Corona Virus: Difficult Times and the Haunting Utopia

I hardly care for days and time these days. It hardly matters to me if it is a Sunday or Monday. Only day and night makes sense; other minute dimensions of time seem to be irrelevant these days. We are locked down. We need not and should not move around to ensure safety of our lives. The monstrous pandemic is gaining strength day by day and the number of affected people as well as the death count rises fast. Suddenly everything comes to a halt. The sky has never been so clear, even one can see the different shades of blue contrasted with bright silvery sunlight. The calm and quiet that the virus brought to us, to homo sapiens, might be a cause of wonder for other living beings whose existence humans hardly recognised in their busy life. Now in metro cities you can hear birds chirping, cows and buffaloes mooing loudly, they cross busy roads without being perplexed by the cacophony of heavy traffic. The pride of humanity, of thinking that the planet and the nature should behave according to their whims alone gets a big jolt. We feel debilitated and scared not because of missiles thrown by powerful countries but by microorganisms that threaten to corrode our bodies en masse.

 

 

In the beginning two three days of the lock down I tried to ascertain my freedom using the enlarged unexpected disposable time; I can sleep as much as I can, I can read without thinking about what I would be producing from the stuff, I can watch movies one, two or three a day. It appeared as a quiet revolt against the discipline that we imbibe from our childhood through schools, colleges and universities that are meant to produce labour, manual or mental in sync with the capitalist clock. But the ‘economic man’ re-emerges again and again that understands the purpose of life through a structured sense of rationality or meaningful use of time. And broadly speaking, that meaning of life has to be realised in the market through its exchangeability. It is a rare experience where parents stay with their kids all the day or adults stay with their parents all locked in a house where hierarchies of issues by metrics of more useful and less important gradually evaporates. People learn to share spaces, emotions, food and entertainment, household chores and somehow learn to compromise individual choices. It is also the time for less envy and less pride. No discussion about who did what, who went where, who ate what or who wore what! The fluctuations of achievements and failures in our individual perception curve have become dull more like a horizontal line. And since happiness is a function of the gap between expectations and achievements, as expectations fall to the minimum level of being alive, our happiness index should have improved! It seems we are locked down to learn something else apart from saving ourselves from the deadly Corona.

 

The warmth of familial and community relations and that of concerns about society at large are precious things which very few of our countrymen can actually appreciate. Just think for a moment that because of another surgical strike, a very harsh of its kind, but needed lock down suddenly closes your avenues of earning. There is no guarantee that salary would be credited in your account at the beginning of the next month; you are not sure whether can buy your necessaries and at the least can ensure two square meals for your family. A rickshaw puller, a labourer at the spot market, a daily waged construction worker, an auto driver, a prèss wala, small vegetable vendors, hawkers, sex workers, beggars and such huge number of precarious labour who are immediately losing their jobs due to the lock down face a cruel trade off: corona versus hunger. They seize to be responsible father, mother, son or daughter in their respective families because of the social distancing. Ruthless cities close their doors for the migrant workers. Employers are clever enough. They didn’t pay the workers the accumulated due wages and landlords throw them out. Some state governments came forward to provide food and shelter to the migrant workers. But mind that workers did not prefer to live the life of beggars and decided to walk hundreds of miles to rescue their security and dignity.

 

People say that death is the greatest equaliser in our society. The poor has nothing to lose be it alive or dead and the rich reaches that level of nothingness only when they die. Death equalises caste, class, gender and all divisions and deprivations. The fear of death also insinuates a similar movement. Everyone wants to die amidst their kin, their tribe and community. The rise of the market and the primacy of individual progress moved people away from their kinship. People move forward leaving behind their ascribed past. It is the fear of death that once again reminds them about their kin. All want to share misery and death with their close acquaintance; it is the last resort of compassion. International passengers are the real carriers of the virus this time. They were not stopped nor were disinfected by chemical spray as the arrive at the airport. The internal migrants decided to walk hundreds of kilometres to go back to their villages. Now all the state borders are sealed and thousands of migrant workers are in a state of limbo; neither getting a shelter at their shoddy work places as there is no work anymore, nor is embraced by the native villagers because of the fear of contamination. Cops hounded them like criminals, disinfected them like animals and the dark underbelly of capitalism, the low cost supply of packets of labour power are now seen by the society at large as the dangerous class of virus carrying irresponsible unwanted humans!

