Social Contagion | Chuang

Social Contagion | Chuang





The Furnace

Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.

But now this furnace driving the post-crisis Chinese economy seems, much like those found in its iron and steel foundries, to be cooling. Though this process was already well underway, the metaphor is now no longer simply economic, either, as the once-bustling city has been sealed off for over a month, its streets emptied by government mandate: “The greatest contribution you can make is: don’t gather together, don’t cause chaos,” read a headline in the Guangming Daily, run by the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department. Today the Wuhan’s broad new avenues and the glittering steel and glass buildings that crown them are all cold and hollow, as winter dwindles through the Lunar New Year and the city stagnates under the constriction of the wide-ranging quarantine. Isolating oneself is sound advice for anyone in China, where the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (recently renamed “SARS-CoV-2” and its disease “COVID-19”) has killed more than two thousand people—more than its predecessor, the SARS epidemic of 2003. The entire country is on lockdown, as it was during SARS. Schools are closed, and people are cooped up in their homes nationwide. Nearly all economic activity stopped for the Lunar New Year holiday on January 25th, but the pause was extended for a month to curb the spread of the epidemic. The furnaces of China seem to have stopped burning, or at least to have been reduced to gently glowing coals. In a way, though, the city has become another type of furnace, as the coronavirus burns through its massive population like a fever writ large.

The outbreak has been incorrectly blamed on everything from the conspiratorial and/or accidental release of a virus strain from the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a dubious claim spread by social media, particularly via paranoid Hong Kong and Taiwan Facebook posts, but now buoyed by conservative press outlets and military interests in the West—to the propensity of Chinese people to consume “dirty” or “strange” types of food, since the virus outbreak is linked to either bats or snakes sold in a semi-illegal ‘wet market’ specializing in wildlife and other rare animals (though this was not the ultimate source). Both major themes exhibit the obvious warmongering and orientalism common to reporting on China, and a number of articles have pointed out this basic fact. But even these responses tend to focus only on questions of how the virus is perceived in the cultural sphere, spending far less time digging into the much more brutal dynamics that lie obscured beneath the media frenzy.

A slightly more complex variant at least understands the economic consequences, even while it exaggerates the potential political repercussions for rhetorical effect. Here we find the usual suspects, ranging from standard warhawk dragon-slaying politicos to the spilled-latte pearl clutching of haute-liberalism: press agencies from the National Review to the New York Times have already implied that the outbreak may bring a “crisis of legitimacy” to the CCP, despite the fact that there is barely a whiff of an uprising in the air. But the kernel of truth to these predictions lies in their grasp of the economic dimensions of the quarantine—something that could hardly be lost on journalists with stock portfolios thicker than their skulls. Because the fact is that, despite the government’s call to isolate oneself, people may soon be forced to “gather together” to tend to the needs of production. According to the latest initial estimates, the epidemic will already cause China’s GDP slow to 5 percent in this year, below its already flagging growth rate of 6 percent last year, the lowest in three decades. Some analysts have said Q1 growth could sink 4 percent or lower, and that this may risk triggering a global recession of some sort. A previously unthinkable question has been posed: what actually happens to the global economy when the Chinese furnace begins to grow cold?

Within China itself, the ultimate trajectory of this event is difficult to predict, but the moment has already brought about a rare, collective process of questioning and learning about society. The epidemic has directly infected nearly 80,000 people (at the most conservative estimate), but it has delivered a shock to everyday life under capitalism for 1.4 billion, trapped in a moment of precarious self-reflection. This moment, while full of fear, has caused everyone to simultaneously ask some deep questions: What will happen to me? My children, family and friends? Will we have enough food? Will I get paid? Will I make rent? Who is responsible for all this? In a strange way, the subjective experience is somewhat like that of a mass strike—but one which, in its non-spontaneous, top-down character and, especially in its involuntary hyper-atomization, illustrates the basic conundrums of our own strangled political present as clearly as the true mass strikes of the previous century elucidated the contradictions of their era. The quarantine, then, is like a strike hollowed of its communal features but nonetheless capable of delivering a deep shock to both psyche and economy. This fact alone makes it worthy of reflection.

Of course, speculation on the imminent downfall of the CCP is predictable nonsense, one of the favorite pastimes of The New Yorker and The Economist. Meanwhile, the normal media suppression protocols are underway, in which overtly racist mass-media op-eds published in legacy outlets are countered by a swarm of web-platform thinkpieces polemicizing against orientalism and other facets of ideology. But almost the entirety of this discussion remains at the level of portrayal—or, at best, the politics of containment and the economic consequences of the epidemic—without delving into the questions of how such diseases get produced in the first place, much less distributed. Even this, however, is not quite enough. Now is not the time for a simple “Scooby-Doo Marxist” exercise of pulling the mask off the villain to reveal that, yes, indeed, it was capitalism that caused coronavirus all along! That would be no more subtle than foreign commentators sniffing about for regime change. Of course capitalism is culpable—but how, exactly, does the social-economic sphere interface with the biological, and what kind of deeper lessons might be drawn from the entire experience?

In this sense, the outbreak presents two opportunities for reflection: First, it is an instructive opening in which we might review substantial questions about how capitalist production relates to the non-human world at a more fundamental level—how, in short, the “natural world,” including its microbiological substrata, cannot be understood without reference to how society organizes production (because the two are not, in fact, separate). At the same time, this is a reminder that the only communism worth the name is one that includes the potential of a fully politicized naturalism. Second, we can also use this moment of isolation for our own sort of reflection on the present state of Chinese society. Some things only become clear when everything grinds to an unexpected halt, and a slowdown of this sort cannot help but make previously obscured tensions visible. Below, then, we’ll explore both these questions, showing not only how capitalist accumulation produces such plagues, but also how the moment of pandemic is itself a contradictory instance of political crisis, making visible to people the unseen potentials and dependencies of the world around them, while also offering yet another excuse for the extension of systems of control even further into everyday life.

Beneath the four furnaces, then, lies a more fundamental furnace undergirding the industrial hubs of the world: the evolutionary pressure cooker of capitalist agriculture and urbanization. This provides the ideal medium through which ever-more-devastating plagues are born, transformed, induced to zoonotic leaps, and then aggressively vectored through the human population.Name Goes Here



The Production of Plagues

The virus behind the present epidemic (SARS-CoV-2), was, like its 2003 predecessor SARS-CoV, as well as the avian flu and swine flu before it, gestated at the nexus of economics and epidemiology. It’s not coincidental that so many of these viruses have taken on the names of animals: The spread of new diseases to the human population is almost always the product of what’s called zoonotic transfer, which is a technical way of saying that such infections jump from animals to humans. This leap from one species to another is conditioned by things like proximity and the regularity of contact, all of which construct the environment in which the disease is forced to evolve. When this interface between humans and animals changes, it also changes the conditions within which such diseases evolve. Beneath the four furnaces, then, lies a more fundamental furnace undergirding the industrial hubs of the world: the evolutionary pressure cooker of capitalist agriculture and urbanization. This provides the ideal medium through which ever-more-devastating plagues are born, transformed, induced to zoonotic leaps, and then aggressively vectored through the human population. To this is added similarly intensive processes occurring at the economy’s fringes, where “wild” strains are encountered by people pushed to ever-more extensive agroeconomic incursions into local ecosystems. The most recent coronavirus, in its “wild” origins and its sudden spread through a heavily industrialized and urbanized core of the global economy, represents both dimensions of our new era of political-economic plagues.

The basic idea here is developed most thoroughly by left-wing biologists like Robert G. Wallace, whose 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu makes an exhaustive case for the connection between capitalist agribusiness and the etiology of recent epidemics ranging from SARS to Ebola.[i] These epidemics can be loosely grouped into two categories, the first originating at the core of agroeconomic production, and the second in its hinterland. In tracing out the spread of H5N1, also known as the avian flu, he summarizes several key factors of geography for those epidemics that originate in the productive core:


Rural landscapes of many of the poorest countries are now characterized by unregulated agribusiness pressed against periuban slums. Unchecked transmission in vulnerable areas increases the genetic variation with which H5N1 can evolve human-specific characteristics. In spreading over three continents, fast-evolving H5N1 also contacts an increasing variety of socioecological environments, including locale-specific combinations of prevalent host types, modes of poultry farming, and animal health measures.[ii]

This spread is, of course, driven by global commodity circuits and the regular labor migrations that define capitalist economic geography. The result is “a type of escalating demic selection” via which the virus is posed with a greater number of evolutionary pathways in a shorter time, enabling the most fit variants to outcompete the others.

But this is an easy point to make, and one already common in the mainstream press: the fact that “globalization” enables the spread of such diseases more quickly—albeit here with an important addition, noting how this very process of circulation also stimulates the virus to mutate more rapidly. The real question, though, comes earlier: prior to circulation enhancing the resilience of such diseases, the basic logic of capital helps to take previously isolated or harmless viral strains and place them in hyper-competitive environments that favor the specific traits which cause epidemics, such as rapid viral lifecycles, the capacity for zoonotic jumping between carrier species, and the capacity to quickly evolve new transmission vectors. These strains tend to stand out precisely because of their virulence. In absolute terms, it seems like developing more virulent strains would have the opposite effect, since killing the host sooner provides less time for the virus to spread. The common cold is a good example of this principle, generally maintaining low levels of intensity that facilitate its widespread distribution through the population. But in certain environments, the opposite logic makes much more sense: when a virus has numerous hosts of the same species in close proximity, and especially when these hosts may already have shortened lifecycles, increased virulence becomes an evolutionary advantage.

Again, the avian flu example is a salient one. Wallace points out that studies have shown “no endemic highly pathogenic strains [of influenza] in wild bird populations, the ultimate source reservoir of nearly all influenza subtypes.”[iii] Instead, domesticated populations packed together on industrial farms seems to display a clear relationship with such outbreaks, for obvious reasons:


Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence.[iv]

And, of course, each of these characteristics is an outgrowth of the logic of industrial competition. In particular, the rapid rate of “throughput” in such contexts has a starkly biological dimension: “As soon as industrial animals reach the right bulk they are killed. Resident influenza infections must reach their transmission threshold quickly in any given animal […] The quicker viruses are produced, the greater the damage to the animal.”[v] Ironically, the attempt to suppress such outbreaks through mass culling—as in the recent cases of African swine fever which resulted in the loss of almost a quarter of the world’s pork supply—can have the unintended effect of increasing this selection pressure even more, thereby inducing the evolution of hyper-virulent strains. Though such outbreaks have historically occurred in domesticated species, often following periods of warfare or environmental catastrophe that place enhanced pressure on livestock populations, increases in the intensity and virulence of such diseases have undeniably followed the spread of capitalist production.










History and Etiology

Plagues are very much the shadow of capitalist industrialization, while also acting as its harbinger. The obvious cases of smallpox and other pandemics introduced to North America are too simple of an example, since their intensity was enhanced by the long-term separation of populations through physical geography—and such diseases had, regardless, already gained their virulence via pre-capitalist mercantile networks and early urbanization in Asia and Europe. If we instead look to England, where capitalism arose first in the countryside via the mass clearing of peasants from the land to be replaced by monocultures of livestock, we see the earliest examples of these distinctively capitalist plagues. Three different pandemics occurred in 18th century England, spanning 1709-1720, 1742-1760, and 1768-1786. The origin of each was imported cattle from Europe, infected by the normal pre-capitalist pandemics that followed bouts of warfare. But in England, cattle had begun to be concentrated in new ways, and the introduction of the infected stock would therefore rip through the population much more aggressively than it had in Europe. It’s not coincidental, then, that the outbreaks were centered on the large London dairies, which provided ideal environments for the intensification of the virus.

Ultimately, the outbreaks were each contained through selective, smaller-scale early culling combined with the application of modern medical and scientific practices—in essence similar to how such epidemics are quelled today. This is the first instance of what would become a clear pattern, mimicking that of economic crisis itself: ever more intense collapses that seem to place the entire system on a precipice, but which are ultimately overcome via a combination of mass sacrifice that clears the market/population and an intensification of technological advances—in this case modern medical practices plus new vaccines, often arriving too little too late, but nonetheless helping to mop things up in the wake of devastation.

