Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

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What is COVID capitalism?

Thomas Nail

To cite this article: Thomas Nail (2022): What is COVID capitalism?, Distinktion: Journal of Social
Theory, DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2075905

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Published online: 14 Jun 2022.

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DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2075905

What is COVID capitalism?

Thomas Naila,b
a
Philosophy, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA; bDepartment of Philosophy, University of Denver,
Denver, CO, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The term ‘COVID capitalism’ designates the ways capitalism and the Capitalism; COVID; COVID
novel coronavirus alter and amplify one another. In this paper, I look capitalism; climate;
at four major features that characterize this relationship so far. (1) migration; inequality; politics
Capitalist extraction and urbanization increase exposure to new
viruses. (2) Capitalism increases the spread of infectious disease.
(3) COVID amplifies inequalities that benefit capitalists. (4) COVID
has led to profits, bailouts, and deregulation for capitalists.
The increasing frequency of COVID and other pandemics not
only amplifies existing capitalist structures but feeds back into
those structures and becomes an advantage to capitalism. I argue
here that COVID is not a threat to capitalism but rather a
mutagen altering and magnifying it.

The term ‘COVID capitalism’ designates the ways capitalism and the novel coronavirus
have altered and amplified one another. In this paper, I look at four features that charac-
terize this relationship so far. In brief, my argument is that COVID is not merely the by-
product of reckless, short-sighted profit-making, as others have argued, 1but has also
become a primary method or tool in itself for increasing profit.
Contemporary capitalism has reached a historical tipping point where capitalist
driven extractive industries, urbanization, and climate change are destroying the last
remaining wild animals, lands, and oceans on the planet. Animals, plants, viruses, and
humans are being forced into migration with nowhere else to run on a scale never wit-
nessed before (Nail 2019, 375–80). We might expect this global disturbance in the means
of production to inhibit capitalist accumulation, but the opposite is happening. Many
capitalists are adapting to pandemics and discovering to their delight that pandemic
instability can actually increase profit if exploited properly. This is a dangerous idea
because it incentivizes the weaponization of pandemics and other catastrophes in the
name of profit. Let’s see how.
My argument here is not just that COVID capitalism is deforesting the planet because
of its shortsighted profit-making agenda. Tithi Bhattacharya and Gareth Dale, and
epidemiologist Rob Wallace have argued well that capitalism has created an ‘age of
pandemics’ as a result of its endless drive for accumulation (Bhattacharya and

CONTACT Thomas Nail thomas.nail@du.edu Philosophy, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA; Depart-
ment of Philosophy, University of Denver, 2000 E Asbury Ave., Suite 257, Denver, CO, USA
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 T. NAIL

Dale 2020; Smith and Wallace 2020). And the Swedish ecologist Andreas Malm has
shown in great historical detail in his book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency how
this has been happening since the beginning of capitalism (Malm 2021, 69-74). But in
addition to all this, I am arguing that pandemics are not merely a nasty by-product of
capitalism anymore. They have become methods in themselves of accelerating and ampli-
fying inequality and profit. While Malm also argues that capitalist extraction and
accumulation lie at the root of the pandemic, I show how the pandemic has in turn
changed capitalism and opened up new avenues for profit.
While some economists such as Adam Tooze have focused on how larger national
economies and issues of social equality were negatively effected or ‘ruptured’ by the pan-
demic, I want to focus here on all the private companies that profited from COVID
(Tooze 2021). David Madden, for example, has looked more closely at how ‘Delivery
companies, fulfilment centres and retailers see economic turmoil as a chance to hire des-
perate workers on insecure contracts. And some companies are seeking to profit directly
off social misery, such as the start-up pursuing a business model that has been described
as ‘Uber, but for evicting people’. In a period marked by the overproduction of social
suffering, some firms see this suffering as a bounteous resource to be exploited’
(Madden 2020, 677-80).
In my view, we cannot ignore the ways that large capitalists have used the pandemic to
their advantage and now have a vested interest in perpetuating and even reproducing the
social misery that comes with the age of pandemics they have created and may continue
to create.