 

For many, lock down is a lull before the storm: aviation, tourism, FMCG, hospitality industries are shivering more than one affected by corona fever. Close down, pay cuts, furloughs, lay off and all symptoms of recession are looming large. Farmers are unable to sell their crops, no work for daily labourers, no payment for migrant workers, domestic help and care givers don’t know how far the compassion and generosity of their middle class employers will continue. Alike others the poor are potential carriers of virus so they are locked down but in this process they are also knocked down to become confirmed cases of hunger and destitution.

 

 

Liberalism taught us about the primacy of individual subjective satisfaction as the uncompromising essence and monad of human well-being. But now it is time to respect collective concern. Social distancing has apparently become the most preferred way to respect the social concern. Individuality is immensely curbed both in terms of movements and options but we are happy to accept such self-restraint without complaining much. Priorities are redefined ignoring individual freedom and choice; resources are allocated where it is most needed. Even social priorities define sequence of death in some countries where it has almost gone out of hand. Countries that were hesitant to impose restrictions on individual movement and did delay in acting upon seem to be the worst affected. While non-liberal authorities seem to have shown reasonably better outcomes. A situation of crisis and emergency taught us that individual freedom can’t be unconditional and collective concerns are nothing primordial as it is often posed to be. People are ready to accept restrictions and volunteer restraints if they are convinced that it is for the collective good.

 

Lockdown shows that life goes on even if malls, restaurants, gyms, movie theatres are closed down. It gives a sense of what actually we need to survive, the necessaries that one must procure. This is not to say that apart from the necessaries the rest are luxuries and can be and should be avoided. We do derive satisfaction from goods and services beyond necessities and there is nothing wrong in it but such satisfactions have different dimensions and need not be driven by possessing goods and services always. In fact deriving satisfaction only by possessing is a sign of impoverishment and human beings can easily go beyond that if the narratives around them changes. At the current moment many people are happy to give and share rather than possess, people are much more compassionate to those who are facing severe problem of livelihood. The competitive instinct of having more than others has somehow taken a back seat for the time being. Generally capitalism recognises only buyers and sellers. Commodities do not have history and neither do life of the sellers matter to buyers. We hardly care about the life of our vegetable vendor, the shopkeeper, the delivery boy, domestic help, auto driver, teacher, doctor and so on. It is only relevant as a point of exchange. Once you pay the price of the pizza your fleeting engagement with the human being who delivers the pizza is over. The relationship between human beings appears therefore to be relation between commodities. As if when you have enough money you become the most independent person of the world. You need not care about any relation with any human being in this world and can get whatever you require by paying for it. The veil of money economy conceals the social relation that exists among human beings. It comes to the fore only in situations of emergency. Lockdown is the temporary suspension of exchange and perhaps reciprocity and use values get temporary prominence. People are caring about their service providers, sympathetic about migrant workers, sharing responsibility for the elderly and thankful to those who are helping every day in keeping our life going. For the time being at least people realise that society is not an aggregation of self-interested individuals but a mutual constitution of the individual and the collective.

 

The religion of market efficiency is seriously facing question worldwide. Privatising gains while nationalising losses, has become the unwritten rule of the game. Stimulus packages to revive the sinking ship of neoliberalism are frequently announced even in the citadels of corporate capitalism. Humans of the world are paying the price of privatising health care. Our life cannot be the business of profit making for the few. We cannot let one die simply because s/he cannot pay the price of the required health care. Many countries are nationalising their private health care facilities because efficient rule of profit maximisation is proved to be grossly inefficient in handling this huge pandemic. Mind that realising the importance of public health care system in the context of fighting the corona virus, is primarily because the disease and the death is infectious this time. Had this been as benign as death due to hunger, malnutrition or because of inaccessible health facilities otherwise, if the poor died just for being excluded by the market as it happened in every other day, it was not contagious for others. But the virus perhaps empowered the poor! Their disease and ailment, their movement, misery and death have to be taken seriously this time. They become important because they can cause harm to others and need to be cured because this time they do not die silently and can create threat to others’ life. Hence, normalisation of excluding the poor is somehow destabilised and at least for the time being, the ‘public’ overrules the ‘private’.

