FORUM Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” Th e COVID-19 pandemic, enslavement, and agro-industrial capitalism

Don Nonini

On Juneteenth,1 Friday, June 19, 2020, union- I see a profoundly intuited reality referenced ized workers of the Durham Workers Assembly here and one also theorized in concepts like of Durham, North Carolina, held a rally in front racial capitalism and carceral capitalism by of Durham Police Headquarters to “defund the scholars writing in the Black radical and allied police” in support of the national Black Lives traditions that are avowedly antiracist, anti- Matter movement protesting in massive num- capitalist, feminist, and (prison) abolitionist.2 bers in the streets of US cities and being met Th ere is an historical relationship—the reality with overwhelming police repression. Black of imperialism, racism and the expansion of Lives Matter marches in the streets of cities and global capitalism—that animates the relation- towns of the United States continued, as the ship between these two pandemics. Each pan- world looked on. demic has a distinct logic intertwined with the Circulars for the rally bore the following other made evident in the political economy of message: “Workers in the US are currently fac- global capitalism, particularly agro-industrial ing two tragic pandemics. Th e fi rst is the plight capitalism and its connections to slavery—to of essential workers, going to work every day “involuntary servitude.” Th e history of global- to risk their lives amidst COVID-19, which has ized agro-industrial capitalism ties together now resulted in the tragic deaths of over 100,000 not only viruses with people and industrially people. Th e second is the reality of racism and produced animals but also sets the terms for police violence. Both disproportionately impact both capitalism’s “normal” exploitation of wage black workers.” Elsewhere the circular stated, labor of some workers and its extraordinary “Exposed by the virus—‘Essentially’ Involun- expropriation of the labor, lives, and property tary Servitude,” and went on to state that “Tens of other working people across the planet— of millions of workers fi nd themselves in a con- whether urban African American in the United dition of involuntary servitude, no eff ective States, Eastern European contract workers voice in their conditions of work, their health or in Germany, North African farm laborers in the security of their livelihood.” Spain, ex-farmers forming the “fl oating popu- Is the idea that workers, especially black lation” of urban China, the Roma of Hungary, workers, are facing two pandemics of racialized or the indigenous migrants to the South Amer- capitalism and of COVID-19 only a fi gure of ican megacities, to name some who are well speech, or is it more than rhetoric? known.

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 89 (2021): 114–129 © Th e Authors doi:10.3167/fcl.2021.890109 Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 115

Figure . Protesters march from headquarters of Durham Police to Durham County Jail, North Carolina. Photo credit: Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press.

Th e insurgency of Black Lives Matter during ism (Kalb 2020). Future initiatives of both sol- the months of May–June 2020 has been widely idarity with Black Lives Matter and critique of theorized by its leaders/organic intellectuals US transnational capitalism can be predicted to such as Patrisse Khan-Cullers (Khan-Cullers come out of these engagements by the European and Bandele 2017) and others.3 It also has its left . Th us, it is particularly appropriate now to own dynamics situated within the politics, eco- provoke these by turning attention toward the nomics, and ecologies of settler colonialism in specifi c connections between the “peculiar in- North America, as this article seeks to demon- stitution” of US slavery, the global pandemic, strate. Th at said, the wide turnout of protests and the Black Lives Matter movement and what inspired by Black Lives Matter in the streets of animates it. European cities and towns (e.g., London, Paris, Th ese connections are nested within the his- Berlin, Stockholm, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, tory of modern agro-industrial capitalism. Manchester) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African American struggles and A helluva virus to run into on a dark is seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own night of time-space compressed life troubled imperial history of enslavements and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist Let’s start with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the resurgence under declining neoliberal capital- agent of the COVID-19 disease pandemic, and 116 | Don Nonini its origins. Let’s start there because although measures of testing those with symptoms, trac- its antecedent causes and conditions in agrar- ing the people they have been in contact with, ian capitalism are almost two centuries in the and quarantining them largely a non-starter making, the pandemic represents the recent but prophylactically since “the bug . . . has long extremely rapid emergence arising from a dia- left the barn, quite literally.” A vaccine will be lectical process that has evolved as the virus re- a long way from being widely available anytime produces itself in increasing numbers of “cases” soon—optimistically sometime in mid-to-late of human-to-human transmission, illness, and 2021. Major variants of it can be predicted to the fork of eventual recovery or “mortality.” As emerge annually, which means that any vaccine of this writing, worldwide there are more than will have to respond to these new variants of it 18 million cases of COVID-19 and 700,000 much as it does to the “seasonal fl u.” So signs deaths. In the United States, 5.8 million cases are that SARS-CoV-2 is going to be with us for and 178,000 deaths have been recorded. some time. As the viral basis for a pandemic goes, SARS- How then is the pandemic of the COVID-19 CoV-2 is proving to be a major global bummer— disease connected to the contemporary era of as is becoming increasingly evident on a tragic global capitalism? daily basis to large numbers of people.4 Th e vi- What we need to understand about the emer- rus itself is highly virulent with the current Cen- gence of COVID-19 is that medical