
massive and unprecedented and the larval class organization that exists and
is currently being built is not capable of rising to the occasion and shaping
the course of things. In addition, a variety of advocacy and direct service
nonprofits, insisting on petitioning the state, are very involved in these matters,
steering the demands and messaging into models that fit their structure and
fundraising needs. This low development of class composition is insightfully
discussed by Justin Gilmore, a comrade in TANC.

While we, as tenant organizers, think that a measure of formal organizing,

to aid in coordinating solidarity and amassing maximum impact, is the best
route to the construction of a viable and toothed tenant movement, there are a
number of exciting developments that are more spontaneous and sporadic. In
New York, 12,000 signatures appeared on a pledge to withhold rent, loosely
DEATH-MASKS 69

organized as an online petition. Strike activity amongst less organized pockets

of tenants kicked off across the country and in Canada kicked off in April and
May, possibly numbering in the thousands. As discussed above, nearly a third
of tenants did not pay rent in April, a significant uptick. The other side of
housing struggles, that of ending houselessness and soliciting or expropriating
housing for this purpose, has had some significant developments as well. Earlier
this year, Moms4Housing, a campaign of black homeless and marginally housed
mothers and their children, took over an empty home in West Oakland, in their
words “evicting the speculators.” They eventually had to resort to eviction
defense shifts staffed by community supporters as the Alameda County Sheriffs
menaced them with threat of eviction, which was eventually carried out with
the brandishing of assault weapons and armored vehicles early one morning.
The moms were later able to come to an agreement to purchase the home with
the landlord. Inspired by this brave inhabitation of empty real estate, a group
of unhoused people in Los Angeles called Reclaim Our Homes took over 12
houses in a 163-house tract owned and left empty by Caltrans, California’s
transport infrastructure agency, a week before the shelter-in-place order. State
police then stationed themselves throughout the neighborhood to intimidate
the reclaimers. In Chicago, a group of rent strikers and unhoused people took
over a building owned by Deutsche Bank and turned it into a shelter for people
experiencing houselessness and a community mutual aid hub. Such instances
are placed in their historic context of an illustrious proletarian tradition of
housing liberation by some other TANC comrades, Julian Francis Park and
Hyunjee Nicole Kim.

These are relatively small and infrequent actions, reflecting the extreme risk
that squatting and expropriation requires and the low capacity to sustain
long-term support. The eviction defense for Moms4Housing brought out over
300 people, many of whom eventually had to go home, opening the way for the
militarized police to come around early the next morning. This enthusiastic
volunteer base is encouraging, but for now the state and rich speculators can
afford to wait it out. This thorny and dangerous practical problem is the
70 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

exact impasse generally facing nascent proletarian class compositions as they

slowly coalesce into intermeshed movements capable of real actions that secure
gains. In order to shift the balance of class forces decisively in our direction,
the ability to sustain strike actions and expropriate and defend housing and
other resources will have to be built up. These are daunting prospects, but
there are latent and unexercised potentials in a tenant movement, centered
around autonomous unions and councils composed of tenants, linking up with
movements of the unhoused and landless. As hard to imagine as this is now, it
is something that will become increasingly necessary as more and more people
fall into housing insecurity by high rents and brutal evicters, get displaced
into worse housing farther from their jobs and eventually become homeless. In
truth, tenants, like all workers, are virtual paupers in waiting, easily expelled
and replaced by the shifting needs of capitalists and property owners only to
then face an increasingly policed and privatized urban space that pushes them
to the absolute margins, joining the ranks of the disposable sleeping rough
under freeway overpasses. Rent strikers are essentially squatters in the eyes
of landlords, approaching that precarious place of living on another’s land
from the other side of the unsheltered by expropriating a house for themselves.
There is no clear path or formula, but building a strong and militant base,
tied together through shared struggle and solidarity, can perhaps hit a critical
transition point and become a flexible movement, with well-tested tactics to
seize housing and ably defend it.

