We’ve been witnessing a coordinated ideological project unfold for the last five years, and the left appears to have ceded the field almost entirely.
Between 2020-2021, estimates for excess mortality (globally) range from 5 million to 14 million and beyond.
Pharmaceutical companies raked in hundreds of billions over the same period, some portion of which inevitably was subject to capital spillage – and during the same time there was vaccine apartheid and a strict favoring of IP against life across the globe.
Wealth inequality became significantly more compounded over the period during and after the official recognition of the ongoing pandemic; and so on.
And what do we now see in this year 2025? An onslaught of books and articles from ostensibly liberal and left-liberal publishers that discuss how a tepid government response with halfhearted lockdowns was a ‘overreaction based on bad models and evidence’ where the costs outweighed the benefits. That mask mandates were in many cases probably too heavy handed. That the pandemic either was never very deadly in the first place, or quickly became flu-like in its virulence.
See ‘An Abundance of Caution’ published by MIT Press.
See 'In Covid’s Wake’, published by Princeton Press.
But based on Biden’s term and the sociological production of the ‘end of the pandemic’, this liberal revisionism has been mounting for years. This rewriting of history comes as no surprise.
What I am surprised about, however, is the vacuum of useful literature on the left – where is the Marxist analysis of this critical historical moment?
We had a real-time demonstration of:
- How capitalism prioritizes profit over public health
- The mechanics of disaster capitalism in action
- State power mobilized for capital while abandoning workers
- International solidarity crushed by IP regimes
- The manufacture of consent around “acceptable” death rates
But beyond Radhika Desai’s Capitalism, Coronavirus and War and scattered podcast episodes, I’ve found virtually nothing.
Did I miss something? Does history move too quickly for us?
GOOD post.
One new book that bucks the trend - Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass, by Sarah Jones, which I just found at my library and hope to start soon. (The jacket says it’s “in the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted . . .”, and Desmond gets really defensive when people point out that he really ought to be a Marxist, so I’m assuming it’s left-liberal, but still.)
That looks decent. I’ll give it a look, thanks for that!