Covid is dead! Long live Covid!
Covid is here to stay until collective action is taken to eradicate it
The scourge of the virus that doesn’t die is surging once again, with multiple new sub-variants bringing with them yet another new wave of death, debility and disability. Many of us are being reinfected for the second or even third time this year alone. So far Covid-19 is estimated to have killed around 23 million people (based on excess deaths) and debilitated or disabled more than 144 million. The normalisation of preventable death continues. For many their infection will probably pass with little consequence, but many will develop Long Covid and for some it will be debilitating and disabling, with no end in sight. A recent University of Glasgow study showed that 42% had only partially recovered at 18 months post-infection, with 6% showing no recovery at all. These were people who were not-hospitalised. The study corroborated other findings that Long Covid causes significant impairment of daily activities, including impairing the ability to work. And we don’t know the full long term effects of this novel virus, though plenty of research indicates cause for concern.
The state policy of forced infection means there will be more social murder—to add to the 330,000 excess deaths from austerity policies in the last decade, as found by a recent study. Disabled people are at the greatest risk—far more likely to die from the virus. Therefore, those who are medically vulnerable have to continue to be highly cautious—a depressing and exhausting state to have to inhabit. Politicians and pundits tell us that the death rate is lower now thanks to the vaccine but this overlooks the continued deaths. In effect these will be considered acceptable deaths—unavoidable deaths—if we wish to live without Covid protections. But it doesn’t have to be this way and indeed it can’t, particularly if the many millions of vulnerable people have any chance to exist more safely in society again. Further, vulnerability isn’t fixed, whether through, for example, pregnancy, other illnesses, or s a by-product of ageing itself.
On top of this, the NHS is struggling to survive the continued onslaught of viral mutations. Covid isn’t the primary cause of its demise but it might provide its final death knell. Until we organise to eradicate1 the virus—and in so doing revolutionise the political economy of health—it will continue to cause havoc and sick people will continue to be excluded from a fuller participation in society. The opportunity is to overcome systemic ableism and the widespread oppression of sick, disabled people and in the process institute stronger workers’ rights, rebuild health care systems, and claw power back from the stranglehold of capital. Organising around Covid doesn’t have to be a distraction from other political struggles, it can become a core component of wider struggles.
Everything is fine
Evolutionary Epidemiologist, Rob Wallace, remarks that ‘Pandemics are mirrors in which countries see themselves’. In the case of Britain, that mirror reflects the ruling class sipping champagne as the caskets pile up. Mixed government messaging, repeated scandals, more than 208,000 deaths, and still the charade continues. Johnson told us that “living with the virus” would ‘restore freedom’. 50,000 people have died from Covid-19 since “Freedom Day” in the UK. It was anything but freedom for many, such as the immunocompromised and chronically sick, who lost some of their freedom to participate more safely in society.
Reopening society was justified on the basis that the vaccine would suppress the virus and drastically reduce the risk of developing Long Covid. Yet we are still unclear how much the vaccine reduces the incidence of Long Covid. Estimates vary wildly. The vaccine, whilst still important, is not the panacea we all desperately hoped it would be and of course its global distribution has been marshalled by imperialist capital. The UK has administered 225 doses per 100 people, whereas in Yemen there have been just 3.2 doses per 100 people. And whilst the vaccine has helped to “decouple” deaths from infections, the vaccine alone was never meant to do all the work and Omicron is showing incredible ability to evade immunity and keeps spawning new offspring.
Whilst the unnecessarily draconian measures taken by the government for much of the first phase of the pandemic undoubtedly took their mental toll and eroded public support for Covid protections, swinging wildly the other way has placed millions of people further in harm’s reach. And ultimately, none of us know who is susceptible to this virus. You might have been fine with your first infection but what about the fifth? The media have done a sterling job of obfuscating the risk of the virus for the last two and a half years. There have been an abundance of Covid minimisers, but reporting has also shown a lack of basics. Particularly in 2022, when it seems the media has mostly given up on its job of reporting on the severity of the situation. Sensationalising aspects of the pandemic in the first 12 months no doubt contributed to pandemic fatigue. In response, we were told we could live with the virus, that the vaccine would be enough. And yet it is clear that we are going to suffer repeated reinfection and each time people suffer. Even if someone doesn’t go on to experience health complications, people lose work, have to repeatedly suffer unpleasant illness and miss life events. Even if you’re not ill for years, you might be ill for weeks or months.