First thesis: capitalist extraction and urbanization increase exposure to

new viruses
Capitalism’s tendency to unleash new viruses is related to what Karl Marx called ‘primi-
tive accumulation.’ For Marx, primitive accumulation is a necessary feature of capitalism
that requires capitalists to continually expel people from the land and extract resources
from the earth. Without forcibly expelling people from the land, they historically will not
go willingly into waged labour. Furthermore, if people stay on their land, capitalists
cannot thoroughly plunder it. In other words, without primitive accumulation, Marx
says, there would be no capitalism. The lesson is this: theft, violence, and extraction
are all primary to the capitalist mode of production.
Indeed, capitalism not only emerged through murder, theft, colonialism, and demi-
neralization; it sustains itself in the same way. This is why Marx wrote that ‘Capital
comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Marx and
Engels 1976, 926). The invention and reproduction of economic value are always drip-
ping with the blood of all the indigenous people it kills and all the materials it steals
from the land.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings
of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for
the commercial hunting of blackskins are all things which characterize the dawn of
the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of
primitive accumulation (915).
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 3

In short, colonialism, extraction, theft, urbanization, deforestation, and ecocide are

integral aspects of capitalist reproduction. This need is also what continues to push
capital deeper into the ‘untapped’ ecosystems of the planet today in search of new
materials. Marx did not foresee, though, the degree to which this extractive drive
would also unleash hundreds of undiscovered viruses upon the world. Yet, here we are.
Marx developed the concept of primitive accumulation from a passage in Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations. He says, ‘The accumulation of stock must, in the nature of
things, be previous to the division of labour’ (Smith 2009). In other words, for Smith,
before we can divide humans into owners and workers, there must have already been
an accumulation such that the workers had nothing to sell but their labour. Smith
assumed that the superior peoples of history ‘naturally’ had accumulated power and
stock as if from nowhere. But, for Marx, this is just a polite way of saying that the
long history of violence, murder, environmental destruction, extraction, and colonialism
was just given’ and not worth emphasizing as the source and ever-flowing fount of
capitalism.
Adam Smith’s usage of the term ‘prior accumulation’ is perfectly typical of the histori-
cal obfuscation wielded by political economists about the violence and expulsion
required for those in power to maintain and expand their stock. Instead of acknowled-
ging this violence, political economists like Smith mythologized and naturalized it. It
was just the way things had always been, they reasoned.
By contrast, primitive accumulation has a material history for Marx. It is the precapi-
talist condition for capitalist production. In particular, Marx identifies this process with
the expulsion of peasants and indigenous peoples from their land through the physical
and legal use of enclosure, colonial dispossession, and anti-vagabond laws in six-
teenth-century England. Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation was prescient
because the same process has continued ever since. Without the displacement of
people, there is no expansion of private property and no capitalism.
However, after hundreds of years of plunder, capitalist primitive accumulation has
become increasingly expensive as resources have become scarce. This has pushed
urban developers and extractive industries into wild areas searching for cheap land
and materials. Along the way, capitalists are increasingly encountering the final dwind-
ling populations of wild animals and their diseases.
Epidemiologists estimate that there are over 1.7 million undiscovered viruses on the
planet and that between 630–830 thousand of them could infect humans. So few may
have been released so far because capitalists were unsure how profitable a global pan-
demic could be and did not directly pursue or intend to unleash them. Also, as wildlife
areas are destroyed populations tend to keep receding into more remote areas. Thus the
diseases may be running away from ecological destruction. However, after COVID, there
is a proven financial incentive for certain companies to seek them out more directly. Pan-
demics could become untapped financial resources even if capitalists may feign ignor-
ance about their role in unleashing them.
Certain humans have now destroyed nearly 90% of wetlands in the world and con-
verted 3/4 of land on the planet into human-use areas. Most of this destruction and
land conversion has occurred since the industrial revolution, the advent of capitalism,
and is directly related to new diseases. Indeed, 31% of new diseases emerge through
deforestation and land-use change, a direct consequence of capitalist primitive
4 T. NAIL

accumulation. Pre-capitalist societies certainly unleashed viruses through deforestation,

