No such thing as long covid?! Well fu-uh-uck you, pal!
I got real mad about this earlier today and had trouble focusing on some other things I had to do. (“I get mad, I get mad, I get mad.” https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/i-dont-want-to-donate-but-if-i-really-have-to/) As I mentioned the other day I’ve got two things I’ve agreed to write and which I want to write and which I’ve struggling with in the most whiny embarrassing way; getting big mad today about the stuff I’m about to rant about made the writing harder today for a minute. I managed to get around that headspace in order to get some decent time typing away at one of those things I’m working on, and the way I did so was that I told myself I could write this post later, before bed, as long as I used the day fairly productively on that other essay. Well, now it’s later, so it’s time. Plus typing this will hopefully prevent me from continuing to be distracted by how furious I am about this particular thing. Anyway, here goes.
The Guardian ran a story recently quoting some medical expert and public health official to the effect that we should retire the term long covid because the rate of incidence of long covid is no greater than the rate of long lasting symptoms in the aftermath of other infections. I’m not linking to it because it’s shitty and fuck them (that’ll show ‘em! I hereby shake my tiny fist!). To be clear, the piece doesn’t deny that the phenomenon exists, Dr. Evil or whatever his name is says directly that some people really undergo what we plebs have taken to calling long covid, buddy just wants to retire the word because he thinks if we name this phenomenon then we will notice this phenomenon and that noticing might shape our behavior. Remember when Trump said we wouldn’t find covid cases if we stopped testing for covid and everyone laughed and called him an asshole? This is like that basically except now respectable liberal publications like the Guardian are running with it.
The pandemic continues to be a nightmare menagerie. The death and disablement are the obviously worst part but the depravity of, well, nearly everyone in any position of official institutional power is shocking. The ability of people like Dr. Evil to say this stuff is uncanny valley territory. They seem like people yet display a startling inhumanity, a level of condescension that boggles the mind. (https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension) I wrote about this a while back in terms of nihilism and the banality of evil. (It’s the second piece here: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-3-me-in-bill-of-health/) We really do live in a different moral universe than the people who rule us and their immediate flunkies.
I find these ghouls compelling because so disturbing - where do they come from, how does a human being get made into this kind of monster? I may be being naive in assuming that it takes a lot of work to turn a person in a ghoul like that. If so it’s a naivete I’m going to try to keep. To an important degree it makes complete sense that these people exist: a society that’s a death machine for so many people is also a ghoul factory, growing these fuckers in a vat so they can tend the wood chipper that so many of the rest of us keep getting tossed into.
I’m struggling for words to convey the depth of my contempt, and I’m aware that part of the appeal of that contempt is that it helps me cope with the grief and the sense of powerlessness. There’s so much work to be done before we’ll be where we need to be. I’m again remembering an important Lenin quote: politics begins when millions are in motion - not thousand, millions. We’re not yet millions in motion in the direction of the kind of pandemic politics we need. I remain convinced we’ll get there, and further that we’ll get there in terms of socialist revolution, but it’s a slow process, a long wait, excruciatingly so.
Dr. Evil’s rhetorical move in this shitty fucking artice is to compare rates of long term harm for covid to rates of long term harm for other illnesses. (It’s a move like that asshole David Leonhardt likes to make, which I wrote about in the third piece here https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-3-me-in-bill-of-health/) Now, the comparison could just as well work in the opposite direction - we could learning something, become different, better! That is, we could say that long covid involves a great deal of suffering and that this suffering is significantly an effect of policy choices and the larger architecture of our society, and that this means covid and its management is political. And because there are other long illnesses similar to long covid therefore those other illnesses and their management too are is political. But then, the outbreak of politics or any sense of meaningful social change is what commentators like this strenuousl want to avoid.
In the Goran Therborn book I often bang on about Therborn identifies a few kinds of postures people can take on in relation to power, postures that help people in power get their way and in doing so make challenges to the organizaton of society less likely. (Abby Cartus wrote a paid of posts on the book, I recommend them, they’re here https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/therborn-1-ideology-subjectivity-angel-numbers/ and here https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/therborn-2-interpellation-boogaloo/. If it’s any interest, I’ve got some spitballing on it here with links there to other notes on it. https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/ideology-and-experience-therborn-and-thompson-again-some-williams.) These postures include deference, fear, and resignation. There are others that I won’t get into right now.
Getting people resigned to this world seems like a go-to move for covid minimizers. Biden said this very early on, it might have been right on or after his inauguration come to think of it, he said there was nothing we could do to change the trajectory of the pandemic.
