[The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more
along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help
solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. ]
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COVID-19 AND CIRCUITS OF CAPITAL  
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Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace
March 27, 2020
Monthly Review
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_ The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more
along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help
solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. _

, Monthly Review

 

Calculation

COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second
severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially
a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and,
one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought
about by surges in patients.

China, its initial outbreak in contraction, presently breathes
easier.1
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South Korea and Singapore as well. Europe, especially Italy and Spain,
but increasingly other countries, already bends under the weight of
deaths still early in the outbreak. Latin America and Africa are only
now beginning to accumulate cases, some countries preparing better
than others. In the United States, a bellwether if only as the richest
country in the history of the world, the near future looks bleak. The
outbreak is not slated to peak stateside until May and already health
care workers and hospital visitors are fist fighting over access to
the dwindling supply of personal protection equipment.2
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Nurses, to whom the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC)
has appallingly recommended using bandanas and scarves as masks, have
already declared that “the system is doomed.”3
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The U.S. administration meanwhile continues to outbid individual
states for basic medical equipment that it refused to purchase for
them in the first place. It has also announced a border crackdown as a
public health intervention while the virus rages on ill-addressed
inside the country.4
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An epidemiology team at Imperial College projected that the best
campaign in _mitigation_—flattening the plotted curve of
accumulating cases by quarantining detected cases and socially
distancing the elderly—would still leave the United States with 1.1
million dead and a case burden eight times the country’s total
critical care beds.5
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Disease _suppression_, looking to end the outbreak, would take public
health further into a China-style case (and family member) quarantine
and community-wide distancing, including closing down institutions.
That would bring the United States down to a projected range of around
200,000 deaths.

The Imperial College group estimates a successful campaign in
suppression would have to be pursued for at least eighteen months,
carrying an overhead in economic contraction and decay in community
services. The team proposed balancing the demands of disease control
and economy by toggling in and out of community quarantine, as
triggered by a set level of critical care beds filled.

Other modelers have pushed back. A group led by Nassim Taleb of _Black
Swan_ fame declares the Imperial College model fails to include
contact tracing and door-to-door monitoring.6
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Their counterpoint misses that the outbreak has broken past many
governments’ willingness to engage that kind of _cordon sanitaire_.
It will not be until the outbreak begins its decline when many
countries will view such measures, hopefully with a functional and
accurate test, as appropriate. As one droll put it: “Coronavirus is
too radical. America needs a more moderate virus that we can respond
to incrementally.”7
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The Taleb group notes the Imperial team’s refusal to investigate
under what conditions the virus can be driven to extinction. Such
extirpation does not mean zero cases, but enough isolation that single
cases are not likely to produce new chains of infection. Only 5
percent of susceptibles in contact with a case in China were
subsequently infected. In effect, the Taleb team favors China’s
suppression program, going all out fast enough to drive the outbreak
to extinction without getting into a marathon dance toggling between
disease control and ensuring the economy no labor shortage. In other
words, China’s strict (and resource-intensive) approach frees its
population from the months-long—or even years-long—sequestration
in which the Imperial team recommends other countries partake.

Mathematical epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace, one of us, overturns the
modeling table entirely. The modeling of emergencies, however
necessary, misses when and where to begin. Structural causes are as
much part of the emergency. Including them helps us figure out how
best to respond moving forward beyond just restarting the economy that
produced the damage. “If firefighters are given sufficient
resources,” writes Wallace,

under normal conditions, most fires, most often, can be contained
with minimal casualties and property destruction. However, that
containment is critically dependent on a far less romantic, but no
less heroic enterprise, the persistent, ongoing, regulatory efforts
that limit building hazard through code development and enforcement,
and that also ensure firefighting, sanitation, and building
preservation resources are supplied to all at needed levels.…

Context counts for pandemic infection, and current political
structures that allow multinational agricultural enterprises to
privatize profits while externalizing and socializing costs, must
become subject to “code enforcement” that reinternalizes those
costs if truly mass-fatal pandemic disease is to be avoided in the
near future.8
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The failure to prepare for and react to the outbreak did not just
start in December when countries around the world failed to respond
once COVID-19 spilled out of Wuhan. In the United States, for
instance, it did not start when Donald Trump dismantled his national
security team’s pandemic preparation team or left seven hundred CDC
positions unfilled.9
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Nor did it start when feds failed to act on the results of a 2017
pandemic simulation showing the country was unprepared.10
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Nor when, as stated in a _Reuters_ headline, the United States “axed
CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak,” although
missing the early direct contact from a U.S. expert on the ground in
China certainly weakened the U.S. response. Nor did it start with the
unfortunate decision not to use the already available test kits
provided by the World Health Organization. Together, the delays in
early information and total miss in testing will undoubtedly be
responsible for many, probably thousands, of lost lives.11
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The failures were actually programmed decades ago as the shared
commons of public health were simultaneously neglected and
monetized.12
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A country captured by a regimen of individualized, just-in-time
epidemiology—an utter contradiction—with barely enough hospital
beds and equipment for normal operations, is by definition unable to
marshal the resources necessary to pursue a China brand of
suppression.

Following up the Taleb team’s point about model strategies in more
explicitly political terms, disease ecologist Luis Fernando Chaves,
another coauthor of this article, references dialectical biologists
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin to concur that “letting the
numbers speak” only masks all the assumptions folded in
beforehand.13
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Models such as the Imperial study explicitly limit the scope of
analysis to narrowly tailored questions framed within the dominant
social order. By design, they fail to capture the broader market
forces driving outbreaks and the political decisions underlying
interventions.

Consciously or not, the resulting projections set securing health for
all in second place, including the many thousands of the most
vulnerable who would be killed should a country toggle between disease
control and the economy. The Foucaultian vision of a state acting on a
population in its own interests only represents an update, albeit a
more benign one, of the Malthusian push for herd immunity that
Britain’s Tory government and now the Netherlands proposed—letting
the virus burn through the population unimpeded.14
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There is little evidence beyond an ideological hope that herd immunity
would guarantee stopping the outbreak. The virus may readily evolve
out from underneath the population’s immune blanket.

