Pandemics and the State of Exception

“Sovereign is he who decides the exception”
--Carl Schmitt

Because of the current global crisis caused by the latest coronavirus, COVID-19, millions of people are learning something a little uncomfortable about our modern “democracies.”

The early news about the pandemic featured an almost morbid fascination with China’s authoritarian response to the outbreak: travel bans, quarantines of entire districts, forced confinement, electronic surveillance, and other forms of government control of people and their movements. These all sounded Orwellian, and so distant from the way we in “The West” expect governments to behave.

But now that these same measures have been implemented in other places, especially in Europe, we’re forced into an odd crisis. China’s totalitarian state surveillance apparatus (including its “social rating” system, which doles out privileges like long-distance travel only to citizens rated “good”) has long seemed a bizarre curiosity, something many dismiss through a subtle mental trick. “They’re Asian,” or “the Chinese are an exception,” a reduction and dismissal of their situation into something essentialist and racist.

That is, we’ve been able to ignore the implications of these control measures by the government in China by treating it as an “Asian” thing. More so, we see such authoritarian control as something that can be “contained” to China, as if all the powers the Chinese government has claimed over its population constitute no more than a localized virus.

This appears to contrast with Europe’s early responses to COVID-19. The crisis in Italy, where already 2,158 people have died and there are now almost 28,000 cases, has so far been the worst in Europe. The retrospective temptation of many here is to suggest the Italian government was not “harsh” enough in its early measures, choosing instead to embrace a more “liberal” approach by not immediately deploying troops to confine people to their homes.

The situation there is quite dire, with countless stories of people living with the rotting corpses of their loved ones because the bodies cannot be transported due to the quarantine. Hospitals have been ordered to “triage” the infected, leaving the elderly and immuno-compromised to die in order to direct limited resources only to those who can more likely be saved. Now the quarantines are heavily enforced, with people confined to their homes by police and the military, and yet the infection rate still rises (3000 more announced yesterday).

The horror of what has happened in Italy compelled other governments to enact strict measures to stave off the “curve” effect of transmission. Yesterday, France announced a nationwide curfew and deployed 100,000 police and an unstated number of military troops into the streets to keep people in their homes for 15 days. Spain has done something similar, while other countries have completely closed down their borders (an earth-shaking act for a continent which stopped internal border controls through the Schengen agreement.)

In Luxembourg, where I currently live, all shops, bars, restaurants, schools, churches, and pretty much any other place with the exception of grocery stores and newstands/tobacco shops have closed. The streets are mostly empty, with non-medical foreign workers (most who work here live in cheaper towns in France, Belgium, and Germany) unable to enter. Confinement, however, is still only recommended, not police-enforced, though that may be coming this week because of Luxembourg’s rather high infection rate.

So the “virus” of authoritarian state controls, once supposedly confined to Chinese exceptionalism, has spread throughout the continent along with COVID-19. In the United States, however, the situation is somewhat different, with each state, county, and municipality having its own rules. Confinement to homes is now mandatory for 7 million people in California, New Jersey has implemented curfews, and New York City is rumored to soon do the same.

Much of this unfortunately may come too late for the United States, which has one of the lowest testing rates, and an extremely fragile health care system with a really low rate of doctors and hospital beds per capita. Worst of all, however, the United States also lacks most of the social safety programs which countries such as France (where workers forced to stay home will be paid and small businesses will have their rents forgiven during the quarantine) and other European countries have. In the US, most of the lowest level workers currently will receive no aid, especially those working in the service industry (where “social distancing” is impossible and working from home isn’t an option).

So when the “virus” of “Chinese” state control finally takes hold of the United States just as COVID-19 is about to, things will get quite ugly.

The thing is, there’s nothing uniquely “Chinese” about these state measures, and their apparently “sudden” use across the world in response to this crisis conceals the fact that these powers have always already existed. State surveillance, the restriction of movements, and confinement of people are all core features of modern Nation-States. “This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature” as they say.

Each government of the world has always held these powers, what Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt called “The State of Exception.” State monopolies on violence, for instance, are exceptions to all the laws that make illegal the confinement, abuse, and murder of citizens. That is, if you were to kidnap someone and lock them in a room for thirty years, that would be illegal. But governments do this all the time, and as a feature of being a government. It’s called prison. Similarly, what the police do on behalf of the state would be highly illegal if you were to do so. You cannot kill an unarmed person on the street because of the color of their skin and expect not to be held accountable, but a police officer may do this very same thing as part of their job. They’re the exception to the rule, because the government decides “the exception.”

While all these powers have always been in some degree or another claimed by governments, the last two decades have seen a shocking increase in the amount of such powers claimed. The PATRIOT act in the United States, the founding document of our modern worldwide “War On Terror,” was only one such increase. In Europe, restrictions of movement within countries and between them, supposedly “illegal” by their constitutions and international agreements, have occurred “exceptionally” many times since 2000, especially in France under the governments of Sarkozy and Hollande.

All this is to say that the “virus of Chinese authoritarianism” is not only not confined to China, but didn’t even start there. China isn’t the exception, it’s the rule, and only our “Western” self-deception has allowed us to think otherwise.

The larger question here is “why.” Why do governments claim this power, and is it truly necessary to stop the spread of diseases like COVID-19?

The answer is a qualified “yes.” Yes, these measures are vital, but only because of another core feature of modern nation-states.

Industrialized civilization, by which I mean the core means of production, consumption, and distribution in the world since the early 1800’s, has led to a shocking concentration of humans within ever-crowded cities. COVID-19, like the flu and other similar viral infections, is spread through close personal contact, and such contact is impossible to avoid in cities. And capitalism, which spawned industrialization and is its defining ethic, has led to those cities (and the nation-states which rule them) becoming less and less good and healthy places to live and more and more like sprawling barracks full of worker-drones.

We think of Beijing as such a place, but Paris, London, and New York City are no different. They are all highly-dense urban centres where humans are concentrated together, coming constantly in contact with hundreds of other people (if not thousands) daily. Viruses like COVID-19, which in non-industrial societies would have been a very slowly-spreading problem and thus something humans could have adequately prepared for, instead has exploded into a pandemic crippling entire nations in a matter of just a few short months.

In such a situation, the only possible response for governments is to declare a State of Exception, to confine, surveille, and quarantine its citizens to prevent worse damage. But it’s only because this is the situation we are in that these measures are necessary. Also, because so many nations have greatly reduced funding for medical facilities, testing, and doctors, sharp infection spikes can completely collapse their health systems (as has happened in Italy).

So yes, this is all a necessary response to this situation and to the material conditions we find ourselves in. But a final question we must ask is a question we maybe wouldn’t otherwise be forced to ask: “is this worth it?”

That is, if industrial capitalist civilization can only survive by means of constant states of exception, through increasing authoritarian measures in which what it once meant to be human and alive becomes less and less a given and more and more a rare privilege, do we really want this civilization? Or maybe, is it time we finally walk away from the whole project, build new systems and new-old ways of life where surviving one of the countless number of viruses that exists in nature doesn’t mean the end of our freedom?

RHYD WILDERMUTH

Rhyd is a druid, pagan, and autonomous Marxist. He’s also a co-founder of Gods&Radicals Press and runs its publishing operations. He was born in Appalachia but now lives in Europe. Get his books here or read his blog here.