Search the archive.

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic served to remind us that despite our Cartesian fantasies of control, naturing nature (natura naturans) is still active in the form of an untamed Other. The dominant reaction on most political sides was anthropocentric: if we do something – a doing generally framed within the scope of technique and management – nature shall go back to the kind and submissive non-viral neutrality that we appreciate in ‘her’ as a supposedly passive resource for productivism. How could humanity – a pandemic species itself and not only metaphorically – be better attuned with the powers of naturing nature, in a posture of co-creation rather than of a reactive technocratic war against the non- periodic or ‘monstrous’ aspects of life? This question is a matter of philosophical health: the future of humanity does not depend on statistics and logistics, but on the possibility of a philosophical (re)generative politics, a trustful care for creative singularity rather than an anxious control and production of regularity. Humanity’s collective health presupposes this reconciliation with naturing nature and the deployment of a global shared cosmology based on the creative healing-growth flux of originative creativity. This regenerative and life- affirming creative Real is here termed ‘Creal’, and we call ‘crealectics’ the generative philosophical health that favours healing growth.

Introduction: recalcitrant nature

Biopower offers a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary forms of governance within a neoliberal order that includes patent law ownership. Foucault argued that, starting in the seventeenth century, mechanisms of power shifted from the sovereign authority to take a life toward the power to foster life.8 Power became directed at administering and regulating the biological existence of populations. Bodies became subject to “techniques of power”9 through diverse institutions such as schools, churches, hospitals, and the family, which were aimed at managing populations for the development of capitalist production. Power therefore, according to Foucault, transformed into a discursive power that “comes from everywhere.”10 As a consequence, Foucault claims that the juridical system of law gave way and shifted to law as norm. This does not mean that the law is no longer an important site of inquiry. Rather, the law, whose task is to govern life, begins to operate more as a norm and “the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, etc.) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.”11 This later point is important for our purposes.

Law remains a crucial site of analysis to consider within biopolitics. Yet, attention must be paid to the discursive and regulatory power of the law and how it is embedded. How does patent law act as an ethico-legal norm privileging certain forms of knowledge production, bodies, and subjectivities over others? How are patent law, scientific knowledge, and the life science industries co-constituted? How is patent law employed as a technique to optimize and manage life in the service of neoliberal capitalism?

Resources of the commons, such as free education, are continually renewable. If we read a text, offer an interpretation, discern a new truth in science, this by no means limits anyone else in doing the same. On the contrary, interpretations and new science proliferate when people are encouraged to build off the exchange of ideas, affects and interpretations. This on its own should be a justification for offering free K–12 and higher education! The logic of consumption distorts our view of the commons. For example, we are not running out of fossil fuels, in fact, there are too many deposits, and they should be left in the ground. Education should promote a fundamental shift in the logic of production from utter con- sumption of the commons to the proliferation of the commons (p. 300).

In Canada, Latin America, and New Zealand indigenous curricula and pedagogies that promote non-exploitative relationships and communal living are gaining ground thanks to community and indigenous activism. In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista movement led to the establishment of autonomous education for indigenous Tzetsal youth in which children learn, alongside literacy and numeracy, skills for political resistance, col- lective democratic engagement, caring for land, gender equality and the revolutionary role of women, etc. (Barronet and Ortega Brena, 2008). In Canada, aboriginal communities have engaged in democratic politics through dissensus in the name of equality (Rancière and Corcoran, 2010; Bazzul, 2015). Indigenous political actions break down artiicial dichoto- mies between natural and social commons. The Idle No More movement advocates a view of rivers, lakes, and non-humans, as part of the same commons and deserving of equal consideration—something unthinkable to a modern juridical mindset. Such activist movements are alter-futures (much like Hardt and Negri’s concept of altermodernity), a combina- tion of democratic thinking and communal forms of life. Idle No More employed social media to (re)produce commons resources, understand- ings, and labor needed to ight for just futures. Educators whose aim is to produce a common livable world must challenge colonial discourses and ontologies, where land is viewed only as a ‘natural resource’ for human consumption rather than that which we are ecologically embedded within and part of (Barad, 2007; Watts, 2013). As we shall see in the next section assemblage thinking can help educators and students envision something new. Education for the commons recognizes that the long-term project is one of (re)production, something continually (re)made:

