‘there will be no recovery’ (ready for the times to get better)

so may is over (sunniest month on record, and one of the driest too). you won’t hear horsemouth complaining. he is well ahead on his suntan for the year. they have sent children back to school (and, when they know it is safe, parliament will be returning too).

‘there will be no recovery. there will be social unrest. there will be violence. there will be socio-economic consequences: dramatic unemployment. citizens will suffer ... some will die...’ 
- jacob wallenberg, scion of one of global capitalism’s most powerful families envisages an economic contraction of 30 per cent and sky-high unemployment to follow.

as horsemouth remarked at the start of this crisis it is not like 2008 - a crisis in the credit farming mechanism that feeds the rich, this is a crisis in production and consumption, in world trade, in the key activities that generate and circulate value. even if the frustrated consumers come out of lockdown and spend spend spend, even if there aren’t second and third spikes we all still get hit with a tidal wave of redundancies and a tidal wave of state debt down the line. and we’re not even out from under the virus yet. it’s like we don’t know enough about what the virus does to be able to fight it effectively yet (even if the ruling class weren’t incompetents). 

going into the crisis agamben (seeing the state of exception spread out over the entire of society, seeing bare life as mere survival become most people’s only aim) raised the alarm publishing an article ‘the invention of an epidemic’ (quodlibet, 20/02/20).

in some senses he is right - in response to the virus many states have gone straight to its biopolitical grab bag of ideas (even if the implementation in the uk and us has been distinctly shonky), and in other senses he is wrong, we cannot tell yet if the virus is a big enough threat to warrant this (we won’t know for sure until it is over and the dead have been counted).

what the crisis does do is speed up the rate of change (and allow the state to sneak in a few measures they would otherwise hesitate to attempt). the dead are made up not just by those killed by the virus, not just by those who die because the underfunded health systems do not have capacity to treat them but also those who die as a result of the economic changes the virus brings in.

just as the 2008 crisis caused a spike in food prices causing widespread hunger across the world so will this crisis. but hey, we are just in the foothills of it.

meanwhile. the cops have killed an unarmed black man and there have been riots and protests in many american cities (horsemouth was pleased to see people marching to the US embassy in london). of course the longer the protests go on the more people the state will kill attempting to halt them.