Intervention

What should be done instead? First, we need to grasp that, in
responding to the emergency the right way, we will still be engaging
in both necessity and danger.

We need to nationalize hospitals as Spain did in response to the
outbreak.15
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We need to supercharge testing in volume and turnaround as Senegal
has.16
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We need to socialize pharmaceuticals.17
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We need to enforce maximum protections for medical staff to slow staff
decay. We must secure the right to repair for ventilators and other
medical machinery.18
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We need to start mass-producing cocktails of antivirals such as
remdesivir and old-school antimalarial chloroquine (and any other
drugs that appear promising) while we conduct clinical trials testing
whether they work beyond the laboratory.19
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A planning system should be implemented to (1) force companies to
produce the needed ventilators and personal protection equipment
required by health care workers and (2) prioritize allocation to
places with the greatest needs.

We must establish a massive pandemic corps to provide the work
force—from research to care—that approaches the order of demand
the virus (and any other pathogen to come) is placing on us. Match the
caseload with the number of critical care beds, staffing, and
equipment necessary so that suppression can bridge the present numbers
gap. In other words, we cannot accept the idea of merely surviving
COVID-19’s ongoing air attack only to return later to contact
tracing and case isolation to drive the outbreak below its threshold.
We must hire enough people to identify COVID-19 home-by-home right now
and equip them with the needed protective gear, such as adequate
masks. Along the way, we need to suspend a society organized around
expropriation, from landlords up through sanctions on other countries,
so that people can survive both the disease and its cure.

Until such a program can be implemented, however, the greater populace
is left largely abandoned. Even as continued pressure must be brought
to bear on recalcitrant governments, in the spirit of a largely lost
tradition in proletarian organizing going back 150 years, everyday
people who are able should join emerging mutual aid groups and
neighborhood brigades.20
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Professional public health staff that unions can spare should train
these groups to keep acts of kindness from spreading the virus.

The insistence that we fold the virus’s structural origins into
emergency planning offers us a key to parlaying every step forward
into protecting people before profits.

One of many perils lies in normalizing the “batshit crazy”
presently underway, a serendipitous characterization given the
syndrome that patients suffer—proverbial bat shit in the lungs. We
need to retain the shock we received when we learned another SARS
virus emerged out of its wildlife refugia and in a matter of eight
weeks splattered itself across humanity.21
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The virus emerged at one terminus of a regional supply line in exotic
foods, successfully setting off a human-to-human chain of infections
at the other end in Wuhan, China.22
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From there, the outbreak both diffused locally and hopped onto planes
and trains, spreading out across the globe through a web structured by
travel connections and down a hierarchy from larger to smaller
cities.23
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Other than describing the wild food market in the typical orientalism,
little effort has been expended on the most obvious of questions. How
did the exotic food sector arrive at a standing where it could sell
its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market
in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or
in an alleyway. Think of the permits and payments (and deregulation
thereof) involved.24
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Well beyond fisheries, worldwide wild food is an increasingly
formalized sector, evermore capitalized by the same sources backing
industrial production.25
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Although nowhere near similar in the magnitude of output, the
distinction is now more opaque.

The overlapping economic geography extends back from the Wuhan market
to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by
operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness.26
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As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild
food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid
the last stands. As a result, the most exotic of pathogens, in this
case bat-hosted SARS-2, find their way onto a truck, whether in food
animals or the labor tending them, shotgun from one end of a
lengthening periurban circuit to the other before hitting the world
stage.27
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Infiltration

The connection bears elaboration, as much in helping us plan forward
during this outbreak as in understanding how humanity maneuvered
itself into such a trap.

Some pathogens emerge right out of centers of production. Foodborne
bacteria such as _Salmonella_ and _Campylobacter_ come to mind. But
many like COVID-19 originate on the frontiers of capital production.
Indeed, at least 60 percent of novel human pathogens emerge by
spilling over from wild animals to local human communities (before the
more successful ones spread to the rest of the world).28
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A number of luminaries in the field of ecohealth, some funded in part
by Colgate-Palmolive and Johnson & Johnson, companies driving the
bleeding edge of agribusiness-led deforestation, produced a global map
based on previous outbreaks back to 1940 intimating where new
pathogens are likely to emerge moving forward.29
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The warmer the color on the map, the more likely a new pathogen should
emerge there. But in confusing such _absolute geographies_, the
team’s map—red hot in China, India, Indonesia, and parts of Latin
America and Africa—missed a critical point. Focusing on outbreak
zones ignores the relations shared by global economic actors that
shape epidemiologies.30
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The capital interests backing development- and production-induced
changes in land use and disease emergence in underdeveloped parts of
the globe reward efforts that pin responsibility for outbreaks on
indigenous populations and their so-deemed “dirty” cultural
practices.31
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Prepping bushmeat and home burials are two practices blamed for the
emergence of new pathogens. Plotting _relational geographies_, in
contrast, suddenly turns New York, London, and Hong Kong, key sources
of global capital, into three of the world’s worst hotspots instead.

Outbreak zones meanwhile are no longer even organized under
traditional polities. Unequal ecological exchange—redirecting the
worst damage from industrial agriculture to the Global South—has
moved out of solely stripping localities of resources by state-led
imperialism and into new complexes across scale and commodity.32
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Agribusiness is reconfiguring their extractivist operations into
spatially discontinuous networks across territories of differing
scales.33
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A series of multinational-based “Soybean Republics,” for instance,
now range across Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The new
geography is embodied by changes in company management structure,
capitalization, subcontracting, supply chain substitutions, leasing,
and transnational land pooling.34
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In straddling national borders, these “commodity countries,”
flexibly embedded across ecologies and political borders, are
producing new epidemiologies along the way.35
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For instance, despite a general shift in population from commoditized
rural areas to urban slums that continues today across the globe, the
rural-urban divide driving much of the discussion around disease
emergence misses rural-destined labor and the rapid growth of rural
towns into periurban _desakotas_ (city villages) or _zwischenstadt_
(in-between cities). Mike Davis and others have identified how these
newly urbanizing landscapes act as both local markets and regional
hubs for global agricultural commodities passing through.36
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Some such regions have even gone “post-agricultural.”37
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As a result, forest disease dynamics, the pathogens’ primeval
sources, are no longer constrained to the hinterlands alone. Their
associated epidemiologies have themselves turned relational, felt
across time and space. A SARS can suddenly find itself spilling over
into humans in the big city only a few days out of its bat cave.

