The Virus In Detroit

The authors of A People's History of Detroit reflect on what the Motor City's long struggle between capital and labor can tell us about the COVID-19 pandemic.

//philip conklin & mark jay

In concert with the national wave of walkouts and labor stoppages by frontline workers since the outbreak of COVID-19, two notable strikes took place in the Detroit area at the beginning of the pandemic. On March 17th bus drivers from the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 26 walked off the job in protest of fatal working conditions, bringing Detroit's public transit system to a grinding halt. Among the workers' complaints were unhygienic buses, lack of access to restrooms, and forced proximity to passengers, many of whom had no access to masks. Detroit is the poorest large city in the US, and also has the highest auto insurance rates of any city in the country (with rates almost double the second-highest-ranking city, New Orleans), with the result that more than a third of Detroiters can't afford a car; and so even as the pandemic ravages the city, hundreds of thousands of Detroiters are forced to rely on the underfunded, overcrowded bus system to get around. "This is death walking around here," Roderick Nash, a city bus driver, said. "And nobody's taking it serious." The city government responded to the strike by suspending bus fare collection during the pandemic to limit passengers' interaction with drivers, providing masks for passengers, and making more toilets (including porta potties) available for drivers. But days after the strike, drivers reported that conditions remained unsafe, with passengers still lacking access to protective masks. The government's safety measures came too late for Jason Hargrove, a city driver who, 11 days after posting a viral video on social media complaining about safety conditions on his bus, died of the coronavirus. 

Two weeks after the bus drivers' strike, 40 workers at an Amazon warehouse in nearby Romulus launched a protest action of their own. According to organizer Mario Crippen, Amazon treats their employees as "expendable." "It's a scary, scary place to be right now," Crippen said. "There's no hand sanitizer, no face masks given out. We're limited on glove use. At the break room door, they're squirting hand sanitizer in our hands, because we're so low.… They're not worried about anyone's safety, they're worried about shipping out packages." Amazon responded to a similar strike in Staten Island by firing the lead organizer, Chris Smalls, a black warehouse worker, and deriding him as "not smart, or articulate." Following a precedent set by Henry Ford a century ago, Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos has opted to deploy harsh union-busting tactics rather than acquiesce to the basic, humane demands of his workers. On May 1, Tim Bray, a vice president at Amazon, quit in protest over the way the company treated its workers. In a public letter Bray wrote,

the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.… At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength. 

As Bray suggests, coming to terms with the social effects of the pandemic requires a deeper reckoning with the dynamics of the class struggle. COVID-19 may be indiscriminate in its choice of hosts, but like the rest of us, it functions within a global society predicated upon widespread poverty, dispossession, and inequality. Much like "natural" disasters, epidemiological ones hit hardest among the most vulnerable sections of the population. This pandemic is a capitalist crisis, exacerbating the fissures and weak points of a society already ravaged by decades of privatization, structural unemployment, and the dismantling of the social safety net. While the coronavirus has presented some new and unprecedented challenges, it is in many ways only an exaggeration of already existing tendencies in our capitalist society. 

Detroit, as we argue in our book, has since the early 20th century served as a sort of magnifying lens for the country at large, amplifying the ups and downs of an already tumultuous history. As a perennial reference point for capitalist extremes, the city's history shows us how the effects of the coronavirus were long foreshadowed by the "normal" operation of capitalism. Three areas in particular illustrate this dynamic: unsafe working conditions, the abandonment of urban landscapes, and the dubious gains of technological "progress." Following are some reflections on how Detroit's history has prefigured the COVID pandemic on these three fronts.

Workplace Unsafety

While crises inevitably worsen the conditions of society's marginalized members, they can also serve as catalysts for coordinated action on the part of these groups. Detroit autoworkers took advantage of the high demand for labor during World War II to jockey for better working conditions at the notoriously dangerous and enervating auto factories that were converted to produce military equipment. The workers struck in huge numbers despite a nationwide strike ban negotiated by union leaders and government officials behind the backs of the UAW rank-and-file near the beginning of the war. Between 1943 and 1944, four million American workers took part in 8,708 wildcat strikes. In early 1944, Detroit averaged a dozen strikes per week, making the Motor City the country’s leading center of worker militancy. Much of the impetus behind the strikes was the deadly nature of manufacturing work: in 1944 one death, five amputations, and one hundred serious injuries occurred per day in Michigan workplaces.

