Healthcare, Technology, and Socialized Medicine /w Pratyush Chandra

Unlike earlier experiences, with Covid-19 we see an emergence of the whole world as a stage where the drama unfolds. This is, of course, due to the technological shrinkage of time and space in our age – now, microbes take flight. But the spectacular similitude of crises and responses at this level demonstrates how social structures, ideologies, and social values have converged globally. The rhetoric of war and the institution of quarantine, where everyone is a warrior, a victim, and a suspect at the same time, have mobilized individuals and communities to act out rituals that affirm bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all), the foundation of capitalism. While the immediate task of controlling the current pandemic determines the actions of states, medical institutions, and research laboratories, several critical microbiologists, virologists, and political economists have done well to ask the structural question about the metabolic and ecological rifts that have unleashed new dangers for humanity. But for the ecological crisis to become a ground to rethink structural transformation, it is not enough to locate it in the wreckage that capitalism accumulates. It must be understood as constitutive to capitalist social relations, having an intimate connection to the robbery of labour. It is in this sense that the particularization of these crises in the form of pathogens and impending diseases becomes crucial. This helps us to understand the ecological rift as central to everyday life and struggle in capitalism, and also to imagine a transformational class politics. Pratyush Chandra is a political activist and writer based in New Delhi. Part of the Socialist Register series “Beyond Digital Capitalism.” Recorded online, 25 April 2021.