ecologists ters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are now convinced that the pandemic has oc- estimate of a cumulative infection rate of 0.7 curred due to the expansion of intensive indus- percent of the US population, with a 7.1 per- trial production of genetically mono-cropped cent mortality rate for those infected with the livestock and the meat commodities derived virus. Th ere are much higher mortality rates from it. As the evolutionary biologist and phy- for infected persons experiencing certain “un- logeographer Rob Wallace and his colleagues derlying conditions” (that is, being older than observe, “By its global expansion alone com- age 65, having preexisting chronic illnesses) modity agriculture serves as both propulsion (CDC.gov), and it should be added, being poor for and nexus through which pathogens of di- and/or economically and socially/racially mar- verse origins migrate from the most remote ginalized. Such “underlying conditions” are par- reservoirs to the most international of popula- ticularly severe in the densely crowded slums of tion centers. It is here, and along the way, where the megacities of the underdeveloped world in novel pathogens infi ltrate agriculture’s gated Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere (Davis communities. Th e lengthier the associated sup- and Abdel Kaddous 2020: 3). ply chains and the greater the extent of adjunct Th e SARS-Cov-2 virus travels quickly through deforestation, the more diverse (and exotic) the and by way of its mobile human hosts, is highly zoonotic pathogens that enter the food chain” communicable, and has a high reproduction (Wallace et al. 2020: 5). number (3.11), meaning on average it infects Nor is this a new phenomenon. Some of the infect three people from exposure to a single most deadly and virulent diseases of the last infected person. COVID-19 disease has a two- several decades have been caused by “recent week incubation period before symptoms nec- emergent and reemergent farm and foodborne essarily manifest but is highly communicable to pathogens” such as the SARS 2003 infl uenza vi- others during this period; studies estimate that rus, Ebola, H1N1 “swine fl u”, E. Coli O157:H7, between 30 percent and 60 percent of the peo- hepatitis E, Salmonella, and several others (Wal- ple infected by the virus have received it from lace et al. 2020). asymptomatic carriers (Apuzzo et al. 2020: 3, Wallace et al. go on to observe, “the entirety 13).5 Th at makes the classic epidemiological of the [industrialized food animal] production Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 117 line is organized around practices that accel- Recent historical research on the North Amer- erate the evolution of pathogen virulence and ican southern plantation economies shows just subsequent transmission” (2020: 5). Th e most how advanced rationalized capitalist production economically valued and profi table character- under the conditions of slavery was (Baptist istics of agro-industrial meat production also 2014; Johnson 2013). Th e cotton selected for work in favor of disseminating the SARS-CoV-2 cultivation in the Mississippi delta slave-based virus effi ciently and widely throughout animal plantations was a uniform specifi c variant called and human populations. Growing genetic ani- Petit Gulf, selected for its “pickability.” Beyond mal monocultures accelerate the evolution of its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusi- pathogens. Dense concentrations of animals nesses’ key innovations, in both technology and depress immune response and facilitate greater organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace transmission and recurrent infections. Th e high 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only “throughput” speed of industrial production against the capacity of slave labor to transform provides a continuously renewed supply of sus- it, setting the cotton production line in terms of ceptible animals. Th e slaughtering of younger “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men be- livestock selects for pathogens able to survive ing “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands,” and more robust immune systems (Wallace et al. children “quarter hands” (Wallace 2016: 262, 2020). Th e long distance trade and transport of quoting Johnson 2013). “Measuring crops and industrial meat animals, even over thousands of slaves ‘to the hand’ was an ecological as well as miles6 (Daragahi 2018) allows more opportuni- an economic measure—an attempt to regulate ties for the intermixing (reassortment) of viral the exchange between slaves and soil by pre- RNA segments to occur and for new pathogens scribing benchmark measures for the process to emerge (Daragahi 2018). by which human capacity and earthly fertility To make these observations is to say that were metabolized into capital” (Johnson 2013: the SARS-CoV-2 virus in its Pilgrim’s Progress 154). Th e labor process of picking cotton was through the human biome is intimately con- one measured and held to a standard by another nected to the dialectics of expansion and repro- unit of measurement—the “lash.” duction of global agro-industrialism itself. “Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to in- crease their own productivity and thus push Enslavement, the mathematics of the lash, through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: and the advent of plantation ecologies 130). As Baptist (2014: 112) points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier . . . enslavers Before investigating the pandemic of the coro- extracted more production from each enslaved navirus and its connection to industrial ag- person every year. Th e source of this ever- riculture, let’s look at the emergence of its rising productivity wasn’t a machine like the intertwined twin—the pandemic of racial cap- ones that were crucial to the textile mills. In fact italism in North America. Th ere is a clear rela- you could say that the business end of the new tionship between the emergence of slave-based cotton technology was a whip.” With the pick- plantation agriculture and the evolution of full- ing of cotton by the slave paced to the rhythm blown agro-industrial capitalism. While many of the cotton gin, plantation owners and over- readers will be familiar with the history of an- seers developed a refi ned rationality