The biology of the virus continues to be catastrophically ignored. Where once people understood that masking was important, now people believe the virus is inconsequential and thus it doesn’t matter if they contract it nor pass it on. Also, people have now been so exposed to the virus, that desensitisation has occurred. If your job exposes you to the virus all day long, why would you wear a mask on a bus? If you have been ok thus far why would you be concerned for yourself? Maybe another factor is that masking reminds us of 2020/21. A time many of us would rather forget. Going back to masking, for many, might represent a regression, a failure. Wearing a mask in public now marks you as someone who doesn’t believe the pandemic is over. It gets you strange looks. What’s more British than the ruling class commanding us all to stop complaining and get on with it whilst they carry on partying at our expense?
However, deaths alone, not to minimise the tragedy of every death, are not the only marker of the virus’ impact. During the last wave, all the way back in July, Ambulances in England were ‘under intense pressure’ according to the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, with ambulances queued outside as people died awaiting basic care. Hospitalisations are once again on the rise, placing even more pressure on the NHS, just as we head into winter. Several hospitals have declared critical incidents and important operations are being cancelled once again. Covid also kills indirectly. Of course, the pathology runs deeper than Omicron’s tenacious transmissibility, but it’s placing extra stress on a health system that is run down, underfunded, overburdened and outdated, from decades of austerity. There is a reason why deaths per capita from Covid in the UK are roughly double that of Germany. S4C revealed that nearly a quarter of all deaths (up to May 2021) from COVID-19 in Wales were caused by infections contracted in hospital. And yet still hospitals don’t provide adequate PPE for their staff.
NHS waiting lists are at record levels and targets are failing to be met across the board. Some cancer treatment targets are at their worst ever levels. More than 60,000 people in Wales have been waiting more than two years for treatment. Predictably, the private sector is feeding off increased demand, as patients who can afford to, seek the treatment they need to survive. Falling standards is driving the privatisation of the NHS. The Covid crisis doing the work of disaster capital. The NHS cannot live with the strain of the virus, and all those who cannot afford private medical insurance, will lose out. The noose of medical insurance that we associate with the US will shortly be pulled around our own necks. For decades governments have pushed “efficiency” targets onto the NHS leading to little capacity to deal with shocks. And if you think Labour will be any different to the Tories then check out the Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting’s privatisation-friendly comments.
When the pandemic mirror is shown to Britain, the reflection is ugly.
Keep calm and carry on. Just get over it and pull yourself together. We’re all fine.
Eugenics by numbers
The abandonment of disabled people to the virus as collateral damage is along the same lines as the abandonment of those in the Global South to the ravages of vaccine apartheid. In both cases capital has deemed these people expendable and not worth the cost. They are deemed surplus by liberal-capitalism. This is the logic of eugenics. Adler-Bolton informs how the legacy of eugenics ‘inspired a template, which drives our preference for policies that prefer the elimination of vulnerable life over society meeting the vulnerables’ needs.’
The combined tactic of letting the virus rip and abandoning medically vulnerable people to “shield” themselves is rooted in the logic of eugenics where a disabled life is worth less, literally, according to health economists who eugenically wield QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years). These health economists mask eugenics in superficially neutral, scientific arguments that conceals their underlying ideology rooted in Social Darwinism. They shrug their shoulders, suck in air and coldly explain away the lives of the sick and old who are not financially worth protecting, according to their calculations. They call themselves realists. The people we love are dehumanised on spreadsheets that predict the cost savings of coffins over meds and hospital beds. All justified by the rhetoric of “unavoidable deaths” and “underlying conditions”. The NHS must be protected at all costs, the government said. Even if that meant sending elderly people prematurely to their deaths, in the tens of thousands. Health care rationing dictated by cold, detached technocrats sat on high in their virus-free, echo chambers.
