Description:
Examining the COVID-19 pandemic as an occasion to think capitalism according to what it always has been, what is revealed about its current ideological deployment, and how we can think about a communist alternative in the face of exterminism.
Review Quotes:
"A live and immediate snapshot of thinking in and through the COVID-19 pandemic, On Necrocapitalism stands as an important document of an indelible year. "M.I. Asma" insists on the rigor and energy of a non-universalist "we" that refuses to return to business-literally-as usual."
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817-2020
"Is the pandemic really unprecedented? Not according to these authors, who demonstrate that the events of the last two years are wholly predictable within the logic and imprisoned imaginary of capitalism itself. Part manifesto, part chronicle, part theoretical rumination, On Necrocapitalism recasts debates about defunding police, essential workers, dystopian codification, and reformist temptations, providing necessary revivification of communist horizons that de-exceptionalize crisis and dispense with pragmatism. An inspiring read."
Jasbir K. Puar, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
"Framing the ongoing present--and deadly non-futurity(ies)--of the COVID-19 pandemic within the historical framework of "necrocapitalism," this dynamic, multivocal project is a radical testimonial against the thick normality of targeted peoples' casualties, suffering, and immiseration. Unapologetically, joyfully, and simultaneously theoretical, narrative, and polemical in presentation, the authors defend as they illuminate the possibilities of a communism for the present as well as the endangered future. What might it mean to apprehend the outpouring of humanist concern, charity and philanthropy, emergency funding, and outraged demands for care under the terms of pandemic as evidence of necrocapitalism's advancement, rather than signs of its collapse or momentary dysfunction? I urge readers to bask in the writers' incisive, explosive, and utterly necessary dismantling of liberal ideology as an extension of racial capitalist, white nationalist domestic and global warfare--that is, of liberal discourse as fundamentally complementary to the spectrum of contemporary right-wing reaction, not antagonistic to it."
Dylan Rodríguez, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California Riverside, former President of the American Studies Association, and author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide