Chapter 2

COVID, commodification and conspiracism

David Seymour*

After six months it is surely time to relax the rules so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks they are prepared to run.

The generation of the Second World War had been prepared to risk life to preserve freedom. This generation is ready to risk freedom to preserve life.

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (The Guardian, 1 September 2020)

‘If No 10 proposes tighter restrictions straight after Christmas, those cabinet ministers with freedom-loving instincts – who gave us all so much hope last week – must speak out’, said one member of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs. ‘In any future leadership contest, we will all remember how they acted this week. We need real, gutsy, freedom-loving Conservatives to rescue us from this madness.’

(The Guardian, 25 December 2021)

Introduction

This chapter examines lockdown as governments’ response 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’s1 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.

In looking at these questions, I draw on a critical conception of ‘the humanities’. If, for present purposes, we understand ‘the humanities’ as ‘championing and promoting [studies that] are about humanity itself: humanity past and present alike, together with whatever thoughts, concerns and hopes about human futures that those studies provoke’ (MacCulloch 2018), we cannot but acknowledge that not only have the humanities and their ‘hopes’ fallen short, but, as history has shown us, they have also been implicated, willingly or unwillingly, in humanity’s darkest chapters, so that ‘instead of entering into a truly human condition’, we continue to run the risk of ‘sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947/1969, xi). However, our loss of innocence should not mean a rejection in toto of the humanities’ underpinning norms and values. It is for this reason that this chapter draws on works that, taken together, offer a critique of the humanities while retaining faith in their ultimate objective of the betterment of humanity and the world of which it is a part. Indeed, it seems to me that, if anything, in the face of everything, it is of the utmost importance to insist on the relevance of their ‘concerns and hopes’ for the present moment.

Drawing on this critical tradition, I deploy Hegel’s (1827/2017) concept of ‘subjectivism’, Marx’s (1867/1995) concept of commodification and Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of mimesis (1947/1969). I make use of these theories to show that the conspiracism that has arisen around COVID-19, 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.

Responses to COVID-19: lockdown and the market

The almost immediate and universal response to the COVID-19 pandemic was what came to be known as lockdown. The purpose of lockdown was quite straightforward. Its aim was to limit as much as possible any social contact outside domestic settings in order to halt the spread of the virus. The UK and devolved governments’ announcement of lockdown was accompanied by a series of emergency measures and decrees to ensure its effectiveness.2

Despite some important exceptions, lockdown brought with it the (temporary) suspension of the normal operations of the market along with the (temporary) suspension of associated legal rights. Places of production, distribution and consumption were closed and individual private rights, such as freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and others, were likewise severely curtailed.

Although deemed necessary to contain the virus, lockdown – along with the suspension of the market – was fraught with difficulties. There is little doubt that, for the vast majority of people, the loss of opportunity to work meant a real threat of or actual loss of business, employment and income leading to potential losses of housing, health care and other basic life amenities. These threats were especially strong in countries where state support was inadequate or non-existent, or where the refusal of the state to intervene was grounded in ideology. The immediacy of this threat was felt particularly by the self-employed and/or owners of small businesses. Moreover, alongside these material concerns were the less visible or less tangible but very real harms relating to mental health and domestic abuse, and those relating to the hiatus of children’s education and socializing.

The conflict between the market and the state

The conflict between the imperatives of lockdown and those of the market can be reframed in the language of a conflict between the individual and the collective, or the particular and the universal. On the one hand, lockdown emphasizes the collective interests of the nation-state (as expressed through public law and the public health of the population as a whole); on the other hand, the market’s conception of the ‘public good’ frames it as an aggregation of individual interests and private rights.

However, the point here is that while the pandemic has highlighted this conflict between the market and the state, it has been present in the modern nation-state from its inception. Although born at the same moment, the necessary relation between the two has always been fraught with tension. It may not be too strong to argue that one of the core political debates of the last two centuries has centred around the legitimacy or otherwise of the state’s intervention in the workings of the market. In recent times, since at least the late 1970s, it has been the major ideological fault-line in many nation-states across the globe. It is within this longer history that we can begin to understand the conspiracism that has arisen specifically in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic.