But this example from capitalism’s homeland must also be paired with an explanation of the effects that capitalist agricultural practices had on its periphery. While the cattle pandemics of early capitalist England were contained, the results elsewhere were far more devastating. The example with the largest historical impact is probably that of the rinderpest outbreak in Africa that took place in the 1890s. The date itself is no coincidence: rinderpest had plagued Europe with an intensity that closely followed the growth of large-scale agriculture, only held in check by the advance of modern science. But the late 19th century saw the height of European imperialism, epitomized by the colonization of Africa. Rinderpest was brought from Europe into East Africa with the Italians, who were seeking to catch up with other imperial powers by colonizing the Horn of Africa through a series of military campaigns. These campaigns mostly ended in failure, but the disease then spread through the indigenous cattle population and ultimately found its way into South Africa, where it devastated the early capitalist agricultural economy of the colony, even killing the herd on the estate of the infamous self-professed white supremacist Cecil Rhodes. The larger historical effect was undeniable: killing as many as 80-90% of all cattle, the plague resulted in an unprecedented famine across the predominantly pastoralist societies of Sub-Saharan Africa. This depopulation was then followed by the invasive colonization of the savannah by thornbush, which created a habitat for the tsetse fly which both carries sleeping sickness and prevents the grazing of livestock. This ensured that the repopulation of the region after the famine would be limited, and enabled the further spread of European colonial powers across the continent.

Aside from periodically inducing agricultural crises and producing the apocalyptic conditions that helped capitalism surge beyond its early borders, such plagues have also haunted the proletariat in the industrial core itself. Before returning to the many more recent examples, it’s worth noting again that there is simply nothing uniquely Chinese about the coronavirus outbreak. The explanations for why so many epidemics seem to arise in China is not cultural, it’s a matter of economic geography. This is abundantly clear if we compare China to the US or Europe when the latter were hubs of global production and mass industrial employment.[vi] And the result is essentially identical, with all the same features. Livestock die-offs in the countryside were met in the city by poor sanitary practices and widespread contamination. This became the focus of early liberal-progressive efforts at reform in working class areas, epitomized by the reception of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, originally written to document the suffering of immigrant workers in the meat-packing industry, but taken up by wealthier liberals concerned about health violations and the generally unsanitary conditions in which their own food was prepared.

This liberal outrage at “uncleanliness,” with all its implied racism, still defines what we might think of as the automatic ideology of most people when confronted with the political dimensions of something like the coronavirus or SARS epidemics. But workers have little control over the conditions in which they work. More importantly, while unsanitary conditions do leak out of the factory through contamination of food supplies, this contamination is really just the tip of the iceberg. Such conditions are the ambient norm for those working in them or living in nearby proletarian settlements, and these conditions induce population-level declines in health that provide even better conditions for the spread of capitalism’s many plagues. Take, for example, the case of the Spanish Flu, one of the deadliest epidemics in history. This was one of the earliest outbreaks of H1N1 influenza (related to more recent outbreaks of swine and avian flu), and it was long assumed to have somehow been qualitatively different from other variants of influenza, given its high death toll. While this appears to be true in part (due to the flu’s ability to induce an overreaction of the immune system), later reviews of the literature and historical epidemiology research found that it may not have been that much more virulent than other strains. Instead, its high death rate was probably caused primarily by widespread malnourishment, urban overcrowding, and generally unsanitary living conditions in the affected areas, which encouraged not only the spread of the flu itself but also the cultivation of bacterial superinfections on top of the underlying viral one.[vii]

In other words, the death toll of Spanish Flu, though portrayed as an unpredictable aberration in the character of the virus, was given an equivalent boost by social conditions. Meanwhile, the rapid spread of the flu was enabled by global trade and global warfare, at that time centered around the rapidly shifting imperialisms that survived the first world war. And we find yet again a now-familiar story of how such a deadly strain of influenza was produced in the first place: though the exact origin is still somewhat murky, it’s now widely assumed to have originated in domesticated swine or poultry, likely in Kansas. The time and location are notable, since the years following the war were a sort of inflection point for American agriculture, which saw the widespread application of increasingly mechanized, factory-style methods of production. These trends only grew more intense through the 1920s, and the mass application of technologies like the combine harvester induced both gradual monopolization and ecological disaster, the combination of which resulted in the Dust Bowl crisis and the mass migration that followed. The intensive concentration of livestock that would mark later factory farms had not yet arisen, but the more basic forms of concentration and intensive throughput that had already created livestock epidemics across Europe were now the norm. If the English cattle epidemics of the 18th century were the first case of a distinctly capitalist livestock plague, and the rinderpest outbreak of 1890s Africa the largest of imperialism’s epidemiological holocausts, the Spanish flu can then be understood as the first of capitalism’s plagues on the proletariat.








Gilded Age

The parallels with the current Chinese case are salient. COVID-19 can’t be understood without taking into account the ways in which China’s last few decades of development in and through the global capitalist system has molded the country’s health care system and the state of public health more generally. The epidemic, however novel, is therefore similar to other public health crises that came before it, which tend to be produced with nearly the same regularity as economic crises, and to be regarded in similar ways within the popular press—as if they were random, “black swan” events, utterly unpredictable and unprecedented. The reality, however, is that these health crises follow their own chaotic, cyclical patterns of recurrence, made more probable by a series of structural contradictions built into the nature of production and proletarian life under capitalism. Much like the case of the Spanish Flu, the coronavirus was originally able to take hold and spread rapidly because of a general degradation of basic healthcare among the population at large. But precisely because this degradation has taken place in the midst of spectacular economic growth, it has been obscured behind the splendor of glittering cities and massive factories. The reality, however, is that expenditures on public goods like health care and education in China remain extremely low, while most public spending has been directed toward brick and mortar infrastructure—bridges, roads, and cheap electricity for production.

Meanwhile, the quality of domestic-market products is often dangerously poor. For decades, Chinese industry has produced high quality, high value exports, made to the highest global standards for the world market, like iPhones and computer chips. But those goods left for consumption on the domestic market have abysmal standards, causing regular scandals and deep public distrust. The many cases have an undeniable echo of Sinclair’s The Jungle and other tales of Gilded Age America. The largest case in recent memory, the melamine milk scandal of 2008, left a dozen infants dead and tens of thousands hospitalized (though perhaps hundreds of thousands were affected). Since then, a number of scandals have rocked the public with regularity: in 2011 when ‘gutter oil’ recycled from grease traps was found being used in restaurants across the country, or in 2018 when faulty vaccines killed several children, and then one year later when dozens were hospitalized when given fake HPV vaccines. More mild stories are even more rampant, composing a familiar backdrop for anyone living in China: powdered instant soup mix cut with soap to keep costs down, entrepreneurs who sell pigs that died of mysterious causes to neighboring villages, detailed gossip about which street-side shops are most likely to get you sick.

Before the country’s piece-by-piece incorporation into the global capitalist system, services like healthcare in China were once provided (largely in the cities) under the danwei system of enterprise-based benefits or (mostly but not exclusively in the countryside) by local healthcare clinics staffed by plentiful “barefoot doctors,” all provided as a free service. The successes of socialist-era healthcare, like its successes in the field of basic education and literacy, were substantial enough that even the country’s harshest critics had to acknowledge them. Snail fever, plaguing the country for centuries, was essentially wiped out in much of its historical core, only to return in force once the socialist healthcare system began to be dismantled. Infant mortality plummeted and, even despite the famine that accompanied the Great leap Forward, life expectancy jumped from 45 to 68 years between 1950 and the early 1980s. Immunization and general sanitary practices became widespread, and basic information on nutrition and public health, as well as access to rudimentary medicines, were free and available to all. Meanwhile, the barefoot doctor system helped to distribute fundamental, albeit limited, medical knowledge to a large portion of the population, helping to build a robust, bottom-up healthcare system in conditions of severe material poverty. It’s worth remembering that all of this took place at a time when China was poorer, per capita, than your average Sub-Saharan African country today.

Since then, a combination of neglect and privatization has substantially degraded this system at the exact same time that rapid urbanization and unregulated industrial production of household goods and foodstuffs has made the need for widespread healthcare, not to mention food, drug and safety regulations, all the more necessary. Today, China’s public spending on health is US$323 per capita, according to figures from the World Health Organization. This figure is low even among other “upper-middle income” countries, and it’s around half that spent by Brazil, Belarus and Bulgaria. Regulation is minimal to non-existent, resulting in numerous scandals of the type mentioned above. Meanwhile, the effects of all this are felt most strongly by the hundreds of millions of migrant workers, for whom any right to basic health care provisions completely evaporates when they leave their rural hometowns (where, under the hukou system, they are permanent residents regardless of their actual location, meaning that the remaining public resources can’t be accessed elsewhere).

Ostensibly, public healthcare was supposed to have been replaced in the late 1990s by a more privatized system (albeit one managed through the state) in which a combination of employer and employee contributions would provide for medical care, pensions and housing insurance. But this social insurance scheme has suffered from systematic underpayment, to the extent that supposedly “required” contributions on the part of employers are often simply ignored, leaving the overwhelming majority of workers to pay out of pocket. According to the latest available national estimate, only 22 percent of migrant workers had basic medical insurance. Lack of contributions to the social insurance system is not, however, simply a spiteful act by individually corrupt bosses, but is instead accounted for largely by the fact that slim profit margins leave no room for social benefits. In our own calculation, we found that coughing up unpaid social insurance in an industrial hub like Dongguan would cut industrial profits in half and push many firms to bankruptcy. To make up for the massive gaps, China has instituted a bare-bones supplementary medical scheme to cover retirees and the self-employed, which only pays out a few hundred yuan per person per year on average.

This beleaguered medical system produces its own terrifying social tensions. Several medical staff are killed each year and dozens are injured in attacks by angry patients or, more often, the family members of patients who die in their care. The most recent attack occurred on Christmas Eve, when a doctor in Beijing was stabbed to death by the son of a patient who believed his mother died from poor care at the hospital. One survey of doctors found that a staggering 85 percent had experienced workplace violence, and another, from 2015, said that 13 percent of doctors in China had been physically assaulted the previous year. Chinese doctors see four times the number of patients per year than US doctors, while being paid less than US$15,000 per year—for perspective, that’s less than per capita income (US$16,760), while in the US an average doctor’s salary (about US$300,000) is almost five times as much as per capita income (US$60,200). Before it was shut down in 2016 and its creators arrested, the now defunct unrest-tracking blog project of Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu recorded at least a few strikes and protests by medical workers every month.[viii] In 2015, the last full year of their meticulously collected data, there were 43 such events. They also recorded dozens of “medical treatment [protest] incidents” each month, led by family members of patients, with 368 recorded in 2015.

Under such conditions of massive public divestment from the healthcare system, it’s no surprise that COVID-19 took hold so easily. Combined with the fact that new communicable diseases emerge in China at a rate of one every 1-2 years, conditions seem primed for such epidemics to continue. As in the case of the Spanish Flu, the generally poor conditions of public health among the proletarian population has helped the virus to both gain footing and, from there, to rapidly spread. But, again, it’s not just a question of distribution. We have to also understand how the virus itself was produced.








There is No Wilderness

In the case of the most recent outbreak, the story is less straightforward than the cases of swine or avian influenza, which are so clearly associated with the core of the agro-industrial system. On the one hand, the exact origins of the virus are not yet entirely clear. It is possible that it originated from pigs, which are one of many domesticated and wild animals trafficked at the Wuhan wet market that appears to be the epicenter of the outbreak, in which case the causation might be more similar to the above cases than might otherwise appear. The greater probability, however, seems to point toward the virus originating in bats or possibly snakes, both of which are usually harvested from the wild. Even here there is a relationship, however, since the decline in the availability and safety of pork due to the African Swine Fever outbreak has meant that increased meat demand has often been met by these wet markets selling “wild” game meat. But without the direct factory farming connection, can the same economic processes really be said to bear any complicity in this particular outbreak?

The answer is yes, but in a different way. Again, Wallace points to not one but two major routes by which capitalism helps to gestate and unleash ever more deadly epidemics: The first, outlined above, is the directly industrial case, in which viruses are gestated within industrial environments that have been fully subsumed within capitalist logic. But the second is the indirect case, which takes place via capitalist expansion and extraction in the hinterland, where previously unknown viruses are essentially harvested from wild populations and distributed along global capital circuits. The two are not entirely separate, of course, but it seems to be the second case that best describes the emergence of the current epidemic.[ix] In this instance, the increased demand for the bodies of wild animals for consumption, medical use, or (as in the case of camels and MERS) a variety of culturally-significant functions builds new global commodity chains in “wild” goods. In others, pre-existing agro-ecological value chains simply extend into previously “wild” spheres, changing local ecologies and modifying the interface between the human and non-human.

Wallace is himself clear about this, explaining several dynamics that create worse diseases despite the viruses themselves already existing in “natural” environments. The expansion of industrial production itself “may push increasingly capitalized wild foods deeper into the last of the primary landscape, dredging out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens.” In other words, as capital accumulation subsumes new territories, animals will be pushed into less accessible areas where they will come into contact with previously isolated disease strains, all while these animals themselves are becoming targets for commodification as “even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains.” Similarly, this expansion pushes humans closer to these animals and these environments, which “may increase the interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized rurality.” This gives the virus more opportunity and resources to mutate in a way that allows it to infect humans, pushing up the probability of biological spillover. The geography of industry itself is never quite so cleanly urban or rural anyways, just as monopolized industrial agriculture makes use of both large-scale and smallholder farms: “on a [factory farm] contractor’s smallholding along the forest edge, a food animal may catch a pathogen before being shipped back to a processing plant on the outer ring of a major city.”