Deference plays a big role as well. There’s deference to Biden and because they have the apparent virtue of not being named Donald Trump. They continue to dine out on that and blue chuds lap that up still, and this will only get worse between now and the next election. There’s also deference to medical expertise - it’s not an accident that so many prominent minimizers have a medical credential. I think the smug liberal “I trust SCIENCE!” gestures that have grown up as part of the culture wars have been weaponized here in that there’s a kind of borrowed trust, as if someone having a medical degree or understanding how ocean currents work means people are good at analyzing social and political phenomena. (I mentioned to my oldest kid that I was angry about this and I ranted a little. She’s a cool and smart 14 year old. She said in a mocking sarcastic tone “oh hey I have a medical degree so I’m the expect on the value of human life!” Exactly. Fuck you, Dr. Evil.)
Having written this, it clicked in my head that of course disabled and chronically ill people have been at the leading edge of understanding the pandemic correctly, having (unfortunately, and as a major injustice) had a great deal of experience with the ways in which medicine is actually a form of politics, often an oppressive one and very often and ostensibly depoliticized form. It also clicked that death and disablement from flu has long been successfully depoliticized. I don’t remember when it happened but I remember the experience of something shifting in my head, as I stopped taking the numbers of flu deaths each year as an apolitical given and instead realized it’s a political effect of policy and social relations. Not everyone’s had that shift, which I don’t say to brag or whatever, just that I’ve had friends and colleagues and acquaintances evoke the comparison between flu and covid in various ways. Not them saying covid’s just the flu as has been common in some circles but rather them using the flu to think about covid - ‘we don’t take such and such precautions with flu, why should we take them with covid?’ and ’we’re at a point when or we will some day be at a point when covid deaths are just like flu deaths in their frequency’, with the implication that flu deaths are an inevitable, apolitical fact of life. There’s also a way in which in those conversations that flu deaths serve as something of a thought stopping cliche, insofar as the people saying this stuff seem to lean heavily on the flu as taken for granted, nothing to do with politics, and ultimately not a big deal, and that rhetorical/ideological status of flu somehow serves to make the deaths that the person mentioned be something they don’t really think about: instead of each death as a loss of an infinitely valuable human being, it’s just, you know, shit happens, whatever, I don’t want to think about it, I haven’t thought about it, kinda thing. It’s deeply callous and also deeply thoughtless, the latter facilitating the former. It’s like a teflon coating preventing anything from sticking, no sense of grief, suffering, loss, or human worth can get through. Writing in Peste magazine early last year Anne Sosin and Martha Lincoln referred to a war on empathy, which is a good term for it. https://web.archive.org/web/20230304161021/https://www.pestemag.com/featured-posts/war-on-empathy-3r6br It’s an attempt by the ghouls to get people to act like ghouls despite themselves, and the depoliticization of flu is an example of how that war is very old. The widespread writing off of disabled people is another, there are many other examples. Part of what accompanies domination and oppression are ways of ignoring and living with those violent social patterns and the harms they create. That’s not to say everyone ignores these injustices, far from it, it’s to say that the status of these harms and injustices - whether they’re understood as political in the first place or whether they’re depoliticized - is politically produced.
I can’t remember anymore if I’ve written this down anywhere finished or if it only lives in my head, hard drive and informal conversations in direct message groups on social media: people who understand social reality accurately and see those most harmed by covid as their moral equals could not act like politicians and other covid minimizers act and want the rest of us to act. The ghouls who publicly minimize covid - and doing so is lucrative; if memory serves the person Ashish Jha replaced as public health dean was pulling down close to a million bucks a year and I assume Jha’s gotten even more - try to get the rest of us to both misunderstand the reality of infection and covid harms and also to get us to not see ourselves as in solidarity with each other or to see those harmed as our moral equals to whom we have any relationships and obligations. (It’s a deeply reactionary thing the minimizers are doing, arguably fascistic though I’m generally one prone to using that term.) They do so in service of other monsters - bosses, owners, politicians, etc - who benefit from the death machine and who don’t want to be troubled by the noise and hassle of plebs complaining about being thrown into the wood chipper. Those master monsters want a quiet life, the minimizer ghouls want to help them getting it by making sure the rest of us shut the fuck up.
Part of why I find the minimizer ghouls so compelling is that I can’t get my head around how someone becomes someone who is better off failing to understand the world and/or failing to recognize others as one’s moral equal, but having written that out, this general type of failing is a deep seated component of all class societies: social class itself is violence, injustice, oppression. The people at the top of the heap could not live with themselves if they both correctly perceived the heap and cared about the humanity of those whose faces they step on, so logically they must not do one or the other or both: to live high on the food chain requires an inaccurate social theory and/or moral reason as well as a lack of empathy.