In many ways, this view of the matter is grounded within the natural law-based liberal conception of political philosophy (Fine 1984/2002). This school of thought reduces the state function to little more than the protection of the freedoms of the market and the legal rights of the owners of private property. From this point of view can be traced the belief that the COVID-19 interventions of the state that obstruct the market’s free operations (lockdown, mask mandates, social distancing, vaccination passports, etc.) are not only an illegitimate overreach but also an improper restriction of innate and ‘natural’ freedoms. It is this notion of the relationship between market and state that, as we will see, both underpins and is radicalized within the ideology of the free market, which gives rise to the belief that the only moment of freedom exists within the market. It is from this perspective, moreover, that any other moments of freedom that do exist (i.e. outside the market, such as civil society and the state) are inverted and reappear as threats of unfreedom.

To understand this inversion and the conspiracy theories to which it gives rise, it is necessary to briefly trace, at least in broad outline, the critique of this orthodox liberal or natural law understanding of the nature of the body politic. In this regard I will refer to the political philosophy of Hegel, Marx’s political economy and Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory. I begin first, however, with the meaning of conspiracism or conspiracy theory that informs this chapter.

Conspiracism and the ideology of the free market

Although much has been written about the meaning of ‘conspiracy theory’, my own interpretation of it draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘ideology’ (Arendt 2004, 593–617). At the heart of Arendt’s conception of ideology is her view that it tells us nothing of substance about that upon which the ideology claims to shed light. For example, in the context of antisemitism it tells us absolutely nothing meaningful about actually existing Jewish people, but rather tells us everything about the ‘idea’ of the Jews which antisemitism contains. As Arendt explains, ideology is the unfolding of the idea into which reality is manipulated, falsified and distorted so as to fit into the initial image.

However, in this chapter I am not focusing on the connections made by conspiracy theory between COVID-19 and antisemitism (although, unsurprisingly, there are many examples of such links), but rather on understanding the connection between conspiracy thinking, COVID-19 and the ideology of the free market. I argue that looking at COVID-19 through the prism of this ideology allows us to make sense of, or at least identify, the origins of contemporary COVID-related conspiracy theory. Thus, just as antisemitism is the unfolding of the idea of ‘the Jew’, so too, in the present context, are conspiracy theories relating to the state the unfolding of the negative idea of ‘the state’ that, again, distorts and denies the messiness of reality.

At the heart of this ideology is the idea, noted above, that the only moment of ‘freedom’ in the contemporary world is to be found in and through the market. It is this freedom that is institutionalized through the many freedoms associated with the free market, including, perhaps before all else, freedom of the exchange of private property and of contract. It is the contract and the freedom of exchange and associated rights that encapsulate the innate freedoms comprising a society of individual private property holders, which seemingly allow for the uncoerced actions of individuals to act in their own self-interest without let or hindrance. It is to these issues that we will now turn in more detail.

Subjectivity and subjectivism

In the context of this chapter, it is noteworthy that in offering an early challenge to the traditional natural law theories of state and market, Hegel appears to have recognized an essential aspect of the ideology of the free market – what he conceptualizes as subjectivism.

In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel recognized the market and the private rights associated with it (i.e. rights to the free ownership and exchange of private property) as one moment of freedom in the modern body politic, but not the only moment. Thus, whereas traditional political philosophy saw the market as the realm of freedom and the state’s role as little more than a facilitator of the market and the guardian of (natural) private rights and private property, Hegel saw the state as a related but distinct moment of freedom in itself – that rights are not the only moment of freedom in the system of right. While the state contains the rights of the market within itself, it does not exhaust the existence of a person’s freedom in their life within the body politic as a whole. In other words, the free market ideology is unable to recognize any other aspects of freedom beyond that of the market.