based on tebellum plantation cotton production in North the application of the whip measured out in America, the close connections between fully lashes to the back of a slave calculated relative to rationalized capitalist plantation production their infraction—how many pounds of cotton and slavery have only recently become clear.7 his basket fell short of making a bale, whether 118 | Don Nonini or not there were impurities in it, whether one the Mississippi Gulf region, which were trans- slave helped another pick her quota—in which formed into thousands of acres ready for slave- case the former received extra lashes. One day based production (Baptist 2014: 228–229). in 1825, Israel Campbell, a newly purchased Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the slave in Mississippi went through his fi rst day rich soils of their original fertility in the plan- of picking and found that he could only pick tation South and exposed the crops to invasive 90 pounds of cotton between sunrise and sun- rust, rot, and worms. Slaves plowing rows of set. Belfer the planter informed Israel that “his cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight due to the daily minimum was 100 pounds—and on this planters’ attempts to maximize yield, irrespec- day he would ‘have as many lashes as there were tive of the pitch of the fi elds, eroded the land pounds short’ in the ‘draft of cotton’ recorded and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years af- beside the name ‘Israel’ on the Irish-born over- ter its clearing (Wallace 2016: 266). Plantation seer’s slate.” And that evening, Belfer called out managers were more obsessed with expanding Israel saying, ‘I will settle with you now,’ and the volume of cotton and increasing their slave proceeded to whip him with ten lashes (Baptist populations than allowing food crops that could 2014: 131–132). Enslavers organized the space be grown locally to feed the enslaved popula- of the cotton row to maximize both the labor tion. Th is also turned the deprivation of food of the slave and the cotton picked—one cotton for the enslaved into another form of labor dis- planter in Tennessee wrote, “A good part of cipline (Wallace 2016: 264). our rows are 550 yards”—a length down which As a result of the lack of food self-suffi ciency stragglers could easily be identifi ed by the over- and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebted- seer and made example of by being whipped in ness by plantation owners to Northern fi nanciers front of other slaves (Baptist 2014: 118). Under and cotton brokers became increasingly com- the circumstances, the rationality of increased mon, to the point that some planters began to “labor productivity” so vaunted by neoliberal refer to themselves, without irony, as “slaves” to economists depended straightforwardly on the fi nanciers. By the 1830s, owners of the new graduated torture—with little contribution (the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama, and cotton gin aside) made from “technological in- Eastern Louisiana had adopted scaled-up forms novation.” It is no surprise that the amount of of fi nance and indebtedness, when the Consol- cotton on average extracted from each slave in- idated Association of Planters of Louisiana was creased year-over-year from 1800 through 1840 established to allow their members to mortgage (Baptist 2014: 112). their slaves as collateral for loans from interna- Th is assemblage of profi table techniques tional fi nanciers, led by the Baring Brothers and based in systematic sadism and hyper-exploita- the Bank of England, which pooled investments tion also simplifi ed and transformed the ecol- from Europe’s fi nest old and new upper classes ogies of the low lands of the southeastern and to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Associa- mid-southern United States, deeply implicated tion (Baptist 2014: 245–248). imperial, that is, British fi nance capital, and was Monocropping of plants and animals, the backstopped by state dispossession and exter- simplifi cation and degradation of local and re- mination of the resident American Indian pop- gional ecologies, rapid expansion of supply and ulation in the early to mid-nineteenth century. trade logistics over space, a heavy reliance on Th e Indian Removal Act of 1830 under An- fi nance capital for debt to expand and maintain drew Jackson culminated the violent displace- production, the separation of animals and labor ment of Indian nations from their territories force from the growing of their food sources during the previous decade with their forced re- (imported from outside the region), and the use moval and elimination from the “new lands” of of enslaved and degraded labor—these design Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 119 features of agro-industrial capitalism have re- New settlements with houses, fruit orchards, mained in eff ect to the present. hog and poultry farms, and rubber plantations that impinge on the habitat of Rhinolophus have in rapid succession appeared within these dis- Origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic rupted mountain ecologies.10 One third of the and the contemporary agro-industrial households in these highland areas have insuf- production of meat fi cient food for at least seasonally one third of the year and oft en hunt wild animals to eat or Briefl y summarized: according to medical ge- sell (Jabr 2020). Ecological disturbance asso- neticists and epidemiological geographers, ciated with deforestation in southern Yunnan sometime in late 2019, the SARS-Cov-2 virus in connection with the construction of the emerged from its nonhuman host, a wild spe- planned Trans-Asian Railway lines that run cies of the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus that is from Kunming southward toward northern Laos prevalent in the forests of highland southern and northeastern Myanmar—part of the neo- China and Southeast Asia, to infect industrial imperial fantasy of Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One animals and human beings in Yunnan prov- Road” to economically integrate China with ince, southwestern China (Andersen et al. 2020; greater Southeast Asia (He 2017)—may also be Gorman 2020; Morens et al. 2020; Wallace et al. implicated. 