The first thing you need is a depressed economy and people desperate for a unifying leader. This usually occurs after an economic depression.
Hardt and Negri are saying basically the same thing in this following excerpt. What one may wish to do with the leader scenario above is to attach the concept of public spending to it, so that they can get a better snapshot of what is occurring in the capitol of Wisconsin. To attempt to decipher the signs, to elucidate in which way society, American society in this case, is evolving. We think that the coming of the virus can be inserted where H&N use the term "conflict."
Importantly, please understand that these two authors are communist. They are convinced that socialism is impossible and explain why in their book. The "unifying leader" above, links to "charismatic" below:
'Where the principle of bureaucratic-rational legitimation has insufficient foundation and is incapable of being applied to a conflict that is so widespread and profound, recourse is made to charismatic legitimacy and the political pressure and participatory mystifications of social-democratic coalitions until the level of inputs of demand for public spending has been enveloped. There are enormous stakes around these issues.
Even though communist theorists do not lead us to the determination of the solidity of the problem, we are forced to confront it by the practices of the two classes in struggle: the proletarian insistence on this terrain and the capitalist attempt to anticipate it with repression. At this point, "public spending" becomes a central element of the debate.'
(Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form, p. 183)
We knew there was something fishy accompanying the announcement that $6 million was being designated for a "public spending" project to upgrade a small, high-traffic piece of property on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. There are defiitely pathologies that coalesce at this location:
1. One end of a major commercial street that was destroyed during the blm riots.
2. Religious installations traditionally placed here to straddle the space (literally, the Jeffersonian space) between Church and State.
3. The major University library, thus the long-used term, "Library Mall."
What was suspicious was that this space was already remodeled not that long ago. What was suspicious was this image in direct contradiction to the image of vacant storefronts where the owners obviously had moved away from the violence, taking their business elsewhere, if they still had a business.
These are convincing signs that it is here that one can get a snapshot of the forthcoming "post-covid" pathologies. If marxists are lurking nearby, H&N may help us to spot them:
H&N continue:
'To discuss public spending it is perhaps necessary, more than in any other field, to situate oneself clearly on the Marxian terrain of the analysis of the process of the circulation of capital, as a sphere of the production and reproduction (and innovation) not only of commodities but also social relations, and thus on the terrain of the tendential emergence of revolutionary antagonisms and subjectivity.
This becomes difficult when, as happens in the case of the authors most firmly linked to the class point of view, the neoclassical and Keynesian mystification of the mercantile system continues to dominate the horizon.
....
The working-class struggle puts the functioning of the law of value in definitive crisis, not only in the sense that its practices determine and reinforce the functioning of the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit, but in an even more profound sense of destabilizing the very terms on which the law holds, in other words, taking away the meaning of the relation between necessary labor and surplus labor (which, as Marx says, is in the final instance the foundation of everything). At this very moment, socialism becomes impossible.'
So Library Mall, where academic labor struggles for class difference in a supposed democracy, where one can learn to read the capitalist landscape much as one can learn to read graffiti.