Covid disproves biopower’s explanation of politics – state intervention split away from capitalism

It is my contention that the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the unviability of the theory of biopower. This theory, which sees dominance being exercised through the production of bare life, is in its heyday. According to this theory, power invades our lives by creating a preoccupation with survival above everything else. In the epoch of biopower’s reign, survival and health become the only values, which take up the center of our political world. As Giorgio Agamben, the leading proponent of the theory of biopower puts it, “The ancient right to kill and to let live gives way to an inverse model, which defines modern biopolitics, and which can be expressed by the formula to make live and to let die.” (5) According to this theory, a radical transformation of the political field – from threatening death to enforcing life – comes to define the new epoch of power. (6) But the response of authorities and theorists of biopower to the Covid-19 pandemic indicates that the explanatory power of the theory, like Leibniz’s theodicy in the face of the Lisbon Earthquake, cannot survive our contemporary disaster. The attempt to save lives – to make live, in Agamben’s terms – cuts against the economic imperatives of capitalism. The efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 put a wrench in the accumulation of capital. As a result, as much as any of the human victims of this disaster, the theory of biopower succumbs to its ravages. The Covid-19 pandemic gives the lie to the theory of biopower because the prevailing responses to the pandemic reveal the tension between survival and the exigencies of the ruling socioeconomic system. The attempt to preserve life – what the theorists of biopower view as the primary operation of power – in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic actually interrupts and disturbs the functioning of capitalism. The capitalist system finds itself unable to deal with the massive threat to life, which reveals that the ruling structure today is not one of biopower at all. Instead of aiding in the process of capitalist accumulation, the measures designed to address the pandemic operate as a brake on the capitalist system. At the moment when it imposes on the economy, state power ceases to work hand-in-hand with the forces of capital. Thus, the pandemic and the response to it show that the theory of biopower marks a fundamental theoretical misstep, a misstep that has had baleful political consequences. The attempt to preserve life during the Covid-19 pandemic leads to a series of measures that interrupt the flow of capital: social distancing that limits possibilities for exchange, lockdowns that close retail establishments and keep consumers in their homes, and mask mandates that disturb the everyday activities that sustain the economy. The leaders of capitalist states institute these measures in the name of allowing citizens to continue to live, but they recognize that such measures have a deleterious effect on the economy, which is why they occasion so much resistance, especially from right-wing proponents of unbridled capitalism. Leaders employ them reluctantly because they have no interest in damaging the capitalist economy that runs their societies, but the exigencies of people’s survival depends on these state interventions. In this way, the conflict between the exercise of state power and the capitalist economy comes to a head in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the midst of this response, it becomes clear that there is no pure exercise of biopower because there is no single site of authority. The divide between the state and capital comes to a head when disaster strikes, which is what the theory of biopower fails to account for. Rather than confronting this discrepancy between the state and capital, Agamben proclaims that capital simply capitulates before the power of the biosecurity regime that now controls the state. For Agamben, it is this regime, not capital, that holds the cards today. In Where Are We Now?, he writes, “Capitalism, for its part, has with only a few exceptions accepted loses to productivity that it would never previously have considered, probably hoping that later on it can find an accord with the new religion [of medicine].” (7) As Agamben frames it here, capitalism is not the strongest force in contemporary society. The pandemic shows that it bows before the exigencies of what he calls the religion of medicine. But this position underestimates the dominance that capitalism typically has over the state. It is not a secondary force in our existence but the primary one. The provenance of the resistance against the measures instituted to protect against the pandemic indicates their political bearing. The resistance movements are not emancipatory efforts struggling against the ruling order. They are not fights against an oppressive power structure. Instead, the resistance against the measures used to fight the pandemic stem from those who champion the free flow of capital, from business owners and libertarians to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The political fault line during the pandemic separates those who side with the forces of capital and those opposing unbridled capitalism. The former fight the restrictions, and the latter embrace their necessity. Confronted with being on the side of Trump and Bolsonaro, Agamben claims that we live in politically confused times, where Right and Left lose their straightforward significance. He then claims, “A truth remains such, whether it is expressed by the Left or enunciated by the Right.” (8) While this seems like a neutral statement about the nature of truth, it is actually an indication of Agamben’s turn to the Right. The leftist understanding of truth necessarily includes the site of enunciation as integral to the truth being articulated. For instance, it is a far different matter when Donald Trump denounces the exploitative practices of Jeff Bezos and a union leader does so. Trump says this to damage a competitor while the union leader says it as part of a collective struggle against the forces of big capital. Trump uses the truth to lie because of the desire driving the statement, whereas this is not the case with the union leader. The desire that informs the statement of truth – why one is saying it – is part of what one says. To fail to take this into account, as Agamben fails to do, is to play into the hands of the Right, which must ignore the logic of desire. The fact that Agamben finds himself on the same side as Trump and Bolsonaro in response to the pandemic points to the error in biopower’s conception of politics. For the theorists of biopower, the struggle is always against power, which is typically manifested in the state. With the pandemic, however, a split opens up between the state and the forces of capital. The site of power itself becomes clearly divided. This is a divide that the theorists of biopower have difficulty reckoning with, which is why, aside from a brief comment about capitalism’s capitulation to the forces of biosecurity, Agamben remains silent about capitalism during the pandemic.