Time, Labour-Discipline, and the End of Industrial Capitalism

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It has been more than three years since the World Health Organisation reported the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Hubei province, China, on 9 January 2020. Three months later, the WHO declared Covid-19 a ‘public health emergency of international concern’. Six months after that, following a deliberate, global demobilisation of social and economic life unknown in human history, deaths from the SARS-CoV-2 virus passed the one million mark. Total infections from the virus today are estimated to be over 300 million; total deaths, 6.5 million. 

Yet this initial, devastating shock is likely only to be the first impact of the virus itself. Contrary to the (absurd, in hindsight) prognoses that either the virus would ‘pass over’ the population quickly, or that vaccines would magically end the infection, the appearance of the Omicron variant at the end of 2021 and its rapid spread across the world was an indicator that the foreseeable future remains subject to severe dislocation. Eradication or even elimination look even more fantastical: with SAR-CoV-2 now present in animal populations close to humanity, and with ‘reverse zoonosis’ from such a population one of the probable sources of the Omicron variant – according to recent research reported in Science – management of the virus will impose significant costs from here on in. The costs of vaccination and revaccination, the costs of screening, the costs of health and care system capacity: these are substantial new burdens for the foreseeable future. Strange new side-effects are being revealed: a sharp rise in deaths from heart disease among those previously infected with covid, reported in Nature; the misery of ‘long covid’, and the costs of managing it; the resurgence in viruses thought somewhat tamed, like monkeypox and polio, with their own complex bio-social relationships back to Covid-19.

We will not be returning to the pre-pandemic world: not as lockdowns ease, not if vaccines are put into every arm, not ever. We should, if the epidemiologists are correct, get to a form of endemic Covid-19, with some luck and a successful global vaccine rollout, over coming years. But the path there will be uneven; as we are already seeing, not only are vaccines themselves unevenly distributed, the distribution of vaccines does not, by itself, remove us from the disease environment we have created for Covid-19. The virus marks the entrance of the global economy into a period, unknown for as long as a capitalist, global economy has existed, of stagnation and decay. It is the first clear marker of a future in which the foundational certainties of the past two hundred years of industrial capitalism, built on the twin principles of maximising exploitation of labour and extraction from nature, are thrown into doubt and, with them, the principle of near-assured and cumulative economic growth that underpins the stability of developed economies. It is, as economic historian Adam Tooze suggested in the early months of this pandemic, ‘the first crisis of the Anthropocene’. 

Understanding Covid-19 economics 

Much of the (inevitably voluminous) writing on Covid-19 has failed to capture this novelty and severity. For economics, the most conservative of all the social sciences, the tendency to assume reversion to a steady mean of steady growth and that ‘exogenous shocks’ fade over time has led to a dramatic understatement of covid’s long-term impact. The failure of economists to look more closely at the virology or the epidemiological modelling, pointing to a prolonged period of instability not easily compared to (say) pandemic influenza, has resulted in some absurdities: in Britain’s official forecasts, not only is Covid-19 not as bad as Brexit in its long-run impacts on the British economy, but it is precisely half as bad as Brexit.

At the level of mainstream theory, meanwhile, attempts to model economic responses to Covid-19 on the basis of rational or near-rational individual ‘utility maximisation’ has produced bizarre results. Mainstream attempts to think through the consequences of covid have tended to underplay the shock it has presented to institutions, and so significantly understate its likely long-term consequences in favour of focusing on individual behaviours. Like economist Alwyn Young’s modelling of the HIV epidemic in southern Africa, which confidently predicted a positive long-run growth impact from HIV because of its negative impact on fertility, the mainstream has zeroed in on the question of how rational consumers might shift their ‘preferences’. The barrier to economic recovery, in this world, becomes ‘fear’ of the virus amongst consumers, rather than the virus itself or the response of the institutions that shape individual actions and possibilities. Conventional macroeconomics, even where more obviously influenced by Keynesian thinking, has tended to view the primary difficulty related to covid as its impact on consumer and business spending – and therefore to understate the risk of sustained inflation arising from supply-side impacts.

