Category Archives: Covid-19 State Responses

Emerging from the emergency

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

Emerging from the emergency [1]

29th of December, 2021

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana and Barbara Giullari

All over the world, although with significant differences, the Covid-19 public health crisis has rapidly evolved into a social emergency, with states “discovering” – as a consequence of the lockdowns and restrictions to social and commercial activities –  millions of individuals and families (totally or partially) excluded from existing social security systems aimed at preventing citizens from poverty. 

Going back to the root of the word “emergency” – becoming visible – in the last two years we have seen in Italy as elsewhere, the “emergence” in the public sphere of two groups. On the one hand, the most vulnerable population, living at the margins of both production and institutionalized reproduction (public welfare): precarious workers, working poor and unemployed, homeless, undocumented and recent immigrants. On the other hand, the social and political activist groups that struggle to respond to the social emergency and to make it a political issue, criticizing the politics and policies of invisibilization of vulnerable groups.

Two years after the crisis outbreak, the extraordinary measures and initiatives to alleviate the hardest aspects of pan-syndemic impoverishment have not put into question extant policies and the cognitive and normative frames upon which they are based.

This double emergence reflects the complexity of the pan-syndemic and reveals the imbrication of sanitary, social and political dimensions in the interpretation of an emergency outbreak.

We can learn from the experience and the critical thinking about “natural” and health emergencies that such complexity can be conceived in two fundamentally different ways: as a punctual and extraordinary “natural” emergency or as the arrival point of longer cycles of hegemonic models of economic and cultural development.

In the first case, what is required is the mobilization of technical and operational abilities for the immediate reaction and alleviation of its consequences, mainly conceived in humanitarian terms: it is the dominant understanding of “preparedness” (based on highly abstract modelling of risks, stockpiling of health and food supplies, activation of standardized emergencies protocols, etc.) which does not question the origins of the catastrophe. In the second case, an alternative, transformative idea of “preparedness” can be mobilized, to cultivate the radical rethinking of the dominant economic model and the practical experimentation of alternatives. While obviously this does not exclude the need to promptly respond emergency outbreaks, it points to a different way of doing it, based on four principles: 1) the shift from short temporal terms of emergency to the longer temporal horizon of historical and ecological transformations; 2) the democratization of the process of definition of emergency and emergency responses; 3) rethinking the notion of vulnerability not as an exception but as the fundamental feature of individual and social life, in the wake of feminist ethics of care; 4) contrast the dominant “humanitarian” approach to emergency through a politicization of health, natural and social crises.

It is urgent to develop critical discussion among researchers, activists and citizens around these issues, with the hope and the determination to help making a counter-hegemonic cultural, social and political movement emerge from the emergency.

 

[1] These reflections come from a joint work in the context of the research project PRELOC (Building Local Preparedness to Global Crises), led by Prof. Lavinia Bifulco https://centri.unibo.it/cidospel/it/ricerca/prelocproject/2020-1150_preloc_-definitivo.pdf/@@download/file/2020-1150_PRELOC_%20definitivo.pdf

 

Davide Caselli

Davide Caselli is a post-doc researcher at University of Milano-Bicocca. His work is focused on expertise, social policy and financialization. He is member of the Foundational Economy Collective (https://foundationaleconomy.com) and the Sui Generis Research Lab (http://laboratoriosuigeneris.altervista.org).

Carlotta Mozzana

Carlotta Mozzana is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her main research interests include the role of knowledge in decision making processes, the transformation of public action, the forms of social vulnerability and the socio-institutional changes of welfare.

Barbara Giullari

Barbara Giullari (Ph.D. Sociology and Social policy) is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the SDE - Sociology and Business Law Department - University of Bologna where she teaches “Local Social Planning” and “Labour and Care Regime”. Her main research interests are related to transformations of work and employment trajectories, social work, transformations of welfare systems and local social planning, knowledge and public action, educational policies development.

