Life versus Capital: The COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of life

Abstract

Like all ostensibly “natural” disasters, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic unceasingly reveals the depths of social inequality and political myopia or governmental recklessness that predictably exacerbate the effects of a more strictly natural calamity. The pandemic thereby exposes the grotesque disparities in how illness, death, and suffering are unevenly distributed. As the COVID-19 public health crisis has summarily provoked a global economic crisis, furthermore, it is simply unthinkable to comprehend the real ramifications of the pandemic outside of the sociopolitical relations of labor and capital, more generally. Furthermore, the global public health crisis commands that we reflect anew on the relations between human life and state power. Both for those who have historically and enduringly been subjected to expulsion from gainful employment, as for those whose labor-power is a commodity of choice for capital, exceedingly selected for hyper-exploitation, the coronavirus pandemic is a toxic matter of both class and race. These dire and increasingly desperate circumstances, however, reveal not only what is most barbaric about capitalist social relations but also the opportunity latent within this crisis.