[D66] THIS ISN’T A VIRUS, IT’S A TIME MACHINE

[R.O.]

https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/isn%E2%80%99t-virus-it%E2%80%99s-time-machine

THIS ISN’T A VIRUS, IT’S A TIME MACHINE
By
Benedict Seymour
metamute.org
17 min
View Original

In a 2015 LRB essay Fredric Jameson briefly imagines the Bolshevik Party 
as a kind of time machine. The party is a device by means of which 
Leninist revolutionaries effect a collective leap into the future:

[H.G.] Wells’s formal innovation … lay in his shifting of the reader’s 
attention to a technological substitute for the missing historical 
transition, namely the time machine. (We might argue that the party was 
Lenin’s analogous innovation in the realm of political strategy).[1]

If the party staged interruptions in the linear, empty time of 
industrial capitalism, or at least put the conveyor belt into fast 
forward, these would be temporal events of acceleration freeing us from 
the old, breaking us from the feudal past, opening up a future of 
self-determination.

Today in the UK (and beyond), we are undergoing first Brexit and now 
Covid as contemporary time machines that really do produce temporal 
leaps – even if their temporality, which comes on punctual (‘Take back 
control!’), ends up leaving behind it an endless smear of bureaucracy 
and technocracy (‘Get it done’, chapters 1 to n). But these time 
machines are regressive, not progressive: they effect a rapid leap 
backward – even if this is retrogression is absolutely novel.[2] In 
political and social-reproductive terms these two successive shocks have 
been coups for a reactionary movement, not least where they have most 
emphasised their focus on the future. Wherever Tories invoke the ‘state 
of the art’, for example behavioural (pseudo-) science, in which the 
hypothesis of ‘herd immunity’ serves to return us to racist eugenics, 
they always set the controls for the heart of darkness, neo-reaction, 
cutting edge disaster. Brexit was a kind of far-right coup or 
contemporary ‘Reichstag fire’ that delivered a fast forward into the 
past, politically, laying out a new set of terms for the ruling class 
and the ruled. It managed potential anti-capitalist sentiment in a 
racialised and technocratic direction, turning righteous hatred of 
Blairites and Tories alike into something toxic and regressive and so 
containing and inverting its implicit threat to the system. The Brexit 
‘choice’ congealed anger into anti-migrant, late colonialist resentment, 
an elegant ideological device to suppress a burgeoning sense of class 
hatred, by pitting proles against each other along lines of age and 
race. So, the embittered white ‘boomer’ male booms on about the 
migrants, the woke, the snowflakes and red tape, NOT the bosses, the 
borders, the Blairites’ attack on social reproduction over decades of 
cuts to services, subsidies, benefits, etc.[3]

Moving on from the Brexit event to the Covid event, the UK state was 
always going to be crucial in dealing with a pandemic, there could be no 
self-organised, grassroots response in the current desperately fucked 
socio-political circumstances (though compare and contrast Hong Kong or 
Kerala’s pandemic response to get a sense of how things could be). 
However, under Johnson’s Tory party, and specifically the Dominic 
Cummings dominated cabinet, dealing with Covid means a de facto and 
tacit assault on the working class in the UK that is as racist and 
necropolitical as it is nerdy and wonkish. It has plenty of room for 
self-organisation as long as it is decoupled from any antagonism to 
capital. From herd immunity to… eternity, Covid becomes the pretext not 
for the libertarians’ nightmare of perma-lockdown, but rather for 
expanded and radicalised laissez-faire: a fake lockdown and real squeeze 
on workers precisely through the unstated but implicit imperative to 
continue working (if you’re poor).

The two great disasters come in rapid succession and manage somehow to 
fulfill the question many of us began 2020 with: how can capitalism 
possibly beat 2019 for horror? Together Brexit and the Tory response to 
Coronavirus add up to a Bannonite great leap backward, a brand new old, 
as Brecht might say: instead of ‘electrification plus soviets’, Lenin’s 
formula for communism, we have digitalisation minus representation and 
social reproduction. Tory pandemic management creates a massive 
opportunity for profiteering dotcoms and far-right app mongers to become 
permanent parts of the social reproductive infrastructure of the UK 
(most egregiously, the non-competitively tendered Palantir contract for 
the NHS data project). This coincides with the imminent subtraction of 
public services, compression of wages, and destruction of the 
(re)production of the collective worker in the form of Higher Education 
(goodbye humanities, and universities more generally; not to mention the 
implosion of the cultural industries; what Marx calls the moral 
component of the wage is about to get mashed all over again, making the 
2008 compression look like a mild flu compared to this social covid).

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