The situation has seen a spur in an already growing sector of class struggle in the
US, and the hits are indeed impacting landlords, perhaps forecasting a similar
concentration of property in the rental market as we saw in the aftermath of the
2008 crisis. Given the centrality of rentier capitalists to the US economy, the
cancellation of rent as a demand and potentially realizable action poses a threat
to an entire sphere of capitalist reproduction. The construction of housing in
real estate development and growth of a population of renters is an increasingly
vital sphere of industry for the reproduction of capital domestically, as loans
and credit continually flow into these sectors driving bubble expansions of
DEATH-MASKS 71

speculations and asset valuations, propped up by the appropriation of surplus

value in these assets through interest on loans, the whole edifice only concretely
backed up by the continual appropriation of wages through rent and loan
payments. The possibility of a prolonged period of defaults would roil the
entirety of the real estate market, a contagion that could rapidly work its way
through into a generalized financial crisis in a similar way that brought the
global economy to the brink in 2008. This is why state actions themselves
cannot muster the political will for any response other than rent repayment
plans and the accumulation of rental debt to tenants already unable to pay, for
any rent cancellation cements the collapse that is already forming.

To return once again to the question of war, the disintegrating symbiosis

between the US and China is a key international development signalling the
erosion of the consensus arrived at in the late 20th century achievements of
capitalist globalization. The previous year’s trade war remains in negotiation,
and following the efforts of the US to pin the blame of the pandemic on China,
the value of newly announced Chinese direct investment projects into the US fell
to just $200 million in the first quarter of this year, down from an average of $2
billion per quarter in 2019. As we observe the bipartisan chicken race over which
party can be the most hawkish on China throughout the rest of this election
year, it appears safe to say we have long passed the signal point of arrival for
the modern Cold War with an ascendant capitalist counterpower. Countering
US smears that China has failed to deliver on “promised reforms,” President Xi
Jinping has recently said that China will no longer seek attempts at a planned
economy, a predictable outcome and the overdetermined culmination of decades
of liberalization and global-integration that has been China’s trajectory since
at least 1978. China, itself experiencing industrial restructuring along the
same lines as the systemic deindustrialization in the US, is making attempts to
transition to a more service-led economy along the lines of the more developed
capitalist core economies. Much of the tension of this attempted transition
can be seen in the ongoing internal problems of expansion and overcapacity
occurring in the Chinese workforce, as wage gains after the post-2008 stimulus
72 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

efforts gained by a strike wave from restive labor flatlined following the 2015
collapse of the Shanghai stock market, making export surplus increasingly vital
to the national capital, and an aggressive position on trade conflicts with the
US a matter of necessity. Technological dominance plays a crucial role here as
well, as last year, for the first time, China surpassed the US in international
patent applications, threatening the axis of US dominance in the tech sector
through appropriation of surplus profits by way of intellectual property rents.

The rhetoric of politicians in the US often frames the pandemic as a war with
the “invisible enemy,” and bipartisan hostilities towards China are greatly
intensifying. As many analysts, commentators, talking heads, and even the
IMF are already declaring this to be the worst economic downturn since the
Great Depression, it escapes no one’s memory, despite the poverty of bourgeois
society’s historical consciousness, the rejuvenating effects of war by which the
US was able to emerge triumphant after that crisis. As we illustrated above,
however, this immobile expansion of value, globally-integrating interests of the
capitalist class, and internationalization of production, as well as the paradigm
of nuclear-capable militaries, make the possibility of a hot war conflict between
inter-imperialist powers not quite tenable, much less politically feasible, at least
in the immediate term. With globalized expansion of productive capacity and
the internationalization of trade flows, a major hub of production that has
stayed prominent within the US and central to its internal expansion is the
defense industrial base. Often a focus for demonstrating the disparity in public
investment into social programs, the defense industry remains a leading field for
the US economy. It is interesting to note, however, how the military-industrial
sector itself has undergone a degree of equalization in production conditions
and predominance of financial operations on par with the general trend of
industry in global economies. The sensitivity of defense companies to capital
markets and investors presents us with a militarization operating in a distinctly
international context, far from the clashes of nations we fear in the present
with increasing hostilities between the US and China.

