In the early
days of the pandemic, Europe and the U.S. attempted to
differentiate themselves from what they claimed was a peculiarly
“Eastern” form of coercive and deceptive rule. These states
insisted that “Western” governments would have to respond to
COVID-19 in a manner following the principles of economic
liberalism — that the freedom of the individual would not be
sacrificed for the benefit of the collective. As the pandemic
hit, however, it rapidly became apparent that the freedoms
guaranteed by liberalism were not as expansive or extensive as
their defenders liked to believe. The only sacrosanct rights, it
turned out, were the rights that guaranteed the extraction of
surplus and the preservation of property. Here, Mitropoulos
highlights both Boris Johnson’s pursuit of “herd immunity” in
Britain and the striking words of Kevin Hassett, the White House
adviser who declared that “our human capital stock is ready to
go back to work.”
Mitropoulos
reads these slippages on herd and stock through Marx’s
suggestion that, just as agriculture had provided “the tropes of
aristocratic right through primogeniture in late feudalism,” it
had contributed, within capitalism, logics for both the
management of populations and the philosophy of virology. Much
of the established knowledge of COVID-19 still draws on the
devastating outbreaks of bovine coronavirus in the late 19th
century, and the vast culls undertaken to control them. It must
be remembered that the law of the household is as much about the
transfer of properties as about holding property — logics of
breeding, inherited superiority, and patrilineal purity are
essential to the preservation of the oikos. Ideas of natural
selection, or even eugenics, are an easy partner to a concern
for the inheritance of properties. This juxtaposition sets up
Mitropoulos’s evisceration of the British government’s plan for
herd immunity, which, if allowed to run its course, would have
had more in common with a cull than with a control.
https://thenewinquiry.com/the-contagious-assembly/
