Publié en 2020

Even before COVID-19 arrived in the United States, it was apparent that in deploying the virus as a propagandistic parry against China, conservatives and liberals alike would make matters worse by imposing an opportunity cost. By crowding the social space with saber-rattling, the United States would fail to take notes about the outbreak and China’s responses pro and con—so as to make adequate and internationally teamed preparations.

Certainly it’s a bipartisan miscalculation borne more out of structural decay than mere hubris or bad data, but the problem extends across the sweep of respectable politics. These broader cultural pathologies, entwined into the literal pathologies of the pandemic, are on full digital peacock display beyond Chang and his ilk. The near entirety of the chatter sphere manifests a primal incapacity to adapt a holistic social and ecological perspective. Little subtle, flexible, and capacious thought—capable of encapsulating both the technical-policy-public health sphere of prevention and prophylaxis and the social-ecological-civilizational domain of responding to the problem from the bottom up—is on offer. No one is caught dead taking the lead of the world’s most affected dispossessed, who might know something about such thinking.

One instead traces a long arc of incompetence, reductionism, social triage, capitalist Mad Hatter logic, technicist tomfoolery, and rank opportunism. From the privatized right to the public left, influencers political and academic have been studiously incapable of responding to the crisis. Against all notions of political ecology, the pandemic is a « Chinese virus » on the right wing or an « act of God » on the left, removing off the board any notion of refounding our agrarian practices or the other modes of social reproduction that together drove the emergence of COVID-19.

In 2011, science journalist Laurie Garrett wrote on the « alarming regularity » of accidents in biosafety labs around the world. The accidents are as much a matter of numbers as any one lab’s poor safety record. A 2013 Princeton University study showed an increasing global population exposed to the risk of accidents from biosafety laboratories pursuing studies of some of the world’s most dangerous diseases.

The study, conducted by health geographer Thomas Van Boeckel and colleagues, showed the population living within the commuting field of BSL-4 labs increased by a factor of four from 1990 to 2012. The fields summed together encapsulate nearly 2 percent of the world’s population. Any escape infection could potentially seed an outbreak able to hop upon the global travel network to infect the rest of the world in short order. Since 9/11, thousands of new BSL-3 and -4 labs have been built for studying pathogens. The team noted a particular surge in Asia, describing, among others, new labs in Taiwan, Singapore, Pune, Bhopal, and, listed in the appendix, Wuhan.

The lab bubble appears to have arisen out of a combination of legitimate concerns about emergent infectious diseases, the return of « respectable » biowarfare research, the ideological demands of the War on Terror, and the next iteration in Keynesian military economy. The sum effect includes producing the very threat of outbreak the labs were ostensibly set up to stop. Expanding such labs in number and geographic extent bends rare events like viral escape toward inevitability. The labs represent a political logistics folding in calculated dangers that science propaganda spins away as so much conspiracy theory.

In 2004 alone, four separate SARS escapes were reported _out of the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology used a « less virulent » SARS strain to test lab disinfectants. Are we going to pretend such things don’t happen ?

You can find a dossier that an anonymous group of self-identified researchers put together in favor of the lab accident theory here. I find some of its inferences and criticism on target and others unconvincing.

[…]

So, what is the Solomonic choice here ? All the contending parties—the United States and Chinese governments, the EcoHealth Alliance, scientists, and conspiracy theorists alike—can piss off. Because they told us all to do so ourselves and are attempting to dump responsibility on each other, letting the whole gang escape. Allowing such hubris to continue to run amok would be an act of self-destruction beyond the COVID pandemic and what climate change already has in store for us.

[…]

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes of liberal parliamentarianism’s neo-Kantian opposition of truth and opinion. In the spectacle of debate, we are allowed to struggle over opinion, the core of the extreme center’s politics, but truth is never up for grabs, we’re told. It’s instead locked away in journals and think tanks that the state and philanthrocapitalists own. And the plebs—left coughing on their couches, not from ritual fire but a virus, their pains and sorrows untrue because these are carefully left undocumented—are never allowed access to the official story as a matter of first principle.

Consciously or not, by devious intent or the best of intentions, in accepting what appear diametrically opposed premises that in actuality are scattered together around the dictates of capital and the imperial states that serve it, the various factions of power—money, political class, the latest in colonial medicine—all back some version of expropriation or empire building that regularly spring deadly diseases. By this season, Midvinter 2019, that Great Game finished off a drag race of protopandemic SARS across lab and field alike.

One strain of the many still circulating got out. I’m betting this round that pandemic SARS emerged along the increasingly industrialized wild animal commodity chain from hinterlands and border towns as far south and west as Yunnan. On the last leg of its domestic tour, the virus made its way to Wuhan by truck or plane and then the world.

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 ?

… De toute façon le soir
A tendance à modifier les choses. Moins la couleur,
La qualité d’une poignée de main, une haleine douteuse,
Qu’une impatience générale à voir les comptes faits,
Les fleurs disposées loin de tout regard.
…