Can the subaltern breathe? What unites BLM and the pandemic?

Wall Street hit a 32-year record high for the last quarter. At the same time, unemployment was at record high levels. Business was doing well; workers badly. Indeed, many workers are dying. 

Labor differs from capital in not being wholly immaterial. It also is supposed to have its possibilities and movements controlled, while capital's should be as free as possible. Capitalists like workers can sicken and die, being sentient vulnerable bodies like the rest of us. (Judith Butler, in her recent book "The Power of Non-violence," seems to think thanatology is the key to a universalistic liberal-left politics: inclusion of all others means empathizing with their mortality; the significance of human beings as laboring bodies is that they can die. So there is equality and justice if black bodies are recognized to be as mortal and suffering-prone as white ones; this means that some Antigone can mourn them, while of us join the chorus). 

There are two figures in the history of Western Christian, colonialist and industrial societies of the (private) immortality of persons (the Roman idea, popularized in post-revolutionary France, of immortality as public recognition of a life now over is something else): the mind or consciousness as separate from mortal and suffering bodies, and capital. Capital has its needs and flourishing, but it you prick it it does not bleed (at least not in the way that animate bodies do, though today we are reminded that they have 'rights' connected to this possibility of suffering, and perhaps requiring it or its representation). Usually, as very long strikes in which workers manage through popular support or carefully planning to outlast the bosses may be an exception. Often, now, when capital is pricked, the factory moves, maybe to China. Blame the Chinese, or the Mexicans, or even the Salvadoreans, some of who want to come here to live and not die, and whose nation has the highest murder rate now thanks to the history of the Contras and now the drug squads serving Americans of a certain taste. 

Capital is stuff bought with money that produces more money. The system is not unlike a virus, in that it in a way both is alive and nonliving, and it uses mortal and energetic bodies and minds, but in itself is like something that just needs to reproduce, like DNA in some theories of evolution, which actually is parasitical on mortal bodies. This figures a Smithian God as the impersonal force of a technology that uses and tosses away the mortal, suffering bodies of animate, creative, and thinking bodies, who serve it as its slaves, rather than being served by it (if that notion would make any sense). Yes, as Adam Smith saw, capital is a strange God. So perhaps is medicine, which along with capital and bureaucracy, which is perhaps a power to rule people and things with statements, a candidate for the new secular religion. It is a religion of use of persons to make flourish certain kinds of abstract things, and therefore the control of these persons and bodies, with 'scientific' and bureaucratic 'knowledge' the informational basis of this control. Capital does not create, but merely organizes labor and enables its management, in a certain way. 

What happened with the triumph of neoliberalism after 1970, 1989, and 2008, is that the New Deal alliance of capital and labor ended. Capitalism flourished, the winners took the spoils, and the left spoke only of the inclusion of identities as "oppression" became a mystical signifier used to invoke an absent politics, much as "spirituality" means something like religion as the self-management of mind without any divine promise of justice or happiness. And the losers were among those people who in the capitalist economy are "labor power": they are useful for what they can do, and otherwise do not matter. 

Your life and mine do not necessarily matter to those who rule our society and more or less the world. Our lives and well-being, however it might be defined for us or we might define it for ourselves, individually and collectively, only matter if and when we are needed. Sometimes we are needed to work. The society as a whole is organized around this economic demand. Otherwise, we and all of life on this planet, are only contingently needed and necessary. It is with people as labor power just as with armies and war. We are expendable. 

The lives of workers and potential workers (labor power) matter to capital insofar as capital needs them to maintain itself and grow. In our neoliberal epoch of financializaiton, capital seems to need workers less, and it dreams, in a different way than we might, of full automation. Our lives matter to us 'internally' or 'for-themselves' because we like to live them, and it is possible to live a life not only as increase of power but enjoyment of Being and Becoming. That our lives matter 'intriniscally' to us, or 'immanenty' and not only as productive of a transcendent and valuing power, is certainly part of our obvious common sense. Yet it has to be asserted, as a claim, perhaps only because capitalism and its uses of technology and bureaucracy (and medicine as well as war and policing) have become not only biopolitical but thantopolitical, machines of producing a distribution of life and death, and requiring decisions on who lives and who dies. We mus say that the most despised and wretched lives matter, and they matter equally, but we must say it of them most. "The stone that the builders tossed aside [while the slaves were bearing burdens of bricks, and made to gather in their free time their own straw] will become the foundation." That is how and why Black Lives Matter. And this is what the coronavirus and the police have in common precisely: they are a power to stop you, when not needed, from breathing.