The Bruised Sky. Photo Courtesy: Malay Mail. Meme: © Dr. Michelle Renée Matisons.
This New Chapter will be routinely updated. {Last update: June 4, 2020.}
Access a separate Introduction document for this
extended study of U.S. pandemic living:
“U.S. Pandemicism: Forcedline Labor and the New Care-ceral Surreality.”
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From Martial Law to Medical Law:
Tracing the Care-ceral as a Shift to Deeper Fascism
OR
Impundemic!
© Dr. Michelle Renée Matisons. June 4, 2020.
Author requests recognition of essay and its original concepts. Sharing essay widely is fine.
“Pandemic era protestors redefine public health as collective, participatory, and free of the racist police state apparatus cultivated in a brutal class war environment. What protestors get in return is an Impundemic: a further state of intensifying police impunity where the phrase “military police” isn’t so much redundant as it is unnecessary. The two become one.”
Introduction
As recent protests indicate, Pre-COVID-19 oppression levels were so high that the twin diseases of COVID-19 and police violence can’t keep protestors at home.
The political battle against murderous U.S. policing was insurmountable before COVID-19. It proves even more difficult in a pandemic with a once divided populace now outright panicked and outraged. As more individuals enter precarious survival mode, retreat into isolation could be justified. The opposite proves true as protestors must defy social distancing rules to oppose police murdering with impunity.
People are fighting for their lives. These events are a turning point. Racist militarized policing is exposed as capitalism’s socio-economic containment mechanism used to create a population of obedient “forcedline” workers and renters, wholly disposable.
As U.S. leaders deny the reality of 43 million unemployed and COVID-19’s impacts on working communities, late May- early June proves historic. Protestors respond to recent police-perpetrated murders of Black U.S. residents and the general pandemic pandemonium. These murders occur on a continuum of practices, inaugurating new Pandemicist era state-perpetrated repressive tactics. The protests have revealed people are conscious of how the pre-pandemic conditions of police violence and economic exploitation pave misery’s way. Protestor courage in the face of infection illuminates the felt exploitation better than almost any other litmus test today.
Want to take the U.S. working class temperature? Take it in the streets. Serious violence and intimidation– resulting in 12 protestor deaths and 11,000 arrests– has not deterred gatherings in all 50 states. Obviously, just like the COVID-19 death count and police brutality stats themselves, the official record of facts and numbers will not reflect the realities of militarized police repression.
If anyone doubted how U.S. residents would respond under Pandemicism’s chaotic and uneven lockdown-to-reopening environment, we now have evidence that any federally expressed “sympathies” for a pandemic-exhausted public stop when resident protests begin. In “U.S. Pandemicism: Forcedline Labor and the New Care-ceral Surreality” I question how far the government will repress under pandemic conditions and now this question is being answered by street clashes, shootings, and tragic deaths across the U.S.
National protests against the murders of Minneapolis, MN resident George Floyd, Louisville, KY resident Breonna Taylor, and Glynn County, Georgia resident Ahmaud Arbery, and other recent racist murders, continue. May 29-31, 2020 is an historic weekend for U.S. protest. Residents protest/riot against what I here term “Medical Law.” The uprising will be discredited by many Pandemicist sources, but we carry on.
While “Martial Law” is a repressive notion of ruling class police power, “Medical Law” is a more “productive” therefore complex web of technological/ policing/ surveillance/ healthcare industrial complex relations. Medical Law involves new Pandemicist anti-riot excuses for protest-busting, as well as the old policing authoritarianism undergirding the U.S. mass incarceration state, including its privatized facilities and services. Subjugation of prisoners, forcedline workers, renters in the less to nothing economy functions like a security blanket; subjugation wraps a failing imperial power up in illusory Medical Law security with its new Pandemicist for their own good, care-ceral, anti-riot tactics. Police violence’s constantly revising tactics are used to subjugate U.S. residents. Now governmental entities have an extra justification for skull-bashing. Pandemic conditions will be cited as another reason for extreme anti-protest/ anti-riot tactics, epitomized by Trump’s threat to unleash federally-ordered military soldiers (not just state-ordered National Guard, which can also be federalized). But rest assured, unique pandemic conditions have the Pentagon, state, and metropolitan officials’ clashing with the Trump administration regarding military police response to protests.