On this account, another relevant text is Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). Cooper expands on Foucault’s line of argumentation in The Order of Things (1994), where he suggests that the develop- ment of modern life sciences and political economy are mutually constitutive. Thus Cooper’s project involves an exploration of how neoliberalism is invested in the promissory logics and possibilities of the life sciences, and how these developments should be understood as parallel. In this way, the life sciences are being employed for the creation of capital accumulation and imperial projects, and, in the process, the life sciences are fundamentally being shaped by militarization and the promis- sory logics of biocapitalism. As demonstrated in the case of Project BioShield, the boundaries between biomedicine and war are blurred in official government formu- lations that treat infectious disease and bioterrorism as identical (see Project BioShield Act of 2004 2004).

This consolidation of infectious disease and bioterrorism establishes a new secu- rity discourse and fuses biomedicine, imperialism, and capital. As Foucault (1990: 137) claims, wars are increasingly being ‘waged on behalf of the existence of every- one ... in the name of life’. Thus it seems that with the legitimacy of the imperialist state waning in some respects, and with neoliberalism running out of ways to extract from the public, both can maintain their standing through the identification of a biological threat. This poses a problem for politics, and particularly for anti- imperialist politics. As U.S. liberals have uncritically exalted the national security apparatus and war machine by obsessing over Russiagate, they may now be doing the same in the name of promoting ‘science’ and calling for its depoliticization in the cultural sphere. Should we be surprised that at the precise moment of formation of a new alliance of bioscience, biomedicine, health, defense, and national security institutions that liberals are calling to depoliticize science in such a way as to obscure these relations?

In my work, I draw from Michel Foucault’s formulations of biopower to think about the organization and management of life, health, illness, and death, especially as those forces instantiate through gender/race/sexuality. Here, I will outline some of the ways that a biopower framework has been useful for me. I will also think about ways that the neoliberal restructuring of the state and economy (especially in the United States) offers and requires some revisions to Foucault’s terms and models.

As is pretty familiar by now, Foucault argues that the modern form of power—what he terms biopower—takes on “life itself,” or, how to manage, contain, constrain, and incite life, as a political concern for governance. Throughout the body of his work, he articulates two trajectories of biopower. The first is disciplinary power, which was taken up by what we can think of as a first phase of US Foucault scholarship, in the 1980s and 1990s. Discipline organizes bodies and subjectivities and their relations to other bodies and subjectivities, especially in terms of space and movement. The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish developed an analytics of discipline, which proved especially productive for early queer studies, as well as feminist interventions into this field.1 The second trajectory was biopolitical power. This came to the forefront in a second phase of US engagement, in the 2000s, during the publication of the Collège de France lectures.2 Rather than the individual subject/body, biopolitics organizes the population as a political concern. Biopolitical technologies intervene in biological life processes at the level of population patterns—birth rates and policies, epidemic and endemic illness, social and economic productivity, resource needs, and statistical predictions of longevity and death.

A quick look at the US Constitutional text suggests that IP exists at the nexus of juridical and public biopower.10 The goal – progress in the arts and sciences – is clearly biopolitical, but the mechanism – property rights – is juridical. It is my central contention that IP has shifted markedly (if unevenly) in the last twenty years or so in the direction of neoliberal biopolitics. Even when they were economically justified, earlier iterations of IP functioned much more along the public biopower model, attempting to improve the welfare of the public as a whole, with provisions such as limits on term length designed to ensure that the public benefited as much and as quickly as possible. Neoliberal IP maintains the idea of welfare enhance- ment, but it grants many more rights to producers, and instead of benefiting the public at large, it increasingly targets individuals in the public directly, reconcep- tualizing them as consumers and their welfare in strictly economic terms.

