After the Viral Economy
In 1988, Jean Baudrillard announced “the triumph of a viral economy.” Already, he saw that the manic circulation of financial assets, information, and—indeed—viruses, both biological and technological, would define the new era. If everything must circulate freely, he observed, “well, so then must germs, viruses, drugs, capital, and terrorists. And this circulation of the worst things is much quicker than the circulation of the best.” Thus, instead of the End of History emerging out of an unchallenged liberalism, Baudrillard predicted the intensifying destabilization of a system “relieved of ideologies.” He described “the triumph of a virtual economy” driven by the “destructuring of value” and speculative circulation:
The game is such as to become suicidal: big companies end up buying back their own shares, which is nonsensical from the economic point of view. . . . But this is all part of the same madness. . . . Companies are not traded—do not circulate—as real capital, as units of production; they are traded as a quantity of shares. . . . That this will be a prelude to other crashes is highly probable. . . . We might imagine labour itself—labour power—moving into this speculative orbit too. The worker would no longer sell his labour power for a wage, as in the classic capitalist process, but sell his job itself, his employment. . . .
....MUCH MORE but no link yet because....And everyone enjoys [these excesses] as spectacle: the stock market, the art market, the Wall Street raiders. We all delight in these things as part of capital’s spectacular brightening of our lives, its mania for the aesthetic. At the same time we delight—with more difficulty and more pain, and more ambiguously—in the spectacular pathology of that system, in the viruses which, like AIDS, the stock market crash and computer viruses, latch on to this delicate machinery and knock it out of kilter. But they are in fact following out the same logic: viruses and virulence are part of the logical, hyperlogical coherence of all our systems.In exposing the fragility of America’s financialized economy and precarious workforce, the coronavirus has revealed nothing that we did not already know. Only now we are forced to confront what, for the last thirty years, we have preferred to ignore.
When Baudrillard’s essay was published, medical shortages in the Soviet Union were seen as evidence of a system in terminal decay. Today, however, it is America that finds itself dependent on China for even the most basic pharmaceutical ingredients and equipment—not to mention many manufactured products in other strategic sectors. Although the media has fawned over American billionaires’ private efforts to fly in supplies from China, it is hard not to hear echoes of secret Soviet flights to London to procure medicine for the nomenklatura. (And the fact that America now rivals the late Soviet Union in the prevalence of gerontocracy—from its politicians, to its business leaders, to its intellectuals—has been brought into macabre relief.)
The degeneracy of America’s plutocratic culture is typified by no one so much as Michael Bloomberg who, after spending nearly $1 billion on a pathetic presidential campaign, has pledged all of $50 million to coronavirus efforts ($40 million for global efforts and $10 million in the United States). But at least the sight of so many “wealth creators”—from private equity titans to Boeing executives—begging for Fed bailouts should dispel any remaining myths about the inviolability of the free market. Somehow, America’s billionaires are its worst capital allocators! Bill Gates and Ray Dalio, for their part, have redoubled their already heroic efforts to increase America’s output of middlebrow punditry....
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