Trump threatens to invoke 1807’s Insurrection Act, last used to quell the L.A. Riots in 1992:
“As a result of several days of rioting, more than 50 people were killed, more than 2,300 were injured, and thousands were arrested. About 1,100 buildings were damaged, and total property damage was about $1 billion, which made the riots one of the most-devastating civil disruptions in American history.”
Imagine the Insurrection Act under Pandemicism. Federal military tanks rolling in will make lots of people uneasy, including Republican governors.
As of June 3, this maneuver is still debated, with the Pentagon Chief officially not on board. The practice of D.C.’s National Guard soldiers sporting bizarre uniforms boldly stating “MILITARY POLICE” ideologically inculcates us into the totalitarian federal agenda. (This backfires for them as they unite the domestic frontlines with anti-imperialist analysis, as in #FergusontoPalestine.)
For Their Own Good Now is the new U.S. policing credo: even if it takes tasers, tear gas, bullets, bombs. The care-ceral mechanism is available for the squeamish-in-power, liberal class hand-wringers, now denouncing excessive force. We find a care-ceral tone in Minneapolis state Attorney General Keith Ellison’s exhortation that residents not conflate the National Guard with the local police: “Ellison noted that members of the state’s National Guard were administering coronavirus tests to Minnesotans just last week, and told protesters they should not “react to them the way you might react to the Minneapolis Police Department.”
U.S. residents know the National Guard is called in to deter and punish riots. They declare this an important time to resist what Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford brilliantly refers to as “the Blue Plague.” The incarceration plague is further compounded by an extra 11,000 protestor arrests. Human Rights Watch has released a global study of COVID-19 prisoner release, including criteria. The U.S. uses the violent/ nonviolent release criteria, with protestors automatically labeled violent outside agitators.
While the U.S. prisoner class always lives in an exceptional state of existence, the unthinkable immiseration arriving with COVID-19 extends this existence to a larger swath of the U.S. population, criminalizing Black and Brown people, tethering bodies to various unfree gendered, sexuated, and sexual machinations, while further denying mass economic relief necessary to ensure stable populations and stem the tide of future arrests and prosecutions. As Henry Giroux reminds us, the U.S. government is “criminogenic.”
Special Pandemicist punishment is reserved for political prisoners. Former Panther Jalil Muntaqim caught COVID-19 after receiving a late April 2020 release order. Now his political prisoner status is repurposed as fascist triumphalism: he remains locked up. They’ve decided he can die inside, instead of abiding by the original release plan. Pandemicism must crush all resistance, including signs and symbols of liberation struggle victory such as political prisoner releases.
One difference between pre-pandemic and pandemic conditions is a new excuse for repression: protests and riots are now community spread dangers! Protest/ riot suppression/ prison lockdown is now a (care-ceral) form of medical “care.” As the pandemic exposes capitalism’s routine exploitation, workers continue to employ death-defying measures. They already mastered tricks to avoid on the job injuries and the usual immiseration accompanying wage stagnation, climate catastrophe, and austerity attacks on the social safety net. Working life has prepared many for survival, but substantive collective sustainment– what bourgeois non-profit speak calls “resilience”– under this most brutal class bludgeoning regime is decided in real time, rapidly accelerating forward.
From Martial to Medical Law
Those encountering police or vigilante violence and intimidation while attending U.S. protests (vs. police brutality/ workers’ rights) are subjected to a new form of Medical Law. This policing form thrives and intensifies. On May 29, 2020 President Trump announced looters in Minneapolis should be shot: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
U.S. capitalism’s brutal class war conditions have one in four workers laid off as of May 28, 2020. Militarized policing will be a key mechanism to keep jobless populations under control– as Trump explains. Prison, jail, and detention facilities remain a key source of economic profit, warehousing, and worker subjection while promoting fascist (white supremacist/ heteropatriarchal) scapegoating backed by an opportunistic and deadly policing apparatus that now suggests protest-busting is for protestors own (medical) good.
The infecting menace is not COVID-19, but instead the (racialized) protesting body.
This socio-economic crisis, even infrastructure meltdown, exposes policing/ prison reform’s fundamental limits. Prison reformers imply a form of incarceration will always occur (the care-ceral is largely reformism’s idea ) while abolitionists assert carceral-to-care-ceral corrections facilities are fundamentally untenable. This tension plays out in the distinction between prisoners charged with nonviolent vs. violent offenses. Reformers perpetuate the “discourse of relative dangerousness.” Setting nonviolent prisoners free first may sound pragmatic and overflowing with tangible social utility. But commonplace abolitionist insights, that discredit any connection between violent acts and chronically violent people, challenge this violence/nonviolence distinction.
