“It’s the Economy, Stupid”: What Marx Can Teach Us about the Pandemic

“Indeed, when COVID-19 hit, the sunny stock market forecasts President Donald Trump boasted of were belied by record levels of corporate debt and a low rate of productivity growth.”

In his posthumous text How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, the famed French thinker Louis Althusser recounts a parable to try to explain the relevancy of Marxist thought. A simple man, Grushka, goes to the elders of his village with a pressing concern. A beautiful tree, he claims, is being despoiled due to it having been tied to a donkey. The elders of the village listen to him patiently, before responding. The solution, they claim, is not—as Grushka had thought—to untie the tree from the donkey. Rather, it is to untie the donkey from the tree.

This apologue, which would not be out of place in say a Winnie-the-Pooh story, may seem trite. But it is used by Althusser to illustrate the guiding thread of his own attempt to construct a self-consistent Marxist theory of knowledge: that bourgeois thought cannot reach the truth because it looks in the wrong place. The foremost example of this, in the work of Marx, concerns the “secret” of surplus-value: the way that in capitalism, profits are principally acquired by paying workers less than the value they create. This seemingly straightforward assertion may seem a truism. However, in fact, the “fathers” of political economy—individuals such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo—consistently failed to observe this mechanism of exploitation. This was not for lack of formal brilliance. It was because, as Althusser stresses, they were ideologically blocked from discovering it.

Is it possible that—when it comes to the current viral pandemic—most of us are like poor Grushka, trying to untie the tree from the donkey? The current civil and economic unrest, so we are told, has occurred due to a natural catastrophe. In responding to it, we are presented with two political options. For the (liberal) Left, the solution is to use fiscal policy to strengthen health care services and ensure a sustained lockdown, thereby mitigating the pandemic’s most egregious effects without fundamentally restructuring the economy. For the Right, the favored response is essentially one of capitulation—that it is not such a big deal if some people die, that it is better for a few to lose their lives than for many to lose their livelihoods. While it is clear which of these choices is preferable, selecting one or the other is a bit like having to choose between crucifixion or death by natural causes.