The two recent labor actions in Detroit highlight a similar dynamic of workplace unsafety and worker power during crises — the essential difference now is the severity of generalized precarity among the working classes. With buses as the only viable mode of public transportation in the city, bus drivers serve the most marginalized Detroiters: those without a car, those experiencing homelessness, those, in short, who are required by circumstance to remain out in the world. Drivers are also workers themselves, and many of them are as such surely compelled to continue working during the pandemic due to precarious personal circumstances. The public health crisis has also shown, to themselves as well as to the public, the pivotal role they play in social reproduction, a position which they utilized in order to ensure better protections for themselves and their riders.

Amazon warehouses are particularly illustrative of the current situation. The corporation has opened several massive "distribution centers" in the Detroit area in recent years (despite municipal and business leaders' failed attempts to bring Amazon's second headquarters to the city in 2017). These facilities offer $15 an hour and benefits for unskilled work, providing much-needed employment opportunities in the jobs-poor region. But the nature of these "opportunities" has turned out to be dubious, as employees inside these behemoths have denounced their "inhumane" working conditions, decrying the company’s union-busting as well as productivity standards that force them to stay on their feet all day long and leave no time for bathroom breaks. One undercover reporter described “employees collapsing at work, suffering panic attacks, pulling muscles and more.” 

As was the case in the early days of Ford, conditions are so grueling and degrading that worker turnover has become a huge issue for Amazon. Even in the midst of the pandemic, Amazon continues to hire new workers for its Metro Detroit warehouses, despite some workers' insistence that the work they're doing is not essential. "People are ordering the same stuff as usual," one employee who took part in the recent strike said. "If it was purely medical supplies and if Amazon actually stepped up and did that then I'd be much more willing to put myself [on what feels like] the front lines because we get stuff from everywhere, but that's not what's going on.... It's people ordering the same cat litter, toys, ramen noodles." Autoworkers who struck during WWII were painted in the media as unpatriotic interlopers who didn't support the troops; likewise, some are already depicting these Amazon workers as “selfish” agitators looking to exploit people's unprecedented reliance on internet-ordered goods for their own gains, when in fact they are simply precarious workers forced to labor in hazardous conditions because they can't afford to miss a paycheck. 

Amazon workers are in a particularly difficult situation. The fact is, many people now rely on Amazon-delivered goods as a safer, and often more affordable, alternative to buying things in person during the pandemic. Cat litter may, in fact, be as valuable as medical supplies to a person who is immuno-compromised and can't leave their home; and internet-ordered toys might be a godsend for stressed-out parents forced to maintain the productivity of their work from home at the same time as they struggle to keep their toddlers occupied. The real problem is the political-economic system which measures human life according to its monetary value — because the safety and affordability of Amazon's goods are purchased at the cost of the cheapening of its workers' lives. If the workers were paid more, if the conditions of work were safer, if they received better benefits, then Amazon's profit rate would fall and its goods would be more expensive, and more of their customers would shop at stores in-person, increasing their chances of contracting the virus. What becomes clear is the ambiguous nature of the definition of "essential" in this context, as we are forced to measure the worth of a worker's life against that of an exhausted parent or an elderly person living alone. And even if the public is on the side of the worker, some still want or need to buy cheap goods online, often for good reasons. Such a conundrum can never be solved under capitalism, a system wherein the creation of value is predicated on the devaluation of workers' lives. To underscore this contradiction between labor and capital, consider the fact that, at the height of the pandemic, the Economist ran a cover article labelling Bezos a "genius" while, at the same time, Amazon's workers decried his lack of basic humanity.

Crucially, recognizing and honoring the plight of these workers does little to ameliorate their situation. An Amazon worker said, “We aren't heroes and we aren't Red Cross workers — we are working people who pack and deliver goods. We're working through a crisis not by choice but by necessity." Striking autoworkers in WWII were in an analogous situation. They were producing "essential" military equipment for US soldiers overseas, and many took their role as supporters of "our boys overseas" seriously; at the same time, they protested against putting their own lives on the line for low wages so that the auto companies could turn a profit. Despite much negative press, including being compared to Hitler and the Axis Powers, the workers repudiated the public's charges against them by pointing out that if patriotism were all that was at stake, then the companies themselves would have been forced to sacrifice for the war effort as well. As one GM worker explained at the time, “The corporations were showing no sense of patriotism or loyalty and were contributing nothing. All the sacrifices were on the part of the workers.”[1] The signs and messages now circulating which thank workers for their courage during the pandemic are surely well meaning; but when the workers are compelled to work because they have to pay their bills, by a company who refuses to interrupt their profit stream even for a global health crisis, something other than gratitude is in order.

When considering the labor situation during the pandemic, it's important to bear in mind that deadly work conditions and worker "expendability" are nothing new in Detroit. As the profits of companies like Amazon soar even as the pandemic ravages the lives of US workers, it's hard not to recall the Great Depression, a time when the masses starved while Detroit's "Big 3" auto companies (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) "thrived": "Ford and Chrysler endured only two modestly unprofitable years while General Motors recorded no losses at all, with profits surpassing the 1928 record as early as 1936. This was accomplished by... massive permanent layoffs, 50 percent reductions in annual pay for those remaining, and unprecedented speed-ups." The extent to which workers were asked to shoulder the load of the crisis is revealed in one Chaplinesque anecdote: as a result of Ford's brutal speed-up campaign, one worker's job entailed operating two drill presses, one in each hand.

These brutal conditions continued inside Detroit's factories for decades, all throughout the city’s so-called golden years. A 1973 report by the US Department of Labor found that significantly more people died each year inside US factories than on the battlefields in Vietnam. The report “estimated 65 on-the-job deaths per day among auto workers, for a total of some 16,000 annually. Approximately half of these deaths were from heart attacks…. These statistics did not include many long-term illnesses endemic to foundry workers and others exposed to poisonous chemicals and gases, nor did they include deaths and injuries made by accident.”[2] These 16,000 deaths pale in comparison to the toll of industrial diseases, which the Public Health Service estimated took a remarkable 100,000 lives each year at this time. Foundry workers, machinists, and coarse-metal finishers were at significantly greater risk of fatal heart disease and lung disease than other workers. These were the jobs that Detroit’s black workers were primarily assigned, making the city's black population particularly vulnerable to premature death — just as black workers and those living near polluting factories are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus today.

In their struggle for safe and dignified living conditions, Detroit activists have not only come up against profiteering businesses, but also governments who have slashed public programs and the social safety net in favor of subsidies to these same businesses. For decades, organizers such as Maureen Taylor and Marian Kramer, have been leading the struggle for a universal living wage and adequate healthcare for all Detroiters. If their basic demands had been met, non-essential workers in Detroit would not have to risk their lives by getting on the bus each day to get to degrading, underpaid jobs throughout the metro area. But instead, tax breaks for big business and austerity for the masses have been the order of the day, compounding the devastation of the COVID-19 crisis, which comes after decades of cuts to public spending, water shut-offs, and home foreclosures. As the social wage has been eviscerated these last decades, governments in Detroit and across the US have sought to pacify the poor and the dispossessed through more aggressive police measures, thus setting the table for the heinous forms of state violence that Black Lives Matter protesters have been in the streets protesting against since the murder of George Floyd in late May. 

Landscape Abandonment

Across the country, and the world, urban landscapes have been vacated to stop the spread of the coronavirus, with images circulating online showing abandoned streets in usually bustling areas. The eerie emptiness of tourist traps and national landmarks is enough to spook even a nonbeliever. But like fatal work conditions, ghostly landscapes are also nothing new in Detroit. A New York Times writer recalled being "unnerved" by the emptiness of Detroit's downtown streets back in 2001. "It felt like the beginning of a zombie apocalypse movie," he wrote. 

Starting in the 1940s, the "Big 3" auto companies fled Detroit precipitously, first to the suburbs, then increasingly to low-wage areas across the world, abandoning not just factories, but also the workers on whose backs these companies' fortunes were built. By the late 20th century, after decades of federal cutbacks and failed initiatives to lure investment to the Motor City, signs of this corporate abandonment were unmistakable. This dramatic situation led to a range of competing visions for the future Detroit.