The violence/ nonviolence distinction thrives elsewhere as protest tactics are debated across the country.
Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) research addresses the faulty distinction between violent and nonviolent offenders. In “Reforms without Results: Why states should stop excluding violent offenses from criminal justice reforms” the PPI reports:
“These “tough on crime” policies reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of violence. They are grounded in the belief that lengthy incarceration is an effective deterrent or containment strategy for violence, despite years of evidence to the contrary, and a desire for retribution. In particular, arguments that extreme sentences are needed to protect the public assume that violence is a static characteristic in people, and that they are incapable of change. But research consistently shows people convicted of violent offenses are not inherently violent. Rather, violence is a complex phenomenon that is influenced by a range of factors, some of which diminish with time (such as youth), and others that can be mediated with interventions other than incarceration. And even when crimes warrant severe punishment, a balance must be struck between the desire for vengeance, the appropriate use of public resources, and the rights of the convicted person.”
Casino capitalism’s criminalization game requires moral-behavioral differentiation. Differentiation between violent and nonviolent prisoners reinforces criminalization processes. COVID-19 has introduced an emergency climate that some have used to push this faulty distinction. Pandemicism opportunistically criminalizes every body as a potential viral spreading agent, thus requiring constant self/ other surveillance.
Free Us From Mind Control. Photo Courtesy: UPI.Com.
“Biopower” notes the phenomena of internalized surveillance or self-surveillance. Pandemicism has produced a Universal Pandemic subject– a surviving subject–with characteristics intersecting with pre-existing socio-economic differentiations: gender, race, class. In formal policy and informal social relations, the sense of general criminalization/ contagion will get redirected onto previously targeted groups. Poor, Black and Brown/ POC, elderly/ disabled, female-identified, queer/ trans/ non-binary bodies are seen as more contagious and/ or weak and disposable now. More dangerous. This pandemic residual condition of the surviving individual subject is unpredictable.
Michel Foucault explains how the discourse on dangerousness is used by historic criminalization processes under repressive power that stokes fears against external enemies within the U.S., a constant theme in the detention/ deportation happy U.S. Under the pandemic, the dangerous internal sphere is corporeal, begging self-regulation. “Dangerousness” serves the interests of productive, self-policing power too. Medical Dangerousness is now a universal condition for a surviving subject. Discussions about “self-policing” and “self-surveillance” have not been in vain: Pandemicism does rely on a new health/ medical individual awareness (for survival, minimally.) Echoes of Foucault fill the potentially contaminated air, as unique historic policing forms meet bio-power’s production of disciplined and undisciplined pandemic bodies to arrive at a new socio-biological technofascism: Medical Law. This is a socio-economic hierarchy backed by nature’s “nasty, brutish, and short” qualities. This is a reference to Thomas Hobbes’ own Pandemic era political tract, The Leviathan, published in the seventeenth century– the time of the Great Plagues. Hobbes’ theory of power is not my concern, but a twisting eternal recurrence of putting pleasure first can result in the Leviathan backwards– where civil society shifts back to nature and natural concerns. Hobbes wrote this: “The Power of a [sic]Man (to take it Universally) is his present means to form some future apparent Good.” Unconsciously, the pandemic has unleashed an ecological sense: survival=future=Good=nature/ environment/ climate action.
There’s emerging anti-ecological and ecological fascisms that want land for survival. They will collectively lash out with violence and austerity to compensate for this anxious double threat from within: domestically located internal enemies AND our own individual bodies as potential infecting agents– with infection experienced internally, but dumped on others.
Pandemicism calls for peace in the streets, as power’s history unfolds before us. Monarchical rule’s crowned head was replaced by heads of state only to be represented virtually as the technocratic screen-based singular Big Brother talking head. Finally, power is pluralized and disseminated– as future society is ideally constituted by algorithmically-attuned atomized individuals primarily engaged in self-surveillance. Pandemicism wants these cyber-self-surveilling individuals to obediently accept dangerous work and living situations. When necessary, obedience will be reinforced by militarized police brutality and even remotely administered cybertorture within a generalized environment of socio-economic immiseration and recalibrated police power.
The U.S.’s complex apparatus of rule simultaneously employs repressive and productive power forms. Old and new mix together, confusing the playing field for resistance forces: whether disaggregated, newly woke, or a pre-pandemic activist community member.