but in a different way. As Malm also notes in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, pre-
capitalist societies deforested more slowly, distributed disease less globally, and defor-
ested less acres in the same time (Malm 2021, 69-74). They were also not in the same
position to take advantage of the global consequences.
Studies show that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest produces the perfect con-
ditions for the spread of malaria (Vittor et al. 2009, 5-12). ‘Between 2003 and 2015, on
average, they estimated that a 10 percent yearly increase in forest loss led to a 3 percent
rise in malaria cases’ (Zimmer 2019). In 1997, capitalists burnt down a patch of Indonesian
rainforest the size of Pennsylvania to make way for agriculture. This caused fruit bats to flee
the area searching for food and spread diseases to nearby pigs, which then spread the Nipah
virus to people in outbreaks across Southeast Asia (Zimmer 2019).
Nearly 60% of new infectious diseases originate from forest-dwelling animals dis-
placed by capitalism, including HIV, Ebola, and Nipah (Jones et al. 2008, 990-93). In
2013 the Ebola outbreak may have been caused by deforestation from ‘foreign mining
and timber operations’ in Guinea (NPR 2015). Capitalist extraction brought residents
closer to bats, and an 18-month-old boy playing near a bat-filled fruit tree was the
first to die and spread the disease to the village.
Peter Daszak, the president of Ecohealth Alliance, a nonprofit focused on the intersec-
tion of conservation and global health, worked on a study of more than 500 disease out-
breaks over the past four decades. The study showed that deforestation played a role in
increasing diseases, including malaria, dengue fever, SARS, Ebola, schistosomiasis, and
leptospirosis (a bacterial disease that can lead to meningitis and liver failure) as
animals transmit diseases to humans. Daszak writes:
The idea was that something fundamental is going on in this era that is driving all these pan-
demics … but no one was bringing the whole thing together … The fundamental change is
what we’re doing to the planet. We’re not only driving global pollution, climate change and
all the rest, but we’re driving the emergence and spread of all these new pathogens. Defor-
estation and land conversion for agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of pandemics (Mor-
rison 2016).

Capitalist deforestation and extraction disproportionally affect the global poor and
people of colour, but the process is everywhere. For instance, suburban expansion into
the wilderness areas spread Lyme disease in Connecticut in the 1980s. By destroying
predatory animals, humans proliferated white-footed mice, which carried Lyme
disease from ticks.
The global market in exotic and wild animal pets has led to the spread of infectious
diseases. For example, in 2003, 47 people across six US states caught monkeypox, new
to the US, after people caught them from prairie dogs they purchased as pets
(Chomel, Belotto, and Meslin 2007). When markets collect and sell different wild
animals as pets or food, they may be transmitting diseases between them and distributing
them around the world. In addition, factory farming now supplies more than 90% of
meat globally, and 99% in the US put animals in harsh and unsanitary conditions
(Samuel 2020).
When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size sheds,
to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling their immune
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 5

systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs, and
there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight – put all these factors together and you have a
perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of disease (Greger 2006).
As farms breed certain animals to be genetically identical for more meat, they also
make it easier for viruses to spread without encountering genetic variants that might
fight it off. As a result, the World Health Organization and the Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention have said that industrialized farming practices increase the
risk of new infectious diseases. For instance, in 2009, the H1N1 swine flu came from
factory-farmed pigs in North American, spread to humans, and became a global pan-
demic, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
This is not the result of a few individuals treating animals poorly. It is the repeated and
systematic usage of animals to produce meat according to capitalist profit imperatives.
Capitalists hyper-exploit the biological labour of animal bodies in factory farms by muti-
lating animal bodies, reducing costly welfare standards, intensifying their suffering, and
ultimately spreading disease. Just as capitalists are approaching the planet’s ecological
limits and encountering disease, they are approaching the biological limits of animal’s
bodies and finding the same. For instance, highly pathogenic strains of H5H1 bird flu
between 1997 and 2006 came from China’s poultry factory farms. Those who got the
virus had a 60% chance of dying from it. Furthermore, giving low-dose antibiotics to
factory farm animals allows bacteria to become resistant and decrease human and
animal defences.

Thesis two: capitalism increases the spread of infectious disease

There are two primary ways that capitalism has increased the spread of COVID. The first
is through forced migration and climate change. Global migration is highly uneven.
International transport allows elites and commodities to circulate freely but criminalizes
poorer peoples’ movement and endangers them with disease and death.
Although Marx understood capitalism’s imperative of forced migration well, he did
not anticipate the degree to which capitalism’s acceleration of climate change would
work in combination with migration as a weapon of primitive accumulation. The histori-
cal link between fossil fuels, capitalism, and climate change is well-established (Parenti
and Moore 2016). However, what is not nearly as emphasized is that the increase of
environmental disasters, including fires, tornados, and tsunamis caused by climate
change destroy wilderness habitats, and lead to the emergence and spread of new dis-
eases. In addition, more than half the animals on earth are now migrating as tempera-
tures and ecosystems are changing (Welch 2017). As they move, they mix with others,
including humans, and spread disease.
Something similar is happening with humans as well. There are more human migrants
now than at any time in history. This is not by accident or by ‘free’ movement alone. The
vast majority of migrants are forced migrants and refugees. Capitalism is a major cause of
climate change migration and capitalists directly benefit from what I have called the
‘climate migration industrial complex.’ Let me explain.
Climate change has disproportionately negative effects on poorer countries and people
of colour and disproportionally positive effects for receiving countries who benefit by
what Marx called the hyper-exploitable and precarious ‘reserve labor army.’ The
6 T. NAIL