One vision was to make the city a spectral theme park of decay. Camilo Jose Vergara, the famous Chilean photojournalist and author of American Ruins, made the following suggestion for Detroit in the April 1995 edition of the leading architectural magazine Metropolis: “As a tonic for our imagination, as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers [should] be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis.” Apparently, according to Vergara, since nobody of any real import still lived in the area, downtown could be turned into “a grand national historic park of play and wonder. Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals—squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects—would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots, and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings.” COVID-19 has given us a glimpse of this dramatic vision, as animals have quickly ventured into urban spaces formerly occupied by humans.

In 2013, Vergara, who is considered by many to be the father of "ruins photography" or “ruin porn,” was invited to the White House, where President Obama awarded him with the National Humanities Medal. Two years after Vergara was honored in the nation's capitol, David Yarrow, Europe's highest-selling wildlife photographer, attempted, in his own bizarre way, to realize Vergara's radical vision for Detroit — wild animals and all. The Scotsman booked a photo shoot at the Packard Plant — an abandoned east-side factory that was in the early 1900s one of the largest and most advanced in the world — and then, without informing any city officials, or any of the hundreds of residents that live in the blocks surrounding the plant, he brought a tiger, a bobcat, and two wolves along with him. The tiger soon escaped, and after unsuccessful attempts to lure the tiger out of a 4th floor staircase with a weed whacker, the police were eventually called in to help capture the animal. No fines or arrests were issued. Yarrow published the photo in his critically acclaimed collection, "Storytelling."

Soon after Yarrow's photoshoot, Lonely Planet ranked Detroit as the second most desirable tourist destination in the world: "Not only is there more than ever to enjoy in Detroit, you can also eat, sleep and play in buildings that were moldering ruins just a few years ago." Yarrow's photograph of a woman holding a leashed tiger, surrounded by the Packard ruins and flanked by young black men in urbanwear, sells for $26,000. In 2015, a slab of concrete painted with a mural by Bansky was removed from the Packard plant and sold for $137,500 at an auction in Beverly Hills.

While fetishized emblems of Detroit's decay were fetching high prices in the art circuit, a second vision for Detroit's future was proposed by the late activist Grace Lee Boggs, who saw in Detroit's abandonment the seedbed of revolution. Boggs was inspired by the fact that, as Detroit hollowed out, activists were responding in a myriad of inspirational ways, by repurposing vacant buildings, creating communes, starting small businesses, and planting urban farms: 

Boggs's vision, supported by a lifetime of dedication to the struggles of Detroiters, is a powerful one. And activists have found a way to create community schools, networks of food security, and other essential services even in the face of municipal indifference and private disinvestment. 

Unfortunately it was not only activists, but capitalists, who saw potential in the city's emptiness. "Detroit has bottomed out," Dan Gilbert's business partner John Linkner wrote in Forbes in 2012, "so now, there's nothing but upside." In recent years, investors have pounced. Gilbert has led the way, purchasing around 100 buildings in the city, making him the owner of more than half of downtown Detroit. Even after Gilbert wrangled hundreds of millions in government subsidies, at one point even threatening to move his company QuickenLoans to Cleveland, the corporate media has hailed Gilbert's efforts. The Atlantic wondered if he was "Detroit's New Superhero." The New York Times called him a "missionary," and foresaw the arrival of more capitalists — "mini-Gilberts" and "black Dan Gilberts" — whose investments would spur on the city's "revitalization." 

Repudiating Vargas's American Acropolis, companies and wealthy individuals are buying up the quintessential subjects of ruin porn photography to enact their own vision. And there is no more dramatic ruin than Ford's recent purchase, Michigan Central Station, which, when it was built in 1913, was the tallest train station in the world. Closed in 1988, the abandoned train station has for decades been a mecca for urban spelunkers, the subject of myriad investigative reports, and a go-to backdrop for post-apocalyptic Hollywood action films. Now, in an almost too-perfect metaphor for the current remaking of Detroit, Ford plans to turn the train station and its surrounding area into a 1.2 million-square-foot “innovation hub” geared toward “mobility solutions that will shape the future of transportation” — so a city whose fortunes were built on the auto industry, and whose degeneration followed its abandonment by that industry, is now, in the throes of its rebirth, becoming a hub for the auto industry of the future. 

