Stop calling coronavirus pandemic a ‘war’

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Loughborough University

In speeches, commentaries and conversations about the coronavirus pandemic, we keep hearing war-like metaphors being deployed. It happens explicitly (“we are at war”, “blitz spirit”, “war cabinet”) and implicitly (“threat”, “invisible enemy”, “frontline”, “duty”).

This, after all, helps project an interpretation of the extraordinary reality facing us which is readily understandable. It helps convey a sense of exceptional mobilisation and offers to decision-makers an opportunity to rise up as heroic commanders.

It is also true that the language of biomedicine and epidemiology is already heavily militarised. We “battle” a virus, and our body has “defence” mechanisms against the pathogens that “invade” it.

But the coronavirus crisis is an international, pan-human challenge. It certainly requires exceptional collective mobilisation, but no real weapons, no intentional killing of fellow human beings, and no casting of people as dehumanised others. Militarised language is unnecessary.

Explaining and encouraging community resilience and togetherness in the face of adversity by evoking images of war conjures up distorted myths and narratives of heroic past national glory and military campaigns. This might function as a cognitive shortcut to evoke collective effort, but the narrow narratives it reproduces are open to exploitation by opportunistic politicians.

We could just as much favour analysis of the evolving situation in calmer scientific and medical terms. You don’t need ideas about war to tell a story of the human race naturally coming together when faced by a common danger.

Indeed, one striking phenomenon has been the huge proliferation of organic networks of mutual aid. From street-level up, and often with the help of social media, a huge number of people have been organising solidarity networks to help each other – and especially the most vulnerable.

People have come together and organised within neighbourhoods, cities and regions – but also across nations – to help each other without needing to call it a “war” or military “duty”. The language of mutual aid and solidarity works just as well.

Ideological appropriations

Anyone interested in political theory and ideologies must be watching all this with some intellectual curiosity. Different perspectives come with different assumptions about human nature, the role of the state compared to other institutions, and so on.

War is the business of the state par excellence. Some argue it was war-making that actually made the modern state. Framing the response to COVID-19 in military language will reinforce such statist thinking – and the statist project itself. It will reinforce the state and its power.

It is of course true that, given the political architecture in place as the crisis hit, states do hold much organisational capacity and power. They have a crucial role to play in tackling the current emergency. But other political entities matter too, from spontaneous bottom-up networks and municipalities to regional organisations and the World Health Organization. Military metaphors, however, either conceal their contributions or co-opt them by describing their efforts in military terms.

One could just as much pitch the crisis as being about medicine, health workers and human communities across the globe. One could analyse events around particular socio-economic classes, such as supermarket workers, delivery workers and essential equipment manufacturers, in every country affected by the virus. Looking at socio-economic classes across borders could also set up more searching discussions about homelessness, refugee camps, working conditions and universal healthcare.

An analysis based on class or social justice is just as appropriate as one revolving around military metaphors. But instead of reinforcing statist and military thinking, it would explain the crisis in anarchist, Marxist, feminist, or liberal internationalist terms, for example.

Normalising war

Language matters. It helps frame particular stories, interpretations and conversations while at the same time closing off alternative perspectives. It reinforces particular theories about how the world works, and sidelines others.

Framing political issues in the language of war both illustrates the prevalence of militarised thinking and further enables it. The more we use military language, the more we normalise the mobilisation of the military and the more we entrench military hierarchies. When the next international crisis arrives, rather than examining the deeper structural problems that caused them, we jump again to heroic narratives of national militarised mobilisation.

Who benefits from this? Politicians can project an image of decisive generals protecting their lot. Agents of state coercion can project themselves as dutiful and robust but popular administrators of the public will. They can then mobilise this (typically masculine) brand for their own political agenda later on. If you are Trump, perhaps you can even egg up some anti-Chinese patriotism.

Missed is the opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of human capabilities not restricted to national boundaries. Yet this international solidarity and these pan-human capabilities might be what we need to tackle other problems of international scale, such as the climate crisis.

When a crisis of global proportions gives rise to organic expressions of mutual aid, our imagination has grown so restricted that we find ourselves framing the challenge in statist and national terms. Instead of seeing the whole of humanity rising to the challenge together and observing the multi-layered outpouring of mutual aid, our imagination is restricted into encasing this in military language.

But that does not capture the full story. The human race will come out of COVID wiser if it does not frame its understanding of its response to it in narrow military language.