Ecosystems in which such “wild” viruses were in part controlled by
the complexities of the tropical forest are being drastically
streamlined by capital-led deforestation and, at the other end of
periurban development, by deficits in public health and environmental
sanitation.38
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While many sylvatic pathogens are dying off with their host species as
a result, a subset of infections that once burned out relatively
quickly in the forest, if only by an irregular rate of encountering
their typical host species, are now propagating across susceptible
human populations whose vulnerability to infection is often
exacerbated in cities by austerity programs and corrupted regulation.
Even in the face of efficacious vaccines, the resulting outbreaks are
characterized by greater extent, duration, and momentum. What were
once local spillovers are now epidemics trawling their way through
global webs of travel and trade.39
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By this parallax effect—by a change in the environmental background
alone—old standards such as Ebola, Zika, malaria, and yellow fever,
evolving comparatively little, have all made sharp turns into regional
threats.40
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They have suddenly moved from spilling over into remote villagers now
and again to infecting thousands in capital cities. In something of
the other ecological direction, even wild animals, routinely longtime
disease reservoirs, are suffering blowback. Their populations
fragmented by deforestation, native New World monkeys susceptible to
wildtype yellow fever, to which they had been exposed for at least a
hundred years, are losing their herd immunity and dying in the
hundreds of thousands.41
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Expansion

If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both
propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins
migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of
population centers.42
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It is here, and along the way, where novel pathogens infiltrate
agriculture’s gated communities. The lengthier the associated supply
chains and the greater the extent of adjunct deforestation, the more
diverse (and exotic) the zoonotic pathogens that enter the food chain.
Among recent emergent and reemergent farm and foodborne pathogens,
originating from across the anthropogenic domain, are African swine
fever, _Campylobacter_, _Cryptosporidium_, _Cyclospora_, Ebola Reston,
_E. coli_ O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, _Listeria_,
Nipah virus, Q fever, _Salmonella_, _Vibrio_, _Yersinia_, and a
variety of novel influenza variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v,
H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.43
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However unintended, the entirety of the production line is organized
around practices that accelerate the evolution of pathogen virulence
and subsequent transmission.44
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Growing genetic monocultures—food animals and plants with nearly
identical genomes—removes immune firebreaks that in more diverse
populations slow down transmission.45
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Pathogens now can just quickly evolve around the commonplace host
immune genotypes. Meanwhile, crowded conditions depress immune
response.46
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Larger farm animal population sizes and densities of factory farms
facilitate greater transmission and recurrent infection.47
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High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a
continually renewed supply of susceptibles at barn, farm, and regional
levels, removing the cap on the evolution of pathogen deadliness.48
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Housing a lot of animals together rewards those strains that can burn
through them best. Decreasing the age of slaughter—to six weeks in
chickens—is likely to select for pathogens able to survive more
robust immune systems.49
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Lengthening the geographic extent of live animal trade and export has
increased the diversity of genomic segments that their associated
pathogens exchange, increasing the rate at which disease agents
explore their evolutionary possibilities.50
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While pathogen evolution rockets forward in all these ways, there is,
however, little to no intervention, even at the industry’s own
demand, save what is required to rescue any one quarter’s fiscal
margins from the sudden emergency of an outbreak.51
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The trend tends toward fewer government inspections of farms and
processing plants, legislation _against_ government surveillance and
activist exposé, and legislation against even reporting on the
specifics of deadly outbreaks in media outlets. Despite recent court
victories against pesticide and hog pollution, the private command of
production remains entirely focused on profit. The damages caused by
the outbreaks that result are externalized to livestock, crops,
wildlife, workers, local and national governments, public health
systems, and alternate agrosystems abroad as a matter of national
priority. In the United States, the CDC reports foodborne outbreaks
are expanding in the numbers of states impacted and people infected.52
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That is, capital’s alienation is parsing out in pathogens’ favor.
While the public interest is filtered out at the farm and food factory
gate, pathogens bleed past the biosecurity that industry is willing to
pay for and back out to the public. Everyday production represents a
lucrative moral hazard eating through our shared health commons.

Liberation

There is a telling irony in New York, one of the largest cities in the
world, sheltering in place against COVID-19, a hemisphere away from
the virus’s origins. Millions of New Yorkers are hiding out in
housing stock overseen until recently by one Alicia Glen, until 2018
the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development.53
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Glen is a former Goldman Sachs executive who oversaw the investment
company’s Urban Investment Group, which finances projects in the
kinds of communities the firm’s other units help redline.54
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Glen, of course, is not in any way personally to blame for the
outbreak, but is more a symbol of a connection that hits closer to
home. Three years before the city hired her, upon a housing crisis and
Great Recession in part its own making, her former employer, along
with JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo & Co., and
Morgan Stanley, took 63 percent of the resulting federal emergency
loan financing.55
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Goldman Sachs, cleared of overhead, moved to diversifying its holdings
out of the crisis. Goldman Sachs took 60 percent stock in Shuanghui
Investment and Development, part of the giant Chinese agribusiness
that bought U.S.-based Smithfield Foods, the largest hog producer in
the world.56
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For $300 million, it also scored out-and-out ownership of ten poultry
farms in Fujian and Hunan, one province over from Wuhan and well
within the city’s wild foods catchment.57
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It invested up to another $300 million alongside Deutsche Bank in hog
raising in the same provinces.58
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The relational geographies explored above have circulated all the way
back. There is the pandemic presently sickening Glen’s
constituencies apartment-to-apartment across New York, the largest
U.S. COVID-19 epicenter. But we need also to acknowledge that the loop
of causes of the outbreak in part extended out from New York to begin
with, however minor in this instance Goldman Sachs’ investment may
be for a system the size of China’s agriculture.

