From Class War to Carceral Violence: How Covid Still Shapes our Struggles

WATCH: The Political Economy of Covid - Death Panel Podcast Session at the 2024 Socialism Conference

[Image Description: color photograph, huge brush fire swells around a wooden sign with white writing that reads in all caps “SENIOR CENTER, WEAR A MASK, WASH YOUR HANDS, SOCIAL DISTANCE, STAY SAFE, COME JOIN US.” The first and last lines of text are permanently part of the sign, the middle text that is specific to the early Covid pandemic is printed on fabric that is strung up on the wooden frame, billowing and violently straining against what secures it to the frame as the fire rages around it.]

From Class War to Carceral Violence: Covid Normalization Impacts Us All

The Covid pandemic didn’t end; it was normalized as part of the capitalist drive to stabilize and perpetuate existing power structures. To "normalize" in this context means to embed the pandemic's disruptions into the routine operations of capitalist society, transforming what was once an acute crisis into a standardized, expected condition of daily life. This process aligns social values and policies with capitalist interests, downplaying the pandemic’s severity to fit a so-called "new normal" that maintains economic productivity and social control at the expense of our collective health, stability, and safety. Rather than addressing the root causes or protecting people, normalization integrates ongoing health threats into the capitalist framework, ensuring that labor exploitation and profit prioritization continue efficiently unabated by sickness, debility, and death.

Normalization represents the process by which the pandemic’s conditions have been woven into everyday capitalist life, despite Covid’s persistent threat. It serves capital by downplaying Covid-19’s severity, transforming high transmission rates, severe outcomes, and recurring infections from critical concerns into so-called "manageable" risks. This process involves dismantling protective measures, altering public perceptions, and embedding these changes in every aspect of daily life through interpersonal interactions, media, workplace culture, and public policy shifts. Essentially, normalization allows capitalist systems to exploit labor and prioritize economic activity over public health as the pandemic continues, reinforcing existing power dynamics and systemic inequities.

The elimination of essential public health measures—like mask mandates, or free testing, treatment, vaccines, and care for the uninsured—alongside the abandonment of social distancing and forcing workers to return to work still sick, or unmasked despite ongoing waves of Covid, epitomizes the capitalist agenda of prioritizing economic stability over public health. This erosion of protections both exposes us to more risk and fosters a false sense of security, conditioning the public to accept persistent waves of Covid-19 and high infection rates as an unavoidable aspect of "living with the virus," rather than as an urgent call for rigorous intervention. Governments and institutions, driven by capitalist interests, have embraced policies that normalize a perpetual pandemic by prematurely lifting restrictions and prioritizing economic recovery over genuine health and safety measures. This approach serves to perpetuate capitalist exploitation and reinforce systemic inequalities, ensuring that the working class continues to bear the brunt of both the pandemic and its economic fallout.

Normalization functions as a mechanism to sustain capitalist social and economic structures by superficially "managing" the pandemic, often at the expense of robust public health responses and collective safety. This process is a form of class warfare, disproportionately impacting marginalized, working-class, and impoverished communities. The pandemic has consistently inflicted the greatest harm on lower-income populations, with infection and mortality rates sharply higher among those with fewer resources. Normalizing the pandemic exacerbates these disparities, as seen with the termination of support programs like the Bridge Access Program. Such policies deepen existing disparities by cutting crucial resources and care for those who are already most vulnerable, aligning with capitalist interests that prioritize economic efficiency over the well-being of the working class.

The sociological production of the pandemic's "end" reflects a capitalist prioritization of economic recovery over public health, benefiting the resourced and secure ruling and owning classes at the direct expense of the working and surplus classes. The normalization process has disproportionately harmed those with the fewest resources, worsening existing disparities in health by income. Reduced access to healthcare—and care that now often comes with higher risks and economic costs in terms of risk of infection or missed work—has yet further deepened these inequalities, reinforcing class and racial health disparities as a "normal" part of everyday life. Lower-wage workers, who face the greatest exposure to Covid’s risks, are especially affected. They are frequently coerced into unsafe working conditions or required to work while still infectious, thus endangering their health and that of their fellow workers, kin, families, friends, community, and organizing or social networks. This dynamic underscores the capitalist system's exploitation of labor, prioritizing profit and economic stability over the well-being and safety of the working and surplus classes.

