Issue 55 – Pandemic, Crisis and the New Normal

Capitalism was nearing the end of its life-cycle through its own dynamics when it was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, which not only threw the system into a devastating crisis but also began to generate the seeds of a possible post-capitalist order. This is reminiscent of the spread of Black Death across Europe in the fourteenth century, leading to the dissolution of feudalism and the eventual rise of capitalism. In an analytical comparison between these two periods that takes into account similarities and differences, the article attempts to identify certain trends by linking current events to long-term class dynamics.
Keywords: Capitalism, Black Death, Covid-19, digital revolution, agroecology.

During the last decade since 2008 global financial crisis capitalist societies have experienced a series of traumatic changes as they have struggled to cope with the repercussions of economic, social and humanitarian crises that have engulfed them. This has, in turn, stirred a series of theoretical responses to come to terms with the political and social outcomes which ensued in the context of the protracted period of crises. As the conceptual categories such as financialization tend to function as tools of periodization, there arises the need to problematize them so as to compare the past and current periods. Theoretical debates on such conceptual categories gain saliency in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic that instigated the current crisis of social reproduction.
Keywords: crisis management, neoliberal hegemony, debt, financialisation, social
reproduction.

State capitalism is once more on the agenda because of the resonance of the extraordinary conditions triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the difficulties of self-reproduction of neoliberalism since the global financial crisis of 2008. The coincidence of the economic and geopolitical ascendancy of China and some other developing countries and the weakening of the US as global hegemonic power support the opinions on the start of a chaotic era in which we may experience serious socio-political transformations. In this article, I examine the concept of state capitalism in its three distinct historical waves through specific dynamics and ideas that create and shape them. In the center of the first wave, there were Germany’s catch-up policies led by Friedrich List’s theory of national capitalism and as a consequence to that, protectionary reactions of the UK, which contain the abolition of the free trade principle. The second wave included the era of New Deal and Keynesian politics which were mainly designed to confine the extremities of the free market politics as a reaction to the threat of communism, organized labor, and national independence struggles. The third wave which has many similarities with the first one is shaped by the catch-up of some emerging countries and the reactions of the center to this process. I contend that the main characteristics of this era will be determined by the reactions of the working classes’ to the intensified social problems of the post-pandemic world. I also discuss the potentials of a struggle against the insecurity and uncertainty for the reconstruction of a social movement of the working classes.
Keywords: State capitalism, post-pandemic transformation, insecurity, imperialism, class.

MUSIAD announced that it is planned to establish “isolated production bases” in four regions (Tekirdağ, Istanbul Hadımköy, Hassa and the Black Sea), with its project titled as “ProductionTrade-Investment Planning / Production Move for Normalization After Corona” and shared details in May 2020. MUSIAD, the representative of small and medium-sized capitals and SMEs, proposed a spatial arrangement that would allow production to continue uninterrupted during the pandemic or in the face of any disaster. This article examines how the capitalist class can intervene in the labour regime in the face of extraordinary situations such as pandemics, with reference to MUSIAD’s Isolated Production Bases Project. It aims to present an overview of this project considering the changes in labor relations, labor regimes and labor control processes over the last thirty or forty years. The article claims that this project incorporates the strategies capital uses in different production models for labor control and has serious similarities with the dormitory labour regime that has become widespread in Asian countries. It also highlights the implications and possible consequences of this project and the proliferation of this type of spatial arrangement for the working classes.
Keywords: MUSİAD’s Isolated Production Bases Project, pandemic, dormitory labour regimes.