At the same time, the expression of power in IP is deeply contested within the very institutions through which it operates. For example, the Supreme Court’s patent jurisprudence has repeatedly insisted that IP is to be treated juridically, through standard judicial norms and vocabularies. Similarly, §1201 of the Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection technologies, has oper- ated in practice to allow copyright owners to regulate how copyrighted material is consumed, strongly nudging individuals to approach this material only as paying customers, not as members of a more amorphous public. At the same time, the Copyright Office carves out periodic exemptions to the law for such public func- tions as education.

In Weil’s depictions of affliction and the effects of force, images of living death proliferate. There exists in Weil’s imaginary a kind of human being whose life has been destroyed even as they remain alive. Under the weight of social degradation, oppression, or warfare, a human being can become dead-while-alive. In both essays, Weil describes this state of death-in-life as involving an ontological transformation. Recall the analogy to waterboiling: to go from suffering to affliction, from pain to having one’s life become an attenuated death, is akin to the transformation of hot water to boiling water. It is a transformation in kind, not simply in quantity. I have suggested that, for Weil, this transformation is marked by several features: one who inhabits a living death cannot think, hope, or will; the inevitability of death subsumes her entire vision of the future; and she loses the reflexive reactivity to stimuli usually shared among human and non-human animals. Further, force should be condemned not only for its production of death, but also for the way that its presence transforms the way in which life is lived. The threat of death does not only cause harm when death arrives; rather, the threat itself, the fact that one could be killed at any moment, is itself profoundly destructive to the human being. Exposure to the possibility of death is here presented as something that makes a human being a corpse while still alive. To be alive under the constant threat of death is to enter a different kind of aliveness – a life in which one is already in some sense dead.

The potential for a human life to become a kind of death poses particular challenges for modern ethical and political discourse. An ethical framework that emphasizes sympathy and compassion becomes untenable in the face of living death, for we are largely incapable of feeling compassion for such individuals and instead either feel disgust or fail to register their existence at all. Further, a political discourse of rights and personhood fails to adequately name the devastation to which human beings are too often subject; mistakenly articulating the damage wrought by force saps protests against such force of their normative potency.

The production of living death is particularly common in warfare. In Weil’s discussion of war there emerges another aspect of what it might mean to exist in a living death. On the one hand, war turns all its participants into “things.” Both conqueror and conquered are caught up in a momentum that robs them of their freedom, making them subject to pure necessity and thus depriving them of some aspect of being alive. In Weil’s imagining, those subject to force become inert, frozen in place like Hector before Achilles, while those who ply it are driven by an equally mechanical momentum of violence and destruction. She concludes that battles are fought not by human beings but by things, by “men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum.”239 War, that is, makes “things” of all those it touches.

In addition to becoming a “thing” caught up in the momentum of war, soldiers undergo a psychic shift that alters their relationship to “life.” At first, conquering soldiers shield themselves from the horrors of war through emotional and conceptual distancing. They view warfare as a kind of game, and the lives they destroy “are like toys broken by a child, and quite as incapable of feeling.”240 Eventually, though, their own vulnerability to pain or loss becomes unavoidable, perhaps due to a serious injury or the death of a beloved comrade. In such a moment, the reality of war makes itself painfully present. Awareness of this reality transforms the soldier’s relationship to living and dying. As Weil describes it, “for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men. For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the solider death is the future, the future his profession assigns him.”241 Life enfolds death. Death becomes the only imaginable future – the death of one’s enemy, of one’s comrades, of oneself. This relationship to futurity, in which death appears as the sole future, alters not only the relation to the future but also to the present. It is “much too hard to be borne,” “abhorrent,” “unendurable.”242 Weil continues, “Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years.”243 War reveals a reality that is intolerable to the mind, yet the mind cannot turn away. The possibility of death becomes ever-present, inescapable. It is as though the solider must each day experience the acute agony of facing a sword that could strike at any moment. The solider is like Hector, but for far more than a single moment. Every day, “the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way.”244 When the future appears (only) as death, aspiration becomes impossible. Contemplating the future entails contemplating death; death becomes life’s only possibility, its sole horizon. Thus, Weil claims, “the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence.”245 War imprisons the mind, making it impossible (or at least incredibly painful and therefore exceedingly rare) to imagine anything beyond the present, which is suffused with death. The future holds only death; the present is lived in thrall to this deathly future. To pass through one’s days in such a way cannot really be called “living.” One who exists in this way “belongs to a different race from the race of the living,” Weil insists.246 Like Hector, all soldiers who have perceived the reality of war become no longer quite alive.