Yet even the more radical attempts to apprehend the pandemic through its ‘biopolitical’ impacts understate its novelty. For the anti-science conspiracy theorists – given a high theory gloss by a former star of the left academy, Giorgio Agamben – the impositions of lockdowns and coercive vaccination are nothing other than a monstrous assertion of pure biopolitical power against human life. The material reality of the virus – the fact it really will kill at least some people, and disable others – disappears behind this all-encompassing social construction, in which the virus itself is an ‘invented’ plague, as Agamben called it. But the proposed ‘good biopolitics’ challenge to this ‘negative biopolitics’, as called for by Benjamin Bratton in responding to Agamben, also falls short, glossing the specific impacts of Covid-19 – its peculiar biology: (very largely) respiratory spread, long latency periods, and large numbers of asymptomatic cases – and the interaction of those features with the institutions of capitalism. Instead, we are offered appeals to ‘the responsibilities of medical knowledge’ and the good of public health. 

But knowledge doesn’t have ‘responsibilities’: people in specific institutions facing specific situations do, with those specificities including the biological make-up of SARS-CoV-2 itself. There are hard limits on what our technologies can achieve because of these specificities, whether through vaccinations or the (more insidious) social technologies of control built into China’s now-crumbling Zero Covid programme. Bratton’s ‘good biopolitics’ isn’t biological enough. Elsewhere, Panagiotis Sotiris has offered a ‘democratic biopolitics’ as an alternative to either ‘plandemic’ conspiracy theorising or lockdown fetishism. The recognition that a humane resolution – or even a route through – our multiple crises will require the active participation and engagement of the demos is to be strongly welcomed.

Covid-19 is neither a ‘hoax’ nor is it a generic medical emergency, to be treated separately from the society in which it arose by the good auspices of medical science. We know that Covid-19’s health impacts are decisively shaped by pre-existing economic inequalities – the research lead by Michael Marmot for the UK is crystal clear on this. What has been perhaps less considered is the reverse causality: the prospect that Covid-19’s uneven effects on capitalism are shaped by its public health impacts. Estimates for the specifically economic impacts of ‘long covid’ across the world vary, but are everywhere significant, including reduced numbers in work and direct costs to healthcare systems. 

Our participation in the grand structures of capitalism has been radically disrupted by the virus, on a daily and continuous basis during the peak of lockdowns, and the form of that disruption to the structures – and therefore our agency – is intimately tied to the biological form of the virus that provoked it.

Time in the pandemic

Most radical among these disruptions were the social distancing measures imposed from February 2020. The stasis of lockdown and then, creeping behind it, the radical, new uncertainty about the near future shattered otherwise well-rooted senses of the rhythm of the days, weeks and months, as psychological research is starting to show. We have, for generations now, operated in modern societies in accordance with a specific rhythm of work that appears as natural as the ebb and flow of the tides or the passing of the seasons, but which in reality had to be wrenched from the machines and then imposed on us all. Specific times on specific days were marked, too, by our physical locations: at the office or the factory during the week; at the home at the weekend. By disrupting that rhythm of place, forcing so many of us into furlough or working from home, the public health response to the pandemic has thrown open the organisation of the working day and the systems – from public transport to city centre sandwich shops – we built to sustain it. 

But looking out beyond the disruption to long-established daily routines and we are peering as if into the mist. A future where covid continues to circulate, provoking disruptions – continued efforts at social distancing; longer-term health impacts – alongside the mushrooming of zoonotic spillovers and extreme weather events as climate change accelerates is one that is radically uncertain, relative to the recent past. Our best guides give us outlines of shapes, modelling the likely impacts of the virus into the future, but show nothing comparable to the stability that perhaps three generations have known, at least in the developed world, since the end of the Second World War – the last truly global disruption. 

We are, of course, used to a degree of uncertainty in economic life: notoriously, capitalism is prone to booms and slumps, financial panics and manias, and a whole would-be social science (economics) is devoted to understanding them. Far more significant, however, than the volatility of the stock market, or even the ups and downs of the business cycle, is the profound stability of the capitalist economy underneath the froth: ‘the movement of the whole disorder is its order’, as Marx put it. It is the deep, stable structures of capitalism that attracted his interest: like other classical economists, his basic concern was how this incredibly unstable, decentred system could generate stability over time. By contrast, modern, neoclassical economics assumes stability, in the form of equilibrium, and then seeks to explain the deviations from this.