The fact is that the “natural” sphere is already subsumed under a fully global capitalist system that has succeeded in changing baseline climatic conditions and devasting so many pre-capitalist[x] ecosystems that the remainder no longer function as they might have in the past. Here lies yet another causative factor, since, according to Wallace, all these processes of ecological devastation reduce “the kind of environmental complexity with which the forest disrupts transmission chains.” The reality, then, is that it’s a misnomer to think of such areas as the natural “periphery” of a capitalist system. Capitalism is already global, and already totalizing. It no longer has an edge or border with some natural, non-capitalist sphere beyond it, and there is therefore no great chain of development in which “backward” countries follow those ahead of them on their way up the value chain, nor any true wilderness capable of being preserved in some sort of pure, untouched condition. Instead, capital merely has a subordinated hinterland, itself fully subsumed within global value chains. The resulting social systems—including everything from supposed “tribalism” to renewals of anti-modern fundamentalist religions—are wholly contemporary products, and are almost always de facto plugged into global markets, often quite directly. The same can be said of the resulting biological-ecological systems, since “wild” areas are actually immanent to this global economy in both the abstract sense of dependence on the climate and related ecosystems and in the direct sense of being plugged into those same global value chains.

This fact produces the conditions necessary for the transformation of “wild” viral strains into global pandemics. But COVID-19 is hardly the worst of these. An ideal illustration of the basic principle—and the global danger—can be found instead in Ebola. The Ebola virus[xi] is a clear case of an existing viral reservoir spilling out into the human population. Current evidence suggests that its origin hosts are several species of bats native to West and Central Africa, which act as carriers but are not themselves affected by the virus. The same is not true for the other wild mammals, such as primates and duikers, which periodically contract the virus and suffer rapid, high-fatality outbreaks. Ebola has a particularly aggressive lifecycle beyond its reservoir species. Through contact with any of these wild hosts, humans can also be infected, with devastating results. Several major epidemics have occurred, and the fatality rate for the majority has been extremely high, almost always greater than 50%. The largest recorded outbreak, which continued sporadically from 2013 to 2016 across several West African countries, saw 11,000 deaths. The fatality rate for patients hospitalized in this outbreak was in the range of 57-59%, and much higher for those with no access to hospitals. In recent years, several vaccines have been developed by private companies, but slow approval mechanisms and stringent intellectual property rights have combined with the widespread lack of a health infrastructure to produce a situation in which vaccines have done little to stop the most recent epidemic, centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and now the longest lasting outbreak.

The disease is often presented as if it were something like a natural disaster—at best random, at worst blamed on the “unclean” cultural practices of the forest-dwelling poor. But the timing of these two major outbreaks (2013-2016 in West Africa and 2018-present in the DRC) is not a coincidence. Both have occurred precisely when the expansion of primary industries has been further displacing forest-dwelling peoples and disrupting local ecosystems. In fact, this appears to be true for more than the most recent cases, since, as Wallace explains, “every Ebola outbreak appears connected to capital-driven shifts in land use, including back to the first outbreak in Nzara, Sudan in 1976, where a British-financed factory spun and wove local cotton.” Similarly, the outbreaks in 2013 in Guinea occurred right after a new government had begun to open the country to global markets and sell off large tracts of land to international agribusiness conglomerates. The palm oil industry, notorious for its role in deforestation and ecological destruction worldwide, seems to have been particularly culpable, since its monocultures both devastate the robust ecological redundancies that help to interrupt transmission chains and at the same time literally attract the bat species that serve as a natural reservoir for the virus.[xii]

Meanwhile, the sale of large tracts of land to commercial agroforestry companies entails both the dispossession of forest-dwelling locals and the disruption of their ecosystem-dependent local forms of production and harvest. This often leaves the rural poor with no choice but to push further into the forest at the same time that their traditional relationship with that ecosystem has been disrupted. The result is that survival increasingly depends on the hunting of wild game or harvesting of local flora and timber for sale on global markets. Such populations then become the stand-ins for the ire of global environmentalist organizations, who decry them as “poachers” and “illegal loggers” responsible for the very deforestation and ecological destruction that pushed them to such trades in the first place. Often, the process then takes a much darker turn, as in Guatemala, where anti-communist paramilitaries leftover from the country’s civil war were transformed into “green” security forces, tasked with “protecting” the forest from the illegal logging, hunting and narcotrafficking that were the only trades available to its indigenous residents—who had been pushed to such activities precisely because of the violent repression they had faced from those same paramilitaries during the war.[xiii] The pattern has since been reproduced all over the world, cheered on by social media posts in high income countries celebrating the (often literally caught-on-camera) execution of “poachers” by supposedly “green” security forces.[xiv]








Containment as an Exercise in Statecraft

COVID-19 has gripped global attention with an unprecedented strength. Ebola, the avian flu and SARS, of course, all had their associated media frenzies. But something about this new epidemic has generated a different kind of staying power. In part, this is almost certainly due to the spectacular scale of the Chinese government’s response, resulting in equally spectacular images of emptied-out megacities that stand in stark contrast to the normal media image of China as over-crowded and over-polluted. This response has also been a fruitful source for the normal speculation about the country’s imminent political or economic collapse, given an extra boost by the continuing tensions of the early-stage trade war with the US. This combines with the rapid spread of the virus to give it the character of an immediately global threat, despite its low fatality rate.[xv]

At a deeper level, though, what seems most fascinating about the state’s response is the way in which it has been performed, via the media, as a sort of melodramatic dress rehearsal for the full mobilization of domestic counterinsurgency. This gives us real insights into the repressive capacity of the Chinese state, but it also emphasizes the deeper incapacity of that state, revealed by its need to rely so heavily on a combination of total propaganda measures deployed through every facet of the media and the goodwill mobilizations of locals otherwise under no material obligation to comply. Both Chinese and Western propaganda have emphasized the real repressive capacity of the quarantine, the former narrating it as a case of effective government intervention in an emergency and the latter as yet another case of totalitarian overreach on the part of the dystopian Chinese state. The unspoken truth, however, is that the very aggression of the clampdown signifies a deeper incapacity in the Chinese state, which is itself very much still under construction.

This itself gives us a window into the nature of the Chinese state, showing how it is developing new and innovative techniques of social control and crisis response capable of being deployed even in conditions where basic state machinery is sparse or non-existent. Such conditions, meanwhile, offer an even more interesting (albeit more speculative) picture of how the ruling class in any given country might respond when widespread crisis and active insurrection cause similar breakdowns in even the most robust states. The viral outbreak was in every respect assisted by poor connections between levels of the government: repression of “whistleblower” doctors by local officials contra the interests of the central government, ineffective hospital reporting mechanisms and extremely poor provision of basic healthcare are just a few examples. Meanwhile, different local governments have returned to normal at different paces, almost completely beyond the control of the central state (except in Hubei, the epicenter). At the moment of writing, it seems almost entirely random which ports are operational and which locales have restarted production. But this bricolage quarantine has meant that long-distance city-to-city logistics networks remain disrupted, since any local government appears able to simply prevent trains or freight trucks from passing through its borders. And this base level incapacity of the Chinese government has forced it to deal with the virus as if it were an insurgency, roleplaying civil war against an invisible enemy.

The national state machinery really started to roll on January 22nd, when authorities upgraded the emergency response measures in all of Hubei province, and told the public they had the legal authority to set up quarantine facilities, as well as to “collect” any personnel, vehicles, and facilities necessary to the containment of the disease, or to set up blockades and control traffic (thereby rubberstamping a phenomenon it knew would occur regardless). In other words, the full deployment of state resources actually began with a call for volunteer efforts on behalf of locals. On the one hand, such a massive disaster will strain any state’s capacity (see, for instance, hurricane response in the US). But, on the other, this repeats a common pattern in Chinese statecraft whereby the central state, lacking efficient formal and enforceable command structures that extend all the way down to the local level, must instead rely on a combination of widely-publicized calls for local officials and local citizens to mobilize and a series of after-the-fact punishments meted out to the worst responders (framed as crackdowns on corruption). The only truly efficient response is to be found in specific areas where the central state focuses the bulk of its power and attention—in this case, Hubei generally and Wuhan specifically. By the morning of January 24th, the city was already in an effective full lock down, with no trains in or out nearly one month after the new strain of the coronavirus was first detected. National health officials have declared that health authorities have the ability to examine and quarantine anyone at their discretion. Beyond the major cities of Hubei, dozens of other cities across China, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai, have launched lockdowns of varying severity on flows of people and goods in and out of their borders.

In response to the central state’s call to mobilize, some localities have taken their own strange and severe initiatives. The most frightening of these are to be found in four cities in Zhejiang province, where thirty million people have been issued local passports, allowing only one person per household to leave home once every two days. Cities like Shenzhen and Chengdu have ordered that each neighborhood be locked down, and allowed entire apartment buildings to be quarantined for 14 days if a single confirmed case of the virus is found within. Meanwhile, hundreds have been detained or fined for “spreading rumors” about the disease, and some who have fled quarantine have been arrested and sentenced to lengthy jail time—and the jails themselves are now experiencing a severe outbreak, due to officials’ incapacity to isolate sick individuals even in an environment literally designed for easy isolation. These sorts of desperate, aggressive measures mirror those of extreme cases of counterinsurgency, most clearly recalling the actions of military-colonial occupation in places like Algeria, or, more recently, Palestine. Never before have they been conducted at this scale, nor in megacities of this kind that house much of the world’s population. The conduct of the clampdown then offers a strange sort of lesson for those with a mind for global revolution, since it is, essentially, a dry run of state-led reaction.






An image of one local quarantine checkpoint that was making the rounds on Chinese social media






Incapacity

This particular clampdown benefits from its seemingly humanitarian character, with the Chinese state able to mobilize greater numbers of locals to help in what is, essentially, the noble cause of strangling the spread of the virus. But, as is to be expected, such clampdowns always also backfire. Counterinsurgency is, after all, a desperate sort of war conducted only when more robust forms of conquest, appeasement and economic incorporation have become impossible. It is an expensive, inefficient and rearguard action, betraying the deeper incapacity of whatever power is tasked with deploying it—be they French colonial interests, the waning American imperium, or others. The result of the clampdown is almost always a second insurgency, bloodied by the crushing of the first and made even more desperate. Here, the quarantine will hardly mirror the reality of civil war and counterinsurgency. But even in this case, the clampdown has backfired in its own ways. With so much of the state’s effort focused on control of information and constant propaganda deployed via every possible media apparatus, unrest has expressed itself largely within the same platforms.

The death of Dr. Li Wenliang, an early whistleblower on the dangers of the virus, on February 7th shook citizens cooped up in their homes across the country. Li was one of eight doctors rounded up by police for spreading “false information” in early January, before later contracting the virus himself. His death triggered anger from netizens and a statement of regret from the Wuhan government. People are beginning to see that the state is made up of bumbling officials and bureaucrats who have no idea what to do but still put on a strong face.[xvi] This fact was essentially revealed when the mayor of Wuhan, Zhou Xianwang, was forced to admit on state television that his government had delayed releasing critical information about the virus after an outbreak had occurred. The very tension caused by the outbreak, combined with that induced by the state’s total mobilization, has begun to reveal to the general populace the deep fissures that lie behind the paper-thin portrait that the government paints of itself. In other words, conditions such as these have exposed the fundamental incapacities of the Chinese state to growing numbers of people who previously would have taken the government’s propaganda at face value.




Video Player



00:00

00:52









W. B. Yeats@WBYeats1865



#China CCP's "infection control" propaganda in #Wuhan, locals:

"They're here everyday only to take group photos with the Party flag"

"They took off their PPE once they've taken the photo. He uses PPE to wipe his car!"

"He just threw PPE into a rubbish bin!"#WuhanCoronavirus


1,598
4:32 PM - Feb 12, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,572 people are talking about this









If a single symbol could be found to express the basic character of the state’s response, it would be something like the video above, shot by a local in Wuhan and shared with the Western internet via Twitter in Hong Kong.[xvii] Essentially, it shows a number of people who appear to be doctors or first-responders of some sort outfitted in full protective gear taking a picture with the Chinese flag. The person shooting the video explains that they’re outside that building every day for various photo ops. The video then follows the men as they take off the protective gear and stand around chatting and smoking, even using one of the suits to clean off their car. Before driving off, one of the men unceremoniously dumps the protective suit into a nearby trash can, not even bothering to stuff it to the bottom where it won’t be seen. Videos such as this one have spread rapidly before being censored—small tears in the thin veil of the state-sanctioned spectacle.

