Beyond the Essential-Yet-Disposable Paradox

Jeremy Posadas is Director of Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Austin College (on the rural Texas-Oklahoma border) and Wendland-Cook’s first faculty fellow.

Wendland-Cook is proud to feature the next in a series of responses to our current public health, political, ecological, and economic crisis of COVID-19. This is the second of two posts by Dr. Jeremy Posadas. The first is here. Joerg Rieger, Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program started off the series with his article, “The Ugly Truth of a Pandemic and the Logic of Downturn.” Read Joerg’s blog here: www.religionandjustice.com/blog/the-ugly-truth-of-a-pandemic-and-the-logic-of-downturn

In my previous post, I discussed what really makes essential workers essential: they do jobs that keep us alive, jobs without which our communities couldn’t survive. Capitalism needs living communities so that it can extract profit out of them through both the exploitation of most workers and the dispossession of marginalized groups. Yet capitalism abhors essential status for any worker, because an essential worker is a worker with greater bargaining power in capitalist labor markets: capitalism relies on making workers as disposable (by executives) as possible, keeping as many workers as possible from becoming essential to the business. Indeed, many of the workers identified as essential based on stay-at-home orders, workers essential to human survival, are in occupations that capitalism has made the most disposable through low incomes, job-security, workplace safety, and social prestige. Not coincidentally, most of these are also occupations whose work forces are disproportionately comprised of women and people of color (women of color in particular).

Hence the paradox that arises if we try to ensure that capitalism survives coronavirus along with humankind, poignantly expressed in a tweet by Jake Merch, who works as a caregiver for adults with developmental disabilities: “Got a letter that says I’m an essential employee, and a paycheck that says I’m not.” This paradox has been made even more gruesome in recent weeks, as many states have rushed to force workers off unemployment insurance and back on the job — “reopen the economy” is the euphemism — even though they do not have adequate access to protective equipment, testing, healthcare, childcare, or hazard pay.

This essential-yet-disposable paradox is only possible insofar as we continue to accept a founding myth of capitalism: that one of the primary purposes of our care for one other in our families (biological, legal, and chosen) and communities is to enable capitalist markets to succeed. In reality, for everyone besides the small fraction of humanity who own and control most of the world’s wealth, capitalism’s potential value as a social and moral good lies solely in its capacity to enable and sustain our care for each other, and in this regard it has failed more widely and often than it has succeeded.

Humans are not created for the market; rather, the market is created for humans. Nevertheless, the question remains: for which humans — for whose benefit — is the market created? For 600 years, since capitalism began with European overseas colonization coupled with chattel slavery, capitalist markets have continually been created and re-created to benefit those who already own most of society’s wealth while rendering everyone else as fully disposable as possible. But the novel coronavirus once more unmasks realities that lead us to cry out a different answer: an economy only for ALL the people, with ALL of Earth!

Frontline service workers have already begun raising this cry during the crisis. Their voices add to three social movements whose melodies of justice, if they can join in thunderous chords, have the potential to save all our lives with the whole life of the planet. Each of these movements has expanded leadership by women, people of color, and specifically women of color. The first is the reproductive justice movement, which for a quarter-century has bravely stewarded a key moral principle — justice means universal access to the resources necessary for the care that that sustains whole communities — that can be extended from the parent-child relationship to all relationships of mutual care, in all their social dimensions. Corresponding to this is the farmers’ movement for regenerative/conservation agriculture and agro-ecology (exemplified by the Green Belt Movement, founded by the late Nobel laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai, as well as by the farmers profiled in Growing a Revolution, by geologist David Montgomery), which effectively demonstrates the principle that the resources necessary to sustain human communities can be produced in ways that enhance the life-capacities of the whole ecosystem(s) involved. The third movement is the resurgence of “social justice unionism” within the labor movement, spearheaded by progressive unions such as the Chicago Teachers Union and the California Nurses Association; this movement does not limit its demands only to what benefits its members, but also fights for the holistic good of the communities in which its members — as well as their students, patients, clients, customers — live and work. Having energized some of the most successful labor organizing in the entire neoliberal era, it shows us how the power to disrupt capitalist structural inequities lies in organizing everyone whose caring labor, both paid and unpaid, sustains human communities.

As many have noted, we must not let capitalism take us “back to normal.” We must, instead, move the market to the place where the dreams of these three movements intersect and come alive alongside many others, from worker coops to racial justice and beyond. Religious communities can advance this effort by letting these movements lead them to search or re-construct their long traditions for wisdom that resonates with and amplifies them. Moreover, religious communities can educate their members about all three of these movements and stand alongside them when they demand policy-changes by corporate and government leaders. Finally, as they deepen their involvement in each of these movements, religious communities can play a strategic role in fostering cross-connections among them that do not currently exist. This is how we can end capitalism’s rapacious disposal of people and the planet.