The classical economists’ insight – that stability, rather than instability, is the fundamental that needs to be explained – may sound similar to that offered by the fashionable belief in the ‘emergent properties’ of systems, in which choices by individual actors – each following a more-or-less simple set of instructions – can spontaneously generate large-scale and persistent structures. The self-regulating systems of the natural world, in which the balances of predators to prey to sources of nutrition oscillate over time, but do not tip into chaos, are a striking example of how closed systems can generate cyclical stability. Even seemingly chaotic events – the regular outbreaks of naturally-occurring forest fires, for example – can form part of the self-regulating system. It is understandable that these sorts of self-stabilising processes have acted as a spur to the modelling of capitalist economies in which self-interest behaviours of individuals form cyclically stable structures.

But the stability exhibited by capitalism is different to the stability predicted by these modelling efforts. We don’t just form stable structures, as if out of nowhere, from our self-interested actions: we cling, doggedly, to the structures we have, as providers of meaning and security. The working day, stabilised in industrialising northern Europe after the mid-nineteenth century and then exported across the globe, is one such structure attracting stabilising beliefs of this kind: for many of us, work isn’t just valuable; the particular form of regular, systematic and money-directed work is a goal in itself, as Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back surveys.

And we can think about and create new structures. The rhythms of industrial capitalism were imposed on us, smashing through customary beliefs about the pace and timing of work, the proliferation of feast days and holidays, and venerable unofficial traditions like that of ‘Saint Monday’ – brilliantly reconstructed by E P Thompson in his classic essay, ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’. It was the Industrial Revolution, and the technologies it introduced, that radically altered perceptions and uses of time. The development of clock-time had taken place in the centuries beforehand, with the steady perfection of the clockwork mechanism from the fourteenth century onwards. Sundials, water-clocks and hourglasses had provided an approximate division of the day since ancient times, with shadow clocks referenced in Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy, dating their use from around 1500 BCE. 

What the breakthrough of the mechanical escarpment allowed, following its appearance in Europe around 1300, was to replace naturally-occurring markers of time with a significantly more precise artificial mechanism – the regular ticking of the clock now able to mark out hours, and, by the 1500s, minutes and seconds. Clocks spread onto public buildings, notably churches, across the continent in the fourteenth century, replacing much older water clock displays. It became possible to create a new perception of time, changing it from its appearance as a natural marker in the day – sunrise, noon, and sunset, a subset of the bigger, natural divisions of the year into its seasons – and into known, precise and public regulator for human life, as Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilisation argues. 

But this public, regulated time – a formal and official organisation of the public life of the community, or at least its leading members located in the professions, engaged in trade, or maintaining ecclesiastical roles – remained quite distinct from the time of most of humanity. Notions of time could be tied to tasks to be performed, regulated by nature – the cockcrow, the changing tides – and divisions of time left to individual communities and longstanding custom to determine. Life was built on radically different rhythms to the standardised hours and timetables we are accustomed to: agricultural work would see interspersing periods of intense activity around harvest with extended periods of rest. Work itself was generally a far less dominant part of life: between feast days and customary holidays, such as the incredible number of saints’ days celebrated in medieval Europe, the working year would be far reduced by modern standards. One estimate suggests a fourteenth century agricultural worker in southern England would typically work around 130 days a year. The ancien regime in France of the later Middle Ages guaranteed ‘fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays’, writes Julia Schor, while in Spain at the time, travellers reported five months of holidays a year. Working days for agricultural labourers, when they were working, were longer, running up to twelve hours – but there is no doubt the number of hours committed in any given year were below the standards more typical today, and very substantially below those of early industrial capitalism.

For those in work, but doing so at a further remove from nature – craft workers and apprentices in towns, innkeepers, brewers, brickmakers – the rhythm of life was closer to the public, official time. But the basic rhythm of life in pre-industrial society was, inevitably, tied to that of nature and the seasons and this, in turn, granted a certain freedom of organisation to those who worked to it. Whatever a feudal lord or an employer or a market may try and demand, the fundamental attachment of work to nature and its rhythms was a permanent barrier to their control over the labour process. 