In a more specific challenge to a free market ideology, Hegel is clear that although the protection of private property and associated rights are included within the wider ambit of the state, they should not be regarded as sacrosanct or supreme as against other moments of freedom, such as the life of the citizen. Indeed, he recognizes that in certain ‘extreme situations where the requirements of personal survival come into collision with the rights of property, the latter may be subsumed to the “right of necessity”’ (Fine 2001, 52). Hegel’s thinking on this point is directly applicable to the contestation between the market, state, freedom and COVID-19:

Life as the totality of ends, has a right in opposition to [the rights of private property]. If, for example, it can be preserved by stealing a loaf of bread, this certainly constitutes an infringement of someone’s property, but it would be wrong to regard such an action as common theft. If someone whose life is in danger were not allowed to take measures to save himself, he would be destined to forfeit all his rights, and since he would be deprived of life, his entire freedom would be negated. There are certainly many prerequisites for the preservation of life, and if we look into the future, we must concern ourselves with such details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now; the future is not absolute, and it remains exposed to contingency. Consequently, only the necessity of the immediate present can justify a wrong action, because its omission would involve committing a wrong – indeed, the ultimate wrong, namely the total negation of the existence of freedom … no one should be sacrificed completely for the sake of right (Hegel 1827/2017, 127A, quoted in Fine 2001, 52; emphasis added).

Hegel’s view is not that the state can ride roughshod over the rights of private property, but that there are occasions when other concerns (i.e. the health and life of the citizenry, both as individuals and as a collective) take priority. The point is that, unlike the ideologists of the free market, the relationship between the market and the state does not turn on a conflict between freedom and unfreedom respectively, but rather between different spheres of freedom: between the rights of private property and the right or freedom present within the realm of the state. Ultimately, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s famous aphorism, this is the fundamental freedom, or the right to have rights (Arendt 200 4, 277).

Yet even at the time he wrote these words in 1824, Hegel was more than aware of the tension that exists between market and state and of the dangers of what happens when the market is treated as the sole repository of freedom. As we will see, it is this aspect of his thought that has a great bearing on the connection between the market, COVID-19 and conspiracism.

Hegel not only acknowledged the error in prioritizing any one ‘moment’ of right over others (be it rights and/or the state), but he also recognized the danger in idealizing one realm over the other, which could lead to a situation in which the latter realm would come to be ‘viewed as instances of illegitimate power’ (Fine 2001, 31). It is in this context that Hegel discusses his concept of subjectivity and subjectivism which, in many ways, can be seen as foreshadowing free market ideology’s content.

For Hegel, modern subjectivity and its relationship to private property is to be welcomed. It is, he notes, the first time in history that a person is free to decide what to produce, when to produce and what to exchange. It is this freedom that separates the modern person from the slave of the past, a past that cannot return without the destruction of rights and right.3 However, as much as Hegel ‘embraces the right of subjective freedom as the supreme achievement of the present age’ (Fine 2001, 34), he also recognizes its opposition to subjectivism, which ‘fetishizes’ this subject. In short, subjectivism ‘converts [the subject] into the absolute and fixes on this moment in its “difference from and opposition to the universal”’ (PR.124R, quoted in Fine 20 01, 34).

For Hegel, just as individual ownership of private property captures an instance or moment of contemporary freedom within the body politic, subjectivism fetishizes it as if it were the only moment of freedom in toto. Fine spells out the consequence of this error:

For Hegel, the distinction between subjectivity and subjectivism (or the fetishism of the subject) is crucial. If the former is the greatest achievement of the modern age, the latter constitutes its characteristic pathology. The subject becomes ‘like God’. It presents its will as absolute. It demands worship. What starts life as a principle of critical thought becomes in the course of its own development a new source of superstition (Fine 200 1, 34).

