COVID, Commodification and Conspiracism

This chapter examines lockdown as governments’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic, the market’s response to lockdown and how and why this latter response is often articulated through conspiracy theories. As we will see, the market response to lockdown brings to light long existing contradictions and tensions that are inherent in the modern nation-state. For reasons that will become clear, the nature of commodification forms the centrepiece of my analysis.The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the nature of the state’s response to the pandemic with emphasis on the periods of lockdown. It then moves on to examine the response to that response. This latter discussion is framed within a pre-existing tension, if not conflict, between the market and the state. It is from this tension that the ‘space’ for conspiracism around the issue of lockdown and other measures comes to the fore. Drawing on the Frankfurt School critical tradition, I deploy Hegel’s concept of ‘subjectivism’ (Hegel,1827/2017), Marx’s concept of commodification (Marx, 1867/1995) and Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of mimesis (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947/1969). I make use of these theories to show that the conspiracism that has arisen around COVID, although in many ways novel, draws on and reveals inherent unresolved contradictions and tensions that are embedded within the nation-state itself, but which the recent pandemic has brought to the surface.