The Therborn book I mentioned has a discussion of how different kinds of people are made by our society, he calls it ideological subjectification if memory serves. For my purposes here I’d say that monstrous societies have processes for making the monsters they need to operate. The death machine’s a ghoul factory, as I said above. We’re in a particular version of that general condition right now. Some of us understood this, or elements of this, before the pandemic. Some of us have come to understand this, or elements of this, during and in response to the pandemic. Some of us have yet to come to understand it.
I’m unsure here but I’m tempted to say that this also means there’s a degree of danger to the powerful in the pandemic. One aspect of that danger is straight forward, along the lines of keeping proft rates high, successful political careers, and so on. I think that’s driven a great deal of the mass murdering shitheadedness of the Biden administration’s pandemic response. There’s also another kind of danger, maybe, in that the experience of the pandemic is shaping people’s outlooks. I was talking the other day about the first New Left in the UK and what EP Thompson wrote about consciousness and social life. (https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/enforced-meaninglessness-plus-more-on-the-first/) As Thompson put it, we live a certain way and we have a consciousness to match: how we live explains our consciousness, not vice versa. Experience, he said, is a junction or hinge connecting social life to social consciousness, it’s partly a word for what we live out and it’s partly a word for what we make of what we live out - what new thoughts we have, what new priorities we develop, what ways we try to live differently. In the pandemic a lot of people are having profoundly re-orienting experiences due to the many kinds of awfulness inflicted. That re-orienting has the potential to foster what Ralph Miliband called a state of desubordination - basically when lots of plebs get uppity. (I wrote a bit more about it at that link and I have an essay under review which I will hope someday come out getting into a little more detail on this, related to the political perspective that went by the name socialist humanism in the UK’s first New Left. I think I’ve mentioned this before somewhere at Open Mode but I can’t recall where and am too tired and lazy to look it up.)
The Biden administration and its allies and its analogs are working to a significant degree to prevent that re-orientation, to keep us all the same and to not have the experience of pandemic life and death create any kinds of new ways to live and new aspirations for how to live. They want to prevent the development of, to use Raymond Williams’s phraseology, emergent cultures and ideologies that can be alternative to or in opposition to the dominant culture and ideology. The ghouls may not know that this is what they’re doing, they don’t have to be aware of what I’ve suggested might be this threat to them and their world, I think their careerism might get them to act the same way as if they had a deeper political commitiment to preventing the emergence of a new liberatory perspective.
I’m not sure about this but I’m tempted to say that what I’ve said here amounts to the pandemic being basically the ordinary operations of capitalism, a kind of distillation of those ordinary operations and also a playing out in relatively short term (and at an absolutely massive scale), - and so maybe in a kind of more perceptible than usual way of - processes that usually take a longer, slower, more diffuse form. If so that would also speak to the idea that there’s a danger to the powerful and their system in all of this, albeit a danger they’re successfully managing so far. But my point is that they do have to do that managing, it’s got real stakes for them.
I’ve talked repeatedly on here and elsewhere about capitalism’s tendency to kill, which Engels called social murder. I think experiences of witnessing social murder tend to create politicization. That’s not at all to say specifically left wing emancipatory politicizatoon, far from it. It’s to say that the fixed in place and unconsidered character of social relations periodically become unfixed and become potental objects of greater collective consideration in response to social murder - provided collectivities for doing that politicizing thought get built successfully, anyway. The minimizer ghouls and the monsters who are their masters couldn’t stop social murder even if they wanted to - capitalism kills necessarily - so at most they can manage the politicization that can result from experiences of social murder. The prevailing form of that management under Biden and similar monsters seems to be to depoliticize and to declare war on empathy and moral equality. Under Trump we sometimes got a different response, a reactionary political one - I remember some right wing commentators saying explicitly that maybe old people had lived long enough and should die. I want to stress that the liberals are no less committed to eugenics than that, they’re just less open about it publicly and I suspect less honest with themselves about it. The far right around the Republicans will just embrace that some people are less than others and have to die. The center right around the Democrats will pretend they don’t think that, or try to not think at all, though sometimes they do let slip that they too don’t give a fuck about any of the less humans who get culled. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, though in the present the latter perspective seems to succeed better. I suppose that openly reactionary bigots can’t get as much traction as nihilist technocrats can is a good thing insofar as more traction for bigots would be even worse, but I can’t say I’m grateful or whatever.
