Reading Response 4

 Matthew R. Berry

 Critical Geography

 09/23/2020

 Professor Simpson

COVID-19 Reading Response: Social Contagion

1) The author uses the initial lockdown in Wuhan, China, and across the rest of the country as a means "review substantial questions about how capitalist production relates to the non-human world at a more fundamental level— how, in short, the “natural world,” including its microbiological substrata, cannot be understood without reference to how society organizes production (because the two are not, in fact, separate)." Furthermore, the author argues that it is an excellent moment to step back and reflect on the state of Chinese society overall as well as the stability of the Communist government. The author argues that capitalism innately perputrates and allows for pathogens and plagues to happen more frequently and across larger spaces. Capitalism itself functions of the continual consumption of goods and resources as well as streamlining the process which allows these goods and resources to be consumed. The streamlining process, especially in the agro-industry, is what allows for these pathogens to continue unabated in the animal-to-human jump. The author argues that through selective breeding and the consolidation of these animals, it allows for viruses to have an easier time in their transmittability. The author details how the control of these cities during the inital lockdown revealed the incompetence of the Chinese state and how they viewed control of information more important than the health and validity of the virus itself. The author also argues that the lockdown could be utilized as a preemptive test run of a later popular uprising of the Communist government.

2) I felt this connected to other discussions on the importance of space as a means of political usage. The Chinese government used space as the criteria for locking down entire regions, which had person connections to me. My sister-in-law is Chinese, and her parents were stuck in a nightmare scenario of having been traveling during this lockdown and thus were confined to a portion of the country which is far from their home. The use of space as a means of control is another discussion we have had previously in class that is very applicable to the discussion of the coronavirus initiated lockdown in China.

3) P. 10 "Instead, its high death rate was probably caused primarily by widespread malnourishment, urban overcrowding, and generally unsanitary living conditions in the affected areas, which encouraged not only the spread of the flu itself but also the cultivation of bacterial superinfections on top of the underlying viral one." I thought this was a powerful statement which correlated the working conditions that arise under industrial capitalistic societies at the turn of the previous century. During the 1918/1919 Influenza, it's argued that other factors led to the severe death toll, which capitalism accentuated through the working conditions involved in these urban areas. In a way, the influenza acted like a domino that pushed an already tipping line of other dominos down.

4) In a way, it seems like a catch-all to continuously say "It's capitalism's fault!" or "It's globalization's fault!" Or "It's global capitals fault!" Do these statements ring true with all the evidence we have, or is it a cop-out? Is there one single thing we can say is at fault for all these instances? Is there an alternative to the system we have? What does a post-capital world look like? Is that even possible?