To die a thousand deaths: COVID-19,racial capitalism,and anti-Black violence

Abstract

In this short commentary, we discuss the ways in which racial capitalism has developed a historical and ecological landscape through which COVID-19 has emerged, spread, and created uneven impacts across long-standing racial divisions inseparable from capitalist accumulation and expansion. We argue that this perspective on COVID-19 (and infectious disease in general) creates strong alliances with calls for reparations rooted in abolition of policing and incarceration, especially in light of the conjuncture of pandemic and uprising in response to police violence in the United States context. By bringing long-standing Marxian notions of alienation and metabolic rift, crucial for understanding the ecological and epistemic fissures leading to COVID-19’s spread, in conversation with writing on racial capitalism and anti-Blackness, we hope to illuminate pathways to a more grounded historical and ecological analysis that supports a radical vision of ecosystem health.

Keywords

alienation COVID-19 metabolic rift racial capitalism state violence

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bledsoe

Wright

(2019) The anti-Blackness of global capital. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37(1): 8–26.doi:10.1177/0263775818805102

Derickson

(2020) Let this radicalize us: after the minneapolis uprising. Verso Blog. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4741-let-this-radicalize-us-after-the-minneapolis-uprising (accessed 15 June 2020).

Freshour

Williams

(2020) Abolition in the time of COVID-19. Antipide Online . Available at: https://antipodeonline.org/2020/04/09/abolition-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ (accessed 26 May 2020).

Gilmore

(2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moore

(2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life. New York: Verso.

Salvage Editorial Collective (2020) The covid state: dispatch three from a changing world. Available at: https://salvage.zone/articles/the-covid-state-dispatch-three-from-a-changing-world/ (accessed 29 May 2020).

Walker

(2020) The discreet charm of coronavirus. episteme issue 2: COVID-19 pandemic. Available at: http://positionswebsite.org/episteme-2-walker/ (accessed 26 May 2020).

Wilderson

(2003) Gramsci’s black Marx: whither the slave in civil society? Social Identities 9(2): 225–240.doi:10.1080/1350463032000101579

Wright

(2018) As above, so below: anti-black violence as environmental racism. Antipode 46(2): 1–19.doi:10.1111/anti.12425