Book Review/Seth Sandronsky

COVID Ends?

Watching season two of “Sprint” on Netflix recently, American sprinter Noah Lyles says from the 2024 Paris Olympics that the COVID pandemic is over. For him, it’s the place and time to run fast and self-promote faster.

He does both. First, Lyles wins the 100 meter dash in a photo finish. His performance before, during and after winning this gold medal shows that it’s not bragging when an elite athlete predicts a victory and achieves it.

Later, Lyles contracts COVID before the finals of the men’s 200 meters dash. The virus basically ends the sprinter’s bid for a gold medal in the 200 meters, arguably his best race.

Let’s look past Lyles at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Do you know that as many Americans have died of COVID during President Joe Biden’s administration as perished when President Donald J. Trump occupied the White House?

My source is “The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era” by Rob Wallace (Monthly Review Press, 2023). In their dollar-drenched and dismal run for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris and Presidential Donald J. Trump chose to sidestep US deaths from COVID during and after the pandemic.

In Wallace’s view, COVID is a symptom of the Earth System in distress. Consider, as he does, environmental destruction such as what is happening in the Amazon rain forest due to deforestation from logging.

That violence also worsens human health. It does so by unleashing viruses that have been isolated to forests previously.

There are plenty of fingers to point for the increase in distress to the Earth System. Take Big Oil.

Extraction of the fossil fuels that, when burned, are warming the planet and causing extreme weather is a driving force for distress of the Earth System. On a related note we turn to agribusiness.

Agribusiness depends on petroleum-based fertilizers. That dependency, a requirement of industrial farming, disrupts what Marx called the metabolism between human beings and nature.

Marx is building on the work of Justus von Liebig, a leading soil scientist of the time. Wallace writes in their tradition.

As Marx writes, capitalism, with state intervention (not Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand) pushes peasants off their land and into cities to become wage workers. The late Michael Perelman, an author and economics professor at Cal State Chico, in “The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation” (Duke University Press, 2000), reveals how Smith and David Ricardo downplayed legal penalties such as the Game Laws that made self-sufficiency—hunting and gathering on common lands—impossible for peasants in pre-capitalist England.

For a few people to own large amounts of private property, many have to lack any property or means to access common lands. We see the origin of the capitalist state here.

This dynamic of legalized social dislocation also disrupts the cycle that returns waste (food and fiber) to the countryside. Instead, waste accumulates in urban areas along with toxic byproducts from industry that produces commodities for sale in the global market.

This social order creates pollution. Crucially, pollution breeds disease and sickness among animals and humans.

The consequences of China becoming the world’s workshop are a sign of humanity’s changing and dangerous relationship to nature. Capitalist land use is high on the list of such metabolic changes, with the toxic rise of infectious diseases like COVID a case in point.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2024

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