Back in June 2020, Rachel O’Brien warned how ‘disabled people are becoming an unacceptable sacrifice’. The culling of disabled people, whether through conscious intention or through neglect has always been at the very core of the eugenics project. During the first wave, nearly a third of people admitted to hospital for Covid had, ‘Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation’ orders applied to them. These were, predictably, disabled people. Despite the imposition that they weren’t worth the bed they occupied, the majority of these people, in defiance, survived their acute Covid. Atrocities occurred, such as the tragic death of Susan Sullivan, who was refused medical treatment at Barnet Hospital, due to her disabilities.
The broader left can’t absolve itself of its own role in legitimising ableist ideology, after Novara Media decided to host eugenicist Peter Singer on their prime Tysyksour podcast. A man who believes that it’s beneficial to euthanise disabled infants. Who has also authored an article entitled ‘Why We Must Ration Health Care’. These are the arguments that underpin justification that disabled people are worth less, and thus leads to policies where disabled people are abandoned to die at a far higher rate. The left’s ignorance of disability justice playing the role of legitimising the broader intellectual and ideological justification for these atrocities. As Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author of forthcoming Health Communism and co-host of Death Panel podcast, writing about eugenics and Covid highlights:
When you’re only entitled to the survival you can buy—it’s no wonder that simple cost-benefit analysis has the tendency to white wash genocidal eugenic policies.
Masking in public spaces, combined with isolation protocols and free testing, whilst far from sufficient, did allow those of us who cannot risk catching the virus (or catch it again and again) to have some extra safety and confidence to participate in social life, than we do now. The mitigations also gave more protection to frontline workers—although not nearly enough protection. “Freedom Day” depended upon the negation of the (already limited) freedom of disabled people. The medicalised, individualised model of disability being further adopted en masse where we are all forced to do what we can for ourselves within our classed means. The neglect of disabled people in this pandemic, not an aberration, but a continuation and deepening of the norm.
Living with the virus
This is no euphemism, research has now shown that the virus persists in immunologically-privileged sites and the blood for at least twelve months. Long Covid is multi-systemic. In the UK it’s diagnosed if you suffer ongoing Covid symptoms for more than twelve weeks. Many Long Covid “long haulers” are diagnosed with ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). It varies by person but Long Covid can include: being bed-bound, nausea, tachycardia, fainting, vertigo, migraine, debilitating fatigue, muscle and joint pain, post-exertional malaise, microclots, chest pain, gastrointestinal upset, hives and rashes, insomnia, neuropathy, cognitive dysfunction and memory issues, amongst other symptoms. It wreaks havoc across your body.
There is an assumption made, particularly reinforced by the media, that Long Covid is a temporary illness for most. There is no evidence to support this. Some improve and some show little or no sign of improvement, years later. Part of the confusion with Long Covid is definitional. It ranges from post-viral syndrome that clears up after a period of months to severe disability and serious health complications. Roulette is being played with the health of millions. It’s also a lonely experience that isolates you from loved ones and the rest of society, where you face persistent gaslighting and little medical support.
In the UK, 2,300,000 people have Long Covid with 514,000 people reporting Long Covid for more than two years, and 1,100,000 for more than a year, according to the latest ONS data. 438,000 people have developed Long Covid since Omicron so far, representing 24% of total Long Covid patients. Unsurprisingly, this is fuelling labour shortages. Currently around 32,000 children have had it for at least twelve months. In the US, since Omicron, infants are now being hospitalised at a higher rate than the over 75s. Globally, 144 million are conservatively expected to have Long Covid. This is a mass disabling event with multiple unknown long term consequences. These people are now deemed surplus, as so many disabled people are by capitalist society. As of June there were 10,000 NHS staff off sick with Long Covid for more than 3 months and many others burnt out. The NHS in England, Scotland and Wales has also recently decided to end indefinite sick pay for healthcare workers suffering from Long Covid. Healthcare workers with Long Covid have been abandoned.