asymmetry between citizens and migrants results from a long history of capitalist colo-
nialism and racism, which continues today through the bordered management of
migration.
Thus, we cannot reduce contemporary global migration to merely natural climatic
causal explanations (Hulme 2011). The ‘climate refugee’ is never simply fleeing climate
change but is doing so under postcolonial conditions of geopolitical violence and
racism. The term ‘climate refugee’ itself serves to cover the real political conditions of
social circulation at work that make such populations vulnerable to displacement and
disease in the first place.
Climate change is a weapon of primitive accumulation, or what I have called ‘expan-
sion by expulsion, their from people expelling forcibly by power Western expands
because’ it expands Western power by forcibly expelling people from their previous pat-
terns of motion and appropriating them into its conditions of social reproduction (Nail
2015). This expulsion is fourfold:

. Migrants lose the right to their land and homes (territorial expulsion).
. They lose their right to full civic participation (political expulsion).
. They lose their right to legal status (juridical expulsion).
. They lose their right to the means of production or subsistence (economic expulsion).

This four-fold expulsion enacted using various borders is necessary for the direct
appropriation of vulnerable and cheap migrant bodies and the expansion of social
power. Unfortunately, it also puts them into dirty, dangerous, and degrading jobs and
detention facilities where COVID is spreading and killing migrants. In other words,
capitalism is spreading disease by impoverishing migrant health and then blaming
migrants.
For example, with the spread of COVID, there has been an explosion of newly
reinforced and modified borders worldwide that have negatively affected migrant
health. Between March 2020 and February 2021, nation-states have implemented over
100,000 movement restrictions (International Organization on Migration 2021). Ironi-
cally, the United States has rejected asylum seekers by claiming they pose a health
risk.2 Spain, for instance, has required negative COVID tests as a condition of entry
and 91% of the world population live in countries with COVID-related travel restrictions
(Reuters 2021; Connor 2020).
The spread of COVID has also added to the dangerous conditions inside detention
centres and hastened deportation orders. As of February 24, 2021, 9,569 ICE detainees
have tested positive for COVID-19 (Cahan 2021). When officials deport infected
migrants across the border, they can infect others before crossing again. In other
words, deportation regimes are also disease regimes.
In 2020, for instance, due to fears of COVID, Trump invoked a law called ‘title 42’ that
allowed border officials to directly expel migrants without formal processing in cases of
national health emergencies (BBC News 2021). So far, Biden has continued to use this
law as well. However, the Centre for Disease Control has publicly said that asylum
seekers pose no health risk (Sawyer 2020). Officials have expelled more than 204,000
people under title 42 (2020). Deported migrants are now pooling up and circulating in
Tijuana and border towns during a global pandemic where disease could break out
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 7

