Pandemonium: The Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve

by Angela Mitropoulos

In November 2019, a new strain of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread across the world. Since then, the pandemic has exposed the brutal limits of care and health under capitalism. Pandemonium examines how a virus became a crisis along racial, class and gendered borders, shaped by the legacies of colonialism in which deaths are passed off as inevitable. It questions the dangers of capitalist understandings of order and disorder, of health and disease, and of life itself.

From the origins of the crisis at the crossroads of the bio-pharmaceutical industry, fossil-fueled pollution, and the privatization of healthcare in China, Mitropoulos follows the virus spread as governments embraced reckless strategies of containment. The failures of quarantines and travel bans racialized the disease, and the reluctance to expand healthcare capacity deepened already perilous inequalities. Untested pharmaceuticals and right-wing demands to reopen the economy no matter the human cost reveal a world where the very definition of the economy is fundamentally shifting.

Pandemonium demands a radical epidemiology—one that is informed by an understanding of the interdependence of living things, involving both the power of combined human agency and the molecular swerve.

Genres: Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

How did neoliberalism lead to neo-fascism? We all want to know. Miropoulos wrote this book in 2020 to explain how the weird stuff we saw from governments in the US, the UK and elsewhere during start of the COVID-19 pandemic fit into that. How much of the failed policies were because of neo-fascism and how much sprang from neoliberal policies?

I'm usually intimidated by the philosophical jargon of critical theory, but I think I took away a lot from this book. My first clue that I wasn't going to miss everything was when she discussed attempts to rehabilitate "nineteenth-century dirtbag philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche from his justified association with the history of fascism." She then goes on to-shock!-place Nietzsche in historical context! Like knowing what was happening might make a difference to understanding his thought!

Here's some context for the pandemic I definitely didn't have: Wuhan underwent a privatization of public housing and healthcare in the 1980s and 1990s. Mitropoulos speaks of a collapse of public healthcare in China. Wuhan has terrible air pollution. In the meantime, as Mitropoulos notes, the rest of the world can point at the start of the pandemic in China and make up exoticizing stories about what Chinese people eat or how "Asian values" of deference could have contributed to a slower response to the virus. Those ideas weren't new to me, but the idea that China's supposedly still communist society fails to provide free healthcare--that was new.

Mitropoulos has done research on this level through the entire book. For example, she explains the original meaning of the term "herd immunity" and the perverse ways that governments used it. She explains catastrophe bonds, a kind of financial instrument that pays out only when enough people have died--that is, that the funds cannot be used for prevention. One piece that was interesting for me was Mitropoulos' explanation of the role of irrational "patriarchal feelings" in Platonic philosophy, and how that related to Trump's espousal of hydroxychloraquine and other quick cures.

On some level, this is a book about the continuities between distinct yet related phenomena. If I understood this right, and I make no guarantee, Mitropoulos is tracing the lineage of the decision to let people die in the pandemic back to Platonic rationalism--a rationalism with an underlying irrationality, "a seemingly inexplicable but otherwise remarkably consistent feeling and desire for selecting this categorical predicate over that." Not only does this, as she says, underpin exoticist explanations for the virus (i.e., if we close our borders, the virus can't come in) but also, decisions to deprive people of medical help or PPE or other human needs based on whether doing so is profitable.

[Frank Keizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense little book that I have to return to in order to be able to parse out the argument more fully. It engages in a critique - lays out the conditions of possibility - of the capitalist countries' response to the pandemic and how that response has led to the proliferation of capital-led regimes of power and control, doubling down on neoliberalism, authoritarian populism and far right racist rhetoric. It explores some far-reaching, not often plotted connections, for example between the whole edifice of economic liberalism - contracts, bonds, property law - and biological concepts like contagion, or between a fatherly ethos of care and intuitively accessed but dangerously unsafe 'knowledge', suppressing other regimes of public health and economy not predicated on the patriarchal household. The book shows how this has stamped a reactionary disease control strategy, focusing on quarantine, herd immunity, the promotion of dubious pharmaka and pandemic bonds - to the detriment of historically disenfranchised, marginalized populations, whose biopolitical control has intensified during this crisis. Bottom line is, even with the pandemic ongoing and the postpandemic future susceptible to the title's epidemic swerve, that what has come to pass, did not have to come to pass and was never inevitable. Neither is the future; may it swerve into a direction that will undo not just the symptoms, but the violent causes at the root.

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

quick read of covid politics by one of the sharpest and most unique Marxist-feminist critics out there. goes to some different places than the standard-issue readings out there, including a fascinating reading of why Trump et al would be so psychically invested in hydroxyzine, and a crucial account of pandemic bonds. highly recommended!