Read the other essays on the State Responses to Covid-19 here: 

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

Covid in the UK

Debate on Covid-19 State Responses

Covid in the UK

29th of December, 2021

Beverley Skeggs

Chaos, carnage and corruption exemplify the English government’s response to Covid-19. Even the government’s own joint health and social care and science and technology committees denounced their own government’s response as ‘one of the most important public health failures ever’. One of the major failures was due to nine days of bumbling and procrastination at the beginning of the pandemic which allowed the virus to flourish. And it’s happening again. Such malevolent neglect is a clear revelation that the government really does not care and refuses to take responsibility for anything other than lining their own class pockets and that of their party to enable them to build kleptocracy into the future. Establishing a VIP lane to issue PPE contracts to incompetent friends and funders who were highly unlikely to deliver was an act of supreme sleaze and callous disregard. They really didn’t let the crisis go to waste, instead they capitalised on it, repeating the historical legacies of necrospeculation and thanatocracy perfected over centuries by English colonial government.

We have witnessed a staggering lack of care and concern by government throughout the pandemic. The social contract already weakened through austerity is now truly broken. Three major factors shaped the English government’s response: firstly, corporate state capture which after decades of neoliberal deregulation has enabled the political sphere to be opened-up to direct business involvement with over a third of government spending contracted out and the current government dominated by people who are economic libertarians for whom politics is a mechanism for redistribution of wealth to their class. There is not just a ‘revolving door’ of ex-lobbyists currently inhabiting government but also a mutual gifting: government contracts for party political donations, an attempt to build a gift that just keeps giving. In this ‘pigs at the trough politics’ the push back of social protection disappears, regulation is not fit for purpose and public criticism disregarded. The political control of the BBC through the constant threat of corporate capture has produced craven compliance.

The second connected factor that made the UK ‘world beating’ (taken from the Brexit campaigning) at infection, contagion and death rates was Brexit. When Covid-19 hit the UK over 25,000 civil servants were absorbed in the quagmire of Brexit policies. Their energies were displaced. Incompetent leadership plus distracted government led to chaos and carnage. The third factor was also connected to corporate capture of the health and social care sectors: the financialisation of elderly care providers which had produced depleted provision prior to the pandemic turned out to be deadly. Likewise, the privatisation of hospital provision had led to one of the lowest ICU bed capacity rates in Europe: 7.3 per 100,000 compared to 33.8 in Germany. The outsourcing, corporate capture, of both government and social protections, spelled doom, as Polanyi would predict. Destruction of social protections was accompanied by an extreme form of Foucauldian ‘responsibilisation’ whereby protection from Covid-19 became an individual’s responsibility. For many individuals a spurious libertarian idea of “freedom” meant freedom to die and kill others. And as I write this it is happening all over again. The reckless opportunists continue to refuse responsibility and become even richer as a result. The devastation has been released, the question now is, from where is the dialectical response to it likely to come?

Beverley Skeggs

Beverley Skeggs is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She published Formations of Class and Gender; Class, Self, Culture; Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Audience, Performance, Value. She is also the Chief Executive of The Sociological Review Foundation.

Read the other essays on Covid-19 State responses here: 

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

Covid-19 and hybrid trends in economy and society

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

Covid-19 and hybrid trends in economy and society

22nd of December, 2021

Manos Savvakis

The pandemic condition forms a complicated and multilevel social reality that is heavily produced and magnified by and through the globalization of the market economy, as initially described by Karl Polanyi. This global trend entails the high speed of modern life and the constant movement of values, commodities and people. However, this post-modern globalized world of human movement, trade and commodities radically changes the way and speed epidemics move and sometimes turn into pandemics.

This pandemic condition poses serious questions and debates regarding the following day and what are yet to come, in several aspects of economy, health and society as a whole. There is a strong possibility after the official ending of this period that we move towards one-dimensional national health systems with huge problems of understaffing and work exhaustion (burnout syndrome and alienation). At the same time, new forms of post-pandemic economy along with new models of socialization seem to gradually establish themselves, solely based on social and physical distancing. For example, new forms of music and art creation are already emerging on the internet (i.e., electronic concerts, home concerts, philharmonic orchestras and sport tournaments without spectators, virtual evets, large galas in big empty stadiums etc.).

In Greece, after the second lockdown (October 2020-May 2021), the gradual re-opening of almost all economic and social activities and the suspension of sending SMS to the police, coincides with the beginning of the touristic period. However, as medical experts publicly warn, the pandemic condition is not entirely over – what is pronounced as the fourth wave of mutated Covid-19 virus – and we already face the economic and social consequences of this new situation. For this simple, albeit fundamental reason, societies need social sciences, particularly qualitative sociological research, because those can propose applicable solutions and good practices that take into account the social dimensions alongside economic and health requirements.