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Loughborough University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Why the Collection of Commercial Rents Should Be Suspended During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Dr. Todd Mei (Philosophy, University of Kent)

Most of us are familiar with the term “rent” as that annoying expense we have to pay on a monthly basis. Studies show that rent typically takes up as much as 1/3 of a person’s income, if not more. It’s no different for commercial businesses that don’t own their own land. Just think of all those stores on the high street that have either moved or shut down?

There are several factors contributing to this, and a significant one is an increase in rents that businesses cannot afford. But how can it be in the interest of landlords to raise rents and lose tenants, especially when shops remain empty? That is another story that has to do with speculation and land banking.

This post is about explaining how rents are generated commercially and why, during this time of pandemic-induced economic slowdown, collection of commercial rents should be suspended.

It was David Ricardo (1772-1823) who first formalised the theory of rent when trying to show how land is a passive factor of value production. In other words, land generates its own kind of value distinct and non-attributable to labour or capital.

What Ricardo observed was how land use always takes into account certain advantages for production. He referred to different fertility grades of land, and how more fertile lands will produce more crops given the same expenditure of labour and capital across land of lesser fertility. The difference of output between the highest and lower grades of land is thus a surplus value.

This surplus, or difference, is what Ricardo and some of his contemporaries termed “ground rent”. J. S. Mill (1806-1873) famously shows how “Ricardo’s doctrine” applies to all land use—commercial, residential, and aesthetic.

One important feature to note with respect to our current situation is that such rent is based on future expectations of production. In other words, when deciding to employ labour and capital, the user of land will estimate how much of a return s/he will get over a period of time. The general term for this estimate is “value”, but as suggested above, this value breaks down into value produced by labour (or wages), by capital (or interest), and by land (or rent).

When a landlord is figured into this equation, s/he will estimate what fee (also called “rent”) can be charged based on the future earnings of the land. And the land user, or tenant, will only pay this fee if s/he thinks that production levels can indeed meet this fee and exceed it (in order to pay wages and operating costs).

To sum up, Ricardo’s theory of rent is differential, because it takes note of different qualities of land when providing advantage; and it is prospective, because value is based on future returns.

With commercial land use, differential land value is often captured by location. Business plots closer to the hub of social activity will garner more value because there is an expected increase in footfall. There may be aesthetic or esteem factors, as well. The prospective element is closely related to this. With more footfall, there is the expectation that demand for things sold or services provided will be steady, if not increase over time.

However, once the economy slows down, note that the prospective element declines. In the short run, businesses can make up the shortfall some other way (e.g. redundancies, lower wages, decrease size of products, etc.) until things pick up.

In the long run, if the drop is continuous, it cannot be compensated. Why? Because there is simply no future return on work. Businesses can’t even play catch up.

Now imagine a situation in which there is a pandemic, and most businesses have to shutter their doors for an indefinite time. Because this is happening now, rent is certainly coming to the fore as an important topic with there being no current and future production for a vast majority of businesses.

Yet, rents are still being collected. Moreover, if public assistance is provided in terms of a grant or loan, at least 1/3 of that financial assistance is taken by the landlord . . . when no production is taking place! Or consider the recent US stimulus package where commercial property owners get a tax rebate for a drop in land value. This approach seems unfair.

And so, it might be a prudent proposal to suspend the collection of commercial rents until better economic conditions emerge.

But does this mean that commercial landlords are the losers? In one sense, pre-pandemic they were already losing due to a steady drop in retail and speculative value. But to really get a reasonable perspective on this matter, it is important to bear in mind who loses if rents are not suspended? It seems clear: A significant portion of the working population, town and city centres, and tax payers versus a minority sector of business that thrives on the speculation of future production.

In the grand scheme, landlording is reliant on production and retail. It cannot collect rents without their thriving. In that sense, the question of landlords losing is moot. Suspension of rents seems as necessary as a lockdown to prevent further damage and disadvantage from spreading.

What moral values do school choices teach our children?

Our son, who is now 4 years old, will start school next week. The closest taxpayer-funded school to us is St John the Baptist, a CofE school with a good reputation. But he won’t be going there, and the whole episode will provide the whole family with plenty of material to think about “right” and “wrong”.

We did visit St Johns (along with many other schools), several times. Although CofE schools have often been perceived as rather soft on Christian proselytism in recent decades, we had heard St Johns were now tuning up their religious ethos (including optional church visits during normal school hours), so we were curious to see what we could for ourselves. We asked local staff how important it was to “be Christian”. The recurrent reply was that St John’s actually welcomes all faiths “because religion teaches moral values”. True enough. But this statement seemed to barely mask two implicit claims that we think are worrying.