2020). Genetic comparisons between the dif- Deforestation and incursions by human set- ferent SARS viruses endemic in this species of tlement and industrial animal production cross wild bat and the SARS-Cov-2 virus suggest that over the highlands’ previous barriers between the habitat of these bats was probably either the wild bats and SARS viruses, on one side, and Shitou cave outside of Kunming, the capital of industrial animals and humans, on the other— Yunnan province, or caves in Mojiang County spatial and ecological barriers where forests’ in southern Yunnan, where the famous Pu’er tea ecological complexity “keeps deadly pathogens is grown (Qiu 2020: 29–31). Th e family of SARS from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto the coronaviruses has a history of millions of years world travel network” (Wallace et al. 2020: 8). of co-evolution with this bat species in the re- Once grown or captured, these infected pan- gion (Gorman 2020; Wallace et al. 2020). golins or hogs were transported in trucks from Deforestation in this region of southern where they were collected, over hundreds of Yunnan province combined with the nearby miles from their source in southern Yunnan industrial production of swine or the rearing northward to the Huanan Wet Market of Wuhan, and hunting of wild pangolins as “bushmeat”8 a city of 11 million people and capital of Hubei appears to have led to contact between the bats province in south-central China. Either in the and one of these animal species and the trans- course of transport to Wuhan or once present in mission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus through the these animals captive in its wet market, the virus bats’ droppings or blood infecting the animals successfully passed to humans. From Wuhan in (Wallace et al. 2020). Genetic evidence suggests December 2019, within four to six weeks, the the pangolins as carriers (Andersen et al. 2020; virus had spread through transmission to other Qiu 2020: 31), with domestic hogs as another humans via high-speed train and air travel possibility (Wallace 2020: 8). Intentional forest from the infected human population of Wuhan fi res and deforestation in Yunnan have been ex- to elsewhere in China, Eurasia, and the Asia- tensive as the province’s population has rapidly Pacifi c and was on its way to the rest of the planet increased.9 First has come logging, then shift s by mid-to-late January 2020. Broadly speaking, in land use from strip-logged landscapes to we know what occurred thereaft er in terms of intensive agriculture and urban development. its transmission and dissemination around the 120 | Don Nonini world and its manifestation as the COVID-19 increase assembly line tempos (Schlosser 2012 disease pandemic. [2001]). By the 1950s, there was an incorpo- ration of meat eating as an almost universal practice within the diets of the US population Twentieth-century transformations (Schlosser 2012 [2001])—an advertisement in agro-industrial capitalism and the for US “prosperity” combined with Cold War neo-slavery of African Americans in triumphalist braggadocio with respect to the the United States USSR. Finally, since the 1980s, there has been the transnational expansion of agro-industrial Th e history of agro-industrial food capitalism meat production in all its stages to the newly since the American Civil War can only very industrialized BRIC economies, where meat is briefl y be summarized—as well as the separa- increasingly consumed as a status marker by tion of African Americans from the southern upwardly mobile members of the new capital- plantation economy under conditions of twen- ist and professional classes. Such transnational tieth-century outmigration and urbanization. expansion has been made possible by the lu- By the Great Depression of the 1930s, the post– brication of capital provided by hedge funds plantation complex of impoverished, indebted, and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ and ecologically depleting cotton sharecropping deal-making and investment in the sale of gave way to the rise of industrialized poultry Smithfi eld Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wal- production, as white men appropriated the pre- lace et al. 2020).11 vious small-scale domestic growing of “fryers” Subjugated and coerced labor forces have by white women and African Americans. Th ey anchored and off ered up surplus value to agro- capitalized, systematized, and scaled-up the industrial cotton and meat production since the production of “broilers” and became “hatch- end of legal slavery. First, there were indebted ery men,” feed mill owners, and poultry grow- African American sharecroppers oft en pressed ers, and eventually they created a new industry by local police into cotton harvesting of white (Gisolfi 2006; Striffl er 2005). landlords’ crops during the Jim Crow period. Subsequent developments in this pioneering Later, as part of vertical integration, white small- mode of agro-industrial meat production from scale farmers specializing in the grow-out phases the 1940s onward have taken place within the for young poultry and hogs came to be recruited path-dependent circuits of capital accumula- by the industries. However, they were so in- tion of the industry. Th ese include the vertical debted to banks to fi nance their grow-out sheds integration of all steps of production—from that they were little more than proletarianized hatchery and feed production/supply to “grow- rural laborers and, of course, suff ered physically ing out” of poultry from chicks to harvested from the ammonia and bacteria emitted from young adults and slaughtering of the animals animals’ excrement deposited on their land. (Heff ernan and Constance 1994; Striffl er 2005). Since the 1960s, rural poor African Americans, Th ere have been corresponding transitions to especially women, have worked in the meat pro- and intensifi cations of the industrial production cessing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta, of swine and beef meat industries, coextensive and Carolinas regions experiencing intensifi ed with the rise of transnational markets for huge exploitation, sexual harassment, and brutal- quantities of industrially produced soybeans ized and unsafe working conditions.12 By the and corn grown elsewhere and transported to 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CA- and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; FOs) for use as animal feedstuff s (Patel 2012: Striffl er 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white 192–194, 304; Schneider 2017: 90–93). Slaugh- plant managers set them in competition or even terhouse technologies have been redesigned to forced them out once they began to assert their Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 121 legal rights against wage and labor discrimina- and most exploited sectors of healthcare (e.g., in tion under Civil Rights laws (Sider 2006). nursing homes) situated in the cities and small Th e Great Migration of six million African towns of the South, Midwest, and the Northeast, Americans from 1915 to 1970 from the South and those who are chronically unemployed and to cities in the northern and midwestern United underemployed, doubly discriminated against States arose in large part as fl ight from cot- due to poverty (forcing them to leave school ton sharecropping’s stoop labor and from re- before high school graduation), and their race. legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow Th ose African Americans who have more or less whites—in the form of black criminalization, steady employment also show disproportionate lynchings, and burnings and lootings of “black levels of consumer debt—from credit cards, stu- towns” and murders of their residents in the dent loans, and medically related debt (Aspen South. Institute 2018; Wang 2018: 128–131). Whether Migration to the Midwest and Northeast steadily employed or no, a key insight is that by placed large numbers of blacks at the factory and large both groups are the same population doors of the Fordist industries of the North, of urban African Americans—and it was this even while black women sought alternative em- fact that the Juneteenth circular of the Durham ployment as domestic workers in the homes of Workers Assembly pointed to. affl uent white families. Almost always relegated Th e population of urban African Americans to the secondary labor markets of the indus- who constitute the most disposable elements trial North and Midwest due to discrimination of a heterogeneous US working class have had by white industrial labor unions (Cowie 2010: the profound misfortune of living in urban sites 236–244; Foner 2017 [1974]), nonetheless a sig- that have been recurrently subject to gentrifi ca- nifi cant number of black industrial workers in tion at the new “urban scale” of real estate and the 1950s to 1970s experienced a period of brief fi nance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239–266). prosperity, particularly in industrial areas such Th eir residence in spaces made newly desirable as Detroit and Chicago.13 by gentrifi cation by the 2000s is the obverse of Since the 1990s, with the advent of NAFTA the fact that up to the 1990s, whites fl ed inner and the WTO, large numbers of black industrial cities in large numbers and moved to the newly workers in the North and Midwest have, like built segregated suburbs outside these large cit- their white counterparts, been thrown out of ies, while African Americans found themselves work by the globalization of industrial produc- only able to aff ord, and only allowed to live tion, with its new links to production value and within, the housing provided in these redlined supply chains to Mexico and East Asia. Th e only inner-city districts. large-scale exception has been the neo-slavery By the 2000s, however, real estate in these of hyper-sweated meat processing and related districts and nearby had become quite “hot food industrial labor. properties” for fi nance capital—subject to “de- velopment” and gentrifi cation made possible fi rst by US government Title VI “urban rede- “Broken windows” and the expropriation velopment” funding in the 1970s, and more re- of Black lives: Tales from the frontiers of cently by the infl ux of global capital seeking new urban fi nance-rentier capital sites for safe but extraordinarily profi table rent collection and property speculation in realizing Th e grown children and grandchildren of these value. Th is trend by the 1990s was shaped by and laid-off black industrial workers, with more re- reinforced the War on Drugs and stereotypes cent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both about Black male criminality during the Clin- the hyper-exploited workers in the food indus- ton years (Alexander 2020 [2010]), and by the tries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) “broken window policing” that targeted unem- 122 | Don Nonini ployed and underemployed African Americans and vulnerable subjects comes to the fore when and Latinx populations, and was fi rst insti- normal exploitation fails, as the state apparatus, tuted in New York City, and then extensively including the police, come to the aid of capi- disseminated to other major cities throughout talists in crisis (Fraser 2016: 169–173). In the the United States from the 1990s to the present current era of neoliberal “fi nancialized capital- (Camp and Heatherton 2016). ism,” Fraser argues that instead of a prior sharp What precisely is the role of broken windows divide between those who are exploited and policing in the gentrifi cation process? Put non- those who are expropriated, there now “appears too-subtly, based on the idea that even a broken a continuum. At one end lies the growing mass window is the indication of the existence of a of defenseless expropriable subjects; at the other, criminal element who is an undesirable feature the dwindling ranks of protected exploited citi- of a neighborhood, the role of such policing zen-workers. At the center sits a fi gure . . . : the is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker, for- that is impossible, the destruction of African mally free but acutely vulnerable” (Fraser 2016: Americans whose very presence threatens the 176). “real estate values” that the fi nance industry and We can see these two modes of appropriation its local ally, the Chamber of Commerce, holds of surplus value in operation with tense inter- dear. It is this that has much to do with the facts connections between whites and African Amer- that of the more than one thousand people icans in the United States through the latter’s killed by local police every year in the United vexed history with respect to agro-industrial States, more than one fourth are African Amer- capitalism. What now distinguishes the current ican; that the United States