In this situation, social sciences and especially sociological theory and research should get involved in a deep understanding of the pandemic condition as a total social phenomenon and in proposing realistic schemes and ways of acting. The pandemic condition – and that includes structural and institutional levels of human action as well as the everyday life – highlights the role of sociology. Polanyi’s analysis of the detachment of economy from society is crucial in understanding and reflecting upon this new and not so promising new normality that will follow us to a greater or lesser degree, since it is almost certain that other epidemics or pandemics will succeed this one, possibly with greater rates of mortality.

In this sense, a “return to normality” is far from restoring social justice and healing economic inequalities, gender violence and educational or health problems. In fact, the pandemic situation can offer a great excuse to conservative political elites to imply permanent authoritarian forms of governance and further reduce social rights. It can as well shape a great opportunity for broader social coalitions that seek the expansion of the welfare state and civil freedom. The future is, as always, open and resisting any prediction.

Manos Savvakis

Manos Savvakis is an Associate Professor in Microsociology and Qualitative Methods (Department of Sociology/University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece).
He is also an external Professor at the MA Program “Health Units Administration” of the Hellenic Open University, Greece.

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here:

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

Questioning the pandemic state of care

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

Questioning the pandemic state of care:
care familialism and care nationalism in times of Covid-19

22nd of December, 2021

Mike Laufenberg and Susanne Schultz

In the Covid-19 pandemic, the (nuclear) family and the private household that is assumed to contain it received an enormous revaluation. At the same time, the notion of a nationally formed capitalist welfare state that protects “its” vulnerable population is reenacted as a central care entity. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made these institutional foundations of care in the pandemic state very visible in one of her first speeches during the pandemic. In an empathetic and rather non-authoritarian tenor, she addressed not an anonymous public but people as members of an affectionate – private as well as national – community with her appeal “to take care of you and your loved ones” and interpreted the pandemic as the biggest “challenge for our nation” since World War II[1] (Merkel 2020). During the pandemic social relations around care became more visible for the general public and, like in Germany, welfare states might partially and temporally – in some cases even in a sustained way – restrengthen certain sectors of public responsibility for care that had been marketised in the past decades. However, this re-embedding of care relations is accompanied by multiple forms of knowledge production, problematisation, and solution approaches which are institutionally reinforcing the household/family and the nation. As a result, hierarchical relations of exploitation and exclusion are reinforced. We suggest therefore the concepts of “care familialism” and “care nationalism” to analyze both the underlying methodological familialism and methodological nationalism and the conditions of inequality and exclusionary effects of these intertwined formations of “home” in the wake of the pandemic state crisis management[2]. By shedding light on intersectional and transnational hierarchies of care/carelessness that are systematically established and deepened in the pandemic crisis, the systemic violence of differential modes of embedding the social becomes the center of attention. Its dimensions range from the neglect of those who cannot retreat to a “safe home” because of their working conditions, violent family relations or ways of institutionalization/incarceration to the necropolitics of tightened border regimes and the systematic carelessness towards those who are recruited to provide care for the nation as live-in or illegalised domestic workers.

The research on care within the pandemic state therefore needs to conceptually decenter the family and the nation as the dominant formations through which care relations are institutionalised. For the debate on care, as it goes viral in these times, this means decentering the focus of gender research on the middle-class home office family household and widening the analysis towards the caring situation of the precarious nonprotected workers that more or less directly support this entity. Generally, to go beyond an analysis of care as utopian postcapitalist social relations and instead to analyse care as specifically and often hierarchically institutionalized relationships. For a theory of the pandemic nation state it includes stressing the transnational and intersectional exclusionary effects of current tendencies of re-embedding care relations through strengthening public infrastructures. We also need to analyse how transnational relations of resource and care extractivism, necropolitial border regimes, and the increasing disinterest (in) and disengagement for global social rights and against global power relations might be reinforced in the same act.

[1] Merkel, Angela (2020): Fernsehansprache von Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. https://www.bundesregierung.de/resource/blob/975232/1732182/d4af29ba76f62f61f1320c32d39a7383/fernsehansprache-von-bundeskanzlerin-angelamerkel-data.pdf (Accessed December 8, 2021).