At a more fundamental level, the quarantine has also begun to see the first wave of economic reverberations in people’s personal lives. The macroeconomic side of this has been widely reported, with a massive decrease in Chinese growth risking a new global recession, especially when matched with continuing stagnation in Europe and a recent dip in one of the major economic health indexes in the US showing a sudden decline in business activity. Across the globe, Chinese firms and those fundamentally dependent on Chinese production networks are now looking into their “force majeure” clauses, which allow for delays or cancellation of the responsibilities entailed by both parties in a business contract when that contract becomes “impossible” to perform. Though at the moment unlikely, the mere prospect has caused a cascade of demands for production to be restored across the country. Economic activity, however, has only revived in a patchwork pattern, everything already working smoothly in some areas while still indefinitely paused in others. Currently, March 1st has become the tentative date by which central authorities have called for all areas outside the epicenter of the outbreak to return to work.

But other effects have been less visible, though arguably far more important. Many migrant workers, including those who had stayed in their work cities for Spring Festival or were able to return prior to various lockdowns being implemented, are now stuck in a dangerous limbo. In Shenzhen, where the vast majority of the population are migrants, locals report that the number of homeless people has begun to climb. But the new people appearing on the streets are not long-term homeless, instead having the appearance of literally just being dumped there with nowhere else to go—still wearing relatively nice clothes, unfamiliar with where best to sleep in the open or where to obtain food. Various buildings in the city have seen an increase in petty theft, mostly of food delivered to the doorstep of residents who are staying home for the quarantine. Across the board, workers are losing wages as production is stalled. The best case scenarios during work stoppages are dorm-quarantines like that imposed at the Shenzhen Foxconn plant, where new returnees are confined to their quarters for a week or two, paid about a third of their normal wages and then allowed to return to the production line. Poorer firms have no such option, and the government’s attempt to offer new lines of cheap credit to smaller businesses will probably do little in the long run. In some cases, it seems like the virus will simply accelerate pre-existing trends in factory relocation, as firms like Foxconn expand production in Vietnam, India and Mexico to make up for the slowdown.








The Surreal War

Meanwhile, the clumsy early response to the virus, the state’s reliance on particularly punitive and repressive measures to control it, and the central government’s inability to effectively coordinate across localities to juggle production and quarantine simultaneously all indicate that a deep incapacity remains at the heart of the state machinery. If, as our friend Lao Xie argues, the emphasis of the Xi administration has been on “state-building,” it would appear that much work in that regard remains to be done. At the same time, if the campaign against COVID-19 can also be read as a dry run against insurgency, it is notable that the central government only has the capacity to provide effective coordination in the Hubei epicenter and that its responses in other provinces—even wealthy and well-regarded places like Hangzhou—remain largely uncoordinated and desperate. We can take this in two ways: first, as a lesson on the weakness underlying the hard edges of state power, and second as a caution on the threat that is still posed by uncoordinated and irrational local responses when the central state machinery is overwhelmed.

These are important lessons for an era when the destruction wrought by unending accumulation has extended both upward into the global climatic system and downward into the microbiological substrata of life on Earth. Such crises will only become more common. As the secular crisis of capitalism takes on a seemingly non-economic character, new epidemics, famines, floods and other “natural” disasters will be used as a justification for the extension of state control, and the response to these crises will increasingly function as an opportunity to exercise new and untested tools for counterinsurgency. A coherent communist politics must grasp both of these facts together. At a theoretical level, this means understanding that the critique of capitalism is impoverished whenever it is severed from the hard sciences. But at the practical level, it also implies that the only possible political project today is one able to orient itself within a terrain defined by widespread ecological and microbiological disaster, and to operate in this perpetual state of crisis and atomization.

In a quarantined China, we begin to glimpse such a landscape, at least in its outlines: empty late-winter streets dusted by the slightest film of undisturbed snow, phone-lit faces peering out of windows, happenstance barricades staffed by a spare few nurses or police or volunteers or simply paid actors tasked with hoisting flags and telling you to put your mask on and go back home. The contagion is social. So, it should come as no real surprise that the only way to combat it at such a late stage is to wage a surreal sort of war on society itself. Don’t gather together, don’t cause chaos. But chaos can build in isolation, too. As the furnaces in all the foundries cool to softly crackling embers and then to snow-cold ash, the many minor desperations cannot help but leak out of that quarantine to gently cascade together into a greater chaos that might one day, like this social contagion, prove difficult to contain.



For more articles like this, check out the second issue of our journal, available for free online here, or support us by purchasing a high-quality print version here.





Notes

[i] Much of what we will explain in this section is simply a more concise summary of Wallace’s own arguments, geared toward a more general audience and without the necessity of “making the case” to other biologists through the exposition of rigorous argumentation and extensive evidence. For those who would challenge the basic evidence, we refer throughout to the work of Wallace and his compatriots.

[ii] Robert G Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, Monthly Review Press, 2016. p.52

[iii] Ibid, p.56

[iv] Ibid, pp. 56-57

[v] Ibid, p.57

[vi] This is not to say that comparisons of the US to China today are not also informative. Since the US has its own massive agro-industrial sector, it is itself a huge contributor to the production of dangerous new viruses, not to mention anti-biotic-resistant bacterial infections.

[vii] See: Brundage JF, Shanks GD, “What really happened during the 1918 influenza pandemic? The importance of bacterial secondary infections”. The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Volume 196, Number 11, December 2007. pp. 1717–1718, author reply 1718–1719; and: Morens DM, Fauci AS, “The 1918 influenza pandemic: Insights for the 21st century”. The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Volume 195, Number 7, April 2007. pp 1018–1028

[viii] See “Picking Quarrels” in the second issue of our journal: <http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/picking-quarrels/>

[ix] In their own way, these two paths of pandemic production mirror what Marx calls “real” and “formal” subsumption in the sphere of production proper. In real subsumption, the actual process of production itself is modified via the introduction of new technologies capable of intensifying the pace and magnitude of output—similar to how the industrial environment has changed the basic conditions of viral evolution such that new mutations are produced at a greater pace and with greater virility. In formal subsumption, which precedes real subsumption, these new technologies are not yet implemented. Instead, previously existing forms of production are simply brought together into new locations that have some interface with the global market, as in the case of hand-loom workers being placed into a workshop that sells their product for a profit—and this is similar to the way in which viruses produced in “natural” settings are brought out from the wild population and introduced into domestic populations via the global market.

[x] It’s a mistake to equate these ecosystems with “pre-human” however. China is a perfect example, since many of its seemingly “primeval” natural landscapes were, in fact, the product of much older periods of human expansion which wiped out species that were previously common on the East Asian mainland, such as Elephants.

[xi]Technically this is a blanket term for 5 or so distinct viruses, the most deadly of which is itself simply named Ebola virus, formerly Zaire virus.

[xii] For the West African case specifically, see: RG Wallace, R Kock, L Bergmann, M Gilbert, L Hogerwerf, C Pittiglio, Mattioli R and R Wallace, “Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests PRoduce a New Niche for Ebola,” International Journal of Health Services, Volume 46, Number 1, 2016; And for a broader overview of the connection between economic conditions and Ebola as such, see: Robert G Wallace and Rodrick Wallace (Eds), Neoliberal Ebola: Modelling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm, Springer, 2016; And for the most direct statement of the case, albeit a less scholarly one, see Wallace’s article, linked above: “Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak,” Counterpunch, 29 July 2015. <https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/29/neoliberal-ebola-the-agroeconomic-origins-of-the-ebola-outbreak/>

[xiii] See Megan Ybarra, Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest, University of California Press, 2017.

[xiv] It’s certainly incorrect to imply that all poaching is conducted by the local rural poor population, or that all ranger forces in different countries’ national forests operate in the same fashion as former anti-communist paramilitaries, but the most violent confrontations and the most aggressive cases of forestland militarization all seem to essentially follow this pattern. For a wide-ranging overview of the phenomenon, see the special 2016 issue of Geoforum (69) devoted to the topic. The preface can be found here: Alice B. Kelly and Megan Ybarra, “Introduction to themed issue: ‘Green security in protected areas’”, Geoforum, Volume 69, 2016. pp.171-175. <http://gawsmith.ucdavis.edu/uploads/2/0/1/6/20161677/kelly_ybarra_2016_green_security_and_pas.pdf>

[xv] By far the lowest of all the diseases mentioned here, its high death toll has largely been the result of its rapid spread to a large number of human hosts, resulting in an elevated absolute death toll despite having a very low fatality rate.

[xvi] In a podcast interview, Au Loong Yu, citing friends in the mainland, says that the Wuhan government is effectively paralyzed by the epidemic. Au suggests that the crisis is not only tearing apart the fabric of society, but also the bureaucratic machine of the CCP, which will only intensify as the virus spreads and becomes an intensifying crisis for other local governments across the country. The interview is by Daniel Denvir of The Dig, published 7 February: https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/hong-kong-with-au-loong-yu/

[xvii] The video itself is authentic, but it is worth noting that Hong Kong has been a particular hotbed of racist attitudes and conspiracy theories directed toward mainlanders and the CCP, so much of what gets shared on social media by Hong Kongers about the virus should be carefully fact-checked.

Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)


Like this:

28 Comments


IA on February 27, 2020 at 11:00 am


Excellent. Marred only by Chuang’s insistence on referring to Maoism’s state-feudalism* as ‘socialism’. Only God knows why. Academic convention? Subcutaneous Leninism? (On Lenin, the great revisionist: https://bataillesocialiste.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/lenin_reads_marx_on_socialism.pdf)

* (Satya Gabriel’s term, though state-collectivism etc will also do well)Reply


chuang on February 27, 2020 at 9:00 pm


We lay out our theory of that period in Sorghum & Steel, available here: <http://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/>Reply


John Lowrie on March 8, 2020 at 9:40 am


”state feudalism”? If I can make sense of this formulation I presume it means the communes paid a rent to the state.

Now Jack Chen, who has this advantage over armchair-bound Marxists, that he went to live and WORK for a year with the peasants of ”Upper Felicity” describes the economic organisation prevailing at that time:”Out of the gross output of the team the grain tax(in kind) is paid to the state (3% in 1972)…. 20% is set aside as the reserve fund..against calamity, flood, drought etc. and welfare…care when sick or too old to work.

Another 20% is sold to the state at state -set prices and the proceeds go o the members who sell it.

”The distribution fund id divided into two fairly equal parts….The first half is divided by the total number of people in each team, and gives the amount grain allocation ….The other part of the distribution fund is used for the payment of work-points earned by team members…in Upper Felicity every able-bodied adult is rated at ten work-points per day.” However those doing more strenuous work such as coal hauling are credited with 12 points, those doing lighter work 7 points. (Jack Chen, ”A Year in Upper Felicity” 1973 Pp157-159).

Now it is not clear to me how this organisation of production should be designated ‘feudal’! I should certainly like to learn of what concept you have of a socialist organisation of agriculture. But before you claim that the tax paid by the peasants is ‘feudal rent ‘ let me remind you Marx’s explanation, ”the total agricultural labour…of one section of society must be sufficient to produce the necessary foodstuffs for the entire society i.e. also for the non-agricultural workers….Even though the labour of the direct producers of foodstuffs ..breaks down into necessary and surplus labour, in relation to SOCIETY it thus represents the labour required simply for the production pf foodstuffs” (Marx ”Capital Vol3 P 773).Reply


Stavrogin on March 8, 2020 at 11:29 am


The article “on Lenin the great revisionist” for which you provide a link is so rife with inaccuracies and outright falsifications that it would require many pages to point them out and discuss them.Reply


Georg Holm on March 25, 2020 at 11:20 am


So why don’t you? Marx’s view of the state has clearly been misinterpreted by most of the traditional marxists, whether they be socialist or communists (and on the other side of the coin, the anarchists have had a really hard time dealing with what they see as an ambiguity on the question of the state because Marx never said anything negative about -authority- or of it’s implementation in social relations as -dictating- the circumstances – Marx was not anti-Power, he was anti-Capital (and that includes the state machinery)).

Consider the state apparatus in coordination with the production for value. It is fairly easy to see that Marx’s view of the revolution does not have any place for a state machinery, mainly because it would not be needed when commodity production is no longer the dominant mode of production. The state is a repressive apparatus in place to control and secure commodity production and exploitation.
So are schools, hospitals, prisons and all the other, for Capital, necessary outgrowths of the state apparatus.

“At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.”

“The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.”

“The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state.”

“The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excresence.”

“The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society.”

“The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government – a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state functionarism.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htmReply


John Lowrie on March 9, 2020 at 3:02 pm


” Marred only by Chuang’s insistence on referring to Maoism’s state-feudalism* as ‘socialism’.” It seems to me that socialism is at least a better designation than state feudalism.