If it is the case that, from a legal perspective, subjectivism poses a threat to the entire system of right (freedom) in the name of a distorted and abstract subjectivity, its full negative potential reaches its destructive boiling point when articulated through the language of ‘morality’.4 In a foreshadowing of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment (Nietzsche 1887/1990; Seymour 2005), this potential catastrophe arises from a notion of morality in which the only judge of ‘good and evil’ is one’s own (individual) conscience seemingly detached from – and in opposition to – other sources of moral value, such as ethics. Morality, in other words, becomes a negative freedom that, in turn, threatens to negate freedom itself. If an inward and seemingly autonomous morality sets the standard for what is moral or not, then anything deemed immoral from this individual and subjectivist viewpoint is correspondingly evaluated as contrary, hostile and a threat. It is, therefore, from subjectivist morality that the world of freedom is most at risk:

The danger arises by … elevating negative freedom [morality] to ‘supreme status’. Self-determination becomes ‘sheer restless activity which cannot yet arrive at something that is. (PR.108A). ‘What is’ is, therefore, devalued against ‘what ought to be’ and appears worthless, fit only for destruction (Fine 20 01, 38).

It is this concept of subjectivism that we can see at play at the heart of the ideology of the free market and its opposition to the state through the way it distorts and manipulates reality to fit it into its worldview. Subjectivism, both politically and morally, cannot but perceive the state as anything other than hostile and a danger to its own narrow conception of freedom. Thus, in the case of COVID-19, the temporary suspension of the market and associated private rights comes to be interpreted as part of a clandestine attempt by the state to destroy the freedom of the subject. Moreover, if Hegel notes the legal aspects of the potential danger to right wrought by subjectivism, it is Marx who traverses the same development, but from the perspective of political economy and the nature of commodification that lies at its heart.

COVID-19, the market and commodification

In this section we will discuss the content of Hegel’s concepts of subjectivity and subjectivism as it appears within the ideology of the free market. The main themes here are the ways in which both the subject and their private rights are determined by the nature of commodification which, in turn, leads to the commodification of the subject. It is a consequence of this development that modern, market subjectivity adapts to, and takes on, the characteristic of a commodity itself.

The prism of the ideology of the free market helps us to understand the market’s response to the virus, most notably its normalization. Normalization is also part of the attempt to remake COVID-19 in the market’s own image. In so doing, it seeks to take the sting out of the uniqueness of the virus and so downplay its catastrophic potential for causing mass harms and deaths. Correspondingly, it downplays the need to interfere with the market’s normal operations. The essence of this attempt has been to transform COVID-19 into a commodity.

Following Marx, all we need to know about a commodity at this stage in the discussion is that it is an article of private property that is capable of exchange through the market (Marx 1867/1995, 13–93) What defines something as a commodity is less its actual existence as a particular article (its use-value) but rather its ability to be exchanged (its exchange-value). From the point of view of the market, all that matters is the exchange-value behind which the use-value of the thing disappears. It is only as a result of this process that unlike things can be made alike and become capable of exchange. For example, whether something is a chair or a washing machine, all that is relevant is that it can be exchanged for something else, a necessity if it is to take its place in the market. By presenting the virus as a commodity, therefore, not only does COVID-19 become ‘just’ one more product capable of exchange with another, but, as a species of private property, it is also deemed a matter of ‘individual freedom’ whether one chooses it over a host of other equally available ‘goods’.

This intimate economic connection between the market and commodification is reflected in the nature of their associated rights. Just as the commodity abstracts and reifies exchange-value at the expense of use-value, so analogously do the legal rights of private property abstract the juridical person (the rights holder) from the flesh-and-blood, socially situated individual along with all their specific or particular characteristics. As with the commodity, so, too, the abstract nature of associative legal rights allows the unalike to become alike, and so all, as owners of commodities, enter the realm of exchange, which is the market.

Since it is also as owners of private property and determiners of its exchange that market-related rights come into existence, it is no surprise that the ‘choice’ to choose COVID-19, free of outside interference, is framed in the language of private legal rights. It is a consequence of this way of thinking that a seemingly unbreachable link is made between COVID-19, the market and rights.