For one, though “religion” does “teach moral values”, the examples of people who trace their moral values to their “religion” do range from the Amish to the Inquisition, from the Ahmadiyya to ISIS, and so on. In other words, there is a very wide range of “moral values” and associated enforcement structures that “religion” has given rise to. You might (rightly) retort that the same holds true of secular worldviews (from Enlightenment liberalism to Stalinism), but that is precisely the point: the content of those values matters at least as much as their religious or philosophical origin.

However, also worrying in this claim that “religion teaches moral values” is the implied converse statement (“atheism/humanism does not”?). Not only does this ignore the numerous moral systems built without needing religious references (say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the French Constitution, or the UN Charter), but it also seems to imply that you need the threat of punishment by some all-powerful super-judge for you to consider being nice to your neighbour. I’m not sure even religious people are ethical only because their religion taught them, or indeed that religion is the only source of their morality.

I quite like various aspects of Christianity (in fact I research, teach and publish on it): the theology can be rich and interesting, and the ethics preached by Jesus quite moving and thought-provoking. One thing which he did seem particularly condemnatory about though was hypocrisy. Funny then that every year parents, clergy and schools play this little game the falseness of which everybody is aware of: attend church for a year, get a letter from the priest, get the precious progeny into the better local state-funded school, then go back to normal. Interesting display of “Christian values”, from all parties.

But why do new parents play that game every year? Can they really be faulted if this is because they want the best education for their children? It’s great that many publicly-funded schools are excellent (even when under-funded). It’s important that they all teach moral values, as well as religion(s). If some religious bodies want to teach kids their way, then the current legislation allows that. But should the schools funded by a multicultural state declare a preference for kids whose parents declare them to be religious?

When our son is intellectually and emotionally mature enough to begin to grapple with the big questions that religion is concerned with, we certainly intend, with his school’s help, to encourage him to consider the various answers provided by different worldviews. Meanwhile we try, like all parents, to teach him moral values by word and by example. As currently designed and lived-out every year, however, the process with which young children enter the British school system is not exactly providing a glorious parable teaching the moral values of honesty, tolerance, solidarity, and so on. Thankfully, there are plenty of examples across Europe and beyond (each with their own challenges of course) of how else the parable could be written.

Crowdfunding Essays on Anarchism and Religion

Essays in Anarchism and Religion is a multi-volume collection of academic essays which aims to be available freely online, and cheaply in print (priced at the cost of printing). The first volume is ready for production with Stockholm University Press, and two more are in the pipeline.

To reach the aim of producing a scholarly text that is freely available online, and available as a cheap physical copy, the editors have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to meet the production costs. A range of rewards are available, for contributions as low as £5. If the campaign manages to raise more than we need for volume 1, the extra funds will go towards the production costs of the next two volumes.

The series as a whole examines the intersections between anarchist politics and activism on the one hand, and religious ideas, thinkers and practices on the other. Conventionally treated as intransigently hostile systems of thought, the series explores the unexpected points of contact and contestation in a richly varied perspective that encompasses, amongst others, Christianity, Buddhism and mysticism, and the ideas of Kierkegaard, Proudhon and Voegelin. In charting these relationships, the series casts fresh light on the intellectual foundations of anarchism as a political movement, and on the neglected relevance of anarchist ideas to multiple  strands religious thinking. This series will therefore be of interest to those interested in political theory and religious studies, but also those interested in the history of ideas and philosophy.

For more information, to look at the contents of the first volume, and to make a pledge, please visit the campaign’s Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/97077166/essays-in-anarchism-and-religion.

Think the world’s in a mess? Here are four things you can do about it

Brexit. Trump. Climate change. The financial system. The arms trade. Hardliners. You name it, it’s causing anxiety. The state of the world upsets you, but what can you, a poor little meaningless individual lost in a powerful and complex system, do to change anything? How can you make any difference?

There are actually numerous ways you can engage politically – as often as every day. Here are four to think about.

1. Be a reflective producer

What we do as a job ends up being our biggest contribution to society in terms of productive capacity. We spend decades labouring in a particular sector of the economy and for particular employers, producing a particular “output”. Some of these jobs are neutral, some harmful, some more helpful.

