It’s interesting to consider, re. supply-chain shortages, that COVID doesn’t infect machinery or transport; just people. So every time you can’t find something, that’s a sick person. Every missing item, that’s a sick person. (People, really, but it’s hard to imagine “people” in the abstract, and what COVID makes visible is that the supply chain is human beings.) I was thinking last night that we’ve been talking about supply-chain problems as a result of an epidemic, but ultimately they’re both the result of the same thing: the fact that we’re all connected to each other, despite what we might insist or wish. It's quite true that things like clogged ports and semiconductor shortages are real factors, and it requires a little bit of imagination to understand what this has to do with sick people. + But consider: physically, the ports are fine. The ships are fine. Why can't they be unloaded faster? Similarly, the raw materials for (e.g.) semiconductors exist, or we wouldn't be able to make them at all. Why can't we increase production to meet the need?
The pandemic is at least helping to unobscure some of the social relations normally hidden by the logic and functioning of capitalism. This is essentially the reality behind what Marx termed fetishism, i.e., "the way in which a situation hides what the real significance is" (David Harvey).
As Marx explains in relation to commodities in Capital vol. 1:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
And some of that mystification is removed when we start to view things in the way Miriam Posner does, i.e., that "[E]very time you can’t find something, that’s a sick person. Every missing item, that’s a sick person. (People, really, but it’s hard to imagine 'people' in the abstract, and what COVID makes visible is that the supply chain is human beings.)"
While this may seem like commonsense, I don't think we naturally see it that way because our ingrained focus is primarily on the commodity and its price, availability, etc., while our relationship to it is generally through the commodity itself and its point of purchase, not all the human social labour behind it and embodied within it. Due to our societal habitus, we often have to make a conscious effort to reframe our perspective, which can have radical consequences. And in this case, it helps to rehumanize the labour we're conditioned by capitalist social relations to view in the abstract. And this, of course, is a small step towards increasing worker solidarity.
We can only challenge and effectively combat the social forces and institutions that exploit and oppress working people together. And that fight begins with an illumined consciousness (seeing how the system alienates and exploits us) and a sense of solidarity with other workers and groups of marginalized individuals who, ultimately, depend on each other for their collective emancipation.
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