Industrial capital 

As Andreas Malm’s superb Fossil Capital details, it is in the rise of industrial capitalism that this basic rhythm shifts fundamentally. In his account, the first round of industrialisation was as much the separation of working life from the patterns of nature as it was
the imposition of machinery. Malm shows how water-wheels, in the early nineteenth century, were more efficient than the competing technology of the steam engine – producing more at lower cost – but that by being tied to natural provision, in the form of water courses, they acted as a barrier to the full control of the production process that industrialised capital accumulation demanded. A steam engine could be operated consistently, day after day, hour after hour, with a supply of fossil fuel and – crucially – pliable labour. A waterwheel was more erratic and this, in turn, created a space where labour could still assert its own authority over the production process. Centralising production in the towns and cities of the Industrial Revolution created the ability for the new steam-powered factories to exploit fossil fuel transported into the cities, and to force a crude new factory discipline on the population. This was, in the early years, notoriously brutal: the maximisation of profits for individual factory owners appeared to demand the maximisation of the working day, with twelve- or fifteen-hour days becoming the norm in factory districts in the north of England by 1820.

The broad variety of tasks that pre-industrial or proto-industrial work could encompass, and the capacity of the worker to maintain some control over them – setting the pace on a handloom, for example – were broken by the monotony of the factory division of labour. It was only through political struggle and legislation that industrial capitalism was, through the nineteenth century, steadily humanised, the working week becoming standardised at five-and-a-half days in England by the end of the century, and the full two-day weekend increasingly common. This humanisation of capital laid the foundations for the political style and strategy we would now recognise as reformism: not the wholesale rejection, in the name of the workers, of capitalism, but the smoothing out of its rough edges. The struggle for the working day, then, is the foundation of social democratic and labour movement politics.

The establishment of this humanised capitalism produced its own backwash: by stabilising the core of the system, capitalist organisation could be more readily forced into the rest of the non-capitalist world, drawing greater and greater circles of humanity and nature into a rhythm of production determined by the economic activities of the imperial core. And on the other side, as the social reproduction theorists correctly insist, capitalist stabilisation rested upon on a non-capitalist sphere of household reproduction that, after an initial and radical disruption in the early years of industrialisation, was rapidly reorganised on strictly gendered lines – the male breadwinner, female caregiver household – even as important elements of ‘life-making work’, notably around education and healthcare, were themselves taken outside of the household through the development of the modern welfare state. 

The creation of industrial capitalism meant the creation of a form of life in which the basic regulation of our existence – how we spent our time – was determined by social forces, rather than by nature. It has meant that where a pre-industrial work pattern concentrated its activities in the summer and autumn months, economic activity in half the world now typically peaks in the winter, shaped by Christianity and consumer spending. More recent research from the Grantham Institute cautiously suggests that higher levels of GDP, indicating greater development, are associated with a reduction in the seasonal impact of temperature on production – that is, modern economies become more productive the further removed they are from natural rhythms. 

With more than half of humanity, for the first time in its history, now living in towns and cities, we are all increasingly detached from the underlying time of the seasons or even diurnal life, factory shift work and the twenty-four-hour city both operating independently of natural day and night. This geography of industrialised time, and the attachment of time to a specific organisation of space, appears in two forms: first, and more obvious, in the ‘annihilation of distance through time’ as transport and communications technology improved and the trading relationships of the global economy were built. The second, less often analysed in these terms but even more fundamental, was the organisation of individuals’ locations in relation to time: work was performed in one place, home life in another, social life in a third: metro, boulot, dodo is a ‘spatio-temporal fix’ in daily life, in Bob Jessop’s phrase.

The earlier environmental time, which bound humanity through its common, biological experience to the rhythms of nature, had been replaced by a new, socially constructed capitalist time: at the level of society, a new rhythm of life supplanting the pre-industrial pattern of the seasons and, at the level of the individual, the working day and the working week around which our lives have been organised. Urbanisation is, then, a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth of this kind to occur, creating a regulated geographical space of capitalist time from which labour can be drawn and stable, geographically-located markets into which its products can be sold. Published more than fifteen years ago, Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums looked to a future, already emerging then, where urbanisation globally had run far ahead of capitalist productive activities. 