Jack Chen who went to live and work on a commune in1972 describes the communistic nature of economic organisation ( ”A Year in Upper Felicity” 973 Pp 157-158).

Of course the peasants paid a tax of 3% in kind ( 1972) to the state. Marx explains,”the total agricultural labour-necessary and surplus-of one section society must be sufficient to produce the necessary foodstuffs for the entire society.e. also for the non-agricultural workers….Even though the labour of the direct producers of foodstuffs, taken by itself, breaks down into necessary and surplus labour, in relation to society it thus represents the necessary labour required simply for the production of foodstuffs ( Capital Vol.3 P 773). Now one may not be happy with such an organisation of agriculture, but then one has to come up with an alternative. What with capitalist agriculture aggravated by global warming, time is surely running out!Reply


David Borenstein on February 27, 2020 at 4:08 pm


Excellent article.Reply


Tiron Stefan on March 6, 2020 at 8:30 am


Fantastic, timely article. A bio-cultural account of current media virality & epidemic contagion is needed. I completly agree that any critique of capitalism should also involve hard science. Would be great to have a Romanian translation as well.Reply


John Lowrie on March 15, 2020 at 3:22 pm


”I completly agree that any critique of capitalism should also involve hard science. ”

For such, cf. P.Cockshott, ”How the World Works” ( Monthly review 2019). What the authors of articles like ‘Lenin the great revisionist” fail to provide is an alternative. We get Lenin and /or Stalin were state capitalists, Mao was a state feudalist, Fidel was a petite bourgeois nationalist. A good example from the trotskyist Worldwide Socialist Web a few years back was an article that claimed the economic difficulties Cuba was facing was due to ”the failure of the petite-bourgeois nationalist Castro regime’s failure to develop the productive forces in a scientific manner .” Now I ask myself who in the world could be against the scientific development of the productive forces? Why do these great socialists not share their scientific insights with the rest of humanity? But no, they keep such mysteries to themselves! For real scientific analysis with suggested alternatives, try Cockshott.Reply


chuang on March 1, 2020 at 8:50 pm


French translation: Contagion sociale — Guerre de classe microbiologique en Chine https://dndf.org/?p=18327Reply


chuang on March 1, 2020 at 8:51 pm


Portuguese translation: Contágio Social – coronavírus, China, capitalismo tardio e o ‘mundo natural’ http://afita.com.br/outras-fitas-contagio-social-coronavirus-china-capitalismo-tardio-e-o-mundo-natural/Reply


Stavrogin on March 8, 2020 at 11:39 am


Excellent article. Who is the writer though? I don’t see any name(s).Reply


chuang on March 13, 2020 at 3:53 am


The author is the Chuang collective. On our blog and in our journal, when there is no byline, that means it was penned by our editorial collective. Usually there’s one or two main authors with input from the others. Glad you found it helpful.Reply


Adam on March 10, 2020 at 3:59 am


Amazing article. A great introduction to your project — I look forward to reading more.Reply


chuang on March 13, 2020 at 3:46 am


German translation:
»Soziale Ansteckung: Mikrobiologischer Klassenkampf in China«
http://www.wildcat-www.de/aktuell/a112_socialcontagion.htmlReply


chuang on March 22, 2020 at 9:54 am


Second German translation: https://wirkommen.akweb.de/2020/03/soziale-ansteckung/Reply


chuang on March 13, 2020 at 3:56 am


Spanish translation:
«Contagio social: guerra de clases microbiológica en China»
https://artilleriainmanente.noblogs.org/?p=1334Reply


chuang on March 22, 2020 at 9:55 am


Revised pamphlet version of the Spanish translation with new preface: https://lazoediciones.blogspot.com/2020/03/chuang-contagio-social-guerra-de-clases.htmlReply


chuang on March 13, 2020 at 6:01 pm


Italian translation:
Contagio sociale – Guerra di classe micro-biologica in Cina
https://www.infoaut.org/global-crisis/contagio-sociale-guerra-di-classe-micro-biologica-in-cinaReply


chuang on March 22, 2020 at 9:55 am


The Italian translation was originally published here: https://pungolorosso.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/contagio-sociale-guerra-di-classe-micro-biologica-in-cina/Reply


Red guard on March 18, 2020 at 5:07 pm


Thanks for your contribution! Could you explain more about “Chinese state, which is itself very much still under construction”? What does it mean?Reply


chuang on March 22, 2020 at 9:58 am


Yes. This idea is introduced in our interview with the Chinese Marxist Lao Xie, “A State Adequate to the Task”: http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/an-adequate-state/Reply


jorgen on March 21, 2020 at 3:13 pm


Russian translation:
Социальное заражение. Микробиологическая классовая война в Китае
https://zubynapolku.info/texts/social-contagion.htmlReply


parallax on March 24, 2020 at 2:51 pm


Greek translation: Κοινωνική Μόλυνση: Κοινωνικός και ταξικός πόλεμος στην Κίνα

https://yfanet.espivblogs.net/files/2020/03/CORONAVIRUS-mobile.pdfReply


A.R.Vasavi on March 22, 2020 at 11:51 am


Excellent article….comprehensive in its historiographical and political economic grounding, and sharp in its observations. It makes a substantial argument against monopoly industrial agriculture. Thanks and congratulations to the authors.Reply


chuang on March 26, 2020 at 2:58 am


Arabic translation:
وباء اجتماعي: الحرب الطبقية الميكروبيولوجية في الصين

https://al-hamish.net/%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b5%d9%8a%d9%86-%d9%88%d9%88%d9%87%d8%a7%d9%86-%d8%a3%d8%b5%d9%84-%d9%88%d8%a8%d8%a7%d8%a1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%83%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%88%d9%86%d8%a7/Reply


chuang on April 2, 2020 at 4:27 pm


A second Arabic translation from MadaMasr.com:
العدوى الاجتماعية
https://madamasr.com/ar/2020/03/28/opinion/u/%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%af%d9%88%d9%89-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a7%d8%ac%d8%aa%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%b9%d9%8a%d8%a9/Reply


chuang on March 27, 2020 at 2:41 am


Farsi translation:
بیماری واگیردار اجتماعی ـ جنگ طبقاتی میکروبیولوژیکی در چین

https://enghelabenovin.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_83.htmlReply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China (Chuang, 2020) | communists in situ - […] Chuang.org […]
Un Virus Sociale | Pulgarías - […] Chuang.org, febbraio 2020. Titolo originale: Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China. Traduzione parziale di Enrico […]
February readings – Uneven Earth - […] Social contagion: The production of plagues […]
Contagion - Diffractions Collective - […] [xii]. Chuang. (2020, February 26). Social Contagion. Retrieved March 07, 2020, from http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
ALUGANDO - […] Social Contagion […]
Capitalismo selvagem e Estado resiliente – ALUGANDO - […] Social Contagion and China’s response to #Covid19 outbreak came out last February in English at Chuang’s website. A Brazilian…
L'épidémie n'a pas de vertus - Perspectives Printanières - […] Revue Chuang (2020), Social Contagion. Microbiological Class War in China, traduction française disponible […]
Living The Dream with COVID-19 and a Recession – The Word From Struggle Street - […] You should read Social Contagion […]
Contagio sociale. Guerra di classe micro-biologica in Cina - […] Fonte: Social Contagion. Microbiological Class War in China (26 febbraio 2020) […]
From Corona to Crisis, Capitalism is the Plague of Humanity – An internationalist Articles Selection & Review - […] an extensive study (in more than 10,000 words) by Chuǎng should be mentioned: Social contagion. Microbiological Class War in…
Sixes and sevens #036 – the next wave - […] The richest commentary I’ve seen is on a Chinese blog. Chuang has a long, long piece reflecting on this…
YUGSA Executive Response to Coronavirus, COVID-19 - […] Critical Analysis […]
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: Pulling Each Other Through Coronavirus Pandemic – The Free - […] Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China, Chuang […]
Microbiological Class War in China | 3 Quarks Daily - […] More here. […]
contagio sociale. guerra di classe micro-biologica in cina. importante documento di analisi (da proletari comunisti) | Pennatagliente's Blog - […] in forma pandemica del virus COVID-19 ha destato da più parti interesse il contributo della rivista cinese Chuang del…
Un Virus Sociale | Enrico Sanna - […] Chuang.org, febbraio 2020. Titolo originale: Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China. Traduzione parziale a cura di Enrico […]
Autonomous Corona Solidarity - Hambach Forest - […] Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China, Chuang […]
13 political texts about Coronavirus- for all of us staying at home – Void Network - […] - Text by the very interesting Chuang team on microbiological class warfare in China. http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
coronavirus… una oportunidad para reflexionar | emak bakia - […] hecha por artillería inmanente del que fue publicado el pasado 6 de febrero en el sitio web de Chuang…
Sutramdžius koroną socialinė krizė nesibaigs – reikia platesnių pokyčių | Gyvenimas per brangus - […] fermų gyvulių su prastomis imuninėmis sistemomis. Wuhano gyventojams nepasisekė, bet nepasisekė neatsitiktinai. Viena vertus, laukinės mėsos paklausa čia išaugo…
Κοινωνική Μόλυνση: Μικροβιολογικός ταξικός πόλεμος στην Κίνα. Από την επιθεώρηση Chuǎng – σφίγγα και άλλες χίμαιρες σε δύσκολους καιρούς - […] δημοσιεύτηκε για πρώτη φορά στο site της επιθεώρησης 闯 Chuǎng. Στα ελληνικά μεταφράστηκε από τους «Φίλους και φίλες […]
Κοινωνική Μόλυνση: Μικροβιολογικός ταξικός πόλεμος στην Κίνα. Chuǎng – σφίγγα και άλλες χίμαιρες σε δύσκολους καιρούς - […] δημοσιεύτηκε για πρώτη φορά στο site της επιθεώρησης 闯 Chuǎng. Στα ελληνικά μεταφράστηκε από τους «Φίλους και φίλες […]
Autonomous Groups Are Mobilizing Mutual Aid Initiatives To Combat The Coronavirus – The Green Market Agorist - […] Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China, Chuang […]
Love in the Time of Corona – Jävla Sverige… - […] ‘Social Contagion’, Chuang […]
Socialism in a time of pandemics – Worldwide Socialism – Today Topic - […] Chuang, 2020, “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class Struggle in China” (February), http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
Thoughts From Quarantine – giant feral infant - […] in crisis. If you’re looking for some great isolation reading on how we got here, then check out this…
«Contagio social: guerra de clases microbiológica en China», del grupo comunista chino «Colectivo Chuang» – De Frente - […] crítico del sistema político y el capitalismo dominante en el gigante asiático. El texto está publicado en su página…
Die zweite Geige zum Solo. Ein Bericht über die Wuppertaler Friedrich-Engels-Konferenz – theorieblog.de - […] Graßmann promoviert zu Marx‘ Krisentheorie und empfiehlt die Pandemie-Analysen von Chuang und Mike […]
Ökologie: Wo entstand das Corona-Virus? ‹ BFS: Sozialismus neu denken – Kapitalismus überwinden! - […] Text ist eine stark gekürzte Fassung des Artikels »Social Contagion. Microbiological Class War in China«, der Ende Februar auf…
«Contagio social: guerra de clases microbiológica en China», del grupo comunista chino «Colectivo Chuang» | werken rojo - […] crítico del sistema político y el capitalismo dominante en el gigante asiático. El texto está publicado en su página web…
Revolt to carve out an individual existence within Capitalism? – An internationalist Articles Selection & Review - […] the Chuǎng collective published an elaborate article on the Corona-virus pandemic in China, Social Contagion. Microbiological Class War in…
dialectical delinquents » Coronavirus – an exercise in intensified social control - […] Social Contagion […]
Einige notwendige Kritikpunkte zum Artikel „Soziale Ansteckung – Mikrobiologischer Klassenkampf in China“ (Chuǎng) – Arbeiterstimmen - […] diese soziale Ansteckung, als schwierig einzudämmen erweisen könnte.“ (übersetzt aus dem Englischen Original, Die Version in Wildcat.de ist nicht…
SOCIAL CONTAGION | Sebastiano Isaia - […] ritardo ho letto e oggi pubblico uno scritto (Social Contagion) apparso il 27 febbraio sulla rivista Chuang, una rivista…
China und die Corona-Krise #63 - halbzehn.fm - […] linke “Chuang-Kollektiv” zu Corona […]
Contagio social: guerra de clases microbiológica en China | Viento Sur - […] http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
Which Are the Wars Worth Fighting? The Case for a Ceasefire in Bastar – My Blog - […] the model of ‘development’ promoted in resource rich places like Bastar. After all, it is the destruction of habitats…
Contágio Social: guerra de classes microbiológica na China | entreabruma - […] 17.O vídeo pode ser visualizado em https://twitter.com/i/status/1227488058288697344 e http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
Notes from the lockdown: How we view and experience consequences of coronavirus outbreak reveals society’s schisms – Viral feeds - […] of wild-domestic barriers rather than in closer human contact through regular migration, as this article amongst others has powerfully…
Notes from the lockdown: How we view and experience consequences of coronavirus outbreak reveals society’s schisms – News search India - […] of wild-domestic barriers rather than in closer human contact through regular migration, as this article amongst others has powerfully…
Notes from the lockdown: How we view and experience consequences of coronavirus outbreak reveals society’s schisms – News search India - […] of wild-domestic barriers rather than in closer human contact through regular migration, as this article amongst others has powerfully…
Full reading list | Exploring Diagnosis - […] http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
This! March 2019 – Pieceoplastic - […] Social Contagion [chuang] – “Now is not the time for a simple “Scooby-Doo Marxist” exercise of pulling the mask…
Guerra de clases microbiológica en China – Periódico Alternativo - […] Compartimos la traducción de un artículo sobre las repercusiones del sistema capitalista mundial en otra epidemia viral. En este…
Bollettino della quarantena #1 | Not - […] Contagion: un vecchio (è del 27 febbraio!) ma interessantissimo approfondimento sulla «Microbiological Class War in China» apparso su Chuǎng,…
Guerra de clases microbiológica en China – Movimiento Caamañista - […] Compartimos la traducción de un artículo sobre las repercusiones del sistema capitalista mundial en otra epidemia viral. En este…
Gleaners of Sino-Europa – _o_megatiron - […] (2020). Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/ […]
Four Ways COVID-19 will Change Food Systems and Food Security - Resilience - […] It is worrisome that few medical or public health officials have drawn attention to the intensive agricultural practices that…