has the largest incar- era of fi nance capital is that the “risk”-based cerated population per capita in the world; and mechanisms for creating indebtedness for this that “fully 29 percent of black male high-school “expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker” in- dropouts between the ages of 19 to 35 in 2014 creasingly operate through the divide of race: were institutionalized”—in jail awaiting trial, on debt is onerous but bearable for most petty- bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation property-owning whites (that is, mortgage debt), or parole—and form a plurality of incarcerated while debt (e.g., predatory payday lending and people grossly disproportionate to their repre- student debt) becomes ruinous for large num- sentation in the US population (Guo 2016; also bers of African Americans marked by property- see Alexander 2020 [2010]). lessness as the legacy of enslavement. As Fraser Nancy Fraser (2016) has observed that there emphatically notes, the racialized distinction is an historical dialectic between capitalist strat- between those defi ned as being only exploitable egies of “normally” exploiting workers, on one and those predictably expropriable still exists hand, and strategies that violently expropriate (Fraser 2016: 176), although some whites are confi scated lives, labor, and property of racial- expropriated (and end, say, being incarcerated), ized and vulnerable (e.g., immigrant) popula- while some African Americans are only (hyper-) tions, on the other (see also Harvey 2018: 48, exploited. Anxieties among an increasingly in- 70, 199–200). For Fraser, these strategies are debted white, self-proclaimed “middle class” complementary modes of appropriating surplus (that “we’re all dispensable now”) juxtaposed value and governing labor and lives that have with the (receding) legal gains for blacks from operated simultaneously throughout the history the 1960s US Civil Rights movement, may go of capitalism. Th eir relative roles in governing far toward explaining the current high pitch of labor and securing surplus value shift over time white supremacist animosities toward African as capitalism passes through periods of expan- Americans and other people of color. sion, crises of overproduction and realization, Due to reasons that merit much discussion, and devaluation: expropriation of racialized neoliberal globalized capitalism is in a realiza- Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 123 tion crisis having to do with the build-up of such in the United States doubled to 68,000 cases debt or “negative value” (Harvey 2018; Kalb during the month of May 15–June 15, 2020, 2020), whose burden on the future of most in- and deaths in prisons due to COVID-19 have dividuals will never be lift ed or even partially risen by 73 percent during the same period. As discounted due to the sheer volume of debt held of this writing, the fi ve largest known clusters of by the populations of the West. Ongoing crimi- COVID-19 in the United States are inside cor- nalization and the indebtedness of black people rectional institutions (Williams et al. 2020). (much of it from Wall Street’s predatory lend- Simultaneously, since the pandemic began, ing14) are the instruments driving large num- there have been the killings by police of George bers of urban black workers, disproportionately Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and employed in the agro-industrial food and health- numerous others, which incited the most recent care sectors toward the toxic mix of bankruptcy, protests by the Black Lives Matter movement. unemployment (where employers refuse to hire Th e violent police repression of these protests or even fi re workers holding consumer debt sanctioned by the Trump administration has [Traub 2014]), bankruptcy, evictions from shel- led to the beatings and killings infl icted by po- ter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced lice on African American men and women and fi nes and fees levied against them (via police their allies followed by their arrests and con- working for distressed municipalities undergo- fi nement, leading to further transmission of ing austerity), assault, imprisonment, and kill- COVID-19 to thousands of nonviolent protest- ing by police (Camp and Heatherton 2016; Wang ers and bystanders. 2018: 120–136, 151–162). Among the hyper-exploited racialized la- bor force, unlike most white workers exploited “normally”: Th e looping back of agro-industrial Workers in agro-industrial food assembly capital to incarceration and the and retail work, transport, and health care sec- COVID-19 pandemic tors have all been deemed “essential” workers, that is, legally required to labor at whatever risk Let us now see how the two pandemics—of of contracting COVID-19 disease their employ- COVID-19 and of racial capitalism—are com- ers may (in most cases) wish to impose on them, plexly intertwined in helical, spiraling connec- and thus treated as ultimately disposable. Th ese tions. Th e connections are intimate and insep- sectors are characterized by disproportionate arable—neo-slavery and the highest incidences numbers of African American workers repre- of COVID-19 infections—and come full circle sented in the labor force. Workers are denied consistent with the dual dialectic between ex- suffi cient (or any) personal protective equip- propriation and (hyper-)exploitation of racial- ment and are prevented by the employer from ized workers that Fraser sets out. maintaining the social distancing that protects Among the most expropriable: them from infection by the virus. Most are ei- We fi nd that major loci for the outbreaks of ther expected to attend work even if they are COVID-19 infections are in prisons and jails— symptomatic or have tested positive with the disproportionately fi lled by African Americans virus or laid off temporarily without pay while experiencing involuntary servitude due to their symptomatic. criminalization as part of broken window po- As of mid-May 2020, more than 36,000 meat licing. Despite some inmates being released processing and farm workers have tested pos- from municipal jails since the pandemic began, itive for COVID-19, and at least 116 workers large numbers of prisoners are still confi ned in have died, although the numbers listed of in- crowded cells in prisons, jails, and detention fected and deceased