Structural Violence and the Pandemic: An Update on Our Collective Reality

How to (still) give a fuck about Covid (even if you already gave up)

[Image description: Detail of found print, lithograph. Death pours a purple liquid into a delicate glass, standing on a red ground, in front of a blue, white, and grey background.]

A Brief Argument for (Still) Giving a Fuck About the Pandemic

I wrote a very popular post back in early January 2022 that was a brief argument for still giving a fuck about the pandemic, called “Deaths Pulled From the Future.” It’s been cited a lot—from mainstream newspapers to Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger. That’s an honor, sure, I guess... But it also hurts because an essay doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. We’ve not gained much ground in the two and a half years that it has been circulating and widely cited. And it’s high time to update the argument and push it further. 

I originally said, “If you think you have left political views, now is not the time to disengage on Covid-19.” That remains true, but the stakes have only intensified, and it’s clearer than ever that the problems with the global response to Covid are deeper than public health mismanagement or disregard for the vulnerable—they are rooted in the structural violence of the state and our capitalist political economy.

Since March 2020, we’ve been living through a crisis where the death toll has become increasingly invisibilized, causing uneven suffering and loss. From the beginning, there has been a widespread attitude that Covid deaths were somehow inevitable, particularly for the most vulnerable—what we called “deaths pulled from the future.” This dismissive, ableist framework entered the discourse early and has since become foundational to the normalization of the pandemic.

In July 2020, five months into the pandemic, my co-host on Death Panel, Phil Rocco, texted our group a chilling picture of his local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which framed the pandemic as “pulling deaths from the future.” It said that scientists were studying whether the lives lost to Covid were simply those of people “already close to death”—suggesting these deaths were insignificant. This ableist and dehumanizing framework quickly became mainstream and has continued to shape public perception, even as the pandemic worsened.

We’ve become accustomed to measuring the toll of Covid through economic lenses, where the sacrifice of certain populations—disabled and chronically ill people, the incarcerated, the working class, and the poor—is seen as acceptable collateral damage in the broader pursuit of “normalcy” and “health” for the state. This logic has persisted and even escalated over time. In the years since 2020, the normalization of unequal distribution of death, illness, and economic risk has gone from being crass but necessary to becoming standard operating procedure.

What we see today is a deeply ingrained form of denialism. The U.S. response to Covid cannot be understood merely as public health failures, vaccine hesitancy, or pandemic fatigue. These issues are all tied to broader systems of power. The death and suffering we’ve witnessed were not just unfortunate byproducts of a novel virus—they were produced by a system that views death as an acceptable outcome in the preservation of capital.

We’ve bought into the logic that these deaths are just part of the cost of doing business. But this narrative hides a critical truth: that vulnerability, especially in the context of a pandemic, is socially determined. Which means it is not out of our control. Not a fact of nature, like the law of gravity. 

The political system treats vulnerability as a given, but it’s important to remember that, as Artie and I argue in Health Communism, under capitalism, no one can be truly “healthy.” Health is an aspirational state that we are constantly told to strive toward, while the system denies the material conditions necessary to actually achieve it. It dangles the illusion of health in front of us while locking the means to that goal away, just out of reach. 

As I’ve said many times before, under capitalism, you work, you earn a wage, and then you are only entitled to the survival you can afford to buy. Yet in a society obsessed with health and wellness—fueled by billion-dollar industries in supplements, diets, fitness, and medicine—what do we have to show for the average worker, let alone the most vulnerable among us?

The sick, disabled, poor, and marginalized don’t benefit from this system. Instead, they are exploited for profit and left to die from preventable causes like Covid or pollution. The pandemic has only underscored this reality. The political-economic forces that determined who got to work from home and who was forced into unsafe environments also dictated who would become infected and who would survive. 

In fact, if everyone in the first year of the pandemic had died at the same rate as college-educated white people, 71% fewer people of color would have died in 2020. That is a horrifying indictment of a system that devalues Black, Indigenous, and Brown lives in service of capital.

Even though many today truly believe the pandemic is over, we are not out of the woods. Despite the rhetoric about “moving on” or “learning to live with the virus,” the pandemic is still very much with us. Covid transmission remains high, and the virus continues to evolve in ways that threaten everyone. This summer saw another large increase in cases not tied to seasonality, with hospitalizations rising, new variants spreading, and millions more infected. 

