It is obvious to most that the pandemic has allowed to state to create a submissive population, a population that sits and waits for the next set of instructions. Scanning news broadcasts to see where we can go, who we can meet, what parts of society are open to us and what parts are closed. With remarkable ease the state has created what it always strives for, total control over the citizens. Yes we are living through a pandemic, could it have been handle better with a more community inclusiveness? Of course it could, but this is capitalism and decisions are made on the best way to handle the economy, how to save the economy, how to get the economy "back on track", which we all agree is a track to environmental destruction. The needs of the people will follow after these priorities have been seen to be handled in the best method to suit the system.
Now there are remarks about the damage to the mental health of many of our people because of isolation and lose of human contact, those with other illnesses are now suffering long delays and possible death. Was this all unknown, of course not, medical and scientific experts were well aware of the effects of isolation and the denying of social contact, but our decision makers, who claim to be following the scientific advice, cherry pick that advice according to their mindset that the economy is paramount.
The result being a society of submissive citizens, with anger simmering under the surface, an increase in poverty and its attendant illnesses, an incredible strain on the health and care services, which have been denied proper funding for years. Despite this our lords and master will puff out their chest and try to convince you of how well they have done. Of course in their eyes they have done exceedingly well, they have transferred billions to large rich corporations, the parasite billionaire class has seen it obscene wealth grow at an incredible rate. Where does that leave you and me?
Now there are remarks about the damage to the mental health of many of our people because of isolation and lose of human contact, those with other illnesses are now suffering long delays and possible death. Was this all unknown, of course not, medical and scientific experts were well aware of the effects of isolation and the denying of social contact, but our decision makers, who claim to be following the scientific advice, cherry pick that advice according to their mindset that the economy is paramount.
The result being a society of submissive citizens, with anger simmering under the surface, an increase in poverty and its attendant illnesses, an incredible strain on the health and care services, which have been denied proper funding for years. Despite this our lords and master will puff out their chest and try to convince you of how well they have done. Of course in their eyes they have done exceedingly well, they have transferred billions to large rich corporations, the parasite billionaire class has seen it obscene wealth grow at an incredible rate. Where does that leave you and me?
Quarantine isn’t coming to the US, it’s already here. Like everywhere else It does not arrive as a social peace treaty but comes crawling from the decaying corpse of the welfare state as a monstrous racial policing apparatus. Prison has never been a singular place but a particular collection of techniques of social control and that is most apparent under the logic of quarantine where every good citizen is both, and happily we may add, captive and warden. What this says for physical prisons is even more grim as they are transformed into the most pure expression of capital: workhouses where prison slaves manufacture our hand sanitizer[1] and PPE[2] so that we may live, and on the flip side mass graves, human warehouses packed to the brim under hostile conditions, a fertile field for both the virus and their captors to run wild[3].
Crisis is here, as it always is, and it doesn’t put a hold on all the other crises unfolding, it just both obscures and amplifies the intensity of them. Still the police are executing black people in the streets, still riots are breaking out[4], still black people are enduring and dying from medical neglect[5]. Still, still still! We are struggling and suffering and dying – and now the old ways of holding together the social peace reveal themselves for what they are – absolutely nothing. Reforms, inclusion in institutions, ‘community policing’, and paltry hand outs mean fuck all, just as they ever did but even more so now. Even what they offer us now is more insulting than anything: a paltry, one-time, 1200$ that will maybe cover one or two months of rent, and only for some of us at that[6][7][8]! All the promises of our masters turn to dust in our hands.
The state recognizes what’s going on and whats falling apart and in order to ensure it’s continued existence is using the logic of quarantine to wage all out war against the entirety of the social body to ensure social cohesion. The life giving and death giving institutions of the state – the police, the medical industry, the carceral institutions, the military – are working overtime now. But where other technique of capital and governance have failed and are now failing to absorb the social body into it’s logics, health and pandemic have mutated into one sinister, paternalistic technique of governance that has managed to absorb the social body into the nation and the economy. What’s healthy for the nation, whats healthy for the economy, is healthy for us because we are them. With this one trick the social body has become a weapon wielded against itself. From discourses willing to sacrifice more vulnerable people for “our” collective health [9][10] (that of the nation and the economy), to neighborhood snitches calling the police on those violating the imposed rules of ‘social distancing’.[11] How long before those neighborhood snitches become neighborhood shooters enforcing a hardened border of social distance? Everyone knows behind the walls of our healthy neighborhood are the hoards of sick others…
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