Jobs in finance, agriculture, manufacturing, NGOs, marketing, energy or education fulfil different functions in society. Even within these sectors there are differences in the moral stature different employers and employees can genuinely claim for themselves.

Of course, for many of us, choices are quite limited. But some can choose which industry and company profits from their productive capacity – and the more comfortable classes tend to have more choice. Why not reflect further on what your job is dedicated to morally, economically and politically? Is your creative potential absorbed in advertising? Your engineering skills in weapons technology? Your oratory sold to the highest bidder? Is the production process you contribute to dedicated to justice? Knowledge? Crude profit? Who benefits from the work of your employer?

Where your job sits in the economy frames its contribution to society. It might be the slowest and most structural area of political decision-making at an individual level, but it nonetheless remains at your disposal.

2. Be an ethical consumer

We give lots of money to people over a lifetime through the purchases we make. Some products reach us through better labour conditions or have a lower environmental footprint.

We owe it to those affected not to forget that smartphones may contain rare conflict minerals some of which come from eastern Congo where mines are controlled by militias with child soldiers and rape is a weapon of war. Let’s also remember that parts of the clothing industry use child labour. And let’s not forget that so much of the plastic we consume is produced from petrol, an industry which partly fuels war in the Middle East.

How was your morning coffee produced? Shutterstock

Everything we buy has a history and a social, environmental and political cost: the raw materials, the labour, the ecological footprint. There is much more to it than the price.

There’s also the stock market dimension. Many pension funds, banks and insurance policies invest our money in whatever offers the highest returns, often without much thought about ethics. Why not pressure those massive money pots to be more ethical in their investment preferences?

Of course you cannot put your money where your ethic is all the time. Nor does ethical consumption (which advertisers have become effective at spinning) resolve deeper structural issues. But a more inquisitive approach to our daily shopping can have an impact on the world. So ask yourself: who and what benefits if I buy this product?

3. Be an active citizen

Obviously, we can use the political channels officially open to us to be an active citizen, from elections to petitions, to campaigning, participating in trade unions and writing to politicians. Some will even consider tactical civil disobedience: for all the critics of the suffragettes or Gandhi at the time, even established politicians have since come to praise them as heroes.

But we can also become more conscious recipients of political messages. We can bone up on basic lessons of political communication to avoid falling for tricks. There’s agenda-setting theory, spiral of silence theory, cultivation theory and many more. Political marketing tactics have proved effective at winning votes (Trump is a brand). The tools they have been using to swing us are not that difficult to see through once we know how.

4. Be a principled person

Think of that conversation you overheard in the street, or what your uncle said at the family dinner, or the racist or misogynist insult you overheard on the bus. You can let it pass or you can intervene. Of course, a fruitful intervention needs to be sensitive and tactful. But if someone says something that worries you, who wins if you don’t react? If someone is driven by fears, why not listen and discuss, even while sticking to your principles?

Think while you tweet. Shutterstock

We live in our local communities. Most people are quite normal. Some have opposite views to you on key political questions. Why not talk them through politely and respectfully, try to empathise and even consider solutions together? It might even develop our own thinking.

Bethink yourselves

These four areas of decision-making are not exhaustive, and they do overlap. When you’re on social media, you are consuming but also producing content. When your insurance company invests in your sector but asks for higher returns through weaker labour conditions, you indirectly become both slave and slave owner. Human structures and institutions are complicated.

So we need to ask questions and be open to learn. Decisions still need to be informed by reflection and analysis, including through discussion with those who do not already agree with us.

Nor is it fair to expect perfection: compromises are inevitable, though there is always room for more effort in a conscious and critical direction. Without continuous questioning and engagement, the current structures of power and oppression continue unabated.

Tolstoy wanted us to “bethink ourselves”: to wise up to false preachers and systemic injustice, and to withdraw our complicity from structures of oppression (especially if you’re among the comfortable classes). A century on from his death, there are many more ways we can all engage in politics. You’re only one of many, but there are many like you, and if the direction of the world worries you, there are actually quite a few things you can do about it.

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Loughborough University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why is Jo Cox’s murder not ‘terrorism’?

Jo Cox’s murder is shocking. Much as already been said on how energetic and loved she was as a mum, a campaigner and an MP. Much more will be said about all this that is important (often more than the issue I want to touch on here), but I want to reflect on one particular curiosity.

That is: why is hardly anyone using the word ‘terrorism’ for what happened?