Long-run growth

This reorganisation of time and space had its own long-run dynamic, breaking with the nature-determined cyclicality of the past. Generalised economic growth – apparent from the 1850s, measurable from the 1930s, systematic from the 1950s – is the primary form taken by this capitalist opposition to cyclical, environmental time. Growth is necessarily cumulative, pushing back against the cyclical time of agriculture with an expansion of commodities that is, in principle, infinitely extendible. Where cycles in accumulation do appear, they are dominated by those induced in a competitively-organised and exploitative economy: the business cycle of recessions and booms, the cycles of capital investment, or the still longer (and more contested) Juglar or Kondratieff cycles. This distinctively capitalist process of removing ourselves from the environment, founded on both the exploitation of time spent in work and of the bounty of the natural world itself, has proved immensely rewarding: the more that cyclical, environmental time can be squeezed out of human existence, the greater the potential for the creation of commodities in endlessly different forms and therefore for the accumulation of wealth. Alienation, from both our own humanity and from the natural world of which we are part, can be productive, as Marx’s early writings suggest. 

For a brief period, this expanding mechanism of alienated creativity and the steady extinction of environmental time has produced exceptional riches: in the West, during the ‘Golden Age’ of the post-war boom, the commodity bounty produced by industrial capitalism was spread with unprecedented equality through their populations; in the East, and especially China, the entire century-long process in the West was radically condensed, and produced an exceptionally rapid move into a globalised version of modernity for an extraordinarily large number of people. 

Although it is common to divide this period of widespread prosperity following World War Two into two periods – the ‘Keynesian’ and the ‘neoliberal’, roughly divided at or around 1979 – from the longer-run perspective of accumulation against the environment, it is one long period marked by the labour market’s reach being expanded across the globe, the growth of commodity production on an extraordinary scale, and the (strictly temporary) existence of an environmental ‘sweet spot’ in which the environmental costs imposed by industrial capitalism did not have to be borne by capitalist society in general. Localised environmental calamities occurred, of course – from crises of chemical poisoning to the loss of biodiversity to the rising preponderance of climate-related disasters. But a generalised calamity, sufficient to halt and disrupt the accumulation machine globally, did not occur.

Pandemics in the last two centuries could be hugely destructive, just as they have been throughout history, but they did not fundamentally disrupt the functioning of global capitalism. The twentieth century saw three influenza pandemics, one of which, the so-called ‘Spanish flu’ of roughly 1918 to 1921, may have killed over 5 per cent of the world’s population at the time, or around 100 million people. Yet it seems to have burned through society like a wildfire: enormously destructive as it swept along, but leaving the basic structures and institutions of society untouched. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing, having claimed 36 million victims (and rising) since the virus was first identified in the early 1980s. Its local economic impacts, where the disease has become endemic, have been significant, but not catastrophic – a further burden to add to the toxic legacy of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, but not a dramatic change in the economic course. Similarly endemic diseases, like malaria, have a similar set of impacts, reinforcing existing structural problems and imbalances. The burden of disease is terrible for humanity; the impact on capitalism, more limited. No pandemic in capitalism’s comparatively short history has presented an authentically systemic challenge to its operations.

Novelty

Until now. The novel coronavirus was not only new to humanity on its identification in early 2020. It has been utterly novel in its social impacts. SARS-CoV-2, and its proliferation of variants, has become a particularly unsettling new element in our existences not because of its inherent destructiveness – it can be deadly, but compared to, say, the Black Death or the ferocity of newer diseases like Ebola, it is significantly less deadly, even in the absence of medical interventions. The destructiveness lies in the precise way in which it interacts with the global capitalist economy and, in particular, disorders its primary institution, which is the institution of labour-time. 