As with everything, people’s experience with Long Covid is divided along class lines. Those with the means to do so are able to take extended leave from work, rely on paid support, see private consultants, stock the cupboard with supplements, and fly around the world trialling experimental treatments. Everyone else is left to suffer with little medical support and few medications. Still now, too many medical professionals psychologise the disease and gaslight their patients despite copious research showing its devastating pathophysiology. Something ME/CFS sufferers have been subjected to for decades. It’s important not to present Long Covid as entirely unique—what’s unique is its scale. Influenza itself also causes death and disability. Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) alone is linked to ME/CFS, Multiple Sclerosis and cancer. Long Covid patients have benefited immensely from the knowledge, solidarity and experiences of those with ME/CFS, and this cross-disability solidarity must be built upon, ensuring the attention garnered by Long Covid is extended to other conditions.
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), that bulldog of the British austerity state, have been militantly opposing those with Long Covid from claiming Personal Independence Payments (PIP), despite so many losing the ability to leave the house, nevermind hold down a job. Long Covid forums are full of people desperately exhausted but having to continue working, as much as they can. Energy spent working to survive rather than recovering. Along with others who can’t work, they’re suffering the dehumanising, cold bureaucratic violence of the PIP process that gatekeeps the meagre welfare offered by the state. A change could be seen due to the recent tribunal ruling of Long Covid as a disability, which should make it easier for people with Long Covid to claim PIP.
How to politicise sufferers of Long Covid? Currently, the politics of the Long Covid community are borrowed from a liberal framework that demands the state to act rationally on behalf of its “citizens”. Appeals are made to a rational, democratic state that does not exist—ignorant of the power of capital. Students of sciences and medical/health professions are not really taught to question the nature of the state—a faith in technocracy is in-built into the training. Many NHS workers have come to the realisation, the hard way as a sick patient, that the healthcare system can be irrational and often does not serve the needs of the patient and instead pits doctor and patient in antagonism.
In lieu of medical guidance, mutual aid support groups have formed where patients help inform each other on the latest research, medications and practices that can help alleviate suffering and provide guidance on how to struggle with PIP, whilst providing necessary emotional support. There is care and solidarity shown to each other. Clearly, there are obvious limitations and challenges, but there is political motivation as we will never be safe while Covid is in widespread circulation, anywhere on the planet. Even those who go on to make a recovery from Long Covid, they still require the elimination of the virus to be safe. Chronic illness can be a politicising (and proletarianising) moment in someone’s life.
Class character of Covid
In England in 2021, people living in the most deprived parts were more than twice as likely to die from Covid as those living in more well-off areas. A survey carried out by Trades Union Congress in May showed that only 29% of workers (and 14% of disabled workers) feel safe going to work, since remaining protections were lifted earlier this year. Covid safety is workplace safety. NHS advice is still to isolate whilst you test positive, but with the consequences for many meaning lost income, it means we often can’t protect each other and the power is with employers.
All the same, there is potential for organising. However, the British left appears to have acquiesced to the prevailing narrative of “living with the virus”. Feeling like there is little to be done but get on with it, which is understandable, given pandemic fatigue. And it’s not as if Covid is the only pressing political concern of the day. Disabled comrades, however, are not feeling much solidarity from the rest of the left, which is not a new phenomenon unfortunately. There is a reason why this piece has had to lean so heavily on US thinkers. Again, Adler-Bolton points out, ‘Pandemic nihilism is not the solution.’ This virus isn’t going away in this perfect petri dish. Last year, there was a hope that the vaccine would end the pandemic, which is what we were repeatedly told. Omicron broke that bubble. But who wants to be reminded of Covid-19 anymore? It’s nearly 2023.