In speaking of othering as a technology of government underpinning and reconciling two types of power—one promoting life or improvement, the other violence or sacrifice—we do not argue that these are the only ways that, historically, the West has represented “the rest”. In a broad sense, ways of knowing the other have much deeper and more complex histories: the practice of ethnographic writing, and attention to the knowledges and practices of other cultures, stretch back to ancient Greece (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Sullivan, 2017, p. 222); moreover, Western representations of non-European cultures and geographies, even when associated with colonialism, include positive depictions and even romanticising idealisations (e.g. Altmann, 2020). Here, however, we want to maintain our focus on these two ways of constructing the other—as an internal enemy or an object of improvement—because we find them especially salient to dominant ways of framing and governing the climate crisis.

In doing this, we also caution against exaggerating the difference or distance between these two logics of othering. These are in fact “idealtypes” that, in practical contexts, often overlap and conflate. First, before being (and in order to be) identified as an internal enemy, a certain group needs to be included within the governmental responsibility of the state (or development institution). Second, othering may serve not simply to exclude or include, but also to include differently. For instance, as Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015, p. 59) argue, drawing on Mbembe (2003), the necropolitical logic of colonialism and the plantation in Africa did not preclude “making live” native populations in the colony, yet it did so in ways that primarily advanced the interests and “improvement” of the ostensibly racially superior people in the metropole. Othering, therefore, underpins a wide array of interventions that go from the pure act of killing or sacrificing an internal or internalised enemy, to the ostensibly disinterested act of including, as a way of improving a group’s conditions, wealth and wellbeing.

There is no gainsaying the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on the lives of people all over the world. It has not only led to the loss of lives but has also led to the loss of livelihoods. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been diverse in different countries but all pointing to the reality that the human body became the centre of political action towards containing the spread of the virus. Notably, in different locations certain bodies were considered biological threats; for example, the West/the USA saw China as a threat, souring relations between the countries (Christensen 2020); and at some point, in China Africans were seen as biological threats (Castilloa and Amoah 2020; Ngcobo 2021); in South Africa black people/ townships were mostly targeted as biological threats hence the deployment of soldiers to mostly Black populated areas (Bond 2022). These incidents including the numerous restrictive regulations put in place by governments globally to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitate an interrogation of how social beings were governed through discursive practices and disciplinary techniques and use of power. Notably, during COVID-19 two styles/types of power were exercised; repressive and productive power (Barceló et al. 2020; Patterson and Clark 2020). Both kinds of power produced different outcomes and deployed different strategies. The issue then would be to try and investigate how these deployments of different forms of power structured human ways of being during COVID-19.

According to Brown and Gershon (2017: 2) ‘the theme of body politics directs our attention to how bodies are included or excluded in the polity. How do governments respond to the political demands of bodies that transgress normative boundaries? How does the regulation of bodies, or the lack of regulation, impact society?’ The issue has also brought to the fore a revived interest in the interrogation of the nexus between state power and control of the freedom of citizens. Notably, by extension, the control of citizen’s freedom meant the control of the human body through several restrictive acts as already mentioned. The issue has also brought into focus Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and rule in modern and postmodern societies centring on the concept of biopower/biopolitics. Biopolitics concerns the administration of life – it is concerned with issues of life and death, birth and breeding, health and disease (physical and mental), and the procedures geared towards retarding or sustaining life optimisation in societies (Dean 2001; Armstrong 1983: 2-3).