Ford’s purchase of the train station has for many also signaled a milestone in Detroit’s recovery. As a Detroit Free Press columnist put it, “Ford’s act of faith in Detroit’s future with the enormous investment it will bring signals a new era. Victory no longer seems so remote. The issue is no longer in doubt.... From now on, redevelopment will occur as the natural and expected outcome in a city once again on the move.” With comparisons to the first moon landing and World War II, the author claims that, having solved “the toughest of all Detroit’s redevelopment puzzles,” the city is on a conveyor belt to prosperity — all thanks to a company that has supported Detroit from the beginning: “The Fords have been there for Detroit.” Shortly after purchasing the train station, Ford projected on its facade, in story-high letters, the city’s official motto: “Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus” — We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes. (Less noted in the triumphalist media narrative was the fact that a primary focus of this “innovation hub” will be driverless cars, which is a particularly ominous development in Michigan, where, in 2018, upward of 100,000 people worked as drivers.)

Corporate investment is seen by those in power as the solution to Detroit's abandonment; it seems that, in the mainstream discourse, the only way to make the city a vibrant place to live is to make it a vibrant place to invest. But even while these investments have failed to address the needs of poor Detroiters, the coronavirus epidemic has shown just how fragile this "solution" is even for those on the receiving end of its benefits.

Technological Unemployment

As workers in Detroit, and around the world, protest against deadly workplace conditions, capitalists are using the crisis as an excuse to justify automation. This is nothing new. There is a long history of capitalists using worker protests against inhumane conditions as a pretext to invest in labor-saving technology, leading to unemployment and an increasingly hectic pace of work, as human labor is forced to adapt to "the inhuman speed of the machine." Under the banner of public health, the current wave of automation is sure to reproduce these same effects, barring coordinated government intervention or a robust response from workers' movements. 

Similar dynamics led to the rise in Detroit of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a Marxist union that launched its first strike on May 2, 1968, when 4,000 workers walked off the job in protest of deadly conditions at the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck. DRUM's actions inspired dozens of other anti-capitalist unions to form across the city, and they all eventually coalesced into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization that reasoned, through its words and its actions, that the only way that workers were to be treated as dignified human beings, was to challenge the power of the "parasitic, cannibalistic, vulturistic" corporate elites who ruled Detroit. The formation of DRUM and the League were partly a response to the racist policies of the UAW and the aloof stance of the leadership toward the rank-and-file; the union's strategy since WWII had been to negotiate for wage and benefits increases while ceding control of the shop floor to the company, giving them carte blanche to speed up production and automate work. The result was an increasingly smaller workforce getting high wages but exploited to the hilt, and a growing "surplus population" (Marx's term) replaced by technology and made redundant to the system of production. The union's racism ensured that the benefits of this system fell largely to white workers, while black workers bore the brunt of unemployment and worked the least skilled, most dangerous jobs. While, according to Marian Kramer, the League "won just about every reform in the factory that had to be won," decades of automation insured that fewer and fewer people would be employed in Detroit's factories.

As people around the world attempt to maintain their work and their lives during the pandemic, they are forced to find creative ways to adapt to the limitations imposed by the crisis — figuring out how work from home, switching from in-person to virtual interaction, and the like. While the ensuing innovations are an encouraging sign of our collective imagination and resilience, one can't help but wonder whether these adaptations will serve to further the encroachment of labor-saving technology into new realms. According to Marxist geographer David Harvery, one long-term effect of the pandemic will likely be companies "moving towards less labor-intensive forms of production (with enormous implications for employment) and greater reliance on artificial-intelligent production systems." 

To give just one example, academic workers are being forced to find ways to provide instruction virtually. This happens amidst an already prevalent trend toward online education. As the CEO of online learning platform Coursera has explained, "While most educational institutions have not traditionally invested in online education as a core aspect of their learner experience, the tide began to change a few years ago with top universities committing to build fully digital academic experiences. The current crisis will accelerate this trend." There's certainly something to be said for flexibility in instruction and the increased accessibility made possible by online educational materials. On the other hand, it's not hard to see that prerecorded lectures, remote office hours, and virtual assessments will lead to an unprecedented casualization of academic labor, and a concomitant weakening of the power of academic workers to act collectively. At UC Santa Cruz, the pandemic hit in the middle of a months-long labor action by underpaid graduate student workers, and the move to a virtual learning and working environment has undermined their most important weapons: their ability to withhold their labor and to disrupt the functioning of the university, which insists on "business as usual" during the pandemic. It's important to remember that "flexibility" in the work process is generally a euphemism for the flexibility of workers to live without a stable livelihood, and that technological innovations under capitalism are always and inherently about disciplining labor, one way or another.