The specific economic damage caused by Covid-19, and the reason this will prove to be a permanent disruption in the operation of capital across the globe, relates directly to the biological characteristics of the virus itself, and their interaction with global capital: an infectious respiratory illness with an unusually high number of asymptomatic cases, a relatively small (but nonetheless alarmingly high) number of severe or fatal cases, and a pattern of infection (we now know) strongly driven by a limited number of ‘super-spreader’ events. In a world built around proximity in cities and international trade and travel, it should be no surprise the virus has spread so rapidly – and that attempts to contain it have proved so disruptive, driven by attempts to impose social distancing. Two previous novel coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, were contained, leading to some hubristic ruminations on the success of the ‘post-Westphalian’ disease control system by public health researchers like David Fidler; but in both those cases, the number of asymptomatic cases was far lower than Covid-19, and the infectious period far shorter. Both were easier to manage. 

As industrialised agriculture continues to encroach on the animal reservoirs of novel diseases – while providing perfect hothouses for their mutation and zoonotic transfer, as shown in Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Make Big Flu – and as climate change continues to shake up natural environments, we can expect more novel diseases to emerge. The rate of new disease emergence appears to have been increasing steadily for the past four decades. Those diseases successfully breaking out of their limited initial circulation, spreading widely in the human population, and becoming truly threatening to capitalism – as well as mere human life – are likely to be similar in their biology to Covid-19: easily transmitted via respiration, with many asymptomatic infections and long periods of infectiousness before any symptoms appear. They will be viruses, in other words, selected by evolution to succeed in a world economy that we have built around dense urban living, paid employment in dedicated workplaces, and mass, frequent, long-distance travel.

Covid-19, then, is a disease of capitalism: whatever its origins (although not certain, the most likely cause is zoonotic transfer from some prior animal host, most likely a bat), it would not now be on its way to endemicity in the human population without it also being keyed in to the structures of global capitalism. (The counterfactual makes this clear: a virus less well-adapted would not have spread so far; natural selection made sure it was SARS-CoV-2 that was most likely to break out and will, presumably, repeat the trick with a similar pathogen at some point in the future.)

Industrial capitalism was built on the creation of regimented, organised and managed labour, set against the pace and timing of work determined by nature, or workers, or both in concert. Covid-19 throws this global organisation by capital of labour against nature into disorder. To disrupt the labour process is to disrupt the entire system of production, and it is this disruption – rather than the more superficial drop in demand, a disorder in the system but one relatively easily patched up by governments – that guarantees the longevity of Covid-19’s economic impacts. Once the virus is present, a volatile new element is introduced into human relationships. In particular, the ability of capital’s owners to exercise control over the performance of work-time is weakened – at points in the last few years, very radically so, via lockdowns and social distancing. Either social distancing is enforced by public authorities (including border restrictions and other checks on movement), or significant expenditures are made to reduce its impact – for instance, in imposing a costly new testing regime, or spending on vaccination, or in dealing with the longer-term health impacts. Or, perhaps most horrifying of all for capital, labour itself can enforce the requisite social protection measures and learn to exploit greater control over its use . At the very least, the cost of purchasing the control of labour under these circumstances becomes rather higher.

But the outbreak has moved through its own rhythm: we have been bound, for nearly three years, to the inexorable logic of
viral reproduction, tied to an exponential process that ripped through our societies, breaking it only with a significant force of collective action via the social distancing measures. The rapid production of effective vaccines, and their deployment, has already begun to reduce the vertiginous effects of the exponent in viral reproduction. Deaths and hospitalisations can be brought under control with an effective vaccine programme. However, while the vaccine limits its impact, it does not remove the virus, and the unevenness of the vaccines’ distribution – a virtual guarantee in an unequal and competitive capitalist world economy – means flare ups and new variants remain a risk. The sequencing of these, and future such shocks, is not that of the business cycle, nor the seasons, nor even the great regulators of global climates like the El Niño Southern Oscillation. It represents something new. 

