On the re-opening: With workers dying, America means business
As America begins to reopen, the need for a sense of relief is justified by a widespread false sense that the danger is over—when there is still neither cure nor vaccine, only a statistical downturn in cases because of the effectiveness of the shut-down. Of course, immediately the numbers of cases have shut up everywhere where cities have been reopening. It must be said:
Our government does not kill people in camps, but lets them die in cities and communities of whatever kind.
The pandemic has been declared essentially over so that American business can go back to work and not lose any more money. That American workers will die in large numbers as a result is a detail, an accident. Again, because people are simply being allowed to die.
The US leads the world per capita in deaths from the pandemic for this reason. And this must be related to the facts that it also leads the world in police killings, rigged prosecutions (that send literally defenseless people to prison on dishonest and coercive plea bargains), and incarcerations, especially of black men.
Capital needs labor performed by workers, but beyond that does not need people to live in any particular way or at all. Maybe this is the ultimate reason why 'the camp is,' as Agamben says, 'the nomos' of our world.
At least it helps explain the systematic downgrading of our economy and society. This affects poor and ‘privileged’ alike. For instance, prescribed and illegal drugs are how most of the country copes with the dissatisfactions of life in a business-oriented society that offers people little more than a chance to compete for scarce opportunities valued mostly monetarily. Those jobs and careers, when they do exist or offer much of interest, are important because they enable repayment of the loans. Thus, people, as labor power, serve the circuit of capital: they must borrow to study, study to get jobs, and get jobs to pay off what they borrowed; it starts an ends with service to The Man. Neoliberalism as neo-feudalism. Our universities are being destroyed by turning students into lifetime debt peons, and intellectual workers into low-paid teachers with no job security and no opportunity to do the scientific and scholarly work for which they were trained. While public schools have reduced education to studying for tests that are mere games of information recall for docile future workers with no need to think at all.
In this context, the police are a military force implicitly at war against a large part of the population. The poor, of course, whether as domestic urban minorities or immigrants seeking not so much a better life as a chance to live at all are typically blamed for bearing the consequences of social malaises profitably wreaked upon them. They too may be allowed to just die.