Pause for Thought
Disruption as Progress
The pandemic forced the neoliberal state to break from its signature ethos of rugged individualism and embrace thoughtfulness and passivity. In other words, we stopped trying to elbow our way to the front of the line and, ideally, just sat on our butts. As it turns out, temporarily suspending the petty state-decreed war of every man for himself unlocked unimagined potential.
Many political and economic leaders in the so-called advanced countries seem to fear the passivity of the masses more than their activity. So that alone, if nothing else, vexed them to no end during the COVID-19 pandemic. The decades of neoliberalism that came before were all about activation: The proletarians and petit bourgeois of ages past were to become self-governing entrepreneurs of their own labor power, so they wouldn’t need to be governed anymore. Only those who, even with the best intent in the world, failed to make it in the new free-for-all of competing service providers — and that includes academics, temp workers, and pizza delivery boys alike — would be left to the mercy of the social welfare system. But all the welfare system would have to do was maintain the “activation” — more or less as an end itself — by foisting useless continued education and equally useless soft skills training on people who were already booted from the system anyway.
This system worked fine for a long time. The threat of the welfare office breathing down their necks made casual workers and the pseudo-self-employed toe the line, and it made the steadily employed fight tooth and nail to keep their increasingly unpleasant jobs. This brazen economic coercion cloaked itself in the cultural industry’s promise of self-realization and the specious argument that everyone has different needs and capacities, which kept us from seeing the global devaluation of labor power. And then, it happened: SARS-CoV-2 forced the neoliberal state to break from its signature ethos of rugged individualism and embrace thoughtfulness and passivity. In other words, we stopped trying to elbow our way to the front of the line and, ideally, just sat on our butts.
The momentum of the neoliberal decades seems to have petered out. It has become all too blatant to the workforce in their day-to-day experience that the ever-increasing workload and total dissolution of the boundaries between work and private life are accompanied by an ever-shrinking paycheck and ever less job security. It almost seems as though, due to the objectively unavoidable COVID-induced standstill, the fear of not getting ahead anymore, or at least not keeping up with the Joneses, has lost a great deal of its sway over the labor force.
The end of “prehistoric” times will also be the end of dynamic change, and progress is already working towards this end.
In other words, “forging ahead” reduced to the mere ever-accelerating sense of “carrying on as before” actually amounts to “more of the same,” increasingly dimming any prospect of what Marx and Adorno understood by progress: the possibility of humans to adapt their metabolic exchange and their intercourse with one another as well as with nature to their needs in a reasonable and rational manner.
So, the imposed standstill may well have been a brief epiphany that moving of our own free will means something very different from being moved by the blind compulsion of accumulation. Only a humanity that is not compelled to do everything it is capable of but can just as easily let things lie, would emerge from the stasis of momentum and truly determine its own destiny — and as a result, its history. This end is served by pausing for thought, by disruption, and by the shock of standstill, for, in Adorno’s words, “There is something unhistorical in the dynamic force which moves in aimless circles.”
This system worked fine for a long time. The threat of the welfare office breathing down their necks made casual workers and the pseudo-self-employed toe the line, and it made the steadily employed fight tooth and nail to keep their increasingly unpleasant jobs. This brazen economic coercion cloaked itself in the cultural industry’s promise of self-realization and the specious argument that everyone has different needs and capacities, which kept us from seeing the global devaluation of labor power. And then, it happened: SARS-CoV-2 forced the neoliberal state to break from its signature ethos of rugged individualism and embrace thoughtfulness and passivity. In other words, we stopped trying to elbow our way to the front of the line and, ideally, just sat on our butts.
A Life Without Work?
While those griping about their lost “liberties” were causing a ruckus, an opposing force set in, quietly and all the more far-reaching as a result: Temporarily suspending the petty state-decreed war of every man for himself unlocked unimagined potential. Workers in the lowest-paid industries left their sweatshops in droves. In the U.S., 45 million employees quit their jobs in 2021, more than ever before, and twice as many people as expected retired last year. In Germany, thousands of workers deserted the catering and health care sectors, and the country now has to recruit harvest hands and truck drivers from way over in Georgia, 4,000 kilometers away — and more often than not under false pretenses. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Union) party, has aired fears that “people are getting used to a life without work.”The momentum of the neoliberal decades seems to have petered out. It has become all too blatant to the workforce in their day-to-day experience that the ever-increasing workload and total dissolution of the boundaries between work and private life are accompanied by an ever-shrinking paycheck and ever less job security. It almost seems as though, due to the objectively unavoidable COVID-induced standstill, the fear of not getting ahead anymore, or at least not keeping up with the Joneses, has lost a great deal of its sway over the labor force.
Forging Ahead Undermines Progress
This disruption made people stop and think things over. It’s as though Theodor Adorno’s observation in his famous essay “Statik und Dynamik als soziologische Kategorien” (“On Static and Dynamic as Sociological Categories,” 1961) had become plausible in our everyday lives. According to Adorno, the dynamic born of competition between “doubly free” wage earners in the Marxian sense has nothing (more) to contribute to progress. On the contrary: The urge to expand, to absorb more and more, and to leave out less and less has thus far remained static or invariant. In this way, every part of society has sealed its own fate: While it was trying to expand in order to avoid destruction, it was unconsciously working towards its own demise. (Translation by H. Kaal, Diogenes, No. 33, Spring 1961) Furthermore:The end of “prehistoric” times will also be the end of dynamic change, and progress is already working towards this end.
In other words, “forging ahead” reduced to the mere ever-accelerating sense of “carrying on as before” actually amounts to “more of the same,” increasingly dimming any prospect of what Marx and Adorno understood by progress: the possibility of humans to adapt their metabolic exchange and their intercourse with one another as well as with nature to their needs in a reasonable and rational manner.
So, the imposed standstill may well have been a brief epiphany that moving of our own free will means something very different from being moved by the blind compulsion of accumulation. Only a humanity that is not compelled to do everything it is capable of but can just as easily let things lie, would emerge from the stasis of momentum and truly determine its own destiny — and as a result, its history. This end is served by pausing for thought, by disruption, and by the shock of standstill, for, in Adorno’s words, “There is something unhistorical in the dynamic force which moves in aimless circles.”
