Pandemonium: The Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve (Vagabonds)

In November 2019, a new strain of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread across the world. Since then, the pandemic has exposed the brutal limits of care and health under capitalism. __Pandemonium__ examines how a virus became a crisis along racial, class and gendered borders, shaped by the legacies of colonialism in which deaths are passed off as inevitable. It questions the dangers of capitalist understandings of order and disorder, of health and disease, and of life itself. From the origins of the crisis at the crossroads of the bio-pharmaceutical industry, fossil-fueled pollution, and the privatization of healthcare in China, Mitropoulos follows the virus spread as governments embraced reckless strategies of containment. The failures of quarantines and travel bans racialized the disease, and the reluctance to expand healthcare capacity deepened already perilous inequalities. Untested pharmaceuticals and right-wing demands to reopen the economy no matter the human cost reveal a world where the very definition of the economy is fundamentally shifting. __Pandemonium__ demands a radical epidemiology—one that is informed by an understanding of the interdependence of living things, involving both the power of combined human agency and the molecular swerve. In November 2019, a new strain of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread across the world. Since then, the pandemic has exposed the brutal limits of care and health under capitalism. Pandemonium underscores the turning-points between neoliberalism and authoritarian government, crystallised by ineffective responses to the pandemic. In so doing, it questions capitalist understandings of order and disorder, of health and disease, and the new world borders which proliferate through distinctly capitalist definitions of risk and uncertainty. From the origins of the crisis at the crossroads of fossil-fuelled pollution and the privatisation of healthcare in China, Angela Mitropoulos follows the virus'spread as governments embraced reckless strategies of'containment'and'herd immunity.'Exoticist explanations of the pandemic and the recourse to quarantines and travel bans racialised the disease, while the reluctance to expand healthcare capacity displaced the risk onto private households and private wealth. Tracing iterations of borders through the histories of population theory, the political contract and epidemiology, Mitropoulos discusses the circuits of capitalist value in pharmaceuticals, protective equipment and catastrophe bonds. These and the treatment of populations as capitalist'stock'in demands to'reopen the economy'reveal a world where the very definition of'the economy'and infrastructure are fundamentally shifting. Much will depend on how these are understood, and debts are reckoned, in the months and years to come. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Origin of the Species Quarantine Bodies in Motion Pharmakon Liquid Geometries of Value Economy and Infrastructure Notes Demanding a radical epidemiology in the face of the lethal failures of capitalism.