It will take targeted public health interventions to exit the pandemic. But the left hasn’t yet started to form a clear position. It barely makes a ripple on left media outlets or discussions. There has been no meaningful engagement with the topic in 2022, and basically none at all on Long Covid. One thing for sure, the left’s disengagement from the everyday struggles of disabled people is one of the core reasons. If it wasn’t detached from the struggle for disability justice, it wouldn’t be able to move on from the pandemic. It wouldn’t be able to discuss the social model of disability whilst glaringly ignoring its implementation for the sick and vulnerable at left-organised events. Ableism persists. Referencing the work of Marta Russell, Nate Holdren asks us to consider “what it would mean if we sought to make disability a more central category within Marxism.”
Earlier optimism around a resurging awareness of our interconnectedness and the importance of mutual aid and care for one another was ground down by the media, government and capital as well as the exhausting reality of life in a pandemic. It often degraded into a cop mentality where neighbours spied and snitched on each other. josie sparrow pointed out in the first wave that there was opportunity for ‘developing and deepening relationships based on reciprocal trust, love, and the assumption of basic goodness’. An opportunity that was mostly passed by. Right from the get go elderly and disabled people who died from the virus were excused away. The BBC ran an article in April 2020 reassuring the rest of the public that ‘nine in 10 dying have existing illness.’ Phew. A sigh of relief was breathed across much of the country. They were going to die anyway. Sorry nan. These are just ‘deaths pulled from the future’. This is how people justified mass death. It was happening to them, not us.
Right libertarians pinned their hopes on Sweden. A country that has had a disastrous pandemic, though that didn't stop the media showing us pictures from Stockholm with people carrying on with life sitting in cafes. Meanwhile Sweden’s death toll per capita is three times that of its neighbour Norway. Nor do they mention the elderly people in Sweden who were left to die without access to medical treatment because of eugenic healthcare rationing that overlooked their ability to survive the virus. British children’s author, Michael Rosen, poignantly recalls speaking to a ‘famous journalist’, who after learning about his ordeal of 48 days in intensive care with Covid-19 exclaimed, ‘but you are 74’.
However, we must resist simplistic binaries between being pro or anti lockdown. The same government that didn’t care to save the lives of elderly or disabled people, also didn’t care to help those who were hit hard by lockdown. Who was excluded from the safety that lockdowns were implemented to provide? Jobs were lost, forcing people into poverty. Borders were strengthened, acutely impacting racialised people. People who suffer domestic violence were kept in hellish prisons of the home with little way out. Children had their social bonds abruptly disrupted. The first lockdown was a necessary evil but it can’t be seen as the “good old days” of pandemic management when “politicians cared”. It was an emergency measure that exacerbated and highlighted the inequalities and suffering of capitalist society. Our analysis necessitates complexity.
In reality, despite complicated glimpses of solidarity the messy period of heavy Covid restrictions was beset by a settled conservative notion of community. There was a surveilling of others, rather than finding ways of supporting each other through crisis. The rich were protected by the poor. Conservatism was evident in the Churchillian language of the period and the enduring nostalgic myth of “the blitz spirit”, as Gareth Leaman explored in his piece ‘The British Virus’. There was mostly no transformation in national consciousness.
Frontline workers were forced to work anyway, in unsafe environments, often serving and caring for those fortunate enough to bake sourdough bread at home or flee to country retreats. They were provided little protection. Essential workers were fetishised and then disavowed in quintessential British manner. Furlough schemes mostly aided the middle class, whilst gig workers, the “precariat” and the self-employed were largely left to fall through gaping holes in financial support. There didn’t need to be a breakdown in basic human values such as we saw with preventing people from saying goodbye to their loved ones, as seen during the first wave. Pregnant women should never have been denied a birthing partner in hospitals—a policy that continued long past the initial crisis. It is no accident though that the policies fell hardest on women, racialised people and the working class.