 

[2] Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz (2021): The Pandemic State of Care. Care Familialism and Care Nationalism in the Corona Crisis. The Case of Germany. In: Historical Social Research 46(4), Special Issue: “Caring in Times of a Global Pandemic“ (eds. E. Dowling, A. Dursun, V. Kettner und S. Hasenoehrl, B. Sauer), pp. 72-99. Open Access: https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/76010

Mike Laufenberg

Mike Laufenberg is a research associate at the Institute for Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and member of the kitchen politics editor collective. His research interests are social theory and theories of social reproduction, welfare capitalism, citizenship studies, gender/queer studies.

Susanne Schultz

Susanne Schultz is a sociologist at the Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, member of the kitchen politics editor collective, and engaged in antiracist feminist movements. Her research interests are bio- and necropolitics, state theory, population policies, reproductive justice, racism and migration regimes, social movements in Latin America.

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here:

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

From the perspective of social reproduction and intersectional equalities

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

State Responses to Covid-19 from the perspective of
social reproduction and intersectional equalities

22nd of December, 2021

Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner and Birgit Sauer

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent global health crisis, states and governments quickly stepped in to protect the national population and economies, reinforcing the impression that the state is now back (Stephens 2021). From a feminist perspective, this claim can be reciprocated in two ways. First, the state has never been gone and continues to play, though in altered ways under neoliberalism, a key role in shaping the material and symbolic conditions of how societies reproduce themselves. Second, the state’s relative comeback in terms of increased government spending is likely to exacerbate rather than dismantle existing intersectional inequalities due to historical and institutional path dependencies. The return of the state might therefore not be seen as a movement to protect the society in a Polanyian sense (Polanyi 2001). These two points can be demonstrated based on the example of live-in care workers in Austria during the pandemic, as the following observations speak to structural patterns beyond the Austrian context.

The transition from the Fordist male-breadwinner to the post-Fordist dual-earner family model has altered the modes and regimes of social reproduction in the societies of the Global North. This has led to the expansion of public care infrastructure (e.g., public childcare) as well as to the commodification of care (e.g., private nursing homes) while most care work continues to be done in the private households by familialized women and increasingly by migrant care workers. States have played an active role in the formation of “global care chains” (Hochschild 2000) and the formalization of “care extractivism” (Wichterich 2016) and thus in the emergence of the “migrant-in-a-family” care model (Aulenbacher, Bachinger, Décieux 2015) to “fix” (Dowling 2021) the intensifying structural care crisis. In Austria, this model was formalized with the 2007 Home Care Act (Hausbetreuungsgesetz) which both draws on and reproduces existing gender, race, and class inequalities as demonstrated by the following figures. There are more than 60,000 live-in care workers in Austria. More than 92 percent of them are female, more than 98 percent are migrants, mainly from East European countries such as Romania and Slovakia, and their wages are below the minimum wage (Amnesty International 2021).

The Austrian government sought to maintain this notoriously precarious mode of caring during the pandemic. Some local governments organized charter flights and night trains to facilitate transnational mobility for care workers despite border closure in 2020 while the federal government introduced a “one-time, tax-free bonus of 500 Euros for live-in carers who extended their rotas for at least four weeks” (Leiblfinger et al. 2020, 145) which has added to the workload and psychological and emotional burden of care workers (ibid.). We thus observe a continuity and consolidation rather than a disruption in the way the state has steered and secured social reproduction at the expense of feminized and racialized individuals from poorer countries and households during the pandemic.

While increased government spending brought a relative state comeback for some workers and sectors during the Covid-19 crisis, feminized and racialized workers in precarious and informalized sectors could not benefit from state assistance and protection to the same extent due to preexisting inequalities and institutional path dependencies. As a “one-person company”, live-in care workers were technically eligible for the “hardship fund” (Härtefallfonds) issued by the Austrian government to relieve the self-employed and small companies during the pandemic (Sagmeister and Matei 2021). However, since most live-in care workers’ annual income remained below the 11,000 Euros tax allowance threshold, and they did not have an Austrian tax number or bank account, they could not take advantage of the fund. The government systematically missed the most precarious workers and exacerbated existing intersectional inequalities. Only after the intervention of the Interest Group of 24-Hour Carers (Interessensgemeinschaft der 24-Stunden-Betreuer_innen, IG24) did the government agree that the payments from the hardship fund could be made to European bank accounts outside of Austria (IG24 2021).

These observations suggest that, first, the state has not simply (re-)started but rather continued to actively shape the relations of social reproduction and care during the pandemic and, second, did so by drawing on existing forms of gender, race, and class inequalities to accommodate the care needs of white middle-classes. It is only by looking at such institutionally marginalized policy areas (compared to privileged policy areas such as public health and “the economy”) during the pandemic that we may capture the fact that the state has never really been gone and that its relative comeback in times of a crisis may not always be good news for those who will carry the brunt of its careless policies.

 

References

  • Amnesty International. 2021. “Wir wollen nur ein paar Rechte”. 24-Stunden-Betreuer*innen werden ihre Recht in Österreich verwehrt. Available online: https://www.amnesty.at/media/8593/amnesty-bericht_wir-wollen-nur-ein-paar-rechte-24h-betreuung-oesterreich_juli-2021_deutsch.pdf
  • Aulenbacher, Brigitte, Almut Bachinger, and Fabienne Décieux. Gelebte Sorglosigkeit? Kapitalismus, Sozialstaatlichkeit und soziale Reproduktion am Beispiel des österreichischen „migrant-in-a-family-care“-Modells. Kurswechsel 1 (2015): 6-14.
  • Dowling, Emma. 2021. The Care Crisis. What caused it and how can we end it? London and New York: Verso.
  • Hochschild, Arlie R. 2002. Global care chains and emotional surplus value. In On the Edge. Living with Global Capitalism, ed. Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, 130-146. London: Jonathan Cape.
  • 2021. Härtefallfonds: Österreich akzeptiert nationale Bankkonten der Betreuer*innen nach Intervention der IG24. Available online: https://ig24.at/ro/haertefallfonds-oesterreich-akzeptiert-nationale-bankkonten-der-betreuerinnen-2/
  • Leiblfinger, Michael, Veronika Prieler, Karin Schwiter, Jennifer Steiner, Aranka Benazha, and Helma Lutz. 2020. Impact of COVID-19 Policy Responses on Live-In Care Workers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Journal of Long-Term Care, 144-150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31389/jltc.51
  • Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.
  • Sagmeister, Maria, and Flavia Matei. Die “Pflegekrise” als krise der Arbeit sichtbar machen. Juridikum 3(2021), 395-403. https://doi.org/10.33196/ juridikum202103039501
  • Stephens, Philip. 2020. How coronavirus is remaking democratic politics. The Financial Times. 26.03. Available Online: https://www.ft.com/content/0e83be62-6e98-11ea-89df-41bea055720b/
  • Wichterich, Christa. 2016. Feministische Internationale Politische Ökonomie und Sorgeextraktivismus. In Globalisierung analysieren, kritisieren und verändern. Das Projekt Kritische Wissenschaft: Christoph Scherrer zum 60. Geburtstag, Ulrich Brand, Helen Schwenken, and Joscha Wullweber, 54-71. Hamburg: VSA Verlag.

Ayse Dursun

Ayse Dursun is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna and a researcher in the research group GAPS (Gender, Affect, Politics, State).

Verena Kettner

Verena Kettner works at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna as a Junior Researcher since September 2019.

Birgit Sauer

Birgit Sauer is a Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. She is vice spokesperson of the Research Platform GAIN (Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities).

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here:

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

Decommodification Geographies

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

DECOMMODIFICATION GEOGRAPHIES DURING COVID-19

22nd of December, 2021

Geoff Goodwin

State responses to Covid-19 reveal important features of twenty-first century capitalism and offer some clues about its future. One standout characteristic is the enormous difference in the capacity of capitalist states to limit exposure to the vagaries of markets through decommodification. Divergences between countries in the Global North and Global South have been particularly pronounced, indicating the scale and durability of the spatial inequalities that have emerged through centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Take some headline measures introduced in Britain and Ecuador as illustrative examples. Whereas the right-wing Johnson government begrudgingly paid millions of workers between 60% and 80% of their monthly salary up to £2500 for several months, the right-wing Moreno government disbursed cash transfers of $60 and $120 to around one million low-income families (the minimum wage in Ecuador is $400 per month). Moreno also pledged to provide $500 to half a million workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic but failed to deliver on this promise before leaving office in May 2021 and the country shortly afterwards.

The British state response occurred in the context of a welfare regime that provides basic support for low-wage and unemployed workers, despite being hollowed-out through decades of neoliberal restructuring. Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian state response took place amid a highly truncated welfare system that provides protection for workers in the formal sector and small means-tested cash transfers to some informal and agricultural workers. The Moreno government could have provided much more generous and universal support – its decision to offer such devastatingly limited assistance was rooted in an ideological commitment to cutting public spending, slashing market regulation, and protecting the interests of domestic and global capital, as indicated by the multi-billion loan it agreed with the IMF before the pandemic. Yet its response was also shaped by Ecuador’s historic role as a primary exporter and the place the country occupies in a highly unequal capitalist world economy.

The chasm between the measures introduced by right-wing elite-dominated governments in Britain and Ecuador indicates the enormous difference in the decommodifying potential of capitalist states and the diverse geographies of decommodification in the early twenty-first century. But whatever the form and scale of decommodification measures introduced in response to Covid-19, they seem to have been primarily aimed at protecting rather than rupturing the commodifying logic of contemporary capitalism. The Johnson government, for example, took every opportunity to expand commodification while temporarily ramping up labour decommodification to unprecedented levels. This indicates the value of reading the double movement as a simultaneous dialectic process rather than a sequence of distinct phases, i.e., movement then countermovement, commodification then decommodification. The expansion of decommodification through the state during the pandemic is likely to support rather than disrupt processes of commodification and accumulation in the short-term. However, the contradictory forces of the double movement might lead to radical changes over the long-run as capitalism becomes increasingly unstable. Who knows, the twenty-first century might follow a similar path to the one that Polanyi identified in the twentieth century – ‘conservative twenties, revolutionary thirties’ – as attempts to maintain the neoliberal order eventually give way to political-economic transformation on a global scale.

Geoff Goodwin

Geoff Goodwin teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the political economy of land and water in Ecuador and Colombia.
His latest article on Polanyian theory and analysis - 'Double Movements and Disembedded Economies: A Response to Richard Sandbrook' is forthcoming in Development and Change.

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here: 

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

Making Global Property

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

Making Global Property:
Covid-19, the Blockchain, and the Role of the State

22nd of December, 2021

Joel Z. Garrod

In recent years there has been a resurgence of literature suggesting that capitalism is moving toward a ‘new feudalism’, with significant weight given to the transformative role of large technology firms and the rise of the platform economy.[1] That there is renewed discourse about feudalism is not surprising. If what is emerging is not capitalism, but something worse as Mackenzie Wark argues,[2] it makes sense that feudalism might once again reignite our imaginations, given that feudal society represents the negation of those civil and political rights that have long constituted most national capitalisms.

At the root of many of these discussions are longstanding questions about ownership. These questions are especially pronounced in the universe of the blockchain, whose capacity to track and transfer varying forms of private property (money, data, identity) across national jurisdictions has led many supporters to believe it will solve many of the crises facing humanity today.

In a similar vein as to how Karl Polanyi looked backwards to understand the nature of his own time,[3] I too suggest that we might want to look back to the emergence of capitalism to better understand our own epoch. If the making of capitalism involved the rise, and eventual dominance, of private property relationships alongside the centralization of territory and rights under the authority of the nation-state, then what might this current transformation of property relations be making?

Similarities to the emergence of capitalism abound. Many blockchain supporters, for instance, echo the calls for freedom, justice, and liberty that were part of the making of capitalism. Today, however, these calls refer to the ability to protect one’s private property across the territory of multiple states without government intervention. And just as capitalism could not be made without the work of state-employed jurists to create and apply new legal rules about contracts, property, and procedure, so too do we see efforts to transform the regulation of blockchain-based activities, often supported by civil servants from the blockchain universe.[4] And similar to how the Black Death hastened the pace of monetization, so too is the blockchain offered as a means of tracking vaccine supply chains and securing vaccination status cards—all while the adoption and price of the major cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed. As crypto-economic activity increases in use, there will be continued pressure to transform existing national property regimes, and thus, the role and nature of the nation-state: what rights it enforces, where those rights apply, and what authority enforces them—and ultimately, who benefits.

[1] There are numerous examples, but a few prominent ones are: Dean, J. (2020a). Communism or Neo-Feudalism? New Political Science, 42(1), 1–17; Dean, J. (2020b, May 12). Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism? Los Angeles Review of Books. https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/; Fairfield, J. A. T. (2017, September 6). Silicon Valley and the new feudalism: Why the “Internet of Things” marks a return to the Middle Ages. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-private-property-and-new-feudalism-why-internet-things-marks-660102; Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners take all: The elite charade of changing the world. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Kotkin, J. (2020). The coming of neo-feudalism: A warning to the global middle class. Encounter Books; Morozov, E. (2016, April 24). Welcome to the new feudalism—with Silicon Valley as our over-lords. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/24/the-new-feudalism-silicon-valley-overlords-advertising-necessary-evil; Varoufakis, Y. (2021, June 28). Techno-feudalism is taking over. Project Syndicate. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalism-replacing-market-capitalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-06.

[2] Wark, M. (2019). Capital is dead: Is this something worse? Verso.

[3] Polanyi, K. (2002). The great transformation. Beacon Press.

[4] Some examples being the former head of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Brian Brooks, who was previously Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer, or Gary Gensler, the current Chairman of the SEC who previously taught courses on the blockchain.

Joel Z. Garrod

Joel Z. Garrod is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. His research focuses on the relationship between globalization, neoliberalism, corporate power, and the transformation of the nation-state. His research has been published in Economy & Society, Studies in Political Economy, and Science & Society

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here: 

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

Pandemic politics to restore the pre-pandemic order

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

Pandemic politics to restore the pre-pandemic order

22nd of December, 2021

Karl Polanyi shared the liberals’ view that late-19th century’s laws about labour, social insurance, trade, health services, public utilities, tariffs etc., were indeed “protracting business depressions, aggravating unemployment, deepening financial slumps, diminishing trade, and damaging severely the self-regulating mechanism of the market”[1]. But this “protectionist movement”, as Polanyi described it, was not part of a statist “antiliberal conspiracy”, as liberals thought. It was due to what he called “objective reasons of a stringent nature[2] to assist the reproduction of capitalism that was never capable to simply maintain itself and always necessitated a strong state on its side, even more so in times of crises.

The pandemic is the fourth “global crisis” of the 21st century after September 11 2001, the financial crisis in 2008, and the refugee crisis in 2015. Because lockdowns caused a deep recession, “objective reasons of a stringent nature” emerged again, necessitating such state interventions as bailouts (e.g. of airlines companies), temporary transfers (e.g. to workers who lost their jobs), and tax and rent reductions (e.g. to closed businesses). Emmanuel Macron’s approach that governments ought to save the economy “whatever the cost[3] dominated, reminiscent of the monetary policy approach of former ECB president Mario Draghi, who stated he would do “whatever it takes” in 2012 to preserve the Eurozone. As a response to the pandemic, the ECB provided monetary support to member states with the “Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme” and the “Next Generation EU”, which, according to the European Commission, is “the largest stimulus package ever financed in Europe”[4]. Following Polanyi, it can be argued that these costly interventions do not aim to challenge neoliberal globalization but restore it after the pandemic ends.

What came intensively to the fore during the pandemic are the effects on public healthcare of decades of neoliberalization, budgets cuts, austerity and the constantly increasing share of the private sector in provisioning healthcare services. Although the pandemic gave rise to social expectations of a stronger public healthcare system, the plans for further privatisation of healthcare are not really interrupted. Although the need for a broader welfare state became obvious, it was rather the police and the surveillance state that were strengthened by means of new technologies as a response to Covid-19. Although the pandemic’s crisis management was the outcome of the interlocking of international health organisations, state institutions, pharmaceutical companies, global financial institutions, and the police, it was “individual responsibility” that was promoted as the most fundamental factor for the success of policies against Covid-19. Although “essential” workers and social carers were often praised by officials for the services they provided, their wages and working conditions hardly improved.