Nationalistic finger pointing, from Trump’s racist “China virus”
and across the liberal continuum, obscures the interlocking global
directorates of state and capital.59
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“Enemy brothers,” Karl Marx described them.60
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The death and damage borne by working people on the battlefield, in
the economy, and now on their couches fighting to catch their breath
manifest both the competition among elites maneuvering for dwindling
natural resources and the means shared in dividing and conquering the
mass of humanity caught in the gears of these machinations.

Indeed, a pandemic that arises out of the capitalist mode of
production and that the state is expected to manage on one end can
offer an opportunity from which the system’s managers and
beneficiaries can prosper on the other. In mid-February, five U.S.
senators and twenty House members dumped millions of dollars in
personally held stock in industries likely to be damaged in the
oncoming pandemic.61
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The politicos based their insider trading on nonpublic intelligence,
even as some of the representatives continued to publicly repeat
regime missives that the pandemic served no such threat.

Beyond such crass smash-and-grabs, the corruption stateside is
systemic, a marker of the end of the U.S. cycle of accumulation when
capital cashes out.

There is something comparatively anachronistic in efforts to keep the
spout on even if organized around reifying finance over the reality of
the primary ecologies (and related epidemiologies) on which it is
based. For Goldman Sachs itself, the pandemic, as crises before,
offers “room to grow”:

We share the optimism of the various vaccine experts and researchers
at biotech companies based on the good progress that has been made on
various therapies and vaccines so far. We believe that fear will abate
at the first significant evidence of such progress.…

Trying to trade to a possible downside target when the year-end target
is substantially higher is appropriate for day traders, momentum
followers, and some hedge fund managers, but not for long-term
investors. Of equal importance, there is no guarantee that the market
reaches the lower levels that may be used as justification for selling
today. On the other hand, we are more confident that the market will
eventually reach the higher target given the resiliency and
preeminence of the US economy.

And finally, we actually think that current levels provide an
opportunity to slowly add to the risk levels of a portfolio. For those
who may be sitting on excess cash and have staying power with the
right strategic asset allocation, this is the time to start
incrementally adding to S&P equities.62
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Appalled by the ongoing carnage, people the world over draw different
conclusions.63
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The circuits of capital and production that pathogens mark like
radioactive tags one after the other are thought unconscionable.

How to characterize such systems beyond, as we did above, the episodic
and circumstantial? Our group is in the midst of deriving a model that
outstrips efforts by the modern colonial medicine found in ecohealth
and One Health that continues to blame the indigenous and local
smallholders for the deforestation that leads to the emergence of
deadly diseases.64
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Our general theory of neoliberal disease emergence, including, yes, in
China, combines:

* global circuits of capital;
* deployment of said capital destroying regional environmental
complexity that keeps virulent pathogen population growth in check;
* the resulting increases in the rates and taxonomic breadth of
spillover events;
* the expanding periurban commodity circuits shipping these newly
spilled over pathogens in livestock and labor from the deepest
hinterland to regional cities;
* the growing global travel (and livestock trade) networks that
deliver the pathogens from said cities to the rest of the world in
record time;
* the ways these networks lower transmission friction, selecting for
the evolution of greater pathogen deadliness in both livestock and
people;
* and, among other impositions, the dearth of reproduction on-site
in industrial livestock, removing natural selection as an ecosystems
service that provides real-time (and nearly free) disease protection.

The underlying operative premise is that the cause of COVID-19 and
other such pathogens is not found just in the object of any one
infectious agent or its clinical course, but also in the field of
ecosystemic relations that capital and other structural causes have
pinned back to their own advantage.65
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The wide variety of pathogens, representing different taxa, source
hosts, modes of transmission, clinical courses, and epidemiological
outcomes, all the earmarks that send us running wild-eyed to our
search engines upon each outbreak, mark different parts and pathways
along the same kinds of circuits of land use and value accumulation.

A general program of intervention runs in parallel far beyond a
particular virus.

To avoid the worst outcomes here on out, _disalienation_ offers the
next great human transition: abandoning settler ideologies,
reintroducing humanity back into Earth’s cycles of regeneration, and
rediscovering our sense of individuation in multitudes beyond capital
and the state.66
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However, economism, the belief that all causes are economic alone,
will not be liberation enough. Global capitalism is a many-headed
hydra, appropriating, internalizing, and ordering multiple layers of
social relation.67
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Capitalism operates across complex and interlinked terrains of race,
class, and gender in the course of actualizing regional value regimes
place to place.

At the risk of accepting the precepts of what historian Donna Haraway
dismissed as salvation history—“can we defuse the bomb in
time?”—disalienation must dismantle these multifold hierarchies of
oppression and the locale-specific ways they interact with
accumulation.68
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Along the way, we must navigate out of capital’s expansive
reappropriations across productive, social, and symbolic
materialisms.69
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That is, out of what sums up to a totalitarianism. Capitalism
commodifies everything—Mars exploration here, sleep there, lithium
lagoons, ventilator repair, even sustainability itself, and on and on,
these many permutations are found well beyond the factory and farm.
All the ways nearly everyone everywhere is subjected to the market,
which during a time like this is increasingly anthropomorphized by
politicians, could not be clearer.70
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In short, a successful intervention keeping any one of the many
pathogens queuing up across the agroeconomic circuit from killing a
billion people must walk through the door of a global clash with
capital and its local representatives, however much any individual
foot soldier of the bourgeoisie, Glen among them, attempts to mitigate
the damage. As our group describes in some of our latest work,
agribusiness is at war with public health.71
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And public health is losing.

