Wallace, COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital

To avoid the worst out­comes here on out, disa­lie­na­tion offers the next great human tran­si­tion : aban­do­ning set­tler ideo­lo­gies, rein­tro­du­cing huma­ni­ty back into Earth’s cycles of rege­ne­ra­tion, and redis­co­ve­ring our sense of indi­vi­dua­tion in mul­ti­tudes beyond capi­tal and the state. However, eco­no­mism, the belief that all causes are eco­no­mic alone, will not be libe­ra­tion enough. Global capi­ta­lism is a many-hea­ded hydra, appro­pria­ting, inter­na­li­zing, and orde­ring mul­tiple layers of social rela­tion. Capitalism ope­rates across com­plex and inter­lin­ked ter­rains of race, class, and gen­der in the course of actua­li­zing regio­nal value regimes place to place.

At the risk of accep­ting the pre­cepts of what his­to­rian Donna Haraway dis­mis­sed as sal­va­tion history—“Can we defuse the bomb in time?”—disalienation must dis­mantle these mul­ti­fold hie­rar­chies of oppres­sion and the locale-spe­ci­fic ways they inter­act with accu­mu­la­tion. Along the way, we must navi­gate out of capital’s expan­sive reap­pro­pria­tions across pro­duc­tive, social, and sym­bo­lic mate­ria­lisms. That is, out of what sums up to a tota­li­ta­ria­nism. Capitalism com­mo­di­fies everything—Mars explo­ra­tion here, sleep there, lithium lagoons, ven­ti­la­tor repair, even sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty itself, and on and on—these many per­mu­ta­tions are found well beyond the fac­to­ry and farm. All the ways near­ly eve­ryone eve­ryw­here is sub­jec­ted to the mar­ket, which during a time like this is increa­sin­gly anthro­po­mor­phi­zed by poli­ti­cians, could not be clea­rer.

In short, a suc­cess­ful inter­ven­tion kee­ping any one of the many patho­gens queuing up across the agroe­co­no­mic cir­cuit from killing a bil­lion people must walk through the door of a glo­bal clash with capi­tal and its local repre­sen­ta­tives, howe­ver much any indi­vi­dual foot sol­dier of the bour­geoi­sie, Glen among them, attempts to miti­gate the damage. As our research group des­cribes in some of our latest work, agri­bu­si­ness is at war with public health. And public health is losing.

Should, howe­ver, grea­ter huma­ni­ty win such a gene­ra­tio­nal conflict, we can replug our­selves back into a pla­ne­ta­ry meta­bo­lism that, howe­ver dif­fe­rent­ly expres­sed place to place, recon­nects our eco­lo­gies and our eco­no­mies. Such ideals are more than mat­ters of the uto­pian. In doing so, we converge on imme­diate solu­tions. We pro­tect the forest com­plexi­ty that keeps dead­ly patho­gens from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto the world’s tra­vel net­work. We rein­tro­duce the live­stock and crop diver­si­ties, and rein­te­grate ani­mal and crop far­ming at scales that keep patho­gens from ram­ping up in viru­lence and geo­gra­phic extent. We allow our food ani­mals to repro­duce onsite, res­tar­ting the natu­ral selec­tion that allows immune evo­lu­tion to track patho­gens in real time. Big pic­ture, we stop trea­ting nature and com­mu­ni­ty, so full of all we need to sur­vive, as just ano­ther com­pe­ti­tor to be run off by the mar­ket.

The way out is nothing short of bir­thing a world—or per­haps more along the lines of retur­ning back to Earth. It will also help solve—sleeves rol­led up—many of our most pres­sing pro­blems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mour­ning our dead, want to go through such an out­break again. Yes, infec­tious diseases, for most of human his­to­ry our grea­test source of pre­ma­ture mor­ta­li­ty, will remain a threat. But given the bes­tia­ry of patho­gens now in cir­cu­la­tion, the worst spilling over now almost annual­ly, we are like­ly facing ano­ther dead­ly pan­de­mic in far shor­ter time than the hun­dred-year lull since 8. Can we fun­da­men­tal­ly adjust the modes by which we appro­priate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infec­tions ?