I need to jump off here but one or two last thoughts. As I mentioned on here before, I think in my last post on the first New Left in the UK but I don’t remember, Williams talks in an interview about what he called pre-emergent phenomena. As I recall and as I understood it, the idea is that people sometimes have experiences, and needs and aspiration in response, that they don’t yet know how to make sense of. (This is my experience of so much of the pandemic and is, I think, one reason I’ve found more meaning in music like noise rock and jungle, insofar as that music is in part about being in a state simultaneously agitated and inarticulate.) Under these sorts of conditions, sometimes an artistic work or political perspective comes along that gives words to something that we craved words for, whether or not we knew it - that work or perspective manages to be new in one sense while also being familiar in another sense, we recognize ourselvs or our lives or our world in that newness because the work is articulating to us what we previously lacked a way to articulate. This is a terrible way to put it, but in terms of supply and demand, one part of the pre-emergent is the development of demand for the new artistic and political work that articulates what we need articulated but so far haven’t been able to articulate.
This may sound positive - hurray for new art and new politics! - but ‘new’ and ‘liberatory’ are not at all synonyms, and it is not only left politics and left-leaning art that is capable of meeting the needs we have. As I said above, I think the center right is to a significant degree working to block the emergence of anything that articulates our experiences, to prevent processing and reflecting on what we’ve lived through. (Abby Cartus called it enforced meaningless, as I talked about in that post I linked to. See also her essay on social murder and social meaning, engaging the great book Mute Compulsion. It’s here https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/social-murder-and-social-meaning/)
Dr. Evil’s call to retire the term long covid is a case in point. It’s so fucking on the nose that it’d be hard to justify in a satire, being as it is a direct call to make these experiences more meaningless and in an important sense less experienced - endured, inflicted, but not process. That blocking doesn’t alleviate the need, though. It just blocks some forms of meeting the need. The result is a relative vacuum, and that vacuum can foster some truly awful shit. The growth of antivax perspectives is one example, that’s a politicizing of aspects of medicine and public health which, however warped and misguided, has an important rational kernel to it which is why it appeals to people in conditions like the relative vacuum we’re in, and which is intensified by the smug, thoughtless ‘I trust SCIENCE’ posture. (That’s not to say reject science, it’s to say that uncritical trust is a bad idea in general and tends to sweep certain real experiences aside in ways that leave people with real needs unmet, sometimes urgent ones, and in those conditions it’s no wonder that some people will turn to the snake oil salesmen when those salesmen use the partial recognition of unmet needs as part of their sales pitch.)
Antivax isn’t the only example. Closer to home - my home, here in the Covid Zero Marxist Zealot Cave, beneath stately Wayne Manor - there are some people politicized in a loosely leftward direction by their experiences of covid, real harms and grief and distress, but drawing, as all newly politicizing people do, on a mishmash of their prior political common sense and elements of the dominant political culture. This takes the form not least of overly individualist outlooks, litigating all individual choices or assuming that all individual actions flow from a pre-existing and coherent individual consciousness. (I wrote a bit about this here: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/nonmasking-derives-from-context-not-beliefs-ps/ arguing that I think it’s a mistake to say, as some people do, that every person who isn’t masking as often as we Covid Zero Marxist Zealots would prefer is an individual who believes covid harms are acceptable.)
I do still think the left has not been as good on covid as it ought to have been and I remain frustrated with some comrades who ought to know better - as one friend put it, many people who are willing to chase up the details of various of Marx’s footnotes and unpublished manuscripts have been shockingly incurious about the pandemic, and that reflects a failure of committed responsibility - but the degree to which people are responsible for those failings is the degree to which they are our peers and the reality is that not everyone is everyone’s peer on everything, as hard as that can feel to square with being an egalitarian, because there is so much unevenness both in what we experience - tied to the unequal distribution of fates in this shithole society - and in the resources we have to make meaning of those experiences. That the left isn’t up to its historic tasks in the present is upsetting in lots of ways and a condition where we lack a left adequate to the demands of the present is one that creates the kinds of vacuums I mentioned. What’s the name of the old painting? The sleep of reason produces monsters? And some of those monsters in turn make it harder for reason to wake up.
Slightly less metaphorically, if politics begins when millions are in motion, similarly, really thinking politically about the whole scope of our social world and its many harms and injustices also requires a great many people. It’s more than individuals can do as individuals - it takes collectivities to create the emergent cultures and analyses and sensibilities and so on. Elements of that is happening, in pockets, unevenly, conflictually sometimes, and I mean happening specifically in a positive way and positive direction. But this is contest with and embattled by both the ghouls and their thoughtlessness and by less adequate analyses and politics.