Should, however, greater humanity win such a generational conflict, we
can replug ourselves back into a planetary metabolism that, however
differently expressed place to place, reconnects our ecologies and our
economies.72
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Such ideals are more than matters of the utopian. In doing so, we
converge on immediate solutions. We protect the forest complexity that
keeps deadly pathogens from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto
the world’s travel network.73
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We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate
animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up
in virulence and geographic extent.74
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We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural
selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real
time. Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of
all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by
the market.

The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more
along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help
solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None
of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse,
mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes,
infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of
premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of
pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost
annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter
time than the hundred-year lull since 1918. Can we fundamentally
adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of
a truce with these infections?

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]]
Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Coronavirus
Disease (COVID-19)—Statistics and Research
[[link removed]],”
Our World in Data, accessed March 22, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Brian M. Rosenthal, Joseph Goldstein, and Michael Rothfeld,
“Coronavirus in N.Y.: ‘Deluge’ of Cases Begins Hitting Hospitals
[[link removed]],”
New York Times, March 20, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Hannah Rappleye, Andrew W. Lehren, Laura Stricklet, and Sarah
Fitzpatrick, “’The System Is Doomed’: Doctors, Nurses, Sound off
in NBC News Coronavirus Survey
[[link removed]],”
NBC News, March 20, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Eliza Relman, “The Federal Government Outbid States on Critical
Coronavirus Supplies After Trump Told Governors to Get Their Own
Medical Equipment
[[link removed]],”
Business Insider, March 20, 2020; David Oliver, “Trump Announces
U.S.-Mexico Border Closure to Stem Spread of Coronavirus
[[link removed]],”
USA Today, March 19, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Neil M. Ferguson et al. on behalf of the Imperial College COVID-19
Response Team, “Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to
Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand
[[link removed]],”
March 16, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007);
Chen Shen, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, “Review of
Ferguson et al. ‘Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions
[[link removed]],’”
New England Complex Systems Institute, March 17, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
NewTmrw, Twitter post
[[link removed]], March 21,
2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Rodrick Wallace, “Pandemic Firefighting vs. Pandemic Fire
Prevention” (unpublished manuscript, March 20, 2020). Available upon
request.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jonathan Allen, “Trump’s Not Worried About Coronavirus: But His
Scientists Are
[[link removed]],”
NBC News, February 26, 2020; Deb Riechmann, “Trump Disbanded NSC
Pandemic Unit That Experts Had Praised
[[link removed]],” AP News,
March 14, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan, and Michael Crowley,
“Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded
[[link removed]],”
New York Times, March 19, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Marisa Taylor, “Exclusive: U.S. Axed CDC Expert Job in China Months
Before Virus Outbreak
[[link removed]],”
Reuters, March 22, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Howard Waitzkin, ed., Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond
Capitalism for Our Health
[[link removed]] (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, “Let the Numbers Speak
[[link removed]],” International
Journal of Health Services 30, no. 4 (2000): 873–77.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Owen Matthews, “Britain Drops Its Go-It-Alone Approach to
Coronavirus
[[link removed]],”
Foreign Policy, March 17, 2020; Rob Wallace, “Pandemic Strike
[[link removed]],” Uneven Earth,
March 16, 2020; Isabel Frey, “‘Herd Immunity’ Is Epidemiological
Neoliberalism
[[link removed]],”
Quarantimes, March 19, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Adam Payne, “Spain Has Nationalized All of Its Private Hospitals as
the Country Goes into Coronavirus Lockdown
[[link removed]],”
Business Insider, March 16, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jeva Lange, “Senegal Is Reportedly Turning Coronavirus Tests Around
‘within 4 Hours’ While Americans Might Wait a Week
[[link removed]],”
Yahoo News, March 12, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Steph Sterling and Julie Margetta Morgan, New Rules for the 21st
Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of Prescription
Drug Policy in the United States
[[link removed]]
(New York: Roosevelt Institute, 2019).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jason Koebler, “Hospitals Need to Repair Ventilators: Manufacturers
Are Making That Impossible
[[link removed]],”
Vice, March 18, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Manli Wang et al., “Remdesivir and Chloroquine Effectively Inhibit
the Recently Emerged Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) In Vitro
[[link removed]],” Cell Research 30
(2020): 269–71.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
“Autonomous Groups Are Mobilizing Mutual Aid Initiatives to Combat
the Coronavirus
[[link removed]],”
It’s Going Down, March 20, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes,
and Robert F. Garry, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2
[[link removed]],” Nature Medicine
(2020).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Rob Wallace, “Notes on a Novel Coronavirus
[[link removed]],” MR
Online, January 29, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Marius Gilbert et al., “Preparedness and Vulnerability of African
Countries Against Importations of COVID-19: A Modelling Study
[[link removed](20)30411-6],” Lancet 395, no.
10227 (2020): 871–77.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Juanjuan Sun, “The Regulation of ‘Novel Food’ in China: The
Tendency of Deregulation,” European Food and Feed Law Review 10, no.