At first sight it may seem strange that COVID-19 should be treated as a commodity, as something that an individual could and, indeed, should be able to exchange for anything else (including their (and others’) health and life). The first observation on this point is that in many countries, most notably the USA and to a lesser extent the UK, health and health care are already considered as much a commodity as any other service (i.e. in the USA health care can be part of the employment contract), and in both countries this has become one of the most controversial fault lines of the past few years.

However, and this is the second observation, from the perspective of the ideology of the free market, the notion that one can alienate (own and exchange) one’s health or virus as a species of private property is not as far-fetched as it may appear. After all, the notion that one has property in one’s body is far from novel. Indeed, for many, private ownership of the body is the hallmark of freedom and the essence of the modern, emancipated individual (Stychin 1998). Hegel makes this point when he notes that the ability to own private property in oneself is an inherent, if not fundamental aspect of what it means to be a person rather than a thing. Personality, or more specifically legal personality (the rights-bearing individual), is the hallmark of the modern age.5

It is to be noted in this context that although a person’s body can be freely alienated, it can never be completely owned in its totality. It is this point that underpins Marx’s distinction between his concept of labour and labour-power, with the former equating to slavery (nothing of the person remains, including their will, after their labour has been extracted) and the latter pointing to the ability of a person to sell their labour-power for X hours a day at X wages, while still retaining ownership of themselves.

It is this view of private property as ownership over one’s body that has a direct bearing on the commodification of both health in general and COVID-19 in particular. It opens the potential that a person can, like their labour-power, treat their health as their own private property and so alienate and exchange it through the market. It means further that COVID-19 could become just one more good to be exchanged according to private preference; or, as the Australian Prime Minister phrased it:

After six months [of lockdown], it is surely time to relax the rules so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks they are prepared to take (Wintour 2020).

From the perspective of the free market ideology, the core of this attempt at commodifying COVID-19 is to make it amenable to contract-based exchange. This point is evident in the many attempts to find equivalences between the virus and other products. For example, the idea arose that COVID-19 was ‘just like’ the common cold, the flu or SARS. Similar equations underpinned claims that since people die of all kinds of illnesses and diseases, it would make no difference if they were to die from COVID-19. In other words, as with the nature of commodities in general, COVID-19’s exchange-value (gained through being placed on the market) is abstracted from its content (or use-value) so that the latter disappears from sight. Once the virus is robbed of its content, so the ideology continues; just as those other illnesses and outbreaks did not necessitate the suspension of the market and associated rights, neither does COVID-19.

More callous were the claims of equivalence that extended to the exchange of COVID-19 with human lives. Included within this category of thinking was the view that, for the sake of the market, it was both necessary and expedient to exchange the lives of the elderly or ‘the weak’ for those of the young and ‘the strong’. Perhaps the clearest example of this train of thought was the statements of the Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick:

Let’s get back to the living … Those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country. [After saying that he was not living in fear of COVID-19, he continued] What I’m living in fear of is what’s happening to this country. No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all Americans love for your children and grandchildren?’ ... If that’s the exchange, I’m all in! (Knodel 2020, emphasis added).

It is at this juncture in the discussion that we come to the nub of the problem and that axis around which COVID-19, commodification and conspiracy theory turns. The exchange inherent in the commodification of COVID-19 means not only that the rights-bearing individuals exchange their health for the virus, but also that they take on the same characteristics as COVID-19 itself. As with COVID-19, the abstract rights-bearing individual is robbed of their content (i.e. the harmfulness of the virus and the person’s health, if not life, respectively). In other words, just as COVID-19 is endlessly contagious and transmissible, so too is the individual who makes the exchange with COVID-19 a potential risk to all who come into contact with them; and so on and so forth. In other words, the nature of COVID-19 and the nature of the rights-bearing individual not only come to mimic one another, but, understood in this way, the commodification of the virus also means the interchangeability of COVID-19 and its ‘owner’.

COVID-19, commodification and conspiracy theory

This notion of the interchangeability of COVID-19 and the rights bearer, and of the latter adopting (or having to adopt) the characteristics of the former, draws on one of the themes of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, most notably the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer (194 7/1969).

