Pandemic Climate Lessons: Negationism and Inertia Reveal Another Face of Necropolitics
What Covid-19 is revealing is that, if there were willingness, it would be possible to act quickly and effectively against climate change.
There are several articles in prominent vehicles trying to understand the reasons why Covid-19 managed to shake the world while the climatic collapse cannot. The latter is broader in scale and more dangerous when it comes to threatening people’s lives, yet is unable to move a needle for significant changes. At the same time, there are tons of debates and evidence about the enormous capacity of capitalism to generate epidemics derived from uncontrolled growth, coupled with the lack of support such as access to health, decent food, basic sanitation, etc, for most of the global population.
Although both discussions are essential, I believe that we are in an opportune time to focus on another debate: how climate denial and inertia are instruments for expanding the necropolitics installed in the world’s suburbs. Two reasons make me consider the urgency of this conversation. The first relates to the predictions that climate change — along with globalization, intensification of migratory flows and expansion of agricultural frontiers — should increase epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks such as the one we are experiencing right now. Secondly, elections will take place soon. We need to look at opposing proposals of political leaders in search of an active agenda on climate issues.
First, it is important to point out which facet of the concept of necropolitics I am resorting to when supporting the argument of climatic denialism and inertia as instruments to expand necropolitics. Specifically, the “material destruction of human bodies and populations judged to be disposable and superfluous.” The philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe coined the concept. He is responsible for updating and situating Michel Foucault’s biopolitics in the post-colonial world. For Mbembe, necropolitics reveals capitalism’s “politics of death,” as the system undergoes a structural crisis.
As technology advances, what Karl Marx called dead labor or workforce accumulated in machines, it creates a mass of subjects that no longer serve either the means of production or the reproduction of means of production. It is a collective of useless and disposable people formed by a proletariat expropriated from work, consumption, and, therefore, from any practical function in our world where existence is conditioned and focused on working to consume.
Thus, we had the production necessary for the perfect functioning of capitalist expansion, which used to assimilate bodies and subjects under an intense policy of domination, locking them mentally and physically in production lines and office stalls. We then went through the exclusion of masses of residual or indomitable people, throwing them in prisons, hospices, and peripheries. Finally, we arrived at annihilation, through violent state mechanisms, such as the killings of young people in Brazilian favelas by the police.
Who dies, who lives
While the capitalist advance creates this contingent of people without any function who no longer serves as a resource through the significant increase in dead labor, it also originated the greatest challenge ever faced by human beings to date: climate change. Its consequences are already affecting thousands of people, displacing them from their homes and their means of survival, deepening poverty, vulnerability and inequality in the face of instabilities in the natural environment, consequently forming another mass of people subject to annihilation.
Climate change and necropolitics intertwine on key issues. Both represent a structural crisis in the capitalist system That is, they are problems whose solution invariably requires overcoming the current production model. At the same time, in the face of the permanent and insurmountable apparatus of capitalism, managing chaos is the only decision left: annihilate the amorphous mass of useless subjects on one side and ignore the climatic collapse on the other. It is here that necropolitics and climate issues cease to be only correlated and become complementary.
In the face of climate collapse, which would demand a series of actions to mitigate and contain damage, both open denialism and disguised inertia become a practical instrument for the annihilation of an inconvenient human volume. This is especially true considering that the effects of climate change primarily threaten non-white and poor people, mostly women.
We have some examples to illustrate this. Back in 2012, a study led by researchers from Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) and the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) revealed that the Northeast will be the region most affected by climate change in Brazil. As the areahas a high population density and a low Human Development Index (HDI), the population is less prepared to deal with changes in temperature and rain flows (such as long periods of drought).
The inconstancies, which will directly affect the lives of the population, will be active forces stimulating migration to large urban centers. These cities are illprepared to receive and guarantee a dignified life for this “migrant” population, which leads, as history shows, to a tendency to settle in slums. Meanwhile, cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are also sensitive regions, as they already concentrate a large number of inhabitants and are prone to landslides and floods. As these events are already frequent in more impoverished neighborhoods, the amorphous mass of beings useless for the reproduction of the system will be doubly vulnerable as the severity of the consequences of the collapse increases.
If managing chaos means annihilating residual people, who is interested in acting to reduce and contain damage resulting from climate change? If the State and big corporations are the most prepared for actionhaving tools such as power and money to use, these same actors keep denying and sometimes ignoring the countless warnings of science,doing nothing about it. More than a problem, climate change appears, then, as a way of expanding a “social cleansing” strategy that is already in flux.
What the pandemic is making clear is not only the vulnerability of human beings to the problems we created ourselves, nor just the tendency of governments to protect the financial market and corporations above people. But also that, if there were willingness, it would be possible to act quickly and effectively. Therefore, not acting — and leaving people to their own fate — is simply a choice.
Written by Marina Colerato
Translated by Carol Bardi
Originally published at modefica.com.br on March 18, 2020.