Yet, the U.S. government and public health officials have scaled back protections, abandoning the immunocompromised, disabled, and chronically ill. Mask mandates are gone, workplace protections have been rolled back, and pandemic denialism is now the norm. But the deaths continue. Long Covid continues. The pandemic continues. 

In this context, I get why people feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and ready to give up. But if you are still politically engaged, it is crucial to resist the pull toward nihilism. The idea that the pandemic is over, that there’s nothing more to be done, is a dangerous illusion. Covid has become a business opportunity as much as it has become a health burden, and the pandemic has long been a testing ground for new forms of biopolitical control. 

This is not just negligence—it’s intentional. The state wants us to believe that nothing can change, that Covid is both gone and here to stay, and that the deaths of over 7 million people worldwide are simply meaningless, “pulled from the future.” But this is a lie. These deaths are politically determined. Every policy decision, every rollback of protections, every mask ban, and every act of pandemic denial is a choice made in the service of the perpetuation of the very same systems of control and subjection that are responsible for the ongoing violence and abandonment of the pandemic.

The Problem is Not Just What the State Has or Hasn’t Done, But the State Itself

What we call the state is a political entity that deploys normative concepts to create and legitimize institutions through which individuals and groups seek to exercise power over other individuals and groups. The state is not designed to de facto protect or provide for our needs or desires, it doesn’t exist to bring people together, make them get along, balance conflicting interests, distribute resources, or achieve any so-called democratic ideals like ‘justice,’ ‘freedom,’ or ‘equity.’ 

The state is the capacity for power and rule—organized through systems of bureaucracy whose goal is not our survival, but to arrange the population in ways that simplify the state’s core needs and desires (taxation and provisioning, conscription [coercion, social reproduction, military, industry, etc.], and the prevention of rebellion).

Put more simply—the state is no guardian of our needs and dreams. Don’t be fooled, the state is not a creature of care or will. It moves through systems and rules, indifferent to our lives, existing to shape power not nurture. The state is not a thing but a network of power where power flows not to protect us, but to control. It doesn’t unite us, balance our desires and needs, or seek to remedy injustice, un-fairness, or social murder. 

The state is a machine without its own engine, a keeper of order for its own ends—it arranges our lives to fit its needs not for our survival, but to sustain its grip, satiate its hunger for perpetuity, its silent demand is that we are shaped to serve its purpose—its purpose is not tied to any intention beyond the flow of power itself.

We often make the mistake of anthropomorphizing the state, imagining it as having desires or intentions to protect us. But this masks its true function as an impersonal, self-reinforcing structure that serves specific interests. By attributing human qualities to the state, we misread its mechanics and distract ourselves from the reality that it operates more like a system that is designed to guarantee a short, cruel, and difficult life than a benevolent entity capable of being reasoned with.

To see the state as something with desires or a mind of its own is a mistake. To assume that the state “wants” to protect us from Covid, but then stopped wanting it is a mistake. By attributing intention or human qualities to the state, we misread its mechanics, distracting ourselves from the fact that this is just how the state functions. We cannot change the outcome without reckoning with the system which guarantees it. 

This same logic applies to the virus. Virologists have long warned against anthropomorphizing viruses like SARS-CoV-2. The virus doesn’t have goals; it simply spreads because that’s how it functions. Just as the virus exploits our bodies to replicate, the state exploits our lives to maintain power. Neither is driven by emotion or thought. Understanding this removes the illusion of intent or morality, forcing us to see both Covid and the state as mechanisms to challenge, not as beings to negotiate with or entities to persuade.

Covid in many ways is a crisis of individuals failing to act on the best interest of the collective, compounded by a misunderstanding of the state as a system designed to protect life. The pandemic has radically transformed society, and while many clamor for a “return to normalcy,” we must ask: what is normal in a system that readily sacrifices most of us to sustain itself?

Take for example the way that the prison industrial complex has shaped the Covid response. The United States, uniquely positioned in its obsession with carceral violence, continues to be one of the worst sites of Covid spread, death, and disability worldwide. Throughout the pandemic, our government’s refusal to engage in meaningful public health interventions—particularly through decarceration—has compounded the suffering of those already deemed expendable. 