and spread through the cities and camps. Although asylum seekers do not pose a health
hazard to the US, the US does pose a health hazard to asylum seekers, migrants, and
Mexican citizens living near ports of entry. As of writing this, COVID cases are now
on the rise in Tijuana migrant camps due to US policy (Rivera 2021).
Nationalism, xenophobia, and racism also play a structural role in the bordering
process of primitive accumulation because they socially devalorize and thus cheapen
the labour and lives of migrant workers. If migrants arrived but were not thoroughly
racialized and discriminated against, their labour would be too valuable for capitalist
investment to bother appropriating them in the first place. Thus, capitalism wields
climate change under a triple condition of bordered colonialism: (1) The historical
origins of recent climate change are in colonialism itself (oil from Africa, industrial pro-
duction from slavery, and so on). (2) Climate change forces colonized populations and
indigenous people to move due to climate change, and (3) wealthy countries racialize
these same populations as dangerous barbarian boat people upon arrival (Moore 2015;
Goldberg 2017, 99-114; Giuliani 2017, 227-42). As a result, capitalist nation-states
increasingly expose human migrants to danger and disease at every step along the
way. During COVID, this has meant the spread of infectious diseases to migrants.
This is not merely an unfortunate by-product of profit-centered thinking, it is an integral
part of how profit is made. By criminalizing and infecting migrants, they become more
vulnerable to exploitation and, therefore, increase profits.
But climate change, like primitive accumulation, is not just about the dispossession
and appropriation of people and cheap labour. As I discussed in the first thesis, it is
also about the direct appropriation of cheap or free land. The two go hand in hand.
At the same time that climate change displaces people, it also opens up previously occu-
pied lands, waters, and forests to newly privatized extractive and construction industries.
Moreover, as the climate changes, humans will encounter previously inaccessible areas
with wild animals and diseases. New markets supplied with abundant cheap migrant
labour will expand, including new security markets for new borders, fences, walls,
drones to control migrants. In other words, climate change may not mean the end of
capitalism, but may be its rebirth or second wind through the use of borders and the
spread of pandemics.
If capitalism loves disaster, as Marx knew well and Naomi Klein has written often, why
should we think climate change will necessarily mean the end of capitalism (Klein 2007)?
There is no absolute natural limit to capitalism if anything can be a commodity, only rela-
tive limits or borders to profit. We are most certainly at the cusp of one of these limits
today, which Jason Moore attributes to ‘the tendency of the ecological surplus to fall’
(Moore 2015). Everything and everyone that capitalism could easily appropriate (oil,
slaves, old-growth forests, etc.) was gobbled up during colonialism. The people who
are left today want more money and more rights. The minerals left are expensive to
extract. This is why capitalists have increasingly retreated to financial speculation. If
only there were a way, the capitalist dreams, to somehow cheaply dislodge huge
amounts of people from their land, devalorize their labour through borders, and appro-
priate it. In other words, if climate change did not exist, it would be necessary for capital-
ism to create it. Lucky for it, it does because it did. Migrants today thus ‘form a disposable
industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred
it at its own cost’ (Marx and Engels 1976, 784) To put this in the contemporary context of
8 T. NAIL

COVID capitalism: the primitive accumulation of wilderness exposes humans to animal

viruses, and forces migrants to spread the viruses which simultaneously renders migrants
more vulnerable to disease and exploitation.
The second way capitalism aids the spread of COVID is by forcing people to work
even when it puts them in danger of contracting and spreading the virus. Capitalism
has never cared about human suffering, but only insofar as it affects profit. This was
no secret, but COVID capitalism has put sickness and death in front of many peoples’
faces and deliberately heaped their bodies into make-shift morgues with a careless shrug.
Not all countries have given in so easily to the profit imperative as economist Adam
Tooze and others have shown (Tooze 2021). In countries such as New Zealand, all non-
essential workers can stay home for a few weeks while essential workers are heavily pro-
tected. There, the spread of coronavirus has not been nearly as bad. Ireland offers six
weeks of emergency unemployment related to COVID. Many European countries and
Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia have provided similar support for COVID quarantine.
A welcome side effect of this is that ecosystems got a bit of a pollution break as well
(Streiff 2020). This is an example of adaptive behaviour that allows societies to be
flexible to new situations (Malm 2021). Sometimes we need to let go of our abstractions
and profit imperatives to change along with the world. In other words, the best way to
survive a severe storm like COVID is to seek shelter, even if it means fleeing your
home and losing everything but the essentials.
Unfortunately, many other countries decided not to give up on profit. Instead, they
kept the non-essential economy open, and infections spread. Hospitals overflowed
with dead bodies sacrificed to an abstract and entirely unnecessary profit motive.
Finally, in March 2020, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, explicitly said
what others were scared to admit during the broader call to keep the economy open.
He noted that older people most at risk of dying from COVID should sacrifice themselves
for capitalism. More precisely, he said they should want to sacrifice for their grandchil-
dren’s future. But their kids would have been OK if some millionaires made less money
for a few weeks. Indeed, their grandparents might still be alive as well.
Similar treatments of workers occurred in other countries. For example, in Peru, capi-
talists forced mine workers to keep working despite the high risks of infection. The result
was hundreds of new infections (Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina
2020). People have heavily criticized mining companies in Congo, Mexico, and Guate-
mala for similar labour and health practices during COVID (Gneiting, Lusiani, and
Tamir 2020, 27). The ‘openness’ of capitalism does not mean ‘the free benefit of all’
but rather sickness and death for the precarious, migrant, and working class.
Keeping the non-essential economy open in the US has resulted in the prolonged
spread of the virus, hurting almost everyone and disproportionately affecting young chil-
dren and parents with school closures. We have watched the metastable feedback loop of
social reality wobble and collapse before our eyes all because some people couldn’t let go
of their favorite abstraction: profit.
Meanwhile, the US government has bailed out hundreds of billions of dollars of ‘lost
profit’ for corporations. As a result, the two most prominent companies in America made
their most enormous profits in 2020, while many workers lost their jobs and houses due
to a lack of financial support. But unemployment can be good for capitalists. As Marx
knew very well, unemployment pits workers against one another to compete for worse
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 9