For left movements, the normalization of a premature "end" to the pandemic represents a critical failure to address the class struggle inherent in the ongoing crisis. This normalization process serves the interests of capital by prioritizing economic recovery, increasing repression, and deepening the exploitation of labor over protecting the well-being of the working class and marginalized groups. By downplaying the severity of the pandemic, normalization perpetuates the capitalist agenda of growth at all costs, and places an exaggerated and inflated cost on protecting our communities. If our movements do not challenge this premature and ongoing normalization of mass infection, sickness, disability and death, we will fail each other. 

The consequences of this normalization are part of a broader strategy of capitalist exploitation: it perpetuates the ongoing exploitation of workers, the abandonment of disabled and immunocompromised people (as well as their kin, friends, family and networks who stick by them in solidarity), the intensification of carceral violence, and the escalation of mask bans that expand regimes of criminalization disproportionately targeting the most marginalized. These outcomes are not accidental but are deliberate results of a capitalist cost benefit analysis that trades our already difficult lives for something crueler and shorter in the name of economic growth (for some) and stability (for none). 

For left movements committed to true liberation, it is imperative to address Covid-19 not merely as a health crisis but as a fundamental issue of political economy, disability justice, and abolition. Confronting the pandemic through this lens exposes the extractive mechanisms at play and demands a radical rethinking of how we address systemic inequalities and health disparities.

Watch: The Political Economy of Covid – Death Panel Podcast Session at the 2024 Socialism Conference

So that is all to say that at this year’s Socialism Conference, we dissected these connections in our live streamed session called The Political Economy of Covid. Myself, along with my Death Panel co-hosts Artie Vierkant and Jules Gill-Peterson, explored how Covid-19 serves as a critical arena for the left, exposing the fundamental conflicts inherent in capitalist exploitation of health throughout the still-ongoing crisis. Unfortunately our fourth co-host, Phil Rocco, was unable to join us at the conference his year, but the analysis we presented is part of shared work we have been doing together as Death Panel for years, even predating the pandemic. In our session, we highlighted how the pandemic exemplifies the intersection of economic interests, disability justice, and systemic oppression, underscoring the urgent need for a unified and revolutionary response. The stakes are simply too high to ignore. 

Thank you to the Socialism Conference organizers and Haymarket Books for providing the space to make this crucial argument at a time when many have tuned out and looked away from the issue of Covid-19, and we want to extend our deep gratitude for implementing the robust layered protections that made attending and hosting our sessions throughout the weekend possible. Their commitment to collective safety and community care allowed us to come together and engage in this vital discussion while acknowledging the risks we were taking by being together and the precautions in place to reduce those risks to the best of our collective resources and ability. Thanks to the mask requirement and robust layers of protection in place the conference space felt safe, welcoming, and supportive for immunocompromised people, which is so rare. Couldn’t have been in starker contrast with the Democratic National Convention, which was a masks discouraged superspreader held in the very same space only a week prior to serious consequences for workers, attendees, and the entire city of Chicago.

This is just one of five sessions we sponsored throughout the weekend, audio recordings of our other sessions will be made available soon for those who wish to delve deeper into these important topics and listen back to our fantastic panelists Mon Mohapatra, Victoria Law, Tracy Rosenthal, Rasha Abdulhadi, Liat Ben-Moshe, Leah Harris, and Sasha Warren. 

Below, I’ll outline some of the key points we covered in our session at the Socialism Conference. This post provides a quick overview of the fundamental arguments we discussed regarding the political economy of COVID-19 and its implications for the left. For a more comprehensive understanding, I highly recommend watching the full video of our session and checking out our recent coverage of the rise of mask bans—which have been an important point of convergence and solidarity around the normalization of genocide in Palestine and here at home in our own settler colony. 

• Watch: Socialism Conference 2024 - The Political Economy of Covid

• Listen, read transcript: Mask Bans Are Everyone’s Fight (08/22/2024)

• Listen, read transcript: The Rise of Mask Bans (06/20/24)

• Listen, read transcript: “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals” (05/23/24)

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[Image Description: digital collage. Photo of Biden from 2021, clippings of headlines from three different points at which Biden Administration declared victory over Covid, two different sized images of the banner that George W. Bush had hanging on a ship behind him when he declared pre-mature U.S. victory in the so-called War on Terror, and a series of layered blue and purple halftones.]

Covid Didn’t End—The State Rewrote the Narrative but the Pandemic Remains a Threat to All of Us

The Biden administration’s declared "victory" over Covid wasn’t a sign that the pandemic was over. Instead, it marked the moment when the state began dismantling pandemic protections and transferring the burden onto individuals. We’ve called this the *sociological production of the end of the pandemic*—a strategy used by the state to convince the public that the pandemic had ended, without actually addressing the ongoing crisis.

