BORDERS, mobility, and crossings are metaphors of our transnational existence. These concepts are used to describe both movements of capital, and human beings or labour. For capital, they emerge and dissolve with regulations and their relaxations. For labour, they restrict movements and incite aspirations. In either case, the concepts become real in the actions and processes initiated by actors, human and institutional, both powerful and with less power.

The pandemic enables us to look at these metaphors anew, to read the structural effects occasioned by Covid-19, which emerge as real through governance and livelihood practices. While borders mean national borders that is guarded by the state, borders also mean boundaries separating groups of human being living in the same social space. Likewise, mobility has dual meaning of both geographical and social mobilities and how they intersect.

Our main contention is that the pandemic makes flows of labour and capital more complicated leaving the structural underpinnings of global capitalism intact. While it challenges the world is flat narrative, it hardly heralds a better world. One has to at the outset recognize the emergent logic of governance in the context of mobilities, as the flexible containment of population.

We identify two logics in the emergent responses to migration. One is the neoliberal governance thematic which prioritizes economy over people, and the other is the populist logic that hierarchizes or divides the population on racial, ethnic lines to institutionalize a graded arrangement of citizenship using fear and withholding rights. These two sometimes coalesce to produce massive transformations of space, place, and territory generating developments and unevenness that attract migration flows. Often they go separate ways. This produces responses that can have a gamut of effects on the citizenry as well as illegal immigrant subjects.

The emergence of the global Covid-19 pandemic seems to have overturned one of the logics in many ways. The outbreak has shifted the attention from the economy to the people. This shift is temporary, messy and episodic. Yet the shift is a reversal of a well entrenched neoliberal logic that valued profit over people. The reversal was palpable in the rising significance of public health workers, doctors and nurses, whose values are not fully recognized in the market or even in popular opinion. A Spanish ex-minister commented that popular footballers earn millions of dollars but corona virus vaccine will be discovered by biologists who rarely earn as much.

 

At the other end of the spectrum, however, we see the renewed assertion of jingoistic nationalism or the populist logic that empower the right-wing politicians. Authoritarian rulers are trying to grab powers of surveillance at an unprecedented scale that they could only wish in the pre-pandemic period. Coupled with such desires, there is a fresh resurgence of politics of hatred that is being instigated and used by the world leaders and populist politicians to further strengthen their respective positions. How these two tendencies interact and counteract each other will shape national societies, global political economy or trajectories of capitalism or its neo-liberal variant. While the identifiable structures and actors, such as the states, leaders, people on the street get all the attention, the force or process that can match the invisibility of the virus is capitalism in its many guises.

Capitalism(s) unlike the virus is more ubiquitous. But the main characters in the potent drama that unfolds are capitalism, virus and the ubiquitous life and mortality of populations. They are forces and events that explode before us to be reckoned with because at this moment capitalisms scalar abilities to affect our lives can only be matched by the pandemic or the virus. The sheer spatial scale of the spread of the virus and the speed at which it contracts and the ease of getting exposed to it has challenged capitalism (or its neoliberal form) on three fronts: regulatory/ethical front, spatial front, and its rational and calculative character.

First, on the regulatory front, this virus originates in precarity that is an outcome of capitalisms unwillingness to regulate and promote freedom at the expense of health. Precarious living pushes/pushed poor people in China to hunt wild animals and trade in them. Yes, such practices emerged in Maoist China that inflicted people with acute food shortages. But those practices got upgraded into an unregulated trade and big business in capitalist China legalized by the state. The virus crosses over to human body from the animal body not simply because of proximity but also because of the conditions in which animals are kept and harvested. Caging wild animals in large numbers in tiny containers emit the virus that remains dormant in their bodies.

 

The same is true of industrial farming practiced in the West/US. Mad cow disease outbreak is a good case in point. While cost-effectiveness and profitability justify unethical production practices, yuppie consumer movements recommending ethical living and vegan diets focused on individuals are touted as the radical resistances to larger structural issues of production and lack of regulation. The question that the corona pandemic raises is that how long we can remain blindfolded to the issue of unbridled meat production and precarities associated with it.