lower-wage work, which increases profit (Marx and Engels 1976, 778-779). Unemploy-
ment forces more workers who otherwise would have had options into dangerous and
disease-spreading work. In this way, too, COVID has been good for capitalists.
In short, coronavirus capitalism has made at least two things transparent. First, capit-
alism does not care about human suffering and is happy to fuel its profits with bodybags if
need be. Second, capitalism’s uncompromising commitment to profit and accumulation
is not only destroying the planet but fostering a suicidal social impulse that is making all
of us deeply vulnerable to any new perturbations in Earth systems. In short, COVID has
dramatized not just the unsavoury by-products of capitalism but more precisely how it
feeds like a virus on ecological destruction and social instability.

Third thesis: COVID amplifies capitalist inequalities

Capitalism unleashed and spread COVID, but COVID, in turn, amplified the social and
economic inequalities that capitalism relies on to exploit and underpay people. It is a
match made in hell. Economists often say that capitalism is not inherently racist or patri-
archal; it’s just good old ‘rational self-interest.’ To me, though, it is indisputable that capi-
talists make more profit by getting away with paying some groups of people lower wages
for the same work. The reason why women are paid less than men for the same work is
patriarchy. People of colour work more dangerous and less well-paid jobs not because
they prefer it but because employers turn them down for other jobs. My point, and
one stressed by feminists and critical race scholars for decades, is that capitalists indispu-
tably benefit from social discrimination.
This is why COVID’s amplification of social inequality is strategically advantageous to
capitalism. Ultimately, it is why capitalism has no incentive to stop ecological destruc-
tion, climate change, and the forced migration of people, plants, and animals. There is
too much to be gained from their vulnerability to stop now.
Of course, social inequalities such as racism, sexism, poverty, and homophobia are bad
for certain humans and are worth abandoning for many reasons. But they are also worth
leaving for the sake of the bigger picture of human survival and planetary metastability.
The COVID pandemic, in particular, has taught us that social inequalities increase the
spread and severity of viruses. This creates a feedback loop of instability that ripples
through the whole social body (Fisher and Bubola 2020). Beliefs and actions that perpe-
tuate inequality are rigid commitments to abstract hierarchies that weaken social and
ecological systems. But this is how capitalism benefits from it. The more natural and
human communities capitalism destroys, the more alienated we feel from them, and
the more readily we let the destruction continue. Let’s look at a few examples.
Historically, anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia have tended to increase when
the economy declines, even though immigrants were not the cause. Immigrants also tend
to be wrongly associated, in the xenophobic imaginary, with ‘bringing disease.’ Now that
there is a full-on economic depression and global pandemic simultaneously, there is a
perfect storm of baseless anti-immigrant sentiment in wealthy countries. Asian and
Mexican people have suffered tremendous discrimination in the US due to the same
idiotic tropes that have characterized xenophobia for hundreds of years. Due to fears
of COVID, Trump invoked a law called ‘title 42’ that allows border officials to directly
expel migrants without formal processing in cases of national health emergencies. So
10 T. NAIL