6 (2015): 442–48.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Emma G. E. Brooks, Scott I. Robertson, and Diana J. Bell, “The
Conservation Impact of Commercial Wildlife Farming of Porcupines in
Vietnam [[link removed]],” Biological
Conservation 143, no. 11 (2010): 2808–14.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Mindi Schneider, “Wasting the Rural: Meat, Manure, and the Politics
of Agro-Industrialization in Contemporary China
[[link removed]],” Geoforum 78
(2017): 89–97.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert G. Wallace, Luke Bergmann, Lenny Hogerwerf, Marius Gilbert,
“Are Influenzas in Southern China Byproducts of the Region’s
Globalising Historical Present?,” in Influenza and Public Health:
Learning from Past Pandemics, ed. Jennifer Gunn, Tamara Giles-Vernick,
and Susan Craddock (London: Routledge, 2010); Alessandro Broglia and
Christian Kapel, “Changing Dietary Habits in a Changing World:
Emerging Drivers for the Transmission of Foodborne Parasitic Zoonoses
[[link removed]],” Veterinary
Parasitology 182, no. 1 (2011): 2–13.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
David Molyneux et al., “Zoonoses and Marginalised Infectious
Diseases of Poverty: Where Do We Stand?
[[link removed]],” Parasites & Vectors 4,
no. 106 (2011).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Stephen S. Morse et al., “Prediction and Prevention of the Next
Pandemic Zoonosis [[link removed](12)61684-5],”
Lancet 380, no. 9857 (2012): 1956–65; Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make
Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the
Nature of Science
[[link removed]] (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2016).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert G. Wallace et al., “The Dawn of Structural One Health: A New
Science Tracking Disease Emergence Along Circuits of Capital
[[link removed]],” Social Science &
Medicine 129 (2015): 68–77; Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Steven Cummins, Sarah Curtis, Ana V. Diez-Roux, and Sally Macintyre,
“Understanding and Representing ‘Place’ in Health Research: A
Relational Approach
[[link removed]],” Social Science &
Medicine 65, no. 9 (2007): 1825–38; Luke Bergmann and Mollie
Holmberg, “Land in Motion,” Annals of the American Association of
Geographer, 106, no. 4 (2016): 932–56; Luke Bergmann, “Towards
Economic Geographies Beyond the Nature-Society Divide
[[link removed]],” Geoforum 85
(2017): 324–35.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Andrew K. Jorgenson, “Unequal Ecological Exchange and Environmental
Degradation: A Theoretical Proposition and Cross-National Study of
Deforestation, 1990–2000
[[link removed]],” Rural Sociology 71,
no. 4 (2006): 685–712; Becky Mansfield, Darla K. Munroe, and Kendra
McSweeney, “Does Economic Growth Cause Environmental Recovery?
Geographical Explanations of Forest Regrowth
[[link removed]],” Geography
Compass 4, no. 5 (2010): 416–27; Susanna B. Hecht, “Forests Lost
and Found in Tropical Latin America: The Woodland ‘Green Revolution
[[link removed]],’” Journal of
Peasant Studies 41, no. 5 (2014): 877–909; Gustavo de L. T.
Oliveira, “The Geopolitics of Brazilian Soybeans
[[link removed]],” Journal of Peasant
Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 348–72.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Mariano Turzi, “The Soybean Republic
[[link removed]],”
Yale Journal of International Affairs 6, no. 2 (2011); Rogério
Haesbaert, El Mito de la Desterritorialización: Del ‘Fin de Los
Territorios’ a la Multiterritorialidad (Mexico City: Siglo
Veintiuno, 2011); Clara Craviotti, “Which Territorial Embeddedness?
Territorial Relationships of Recently Internationalized Firms of the
Soybean Chain [[link removed]],”
Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 331–47.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wendy Jepson, Christian Brannstrom, and Anthony Filippi, “Access
Regimes and Regional Land Change in the Brazilian Cerrado, 1972–2002
[[link removed]],” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 100, no. 1 (2010): 87–111;
Patrick Meyfroidt et al., “Multiple Pathways of Commodity Crop
Expansion in Tropical Forest Landscapes
[[link removed]],” Environmental
Research Letters 9, no 7 (2014); Oliveira, “The Geopolitics of
Brazilian Soybeans”; Javier Godar, “Balancing Detail and Scale in
Assessing Transparency to Improve the Governance of Agricultural
Commodity Supply Chains,” Environmental Research Letters 11, no. 3
(2016).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Rodrick Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led
Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection
(Basel: Springer, 2018).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2016); Marcus Moench &
Dipak Gyawali, Desakota: Reinterpreting the Urban-Rural Continuum
[[link removed]]
(Kathmandu: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition, 2008);
Hecht, “Forests Lost and Found in Tropical Latin America.”
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Ariel E. Lugo, “The Emerging Era of Novel Tropical Forests
[[link removed]],” Biotropica 41,
no. 5 (2009): 589–91.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert G. Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, eds., Neoliberal Ebola:
Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm (Basel:
Springer, 2016); Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control;
Giorgos Kallis and Erik Swyngedouw, “Do Bees Produce Value? A
Conversation Between an Ecological Economist and a Marxist
Geographer,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 29, no. 3 (2018): 36–50.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert G. Wallace et al., “Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests
Produce a New Niche for Ebola?
[[link removed]],” International Journal
of Health Services 46, no. 1 (2016): 149–65.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace and Wallace, Neoliberal Ebola.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
. Júlio César Bicca-Marques and David Santos de Freitas, “The Role
of Monkeys, Mosquitoes, and Humans in the Occurrence of a Yellow Fever
Outbreak in a Fragmented Landscape in South Brazil: Protecting Howler
Monkeys Is a Matter of Public Health
[[link removed]],” Tropical
Conservation Science 3, no. 1 (2010): 78–89; Júlio César
Bicca-Marques et al., “Yellow Fever Threatens Atlantic Forest
Primates
[[link removed]],”
Science Advances e-letter, May 25, 2017; Luciana Inés Oklander et
al., “Genetic Structure in the Southernmost Populations of
Black-and-Gold Howler Monkeys (Alouatta caraya) and Its Conservation
Implications [[link removed]],” PLoS
ONE 12, no. 10 (2017); Natália Coelho Couto de Azevedo Fernandes et
al., “Outbreak of Yellow Fever Among Nonhuman Primates, Espirito
Santo, Brazil, 2017 [[link removed]],”
Emerging Infectious Diseases 23, no. 12 (2017): 2038–41; Daiana Mir,
“Phylodynamics of Yellow Fever Virus in the Americas: New Insights
