The exploitation of workers is coming to the fore during this crisis. From amazon staff to medical workers. The latter are the new protagonists of Banksy’s last artwork, which depicts them as heroes. But should the exploited be called heroes?
As a response to the covid-19 crisis, most societies chose to lockdown. Everyone must stay at home except for essential workers. However, most artists can work from home. Banksy is no exception. And he chose to dedicate his last work, called Game Changer, to a specific category of essential workers: medical workers.
The featured image depicts a young boy playing with a nurse superhero toy, leaving the figures of batman and spiderman in a wastepaper basket. It is a tribute to theextraordinary work of hospital staff and is on display in Southampton GeneralHospital. Banksy’s aim is twofold: to help boost the morale of medical workers (the piece is meant as a gift and a message of solidarity) and to auction the piece to raise money for NHS charities. Nevertheless, we can guess a third goal, which usually motivates the artist: the use of art for justice. The idea is that a certain piece of art, through its aesthetics, could open up a space for an emancipatory discourse. Does Game Changer manage to achieve this?
Let us quickly review the current discourse on the matter. Politicians are employing a warlike discourse in presenting the covid-19 crisis (“We are at war with an invisible enemy”); social media are often depicting and describing healthcare workers as heroes, just like Banksy’s piece apparently does. In short, the current discourse on medical workers resembles that of soldiers.
They share a similar condition: they are on the frontline of a ‘war’; they endure much stress and sometimes die at work; they often suffer from moral injury (a trauma that occurs when someone commits, fails to prevent or witnesses and act that is an anathema to their moral beliefs). However, there is one difference: healthcare workers are increasingly being affected by discriminatory attitudes and harassment by other citizens. Because governments failed with timing and protocol provisions, they sometimes contract the covid-19 themselves. Thus, they are often being called ‘infectors’ and treated as such outside their workplace.
As many other essential workers, healthcare workers are often dying of Covid-19 due to lack of Personal Protective Equipment; all of them are strained by extra work stress due to limited resources of National Health Services, which have been gradually weakened all over the world by decades of neoliberalism; many are committing sucidie; they are being treated as infectors outside their workplace. Real emancipation will come from a discourse that allows them to denounce the injustice of their condition and win the hearts of other citizens. The former provides the space to articulate arguments for justice, the latter makes for the emotional soil on which solidarity is harnessed.
Could the hero discourse work? Let us begin with its pros. On the one hand, (a) war heroes are always expected to receive recognition and compensation for their patriotic service. Thus, an increase of welfare benefits for medical workers and/or some public investment on healthcare could be pursued through patriotic discourse. (b) Moreover, if most of us call them heroes, we can hope that they gain more respect when they walk out of hospitals instead of being treated as infectors.
Let us now review the cons. One issue with heroic investment is the risk of depersonalisation: (1) calling workers “heroes” might give the idea that they are somehow different than other humans in their capabilities and possibilities. Indeed, this is the point of every heroic narrative. It distances us ‘humans’ from those ‘super-humans’, the latter category describing those fit for tasks beyond human possibilities. A second problem has to do with compensation. In listing the pros we said how they might gain more respect and avoid being shamed as infectors out of their workplace. But to call them heroes is a sort of moral salary which risks to rob priority to their material protection and compensation. (2) It cleans up our political conscience to call them heroes because instead of forcing us to economically and legally fix their condition it leaves us satisfied with a moral applause. To think “after all they are real heroes, we humans should admire them”, does not leave room for feeling outraged at the injustice of their condition. A third problem is linked with the ontology of heroes. Heroes either are forced to become what they are because of something genetic or immutable, or they undertake a heroic destiny by personal choice. In other words, they become heroes because they have some feature which cannot be redeemed or by their own spontaneous choice. (3) The reason why most workers become what they are is that they belong to a specific social class that has been systemically exploited by another.* But social classes are not immutable, as much as their relation. Unemployment is rising, small and medium entrepreneurs are facing failure, society is being carried forward by healthcare and other essential workers which are all in unjust working conditions. Meanwhile, richest men in the US are increasing their wealth. A truth is now evident: the world is divided between the 1% and the 99%. This is not a natural state of affairs; it can be changed. (4) Concerning the possibility of spontaneous choice, this is not available to healthcare workers. Contrary to heroes who consciously and willingly pick up extraordinary challenges, healthcare did not pick their careers knowing that a pandemic crisis would hit a healthcare system progressively weakened by governmental cuts. They are now morally, legally and economically obliged to carry out their tasks even under the risks of contracting the virus, suffering moral injury, experiencing work burnout, suicide, etc.
Overall, we see that heroic depiction of workers can (a) open the space for a patriotic discourse of compensation and (b) give them enough social honour which might prevent their discrimination. On the other hand, it would (1) depersonalise them, (2) substitute moral compensation for the legal and economic, (3) obscure class discourse, and (4) distort discussion on their freedom.
As we said, real emancipation needs discursive space to denounce injustice and social wave of empathy. Demands of justice can be better articulated in a class discourse which is made credible by a realist telling of workers’ conditions. Moreover, class discourse leaves space for articulating many more demands than a patriotic war-like. Finally, it is hard to see how we can really empathise with workers if we de-personalise them. Also, moral salary is a way too quick and cheap possibility to liquidate real efforts to solidarity.
Banksy’s work surely deserve praise for its intent to boost the Southampton General Hospital staff’s morale. Moreover, the auctioning of the piece will surely be appreciated by the NHS charities. However, it is neither sufficient nor right in directing our eyes during this crisis. Artists can sometimes fail. After all, they are humans like us, and just like healthcare workers.
*In the case of medical workers, we have to distinguish between different kinds: nurses and doctors, and also between doctors themselves. Some highly specialised doctors picked their career out of a will to prestige and because they could economically afford their long-term studies. Therefore, they do not belong to an exploited social class. They are out of our current examination because our aim is to understand how to emancipate medical staff as an exploited group; they are an exception to the group, as most of it is composed by other doctors, nurses and other hospital workers (like cleaners for instance). From a class perspective, the fact that the body of medical staff has a minoritarian exception should not prevent us from discerning an emancipatory path for the exploited majority.