far, Biden has continued to use this law as well. All this despite the Centre for Disease
Control stating that asylum seekers pose no health risk. Officials have expelled more
than 204,000 people under title 42 (Sawyer 2020). Deported migrants are now pooling
up and circulating in Tijuana and border towns during a global pandemic where
disease could break out and spread through the cities and camps. Although asylum
seekers do not pose a health hazard to the US, the US does pose a health hazard to
asylum seekers, migrants, and Mexican citizens living near ports of entry.
Racism and racial violence have always been systemic problems. It is impossible to
ignore police violence on full display in the streets with more national media coverage
of murdered black Americans. We also know that black, brown, and indigenous popu-
lations are disproportionally affected by COVID. Yet, millions of white people refuse to
wear masks in public places, social distance, or get vaccinated (Advisory Board 2020;
Alcindor 2021. How many times will Native Americans be carelessly infected by
white settlers? When it was easy to talk the talk, many white people could adopt
non-racist vocabulary. Now millions of white people cannot be bothered to wear a
mask to protect people of colour. This is a consequence of a deep forgetting and dis-
missal of American racism and genocide. Furthermore, the systematic incarceration of
people of colour in prisons and detention centres is awful. Yet officials have wilfully let
gaols and detention centres become super-spreading death camps where COVID runs
wild.
Additionally, women are disproportionally bearing the brunt of domestic labour
during COVID because they were already bearing the brunt of it before COVID.
Many women are now quitting their jobs to take care of their kids who can’t go to
school while men work. Mental illness, opioid addiction, and domestic violence are all
on the rise during COVID, disproportionally affecting women. Frontline nurses
helping COVID victims are disproportionately women and are getting infected and
dying. Why are male academics publishing more under COVID while submissions
from women are declining? More men got a taste of how hard domestic labour and
child care are but backslid in the second wave of COVID (Aschaiek 2021). Some are step-
ping up, but most families are willing to send their children back to school, which may
endanger underpaid school staff, disproportionately women. It is no coincidence that
‘essential services’ such as cleaning, nursing, cooking, and child care are also dispropor-
tionally done by women.
Things were awful before COVID. Now they are worse. Biology is inseparable from
society. Both are part of feedback loops in Earth systems. COVID spreads not only
where bodies are vulnerable, but bodies are vulnerable where capitalism has exposed
and weakened them. We can see now how global and national inequality helps feed,
spread, and mutate the virus from a planetary perspective. Inequality is not an unfortu-
nate accident in a viral crisis but part of an ongoing history of interlocking oppressions
deeply part of ‘normal’ life. The COVID virus is leveraging them to spread itself, just as
capitalism is leveraging COVID to spread itself. In other words capitalism does not func-
tion despite these inequalities. It relies on them (Nail 2020). Capitalism was built on
gender, race, class, ecological, and ability hierarchies and continues to rely on them to
increase profit (Moore and Patel 2020).
The lesson here is that mutual aid is a much better social, planetary, and cosmic strat-
egy to maintain metastability than hierarchy and inequality (Bender, Littman, and
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 11

Dunbar 2021). This will not be the last global pandemic or ecological perturbation we
face, but COVID might help us see the bigger picture and prepare for the future.
Responses to suspend the capitalist law of profit has not been perfect, but it could be a
step in the right direction. It’s good practice to stop money-making, release non-
violent prisoners and migrants, wear masks to protect one another, and reduce our car
use and energy consumption. People have volunteered resources and time to help
those most at risk and more equally shared domestic responsibilities.
We can hold inflexibly to abstract ideas of human superiority, individualism, nation-
alism, capitalism, and various social hierarchies, or we can try to create more adaptive
metastable systems in response to changes on our planet.

Fourth thesis: COVID led to profits, bailouts, and deregulation for

capitalists
In March 2020, Naomi Klein published a video at The Intercept called ‘Coronavirus
Capitalism – and How to Beat It,’ where she anticipated early in the COVID pandemic
that capitalists would use the crisis as a way to get financial bailouts from governments.
Somehow, the rich have managed to get even richer during COVID, while millions of
people are losing their jobs and facing mass evictions. The poorest are getting even
poorer, while American billionaires’ wealth grew by more than $637 billion between
March 18 and June 11, 2020 (Collins 2021). Jeff Bezos alone made over $24 billion in
that time (Wolfe 2020). Meanwhile the population of hungry mothers and children 12
and under rose from 15-20% to around 40% (Bauer 2020).
Forty-five of the most wealthy 50 US companies profited since March 2020 by laying
off workers, accepting government COVID bailouts, and giving the bulk of their profits
to shareholders instead of helping workers. During difficult economic times, companies
will choose to buy their own stock to show investors that they believe in their companies
future profits. When they do this, their stock values go up, and the shareholders of the
company, who tend to be high-income individuals, make money. However, it also
means that less money goes to supporting workers or increasing health and safety. It
also means that corporations can show a smaller net profit level and become eligible
for government COVID money.
For example, Walmart’s CEO has said that businesses ‘should not just serve share-
holders,’ but still gave $10 billion to investors during the pandemic and laid off 1,200 cor-
porate office employees (MacMillan, Whoriskey, and O’Connell 2020).
During the pandemic, small businesses closed in droves reducing competition and
allowing bigger companies to get even bigger. Small businesses lacked the reserves and
resources to stay open during unpredictable consumer demand and had to close.
‘While the 50 largest companies averaged 2 percent revenue growth over the first nine
months of 2020, small business revenue shrank 12 percent over the same period,’ accord-
ing to data collected by software provider Womply from thousands of small firms. ‘Econ-
omists estimate at least 100,000 small businesses permanently closed in the first two
months of the pandemic alone’ (2020). Once the big capitalists have decimated the com-
petition of small businesses, it’s tough to get competition back. Despite the rhetoric of big
capitalists promising not to lay off workers during the pandemic, they laid off 9% versus
smaller capitalists that laid-off only 7%.
12 T. NAIL