Covid-19 in prisons, jails, and detention centers is not a footnote in the pandemic’s history—it’s a central chapter. From the beginning, these sites have been engines of viral transmission. The prison-industrial complex, already a driver of chronic illness, has functioned as a super-spreader institution. Guards, moving in and out of these facilities unmasked, act as vectors for the virus, while incarcerated individuals have been left to fend for themselves. Often denied even the most basic protective measures like masks, those inside have been punished for attempting to survive.

Instead of treating Covid-19 as a public health crisis, the state has used it as an excuse to impose even more restrictive and oppressive measures on incarcerated populations. Visitation rights have been suspended under the guise of “preventing outbreaks,” while guards continue their daily comings and goings. Programming that might offer mental health support, education, or rehabilitation has been cut, further isolating people from any semblance of community or care. 

The pandemic has only intensified the carceral state’s commitment to dehumanizing and punishing those on the inside. The practice of putting Covid-positive individuals into solitary confinement or mass detention, has become routine. Entire dormitories are quarantined together, untested and uncounted, left to endure the virus without even the pretense of care. 

What is Covid-19 if not a harbinger of things to come? The state’s treatment of incarcerated people—where sickness is punishment, and any attempt at survival is met with repression—is a vision of the future that awaits us all under the ongoing conditions of capitalism. We are living in the future from which deaths have been pulled, and have been this whole time.

For those incarcerated, in jails, prisons, psych wards. and detention centers, the experience of the pandemic was, and remains, an experience of psychological and physical torture dressed up as deliberate abandonment. As the virus continues to mutate and spread, what has become clear is that the United States' commitment to punishment and profit far outweighs its commitment to life.

The lack of care afforded to those on the inside has been replicated across society.  The virus doesn’t stay contained behind bars. It seeps out into the broader community, traveling with guards, contractors, and staff, making its way into our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. The future for many has been pulled into the present. Death, in this system, is not a tragedy but a feature—a grim calculation where profit margins are balanced against lives lost.

Now What?

There’s a deep silence settling like a layer of ash blanketing the millions of graves Covid-19 has already filled. This silence isn’t natural—it’s produced. Not from exhaustion alone, but from deliberate choices made by those in power to make us forget. Forget the losses. Forget the survivors. Forget that any of this could have gone differently. But the pandemic continues to rage, pulling lives from the present—not just the future—and in its wake, the systems that fuel this devastation persist.

Since 2020, the global pandemic has killed millions, disabled millions more, particularly concentrated among the working class, and poor, disabled, and incarcerated people. But we’re told that the real issue is “pandemic fatigue,” “learning loss,” and not being able to see each other’s smiles when we’re wearing masks. 

We’re bombarded with narratives demanding we return to normal, get back to work, and stop resisting—if you do not comply you are shunned, punished, and we are all constantly forcibly exposed to a virus that devastates the body the more times you interact with it. This ideological sleight of hand masks the truth: the pandemic isn’t over because the structures responsible for it aren’t either. Instead, they’ve adapted, entrenched themselves deeper, and capitalized on our growing numbness.

The ruling class, whose pockets have swollen in this time of crisis, has an invested interest in your forgetfulness. They want the machinery of death to keep running while we call it “progress” or “normalcy.” From prisons that incubate the virus to mask bans passed in the name of “freedom,” every part of the response has been designed to keep exploitation intact and the state running ever-forward with a smooth clip. Every rollback of public health measures is not a public failure—it’s a private success. This is capitalism doing what it does best: turning catastrophe into opportunity.

The discourse of “personal responsibility” in handling Covid is just another way to market death as inevitable. It’s a rallying cry that masks the real stakes. The fact is, who lives and who dies is not a matter of personal failing—it’s a decision rooted in historical patterns of exploitation. The pandemic exposed these fault lines, but we should never think they weren’t already there. The uneven distribution of death follows the logic of racial capitalism, hitting the poor, Black, Brown, and disabled hardest.

This is why you can’t disengage, and why if you have disengaged now is the time to pick up where you left off. The same powers normalizing mass death today are the ones that have been exploiting workers, criminalizing the marginalized, and entrenching inequality for centuries. COVID has simply brought this into sharper focus. From the torture of prisoners under the guise of pandemic protections to the outsourcing of public health responsibility onto individuals, what we’re seeing is not new—it’s an acceleration of existing processes designed to preserve power for the few.