into the Origin of the 2017 Brazilian Outbreak
[[link removed]],” Scientific Reports 7,
no. 1 (2017).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu
(New York: New Press, 2005); Jay P. Graham et al., “The Animal-Human
Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production:
Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment
[[link removed]],” Public Health
Reports 123, no. 3 (2008): 282–99; Bryony A. Jones et al.,
“Zoonosis Emergence Linked to Agricultural Intensification and
Environmental Change [[link removed]],”
PNAS110, no. 21 (2013): 8399–404; Marco Liverani et al.,
“Understanding and Managing Zoonotic Risk in the New Livestock
Industries [[link removed]],” Environmental
Health Perspectives 121, no, 8 (2013); Anneke Engering, Lenny
Hogerwerf, and Jan Slingenbergh, “Pathogen-Host-Environment
Interplay and Disease Emergence
[[link removed]],” Emerging Microbes and
Infections 2, no. 1 (2013); World Livestock 2013: Changing Disease
Landscapes [[link removed]] (Rome: Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert V. Tauxe, “Emerging Foodborne Diseases: An Evolving Public
Health Challenge [[link removed]],”
Emerging Infectious Diseases 3, no. 4 (1997): 425–34; Wallace and
Wallace, Neoliberal Ebola; Ellyn P. Marder et al., “Preliminary
Incidence and Trends of Infections with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly
Through Food—Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, 10 U.S.
Sites, 2006–2017,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 67, no.
11 (2018): 324–28.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert G. Wallace, “Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of
Offshore Farming
[[link removed]],” Antipode 41,
no. 5 (2009): 916–51; Robert G. Wallace et al., “Industrial
Agricultural Environments,” in The Routledge Handbook of Biosecurity
and Invasive Species, ed. Juliet Fall, Robert Francis, Martin A.
Schlaepfer, and Kezia Barker (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
John H. Vandermeer, The Ecology of Agroecosystems (Sudbury, MA: Jones
and Bartlett, 2011); Peter H. Thrall et al., “Evolution in
Agriculture: The Application of Evolutionary Approaches to the
Management of Biotic Interactions in Agro-Ecosystems
[[link removed]],” Evolutionary
Applications 4, no. 2 (2011): 200–15; R. Ford Denison, Darwinian
Agriculture: How Understanding Evolution Can Improve Agriculture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Marius Gilbert,
Xiangming Xiao, and Timothy Paul Robinson, “Intensifying Poultry
Production Systems and the Emergence of Avian Influenza in China: A
‘One Health/Ecohealth’ Epitome,” Archives of Public Health 75
(2017).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Mohammad Houshmar et al., “Effects of Prebiotic, Protein Level, and
Stocking Density on Performance, Immunity, and Stress Indicators of
Broilers [[link removed]],” Poultry Science
91, no. 2 (2012): 393–401; A. V. S. Gomes et al., “Overcrowding
Stress Decreases Macrophage Activity and Increases Salmonella
Enteritidis Invasion in Broiler Chickens
[[link removed]],” Avian Pathology 43,
no. 1 (2014): 82–90; Peyman Yarahmadi , Hamed Kolangi Miandare,
Sahel Fayaz, and Christopher Marlowe A. Caipang, “Increased Stocking
Density Causes Changes in Expression of Selected Stress- and
Immune-Related Genes, Humoral Innate Immune Parameters and Stress
Responses of Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)
[[link removed]],” Fish & Shellfish
Immunology 48 (2016): 43–53; Wenjia Li et al., “Effect of Stocking
Density and Alpha-Lipoic Acid on the Growth Performance, Physiological
and Oxidative Stress and Immune Response of Broilers
[[link removed]],” Asian-Australasian Journal
of Animal Studies 32, no, 12 (2019).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Virginia E. Pitzer et al., “High Turnover Drives Prolonged
Persistence of Influenza in Managed Pig Herds
[[link removed]],” Journal of the Royal
Society Interface 13, no. 119 (2016); Richard K. Gast et al.,
“Frequency and Duration of Fecal Shedding of Salmonella Enteritidis
by Experimentally Infected Laying Hens Housed in Enriched Colony Cages
at Different Stocking Densities
[[link removed]],” Frontiers in Veterinary
Science (2017); Andres Diaz et al., “Multiple Genome Constellations
of Similar and Distinct Influenza A Viruses Co-Circulate in Pigs
During Epidemic Events
[[link removed]],” Scientific Reports 7
(2017).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Katherine E. Atkins et al., “Modelling Marek’s Disease Virus (MDV)
Infection: Parameter Estimates for Mortality Rate and Infectiousness
[[link removed]],” BMC Veterinary Research
7, no. 70 (2011); John Allen and Stephanie Lavau,
“‘Just-in-Time’ Disease: Biosecurity, Poultry and Power
[[link removed]],” Journal of Cultural
Economy 8, no. 3 (2015): 342–60; Pitzer et al., “High Turnover
Drives Prolonged Persistence of Influenza in Managed Pig Herds”;
Mary A. Rogalski, “Human Drivers of Ecological and Evolutionary
Dynamics in Emerging and Disappearing Infectious Disease Systems
[[link removed]],” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B 372, no. 1712 (2017).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace, “Breeding Influenza”; Katherine E. Atkins et al.,
“Vaccination and Reduced Cohort Duration Can Drive Virulence
Evolution: Marek’s Disease Virus and Industrialized Agriculture
[[link removed]],” Evolution 67,
no. 3 (2013): 851–60; Adèle Mennerat, Mathias Stølen Ugelvik,
Camilla Håkonsrud Jensen, and Arne Skorping, “Invest More and Die
Faster: The Life History of a Parasite on Intensive Farms
[[link removed]],” Evolutionary Applications10,
no. 9 (2017): 890–96.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Martha I. Nelson et al., “Spatial Dynamics of Human-Origin H1
Influenza A Virus in North American Swine
[[link removed]],” PLoS Pathogens 7,
no. 6 (2011); Trevon L. Fuller et al., “Predicting Hotspots for
Influenza Virus Reassortment
[[link removed]],” Emerging Infectious
Diseases 19, no. 4 (2013): 581–88; Rodrick Wallace and Robert G.
Wallace, “Blowback: New Formal Perspectives on Agriculturally-Driven
Pathogen Evolution and Spread
[[link removed]],” Epidemiology and
Infection 143, no. 10 (2014): 2068–80; Ignacio Mena et al.,
“Origins of the 2009 H1N1 Influenza Pandemic in Swine in Mexico
[[link removed]],” eLife 5 (2016); Martha
I. Nelson et al., “Human-Origin Influenza A(H3N2) Reassortant
Viruses in Swine, Southeast Mexico
[[link removed]],” Emerging Infectious
Diseases 25, no. 4 (2019): 691–700.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, 192–201.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
“Safer Food Saves Lives
[[link removed]],”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 3, 2015; Lena H.
Sun, “Big and Deadly: Major Foodborne Outbreaks Spike Sharply
[[link removed]],”
Washington Post, November 3, 2015; Mike Stobbe, “CDC: More Food
Poisoning Outbreaks Cross State Lines
[[link removed]],”