Pandemicist Planning: Food and Shelter Scarcity
No one predicted a COVID-19 scale pandemic would usher in less authoritarian policing/ planning approaches, but we now have evidence that, pandemic or no pandemic, U.S. workers, homeless, and prisoners remain internal class enemies. Unique is that pandemic-related mass layoffs complicate the blame game, allowing the (however remote) possibility of worker and family relief initiatives. But this is no time to sit by idly. Globalization’s bizarre and now impractical outsourcing and trade practices diminishes steady-handed local supply chains providing necessary survival goods (food, shelter, housing). Natural products and non-GMO/ organic food are in highest demand as pandemic conditions shape the individual body as a threat to itself, and people seek personal relief through prevention (and political relief in the streets.)
Talk of mass-scale worker relief is cheap. Whether special unemployment insurance (UI) pandemic rates– Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA)– will be extended past August is debated just as 34.2 million workers have applied for or received the benefits. Policy initiatives tracking the economic decline indicate: “Last week, 3.1 million workers applied for unemployment benefits. This is the tenth week in a row that initial unemployment claims are more than three times the worst week of the Great Recession.”
Additional to UI is EBT (food stamps)– survival’s bread and butter. Federal and state levels have been negotiating waiver terms to expedite EBT applications. But true to form, some receiving PUA are still being punished via EBT application denial.
Consider New Mexico, already in the national and international spotlight for the genocidal COVID-19 case numbers and death rates reported by Navajo Nation and other Indigenous communities. Colonization’s presumptions of legitimacy cultivate systemic medical, food, and clean water/ sanitation neglect on the state’s reservations, also reflected in the state’s own nefarious benefits infrastructure impacting all residents.
One recently laid off Albuquerque worker reports her EBT application was denied because her PUA is “too high” to qualify her case. The denial letter reads: “Your total income before program deductions is over the program limit for your household size.”
The denied applicant explains: “New Mexico has received federal waivers suspending application process hold-ups: interview protocols, various appeal deadlines and eligibility requirements have presumably been waived to expedite application approvals. Denying EBT relief to households receiving PUA is a proverbial class war tactic: robbing Peter to pay Paul while corporations receive billions in bailout money. New Mexico’s Indigenous population awaits federal financial relief.”
New Mexico’s denial of EBT to PUA recipients is especially egregious, as Summer months allow state EBT recipients to use food stamps and even get double bucks on farmers’ market produce. The EBT/ market collaboration promotes individual and ecological health and economic productivity while modeling local and holistic virus prevention behaviors. Santa Fe’s usually bustling farmer’s market sees around 6,000 shoppers on a Saturday in peak Summer months. Original resistance to broad-scale changes shifted to PPE and shopping bag mandates, take out, and vendor location and spacing rules.
Cloud Cliff Bakery owner, Willem Malten, is one of the top three longest running market vendors; he’s been selling baked goods there since 1987. Today, Malten foregoes personal market involvement due to his vulnerable medical status, but reports there are “only two [masked and gloved] people there selling. Everything is already wrapped beforehand so people who know what they want can get it. They can’t see or touch. There’s no samples.” These changes have caused people to become “very motivated now to get what they need and want,” Malten reports.
The market’s changing distribution policies reinforces how local institutions can flexibly accommodate public health requirements only to then be undermined by governmental forces maintaining the same old punitive benefits model holding EBT applications suspect. Imagine if the seller and buyer motivation was coupled with flowing EBT dollars in state and national local markets. There would be less waste while circulating much needed local capital to small businesses and farmers: besides, everyone knows local organic produce tastes better.
The EBT infrastructure can still accommodate a federal order automatically granting food stamps to households receiving PUA and UI this Summer. This kind of inter-agency coordination between UI’s Department of Labor (DOL) and EBT’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is predated by the (disturbing) example of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) inter-agency sharing of potentially undocumented residents’ names.
Instead of federal agency coordination, we have states’ bureaucratic dirty austerity work. Since a New Mexico state public health order deems farmers’ markets essential businesses, why curtail support for these businesses by denying EBT benefits to PUA recipients?
Federally expedited PUA/ UI/ EBT application initiatives, undermined by state-level application hold-ups and denials, is an excellent example of fledgling U.S. Pandemicism’s codified and weaponized ideological expression: a gloved fist “seeking to unify the social body with a ‘sympathetic’ discourse of medical/ public health concern.” Underneath the glove is a bloody hand of police violence and assured austerity, as basic survival is materially undermined and fear is militarily enforced.