The global landscape of war exists in the shadow of nation-states now am-
DEATH-MASKS 73

biguously attached to national capitals, an internal tension arising from the

contradictions within capital’s tendency to expand beyond any containers.
The national bourgeoisie are defined best in terms of proximity and inter-
meshment with a given central bank and banking system required for firms
to retain stability, yet increasingly manage investment portfolios much more
global in practice. The practical maintenance of the national capital is now
impossible without tending to the interpenetrating global networks of trade,
supply chains, and flows of financial capital. Currency valuations hinge on
bond markets and treasury securities, the asymmetrical organization of pro-
duction and circulation activities that have resulted from the contradictory
relations of value-determination give us a world of property alien to itself and
yet interdependent. Inter-imperial conflicts between great powers appear to
be complicated by the contestations between capitals untethered to any one
state. Even the apparent autonomy of the US Federal Reserve’s actions in the
lead up to and wake of this crisis find themselves beholden to maintaining the
fragile entanglements of a capitalist reproduction process in stasis.

For all this, however, a so-called “deglobalization” is indeed making itself an

established presence through the disintegration of the order established by
decades of international moves towards expansive liberalization. While the
“trade war” between the US and China may have had the most immediate
impacts and grabbed the most headlines, the November 2019 OECD Economic
Outlook Report maps out a global economy experiencing trade disputes as
a growing international trend, ushering in declining investment flows from a
4.33% annual growth rate in Q4 of 2017 to just 1.52% in Q2 of 2019. The
shutdowns in travel and further contractions in investment brought about by
the disruption of the pandemic prompted Henry Kissinger to pen, in an op-ed
published in the Wall Street Journal, that “the pandemic has prompted an
anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends
on global trade and movement of people.” While the old guards of empire
may now be recognizing such developments in print, the breakdown of the
international consensus has been an established trend dominating the preceding
74 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

years’ geopolitical movements, as can easily be seen in the intensification of

border regimes to engineer suitably structured national labor markets amidst
mass immigration. The manifestation of these trends into victorious democratic
seizures of executive power over legislative stasis in core economies is certainly
not merely the fault of the pandemic.

The signal year 2016, with the victories of Trump and the Brexit referendum,
cemented a set of reactions not previously visible from the surface veneer of
liberalism’s global hegemony. The center has consistently failed to hold as it
is overcome by the depth of the crisis faced by capitalist reproduction today,
and panics in the face of another catastrophe that threatens to make this crisis
of legitimacy irreversible. Even in stimulus efforts aiming to hold an economy
headed towards depression together, fractures are emerging in the institutions of
bourgeois rule. Notably, the crisis in the deteriorating Eurozone refuses to abate,
as Germany’s constitutional court may bar Bundesbank, the German central
bank, from participating in the ECB’s multi-trillion bond-buying program,
prompting the ECB to either take legal action themselves to bring Bundesbank
back into the program or bear the burden of making up their quota without the
largest shareholder in the ECB. This comes as recovery strategies are divergent
across core economies, as Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF,
has advocated for systemically important banks to suspend dividends and stock
buybacks to shareholders to maintain buffers of retained capital in order to
weather the crisis ahead, in direct conflict with the interests of the speculators,
investors and corporations that subsist off these dividends, between capital as
such and the cohort of particular capitals composing it, a sure sign that rifts
in the global bourgeoisie will intensify in the conflicting interests that such
measures would provoke.

