Viral Insurgencies: Can Capitalism Survive COVID?

1. Civil Protest—from Event to Social Epicrisis

    “Protests against racial injustice intensify in US,” “Bulgariaengulfed in daily anti-government protests,” “Protests turn vio-        lent in Beirut as anger against leaders grows”    —news headlines in early August 2020 displayed the unlikely      eventfulness of radicalism in the time of pandemic.²

Surely, an acute public health crisis is more likely to focus the said public’s mind on the mundane emergencies of personal survival or even on the exalted metaphysics of human frailty—with both activities best done in solitude, than incite mass insurgencies, remarkable in their ubiquity and duration, about the state of democracy and the nature of rule. Indeed, the civil unrest that erupted amid the COVID-19 pandemic in some (at least nominally) democratic countries³ seemed odd. Not simply because the participants—mostly younger adults from the middle and upper-middle classes who tend to take the health emergency seriously—violate the social distancing measures they in principle support.⁴ The protests are extraordinary also because they have not voiced any pandemic-related grievances, such as governments’ failure to manage efficiently the public health crisis, or the fact that the pandemic and the measures for coping with it are hurting the poor and the already vulnerable minorities disproportionately. The death and economic devastation that the pandemic has wreaked did not trigger protests about such bread-and-butter issues as impoverishment and job loss—like the Yellow Vests had done in France in 2018, when a planned “climate tax” on fuel threatened to aggravate further the effect of austerity policies. Such a reaction could reasonably be expected. In June, the World Bank warned that the world is on the precipice of the deepest economic slump since 1945 with up to 60 million people being pushed into poverty; the US Federal Reserve Bank reported the worst decline in output and employment in 90 years, and the European Central Bank announced that Europe has entered its biggest economic crisis in peacetime.⁵

These protests are not even about a phenomenon widely bemoaned in recent years—the spectacular economic inequalities that, we have [End Page S-87] been told time and again, are the great scourge of our societies.⁶ In a word, these protests have nothing to do with the three great political credos that have defined progressive politics for a long time: redistribution, recognition and representation. What are, then, these uprisings, these eruptions of “pandemic radicalism,” telling us about the state of democracy? Can they help us obtain a somewhat plausible epicrisis, a critical assessment, of our societies’ state of health?

At first sight, the three cases have little in common—the particular claims to suffered injustice hardly bear comparison: in the US the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by the police, unleashed decades of built-up public anger with racial discrimination and abuse of power; in Bulgaria, people took to the streets to protest the media oligarchs’ grip on the economy with the blessing of ruling elites; in Lebanon, citizens accused the government of negligence that led to a gigantic explosion in the port of Beirut that demolished vast swaths of the city. However, precisely because of these differences, articulating a common denominator could be a heuristic tool for going beyond the singular events and into the systemic dynamic that gives them their larger social and historical significance.

Indisputably, these insurgencies are deliberate ruptures in the political common sense, in the logic of rule, as they disrupt public order. But more importantly, they also constitute ruptures in these societies’ habitual logic of dissent, and not only because they are taking place seemingly at the wrong time—a raging pandemic—while expressing a grievance seemingly unrelated to coping with it. They represent a rupture in the logic of dissent in a yet more bewildering way. In Lebanon, the protesters accused their government of corruption and mismanagement, and forced it to resign—a government that had come to power only half a year earlier on an explicit mandate to crack down on corruption. The cabinet had received the briefing about explosives having been stored for six years...