As I have been working on a draft of something else, I have been thinking a lot about the explanations available to us for sense- and meaning-making around the pandemic. I have also been preoccupied with the uses of different kinds of explanation, and the difference between explanation and analysis (or in Jungian parlance -- apparently -- explaining vs. explaining away). Most of the explanations and narratives coming from the right about COVID are obviously bogus, and I won't spend time on them here. The explanations coming from the center, the great American ideological mainstream, are also obviously bogus; interesting in the social function they are supposed to serve, to exculpate and even celebrate the Biden administration, but little else.
What I'm most interested is leftist accounts of why the COVID response was such a disaster. These can be explanations, intended to make meaning by fitting the events of COVID into some narrative structure, or analyses, intended to illuminate the what and why of the pandemic and see what can be excavated in practical terms to inform organizing strategy. For our purposes (as... a left), I think the analytic approach is the right one. I have spent too much of my own life on dissipative tactical campaigns that are completely misinformed and misguided as to the nature of the problem. For example, I was once directed to canvass every house, without a plan, in a given municipality to get signatures in support of Medicare for All to take to the mayor of the municipality to try to get a resolution in support of Medicare for All passed. Needless to say, this is bad strategy and I did not comply.
The stakes are similar with COVID. Insofar as the left overall even seems interested in learning what can be learned from the most cataclysmic event in recent memory, the thinking seems to always redound to vagueness and hand-waving about "capitalism," or if the speaker wants to show their sophistication, "racial capitalism," "interconnectedness," "organizing." (Something I've just realized, we use "redound" on the podcast all the time but we're using it in a very archaic sense). One explanation that is superficially convincing and not altogether wrong -- and one that I myself have devoted substantial time to developing -- is that what happened with COVID is essentially a replay of the events covered in the book Merchants of Doubt. For anyone who isn't familiar, this is about how scientists allied with industry groups to distort the process of knowledge production in order to create false debate and the illusion of uncertainty on matters of public import, principally the dangers of tobacco smoking and climate change.
This was, undoubtedly, part of it. A very interesting part at that, specifically for what analysis of something like the Great Barrington Declaration can teach us about science under capitalism, how knowledge is made and disseminated. As a global explanation for the disaster of the pandemic response, though, I'm not sure it's comprehensive enough.
The theory that I myself am developing has to do with "economic power," a hip new term for how the abstract social logic of capitalism itself is a form of power, domination, and compulsion. Was it sinister bad guys in suits conferring furtively in C-suite conference rooms, or was it the social form of capitalism itself, that doomed us to such a miserable and lethal encounter with COVID? Obviously, it was both, but I've got to do some thinking still about in what combination it was both, how both of these forces interacted in various scenarios.