Organising during COVID-19

Organising during the Coronavirus Crisis – The Contradictions of Our Digital Lives, by Mike Healy

ISBN: 978-981-19-1942-8, Palgrave Macmillan, London, xiii+251pp., 2022.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

Divided into seven comprehensive chapters, Mike Healy’s book on Organising during the Coronavirus Crisis starts by examining digital technologies (DT); DT and labour (Chapter 2); as well as DT and mutual aid (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 illuminates DT and mental stress, while Chapter 5 discusses an area of work hit particularly hard by the COVID19 pandemic, namely: the creative arts. The relationship between DT and protest movements is explained in Chapter 6 before his conclusion (Chapter 7) examines alienation and delivers an overall assessment.

Mike Healy’s introduction starts on 31 December 2019 when a strange virus was detected by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. Shortly after that, on 11 January 2020, ‘China reported the first deaths’ (p. 1). Without getting into any debate as to why all this happened and without naming Dr Li Wenliang, whom the BBC called ‘the Chinese doctor who tried to warn others about coronavirus’ (BBC, 2020), Healy notes that ‘almost every country has reported cases, every region has deaths’ (p. 2). By mid-2022, this continued to be the case approaching 6.4 million officially recognised deaths.

While we know many of the facts surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, what we do not know is what Mike Healy’s insightful book discusses, namely ‘the contradictory relationship between our response to COVID-19 and DT’ (p. 2). Beyond that, the COVID-19 pandemic had more ‘side effects’. For example, it has impacted global food production as ‘we are moving into a scenario where upwards of 1 billion people will be living in extreme poverty’ (p. 11). This will be turbo-charged by the usual pathologies of capitalism, e.g., the continued destruction of food to keep market prices up, the creation of 650 million obese people (www.who.int) and global capitalism’s rather structural and rising food insecurity. Finally, there are also the war in Ukraine (Mearsheimer, 2015) and global warming.

Of course, behind the contradiction between DT and the COVID-19 pandemic also lurk some of the many contradictions of capitalism (Harvey, 2014; Klikauer, 2014) such as the one between ‘market logic of protecting the economy and a public health logic of protecting lives’ (p. 27). The academic terminology of ‘protecting the economy’ actually means assuring the profits of what evil heretics call

‘Big Pharma’ (Hagopian, 2015; Keefe, 2021).

Underneath all this, the COVID-19 pandemic has also proven Hollywood-style disaster movies featuring the individual hero who saves the world as well as right-wing US doomsday preppers wrong again. The COVID-19 pandemic did not lead to a disintegration of society or civil war, nor did it lead to Armageddon. Instead, human nature (Hare & Woods, 2020) did the very opposite of Herbert Spencer’s deeply ideological ‘survival of the fittest’ (1880) liked to suggest. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw once again that ‘cooperation, not competition, was necessary. Solidarity by supporting strangers, not social atomisation, was required’ (p. 30) and delivered.

Simultaneously, ‘the conflict between labour and capital did not cease during the pandemic nor did trade union organising’ (p. 37). Yet, ‘COVID has impacted on 98 per cent of the globe’s working population leading to the loss of 225 million full-time equivalent jobs’ (p. 38). For both –changes in working conditions and union organising – ‘digital technologies were critical’ (p. 42). Most commonly, these were ‘Instagram and Facebook, with some work on Twitter [and] private email messages, [as well as] Facebook groups, Twitter, Reddit [and] Zoom and Telegram’ (p. 43).

In that, ‘union organisers used Facebook Live with weekly question and answer sessions as well as weekly podcasts’ (p. 44). One trade unionist noted, ‘Zoom, WhatsApp and Google Hangout enabled us to stay on top of what’s going on’ (p. 51). Meanwhile, another organiser warned, ‘there’s a sense of false security thinking Facebook or Instagram will respect privacy. But people feel confident with WhatsApp to organise actions’ (p. 53). On the other hand, living in an OECD country makes it easy to forget that ‘Internet service is not free and so workers on reduced income because of the pandemic have to pay for the service’ (p. 60). In other words, there still is a global digital divide (Wang et al., 2022).

Yet on the upswing, a local government worker in the UK noted, ‘members have adapted quickly to teleconferencing or Zoom, becoming familiar with speaking on camera’ (p. 61). Another unionist mentioned that they were ‘using email and Facebook which we called a tea-break meeting which ran from 10:40 am to 11am’ (p. 66) while also saying, ‘we used

WhatsApp groups to organise picketing’ (p. 68). A trade unionist at a university also cautioned, ‘we had used the University’s email system but stopped three years ago over concerns about the University accessing our communications’ (p. 70). On the whole however, Mike Healy closes this chapter by arguing that ‘the pandemic has shown the benefits of DTs for organising workers’ (p. 74).