A virus is haunting Europe - the vector is capitalism

A virus is haunting Europe - the vector is capitalism

A virus is haunting Europe - the vector is capitalism



Brendan Montague | 18th March 2020


The decision to defend capital has led to governments taking too little action too late to stop the spread of novel coronavirus.





The novel coronavirus is infectious, deadly and invisible to the naked eye. It spreads exponentially, has traversed the globe and today poses a threat to the very foundations of modern civilisation. All these properties it shares with capitalism.

David Harvey: Anti-Capitalist Politics in an Age of Covid-19

There are three primary ways in which capitalism has escalated the current coronavirus crisis: the transmission of the virus to humans, the spread of the virus globally, and the failure of governments and deregulated markets to contain the spread of infections.

The transfer of this coronavirus from animals to humans, the subsequent infection of populations in almost every country and the collapse of health services would not have been possible without the specific circumstances brought about by our current economic system. Covid-19 is the name we have given the disease. SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus. The vector is capitalism.

Infections

Scientists in China - the world’s second largest economy - are currently focussing their resources on containing the spread of the virus and finding treatments and vaccinations for its victims. But some information has already been established about the most likely beginnings of novel coronavirus.

The current most likely hypothesis is that Covid-19 or its predecessor originated in the bat population - which is known to carry a virus with a 96 percent match. The bat population was also believed to be the starting place for the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in 2003. Covid-19 was then likely transferred to human beings through the sale of wild animals, perhaps slaughtered on site at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, in Hubei province, China.

The act of killing animals in the presence of the customer is not some uniquely Chinese practice, nor is “traditional” in the sense of being a custom that has been practiced for a long time. In fact, eating wild animals bought at a wet market is the product of a specific historic moment, related to the transfer of responsibility for meat production from the Chinese state to a new private sphere in the 1970s. It has now been made illegal in China.

The Chinese government claims to be Communist, celebrating Marx, Lenin and Mao, and in the United States and Europe this is broadly accepted and also understood to mean that the state with a population reaching 1.5 billion is non-capitalist. The state in China has throughout its current incarnation had a greater level of control over the production, distribution and sale of goods.

However, China has never been communist. There is some debate as to whether the Chinese revolution was a genuine attempt to create a communist state, but even assuming this was the direction of travel - the leadership never got there. China is state-capitalist. It is - like many countries - a mixed economy with some aspects of the production and sale of goods and services controlled by the government and some by privately owned companies and individuals. On this scale it has significantly more on the side of government control than the US or the EU.

Control

However, the level of state control has varied significantly both across time and space. There were decades where almost every aspect of economic life was controlled by the leadership, and provinces where this was tightly administered. But there have also been hot spots where a highly liberalised, deregulated market capitalism has predominated.

The Huanan Seafood Market is such a hot spot. The Chinese regime in the 1970s faced a fundamental crisis. Agricultural production was failing, the population faced famine, and unrest - perhaps leading to revolution - haunted the ruling regime.

As a result the Chinese government transferred the production of meat from state-owned enterprises to private individuals. It handed out land, changed the law and actively encouraged private companies to farm animals - the most popular at that time being chicken and pork - in a desperate attempt to drive up production.

The introduction of a kind of capitalism into the state run economy had some predictable results, predictable to those in China who had read and understood the communist political economist Karl Marx. The more profitable farmers began to dominate the market, benefiting from economies of scale and the division of labour. Farms and agricultural companies grew in size, forming cartels and monopolies.

The small independent farmers were soon driven out of the chicken and pork markets, exactly as they have been in the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe. These farmers needed new ways to survive. They began poaching, and then breeding wild or more “exotic” meats because these could be sold to wealthy customers on the luxury market for a significantly higher price.

Farming

The state was quick to observe and record this change of practice, but condoned and at times supported the new market in wild animals because it resulted in paid employment and money moving out into rural communities. The large urban markets where chicken and pork - and other mainstream meat products - began to host stalls selling a wide variety of animals. This practice was not universal or consistent across China, some wild meats found in the south were never found in Beijing.

The practice of selling wild animals grew, and farmers began to breed the animals in captivity. The conditions were often unhygienic and cruel. A parallel illegal market in banned animals evolved. At the same time, stall holders in the urban markets started slaughtering and butchering these smaller wild animals at the point of sale. This again commanded a higher price as it was popular with wealthier customers in the luxury market. The meat was considered healthier and fresher if the animal had been kept alive.

As the coronavirus crisis took hold in the UK, the reactionary newspapers like the Daily Mail sensationalised the practices in China that seemed so different to our own. This is dog whistle racism. It is also an attempt to blame ‘oriental’ and ‘foreign’ customs and practices for the current crisis, and in the process protect the common practice of consumer-driven capitalism of both China and ‘the West’.

The practice of selling live crabs and lobster is common in the UK. There are “wet markets” - a term used to differentiate butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers from hardware stalls selling mops and toys - in every town and city. We eat exotic foods from far away places. Butchers chop meat from sheep, cows, chicken, rabbit and other animals on the same block. We eat intelligent animals like squid from tins.

I have seen some British dairy and chicken farms up close. The animals were in pain and distressed; they were chained, kept in dark sheds on hot summer days; the cows limped and slid on concrete hidden under a dense layer of their own “slurry”. The UK practice of having mega farms of more than 1,000 cows creating reservoirs of stinking waste, and slaughtering all these animals in a few centralised abattoirs poses extreme health risks, albeit of a different specificity to those in China. The prolific use of antibiotics on US farms - alongside pesticides, hormones, bleach - is a global economic crisis in waiting.

Conditions

The novel coronavirus crisis is not the result of novel or unusual practices in China, it is the result of the capitalism that operates all over the world. The farmers and the market stall holders were “protecting jobs” and “responding to customer demand”. They were serving wealthy and high status Chinese customers.

Many of the earliest victims of coronavirus attended the Huanan market. In time we will find out if these were the staff working for wealthy households.

The fact that we could see unhygienic and cruel conditions in these markets may be a result of the fact the ultimate customer and consumer never visited these places, just as we can buy cellophane covered cuts of beef with no conception of conditions in the abattoir.

The conditions of the transfer of coronavirus from bat to human being were not “communist” nor uniquely Chinese. They were distinctly capitalist. They were specifically the outcomes from the decisions of the Chinese state to have less control, to liberalise the farming and agricultural industries and to let the “market” decide what meats were produced and under which conditions.

Spread

The response of western governments to coronavirus has been to defend and protect capitalism, at whatever cost.

This has been most pronounced in the UK. Boris Johnson and his relatively new Tory government successively attempted to protect capital in two ways. Firstly, the government tried to simply ignore the problem so that capitalism could continue to whirr and splutter. Johnson suggested one approach to the virus outbreak was to “take it on the chin” and do next to nothing.

We would develop “herd immunity”. What this meant is that we would continue to go to work, and the old and vulnerable would be shut into their homes and left to die.

When the evidence from Italy and then Spain was that this approach would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths - and the scientists concurred - Johnson must have suddenly realised that his government would not survive.

This approach would have led to civil unrest. He performed an historic u-turn.

Response

Yesterday (17 March 2020), the British state pivoted to borrowing £350 billion and pouring it into the bank accounts of businesses large and small while suspending some taxes: capital would be saved, and workers would keep enough of their jobs to prevent a political earthquake. But the majority of the funding did not appear to go to the NHS, or directly to renters and those on benefits.

In the United States the Federal Reserve had already promised a $700 billion stimulus and rates cut to support the markets. These two countries alone had found $1 trillion to protect capital from coronavirus. But the initial response in both the US and the UK was to ignore the crisis, pretend it was not real, and just hope it goes away. People might suffer, but for business it would be business as usual.

To see clearly how the governments are protecting capital and not the people, it is worth contrasting how China - a capitalist economy with an interventionist state - compares to the EU and US. It seems at this stage that the primary reason Covid-19 was not contained within China was the fact the virus was not detected early enough, and that the authorities did not act quickly and decisively enough. But when the scale of the crisis became known and acknowledged, the Chinese state shifted billions of resources, and within a few weeks contained and slowed the virus.

This contrasts with how European capitalist democratic states responded to the crisis. These governments sought to protect the markets first, their populations second, and as a direct result the virus was able to spread to almost every country on the planet. The failure of “developed” states such as the United States and the UK to protect their citizens and subjects from the worst, deadly, impacts of the disease is also a direct result of capitalist economics.

The Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organisation on 31 December 2019 that there has been a handful of causes of pneumonia which doctors were reporting as being unusual, in the port city of Wuhan. It was quickly established that some of those infected worked on food stalls at the Huanan. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was shut down, sealed off and sanitised the next day. There were around 40 known infections at that time.

Emergency

A week later - on 7 January 2020 - scientists in China identified the cause of the pneumonia - a new virus that was named 2019-vCoV. A few days later - on 11 January 2012 - the first person died from contracting the disease. A 61-year-old man who had been a customer of the seafood market died of heart failure.

Just two days later the first case was reported in Thailand, and traced back to Wuhan. In less than a week cases had been reported in Japan, the United States, Nepal, France, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan. There were still fewer than 200 reported infections in China.

The seriousness of the novel coronavirus infection became all too apparent on 22 January when reported deaths leapt to 17 and the number of known infections had doubled to 400. The Chinese state acted quickly and decisively and initiated the effective quarantine of Wuhan on 23 January 2020, closing airports and train stations. The same measures were enforced at Xiantao and Chibi, in Hubei province. The Lunar New Year - due to start in two days - was cancelled.

The World Health Organisation declared a state of global emergency on 30 January as China reported 170 deaths and 7,711 cases. It was clear that this virus was spreading exponentially through the human population. A month after the seafood market was closed, the UK along with Spain and Sweden had confirmed its first case of novel coronavirus. The following day Australia, Canada, Germany, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam had all reported new cases.

There were 16 days between 7 January, when scientists in China first confirmed that a new virus was the cause of the disease outbreak, and 23 January, when the entire city of Wuhan - with a population of 11 million people - was closed down. The time that will elapse between the first case in the UK - on 31 January and the ending of overseas flights is yet to be established as the major airlines continue at least some services. So far it has been 47 days.

As Paul Mason has pointed out, Johnson’s government did not hold its first COBRA meeting until 3 March and still then, “Britain did nothing”.

Preventable

The response in China to the virus was slow at first - but then decisive. As the US publication Business Insider reported, “extreme measures” were implemented rapidly. Trains no longer stopped at Wuhan; suspected victims could attend specialist fever clinics; tests were widely available and free; China built two new dedicated hospitals with more than 1,000 beds, the first in a week the second in two; whole wards and hospital entrances were made coronavirus only; all relevant technology was used in an attempt to trace every case; food was delivered to people’s homes; 40,000 medical workers were moved to the centre of the crisis. There were also some terrifying events, with critics of the government going missing.

On 7 March the New York Times was reporting that there were no new cases in Hubei outside its capital, and that the number of new cases had fallen from 2,000 to 99 in a day. The graphs all show that coronavirus is no longer spreading exponentially in China. It has for now been suppressed and contained.