In the light of the history of biological racism and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is not surprising that many sociologists have expressed concerns about the contemporary resurgence of biological and genetic accounts of human capacities and incapacities.3 They have argued that, like previous appeals to biological nature, such developments will tend to generate a politics that individualizes human worth, essentializes variations in human capacities, reduces social phenomena to the aggregate of individual actions, and discriminates against, constrains or excludes those found biologically abnormal or defective. Thus they have warned of the dangers of a new determinism – ‘geneticism’ – based on a false but seductive mystique of the power of the genes, and entailing all sorts of discrimination on genetic grounds (Dreyfuss and Nelkin, 1992; Lippman, 1992; Nelkin, 1992; Nelkin and Lindee, 1995; Nelkin and Tancredi, 1994). Some have suggested that we face the real prospect of the rebirth of scientific racism grounded in the apparent objectivity of DNA sequences, and of a new eugenics fuelled not merely by the commercial interests of the biotech companies, but also by parental desires for a perfect child in an age of manipulated consumerism and reproductive choice (Duster, 1990; Hubbard and Wald, 1999; Rifkin, 1998). From such a perspective, the rhetoric that celebrates the potential of biomedicine and biotechnology to improve the health, welfare and quality of life of individuals obscures the threat that new biological practices of control will coerce, restrict and even eliminate those whose biological propensities are believed – by doctors, parents or perhaps even by political authorities – to be defective.

Some locate the wish to control the biological make-up of the population at the very heart of modernity. Thus for both Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman the thanatopolitics of population purification is immanent within the very project of biopolitics: to manage the health of the ‘body politic’ inescapably requires the control and elimination of ‘foreign bodies’ (Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 1989). The National Socialism of the German Third Reich certainly exemplifies this link between the administration of life and the administration of death. For example, in a book of 1936 entitled Rassenhygiene als Wissenschaft und Staatsaufgabe, Ottmar von Verschuer asserts that politics should mean ‘giving form to the life of the people’ (von Verschuer, 1936: 8, quoted from Agamben, 1998: 148). Life itself, the vital reality of a people, must become the overriding responsibility and criterion that should guide the exercise of political authority. This requires a nationally organized and politically directed programme to improve the quality of the national stock and eliminate taints or weaknesses that might threaten it. Its tactics range from propaganda and education stressing the burden on the race imposed by those with defective constitutions, to eugenic legislation on marriage, the assessment of reproductive worth by experts working on behalf of the state, the prevention of those who are members of defective or inferior sub-populations from reproducing through sterilization or extermination. Once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation. All the eugenic projects of selective reproduction, sterilization and incarceration follow. Indeed, Agamben asserts that ‘the camp’ is the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’: when the collective body of the people becomes the principal resource for politics, the purging of defective individuals becomes an essential part of the care of life (Agamben, 1998).

In a chapter called Panopticism, Foucault (1975) begins by outlining two major forms through which discipline and surveillance were exerted. The first being the spatialisation of the plague-stricken town by means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as placing individuals within enclosures and under severe and permanent supervision. Such surveillance involves ‘tactics of individualizing disciplines’ (Foucault, 1975: 199) which proceed from a system of ‘permanent registration’ (registering the details of each inhabitant of the town) as well as mechanisms of distribution (in which each inhabitant is related to his place, his body and his condition) so that the disease is met by order, eradicating any confusion that may emerge out of the ‘mixing’ of bodies, be these living or dead. The second organisational form is that of the treatment of the leper which, unlike ‘the plague and its segmentations’, functions by means of separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community through mechanisms of ‘branding’, ‘dichotomisation’ and ‘exile-enclosure’. From these two different images (plague and leprosy) which underlies the two different projects (segmentation and separation), Foucault goes on to explain the two ways of exerting (political) power: discipline on the hand (as is the case with the plague), and exclusion on the other (as is the case with leprosy). However, and despite the difference of the two modes, they are ‘not incompatible ones’ (Foucault, 1995: 199) for power functions by way of excluding the ‘infected’ (here, the image of the leper stands as an emblematic figure of ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘madmen’, etc, just as the image of the plague symbolises ‘all forms of confusion and disorder’) and individualising the excluded so much so that lepers (all those who are symbolised by this image) are treated as plague victims (all those who are caught up within disorderly spaces). Hence, power is but a concurrent amalgamation of the two forms, and according to Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon is par excellence ‘the architectural figure of this composition’ (1975: 200).