While we observe these tensions forming amongst the bearers of capital, it

remains more likely that it is, in fact, the class war that is in the most danger
of becoming a hot conflict in the near future, and that the coalescing Party of
Order is indeed aware of this and the measures that will be necessary to protect
capital throughout this crisis. Defense industry production has shifted largely
DEATH-MASKS 75

into the production of surveillance technologies developed from knowledge

gleaned in the urban conflicts of insurgent warfare characteristic of the Forever
Wars in the Middle East. Already in the pandemic, a surveillance apparatus has
been rolled out for trial in Baltimore using aerial capabilities, the location surely
not a coincidence, and in India a state-backed surveillance program, designated
now for contact tracing, is underway. The potential mission creep of contract
tracing is obvious, as it entails tracking one’s movements and social affiliations,
and has already been actualized: police in Minneapolis are using contact tracing
technology to map out the social networks of protestors there. The increase
in military capacities at home is part of a broader feedback loop tendency of
capital accumulation in this industrial sector. Military spending produces new
use-values, but not posited directly to the future production of value. This
depends on the specific application of these means of destruction. In the case
of military force to secure domination of a raw material input for production
processes, we can see a more direct path to value reproduction, though still
not reproductively integrated itself. Military spending does, however, tend to
increase the rise in the organic composition of capital, and thus the growth of
the industrial reserve army, reproducing its own use-value by producing that
necrotic and unruly surplus which it comes to police and incarcerate. It is
no coincidence then that outside of imperial implementations to secure raw
material inputs for production, military spending and the defense industries
find productive expansion in surveillance technologies developed in insurgent
zones abroad finding new homes in application to domestic populations who
are increasingly rendered surplus. This build-up of military weaponry and
surveillance tech, the circulation of counterinsurgency tactics, and the global
institutional interpenetration of police and militaries constitutes a particularly
menacing excess of enforcement capacity, mostly on reserve but able to muster
concentrated force with increasing agility and itchier trigger fingers. The arsenal
of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has historically and continually cut its
teeth on people of color domestically, particularly black people in the US, and
various colonized peoples in the periphery. This process then structures the
ongoing processes of racialization that inflict gratuitous violence against people
76 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

of color and functions to recompose the proletariat into a stratified mass of

effectively segregated populations.

The prison is increasingly a site of the present order’s crisis of legitimacy as

well, and a key area in the racialized geography of the pandemic’s impact.
Prisons in the US are already epicenters of infection, one example being seen
in Lompoc Federal Prison in California, where 70% of inmates have tested
positive. Women’s prisons in Florida have become epicenters for high infection
rates across the board. At the Yakima County Jail in Washington, 14 inmates
escaped in late March following the state’s declaration of an emergency stay-
at-home order. Throughout April, inmates in Cook County jails participated
in a series of actions, from hunger strikes to uprisings and attacks on guards to
a class action lawsuit, to demand COVID-19 testing, soap and face masks, end
of the use of bullpens to group inmates in close quarters and even early release
back into the community. On April 30, ICE detainees in Adelanto, CA went
on hunger and work strikes to protest lack of disinfectants and general health
measures. This was certainly to be expected, as in Italy at the outset of the
emergency declarations widespread jailbreaks occurred, with such instances
as a revolt at Foggia Prison, an escape following the assault and kidnapping
of guards in Pavia, and an uprising at Dozza Prison, just to name a few.
While these by no means can capture the full scope of the unrest happening
behind the walls of capital’s modern system for the brutal domination of those
rendered surplus, the cracks in the penitentiary walls are growing, and with
these capital’s claims to legitimacy as it struggles to contain and mitigate its
inherent antagonisms.

The brutality of the struggle we face moving forward is already making itself
apparent to us beyond the mass death of the pandemic and the containment
measures the state has since abandoned. As economic functions resume in
the reopenings, the “pent-up demand” sought after by hopeful economists
is revealing itself to be pent-up bloodlust, the collisions of fragmentary and
alienated social relations in crisis taking precedence over any economic theory
of “rational actors.” Three teenage workers at a McDonald’s in Oklahoma City,
DEATH-MASKS 77

OK suffered gunshot wounds as a woman opened fire on them for telling her
that the dining area was closed. A security guard at a Family Dollar store in
Flint, MI was murdered by a woman after asking her to put a mask on before
entering the store. A black man in Brunswick, GA was murdered by two white
men in broad daylight on unfounded suspicions of theft, sparking local protests
and demands for prosecution. Racialized extra-judicial police executions have
remained consistent despite the crisis, as seen most notably in Indianapolis, IN,
San Leandro, CA, and Minneapolis, MN. The bare violence defining American
life, well in the public eye for the better part of the past decade, has not ceased
or slowed in deference to the pandemic.