In the discussion above I emphasized the connections between the market, commodities and private legal rights. Of course, these connections have long been recognized. However, it was Marx who offered the first sustained critique of these connections, first in his observation that private rights (what he termed the ‘so-called rights of man’) are but the rights of the owner of private property (Marx 1843/1992, 211–43), and secondly, drawing on this insight, in his later conception of ‘commodity fetishism’ (Marx 1867/1995, 42–51). Commodity fetishism points to the notion that the commodity appears as if it were an autonomous object, separate from those who have produced it. Inherent in this development is the idea that a commodity’s social value – its exchange-value – appears as if it were a natural aspect of the commodity itself. As a consequence, not only is a commodity’s exchange-value abstracted from its use-value, but it is also abstracted from its creation, so that it appears as if it were an element of nature.

It is the combination of these two critiques – of the connection of the relationship between rights and private property and of the appearance of the social aspect of commodities as natural phenomena – that leads Marx to turn the pre-existing understandings of this relationship on its head. In contradistinction to traditional political economy as well as Hegel’s critique of it, Marx argues that it is the ownership of private property that gives rise to private rights (and not the other way round), and secondly that it is the commodity (as exchange-value) that determines the nature of the exchange rather than the parties to that exchange. It is this latter observation that Marx summarizes by noting, somewhat ironically, that far from its owner taking the commodity to market, it is the commodity that takes its owner to market; or, in a more theoretical manner:

The person exists for one another merely as representatives of, and, therefore, as owners of commodities … that the characters who appear on the economic stage [i.e. the market] are but the personifications of the economic relations that exist between them ... What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact that it looks upon every other commodity as but the form of appearance of its own value. A born leveller and a cynic, it is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the same more repulsive than Maritornes herself. The owner makes up for this lack in the commodity of a sense of the concrete, by his own five and more senses (Marx 1867/1995, 53).6

It was these ideas that Adorno and Horkheimer developed some half a century later when they critiqued and radicalized Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and commodification. Recognizing that commodification is the process whereby that which is unique and distinct is caught within the near universal realm of exchange, they argue that as a condition of entry into this realm uniqueness and distinctiveness have to be made amenable for their exchange with everything else. As a consequence, the specific or particular quality – in this case its inherent uniqueness which obstructs that exchange – has to be expunged. It is only when emptied of its particular substance and reformulated in strictly abstract, formalist and, therefore, universal terms that the object becomes a commodity and can take its place within the ubiquitous realm of exchange.

They argued further that the particular content that cannot be contained within the commodity, that is its expunged element, reappears as an unpredictable threat to the structure or system of commodification as a whole. Thus, while on the one hand the commodity’s formal attributes permit its inclusion within the realm of exchange, on the other hand its now expunged yet threatening particularities (its content and substance) are recast as nothing more than superstitious myth, having no place in an increasingly rationalized and commodified world. Rejected from the world, and because it cannot be recognized in its universal aspects, its particular content becomes excluded and taboo.

However, in a further deepening of Marx’s thinking on the relationship between commodity owner (the rights-bearing subject) and commodity, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Marx’s inversion of the relationship between owner and commodity had been correspondingly reduced to that of mimesis, coming from the ancient Greek of ‘mime’ or mimicry. In short, their reference to mimesis points to the necessity that in the contemporary world in which commodification is universal, in order to survive socially, one must adopt the characteristics of the commodity itself. Therefore, to exist in a radically commodified world (as espoused by the ideology of the free market) requires the primacy of a person’s exchange-value at the expense of their use-value. In other words, what counts for any entity, be it a washing machine, COVID-19 or a person, is not their particular attributes (that a washing machine washes clothes, that COVID-19 is a threat to health and life, that a person is elderly or young), but rather their universal aspect. As a ‘person’ is abstracted from their particularity, they can be exchanged for anything else or anyone else. As we have seen, it is precisely this result that is the commodification of COVID-19.

