Thread by @AlexHeffron20

Superb piece from @n_hold

"Capitalism produces both mass death and people in positions of institutional authority who are able to live with mass death. As such, moral appeals to the administrations’ consciences will not get us very far."

blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/21/dep…

"Thus any serious effort at mitigating this catastrophic episode of social murder in the short term can only take as its starting point how large numbers of ordinary people can create serious consequences for those at the heights of power."

"In the long term, we must find our way to a society that is not fundamentally murderous."

The left has overlooked the significance of the pandemic and how it should shape future organising. Its seen as more an obstacle/distraction? To say nothing of the widespread ableism.

First, it's unlikely to be the last major pandemic we face. Second, climate catastrophe is increasing the scale and rate of social murder, to which Covid is comparable. Importantly, it involves the same discursive reliance on appeals to the "natural" or "Nature".

Evoked, by the right, as a way to excuse away mass social murder, though too many on the left have accepted this framing. "Deaths are unavoidable". Rather than maintaining a serious resistance to the state's policy of social murder the left has cave and moved on.

Many parts of the left from liberals to lib coms have evoked "authoritarianism" to condemn any attempts to mitigate the spread of the virus with mask mandates lumped in with full-scale police lockdowns. With little attention paid to the particularities of the situation.

What is learnt from using this vague, generalising term? It's borrowed from right libertarians. It does nothing to help us understand how the capitalist state has prioritised some lives over others and how to resist that. Nor how to resist the increased policing of public space.

Where is the attempt to carve a careful argument that takes into account the very real biological threat the virus poses? This is a virus that's killed more than 10 million people globally, and disabled circa 100s of millions. We can't wish it away.

Where has the left's resistance been to the wide scale eugenicism that we've seen flourish throughout the pandemic from "acceptable deaths" of people who are considered too old, too disabled, too unproductive to allowed shown humane care?

Eco-fascism is talked about enough but where is discussion around eco-eugenics? Eco-eugenics being relevant not only to the pandemic, or to the far/extreme right but also to climate catastrophe and liberal conservatism, where technocrats play god and make life and death decisions

Climate catastrophe is ecological breakdown, just as pandemics are ecological breakdown. The way that people, particularly disabled people, have been abandoned during the pandemic, is similar to how people, mostly in the Global South, are being abandoned.

The challenge of Covid-19 was to build solidarity and new forms of organising and resistance within the new context of a mass disabling and deathly respiratory virus. Ignoring its presence, is analogous to ignoring climate catastrophe.

The eugenics of the pandemic being analogous to the eco-apartheid of Global North states inflicting climate catastrophe on the Global South whilst building its security infrastructure to shut out those fleeing famine, drought, war, fire, flooding, storms etc.

Large swathes of the left have given up contesting how the pandemic has fallen hardest on racialised, disabled and working class communities. It was — it is — a chance to build coalitions and movements and imagine new ways of living.

Pandemic fatigue is understandable. The only way to overcome that is to find ways to fight the capitalist state and how it has condoned the social murder of those it deems replaceable. To contest the way liberal societies have constructed abhorrent apparatuses of social murder.

The way the middle class were protected at the expense of the working class. The way the state acted without any common sense over outdoor socialising. The way that there has been zero effort at improving ventilation and air filtration. How borders were strengthened.

The way frontline workers were (and still are) sacrificed en masse in order to preserve the social reproduction of capitalists and the middle class. How those incarcerated have been offered no protection from the virus. The way homeless people were thrown back onto the street Etc

As it stands, we're going to go into the next pandemic, the next ecological catastrophe, in an even weaker position. The right has surged. The liberal-conservative state has been strengthened. Eugenics has become commonplace left, right and centre.

This was all happening before the pandemic, and it will happen afterwards. Social murder is in-built into the capitalist system. In any crisis there is opportunity to learn and build. But disavowal prevents that and condemns us to repeating it all over again.

"Thus any serious effort at mitigating this catastrophic episode of social murder in the short term can only take as its starting point how large numbers of ordinary people can create serious consequences for those at the heights of power."

"In the long term, we must find our way to a society that is not fundamentally murderous."