Return to Materialism: COVID-19 Fieldnotes for Upstanders
On Friday, April 10th, I led a talk with Prof. Łukasz Posłuszny, a neo-Marxist and sociologist from Wrocław University. It was, in fact, an e-talk happening in the privileged e-world in which we and many other academics are living today. Meanwhile, workers cram themselves on subways, trains, and buses in order to staff shelves at retail stores. Karl Marx reminds us about looking at our own positionality - in this case, at the great privilege thanks to which I can write these words and you can read these words while others belonging to subaltern groups (in Gramscian sense) have to work in the off-line world.
Prof. Posłuszny gave his audience the theoretical tools to assess the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. He mentioned the post-materialist world of neoliberalism and globalization we used to occupy for more than thirty years, and then he mentioned the return to materialism that is happening along with the current pandemic.
The best proof of that return is that we do not worry any more about our opera tickets, resort reservations, and Esperanto classes but rather about toilet paper. It became one of the ultimate symbols of the current situation: the bare necessity of each and every human – to wipe themselves. In Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid representing the hierarchy of human needs, over a few weeks, we moved from the top to the bottom while mostly being concerned about how to keep wiping ourselves with paper. At some point, it was even sold out in Walmart and on Amazon.
The material world, with all its implications, is back.
Donald Trump and Jarosław Kaczyński (leader of Poland’s far-right Law and Justice Party) are bad ‘democrats’ and unfit to face the challenges of the current situation. Barack Obama and Donald Tusk (former European Council president) were good ‘democrats’ but mostly in prolonging the old status quo like the slave owners who were nice to their slaves. After all, not much happened in the past years to improve our precarious silent majority. With almost 17 million people claiming unemployment benefits in the United States as of April 10, with the ‘naked’ European Union (EU) pursuing way too many ludicrous policies while forgetting about its fundamental values, we are clearly moving forward into the unknown.
Repatriation from the United States to Poland, O'Hare Airport, Chicago. March 23rd, 2020. (Photo courtesy of the author)
Tomorrow might be the same as yesterday when mass-graves are covered, and the last infected person either is cured or dies. But it also might be significantly different. Posłuszny predicts two paths the post-pandemic world could embrace: the rise of authoritarianism, or an opportunity for subaltern youth. First of all, the quantitative data for our developed world democracies have never been as bad. The decline of the system became salient and acute in Europe and the Americas. Some, like Victor Orbán, saw the chance to seize the ‘full’ power amidst anti-COVID regulations.
But Posłuszny also asks, why are the young people still staying on the seaside amidst the pandemic? They have nothing to lose other but their loans, their McJobs, their unaffordable rents to live in New York or Cali. It is the ‘old’ persons who have a lot to worry about because their comfortable status quo might be just perishing.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked an activist from the People’s Republic of China why, following the example of Hongkongers, you did not protest just as in 1989? He said that back then, we had nothing to lose; now we have apartments, cars, jobs, stocks, and debts to pay. But the return to materialism may change the rules of the game when the debts and student loans become irrelevant as the majority might not be able to pay them anyway.
“In recent days, we have read enough dystopian visions of the post-COVID world. I do not want to write another one. Because in the hands of upstanders rests the choice between dystopia, maintenance of the status quo, or perhaps a quasi-utopian victory for all of humanity.”
It is, of course, the dream scenario of the Neo-Marxists. But they should also be afraid, and Posłuszny is right in that sense: what is coming next is not a proletarian awakening, not Bernie Sanders’ victory, but the accelerated march towards fascism. Europe lived through it already in the 1930s in the aftermath of the Great Depression. And with the hatemongering fueled with the migration crisis in Europe and the rust belt and migration mélange of grievances in the US, we paved a highway for the neo-Nazi fringe to become our new reality.
This is why the return to materialism should matter for each and every upstander out there. As we cannot protest off-line, we need to be human rights vigilantes. Perhaps as in Poland, the government may place new bills limiting more and more rights, following Hungary’s lead in taking over everything that can be taken.
The EU has never been as silent and as powerless as it is now. But with our welfare and public goods, we still stay alive while New York currently has its 9/11 every day. And if the curtain goes up, and the ‘89 victor, the United States, turns out to be simply ‘nude’ – there are others out there eagerly interested in stepping in. After all, billions of dollars spent on the US military means nothing when confronted with this microscopic-sized enemy threatening US citizens.
In recent days, we have read enough dystopian visions of the post-COVID world. I do not want to write another one. Because in the hands of upstanders rests the choice between dystopia, maintenance of the status quo, or perhaps a quasi-utopian victory for all of humanity. While being under lockdown, or while on the subway, we have the choice to rethink the losses of the past 30 years and be upstanders before others steal the few freedoms we still have left.
Łukasz W. Niparko is a human rights advocate (LL.M. in international human rights law from the European University Viadrina). He is an alumnus of the United World College (UWC-USA) and St. Lawrence University (SLU). He served with various NGOs, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Humanity In Action (HIA, where he currently is a member of the Leadership Council), and Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH). He is a co-founder of the Peace and Liberal Arts Education Center (China), Anne Frank Project: Poznań (Poland), and Global Dialogue Center at SLU. He was the Pat Cox Fellow in the European Parliament. Currently, he is also a Research Assistant and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Banner image: Empty Shelves: Toilet Paper Section. A major retail store in Illinois, March 22nd, 2020. (Photo courtesy of the author)