The previous cycle of riots that erupted in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD

now have reasserted themselves with a vengeance. In Minneapolis, following
the execution of George Floyd, a protest of thousands followed, and those
present justly sought to exact a proportionate response in kind. The ensuing
destruction of police cars, the fog of tear gas, the ripping of rocks and rubber
bullets amidst barricades of steel and shopping carts all made national headlines
in the hours of their unfolding. Over the week of May 25, the rapid shift from
riot to insurrection took hold, as a siege of the MPD 3rd Precinct resulted
in cops fleeing, having exhausted their ammunition, with the looting and
incineration of the station following on May 28. That night, the entire country
learned that we can burn down the strongholds of the police if we are bold and
numerous. The following weekend, protests erupted across the country, at the
time of this writing they are to the count of 380 cities across the US in all
50 states, and many countries across the globe in solidarity; protests often
led by black youth. This moment has already broken numerous precedents,
and there are many developments worth discussing, but things are still very
much in flux. It is clear that no party is in a position to authoritatively predict
anything, as both the police apparatus and the rioting milieu are currently
testing their own limits and capacities, so we will just make a few comments.
Actions have quickly escalated into direct confrontations with police, the lines of
America’s streets now lined with the burning husks of police cars and canisters
78 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

of CS gas. Journalists are now consistent targets of the police and military, all
precedents for domestic conflict are being breached as the forces of order seek
to control the narrative and enforce compliance. Following the explosion of 50
protests across the country on May 29 alone, 17,000 National Guard troops
have been authorized and deployed in 23 states, police forces in metropolitan
regions have consolidated to the core sites of struggle, and the police have
escalated their brutality as the threat to the power of heavily ideological policing
institutions bubbles to the fore. Following the murder of Breonna Taylor from
a no-knock raid by police in Louisville, KY, which set the current uprising
there in motion, police there have already executed another unarmed black
person, David McAtee, amidst the uprising. At the time of writing, it appears
that there have been 7 verified murders of protestors at the hands of police so
far, a number that may not give the full picture, given the chaos of information.
In addition, 11,000 people have been arrested across the country in the span of
a week; in comparison, 4,500 protestors were arrested in 5 months during the
Hong Kong uprising.

“Outside agitator” narratives are on the rise, the nation’s liberal bourgeoisie
lining up in lock-step with the Trump administration’s narrative in an effort to
divide what is demonstrably a multiracial and working-class revolt that defies
the decrepit political infrastructure of an empire that has proven irreformable.
Racialization processes structure the extremes of this crisis and will aim to
be reinforced, as the calls to return to civility increasingly aim to diffuse any
militant actions acting in solidarity across racial coalitions. Suspicion abounds,
paranoia is on the rise, but the danger is certainly real. The narrative of
the pearl clutchers hinges very much on the tired exasperated trope of the
disenfranchised that “destroy their own communities,” however, many of the
uprisings at present are targeted at the symbols of luxurious wealth of the urban
core and the police occupational outposts of their communities, a geographical
contour that itself must be seen as a possibly conscious attack on the racialized
displacements of gentrification that surge throughout the country following 2008.
The new cycle of uprisings is clearly gaining ground, following lessons from the
DEATH-MASKS 79

past while quickly developing in the moment to respond to the objectively new
territory that is being charted. Fire emerges as a common weapon, “broken
windows” deliver on the nightmare urbanism promised by the architects of
mass incarceration, and non-violence is quickly discarded in favor of fluid but
combative tactics. This already makes it apparent that these intense conflicts
will be a persistent trend, as continually escalating expressions of political force
in the pandemic crisis, and indeed the only option in many instances still, as
proletarians treated by capital as externalized costs seek leverage in a situation
they never chose.