While the public health emergency officially ended in May 2023, the reality is that, as recently as early August 2023, over 900 people were dying each week from Covid, according to NVSS data. This mirrors patterns from last year when weekly Covid deaths exceeded 1,000 throughout much of the year.

State and media narratives have obscured or downplayed the ongoing crisis. The data on Covid deaths, long Covid, and the broader economic impact has been either hidden or manipulated to create the illusion of normalcy. But millions are still vulnerable, and every infection increases the risk of long-term complications. The left must reject this manufactured narrative and recognize that the pandemic is far from over.

Covid as Labor Issue: Class War Waged Through Covid

Covid is not just a public health issue—it’s a tool of capitalist exploitation. From the outset, the state’s pandemic response was designed to protect capital, not people. Rushed reopening plans prioritized GDP over lives, while workers were left to bear the risks without adequate protections. The dismantling of the pandemic welfare state—free vaccines, expanded Medicaid, eviction moratoria, and more—was a calculated move by the state to resume business as usual.

For example, reopening plans in 2020 were designed to push workers back to their jobs, with no regard for the risks. The state removed isolation protocols instead of instituting federal paid sick leave, leaving workers more vulnerable to infection, and workplace safety regulations were never established beyond healthcare settings.

The left must understand that Covid is a direct attack on the working class. The pandemic has created a new form of class warfare, where workers are expected to get sick repeatedly, with no safety net. This is not just a health issue—it’s an economic justice issue. Covid is a workplace injury, and the fight for protections must be seen as part of the broader struggle against capitalist exploitation.

In 2020, there were calls for “off-ramps” from Covid protections published in major national news outlets as early as May, even as the virus continued to start spreading across the United States and with the worst period of death yet to come. This was the state’s way of normalizing death and sickness as part of life under capitalism. Workers are being forced to return to unsafe environments, without sick pay, and are penalized for getting sick.

For the last three weeks in the United States, we’ve gone back up to over 1,000 Covid deaths a week. These counts are still being finalized and provisional, and it may turn out that once finalized the official Covid death toll for August is even higher. While some experts insist that we are in a different place with regard to Covid, because they say that all the vulnerable have already died, that is clearly not the case. Nor is Covid only a risk to those already aware of their vulnerability. This logic and the argument that Covid is now endemic, while quite common, are rooted in longstanding ableist myths about the verifiability of ill-health and disability and reinforces the exclusion of the vulnerable as well as our perceived disposability. 

Covid as a Disability Issue: No One is Safe, Until We Are All Safe

The state’s abandonment of disabled and immunocompromised people since early in this pandemic is part of a larger strategy to frame our lives as categorically and inherently disposable or "worth less." Disabled people are being forced out of public life, while the state upholds a false distinction between the "healthy" and the "already unwell to begin with." But Covid isn’t just an issue for disabled and immunocompromised people—it’s an issue for everyone. Every infection increases the risk of long Covid and long-term debilitation.

Millions are already living with long Covid, and the economic consequences are severe. Workers with long Covid face job retaliation, while all with long Covid are met with a lack of affirming and supportive research on their disease, many face disbelief and neglect from individual providers and a healthcare system that systemically ignores their needs. As of early 2024, long Covid was responsible for taking as many as 4 million Americans out of the workforce. There are few if any social safety net supports available to folks pushed out of work by a new or recent onset of disability, especially one as contested by so-called “experts” as long Covid. 

The left must recognize that this false separation between the "healthy" and the "unwell" is a mirage designed to fracture solidarity and reinforce the idea we are each responsible for our individual health via behaviors and choices—papering over the role played by social, structural, spatial and political determinants in consigning each of us to debility and slow death. Masking in solidarity with disabled people isn’t just about protecting them—it’s about protecting everyone. Covid remains a threat to all of us, and our organizing must reflect that.

Covid protections like masking are being framed as personal responsibilities when, in reality, they should be collective actions that protect the most vulnerable as part of the goal of protecting everyone. The vulnerable are not each little islands separate from society—we are your friends, neighbors, coworkers and comrades. We are your children and parents, we are your roommates and subletters, your customers and service providers, next to you on the subway and in the check out line at the grocery store. We share the world with you, we share air, spaces, and lives, and Covid spreads via the air, spaces, and lives we share. Truly, none of us is safe until all of us are safe. The economic burden of maintaining protection—masks, treatments, and vaccines—has been privatized, leaving millions without access to the care they need, protecting each other is the only way to keep any one individual safe. 