This study aims to reconsider and problematize the agrarian question in the face of possible disruption to agricultural production and a consequent food crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Generally speaking, the agrarian question is an inquiry on specific rules of capitalist development in agriculture. From a classical political economy perspective, the agrarian question concerns the obstacles to the development of capitalist production relations and capital accumulation in agriculture. The political economy approach argues that, in most countries, agriculture is subordinated to capitalist commodity production and global economies, and in that sense, the agrarian question has been resolved. From a post-structural perspective, however, the agrarian question concerns the struggles of peasants against the global corporate food regime and its focus on efficiency and economic growth. Social movements are building growing resistance to the industrialization and financialization of agriculture, based on the principles of local food, ecological production, commons and food sovereignty. From this perspective, the agrarian question is an issue of how to organize agriculture as a political construct. However, it seems there is a lack of political dialogue related to/language for discussing the ideal scales of governance and policy planning of agricultural production (i.e. planning at which scale, and for which scale?). The confrontation caused by the absence of this political language is the underlying factor behind the threat of hunger and food shortage in the face of pandemic. Within this context, the study argues that the agrarian question is becoming an issue of determining the most appropriate scale for policy planning and governance of agricultural production. To create this language, we need an alternative perspective that avoids the extremes of either political economy or post-structuralism. In this sense, the agrarian question cannot be divorced from the issues of property relations at the local level or policy planning at the global level.
Keywords: Agriculture, agrarian question, petty commodity production, development, agro-industry, global food regime.

History shows that human-nature relations, just as human-human relations, underwent significant transformations with the rise of settled life. The periods when the world became “smaller,” such relations become intensified and proliferated, trade and profit covetously arose, and spaces and scale of profit extended are also the periods of the rise of pandemics. Conditioned in the context of modes of production and associated relations of production and social relations, the places where pandemics spread and people that they affected varied substantially. The most fundamental difference has always been revealed through class-based dynamics. The history of medicine shows that pandemics have most hit labouring masses, the poor, and the disadvantaged. Therefore, a pandemic is a class-based phenomenon, and accordingly, a political phenomenon.
Keywords: Mode of production; pandemic; classes, labour; the poor.

In this paper, our intention is to theorize the emerging neo-mercantilist imaginary – claims to be against, and in response to, the recent decline of neoliberalism – as the problem our present poses to a new critique of political economy. We will take up this problem of neo-mercantilism, first, as an ideological construct embedded in the symbolic universe of liberalism (the liberal matrix), and then, in its historicity, from the vantage point of Marx’s discovery and object of critique. In Marx, we find two important insights. The first one pertains to his theorization of the appropriation of surplus value as an articulation of commodity abstraction and corporate sovereignty. From this insight, we trace the genealogy of capital’s sovereignty exception as it metastases back into the body of the modern state. The second insight pertains to his communist critique of bourgeois doctrines of social reproduction (production, appropriation, distribution, and consumption) and their visions of harmonious reconciliation (re-staged in most banal ways by the neo mercantilist imaginary). From this insight, we sketch the communist interruption of the logics of exception that organized not only corporate sovereignty (through hierarchical/racialized regimes of “ability”) but also commodity abstraction (through prohibitive and permissive injunctions around “need”).
Keywords: Neoliberalism, neo-mercantilism, corporate sovereignty, appropriation,
communist interruption.

In this essay we elaborate on the limitations of the bourgeois science and claim that these limitations became more vivid within its incapacity of constituting a sound theory of Covid-19, of its causes, and its effects on society. We expand on how this incapacity is originated in the epistemology of the bourgeois science, its current mode and aim, its relation to nature, its monopolistic formation and the condition of scientists under the dominance of capital. Furthermore, we argue that this incapacity unavoidably affects the domain of solutions produced by bourgeois science. This view connotes that the workings of any science and its limits are only comprehensible in its unity with the relations of production that it operates within. In this context we examine the constraints of the bourgeois mode of scientific production and demonstrate how its contradictions and limitations manifested themselves throughout Covid-19 pandemic. We thus suggest that a new science that sublates the bourgeois science should be comprehended as the ground for praxis of understanding and struggling against capital and the ecological crisis it brings out.
Keywords: covid-19, over-specialization, capitalism, mode of scientific production,
crisis.