New cases are from Chinese people returning home from the US, the EU and elsewhere, and not contracted in-country. Dr Gauden Galea, the China representative of the World Health Organisation, has stated: “[T]he natural course of the outbreak does not need to be a very high peak that overwhelms health services. This lesson in containment, therefore, is a lesson that other countries can learn from...” Western capitalist democracies are not learning these lessons.

The situation in the UK, the US and most of the rest of the world could not be more different. The UK has up until today refused to close schools despite the fact children are super-spreaders. Health experts expressed incredulity at the lack of government action.

Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the highly respected, peer reviewed Lancet medical journal evidenced the fact the government ignored warnings from scientists. “This crisis was entirely preventable”.

Capital

Even as China was warning that the virus could spread exponentially and overwhelm health provision, countries in the West failed to act. The planes still today continue to take off, major racing events in the UK took place, theatres and pubs have not yet been ordered to close because the government is managing the crisis on behalf of finance capital, and not the elderly and vulnerable.

The response from Donald Trump as US president has been alarming. Jeff Tiedrich summed it up on Twitter: “Trump’s pandemic response, a partial list: lied; called it a hoax; blamed Obama; praised himself; muzzled the experts; snuggled up to CEOs; whined about bad press; told the sick ‘go to work’; tried to bribe German pharma co.; said it would disappear ‘like a miracle’.” We cannot dismiss Trump as a madman, he is US capital’s chosen representative on earth.

Grassroots organisations such as Protect the People sprung up demanding the government take serious action, such as closing schools and providing funding for the NHS. Johnson’s policy of allowing “herd immunity” and then forcing older people into months of “self isolation” have caused fury. The policy is an outlier - but not by far.

Italy allowed the virus to rage through its population before taking action. A large majority of EU countries have closed schools, shut down public venues and events, and closed borders. In every case, action was taken after the virus had infected populations and begun its inevitable exponential growth.

Bail out

The response to the coronavirus outbreak globally has not been dictated by public health - it has been hampered by concerns for the global market - for capitalism. As the reality of the coronavirus crisis became clear, stock markets around the world started to slide and collapse.

The prospect of millions of workers in each national economy taking leave - some estimates are that as many as 20 percent - has destroyed billions in value on the markets. The coronavirus has revealed the truth that entrepreneurs may dominate the narrative about the success of capitalism, but capitalism depends entirely on hundreds of millions of people turning up to work. The markets have crashed. As early as February, the US stock markets were reporting some of the largest falls since the 2008 economic crisis.

The United States has since announced a $700bn stimulus programme and its Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero in a bid to keep dollars in circulation. Despite this, Donald Trump, the US president, admitted we are on the edge of recession, sending the markets into a second death spiral, with the Dow Jones losing 12.9 percent of its value in a single day.

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor in the UK, last night announced an unprecedented £330 billion in cash to save British capitalism. The money will be poured into companies large and small, as loans and gifts. The state - as Johnson has made clear in his speech - has after a decade of responsibility discovered the principle of collectivity. “We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.”

The airline industry is in absolute crisis. In the UK there has been calls for a £7.5 billion rescue package. This is an industry that has fiercely resisted government policy on climate change by citing the logic of free market capitalism. It has globally avoided trillions of dollars in taxes because these companies threaten to refuel in low tax countries. It has told staff to take unpaid leave to subsidise its survival. And it wants the state to intervene in the market to save its billionaire owners and investors.

Crisis

The government money should be used by companies to pay their rents and wages to their staff - which in turn will ensure they can pay their own rents. The landowning class - the people Adam Smith dismissively called the rentier class - has been isolated from the economic crisis.

The banks have been persuaded to offer those with mortgages a three month holiday, ensuring the value of those loans is not undermined by defaults and missed payments. The government is also using this crisis as an opportunity to slash business taxes.

But what about those most in need? The Conservatives could not find a single magic money tree during the 2015 general election. Now we are lost in the forest. Magic money trees around the world are being felled to save capitalism from itself.

The Tories now realise they can borrow at extremely low rates and pass the cash directly to its own citizens. This comes after we have watched for a decade as the benefits regime has been sadistic, homelessness has more than doubled, schools are falling apart, hospitals cannot afford staff, and more and more old people die in cold impoverished loneliness.

The electorate just didn’t believe Labour could fund its manifesto - but look at all the cash now available as soon as capitalism itself is made vulnerable. Yet the chancellor appeared to ignore people who have to pay rent and the poorest in yesterday’s bailout.

Vaccine

Capitalism has been revealed to be red in tooth and claw during this crisis. Trump’s reported attempt to buy the patent of a potential new vaccine being developed in Germany was the unacceptable - but true - face of modern capitalism.

Global Justice Now has warned that pharmaceutical companies are looking to profit from the crisis.

Professor Robert Reich, the economist and former US Labour secretary, reported on Twitter: “Big Pharma got language in the coronavirus bill preventing government from limiting their profits on any future vaccines, even though many of the same drug companies are receiving funding from the government to combat the pandemic. Even in a national emergency, Big Parma wins.”

The novel coronavirus kills those who are already suffering from poor health. But the current crisis is going to be much worse because a virus-like malaise has already attacked our individual and social defences against sickness: and that sickness is capitalism itself.

The contagion has taken hold because our countries - our national governments, our public services, our emergency response capacity was also sick, and in some places dying. The United States, the richest country in the world, does not have a functioning public health service. There are 27.5 million Americans - 8.5 percent of the population - who do not have health insurance and cannot afford to access any health services. There are also millions of undocumented workers who are also denied access to life saving care.

Rights

A teacher who reported with coronavirus symptoms at a US hospital was given a $10,000 bill - despite not actually being tested for coronavirus during her ER treatment.

American working class people are scared to go anywhere near a hospital in case it bankrupts them. This can be fatal for the individuals, and too many Americans who get sick are financially ruined as a result. But as coronavirus now shows, it is also fatal for society.

The rich and famous in the United States can hide in their private health clinics, and we are beginning to get a sense of quite how many are able to access coronavirus tests and treatment which is completely lacking for working class families.

Bernie Sanders, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, was just weeks ago the only US presidential candidate to argue that health care is a human right, and that the US should not be spending twice as much as any other rich nation to support a health industry that accumulates unprecedented profits, but does not provide basic life saving support for the population.

The crisis of capitalism in 2008 was resolved by a historic transfer of trillions of dollars from the public sector to private individuals and companies in the private sector - the very people who caused the collapse by their reckless gambling on the housing market, subprime mortgages and complex (as in fraudulent) and novel financial products.

Austerity

Health services globally have been bled to death by unprecedented cuts in funding. In the UK this programme of defunding was given the chintzy name “austerity”.

George Osborne, the then treasurer, gleefully argued that “we are all in it together” and we needed to “tighten our belts” as local services were decimated, hospitals slashed budgets, local councils closed departments.

In the UK the NHS had received an annual increase in funding of 3.7 percent since it was founded. This was slashed to 1.4 percent on average after the crash (adjusted for inflation). “The rate of growth slowed during the period of austerity that followed the 2008 economic crash”, according to The King’s Fund. While the new NHS funding deal will ease current pressures, it is not enough.”

The amount spent on social care has also fallen, during a period when need has increased. The UK spent £21.3 billion in the year to 2018 - less than a decade earlier. During the same period councils had seen budgets cut by 21 percent. Wages for the overwhelming majority have stagnated, while capital and capitalists continued to accumulate wealth and increase profits.

The UK government stress tested the health service to see how it would cope with a pandemic flu crisis. Exercise Cygnus took place back in October 2016 to see how the country could cope. It established there was a chronic shortage of equipment, including “inadequate ventilation”, or a lack of ventilation machines for those who would have found it difficult to breath.

Without austerity, with proper funding, we could have been prepared. The same is true across Europe. The Italian health services could have had hundreds more ventilators and beds, and doctors would not have had to choose who would die from this new flu.

Precariousness

If the UK government had found £330 billion to fund public services during the last decade - and if other neoliberal, free market political parties had done the same across the EU and beyond - our economies would not have been sick to paralysis when faced with this public health emergency.

The global economy is now in an extremely precarious state. Johnson has bet his career on an assurance to the public that we can “bounce back” from coronavirus because the economy was otherwise sound. This is not true.

As Paul Mason has set out, world debt now stands at $250 trillion which is “three and a half times global GDP”. He states: “Growth is stagnant and will now collapse, albeit temporarily. And the long-term sources of growth are, as even mainstream economists now accept, meagre. This was bad news even before the coronavirus shock but is worse by an order of magnitude now.”

Capitalism - in the form of unregulated food production in China - was the primary condition for novel coronavirus infecting the human population. The decision to defend capital led to governments to take too little action too late to stop its spread. And when they did act, they acted to protect the markets, and not public health services.

Capitalism - the lurch to small state neoliberalism, the crash in 2008 and the decision to implement austerity - is why are are in no fit state to deal with the crisis.

Projections

These are just three of the reasons why the extreme public health crisis that the UK is about to experience is not down to Chinese shoppers, or to an inevitable and natural spread of a virus from the natural environment to the human population.

It is a direct result of the capitalist economic system which now dominates almost all aspects of our societies worldwide.

There are hundreds of other ways that the orientation towards profit making and returns on investment over the wellbeing and protections of populations has contributed to the crisis and made it much worse. Zarah Sultana, the new Labour MP, has argued that coronavirus has exposed “the worse features of a rotten system.

Indeed, capitalism itself is a deadly virus. It is a living organism - a system that processes energy and exergy to continue in existence. It is self making - demonstrating autopoiesis - which has been identified by scientists and the primary property of the living in contrast to the non-living. It survives in host organisms. It is highly contagious. And over time it kills its host.

We will begin to come to terms with the coronavirus. The infection will become part of everyday lives. Thousands around the world will likely die, as they do because of poverty, disease and the lack of basic sanitation. The crisis will fade into the background.

Revival

As it does, we will be told we must revive capitalism. Even more of society’s combined wealth will be diverted away from the majority of the population in suppressed wages and the public sector through cuts, and towards the pockets of a few hyper-wealthy investors and company owners.

We will be told that the state should further subsidies those companies that could not in fact survive actually existing capitalism. The politicians in the US funded by the fossil fuel industries - and let us include aviation - will sign away trillions of dollars.

But we simply cannot let that happen. We cannot continue to play host to the virus of capitalism. This is an economic system that makes the people who feed it sick, and destitute. It is taking its host - our planet and its biosphere - to the very brink of collapse. The coronavirus is just one of the crises of capitalism - alongside climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and the destruction of our global farmlands.

James Meadway, a former advisor to Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnall, has argued at Novara Media that “coronavirus will require us to completely reshape the economy”. He warns that a recession is now inevitable. More than that, Covid-19 will produce an even bigger crisis than 2008 because “it threatens the most fundamental institution of all in capitalism: the labour market itself.” We have seen that the prospect of workers staying at home has destroyed the value on the world’s stock markets.

Workers need to defend themselves against the economic crisis. Trade unions and activists must fight for better sick pay, protection against redundancy, a fair benefits system at the very least and better still a universal basic income. We need a functioning National Health Service, we need to nationalise those useful corporations and industries that would otherwise go to the wall.

In the US, Sanders has called for $2,000 monthly payments for US households to deal with this crisis. Every one of these measures represents a return to health of the body politic, and the fighting back against the capitalist infection.

The solutions we need today are profoundly non-capitalist, perhaps the seeds of post capitalism. The solution is community activism. The primary example is the hundreds of mutual aid groups that arose simultaneously. A nation of volunteers organised through mutual aid groups are preparing to support neighbours - often strangers - during the hardest of times. There has also been a rapid political grassroots response to the crisis. And the climate movement continues, albeit online.

But we do have to go even further. Capitalism is the vector for coronavirus, but has itself become sick. But we need to kill it. If capitalism does survive, if it can revive, it will once again again drive climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, the devastation of our croplands.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.

So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church: Sweet, Leonard: 9781434799791: Amazon.com: Books

So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church: 

Sweet, Leonard:

 9781434799791: Amazon.com: Books

More than 50 years ago scientists made a remarkable discovery, proclaiming, "We have found the secret of life ... and it's so pretty!" The secret was the discovery that life is helixical, two strands wound around a single axis—what most of us know today as the model for DNA.

Over the course of his ministry, author Leonard Sweet has discovered that this divine design also informs God's blueprint for the church. In this seminal work, he shares the woven strands that form the church: missional, relational, and incarnational. Sweet declares that this secret is not just pretty, but beautiful. In fact, So Beautiful!