Second, this pandemic affects consumption and supply chains simultaneously upsetting the global capitalist distinctions between zones of production and zones of consumption. The former being primarily China and the latter Europe and the US. Pandemics planetary character does not leave capital with any leeway to keep one site on tenterhooks or in competition with other sites to which business or investment can be instantly moved.

The pandemic compresses space and time but not from capital’s vantage point. While space-time compression is the characteristic of late capitalism reliant on finance and hot money which knows no barrier, the opposite has been true for many working people. Migration across national borders has become more challenging. Demand for cheap labour in growing cities are, however, met by poor illegal migrants. Their illegalities or transgressions of stringent migration rules push them to shadowy existence that suppress their voices.

 

By bringing the economy to a halt, the virus leaves the space-time uncompressed, i.e. increases the notional distance between places for both capital and labour. Ease of travel is greatly compromised. Rules of entry and exit from a country become more stringent. Additionally, a cold war like impasse continues in the field of internet technology between China and USA as the trade war between them intensifies. Such processes can potentially dismantle globalization.

Global and domestic trade, supply chains and consumption cannot gain momentum without redistribution and investment in sectors that value people over profit. The question is how the regimes that profess austerity will respond to this situation. Trickle down clearly does not work. This brings us to our third point, i.e. capitalism’s rational and calculative character.

The emergency socialist measures show that calculative character of policy making, the hallmark of neoliberalism, is at abeyance. It is in a way a carnivalesque moment. While political action is being undermined in the name of war and solidarity, the virus can and has potentially opened up spaces to express dissent against not just the state but the attitudes. The virus has brought to the foreground the views, grievances and struggles that health workers, like the Asha workers, have been harbouring and waging for quite some time. In that sense it is carnivalesque vis-à-vis the austerity.

Austerity measures are still being implemented but public opinion might be turning against austerity at least in key sectors. Or we should be observing if the virus gives voice and deepens democracy and also how that tendency is countered and undermined by the agents of the neoliberal establishment by subtly pandering to the populist logic mentioned above.

 

The institutions that defend capital is pitted against the spectre of pandemic that is seen to favour welfare style socialism. What Covid-19 enjoins states to do is to equalize that which was unequal before the pandemic on two fronts, make health facility available to all or at least the poor and mass production of equipments for running the health economy made into a business of the state. What we have here is the omnipresence of a state which is not dictatorial but one which is paternalistically inclined, authoritarian and highly dependable in extreme crisis or at least that is what a state run media is making us believe, in an increasingly mediatized environment.

This plausible outcome of Covid-19 forces us to rethink valorizations tied to capital. How the latter while it may try to wriggle out of its impotency in pandemic times through the backdoor of power relations and the deepening of technology in our lives, ‘social distancing’ and the threat of contracting the virus due to exposure makes war or escalating conflicts an unviable solution to the crisis of capital unlike in normal times. Labour disciplining is one way out of the crisis of capital but the humanitarian outcomes will force capitalists and the state to abide by safety and health standards for workers. This becomes like a never-ending cycle of debts and its revival is through conceiving of altogether new ways of being with capital, a constitution of the pandemic subject which recognizes the priority of biological life and non-rational sphere of values and labour above capital.

Further the pandemic behoves us to pose the question to ourselves about who we are as a collective and where we are socially and spatially located, our social identities, being reconstituted in response to the capriciousness of capital stultified by the existential threat posed by the virus.

 

Alertness is warranted specially when the Covid-19 pandemic has shown signs of a revival of eugenic-like discourse of herd immunity which may have to run its course, when discovery of a suitable vaccine is uncertain. For the discourse can spawn new kinds of insubordinations, violence and expulsions of those who are supposedly thought to be weak in terms of biology and culture. While the pandemic exacerbates the precarity of labour and unevenness of spatial development as witnessed in the return of migrants from cities like Mumbai and Delhi following the lockdown, the pandemic itself created conditions where ‘bare life’ became more important than the imperatives of capital and livelihoods which forces a consequent rethink about our dependencies, hierarchies, value systems, solidarities and ethno-national identifications.

Coronavirus enjoins states and people to cooperate, foster peace, divert resources for promoting regional development and value expert knowledge as a route out of the pandemic.