The normalization of mass death serves as a form of eugenics, where the unproductive—those who cannot be exploited for profit—are left to die. This isn’t a side effect of capitalism; it’s central to how it operates. From the start, this has been a pandemic of selective neglect. The poor, the immunocompromised, the disabled, those in low-wage work, those whose very existence threatens the perpetuity of the state—we were always going to be the ones sacrificed first. The system needs our bodies for labor and extraction, but not for care.

Even the tools developed to protect us—vaccines, treatments, testing—have been commercialized, turned into billion-dollar industries. Access to life-saving treatments depends on your ability to pay, while the state backs off from its responsibility to protect public health. We have been repeatedly told that “we have the tools” even as these tools have become further and further from our reach. This is what it looks like when you turn a pandemic into a marketplace. It’s no accident that those most at risk remain marginalized, even with “the tools.”

And so we return to the question: (if you stopped caring about Covid) why should you still care? Because disengagement is what this system relies on. Our collective power lies in refusing to forget, in ensuring that the dead are not buried without justice. If you have any politics that align with liberation, the pandemic isn’t just a medical crisis—it’s a site of struggle. Every death, every prison left full, every person abandoned to fend for themselves amidst a plague is a reminder of what’s at stake.

While we’re told the pandemic is behind us, it remains very much a part of our present, claiming lives daily. In 2024 so far—as of mid September—34,821 people in the U.S. have died of Covid according to the CDC’s official count. The virus is still raging, enabled by the same systems that have always prioritized profit over the possibility of health.

We are living through a period where the normalization of mass death is the strategy, where the commodification of survival is the market, and where any resistance is painted as fringe or unnecessary. But understand this: we are in a war for life itself, and those of us still resisting are in the fight not just for survival, but for a world where the whims of capital and the state do not dictate the terms of our existence.

If you’ve been quiet or if you’ve fallen into despair, know that’s exactly what they want. The pandemic isn’t over, and neither is the struggle.

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[Image description: Detail of found print, lithograph (inverted colors from version at the top of the post). Death pours a blue liquid into a delicate glass, standing on a blue ground, in front of a blue, white, and grey background.]

Postscript: We Must Seek Deliverance from Covid in Each Other

This post in many ways is directed at folks who don’t see Covid the way I do. If you’ve made it this far, it’s likely that we see eye to eye on Covid at least somewhat. I have not addressed the ways Covid normalization has shaped the experiences of those of us who never stopped giving a shit about the pandemic, and this section is for all of us who need no reminder that the pandemic and the struggle are not over. 

Isn’t it ironic that so many who identify as communists, socialists, or anarchists—practiced at fighting the state’s murderous status quo—are so quick to trust the state’s call to "return to normal"? This is the same state that has held a monopoly on legitimate violence for generations—one we’ve long resisted for its oppressive, subjective, and extractive structures and systems. We know it prioritizes control and profit over the well-being of its so-called citizens, yet we see comrades left, right, and level with us readily overlook this reality when it comes to health.

What is it about health that inspires such confidence in the state’s ability to manage the crisis? Is it the allure of so-called normalcy that distracts us from its historical failures, or the desire to regain at least some of what we have all lost? I don’t know. But what we know is that state institutions have consistently prioritized the violent order of normalcy over lives, and this pandemic is no different. From inadequate healthcare systems to punitive measures disproportionately affecting marginalized communities, the state has played a critical role in amplifying the suffering and death we’ve endured.

As we navigate this crisis, we must question why we trust the same institutions that have repeatedly let us down. Are we really willing to accept a narrative that values economic productivity over genuine public health? A life in public “worth living” for those only willing to forget? 

The pandemic has laid bare the systemic inequities that have always existed. State mechanisms have not alleviated suffering—they’ve exacerbated it. The state made moves not to protect us from Covid, but to protect itself, and in that small abstract sense the state response has not changed much since 2020. 

The fight for health justice must come from a collective effort that prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable. Blind faith in systems that perpetuate inequality and neglect only deepens the crisis. (pun intended 🙂) True community care recognizes that our strength lies in our relationships and shared resources. 