To the extent there is an explicit demand, it is for cities to defund their police
departments, which is already being conceded in Los Angeles, though only with
relatively slight cuts. In truth, these protests are composite formations, with
multiple characters. Some very much treat the gatherings as liberal protests,
with particular choreographies, symbolism and messaging, and goals which are
campaigned for through soliciting allies in reformist politicians, reflecting the
involvement of existing nonprofit and activist groupings. But, often at the
same location and standing in some tension with the former, there exists a
multiracial throng of highly agitated and mostly very young militants spilling
throughout the cities. This gives fuel to those decrying the “professional
incendiarism” of the white anarchist outside agitators, but any careful observer
of the composition of these crowds can safely reject such framing in the majority
of cases, as they are neither primarily white nor previously steeped in a political
subculture in any obvious way. These “riotous elements” can be described
in some instances as “circulation struggles” in which rioting is a means of
“decommodifying” goods produced elsewhere to meet immediate needs. Looters
might take such things as diapers or shoes. But much of the activity is not
strictly goal-oriented, instead tending to look more like defiant jubilation when
a risky move yields a trophy or intense and passionate street battles with a clear
and dangerous enemy. The real content emerging from these struggles, as we
see it, is in the fight for control over urban space, which becomes a motivation
in itself. For black, indigenous, and other people of color, free movement
80 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

is constrained and confined by the racist police state which continually and
ritually abjects them. The police rule the streets, an inverted expression of the
growing surplus populations. As long as the formations remain agile, bold and
willing to flood into the cracks in the armor, by continuing to overwhelm the
police lines, they are practically demonstrating the limits of the state’s ability
to deploy concentrated force at will, in many cases rendering them impotent,
establishing evidence on the ground of this impotence and rushing to fill the
void with a new sense of collective power.

We cannot help but note, with no claims about simple causality, that these
large-scale uprisings occurred the week when real unemployment reached 23.9%.
Black workers are at 16.7% unemployment as of April (most recent statistic),
2.5 % more than white workers. Less than half of black adults currently have a
job. In the aforementioned St. Louis Fed study about household wealth, black
households are nearly twice as likely as white ones to be unable to afford a
$400 emergency. All the same, black workers make up a disproportionate 17%
of essential workers (compared to 12% of total employees), particularly in jobs
requiring close proximity like bus drivers or postal workers and jobs with partic-
ularly high infection risk. Black Americans are consistently disproportionately
likely to contract COVID-19 in many states, with predominantly black counties
experiencing a death rate six times that of predominantly white counties. In
New York City, over half of people who died of COVID-19 are black; in Chicago
it is 70%. This bleak portrait expresses the structure of racialized abjection
in the US: black people are often the last hired and first fired in an already
precarious labor force with the lowest median wages, having to accept the relief
pittance the Federal government offers for the unemployed. At the same time,
they make up many of the services, jobs with little sick pay that constitute the
frontline of labor that the government has shown itself willing to sacrifice. It is
no wonder then that the time came for further militant assertions that black
lives matter.

The police seem shaken and understand the conflict in much the same terms:
as a contest for space, the conquest of terrain. There is a lot of video evidence
DEATH-MASKS 81

