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The Political Economy of Pestilence

2023; Volume: 31; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sym.2023.a914676

1534-0627

Peter Hitchcock,

Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance

The Political Economy of Pestilence Peter Hitchcock (bio) The topic I have chosen to discuss briefly is obviously expansive, shall we say viral, because it refers in part to the ways in which world systems are structured and can be analyzed as such. Recent experience tells us that the impact of widespread pestilence can be severe, although what constitutes its decisive metric has proved to be quite contentious. We are too close and indeed still within the ravages of COVID-19 to tease out the full extent of its contradictory logic of determinate social symptoms (despite the penchant for instant books and modes of declarative commentary), yet we may be able to discern elements of its complex meaning toward a materialist critique of the transmissible in the grammar of contemporary morbidity. We know within late or contemporary actually existing capitalism, pandemic disruption was global and often devastating, and I will refer to some of this below, but initially let us focus on one dimension in order to assay the others: death. COVID-19 has accentuated the meaning of death for modes of production, and Marx, for instance, was never shy to theorize its conceptual impress within the terms of political economy. You can make money from the dead, but in general the dead themselves do not have the labor power available for the extraction and accumulation of surplus value. When Marx used the term dead labor he meant labor otherwise congealed or ossified in commodities and machinery (dead work, not workers)—that workers, subsequently, as living labor and consummate reanimators could work up into new products anxiously dead again in a seemingly endless round of capitalist socioeconomic relations. More than this, Marx noted that "[c]apital [itself] is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks" (1977, 342; "Das Kapital ist verstorbne Arbeit, die sich nur vampyrmäßig belebt durch Einsaugung lebendiger Arbeit und um so mehr lebt, je mehr sie davon einsaugt"). The life-draining drive of capital informs the super genre of our time, resonant in popular culture as the vampire narrative, but it also populates the zombie story used to characterize capitalism as a whole: from Chris Harman (2010) to Wolfgang Streeck (2016), capitalism is read to seethe with multimorbidities, and it wards off expiration with [End Page 441] an ontology that cheekily announces it is already dead. The idea of death as a calculus in relations of production and reproduction is a first foundation but is no less dynamic than any other constituent. Killing labor is, for the capitalist, an unfortunate but necessary by-product of capital accumulation (necro-economic exploitation is itself contagious). The trick in most industries, whether objectified in the iPhone or the World Cup in Qatar, is to keep just enough of labor alive to sustain another business cycle. Labor needs sufficient blood to reproduce itself and consume—take too much and it may treat you to its own version of irrational exuberance, a jiggling arrêt de mort caught between insurrection and interment. In general, modes of capitalism survive not by an insatiable murderous desire qua labor but actually by a nervous pharmacological fix bent on relative homeostasis, one part poison, one part cure. When it comes to pestilence, few are surprised by Big Pharma's profiteering, during peak COVID estimated to reach $65,000 a minute. Yet the economic impact was and is severe, creating a crisis where health workers have been worked to death attempting to prevent it. Pestilence, indeed, reveals the deep structural antinomies of political economy and no more so than when an entire economic system itself is at stake (Galbraith 2021). Historically, plague has been a prime disruptor and influencer. Although the decline of the Roman Empire was the result of many factors, including the sharp resistance of colonial subjects who questioned its beneficence, what became known as the Antonine Plague (from around AD 160), most likely smallpox, killed upward of 10 percent of the empire's population and shattered the Roman army. The Black Death of the fourteenth century deigned to be more global and from East Asia to Western Europe thrived on...