Lockdowns play towards a global, viral bio-apartheid2 and violates the humanity of migrants. Early in the pandemic there was an allure to settler-colonies like New Zealand/Aotearoa, where a quick, hard lockdown with concomitant border closures meant the islands stayed close to Covid-free for two years. That allure is the draw of bio-apartheid. New Zealand promised a place where life could continue—for a while—like normal, without Covid restrictions and without the death and disability we’ve seen pretty much everywhere else bar some exceptions—although this summer brought the first Covid wave to the islands. Is this not the model of a perfect Covid response, as the liberals tell us? In fact New Zealand/Aotearoa’s moves against Covid, are the perfect illustration as to how liberal-capitalism is looking to solve climate catastrophe through the implementation of strong borders and global eco-apartheid. More than two years later racialised families are still separated by border policy. As the article quotes: ‘A tourist from England can come in before the wife or child of someone from India who's been working here throughout the pandemic’.
Preventing people from socialising in the park and encouraging curtain-twitching was not progressive public health intervention. Any of the hardwon benefits were subsequently squandered when the virus picked back up where it left off. In the end, the reliance on lockdowns in the UK, were used in a way that prevented, rather than facilitated, more effective long-term actions being taken. They were utilised as a get-out clause, instead of addressing the fundamental factors of pathogen transmission and a declining healthcare system. Equally so the left needs to put forward serious proposals that get us out of this pandemic, organise on this basis and not simply wish it away. The basic biological fact that this airborne virus spreads like wildfire and targets the immunologically vulnerable cannot be ethically ignored. A masking requirement, for example, in indoor public spaces does not instrumentalise the same state apparatus as border closures.
Currently, vulnerable people are being asked to continue shouldering the burden of risk on behalf of the rest of the population. The lack of any Covid mitigations imposes a two-tier society. Solidarity with immunocompromised people often means wearing a mask in indoor public spaces (for those who can). It’s not the only thing but given the nature of the virus, accepting some limitations on one’s freedom, to allow greater freedom for someone else, will be required if the millions of immunocompromised people, in the UK alone, are to be safe enough to participate more fully in society. Blanche Hampton, living with lupus, an autoimmune condition, told the BBC that:
“I'm expensive and expendable. So, you know, the sooner people like me disappear, the easier it will be for everybody. You don't have any hope and it is one of the requisites for humans to want to stay alive.”
Just as with the climate crisis, where the populations of the Global North are going to have to reduce energy consumption to allow a socially just energy transition. This requires some form of normative coercion along with enabling policies. In addition, the mental health impacts for disabled people having to socially isolate for so long— the loneliness, the feeling uncared for—is given little attention. We can rightfully recognise the mental health damage caused by the long lockdowns, but the current situation is damaging the mental health of millions of people who are justified in living in fear of the virus, who have been in lockdown for two and a half years.
Demands include: community tracing, improved ventilation and air filtration/purification (particularly in classrooms and hospitals), subsidised FFP2/P3 masks and mask mandates, free regular testing, support for home working where possible, targeted and fully paid/supported “firebreaks” when necessary (and without abandoning people and care), workplace accommodations for disabled people, Evusheld for the immunosuppressed, fully paid sick and isolation leave, access to and reform of PIP and an end to vaccine (and anti-virals) bio-apartheid.
Interventions to eliminate Covid need not be divorced from more radical demands such as: ending carceralisation, the abolition of borders, the re-nationalisation of the NHS, and the abolition of factory farming, all of which factor in Covid’s spread. To prevent future pandemics there is an urgent need to abolish factory farming, which is ecologically destructive. This links the struggle against Covid, and other viruses, to wider liberatory movements. Prisons, like factory farms, are incubators of viruses, where humans and animals are abandoned and incarcerated alike. However, the demands for a world without Covid can’t be enacted unless there is some ability to wield power and change material conditions at scale.