 

 

Experts see an ensuing recession if not another great depression; growth rates are likely to dip to near zero or negative levels in immediate future due to the lock down. The scourge of mass unemployment and insecurity is going to create a crisis of legitimacy for capitalism across the world. Cost of privatised health care deter testing and cure and aggravate the pandemic. Social distancing has a cost for the poor that they bear to ensure health and life for the whole society.  Now it is time for social sharing to face the impending crisis. But this is nothing beyond our imagination. We do not deny food and clothes, shelter and medicine to any of our family members because s/he lost job for some reason, we care for our elderly without paying any heed to whether they can earn, we do not calculate that children and elderly are dependent on earning adults. It is only when the context changes from family or community to society our responses tend to be different. The same human being who happily contributes to relief funds, volunteer to prepare food for the poor and destitute or lend time and labour to procure groceries and medicine for an elderly neighbour, share and drive vehicles in situations of medical emergency, emerges to be the rational self-interested individual in a different context of normal life. We live in a society where returns are only based on exchanges and hence insensitive to use and need that do not fit into an exchange equation. In a sense normalcy of the capitalist society subverts our humanitarian qualities. Once normalcy is restored we would once again tend to argue that there is no free lunch; that hunger is the deserving punishment for the jobless and why should one get food, clothes, health care and education if s/he does not have the capacity to pay? Mind that, it would be a disaster if capitalist instincts of profit making once again attain dominance over human needs. Simply tax the rich, introduce tax on wealth instead of exalting corporate philanthropy, restrain luxury consumption, pump money for new investment, create jobs and income. But more importantly we should de-commoditize necessaries such as food, clothes, shelter, health and elderly care as well as education.

 

We need to relook our decision making process and priorities of allocating resources. The Corona crisis shows how incapable we are to meet emergency requirements of masks, sanitizers, testing kits or ventilators. It shows how woefully inadequate our health facilities are, despite experiencing episodes of high growth and rising number of billionaires. We need to alter the priorities as well as the decision making process. This is also something we mortals do in our daily life. Whether to keep money for school fees, pay rents, buy essential medicines or go for a trip or a dinner is the micro level household planning we are habituated to. We do not require a bureaucrat or a politician to decide on our behalf. Grudges and bitterness are mitigated by collective resolutions that are accepted as good for all members of the household. True indeed, what is a simple routine act in a household management is difficult for the country as a whole. It requires understanding of planning, science of setting priorities as well as institutions of participatory feedback on changing needs. But the moot point is the need of the people rather than profit making should guide social priorities and resource allocation. It is not only about nationalising hospital, schools and factories but bringing people into the centre stage of social decision making. Doctors, nurses, health care providers and patients can decide better what should be the priority in the health sector or the teachers, students, publishers, and related non-academic staff can suggest the needs of education system. Workers, engineers, managers similarly can decide what to produce and how to produce. Collectives of people, communities and councils can easily share the pains and gains of the society rather than offloading the pains onto the poor and the powerless.

 

 

Will it be the case that if people are provided food and necessary goods and services free of cost it would encourage free riding and shirking from work? This may not be the necessary outcome. Mind that people shirk from work when they are treated simply as cogs in a wheel; where mind and labour is separated and they are to follow instructions and nothing to decide. They are alienated from the fruits of labour while gains are appropriated by few. Altering the rule of the game also changes human behaviour. And more importantly it is in capitalism paradoxically where the rich can enjoy life through generations without doing any work because of their accumulated wealth. In fact we do not need to work so much compulsorily to fulfil our needs. Because a part of the fruits of our work actually goes to fulfil the luxury consumption and insatiable thirst for profit making of the non-working rich.  If everyone excepting the old and the disabled has to contribute in social labour we need not have to work much. Improved technology has already drastically reduced the need for direct labour but we should collectively own and enjoy the disposable time and increasingly get rid of compulsory work. People in that case would be much more creative and actually may opt to work much longer hours at their choice. Labour then becomes the mode of self-realisation and the biggest joy of life.

 

Human civilisation has a long history of overcoming natural calamities and catastrophes. The two most critical attributes that distinguishes modern civilisation from pre-history is one, the capability to acknowledge ignorance and the second is by creating higher orders of cooperation through imagined reality. The quality to accept ignorance kept alive the quest for scientific knowledge enabling the human race to master their surroundings instead of surrendering to predetermined fate. And humans could surpass other beings not by their physical strength and valour but by means of ideas that facilitated higher orders of cooperation for the future. It is time once again to prove our strength. Not only we develop a vaccine for the novel Corona virus but also rekindle our instincts of sharing, empathy and cooperation that we discovered within ourselves in difficult times. The haunting utopia amidst the pandemic is the new imagined reality of collaboration and reciprocity that could save the human race from the savagery of competition and profit making.