What first appear, then, as "innovations" and "creative adaptations" to the pandemic, take on another valence: they are forced accommodations to a political-economic structure that has for centuries systematically divested workers of their ability to reproduce their own livelihoods. In effect, workers are being compelled to participate in their own devaluation. In the last half-century, political elites of deindustrialized American cities dealt with their growing "surplus population" and the recalcitrance of radical labor activists with a solution as elegant as it was draconian: by throwing them in prison. With millions more workers slated for redundancy as the coronavirus accelerates automation, and amidst unprecedented (and ever-increasing) ecological catastrophe which threatens humans and ecosystems across the globe, we shudder to think how the coming crises will be resolved.

****************

If the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the fault lines of our unequal society, it's no wonder that Detroit, which has long been a benchmark of the extremes of urban life in America, has been hit harder than most cities by the coronavirus, and that it has also already evinced many of the crisis tendencies wrought by this pandemic. Deadly working conditions, abandoned urban landscapes, structural unemployment due to automation, and extreme precarity — these have been endemic in Detroit for the better part of the last 100 years, COVID or not. Even if this history is peppered by bouts of "prosperity," it's clear that the good times are short lived, and that they are rarely as good as they seem from the standpoint of the working class. Today in Detroit, a corporate revival is hailed as the answer to the city's protracted decline, but this has proved tenuous for the Detroiters hardest hit by recent dispossessions. Even as the New York Times acknowledged that “there are no real assurances that gains will be spread democratically across the city, or that city planning and public resources will serve the needs of everyday Detroiters,” it found solace in the vague “hope… that private individuals will keep the greater good in mind.” If this hope seemed far-fetched before, in the midst of the devastations wrought by COVID-19 it now appears so remote as to appear ridiculous.

On the other hand, the pandemic has opened up new spaces for an alternative politics. It's hard to distill the country's collective consciousness over such a short and tumultuous period, but it seems obvious that people's ideas about the responsibilities of government to the needs of the populace is changing. The recent wave of protests against police brutality should also be understood in the context of the coronavirus, as the pandemic has hit hardest those impoverished Americans most likely to confront state violence. George Floyd was laid off when the restaurant where he worked closed because of the pandemic, and then he was diagnosed with the coronavirus and subsequently killed by Minneapolis police for using counterfeit money. 

COVID and police violence are causing many to rethink what we should demand from the state: income support for unemployed workers, or securitized downtown tourist zones for wealthy shoppers? Health care or paramilitary police raids? Many are thinking even beyond the logic of the state. "Mutual aid" has become a household name, as thousands join formal organizations and informal networks to support the needs of their neighbors. While such efforts can seem like a temporary stopgap, the large-scale mobilization of communities could pave the way for a radical local autonomy that provides a bulwark against future calamities. Whatever the long-term outcome of mutual aid, the reorientation of people to the needs of their fellows is a welcome one, and could serve as the precondition for any number of more formalized movements, whether they be a renewed public sphere, support of workers' movements, or more radical alternatives like communism or anarchism. As Robin D.G. Kelley recently put it, the COVID-19 crisis represents a political "opening":

But while many Black Lives Matter activists hope to take advantage of this "portal" by demanding systemic change, the country's largest firms are also taking up the banner of Black Lives Matter in the hopes of closing the "portal" and deflecting scrutiny away from the pro-corporate policies and labor practices that render people like George Floyd disposable, day in and day out. Emblematic is Amazon and Jeff Bezos: after Amazon fired the black labor organizer Chris Smalls, Bezos personally donated $10 million to various black advocacy organizations. "Black lives matter to the front office," Cedric Johnson quips, "as long as they don't demand a living wage, personal protective equipment and quality healthcare."

The COVID-19 crisis, like all crises, presents "openings" for corporate plunder at the same time as it presents "openings" for workers to assert their power and reimagine the horizons of our political landscape. It is this struggle — between capital and labor — that will determine how the COVID-19 crisis is resolved. 

//Philip Conklin and Mark Jay are co-founders of the Periphery and the authors of A People’s History of Detroit.

Sources:
[1] Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes: The Struggle against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW during World War II (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980), 44.
[2] Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 88.