The rise of the ‘sick proletariat’
The ongoing pandemic provides a chance to build new coalitions as part of wider struggle. Political action could focus on the World Trade Organisation’s protection of pharmaceutical profits through vaccines for the Global North over the health of those in the Global South who are subjected to vaccine bio-apartheid. Another necessity is to build a movement that mimics, and hopefully surpasses, ACT UP’s work in struggling against HIV/AIDS. Covid Action UK is campaigning for the elimination of the virus through ‘vaccines plus’ approach. Actions could focus on agitating already existing political organisations, forcing trade unions to represent their sick and at-risk members, aim to further politicise Long Covid sufferers and build cross-disability solidarity.
A key focus of Covid political organising should aim to leverage the power of resurgent worker militancy. In particular, there should be focus on NHS workers who have been treated neglectfully throughout this pandemic. More than 40,000 nurses have quit the NHS in the last twelve months. There is political potential in an organised movement of patients and NHS workers. Nurses, for the first time in their history, are being balloted on strike action. Junior doctors are being balloted in early January. This requires widespread support.
In the long term we must organise to rebuild a society that enables care for each other and does not consign sick people to a life of social isolation and ‘slow death3’? In its first year, Covid-19 saw disabled people represent 58% of UK deaths. Can we, then, build a society where we have ‘collaborative security’—security with, not security from, each other, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò asks.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, discussing ‘organised abandonment’ poses:
Given the enormous disorder that “organized abandonment” both creates and exploits, how can people who inhabit forgotten places scale up their activism from intensely localized struggles to something less atomized and therefore possessed of a significant capacity for self-determination?
Vague appeals to your MP, to decency, to rationalism, to the Big Other to bail us out, won’t work. Nor will ignoring the virus and wishing it away. The catastrophic handling of the pandemic goes deeper than failures in liberal, technocratic notions of competency. The capitalist state has always put the needs of profit before the needs of our loved ones. That’s why the eugenic “herd immunity” plan was adopted as official state policy in the UK, as other Western nations. Holdren elucidates this saying:
Capitalism produces both mass death and people in positions of institutional authority who are able to live with mass death. As such, moral appeals to the administrations’ consciences will not get us very far.
We have to find a way to live without the virus, which means eventually eradicating it, like smallpox. We’re unlikely to get there soon, but we must get there. The capitalist state has no desire to eradicate the virus on our behalf or help us live safely with it. It has found its way of “living with the virus”, through the ‘the violence of abstraction’ whereby the lives being lost, those being made chronically sick and those who have to isolate at home, are deemed expendable. Workers continue to work in unsafe conditions, whether that’s being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 or being forced to die in a tornado at an Amazon warehouse. These are not separate struggles.
The fight to find a way out of this pandemic, as much as anything, is about finding a way to institute not just an ethic of care, but the necessary political-economic means to allow us to care for one another in the way we aspire. The injunction to protect one another is only possible in a world where we are not forced to put our need to serve capital in opposition to our desire to care. The abolition of the capitalist state is the only goal that will ultimately free us from this virus, or the next. This is the only way to stop stirring up new pathogens that spread across the globe on business class flights from one financial centre to the next.
Public health interventions are required but so is the imagination, and more importantly the collective action of many, to abolish the current organisation of life that will help lead us from this increasingly apocalyptic world of virus, fire, flood and famine. Any socialist project of the coming decades will have to reckon with the new viral pressure placed upon society in a world of disintegrating and collapsing ecosystems. Movements have to be internationally oriented and not kept within regimes of colonial and neo-colonial oppression and exploitation. Many already-circulating deadly viruses are excluded from Western liberal analysis such as Ebola, and longstanding HIV/AIDS, which has slipped from popular consciousness, languishing instead as a disease of the “viral underclass” because it affects Africans more than it affects Europeans. 36,000,000 people have died of HIV so far. In 2019, 213 people died from HIV in the UK. In South Africa, 143,851 people died from HIV. Ebola is making a resurgence right now. Global bio-apartheid is an order we must abolish and is now imbricated within mobilisations against eco-apartheid.