Whether through mutual aid, sharing information and medications, or simply being there for a neighbor in need, coming together in solidarity is an act of radical resistance against a system that prioritizes individualism and competition. So what if it doesn’t solve the whole problem in one fell swoop? This is not a problem that has a silver bullet, as we all have experienced over and over throughout the pandemic’s endless parade of “here’s one weird trick to get back to normal.”

Let’s create spaces where everyone feels safe and valued, where we can address our needs together without relying on the very systems that have historically failed us. By embracing community care, we protect not only ourselves but also challenge the structures that perpetuate harm and neglect. Yes we have to contend with the laws and systems which we currently live under, but our work cannot just stop there. Together, only we can ensure that everyone has access to the care they deserve. Let’s commit to a future where our collective safety is in our hands.

Covid-19 still presents us with a profound opportunity to build the world we want. While devastating, and with many committed to forgetting, this pandemic still acts as a catalyst—a longue durée of reckoning that reveals the deep injustices woven into our society and the points at which the system of the state becomes vulnerable. The old world of exploitation, inequality, and relentless profit pursuit is crumbling, and in its place, a new vision of liberation and collective care is struggling to be born.

Yet, this transformative potential is under siege. Pandemic denial is a shroud, trying to suffocate the horizon of deliverance that is within our grasp no matter how far away it seems. The forces of the status quo are desperate to maintain control, urging us to return to normalcy while reinforcing the systems that perpetuate harm.

[Image description: Lithograph, cropped public health poster originally from the Indiana Board of Health. Text reads: “STATE BOARD of HEALTH” at the top. Underneath on the left is an image of death in an opera coat. To the right, text reads: “I AM DEATH” “TO EARLY JOIN ME BREATHE MUCH FOUL AIR.”}

As we navigate the complexities, collective suffering, and pain of this moment, we cannot shy away from the struggle. The challenges we face are immense, but so too is our capacity for resistance and transformation. We must deliver each other from Covid. Together, we can rise from the ashes of the old world, forging a path toward a new reality where everyone really has the means to thrive.

To seek deliverance for each other is to yearn for more than mere liberation; it’s to aim for a profound transformation that shakes the very foundations of our existence. Liberation might free us from oppression’s chains, but deliverance reclaims our souls, histories, and futures. It acknowledges that we seek more than freedom from tyranny—we seek a radical reimagining of what it means to live fully and authentically.

In this pursuit, we must confront the reality that liberation, without deliverance, risks becoming just a shift in power—an exchange of one form of control for another. We may be freed from the oppressor’s shackles, but still bound by the structures that perpetuate harm. Deliverance demands that we dismantle these systems and transform not only our circumstances but our relationships with one another and the world.

Deliverance is an embrace of our collective humanity, a defiance against the systems that seek to divide us. It compels us to remember that true freedom is not found in isolation but in the intricate web of connections we weave. In this quest, we must nurture one another, knowing that our liberation is meaningless if it doesn’t encompass the needs of the most marginalized among us.

To seek deliverance is to embody a fierce love that transcends imposed boundaries of time and space. It is a call to arms, a cry for justice that echoes in the hearts of the forgotten and abandoned. Together, we will forge a future where the scars of our past are not just reminders of loss but badges of honor that guide us in our fight for a world reborn.

Deliverance is the spark that ignites our collective struggle, freeing workers and the surplus from the weight of forgetting. It calls us to remember, to acknowledge how we will never be the same, and to stand firm against the state’s relentless demand that we abandon one another. 

In this act of remembering, we refuse to be silenced or sidelined. Instead, we must over and over again rise in flagrant defiance together, casting aside the illusion of individualism the state promotes. We become the guardians of each other, creating networks of safety through solidarity and compassion. Our lives are intertwined, and through this connection, we find our strength. Vulnerability, far from weakness, becomes a testament to our humanity and capacity for love.

As we gather in defiance, we create a chorus of remembering, a song that echoes against the silence imposed by the state. In this harmony, we find the power to protect ourselves and transform our communities into sanctuaries of mutual aid. Deliverance is not just a moment—it’s a movement, a continuous unfolding of collective liberation.

Let us embrace interconnectedness, knowing that as long as we truly hold one another close, we are stronger for it. We are the architects of a future where no one is left behind, where safety is woven into the fabric of our existence. Together, we must continue to move forward into the future together, unwavering and unyielding, in pursuit of the world we know is possible.