are probable undercounts. centers. Th e number of infected prison inmates Counties where meatpacking plants are located 124 | Don Nonini show twice the incidence of COVID-19 com- Neoliberal capitalism appears to be moving pared to other counties in the United States into a new phase in its treatment of its work- (Graddy et al. 2020). In meatpacking, the hog force. Neo-slavery among African American and poultry processing lines still require work- (and Latinx) workers working under hyper- ers to work shoulder to shoulder, elbow to el- sweated, sped-up and unsafe assembly lines and bow with one another—at frenzied speeds of workspaces has become even more extreme in production, using dangerous tools, under damp the absence of state regulation of employers, and nearly freezing conditions, around large and in this new extreme, it sets the pace for amounts of animal off al and excreta. Employ- abuse and degraded work undertaken by all “es- ers collude with local and state public health sential workers,” even as this category expands authorities in some states by failing to publicly to include new labor sectors (e.g., higher edu- announce the numbers of workers infected or cation). Th at is, while racialized degradation testing positive in their plants, thus allowing the of African Americans in the labor process con- virus to spread to nearby African American and tinues, the new extreme conditions of exploita- Latinx communities, which now show much tion come to be imposed on an increasingly higher infection rates than other counties (Ken- large number of white workers as well. While it dall 2020; Smith-Nonini 2020). Th e lack of state would be incorrect to say that a re-racialization government regulation and the failure of the of workers is occurring, clearly the logic of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Agency lash and other mechanisms of expropriation (OSHA) to intervene in these extremely dan- has begun to shape neoliberal capitalism’s treat- gerous worksites are complementary tributes to ment of the white working class (Wang 2018). neoliberalism at its most ug ly. Th is is precisely the new fi gure of the “expro- African American workers in nursing homes priable-and-exploitable citizen-workers” that work without spatial separation between them Fraser (2016) writes about. and confi ned elderly and chronically ill nursing Th e Juneteenth circulars of the Durham home patients—the sickest and most immune- Workers Assembly wrote of the twin pandemics compromised demographic with the highest rate and of being “Exposed by the Virus—‘Essen- of infection in the United States—and like those tially’ Involuntary Servitude.” Profound insight they care for, they become infected at high rates. indeed. In many instances, nursing home owners have denied workers masks and other personal pro- tective equipment. As of mid-May 2020, nurs- Th e double helix of two pandemics and ing home residents and staff members made up the triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” at least 20 percent of COVID-19 deaths nation- ally (Gebeloff et al. 2020). Infection and deaths Capitalism has met its match. To understand have been highest in nursing homes caring for how the new SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged and African American patients within the racially expanded its numbers prolifi cally according to segregated nursing home industry (Gebeloff et its logic of reproduction, we have to view it dia- al. 2020). lectically. Just as Marx reminds us and we know Other African Americans are found in large historically that the process of capital accumu- numbers in the food services (e.g., fast-food) in- lation is tenacious, productive of commodities, dustries, where employers have been unwilling and exhausts the bodies of humans and the or reluctant to provide workers with personal ecologies of “second nature” (Smith 2008: 49– protective equipment or to redesign and slow 91) when capital as “value in motion” expands down labor processes (such as timed-to-the- and transforms itself in phases of value appro- second fast-food preparation and delivery) to priation, realization, distribution, and reinvest- allow for safe social distancing. ment (Harvey 2018) and spirals out over space, Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 125 so also this virus likewise has its own logic of may generate the kind of pandemic for which reproduction and increase that spirals out neoliberal global capitalism is best suited. For through human populations and is reproducing people, much less so. Nonetheless, a left ward itself throughout the planet, within and across turn toward a rational governing (and more human bodies, wherever—at least so far—its socially just) response to contain the pandemic hosts are to be found. combined with a multi-racial working class ef- But the logic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is fort at mutual aid (e.g., with neighborhood bri- refractory to the logic of capital—something gades) could see the United States through with made obvious from February to May 2020, far less suff ering and far fewer deaths (Wallace when neoliberal state and national governments et al. 2020: 3–4). and corporations competed against one another George Floyd’s gasped last words, “I can’t in bidding wars to corner supplies of personal breathe” (like Erik Garner’s in New York, and protective equipment, ventilators, intensive care countless others) carry a triple valence that the units, and skilled healthcare workers while the Black Lives Matter movement has brilliantly in- virus continued to proliferate unimpeded rap- tuited and elevated as its own statement to the idly in close to ideal conditions of transmission world: while police chokeholds and knees-on- and reproduction. Just as accumulation of cap- the neck suff ocate the person attacked, so also ital occurs through innovations brought about do COVID-19 disease and the neo-slavery of by capitalist competition, this virus (and the the agro-industrial labor process. family of coronaviruses to which it belongs) Th e major conclusion of this article is that have fl ourished through stochastic processes of these all-American modes of suff ocating black mutations followed by natural selection that sets people are intimately intertwined with one an- variants of the virus in competition with one other and causally connected