Even as capitalists received government bailouts in the US, they passed them on to
their shareholders and compensated their executives. Simultaneously, many companies
took advantage of temporary COVID deregulations to not comply with environmental
laws and health monitoring. Other capitalists took the opportunity to lobby governments
for further deregulation around the environment, tax, and social protection. Unfortu-
nately, I cannot reproduce the enormous report on these findings but refer the reader
to a well-cited and devastating Oxfam report on the topic (Gneiting, Lusiani, and
Tamir 2020).
Many researchers and magazines have compiled lengthy reports on how capitalists
used the US government’s poorly written CARES Act to give billions of dollars to the
wealthiest companies and withhold support to the most vulnerable small businesses,
poor people, and people of colour (Abramson 2020). Although the US Treasury Depart-
ment refuses to disclose the programe’s recipients, independent analyses show that the
smallest companies and minority-owned businesses were least likely to receive bailouts.
One survey found that only 12% of African-American and Latinx workers received the
assistance they requested (UnidosUS 2020). The US’s wealthiest and largest colleges
and hospitals received the majority of CARES Act funds in contrast with the poorest
(Abramson 2020).
The consequence of the CARES Act was that small businesses, workers, and especially
people of colour went out of business or lost their jobs while big companies made enor-
mous profits and passed them on to their wealthy shareholders. Capitalists benefited
from COVID, and everyone else footed the bill. So while Dale & Bhattacharya draw
out how COVID highlights and exacerbates inequalities surrounding socially reproduc-
tive work I am trying to show how this deepening of inequalities is one of the primary
aims of COVID capitalism.

Conclusion and postscript: on the ideology of COVID Capitalism

So what is ‘COVID capitalism’? In this paper, I argued that it is the mutual alteration and
amplification of COVID and capitalism. No longer a byproduct, COVID has become a
strategy. Capitalism unleashed COVID through deforestation, extraction, urbanization,
and climate change and spread it through the forced migration of plants, animals, and
people. The spread of COVID, in turn, amplified the social and economic inequalities
that capitalism thrives on to exploit and lay off workers. Finally, wealthier capitalists
profited from the crises by stealing government bailouts, firing workers, pushing
smaller companies out of business, and sharing their profits among the wealthy. Capit-
alism is not just a virus. It has become, if it was not always, a virus that grows and thrives
on viruses.
COVID capitalism also produced an intriguing ideological variant. Many white
working-class Americans suffering the effects of COVID capitalism accepted an ideologi-
cal fear of vaccination. The impact of this anti-vaxx movement has ultimately been to
increase the spread of COVID, politically fragment the working class, increase the
profits of wealthy capitalist hospitals while hurting poor ones, and prolong the mutual
amplification and mutation of COVID and capitalism (Sullivan and Jingnan 2021). In
other words, what is fascinating is that people’s distrust of big pharma fuelled COVID
capitalism. So although many anti-vaxxers are trying not to be manipulated by ‘big
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 13

pharma’ by avoiding vaccination, they are in fact the most manipulated population of the
working class (O’Donnell 2019). In a revolting adaptation, capitalism has turned the dis-
trust of capitalist pharmaceutical companies back against the working class itself. In this
way, fake news and conspiracy theories have led anti-vaxxers to perpetuate the insecurity
and exploitation of their own class.
As is often the case, the ideology of individualist freedom has only served the interests
of capitalism. Indeed, the prevailing ideology of COVID capitalism combines the tra-
ditional liberal capitalist ideology of individual freedom, and the typical racist narrative
that immigrants are bringing disease, and a distrust about capitalists themselves.
Together, the three ideologies continue to perpetuate the spread and power of COVID
capitalism, the precarity of the working class, and amplify all the social inequalities dis-
cussed above.

Notes
1. See thesis number four below for a brief review of the literature on COVID capitalism.
2. See later in this paper for more details on this issue.

Notes on contributor
Thomas Nail is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous
books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of
the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution,
and Being and Motion. His research focuses on the philosophy of movement.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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