Thus, concerns are justified that public spending in 2020 and 2021 may lead to new rounds of austerity measures in the near future. Given that counter-movements to austerity and liberalization in the financial crisis of the 2010s were oppressed and their demands put aside, it is likely that the pandemic’s outcomes in the post-Covid era are again offloaded to working classes, resulting in new forms of precarisation, insecurity, and pauperisation. Whether and how this offloading can be realized or averted is again subjected to the society’s efforts to defend itself, to the “double movement” and class struggle.

[1] Polanyi, Karl (2001). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, p.150

[2] Ibid., p.153

[3] Financial Times. 2020. Interview: Emmanuel Macron. April 16. https://www.ft. com/content/3ea8d790-7fd1-11ea-8fdb-7ec06edeef84

[4] European Commission (2021). Recovery Plan for Europe. https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/recovery-plan-europe_en

Maria Markantonatou

Maria Markantonatou is an Assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean (Lesvos, Greece) and a board member of the IKPS.

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here:

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US

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Beyond Border Sovereignty

Debate on State Responses to Covid-19

Beyond Border Sovereignty: Comparing State and
Regional Responses to Covid-19 in Africa and Europe

22nd of December, 2021

Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba and Cory Blad

Countries in Africa and Europe have adopted a mix of national and regional approaches to managing Covid-19 since its outbreak in 2019. The strategies in the two continents have produced different outcomes in terms of the rates of infections, recoveries, and fatalities. The effectiveness of national and regional institutions in Africa and Europe have affected the divergent outcomes. Regional economic institutions play a central organizational role in both cases, however massive differences in financial support mirror divergences. The need to further embed public health infrastructure in successful economic community cooperation is highlighted in both cases.

In the early months of the outbreak of the virus, Africa followed the examples of other regions and imposed national lockdowns in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. In this process, states commonly activated emergency laws, which restricted human rights and protection of the rule of law. More productive with regards to socio-economic stability, a regional approach has been adopted in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, which has largely helped to mitigate its effects. Under the auspices of the African Union, the Africa Centres for Disease Control has taken the lead in responding to the pandemic on the continent. In West Africa, the Economic Community of West African States has supported member states with funding to purchase test kits, while the West Africa Health Organisation provides daily reports on infections, recoveries, and deaths. Differences in the capacity of African states to address the pandemic and its economic implications could pose long-term challenges in containing the spread of the virus as well as ensuring economic recovery. The porous borders between many countries in Africa present additional challenges and opportunities for a regional-based approach to pandemic response.

In Europe, national lockdowns were imposed. Unlike in Africa where a regional approach was immediately activated, bickering among members of the European Union resulted in delays before a regional approach could be activated. Institutional infrastructure advantages were initially ignored as national restrictions on travel, trade, and exports restricted regional public health coordination. Eventually, several regional economic recovery and public health funding initiatives (CRII and SURE, to name a few) were implemented to provide support for national member states. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control plays a complementary role by supporting the state to provide technical advice, information, and training, but national-level autonomy ensures this advisory capacity. This is like the role played by the Africa Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in terms of information dissemination and some supply coordination, but not with regards to research and development.

As the virus continues to evolve, we see how institutions remain critical to managing the pandemic. In Africa, where many years of neglect led to weak health infrastructures, regional institutions play important roles in mobilizing resources, training, and information distribution. The commitment of each respective Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in coordinating national health institutions needs to be reinforced, but the common experiential need to utilize economic community infrastructure in order to facilitate regional cooperation highlights the long-term impact of social disembeddedness. Both in Africa and Europe, it is imperative build stronger national and regional health infrastructure to combat future pandemics.

Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba

Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba is an Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Honorary Professor at the Thabo Mbeki School of Public and International Affairs, University of South Africa. He is also a Faculty Associate at the African School of Governance and Policy Studies.

Cory Blad

Cory Blad, Ph.D. is interim Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Professor of Sociology at Manhattan College. His work examines political legitimation in the context of neoliberal capitalism.

Read the other essays on State Responses to Covid-19 here:

Davide Caselli, Carlotta Mozzana & Barbara Giullari, Italy
Beverley Skeggs, UK
Mike Laufenberg & Susanne Schultz, Germany
Ayse Dursun, Verena Kettner & Birgit Sauer, Austria
Geoff Goodwin, UK
Joel Z. Garrod, Canada
Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba & Cory Blad, South Africa/Canada/US