Bentham’s utilitarian plan for a prison which is based on an observing supervisor placed in a central tower and who can see without being seen, serves as a compelling paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is intrinsic to the compound power of exclusion and individualization. As Elden (2002: 244) explains, the model of the Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of the figurative leper) ‘is rigidly regimented and controlled’ (as is the case with the figurative plague victim). The idea that ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall tower at the centre does not necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that ‘collective’ individualities are overridden by separated ‘individualities’ (the treatment of lepers as a plague victims – the trinity of segmentation, individualisation and separation) and that power is ‘unverifiable’ (uncertainty about whether/when one is being watched), is what makes the model of Panopticon such a subtle and effective architectural apparatus. Power does not need to be enforced but merely ‘internalised’ through mechanisms of self-regulation. Such mechanisms render the observed as simultaneously the bearer (subject) of and the one subjected to power.

Second, modern doomsayers, who recognize that the human population may actually shrink in the future, worry that free enterprise will continue to drive human consumption of resources to higher and higher levels.51 Again, the data do not agree. We have already noted McAfee’s 2019 book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next. Sophisticated economies, he found, are currently producing ever more goods and services, while at the same time using ever fewer resources. That is a result of a sustained transition in advanced countries from industry to less resource-intensive economic activities that deal with services and information.

To that process, we may also add dematerialization, which refers to declining consumption of material and energy per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). According to Jesse Ausubel from Rockefeller University and Paul E. Waggoner from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, “If consumers dematerialize their intensity of use of goods and technicians produce the goods with a lower intensity of impact, people can grow in numbers and affluence without a proportionally greater environmental impact.”52

Critics such as Mazzucato maintain that, while economic growth and social welfare is driven by innovation, the state must intervene to prevent private actors from extracting too much value from their own innovations. This argument relies on four important assumptions. First, Mazzucato sees value extracted by private innovators as a rent, not a premium for their efforts and investments. In this perspective, entrepreneurs are myopic and must be prodded by the benevolent Leviathan to take a “patient,” long-term perspective. Even using the Ricardian role of rentiers as responsible of economic stagnation, the modern state is itself a rentier, a much larger one than entrepreneurs or large firms and one that bears little risk (unlike private capital, taxpayers’ money is always available). Moreover, the claim that innovators appropriate too much value from innovations with high social benefits is hard to square with the conventional notion that, in the face of positive spillovers, there is too little innovation in R&D (Arrow, 1962)!.

Second, these criticisms view the state is a priori entitled to appropriate a part (which? Half? 90%? 100%?) of the innovation’s value because of its “dirty job.” An example highlights the inconsistency of this argument. Suppose a firm that produces mobile phones uses a natural resource to create a specific component. The firm can buy the natural resource and make the component in-house or buy from an outside supplier. Either way, this process is facilitated by market transactions, either in the market for the resource or the market for the finished component. Assume the state owns the natural resource or the supplier producing the component is a state-owned firm. In both cases, the firm has paid a price to the state for its contribution to innovation (i.e., owning the natural resource or contracting with the supplier). An entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs perform the central role of combining resources and bearing the uncertainty associated with value creation (production takes place before the product is offered and promoted to consumers, who may or may not buy the product). Why should the state be entitled to a share of the created value? A typical answer is that the entrepreneur is leveraging prior investments, infrastructure, institutions, education, etc. provided by the state. And yet, the entrepreneur, the investors, and other stakeholders have already paid for these, in the form of taxes, credit expansion, or however else the state funds its expenditures. Why should the innovator pay an additional “tax” on innovation?