KSL, November 3, 2015.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Sally Goldenberg, “Alicia Glen, Who Oversaw de Blasio’s Affordable
Housing Plan and Embattled NYCHA, to Depart City Hall
[[link removed]],”
Politico, December 19, 2018.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Gary A. Dymski, “Racial Exclusion and the Political Economy of the
Subprime Crisis
[[link removed]],”
Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 149–79; Harold C. Barnett, “The
Securitization of Mortgage Fraud
[[link removed](2011)0000016007],” Sociology of
Crime, Law and Deviance 16 (2011): 65–84.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz, “Secret Fed Loans Gave
Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress
[[link removed]],”
Bloomberg, November 21, 2011.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Michael J. de la Merced and David Barboza, “Needing Pork, China Is
to Buy a U.S. Supplier
[[link removed]],”
New York Times, May 29, 2013.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
“Goldman Sachs Pays US$300m for Poultry Farms
[[link removed]],”
South China Morning Post, August 4, 2008.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
“Goldman Sachs Invests in Chinese Pig Farming
[[link removed]],”
Pig Site, August 5, 2008.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using
‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism
[[link removed]],”
New York Times, March 18, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (New York:
Penguin, 1993), 362.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Eric Lipton, Nicholas Fandos, Sharon LaFraniere, and Julian E. Barnes,
“Stock Sales by Senator Richard Burr Ignite Political Uproar
[[link removed]],”
New York Times, March 20, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani et al., “ISG Insight: From Room to Grow to
Room to Fall
[[link removed]],”
Goldman Sachs’ Investment Strategy Group.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
“Corona Crisis: Resistance in a Time of Pandemic
[[link removed]],”
Marx21, March 21, 2020; International Assembly of the Peoples and
Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, “In Light of the
Global Pandemic, Focus Attention on the People
[[link removed]],”
Tricontinental, March 21, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace et al., “The Dawn of Structural One Health.”
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace et al., “Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests Produce a
New Niche for Ebola?”; Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease
Control.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Ernest Mandel, “Progressive Disalienation Through the Building of
Socialist Society, or the Inevitable Alienation in Industrial
Society?,” in The Marxist Theory of Alienation (New York:
Pathfinder, 1970); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004); Del Weston, The Political Economy of
Global Warming: The Terminal Crisis (London: Routledge, 2014);
McKenzie Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the
Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2017); John Bellamy Foster,
“Marx, Value, and Nature
[[link removed]],” Monthly Review 70,
no. 3 (July–August 2018): 122–36); Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting
the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM,
2018).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Butch Lee and Red Rover, Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on
the Neo-Colonial Terrain (New York: Vagabond, 1993); Silvia Federici,
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation(New
York: Autonomedia, 2004); Anna Tsing, “Supply Chains and the Human
Condition [[link removed]],” Rethinking
Marxism 21, no. 2 (2009): 148–76; Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin,
White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Leandro
Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant
Alternatives to Neoliberalism (London: Zed, 2014); Jackie Wang,
Carceral Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge,
1991); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism
and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Joseph Fracchia, “Organisms and Objectifications: A
Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the ‘Human and the Animal
[[link removed]],’” Monthly Review
68, no. 10 (March 2017): 1–17; Omar Felipe Giraldo, Political
Ecology of Agriculture: Agroecology and Post-Development (Basel:
Springer, 2019).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines:
Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2014); Wark, General Intellects.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Rodrick Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luke Bergmann, and Robert G. Wallace,
“Agribusiness vs. Public Health: Disease Control in
Resource-Asymmetric Conflict
[[link removed]],” submitted for
publication, 2020, available at [link removed]
[[link removed]].
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Robert G. Wallace, Kenichi Okamoto, and Alex Liebman, “Earth, the
Alien Planet,” in Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in
Honor of Mike Davis, ed. Daniel Bertrand Monk and Michael Sorkin (New
York: UR, forthcoming).
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace et al., Clear-Cutting Disease Control.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Wallace et al., “Industrial Agricultural Environments.”

_Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist who has consulted with
the Food and Agriculture Organization and Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. Alex Liebman is a PhD student in human geography at
Rutgers University, with a MSc in agronomy from the University of
Minnesota. Luis Fernando Chaves is a disease ecologist and was a
Senior Researcher at the Costa Rican Institute for Research and
Education on Nutrition and Health in Tres Rios, Costa Rica. Rodrick
Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology of the
New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University.  They
appreciate perspicacious comments from Kenichi Okamoto._

_This article is the Review of the Month for the May 2020 issue. The
print version will carry the same date at the end of the article as
today, March 27, 2020. That we are publishing the Review of the Month
online more than a month ahead of the publication of the issue as a
whole is unprecedented for us and is testimony to the present
emergency. We anticipate that minor updates will be added to the
article when the entire magazine is posted online on May 1.  —The
Monthly Review Editors_

_Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free
online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of
Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print
subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit
the MR store for subscription options
[[link removed]]. Thank you very much.
—Eds._

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