What The Left Fights About When We Fight About Masking

It's Really About Solidarity

The Left even at our least effectual always remains threatening to the ruling class not just for our ideas, but because they are arrived at intelligently, which is to say critically (unearthing the root causes, through a systemic analysis, of social-economic problems). But intelligent people are not only dangerous for their ability to access truths, but also, unfortunately, in their capacity to perform rather incredible mental gymnastics to evade them. I have been observing this play out for over two years on the Left when it comes to the issue of universal masking, particularly in organizing spaces and at protests.

There is a segment of the Left that acknowledges the State abandonment of the most medically vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as its manufactured “end” (by politicians and media) but often such leftists aggressively feel no responsible to do anything about this collectively or individually. I am going to refer to such people as the COVID-Aware-But-Not-Conscious-Left. Admittedly this is an overly long and perhaps lazy moniker, but upon writing it, it seemed appropriate in that the syntactic awkwardness reflects well the incoherent and dizzying array of arguments, especially given that it would require so much less effort to simply wear a mask.

In this little essay, I have tried to compile a non-exhaustive list of the COVID-Aware-But-Not-Conscious-Left’s main arguments for refusing to mask or doing so very inconsistently. The arguments, under scrutiny, fall apart. And again, as they are not made, generally speaking, by ignorant people, I believe these are not intellectual failings, but point to the fact that they are defending—though often not consciously or entirely consciously, at least—against something more abstract and bigger than masking. The debate is really over what constitutes solidarity.

But let’s look at the arguments first. I will begin with the charge that sick and disabled leftists “calling out” the ableism of other leftists for not masking is a form of “tone policing.” This is ultimately an attempt to turn disability and sickness into, in the more pejorative sense, “identity politics” or better said “liberal identity politics”—where the corrective to the societal oppression of a marginalized group often lies in merely rhetorical solutions and cultural representation—not material change. Such leftists refute the charge that their actions (or lack thereof) and attitude towards their actions are ableist, in part, on the grounds that the very term “ableism” smacks of such liberal identity politics. The term ableism for such leftists, is viewed (or viewed in bad faith) as cynical and moralistic. But this argument is largely not about rhetoric, but rather a concrete—that is, material action: it is the wearing of a scientifically demonstrated intervention for mitigating an airborne virus (a widely circulating virus—much of the time—that has and continues to debilitate or further debilitate on an extraordinary scale). The term ableism to describe the refusal to mask is not “tone policing.” And so, yes, it is ableist for relatively able-bodied and/or healthier people to not be willing to make the harmless sacrifice (of physical discomfort) of masking, in order to ensure our spaces and actions are safe and accessible for all.

Another argument, or rather deflection, I have noticed is that instead of targeting other leftists for not masking, the Covid-Conscious Left’s ire and energy should be directed at the ruling class for the problem of unmitigated COVID-19 spread. There is, firstly, plenty of ire at them, but the double layered irony is that this often envisions a rather singular and exclusionary form of protest, which expects medically vulnerable people to put themselves at significant risk of this airborne and highly transmissible virus we want protection from. Additionally, much of Covid- Conscious-Left is made up of people, due to chronic illness and/or disability, who do not have the capacity for this kind of protesting (though have many other skills we could offer if other leftists could think beyond the image of the relatively able-bodied protestor).

More importantly, in misdirecting the argument over masking to who should be criticized and how, there is an implication that only sick and disabled people—not everyone with a social conscious—ought to protest our exclusion from a society that normalizes mass-infection. This not only obscures that Covid has led to the mass debility of working people and hence is also a labor issue, but reifies the very societal-exclusion that such leftists agree we (sick and disabled leftists) ought to be angry about—just not at them.

Perhaps the most often repeated argument from the Covid-Aware-But-Not-Conscious-Left is that (universal) masking is an individualistic matter when we, the Left, ought to be focused only on systemic issues. This appears—at first glance—almost like a sound argument, but to fight for systemic change, involves, most of all, an intellectual understanding that our struggles—because inequality (for example) serves class-society—call for solidarity. Compartmentalizing^[1] struggles is rather an indication that one is not able to (or would rather not—in this case) conduct a systemic analysis of neoliberalism (which thrives on keeping people siloed). This binary of individual and systemic also is, notably, reductionist and deterministic. Only the most dogmatic Marxists could really think there is no human agency involved in collective action or reject entirely that we have a responsibility of care towards one another.

I find myself exhausted following the dizzying mental gymnastics of some of these arguments against something so straightforward as universal masking (I can only imagine how exhausting it is to continue to make them). And well frustrated (to put it mildly) because I recognize the flimsy arguments are so easy to tear apart for the very reason the debate itself evades the real subject here; and that is simply and yet very messily, bodies.

I believe to acknowledge that in the absence of State action (or lack of action), those of us with a social conscious need to keep each other safe, and this calls for a daily—and seeming permanent—sense of care in our communities and organizations. In fact, we need to acknowledge both the constant threat of the virus and our vulnerability to it—for everyone. To mask in shared spaces—as many medically vulnerable people have continued to do since the start of the pandemic—is to inhabit a new subjectivity, to think of one’s own body in a radically different way: as not entirely singular (I am not suggesting we are all one organism, to be clear). In the age of everlasting Covid—and worse pandemics to come—a more radical solidarity is required of us: one that demands a 24/7 responsibility and a recognition of individual and collective, material vulnerability.

And so, I’ve come to believe that beneath much of the Byzantine arguments against universal masking there is, ultimately, a confession: “we’re just not ready” or hopefully and necessarily, “we’re just not ready… yet.”

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^[1] I recognize there is some irony in creating categories of leftists while criticizing leftists for “compartmentalizing struggles.” This is firstly a structural device, on my part, for the sake of clarity, and secondly an observation of what currently is based on behaviors and attitudes—my labeling here is neither deterministic or fatalistic. If the State abandonment of sick and disabled is largely considered part of the fight for intersectional social-economic justice, the need to distinguish or categorize leftists in this way, vanishes.