Like food, now consider housing. Temporary rent relief legislation did not stop “violence, intimidation, and illegal evictions, where landlords change locks or remove the belongings of a resident. And then there are the landlords who have tried to coerce women into exchanging sex for rent”– summarized by Keenga Yamhatta-Taylor’s “Cancel the Rent.” Anti-eviction legislation proves to be lipstick on the pig of private property, in other words. June 1, 2020 sees earlier rent strike actions merge with broader protests.
Like housing, now consider healthcare. The institutional negligence, from no insurance to not enough hospital beds, attended by forcedline workers, is covered at length elsewhere– like National Nurse’s United (NNU) website. Suffice it to say that medical bill waiver efforts and prisoner medical co-pay suspensions are small concessions in the face of government and Big Tech viral tracking/ data mining in Google’s NYC and elsewhere. Pandemicism gives residents an inch while taking their cities.
Ill-timed Theories
Pun intended, today’s pandemic is “ill-timed” for organizers who know crisis conditions build mass revolutionary consciousness. Crisis catapults action by necessity, but the pandemic presents an additional burden of “ill-timing.” This is an affective concept I introduce here to capture the commonly referred to exhaustion accompanying global pandemic living. Many people contract, recover, or fastidiously avoid COVID-19 infection, while possibly doing (exhausting) forcedline wage labor work, applying for jobs and assistance, caring for loved ones, or attending protests. If this many people are in the streets now, imagine if social pressure was lifted. Today, our “ill-timed” schedules and bank accounts are protest hindrances.
Even so-called carefree youth may lose their historic protest advantage, as they are forced to grow up fast in a society cancelling their school schedules and social contact because of a pathological economic addiction to finite resources and cheap labor. Anti-police brutality/ murder by cop protests are a case in point. Streets are filled despite contagion, exhaustion/ hunger, police violence, and mass arrest threats. Tomorrow may never come.
“Pandemic era protestors redefine public health as collective, participatory, and free of the racist police state apparatus cultivated in a brutal class war environment. What protestors get in return is an Impundemic: a further state of intensifying police impunity where the phrase “military police” isn’t so much redundant as it is unnecessary. The two become one.”
Forcedline (essential) workers and prisoners fear retaliation as resistance morphs into a public/social/ physical/ individual/ and ecological health prerequisite. Under Pandemicism’s added vi(sce)ral complexity, resistance is survival: ill-timing means inconvenience, but it was never easy.
Pandemicism’s universal surviving subject exists as slag on capitalism’s streamlining, killer machinery, becoming coextensive with criminalization. Something is happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, and youth stand in solidarity with other criminalized groups– especially prisoners.
My earlier U.S. Pandemicism Introduction argues prison lockdown is the best example of a new Pandemicist ideology that paradoxically and conveniently retrofits the old punitive lockdown tactic to become a new and improved care-ceral public health best practice. Sometimes called “neoliberal fascism”, it is definitely techno-fascism. Capitalist politics elicits a feeling of playing catch up while walking on eggs shells since fascist hyper-surveillance includes torture practices condemned in the recent UN report on psychological torture. Also consider all that dwells under the rubric of Artificial Intelligence (AI): facial recognition/ GPS tracking; deep learning education and tele-health medical infiltration; military modernization; and social media’s fake campaigns– all reported on by data journalism.
Technological dominance drives Pandemicist power grab politics: such as speedier 5G cable laying and weapons/ space/ medical modernization. The Pandemicist is nostalgic for pre-pandemic economics precisely because she knows there’s no such thing as a non-pandemic future. Enter AI and Virtual Reality (VR) technology: the quick-fixes to get us somewhere else, virtually exploiting our need for human connection.
My dissertation, Systems, Standpoint, and Subject: Marxist Legacies in U.S. Feminist Theories was published 20 years ago this October 2020. The argument is still germane today, but things have changed. What sociological intersectionality shares with psychoanalytic/post-structuralist feminism is a sense of delimited identity. This includes Donna Haraway’s cyborg-hybridization, which I criticized for being too reifying of surveillance capitalism’s ascendancy by negating all utopianism.