The reaction to this was exactly as Kalecki forecast. One way to understand the emergence of neoliberalism as the game-plan for running economies from the 1970s onwards is that it was a direct attempt to wrest back control over the economy on the part of management, breaking union organisation as it did so, and radically depoliticising all questions about the economy – from the distribution of its rewards to the control over what and how it produced.

In terms of presentation by the government and media, the economy was shifted from something that we all take part in and create – something, in other words, that is the product of all of our work, plus the natural riches of the world we inhabit – and into a mysterious external force that, like an angry volcano-god, demanded sacrifice: unemployment, pay cuts, austerity. This brutality was glossed over with rhetorical appeals to competition, and to calculation: one was good, the other necessary.

Yet over a million people travel to the US every year for their medical care, including heads of state, the wealthy and elite, who presumably could have received care in their home country or anywhere else in the world. The numbers cited above do not even include the millions who are cared for by the international satellite campuses of the Mayo Clinic, Cornell, Harvard and Johns Hopkins systems, to name just a few, that have been established to bring American health care to the rest of the world.

Around 100,000 Canadians, whose nationalized health system is rated above the United States, are likely to cross the border each year for medical care. These medical tourists recognize that, on the whole, health care in the US is the best in the world.

Sociologist and peace scholar, Elise Boulding (2000), explains how a “culture of peace” can develop through the active cultivation of habits of peacefulness, which are routine acts of mutual caring, respect, and well-being, grounded in shared values, beliefs, and behaviors. A culture of peace avoids violence as a means of conflict resolution. Boulding’s approach frames the building of a peaceful society as a bottom-up process through which peaceful habits are practiced by individuals in their various social arrangements.

One type of arrangement that is potentially important for the development of a culture of peace is a friendship, a dyadic relationship developed and maintained through mutual trust and dependence. Friendships occur in a variety of contexts. We are often introduced to our friends by family or other friends, and we tend to meet friends at school, social gatherings, neighborhoods, or places of worship. We engage in what Boulding described as habits of peacefulness as we care for our friends in their times of need, respect their opinions and beliefs, and take into consideration their well-being.

Based on these interpretations, the advocates argue that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a revolutionary socialist program is the only solution to the global capitalism’s failures on the pandemic. Further, they assert that the pandemic gives the impetus to the ongoing deeply rooted class struggle between the ruling class and the working class while it necessitates a fundamental social change toward a Marxist government (IMT 2020; SEPA 2020).

Henceforth, based on a rather brief review of this movement, the present author would like to outline several critiques on their proposals. The first is that they look over the fact that the most advanced capitalist economy has succeeded in producing highly effective pandemic virus vaccines in record time, in only nine months, because of the entrepreneurial successes of the leading pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca which are one of the hallmarks of capitalism (USFDA 2020a, b).

Some scholars have framed the crisis of global capitalism in terms of a declining U.S. hegemony and the rise of a Chinese competitor. But no new nation-state power can supply the political authority necessary to stabilize the now-inextricably integrated global economy. The crisis of hegemony in the international system takes place within this single, integrated global economy. No one state, no matter how powerful, can control the process of global accumulation. This disjuncture between a globalized economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority generates enormous geopolitical tensions. The end of Western domination of world capitalism is upon us as the center of gravity of the global economy shifts to China. But China will not become a new hegemon. Rather, we are moving towards political multipolarity at a time of acute crisis in global capitalism—prolonged economic turbulence and political decay.

The breakdown of the political organization of world capitalism is not the cause but the consequence of contradictions internal to a globally integrated system of capital accumulation. Escalating geopolitical conflict is pushing us towards global conflagration. Wars provide enormous outlet for surplus accumulated capital. Historically they have pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crisis while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. The most urgent task at this time is to prevent World War III. The more we understand the changing nature of this beast that is global capitalism, the better we are situated to work out strategies of resistance and transformation. The task before us is ever more urgent in the face of the threat of nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the biosphere, and ever more acute inequality, immiseration, and social disintegration around the world.