Covid and Abolition: From #FreeThemAllForPublicHealth to the Carceral Logic of Mask Bans

Covid has long been used as a tool of control within prisons, jails, and detention centers, where the pandemic served as a pretense for deepening oppression. The prison industrial complex (PIC), one of the largest drivers of Covid spread, became a breeding ground for infection, amplifying already dire conditions. For incarcerated people, Covid has become synonymous with state torture, where being sick means not just facing the virus, but being subjected to punitive and repressive measures. Since this argument is less commonly encountered with regard to Covid, I’ve broken it down in a bit more detail. 

The Engine of Infection: How Prisons Spread Covid

From the very beginning, Covid data within prisons disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, making it difficult to trace the full scale of infections. What we do know is that prisons, jails, and detention centers acted as Covid engines, allowing the virus to rip through populations and mutate. Incarcerated people were left with no access to adequate medical care, often punished for even attempting to protect themselves.

Many incarcerated individuals were punished for masking, for sharing information about how to protect themselves, and for attempting to survive the virus within these punitive institutions. Meanwhile, guards—who moved in and out of prisons unmasked—acted as vectors of infection, spreading Covid within and outside the walls. This double standard exposes the PIC’s negligence and disregard for human life.

Repression and Punishment as Covid Management

Rather than providing healthcare, prisons responded to Covid outbreaks with intensified punishment. Visitation rights were revoked, and all social, educational, and vocational programming was shut down in the name of pandemic safety—while guards continued to work unmasked, bringing Covid in from the outside. Incarcerated people were often placed in solitary confinement if they tested positive for Covid, a practice that has long been condemned as torture by human rights organizations. Entire dormitories were quarantined together when one person tested positive, further accelerating the spread of Covid.

This form of pandemic management is not about keeping people safe; it is about using Covid as a pretext to deepen the repression and isolation of incarcerated people. The lack of testing, reporting, and care further entrenched the brutality of the carceral system. Covid exposed the fact that these institutions exist not to rehabilitate but to incapacitate and harm. 

A Pandemic of Neglect: The U.S. Failure to Decarcerate is a Key Driver of Covid

During 2020, several countries took decarceration seriously, recognizing that prisons and detention centers were breeding grounds for Covid. However, the United States failed to act in any meaningful way. Despite hundreds of thousands of applications from incarcerated people with medical conditions, only 35,000 not already scheduled for release were early-released from federal prisons in 2020. Shockingly, the total number of planned and early releases from 2020 (some 600k) was lower than the previous year’s total releases, when there wasn’t a pandemic. This refusal to decarcerate highlights the U.S.’s deep commitment to maintaining its carceral system, even at the cost of human lives.

In contrast, decarceration was a central demand in many public health campaigns worldwide in 2020. Yet, the U.S. chose to keep hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people behind bars. Most of those who were released in 2020 were already scheduled for release, meaning the state took minimal action to address the pandemic in its prisons despite wide knowledge of how many incarcerated people were potentially eligible for early release. Instead of letting people stay safe at home, the carceral state let it rip and forced incarcerated people to be exposed to Covid over and over, while punishing them in the name of public health with further isolation, repression, and violence.

Why Decarceration is Still a Critical Demand for Covid Movements

Prisons, jails, and detention centers don’t just keep Covid inside their walls—infected individuals regularly cycle back and forth between these institutions and the broader public. Covid spreads, mutates, and festers within these facilities, making decarceration not just a moral necessity but a public health imperative. Every day that incarcerated people remain in these dangerous environments, the risk grows for both them and those outside the walls. This is not an overnight task, but it is eminently doable. Covid movements and organizers should spend some time skilling up on and engaging with political education around abolition. If you are new to this topic, we have covered the intersection of the pandemic and abolition on Death Panel extensively since the beginning of Covid—our back catalog is a good place to start diving into this deeper and we’ve released several recent episodes that refresh this argument in our current privatized pandemic context. 