In opposition, the capitalist state may lean into the potential of capitalist catastrophism, to leverage this ‘renewed purpose’, as Heron writes, towards a new project of eco-apartheid. Pandemics have long conflated migrants and viruses, as we seen with Covid-19. The blaming of South Africans for Omicron back in December 2021, and the subsequent reflexive demand for border closures from liberal public health experts, being a prime example. We have seen the same stigmatisation with the spread of monkeypox. Overcoming Covid will only be achieved through global collective solidarity, in defiance of the capitalist state and its racialised, eco-apartheid.
Holdren implores: ‘In the long term, we must find our way to a society that is not fundamentally murderous.’ Transitioning towards such a society will not occur through mild reformism. Building on Marx and Engels, Holdren highlights that social murder is an ongoing necessary process of capitalism—a part of its ‘social ontology’. Adler-Bolton adds that, ‘disregard for life at the systemic level is a requirement for capitalism.’ This is why it’s frustrating to see public health professionals talk about “learning lessons”. Capital accumulation requires the subordination of ecosystems and living beings. As Jason Moore puts it, capitalism is a ‘world ecology’. Ecological breakdown and pandemics are inseparable. Despite ongoing Covid-19, there is a widespread, global Avian Flu outbreak amongst poultry and wild birds. We have entered an era of pandemics due to ecological breakdown at an unprecedented scale.
To overcome it, requires coordination to ‘abolish the present state of things’ towards liberation from recurrent circulation of the virus. Jodi Dean and Kai Heron outline the necessity to actively build a revolutionary climate politics at the scale of the state. Covid requires the same—anything less relegates the virus’ impact to oppressed people, including an expanding disabled population in the Global North, along with vast numbers in the Global South. Individualist or Eurocentric rejections of global, societal action will condemn many more millions to death and disability. The ableist chauvinism shown towards those worst impacted by the virus mimics those social chauvinists in the Global North who ignore how nationalist, eco-modernist climate techno-fixes would further subordinate workers and peasants in the Global South. Localised community actions, though important building blocks, cannot alone surmount the crisis of global ecological breakdown. Trade union action is one starting point, not the final destination. In the short-term, there is a need to fight for basics like free testing, air filtration, full sick pay and the reintroduction of masking into indoor public spaces. In the longer-term, there is a need to build a revolution. Only in joining together different struggles, in this cataclysmic crisis of capitalism, can a better world be won. This virus, or the next, can’t be wished away, it is one we must overcome collectively and urgently.
The choices that were made then have determined what is happening now. And, just the same, the choices that we make now will determine what comes next. We can choose to do things differently, to begin to figure new ways of being with one another—new ways of co-creating ourselves and one another and this whole and multiple ecology within which we’re so beautifully and inextricably entangled. We can choose to nurture those seeds of possibility in memory of all those who were never permitted to bloom. Our mourning can be our organising; our organising a way of mourning. Our organising, too, a way of tending one another, with tenderness and tenacity—we flourish and we love, despite it all, because of it all.
josie sparrow, in Mutual Aid, Incorporated for New Socialist in April 2020
From the CDC: ‘Eradication: Permanent reduction to zero of the worldwide incidence of infection caused by a specific agent as a result of deliberate efforts; intervention measures are no longer needed. Example: smallpox’
This term was first applied in this context by Kai Heron in his piece Capitalist Catastrophism which was published during the first wave of SARS-CoV-2.
‘The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.’ Lauren Berlant
1 how many long covid symptoms exactly match VAR’s?
2 why was and is prevention ignored and censored? VIT D,C, zinc, quercetin, HCQ and Ivermectin?
3 no respiratory virus has ever been eradicated.
4 if you think any kind of mask can stop a respiratory virus you haven’t read the science.
5 40,000 NHS staff left because of threats of mandating an experimental MRNA injection for a disease with a 99% survival rate.