Abstract
Covid-19 has thrown into relief so many key issues: the essential frailty of advanced capitalism, the potential for the state to control the life and death of citizens, the nature of human solidarity and the way in which we desecrate the planet. A virus has done the work ‘when all the sway of earth, shakes like a thing unfirm’. Now is the time for taking stock. If not now, when?
This issue of Race & Class opens with reflections by two radical writers, born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, events which turned the world upside down eight decades ago, to challenge the notions of desecration and of what it is to be human. Jeremy Seabrook, wrote, with great prescience before the virus hit, in ‘Human resourcefulness in a time of diminishing resources’ of how the depletion of the planet is being replicated in the ‘landscapes of humanity’, calling to us to relearn what real needs are. Exactly what we learn today through lockdown. Peter Pelz comes from another direction in ‘The desk killer and the spider’, a review of Gretton’s I You We Them, Journeys beyond Evil: the desk killer in history and today, to speak about communal and individual responsibility for major crimes, again so topical when eugenicist policies beckon.
As newly empowered bureaucracies now, mid-Covid-19, essentially decide who is to live and who not, the issue of professional collusion in repressive state policies becomes key. This was one of the themes discussed in February 2020 by activists, professionals and academics, at a seminar at the Institute of Race Relations in its series on state racism, public health and policy harms; see ‘Coercion and compliance: the politics of the “hostile environment”’ in the Commentary section. And anthropologist Nanna Dahler, too, in ‘Age estimation of young asylum seekers in Denmark’ examines ‘biometric bureaucracy as imperial control’ and how states manage thereby to depoliticise the questions of dispossession and death.
As Pelz notes, ‘not even the richest are immune’ from this present pandemic. But that does not mean either that it will affect us all equally or that we have equal possibilities of surviving it. Those already ‘stigmatised and segregated’ as are the Roma of Údol, Czech Republic, writes Barbora Černušáková, have pre- and post-Covid-19 had to rely on community networks that have replaced the state, that has effectively written them out already. Such ‘surplus populations’, especially those contained and confined in institutions because of age, mental illness, immigration status, criminalisation, are inevitably bearing the brunt of Covid-19. (The situation for desperate and often ill and vulnerable asylum seekers, awaiting decisions, who are being ‘held’ in UK hostels, run by private companies, is being recorded on IRR News, the fortnightly online bulletin of the IRR.)
Since the demise of ‘socialist transformations’ in the Third World and the predominance of neoliberalism throughout the world, those of us in progressive journals like Race & Class have been searching for fault lines to prise open, beacons of hope to guide us. It is ironic that when everything pointed to there being ‘no alternative’ to neoliberalism the possibility of an alternative is, as it were, finding its way into our global bloodstream, via a microscopic virus. All the big questions are there: can capitalism survive, the limit between market and state, how equal are democracies, what limit on state-cum-corporate surveillance, the use and misuse of science, who controls our information, who is my neighbour, how do we want to live.
If we do not turn to face these demanding existential questions now, then when?