• Covid in Federal Prisons: Corridors of Contagion w/ Victoria Law (coming soon)

• Psychiatric Abolition and How Italy and France Freed People During 70s: Storming Bedlam w/ Sasha Warren (Unlocked)

• Prison Abolition and Covid 101: How to Abolish Prisons w/ Rachel Herzing & Justin Piché (09/02/24)

• Data and Normalization: The Promise and Perils of Wastewater Data w/ Betsy Ladyzhets (08/29/24)

• Immigration Detention and Enforcement Abolition: Unbuild Walls w/ Silky Shah (08/26/24)

• Original Anti-Tenant, Anti-Worker, and Anti-Trans Context of Laws Being Revived as Mask Bans: Mask Bans Are Everyone’s Fight (08/22/2024)

• Pandemic Normalization and Political Will: Pandemic Imaginaries w/ October Krausch (08/19/24)

Ending the PIC would give millions of individuals impacted by our propensity for fixing every social problem with caging—from folks in prisons, jails and detention centers to others in spaces on the carceral continuum like psych hospitals, long term care and nursing homes—more control over their health and safety, reducing the spread of Covid within and outside of carceral locales. Decarceration would save lives both inside and outside these institutions of guaranteed slow death. We know that prisons, jails, detention centers are especially efficient death-making institutions, where people go in healthy and often leave disabled or worse. Covid has amplified this crisis.

The Overlap of Covid, Mask Bans, and State Repression

Mask bans are an extension of this carceral logic. Just as incarcerated people have been denied the right to protect themselves, mask bans outside of prisons aim to criminalize those who continue to prioritize collective safety. These bans disproportionately target Black, brown, disabled, and trans people, who are most likely to be subjected to police violence. The PIC and mask bans share the same goal: expanding state repression and limiting the right to protest and exist in public space.

Mask bans are not just health threats; they are legal mechanisms that allow the state to profile, target, and criminalize marginalized communities. This overlap between carceral repression and public health measures is no coincidence. The state’s war on Covid is a war on the most vulnerable.

It’s Time to Bring Back #FreeThemAllForPublicHealth

The left must recognize that decarceration is a crucial demand in the fight against Covid. The prison industrial complex is designed to destroy lives, and Covid has only magnified that destruction. Abolitionists have long understood that the PIC is a driver of death and debility, and the pandemic has shown that these institutions are not equipped to protect people—they are designed to do the opposite. If we are serious about addressing Covid, we must be serious about ending the PIC.

Decarceration is not just a matter of protecting incarcerated individuals from Covid—it is a critical step in dismantling a system built on racialized state violence, exploitation, and death. As long as the PIC stands, the fight against Covid will be incomplete.

The Carceral Logic of Mask Bans

Covid has intensified carceral violence in prisons and jails, turning these institutions into engines of Covid infection on top of their existing reality as sites of mass infection, debility, ill-health, and death. Incarcerated people have been denied medical care, punished for taking Covid precautions, and subjected to increased repression under the guise of pandemic management. This is where the logic of mask bans comes in: they are an extension of carceral practices, used to police and criminalize the most marginalized.

Mask bans disproportionately target Black, brown, disabled, and trans people. They are being implemented in states like North Carolina and New York, proposed in yet more states like Illinois, and are still in place and being newly used against pro-Palestine protest movements in states like Ohio and Florida. These laws are not new—for example in New York they are a revival of anti-masquerading statutes and laws originally created to suppress labor uprisings, such as the 1845 New York anti-mask law used against tenant farmers during rent strikes. That law was in later decades used to target trans folks and has record of being enforced as ann anti-crossdressing law until it was repealed in response to Covid in 2020.

Mask bans are not just a health threat—they are a mechanism of state repression. They represent a direct attack on left movements, public protest, and the right to exist in solidarity with one another. The entire left must oppose these bans as part of the broader struggle against carceral violence and repression.

The new rise of mask bans is explicitly designed to criminalize leftist movements and solidarity efforts. In spaces like Palestine solidarity protests, masks have been used as a form of protection, and now the state is using bans to punish those who continue to resist.

Bottom Line: The Whole Left Must Unite on Covid

The normalization of Covid, the dismantling of protections, and the rise of mask bans are not isolated issues—they are interconnected assaults on all of our movements. The fight against Covid is a fight against capitalism, ableism, and carceral violence.

What will it take for the left to realize that the fight against mask bans is not just about Covid—it’s about defending the right to public space and protest, safeguarding our collective health, deconstructing and destroying carcerality, and resisting state repression?

Covid has been weaponized by the state to divide us and push the burden of prevention onto the most vulnerable thereby increasing risk for us all. We must reject this. The fight against mask bans is a fight for the future of all leftist movements and the right to protest. This is not an optional struggle—it is essential.

Watch the full Socialism Conference “Political Economy of Covid” session recording here, and join us in the fight against mask bans, the fight to resist the normalization of death, and the fight to create a world where we care for one another. This fight touches all of us, and it’s time we acted like it.