Does humanity’s growing use of materials mean that decoupling is impossible? In a word, no, and attempts to reduce all resource and environmental problems to our material footprint won’t help us solve problems of resource scarcity or environmental impacts. In a recent article for Fast Company, the University of London’s Jason Hickel claims that humanity can only consume 50 billion tons of “stuff” each year (compared to current consumption levels at about 80 billion tons). And according to several papers that Hickel cites, that can’t be achieved in the foreseeable future, given growing populations and economies. The only solution, according to Hickel, is to ditch our addiction to GDP growth. Hickel is challenging the concept of “green growth,” which he describes as “absolute decoupling of GDP from material use.” But before talking about evidence for or against decoupling, it's important to ask: decoupling of what? Broadly, there are two reasons to worry about consumption: running out of materials (like fossil fuels) and environmental impacts (like pollution or habitat loss). These often get conflated in unhelpful ways. What Hickel refers to when he talks about decoupling is material flows, which are dominated by things like fossil fuels, metal ores, construction minerals, biomass, and the like. Lumping different material flows together can be misleading, in that it groups together resources that are being used sustainably with those that aren’t, and/or resources that cause big environmental impacts with those that cause smaller environmental impacts. So let’s look at the materials at play here. For several of the materials with the biggest footprint in terms of volume (construction minerals, metal ores, etc.), the problem isn’t really that we're at risk of running out of stuff. Construction minerals account for a large portion of global material flows, but those are resources like stone — last time I checked, we weren't approaching peak stone. (Cue joke about the end of the Stone Age.) We could have a perfectly sustainable civilization without absolutely decoupling from stone for a long time. The 50 billion tons limit is completely arbitrary — it was based on material consumption in the year 2000 — and shouldn’t be taken as the dividing line between sustainability and environmental doom. What about environmental impacts? Here, too, aggregate resource consumption can give a misleading picture. Some of the big items in material flows (again, like construction minerals) account for a pretty small portion of environmental impacts like greenhouse emissions or land use. For biomass, we've managed to increase production and thus mass flows a lot using the same amount of land, so the impacts haven't gone up in proportion to the mass flows. When we look at the actual impacts — like greenhouse emissions, habitat loss, pollution of air and water, and so on — we're seeing some positive trends, and in fact some instances of absolute decoupling. Emissions of several pollutants (like sulfur dioxide) have peaked and declined globally, although they are still going up in some developing nations; nitrogen oxides and nitrous oxide emissions are flat globally. Total farmland area (the most important driver of biodiversity and habitat loss and an important driver of carbon emissions) has peaked, although it's plausible that it will go up again. Water extraction peaked several decades ago in the United States, in spite of increasing industrial and agricultural output. Greenhouse emissions have not peaked globally, and may continue to go up for a while, making carbon emissions perhaps the least decoupled and most concerning of all trends. Even relative decoupling has come to a halt as coal-heavy China accounts for an increasing share of global emissions. As Breakthrough has written about for a long time now, we are still a long way from scalable food and energy systems that run without fossil fuels. But here, too, the most pragmatic solutions involve accelerating technological substitution of clean energy for dirty energy — the same general process of decoupling that has driven progress in other resources. Some or most of these trends may be moving too slowly for Hickel and other observers, and indeed, where acceleration is possible, that should be both the technological and policy goal. But aggregate human consumption of resources doesn’t tell us much of interest about either resource sustainability or environmental impacts. To get at those problems, we need to look at things resource by resource, pollutant by pollutant. And when we do that, we see some significant progress, along with some still-worrying trends. Above all, though, we know that as societies develop, food and energy production gets more resource-efficient, economic growth slows down, and fertility rates decline. All of these trends still imply large environmental impacts in the future. But while intentional economic degrowth or hard limits on resource use seem far-fetched, absolute decoupling of the things that matter — environmental impacts — is still a very real possibility.