The new time

This is crucial: the temporality of the virus itself is not tied to either still-familiar natural rhythms nor to those social rhythms we have created ourselves. A strange new kind of naturalism has appeared with the virus: with respiratory illness circulating more easily indoors, the retreat to indoor warmth in the winter months creates a distinctive seasonality to the progress of Covid-19 itself, much as flu and other more common illnesses flare up during the winter. We find ourselves, for a while, in something resembling a hibernation cycle, or at least an economic existence brought closer to the agricultural seasons: firing up the re-vaccination programme in the winter while reintroducing some elements of social distancing and depressing some kinds of economic activity, just as winter was a dead time in the past. Unlike the four other, more tame coronaviruses in common circulation among humans, SARS-CoV-2 is ‘aggressive’: it cannot be easily managed on a seasonal basis because it mutates easily and, even in milder forms, is highly virulent for at least some cases. As epidemiologist Jeffrey Sharman has noted, the patterns of covid’s eruption are, so far, more disorderly than those of existing endemic diseases like seasonal influenza.

Looking ahead, as older diseases resurge, as antibiotic resistance spreads, and as new diseases make their journey from animal hosts to humanity – the latest, Langya henipavirus, was identified as causing respiratory conditions in eastern China in August 2022 – the shape of the future perhaps begins to become clearer. Having created the space where a combination of effective medicines and effective public health had held back what disease researcher Amesh Adhilja called the ‘horde of pathogens’ that had ‘killed us at will’ for most of our history, the future is one in which the effective technologies remain in place – witness the extraordinarily rapid success of the vaccine – but their use is conditioned by a society subject to repeated, disastrous shocks. The defences of the last two hundred years, during which industrial capitalism established itself, are set to be breached, repeatedly. We lack the social capacity and organisation to prevent it. Attempts to construct those defences, through state action and willpower alone, merely mutate the crisis at great social cost: each fresh lockdown in China’s industrial heartlands contributes to supply-chain disruptions across the globe.

We are confronted by the old, natural seasonality, brought back in industrialised form: it is the alienated reappearance of a changed nature in our social existence; the blowback, with covid as the first of many such shocks, from two centuries of industrialised capital accumulation now reappearing as ecological decline. How we experience this ecological descent, including its temporality, is mediated through the appearance of novel diseases and other lingering calamities: these are not distinct from the descent; they are the descent, as we experience it. 

We do not see climate change as such: its temporality is all wrong from the viewpoint of either the individual or society. But we see its impacts, and these impacts are cumulative. The environment itself reimposes historical, accumulated time on our actions. Just as capital is erected as a barrier against the forces of time itself – it is the accumulation of dead, spent labour and consumed, utilised nature, organised in a hierarchy – so too is the toll of extraction against the environment eventually becoming an immense cost extracted against capital itself. Time will have its revenge.

But what we are threatened with is not a return to a pre-industrial environmental time, but a new form of capitalist time: one where the regulation of human life is no longer under the purview of capital, and subject to its specific pace, but one where human life is bound by the mediated re-emergence of the environment. Further novel diseases are virtually guaranteed, and the very success of Covid-19 strongly indicates the future forms they could take that will be most disruptive. 

But worsening extreme weather, food shortages, disruptions to the supply of essential commodities: all of these help turn the human economy from nature’s master to its servant. That, in turn, strongly suggests that the great engine of industrial growth, running for the last two centuries, will no longer function so effectively. If capitalism cannot easily make objects out of labour and nature, it cannot easily produce the exchange values that it registers as growth. In less abstract terms, the costs of production increase with environmental decay, and so do the difficulties of control and management of production. To ease the latter, states across the world will be dragged increasingly into the productive process itself – organising supply chains, providing funding, and offering their services for the monitoring and surveillance of labour. 

Covid-19, then, is not a ‘crisis’ in the usual sense: it represents something closer to a semi-permanent state of existence. The epidemiological modelling points towards the virus becoming endemic and, with luck and effective vaccines, it will become – if not entirely harmless – at least less obviously unstable and destructive over the next few years. But a decade-long state of existence is not, by the usual standards, a ‘crisis’. It is how the world actually is: a marker of the ecological decay we are living through – and the first of many such shocks and disruptions. It points us to a future where similar such shocks impact our society in broadly similar ways, the precise vectors of the shock depending crucially on the biological parameters of the diseases in question. The ‘first crisis of the Anthropocene’ is the last of the ordered, capitalist world we have known.

James Meadway is an economist and host of the weekly Macrodose podcast, and co-author of The Cost of Living Crisis (Verso, 2023).