Cyborg Feminism embraced partiality (part human/ part machine) in contrast to a “real” eco-feminist wholeness. This technologically-infused identity was a big leap for some U.S. feminist resistance. Many embraced the cyborg as an exhilarating analogy connoting information/ communication sophistication and a stealthy “master’s tools” approach. But technological development now delivers so much more domination than liberation: the verdict is in on social media/ surveillance companies’ monopolization. Today’s technology has more capacities to lull users but the social order still needs to be reinforced by surveillance state realities (even expressed as “healthcare” under Pandemicism). This is important as Big Tech-backed Pandemicism placates the U.S. public with a new affective wellness-speak, while skull-bashing, or contracting with skull-bashers for data services, all the same.
Decades ago, who could predict that the trendy dialectical materialist academic term –“affect”– would function as AI gold: the basis for the very (technologically-delivered) instant gratification/ abjection, the expression of western psychosis, as described by the late feminist theorist, Teresa Brennan, in her original Exhausting Modernity analysis. Today, AI harvests the good feelings, while also remedying the bad feelings: an individual solution to seizing the means of production.
It gets more complicated as AI/ VR doesn’t just strive to fulfill individually; it performs a massive social utility. The entertainment/ culture industry and other design/ art/ infotainment endeavors provide social unification through participation in hyper-individuated consumption escape hatches. The Virtual Fireplace is a screen saver or lengthy video evoking the social fireplace feeling (hearth) through the individual (screen). The added complexity is the virtual fireplace marks the break from real individuated screen use with a screen representing that (social) break. With the U.S. streets in flames now, virtual containment proves failing, but that delicate capture of the social need in individuated virtuality will remain a key Pandemicist project.
Don’t let fiery protests fool you either: the fascist hardware is in place, and can withstand inconveniences. The (deferred) utopian function is more viscerally fulfilled by digitization than ever (thanks to the dark web, sex tech, porn, videos, online malls and warehouses, hard drugs, and pizza delivery on demand.) In the contemporary U.S., immediate pleasure’s prioritization over politics was being further cemented– just as the pandemic hit. Big Tech’s AI revolution marks us individually, but nonetheless wants dominance of society as a whole. They’re coming for the whole planet, as viewed from a Space Force or Tesla or Virgin station.
The part/ whole dialectic prepares us for algorithms, which are highly individuated (data parts) that relate to larger (whole) target groups and industry goals. Social Ecologist Murray Bookchin’s unity-in-diversity remains an important concept: diverse parts are unified in their self-reflexive status as parts. Embracing partiality– as in cyborg feminism– is not the idea: techno-capitalism already enforces mediated partial identities. Resistance lies in partial/ delimited subjects maintaining a connection to a whole (beyond virtual fireplaces).
While maintaining partisan differences, Pandemicism’s neoliberalism and fascism unify around militarism and technology’s profit potential. The extremely “moral” decision to keep prisoners locked up during the pandemic is a strong example of militarized “neoliberal fascist” unity.
More than any other U.S. demographic, incarcerated individuals, already subject to medical experimentation, can ill-afford to wait idly by for change to come. Prison resistance persists and is difficult to track.
As the economic depression unfolds, the role of prisons is reinforced through social warehousing and care-ceral medical intervention, conveniently micro-chipping captive populations under dubious healthcare protocols that substitute for sound medical/ preventative social services and renter/real estate market regulations. Just as Big Tech’s AI/ data tracking profits chase down governmental medical responsibilities– think Cuomo’s Google plan for NYC– prison companies’ medical and social service/ support contracts boom. In telecommunications, inmate videoconferencing for court attendance, legal consultation, and social communications, is an example of a strengthening care-ceral market. Then there’s the non-incarcerated public that needs new things too, which is why meat packing plants and car manufacturer assembly lines are rebooted first.
No one can deny free phone calls help prisoners in the short term. Mass prisoner release, and other structural relief efforts, is supported in wider policy circles. Of course soft release into smaller facilities introduces challenges: residential reentry centers– “halfway houses”– are reported by The Intercept as inadequately testing, tracking and preventing community spread. Release is painfully slow; pre-pandemic release plans collect dust and lockdown remains the national best practice under captive COVID confinement conditions.
With all 50 states entertaining some form of public health-minded reopening fantasy while hitting the 100,000 death mark in late May 2020, policing’s usual racialized, gendered, class war routine of harassment, brutality, lynchings, protestor skull-bashings, even anti-protestor murder, continue.
