Virus and Commons

There’s been much talk recently about the necessary work of the commons in the midst of the pandemic, and of the beautiful self-organized mutualisms that societies all over the world have mustered to move through these dark times. It seems that there’s nothing like a virus, moving invisibly through bodies across time and space, to provoke the sudden planetary realization that our bodies are not contained within sovereign skins. Instead, all bodies are radically open and thus vulnerable—pores and orifices through which clouds of droplets and saliva particles swirl with every breath and every movement. And yet, if we have learned anything—anything at all—from this sudden sense of a planetary bodily commons, then it is that the commonality of vulnerability is shot through with brutal inequalities. It’s almost as if there exist multiple pandemics at once: mutually incomprehensible and differently experienced as they tear through communities along the lines of class, race, generation, gender, and (dis)ability.

But even as intense societal differentiation is made manifest in this pandemic, another truth has come to the fore: What counts more than anything at this moment is the need for the life-making processes that ensure that all are fed, housed, cared for when sick, and educated. These common processes make the life upon which everything, including capitalism, depends—hence the designation of previously undervalued or invisible workers as “essential.” Capitalism hinges on this socially reproductive labour even as it routinely degrades and devalues it. It is fuelled by it even as it refuses to acknowledge its worth. As life stands still under lockdown we bear witness to the fact that capitalism needs this life-making labour to reap profits. There is no wealth but life itself.11John Ruskin, Unto This Last: Four Essays on the Principles of Political Economy (London: George Allen, 1906), 156.

But how to translate this event into a durable transformation of how we value life and life-making in common? And how do we avoid that these flourishing common practices and institutions get smothered by or transmuted into their nefarious—nationalist, racist, exclusionary—cousins? We know from Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize–winning work on the commons that commonly held wealth can be cooperatively managed and shared such that it serves the social reproduction of communities over time (Ostrom spoke specifically about finite resources such as arable lands, forests, fresh water, and fisheries—but one might broadly say the same about collective institutions of care and welfare). But these commons also rely on clear group boundaries, on inclusions and exclusions, and thus often also on the tendency to turn inward as a mode of care. The virus has, precisely because of its planetary nature, already led to the reassertion of borders—to the enclosure of space and its enforcement via the army and the police. Who is to say that the many authoritarianisms that have already reared their heads in the name of viral emergency won’t use this sudden, desperate need for a commonly held health as an opportunity to entrench the privileges of one’s own while excluding others? I fear that the surge of the common will soon give way to a surge in highly exclusionary (re)investments in nationalist commons, reactionary welfarisms, and care turned inward or against those deemed dispensable.

Yet the virus, like no other event in recent history, makes achingly clear that the health and resilience of all ought to be thought of as a commonly held wealth and that this common wealth must be built and maintained through a primary commitment to society’s most vulnerable members. A society that does not foster this common health (and by this I mean health, broadly conceived, as lives well lived economically, politically, and socially) as a commonwealth is weak and unprepared for catastrophes to come.