By Capri Jones
The worldwide COVID-19 death toll just hit 1.6 million, amounting to a spectacular disaster. Since the virus’ discovery in December 2019, it has wiped out entire communities, and forced hunger, houselessness, and an inability to receive medical attention. The death and suffering that COVID has caused is spectacular. As Rob Nixon defines it in his book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, spectacular violence is, “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.” While this may be the case for the pandemic itself, the events that cultivated the environment for death to become a new normal were not spectacular. Instead, they took place over time. It’s important to premise this article with the understanding that disasters are not natural. They are not nature’s best effort at revenge on the human species, or the result of a god punishing its people. Disasters are political, meaning that during events like the COVID-19 pandemic, life and death are predetermined. The conditions that led COVID-19 to develop, and in turn kill so many people, were crafted by the oppressive systems that we live under. It was by no accident that the virus became so deadly, instead, COVID-19 became weaponized by the war-like conditions baked into our capitalist system. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on the underlying disaster of the commodification of housing in the United States. But it is important to note that this is not the only underlying disastrous aspect of the pandemic that took place over time. The housing crisis is only one facet of the austerity-based society that has ripped away any access to safety—economic, medical, community—in an era of neoliberal globalization. It is with this understanding of death in 2020, that analyzing an abolitionist response to disaster is essential. I argue that abolition of the systems that cultivated the environment for premature death by COVID-19 to become a new normal is the only solution for survival in an epoch that is, and will continue to be, stricken by a myriad of crises.