The deadly force of the U.S. mass incarceration state, along with its private facilities, halfway houses, detention centers, psychiatric prisons, pre-trial diversion and drug rehab programs, and various related reform industry efforts– bail and fee elimination, GPS ankle monitoring, probation/ parole, reentry centers–are further exposed. As the U.S. careens towards a new kind of Pandemicist killer policing-surveillance apparatus, protestors hold out the promise of prison abolition/ mass release, wage labor relief, and healthy safe workplaces and communities.
Casino capitalism becomes corona casino capitalism, or something like that. Continuity and rupture, new and old, merge to reveal how a technofascist biopower surveillance state is late U.S. capitalism’s condition. It takes a global pandemic to eradicate the global village; it takes bio-surveillance to eliminate globalist urges.
It remains pivotal to scrutinize Pandemicist reform. Neoliberalism’s love affair with mass incarceration and Big Tech bring us reforms like free phone calls and video conferencing for prisoners, and fee (medical co-pay) reductions that simply reinforce the reality of an unreleased prisoner class.
In Counterpunch, Henry Giroux calls this emerging governmental style a criminogenic (producing criminality) “neoliberal fascism”– “a state of barbarism that reflects a death-dealing psychosis”– “a dangerous state of mind in which violence and death become the organizing and governing principles of a society.” Here Giroux introduces us to the notion of a deep fascism marking late capitalism, and perfected in its U.S. variation, that refashions immoral greed and corruption towards a new morality reviving “the architecture of fascism by mainstreaming its mobilizing passions.” Trump needs the churches open for this, damn it.
Late capitalist governmentality– Pandemicism’s consensus of neoliberal fascism– uses simultaneous political ideologies to hold workers in a tightening grip of dependency and fear. The return to business as usual is not a 9/11 shopping spree to fight terrorism. Instead, a viral threat keeps us at home. Or work, mainly. That’s the plan. Rest assured reactionary U.S. elements will stoke white supremacist and patriarchal violence while government proceeds with nuclear modernization. Blame China, Russia, homeless people, prisoners, immigrants, workers, women, queers, tree huggers, hackers, riotous protestors…
A new rendering of survival of the fittest lies before us. A (however fading) ideological underpinning of hand-wringing “concern” marks states’ abysmal reopening efforts. Coupled with slow prisoner releases, the The Running Man and The Hunger Games set the stage for a continuing mass death spectacle. Climate change activists were already waiting for the grim death tolls. If history and today’s protests teach us anything, racial profiling/ police brutality/murder by cops, long unemployment lines, empty kitchen cupboards, unpaid car/home loans and medical/ air conditioning bills will mix with the the warming Summer heat to create rolling high social temperatures that might be your first sign of viral infection, too…
Pandemicism’s nostalgic dream of return to COVID-free workplaces relates high death rates to exceptional viral dynamics (with lipservice to pre-existing social inequalities) that require detailed tracking and surveillance. Nothing more clearly links the past to present data than the way COVID-19 has ravaged Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations. It is fitting that the issue sparking the first Pandemic-era mass protests is murder by cop.
Diverse state economic recovery plans share a common Pandemicist agenda, despite mild ideological differences regarding degrees of acceptable immiseration and Medical Law violence. Pandemicists are united in domestic militarization/ policing/ prison lockdown efforts (National Guard riot suppression/Operation Relentless Pursuit’s anti-crime surveillance plan for nine U.S. cities) and maintain international warfare capacities (with whole scale global health defunding) as the persistent rule.
On resistance’s side, as CrimethInc. indicates in a recent essay, “Now This Fight Has Two Sides: What the Riots Mean for the COVID-19 Era,” protests are now tinged with new potency: there’s an awareness that COVID-19 can kill people, but it can’t kill protest. Protestors live the risks. It would be foolish to deny this profound fact; political analysis, strategies, and tactics reflecting a heightened sense of urgency are in order.
Pandemicism includes a new policing impunity– an Impundemic– where surveillance drives tactical decisions so that a smaller overall domestic and international population can be more easily monitored and controlled. The Rohingya massacres were enough of a warning about Big Tech/ AI’s own impunity, while U.S. militarized policing enjoys its own guilty impunities.
Looted Apple Storefront with Burning Police Car. Photo Courtesy: Miami Herald.
This article by ©Dr. Michelle Renée Matisons. ©Pure Chance Productions, May 30, 2020. ©Updated June 4, 2020.