Beyond union organising and set against the neoliberal dogmatism of competition is good, many people have set up ‘non-profit mutual aid groups (MAGs)’ (p. 77). Perhaps it is Kropotkin (1902), and not Hayek (1944; 1978), after all. Most, if not all, people working in and for MAGs, ‘rejected … ideologies that champion the individual over society’ (p. 78). In championing working with and for others (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981) while rejecting the neoliberal individual, ‘Zoom has made it easier for people to work together’ (p. 91). Yet, another trade unionist argues that DTs can help but they are by no means everything when he said, ‘the trade union movement is built on camaraderie. Can you get that camaraderie on a Zoom call? I suspect you won’t. Online meetings have many, many, many benefits. But it will never get over that sort of thing’ (p. 107).

Virtually the same can be said about DTs and mental health, as the next chapter shows. And indeed, Healy concludes that ‘for those experiencing mental health challenges, digital meetings cannot replace those encounters [that take place] in a shared spatial and temporal environment’ (p. 140). Worse, DTs and online meetings can even lead to what Anderson and Looi (2020) call Chronic Zoom Syndrome.

Investigating DTs and the COVID-19 pandemic led Mike Healy to examine one of the more severely hit branches of the economy: the creative arts, in which ‘over 10 million jobs were lost’ (p. 145) during 2020 alone. Mike Healy argues that the COVID-19 pandemic had an even more ‘disastrous impact’ in Brazil, particularly under President Bolsonaro (p. 167). Interestingly, one artist commented, ‘Before my home and workspace were separated spaces. Now it’s in my living room’ (p. 170). This is unsurprising as many office workers moved from an office building onto the kitchen table.

Almost self-evidently, ‘the pandemic lockdowns enforced a moment of isolation’ (p. 177), which made it difficult to organise people, as Chapter 6 on DT and protest movements shows. Yet, linking isolated people via DTs also has some entirely different connotations, as Mike Healy writes in the conclusion. He emphasises, ‘video conferencing use, which has become so crucial during the pandemic, is controlled by three products, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. It has been estimated there are over 300 million Zoom calls each day covering 50 per cent of the market in at least 44 countries’ (p. 221).

Mike Healy’s overall conclusion is that ‘this book argues that our individual experiences during the pandemic can be generalised thus revealing the systemic problems inherent in existing social, economic, and political structures and identifying those responsible for failing to adequately deal with the crisis … the pandemic has also enabled us to see who our allies will be in a precarious future’ (p. 227). And these are not the established institutions of capitalism, nor will it be neoliberalism’s hyper-individualism or its relentless drive for competition. Instead, it will be – just as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown during the past years – mutual aid.

Thomas Klikauer has 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope, the Barricades, Buzzflash, Counterpunch, Countercurrents, Tikkun and ZNet. His next book will be on ‘The Language of Managerialism’ (Palgrave, 2023).

Contact: T.Klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

References

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BBC, (2020). The Chinese doctor who tried to warn others about coronavirus (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382, accessed: 18th July 2022).

Hagopian, J. (2015). The Evils of Big Pharma Exposed. Retrieved from https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-evils-of-big-pharmaexposed/5425382.

Hare, B. & Woods, V. (2020). Survival of the friendliest: understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity, New York: Random House.

Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hayek, F. A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom, London: G. Routledge & Sons.

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Keefe, P. R. (2021). Empire of pain: the secret history of the Sackler dynasty, New York: Doubleday.

Klikauer, T. (2014). A capital idea? – Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Australian Universities’ Review, 56(2), 96-97.

Kropotkin, P. A. (1902). Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution (foreword by A. Montagu, The Struggle for Existence by T. H. Huxley, new introduction for Garland ed. by E. Kingston-Mann), New York: Garland Pub. (1955 & 1972).

Mearsheimer, J. (2015). Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 .

Spencer, H. (1880). The Principles of Biology, New York: Appleton & Co.

Wang, X., Shi, J. & Lee, K. M. (2022). The digital divide and seeking health information on smartphones in Asia: Survey study of ten countries. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(1), p.e24086 (https:// www.jmir.org/2022/1/e24086/.