within the violent another in a parallel world of relentless innova- history of modern racial agro-capitalism. tion (= mutation) and competition (= natural selection). Th is world of the virus is not independent Acknowledgments from but, as I have shown, one created by racial capitalism. Capitalism is the landscape through I am indebted to Sharryn Kasmir and Mao Mol- which this virus passes. It travels across the in- lona for their helpful comments and criticisms terface between the human and nonhuman— of a prior draft of this article. most frequently between racialized humans and industrialized hogs, poultry, and wild animal species—in circulation and metabolisms paral- lel to but distinct from those of capital. In this Don Nonini is professor of Anthropology at the sense, the pandemic of COVID-19 accelerates University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. within the helical spiral of a hyper-sped-up He is author of “Getting by”: Class and state capitalism of the present. Th is pandemic and formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell future coronavirus pandemics that are certain University Press 2015); co-editor of Th e tumul- to emerge come out of similar political eco- tuous politics of scale: Unsettled states, migrants, nomic and ecological structures. In fact in late movements in fl ux (Routledge 2020), and editor June 2020, it became public knowledge that the of A companion to urban anthropology (Black- fl u of a new coronavirus, G4 (descended from well 2014). His recent peer-reviewed articles H1N1) has passed from hogs to 10 percent include “Th eorizing the urban housing com- of swine workers surveyed in China (Agence mons.” Focaal 79: 23–38, Fall 2017. France-Presse 2020). Th is class of coronavirus Email: [email protected] 126 | Don Nonini

Notes tion or are exported as exotic foods to China or elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Brooks et al. 2010; 1. Juneteenth is a holiday that commemorates see also Wallace 2020: 9). the emancipation of African slaves, referring 9. Th e provincial population grew from 19 million to June 19, 1865, when the enslaved of Texas in 1948 to 46 million in 2010 (Jabr 2020). learned that they had been freed, and is widely 10. One cannot but note how strongly the eff ects of celebrated among African Americans. ecological devastation portrayed here contrast 2. Th ese scholars would include Angela Davis and with the elegiac treatment of “capitalist ruins” Frank Barat (2016), Cedric Robinson (2000), and “disturbed” landscapes off ered in Tsing’s Nancy Fraser (2016), Michael Dawson (2016), (2015) tome on the matsutake commodity— Kelly Lytle Hernandez (2017), Sarah Haley suggesting that research like that of the present (2016), and Jackie Wang (2018), among many article into the violent prehistory and present others. of the capitalism of that mushroom might be 3. Black Lives Matter, https://blacklivesmatter.com/. worthwhile. 4. A more comprehensive treatment of the eff ects 11. In China there has been a rapid build-out since of the pandemic globally than this article would the 1980s in periurban areas of intensive pro- have to deal with the violence of global fi nance duction of swine in accordance with the logic of capital whose structural adjustment policies the Party-state’s massive urbanization “project since the 1980s have degraded the public health of separating people and pigs, and putting them infrastructures of the major cities in the devel- back together in new confi gurations” (Schnei- oping world, making the result extreme suf- der 2017: 93). While farmers displaced from de- fering and death among their residents (Davis sirable farmland slated for urban “development” and Abdel Kouddous 2020), the equivalent of a in inland China are pressed to migrate as work- crime against humanity. ers to coastal cities or forcibly resettled in huge 5. Asymptomatic transmission of the virus was modernist new tenements constructed on the reported from China in late January (Wallace edges of regional cities, the production of 56.5 2020), but Western infectious disease experts million metric tons of pork from a population continued to doubt this process existed until of 770 million hogs (in 2014) has concentrated early April, perhaps because it challenged cher- in large-scale Concentrated Animal Feeding ished epidemiological models that assumed that Operations (CAFOs) located on the edges of transmissibility of this class of virus appeared cities and roadways to cities that lead to their only at the same time as symptoms, thus losing urban markets. China’s CAFOs have become a valuable two months in limiting its spread dependent upon massive imports of soybeans (Apuzzo et al. 2020; Wallace 2020). from the United States and Brazil as feedstock 6. “Demand for meat is rising all over the world. (Schneider 2017: 90, 93). Th e marketing of meat . . . Th e live export business is thriving. At every consumption to the Chinese human popula- moment of the day, animals are being moved tion—putting hogs and people “back together huge distances across the planet’s surface” (Da- in new confi gurations”—has been hugely suc- ragahi 2018). cessful, with even rural households consuming 7. For an early analysis of industrial rationality an average of 29 kilos of fresh and processed and slave-based plantation production, see Mintz meat in 2012. Privately owned Chinese mega- 1985. agribusinesses in meats are now “playing a key 8. Th e industrial production of wild animals role” in the consolidation of the meat industry through hunting, capture, and breeding in globally, as in the case of the Shuanghui acquisi- “wildlife farms” throughout highland Southeast tion of Smithfi eld previously described (Schnei- Asia is well documented. In Vietnam, autoch- der 2017: 92). thonous species of crocodiles, pythons, soft - 12. Writing of antebellum slavery, Wallace notes shell turtles, bears, macaque monkeys, deer, and that then, “as today, the work itself was its own porcupines are either grown in captivity or cap- discipline, the danger and damage their own tured in the wild, then brokered, transported, message. When an immigrant meatpacker loses and sold to low land restaurants for consump- her hand, the expectation that the line is re- Th e triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe” | 127

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