Using the poignant life of John Newton as a touchstone, Sweet calls for the re-union of these three essential, complementary strands of the Christian life. Far from a novel idea, Sweet shows how this structure is God's original intent, and shares the simply beautiful design for His church.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly


The prolific Sweet—author of articles, sermons, books—turns his vast knowledge of culture and faith toward what he calls the secret of life: an MRI church where 'M' = Missional, 'R' = Relational, and 'I' = Incarnational. He digs deep into MRI theology, calling it the only theology worth bothering with and offering leaders and laypeople a new paradigm for bringing Christ to the world. Sweet outlines the characteristics of each element: missional—The church is 'sent' to be Jesus; relational—Biblical truth... feasts on relationship and revelation; incarnational—The Incarnational life strikes it rich by multiple connections with community and context. Readers will find much to ponder, but they'll have to wade through Sweet's metaphor-heavy, rambling and jumpy writing style, plus his confusing, frequent use of quotation marks around words and phrases as if tweaking their meaning. His vision for following Christ individually and as the church is commendable; his presentation, however, is confounding. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author



Dr. Leonard Sweet is the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Theological School at Drew University. He also serves as a consultant to many of America's denominational leaders and agencies. In 2006 and 2007, he was voted "One of the 50 Most Influential Christians in America." Dr. Sweet is the author of more than one hundred articles, over six hundred published sermons, and a wide array of books. To learn more, visit him at www.leonardsweet.com.




Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition (April 1, 2009)
Language: English
Customer Reviews: 4.1 out of 5 stars21 customer ratings


More about the author
› Visit Amazon's Leonard Sweet Page

Follow

Biography
Len Sweet (www.leonardsweet.com) was born of a mixed marriage: his mother was a fiery Pilgrim Holiness-ordained preacher from the mountains of West Virginia and his quiet father a Free Methodist lay leader from the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. After a deconversion at 17, when Len set about less sowing wild oats than planting prairies, he became an atheist intellectual and scholar dedicated to exposing the nincompoopery and poppycockery, if not tomfoolery and skullduggery of all religions. After this seven-year period of liminality, Len came back to the faith of his ancestors, where he has been ever since, exploring the "insterstices" and "semiotics" of religion, culture and history. He uses two words to describe himself: semiotician and interstitial. In other words, he is obsessed with two questions: "Where have you been?" and "Where are you going?"

----------------

David Phillips
5.0 out of 5 stars Unpacking the Missional Nature of the GodheadReviewed in the United States on March 23, 2009
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Almost 3 years ago, I heard Len Sweet talk about the MRI Church during our first advance for my D. Min. program. In his new book, So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church, Len explores and explains the importance of this idea.

In the book, Len talks about the implications of practicing APC Churches: Attractional, Propositional and Colonial churches. APC churches create members, believers and consumers. However, the MRI Church (Missional, Relational and Incarnational) creates missionaries, disciples, and world changers.

The book is quite thick at over 300 pages. In addition, there are only five chapters, including the introduction. Each of the MRI topics are covered in an individual chapter, along with an introduction and epilogue. Each chapter, however, is broken up into sections that make it easy to take a break in the midst of 40-70 page chapters. I knew this book would be big back in September as Len told me at dinner that each of the topics were 100 pages each and his editor would have to get it down to a manageable size.

Despite it's size, however, it is not a difficult read. But you do have to put your thinking cap on. Len's verbal imagery is very real. He reframes word meanings based on origin and use quite a bit. It is will cause you to pause and consider how you use language yourself. In addition, this a book that draws from a great myriad of sources, as most all of Len's books do. You get a true education by reading Len's book, not just in ministry and life topics, but in science, literature, history, etc.

Content
In the book, Len calls on people and churches to blend together the three MRI strands into one beautiful life.

In Part 1: The Missional Life, Len speaks of God's "going". God is a God of motion, movement and mission. Mission is not an activity of the church but part of the character of God. He is a missionary God. Disciples of Christ are mission-shaped. Every vocation is a missionary vocation. In this section, he fleshes these concepts out in a clear and compelling way.

In Part 2: The Relational Life, Len describes a life where the primary reality is relations and relationships. All of life is about relationships: with God, ourselves, others and creation. In this chapter, he describes the primacy of Relational Truth over Propositional Truth. This is a particularly interesting and needed discussion. I appreciate greatly how he unpacks this concept.

In Part 3: The Incarnational Life, Len describes how instead of pulling people and concepts out of their context, we need to be entering other contexts and in doing so localizing the church within that context. One particular thought that I found very compelling and helpful was this: "Jesus was at home everywhere, but naturalized nowhere. The incarnational life pays homage to context by celebrating regionality, by honoring particularity, by domesticating the missional and the relational. God didn't choose to send us a Superman. God chose to send us an Everyman - `Joe, the Plumber,' `Jesus, the Carpenter' - one like ourselves in every way." (pg. 153) He speaks on how the genius of Christianity is its ability to integrate pagan customs with Christian faith and practice. It uses those customs to communicate itself through indigenous and local expressions of worship.

The final chapter, the Epilogue is practical. It gives you a mirror with which to look at your life and church to see if you are a MRI church. In the epilogue Len provides ten ways to know if your church is MRI. This is a strength of the book.

Additionally, the book is not anti-APC as much as it tries to note the primacy of the MRI over the APC.

Final Thoughts
In a world when most of the attention goes to large, attractional churches, who are by their sheer size considered successful, it is encouraging for someone with such influence noting the need for a different way of being the church. Len does a remarkable job in this book of reframing the idea of church and being vs doing church. It creates energy to infiltrate the world and the marketplace and be the church. It also creates the theological and practical energy for that as well.

Having gotten to know Len over the past 3 years, I admit a bias. But I truly believe that this is one of the best books on being the church and on being a church that influences the context in which we live. It would be a foundational book were I teaching a class on Missional Theology and Practice.
Read less

19 people found this helpful


Prudence A. Cole
3.0 out of 5 stars There are wonderful quotes and insights in this book but it is ...Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

There are wonderful quotes and insights in this book but it is tough going. Sweet has a writing style that can drive you to distractions. This book is a textbook for my seminary studies which is why I read it. And while it is true I have garnered a number of insights I am not sure it was worth the struggle.

One person found this helpful


Abide International
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully communicated!Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2017
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I am always impressed by Len Sweet's ability to make me more passionate about Jesus. His depth of understanding and research challenge me to keep growing. Bud McCord



SnowMan
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book. It's turned me on to more books ...Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Great book. It's turned me on to more books by Len.


Roger
4.0 out of 5 stars Leonard Sweet is worth the read for any preacher just for ...Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

If you wish to move from a church mentality of Aches, Pains and Complaints, to Mission, Relational and Incarnational this book is for you! Leonard Sweet is worth the read for any preacher just for his multitude of fresh sermon illustrations.


Agus Hendratmo
5.0 out of 5 stars Very GoodReviewed in the United States on April 29, 2019
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very good. Recommended seller


Nancy
5.0 out of 5 stars Such an inspiring book. Each page is full of ...Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2014
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Such an inspiring book. Each page is full of wisdom.

rose
4.0 out of 5 stars Four StarsReviewed in the United States on July 1, 2016
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Very helpful book.


E. Morgan
3.0 out of 5 stars Too verboseReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 23, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Like most American authors, Sweet tends to repeat himself to much and obfuscate matters with too many quotes. What he said is OK, but this could have been half the length and still make the point

Intelligent Design vs. Divine Design | The Sensuous Curmudgeon

Intelligent Design vs. Divine Design | The Sensuous Curmudgeon



The Sensuous Curmudgeon
Conserving the Enlightenment values of reason, liberty, science, and free enterprise.
Skip to content

HOME
INTRO
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE CONTROVERSY
DISCOVEROIDS
CREATIONIST WISDOM
LIST-O-LINKS
HURRICANE LINKS
POLITICS
SITE MAP

← Creationist Wisdom #367: The Devil’s Gospel
Discovery Institute: Science is Worthless →

Intelligent Design vs. Divine Design
Posted on 16-November-2013 | 5 Comments


Are you puzzled by our title? This is a bit tricky and very theological, and theology is not a subject we know very well, but we’ll do what we can with an article titled Intelligent Design vs. the Argument from Design.

It appears at the website of the National Catholic Register, which describes itself as “America’s most complete and faithful Catholic news source.” Their website says that copying their material is ” strictly prohibited.” We wouldn’t want to bring their wrath down upon us, so we shall comply. Instead of giving you excerpts, we’ll merely describe what they say.

The reason we found this interesting is that they severely criticize the concept of intelligent design, which is so beloved by the Discoveroids. First, they start out by mentioning Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), a/k/a St. Thomas. Wikipedia says that he “is considered the Church’s greatest theologian and philosopher.” We’ve written before about his five “proofs” of God, each of which has been found fallacious (or at least unpersuasive), but many theologians and believers rely on them anyway.

St. Thomas believed in divine design, that is, he felt that the design of the universe was evidence for God’s existence. This, according to the National Catholic Register, is nothing like the “theory” of intelligent design, which they dismiss as nothing more than a God of the gaps argument. That’s exactly what it is, despite the Discoveroids’ strenuous denials — see Stephen Meyer: “I Don’t Use God of the Gaps”. The Discoveroids claim is that because we can’t understand something, it must have been the work of the intelligent designer.

In contrast, the National Catholic Register says that St. Thomas never used such an argument. Instead, he said that it’s because of divine design that we can understand the way things work. Unlike the Discoveroids, St. Thomas didn’t assume a supernatural designer because of our ignorance, but because of our understanding. He said that the evidence of divine design is that nature is lawful and the world makes sense to us. That seems to be his fifth proof, a teleological argument that claims because everything in the universe follows laws, it must have been created by God.

Whether you find that persuasive or not, it certainly tolerates science better than the Discoveroids’ do. The Discoveroids want to overthrow science. Do you doubt that? Then see What is the “Wedge Document”?

So the National Catholic Register doesn’t think there’s much to recommend the Discoveroids’ notion of intelligent design. They don’t specifically say it, but it’s obvious that they don’t think a God-of-the-gaps argument is good science. And it’s very clear that they don’t think much of it as a theological argument either. In fact, it’s clear that they don’t like it at all.

Our guess is that the only people who do like intelligent design are ignoramuses who imagine it means that science supports their religion, and primitive preachers who don’t know much of anything at all.
Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

• • • • • • • • • • •

. . Permalink for this article

S.

5 RESPONSES TO “INTELLIGENT DESIGN VS. DIVINE DESIGN”
Charles Deetz ;) | 16-November-2013 at 11:01 pm |


Creator and God as a philosophical and faith-based issue. Terrific, some sanity.
Frank J | 17-November-2013 at 8:20 am |


The reason we found this interesting is that they severely criticize the concept of intelligent design, which is so beloved by the Discoveroids.”

One does not need to go anywhere near the jargon-infested subject of theology (a gold mine for wordsmiths) to find a simple, indisputable conclusion: Any religion that preaches “thou shalt not bear false witness” and means it will completely reject the modern ID movement.

The catch is that the leaders of such religion need to know the sleazy tactics that ID peddlers use. And they won’t if they only hear about ID from the media (“it’s creationism.” “it’s a religious view,” etc.)
AnOldScientist | 17-November-2013 at 8:55 am |


FYI. According to fair use, under the 1st amendment you can copy anything you want to as part of a commentary or critique http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/
The Curmudgeon | 17-November-2013 at 10:52 am |


AnOldScientist correctly says: “According to fair use, under the 1st amendment you can copy anything you want to as part of a commentary or critique”

That’s true. But the doctrine of “fair use” isn’t a magic shield that lets us dwell in a blogospheric paradise. Suits alleging copyright infringement were recently rampant during the now-ended terror caused by the tactics of Righthaven. The experience of the blogger defendants illustrates that “fair use” is a defense to a claim of copyright infringement, which has to be demonstrated in court. If sued, one must decide to either fork over something to settle the thing, or fork over perhaps even more to fight the thing in court. Although justice ought to eventually prevail, it’s best to avoid such situations.
MNb | 17-November-2013 at 11:06 am |


“a teleological argument”
Science has thrown teleology out of the window some 200 years ago.

“it certainly tolerates science better than the Discoveroids’ do.”
In the end no. That same Thomas of Aquino adopted the cosmological argument, which relies on causality, which in our days of Quantum Mechanics is just as anti-scientific.

“Monsignor Georges Lemaître was a 20th century physicist who looked at the evidence that everything in the universe was moving away from everything else”
Likely after he had read an article in a German scientific magazine from the Russian commie Alexander Friedman, who had this idea several years before our Monsignor. But yeah, a catholic celebrating a commie ….

Charles D: just ask the most liberal catholic you know if Jesus’ Resurrection was a historical and physical event. Also ask him/her how his causal god relates to the probabilism of Quantum Mechanics.

“a philosophical and faith-based issue”
There is a reason catholics don’t like Kierkegaard.