The term is of course notoriously difficult to agree on. Different commentators will argue passionately about the inclusion or exclusion of specific clauses in their preferred definition. For instance:

• Do the perpetrators have to be ‘subnational’ actors (neatly exonerating states)?
• Does the violence have to be ‘illegal’ or ‘illegitimate’ (and by what/whose measure)?
• Do the methods have to be ‘unconventional’ (but what is ‘conventional’ these days)?
• Do motives have to be strictly ‘political’ (but how do you define ‘political’)?
• Must the attack be on ‘soft targets’ (but then what other word applies when soldiers are targeted)?

These are not insignificant aspects to consider, with good arguments pointing in different directions. Your preferred definition will depend on your conclusions on these clauses, which is one reason there are so many definitions of ‘terrorism’.

But even if you take a rather typical, mainstream and fairly narrow definition – such as: “politically motivated, illegal violence by a subnational actor on a soft target using unconventional weapons” – then that definition applies to Cox’s murder. Take most definitions, and it applies.

Take even the UK’s official definition in the Terrorism Act 2000, as: “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public, or a section of the public; made for the purposes of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause; which involves or causes serious violence against a person, serious damage to a property, a threat to a person’s life [and a couple more clauses]”. Again, Cox’s murder seems to fit the definition.

The one uncertainty to date is the motive, but if the attacker did shout ‘Britain First’ (widely reported but so far unconfirmed), then, on top of Cox very probably being attacked because she was a politician and because of her specific politics, it would make it difficult to argue the motive was not ‘political’.

Without meaning to be flippant, just imagine for a second if the attacker had shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ instead? Wouldn’t the words ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ be splashed about everywhere?

So then, how come the term isn’t used here? Is it that the mainstream commentariat (including politicians and journalists) is actually not even trying to use the term consistently? Why are many of those who for example described Lee Rigby’s killers as ‘terrorists’ not using the term here? What does the rush to label something ‘terrorism’ and the (at best) blissful or (at worst) wilful omission of that term for comparable acts say about the deeper prejudices that affect our analysis of such acts of political violence? And, to ask what is generally an important question: who does it benefit (that the term is used with such selective inconsistency)?

The term ‘terrorism’ carries very negative connotations. When a group has managed to convince (implicitly or explicitly) the majority of onlookers to label a particular act by another group as ‘terrorism’, that first group has scored a moral victory. How the term is used is therefore important. It may be that we should refrain from using it altogether since it is so loaded. Or perhaps we ought to at least try to use it consistently, i.e. to be clear and open about our own definition, and then apply it consistently.

Provided the motive proves to be ‘political’, Cox’s murder fits nearly any definition of ‘terrorism’. Analysing if and when the term begins to be used by prominent media and political actors for this particular act will continue to be quite revealing of underlying and unacknowledged political preferences which we could do worse than be more honest about, reflect upon and discuss.

 

Further sources:

• Ashton, Emily. “Jo Cox Gave This Powerful Speech Calling For Britain To Accept Child Refugees”. BuzzFeedNews. 16 June 2016.  https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilyashton/jo-cox-gave-this-powerful-speech-calling-for-britain-to-acce?utm_term=.iwwzvAbwy#.ylBZdXDkx (17 June 2016).
• Bennett, Owen. “Jo Cox’s Passionate Speech Urging The Government To Help Child Refugees”. Huffpost Politics UK. 16 June 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jo-coxs-passionate-speech-urging-the-government-to-help-child-refugees_uk_5762e19de4b08b9e3abdfcb2?xf6lheb52hurcc8fr (17 June 2016).
• Channel 4 News. “We have far more in common than that which divides us.” https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10153821907831939/ (17 June 2016).
• Legislation.Gov. “Terrorism Act 2000”.  http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/1 (17 June 2016)
• Martin, Gus. Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues. Fifth edition. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2016.
• The Guardian: Editorial. “The Guardian view on Jo Cox: an attack on humanity, idealism and democracy” 16 June 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16/the-guardian-view-on-jo-cox-an-attack-on-humanity-idealism-and-democracy (17 June 2016).

Launching the proper ‘blog’

I have been running this site for nearly a year, not as a blog but as a resource to host top student essays in some of the modules I run. In light of yesterday’s event, I’ve decided I might try to blog – probably not very frequently or regularly, but at least when I feel moved to do so in light of recent news. So, expect the first post in the next few minutes! Comments and discussion, including critical ones, are always welcome – provided they are courteous and in the Socratic spirit of seeking and discussing truth and justice.