on the internet right now of extreme brutality, as well as police explicitly

planning to take exceptional action to avenge the affront to their authority.
Having lost some ground as these formations successfully routed their efforts
at containment, many departments have had to fall back, turning to other
agencies and jurisdictions. National Guard deployments are on the rise in urban
areas, mutual aid agreements between nearby departments, county sheriffs and
state police are in effect to help close ranks in metro centers, the FBI has been
spotted wearing fatigues and sporting assault rifles, and prison riot suppression
“specialists” from the Federal Bureau of Prisons have appeared in a number
of places. There is even speculation of the use of private military contractors.
The Border Patrol has been deployed to Washington DC, which lies within
its expansive 100 mile border zone jurisdiction, a worrying development as
the CBP retains the right to warrantless searches and seizures in violation
of the 4th Amendment. Many talk of rumored future military deployments
if this all reaches a zenith, debating back and forth about its legality under
the Posse Comitatus Act, with the “liberal” New York Times publishing an
op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for “restoring national order” by sending
in the military. Numerous fascistic vigilantes have come out attempting to
harm protestors, mostly getting repelled by selfless and decisive takedowns.
Nonetheless, courageous protestors are refusing to give in. The policing appa-
ratus remains overwhelmed and unable to quell the energy, as of writing. The
riots are sure to continue to be a presence as the crisis deepens. An empire in
decline will see such fracturing bursts of violence and carnage, the social body
ripping itself apart as crisis exacerbates the already growing tendency of capital
to find means of functioning despite its failing reproduction. An asymmetrical
war of maneuver is fully in motion. The police must be treated as occupiers
and engaged as such. We are in for a long and hot summer, and a year that
still has yet to fully unfold.

The war we face ahead will be one unlike those experienced by movements
that came before and sought to transform society, to revolutionize the social
relations upon which reproduction is founded. We may still sing the songs
82 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

and wave the flags of dead generations, but their ability to communicate to
us beyond the grave is limited, and these transmissions may only serve us in
the practice of engaging the class struggle as we now experience it, as it is
already emerging in advance of and from this crisis. The current struggles
themselves might not yet have cohered into specific, focused forms, but the
mistake must not be made to merely transpose revolutions of the past onto
the struggles of the present. To prefigure fixed forms of appearance of these
social relations risks giving into a mere critique of the mode of distribution that
perpetuates the antagonism of these social relations, themselves constituted
by an alienation specific to the organization of production and exploitation in
society, one that exists for its own sake and always aims to expand beyond its
own limits according to the dictums of valorization. The arrival upon these
barriers grinds the engine to a halt while the gas is still floored, so to speak.
From this stasis, the quasi-independent existences of these social relations
are then thrust into motion, encountering each other in this environment of
alienation, our social constitution encountering us in the determinate conditions
that created this form of alienated socialization, appearing as an objective
constraint. This encounter of a developing subjectivity as a political agent
within the objectivity of its situation becomes a decisive factor in such moments
when continuity is called into question. We must reject the reified social roles
that are congealing into universal death-masks.
DEATH-MASKS 83

The consciousness won in struggle, however, must be such that the causal
relation of determined circumstance is revealed as the continual incorporation
of the preceding phases of practice in struggle. The exercise of practice in this
struggle produces the experience by which successive grounds can be gained
as struggle advances. Experience will neither appear to us readymade, nor be
gained all at once, but instead by degrees, as we engage in perpetual conflict
with the unexpected. War is the haven of uncertainty, and it is these very
moments of crisis where the contingencies exposed by the failures to guarantee
reproduction clear space for a political contestation of classes and a potential
shift in the balance of forces moving forward. It is the waste and refuse of
capital today, an accumulated surplus of dead labor that can now only be
set in motion into a speculated upon future in increasingly fictitious forms,
constantly subject to violent disruptions, where these proprietary claims on
value evaporate as illusions of a material reproduction are further shattered.
The material production of value feeding these great chains of money-capital
and proprietary capitalists always must remain just enough to grease the
gears, though it becomes increasingly improbable, subject to fits and starts,
devolving into a massive crumbling as soon as this shutdown initiated an
84 MASK OFF: CRISIS & STRUGGLE IN THE PANDEMIC

impediment to this motion. We should not overestimate the termination of

capitalism just yet, but there is a necessity to be able to demonstrate how the
perpetuation of “extra-economic” coercion on the part of the bourgeoisie will
have to be amplified, and how best to strategically respond. Hence the surge in
insurrectionary uprisings against police, the rapid enhancement of their force
in retaliation, the rise of a proto-fascist movement, the surveillance of striking
workers; in short, the escalation of the smoldering class war.