Biopolitics, Essential Labor, and the Political-Economic Crises of COVID-19

Abstract

Biopolitics is the power to control life. In the early global reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people’s daily labor functions have been placed into stark relief, with a tripartite typology forming between those labor functions that are “essential,” those labor roles that have been lost, and those that have transitioned to an online format. For those whose labor has maintained, as well as those who seek to return to pre-COVID-19 labor conditions, a crude biopolitical calculus takes place where the functioning of our capitalist political economy is weighed against the maintenance of life itself. The current pandemic exposes and highlights many of the unsustainable fault lines characteristic of contemporary capitalism, where the uneven exploitation of labor renders lives associated with some labor functions as more expendable than others. This places us in political-economic crisis, where we have choices to enact more just, equitable, and sustainable systems moving forward.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• Foucault
• Marx
• pandemic
• sustainability

Notes

1 Marx’s second contradiction is the tendency for capitalism to undermine its environmental preconditions. This contradiction, too, has come into clearer focus during the times of the pandemic as natural systems respond to rapidly changing rates of extraction, production, consumption, etc.

2 This typology overlooks those already most economically maligned. Marx and Engels (1970 [1846]) referred to the lumpenproletariat, those who face unemployment, homelessness, vagrancy, and generally lack awareness of their collective oppression. The lumpenproletariat may face high virus exposure, but their labor is difficult to exploit.

3 Tyner (2019) uses the term “dead labor” to refer to those who die all-too-soon in the making of capitalism, an apt concept for essential employees during the pandemic.

4 In an exemplary moment, on May 5, 2020, the US President visited a factory where the Guns ‘N Roses song, “Live and Let Die” blared over the speakers.