COVID-19 and conspiracism

This concept of mimesis – of adopting the characteristics of a commodity, including COVID-19, in order to survive – does not, in itself, account for its connection to conspiracy thinking. Rather, it serves as its precondition (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947/1969, 187–200).

As we have seen, Dan Patrick’s exhortation to sacrifice oneself for America – an America that, in keeping with the ideology of the free market, encompasses the meaning of ‘America’ itself – chimes with Adorno and Horkheimer’s point that the necessity of adopting the characteristics of commodities in general, and COVID-19 as a commodity in particular, entails a corresponding personal sacrifice. This sacrifice is of one’s own ‘use-value’ or particularity (including one’s own health). In short, it involves the sacrifice of one’s own unique individuality along with any promise or hint of a better life or way of living.

This need for endless pressure to sacrifice and disavow one’s own particular self cannot, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, come without a cost. That which is sacrificed always runs the risk of an unwanted return. From the perspective of the subject, that aspect of oneself that has been sacrificed returns as a threat, not only to the subject but also to the social world in general. This threat is particularly troubling because it comprises a part of oneself (including the potential for a better life and, in this case, one’s own life and health). It is for this reason that what has had to be disavowed takes on, from the view of the ideology of the free market, the character of a taboo. It is something that is strictly forbidden and which, therefore, has to be disowned and denied.

Adorno and Horkheimer argue that, in order to carry on living with these fundamental conflicts, the content of the taboo (the potential for a better, healthier life) is projected onto others as if it were the property of those others. Rather than accept that potential and desire as the subject’s own longing, it is made taboo and projected onto what is perceived as a threatening ‘other’. In the case of COVID-19 and its commodification, this ‘other’ is not only ‘the state’ in the sense of institutional responses to the virus through lockdown (which interrupts the process of commodification demanded by the ideology of the free market), but also the individual’s own life as a member of the state, which is not exhausted by the ‘freedom’ of the market and the commodification it entails. In short, therefore, the state and its collective actions (no matter how limited) hint at a life beyond the market which, at the level of the individual, has to be expunged and denied, and upon which all manner of hostility, including that of a giant conspiracy, must be projected.

It is for these reasons, therefore, that the state becomes the target of both hostility and conspiracism. It is because, from the perspective of the ideology of the free market, it is the right or freedom inherent within the state, and which becomes visible in responses to the pandemic, that has to be disavowed, expunged and sacrificed. In other words, from the perspective of subjectivism and its associated rights, the state’s attempts to limit harms and preserve life at the expense of the market appears as taboo, as something that is both forbidden and also destabilizing and threatening to the individual subject.

COVID-19, conspiracism and personification

The fact that this hostility takes the form of conspiracy theories is also inherent within the free market ideology. This accounts for its personification. The notion of personification results from the projection of the radical subjectivity and subjectivism inherent in the free market ideology as if the obscure and complex nature of social and political relations can be reduced to – and understood as – the consequence of individuals. In other words, the image of the world created by the ideology of the free market is little more than a mirror of its own subjectivism. This projection therefore leads to the conspiracist idea that it can only be someone, somewhere who is responsible for the fate of the world and its inhabitants.

It is this projection of a distorted subjectivism onto a wider reality that is intimately connected to the free-market ideology that results in the personification that is itself an inherent element of conspiracy thinking. This accounts for the paradoxical belief that if something good happens, then it must be the result of individual effort and perseverance. However, if something bad happens, then, from the perspective of the ideology of the free market, it can only be the result of secret, malevolent powers emanating from some person or persons illegitimately and clandestinely interfering to derail the good outcome dictated by the promise of industriousness alone.

It is from this perspective, therefore, that the complexity of the state, both as an institution in its own right and in its relationship to the market, is reduced to a singular, unitary and independent entity standing in splendid isolation and populated by malign malcontents. Through this type of conspiracy thinking COVID-19 has brought to the fore – and has been captured and given life by – the ideology of the free market. Again, as noted above in the discussion of Arendt’s meaning of ideology, these imaginings are not so much mere fantasies, but rather distortions and manipulations of real-life events, most noticeably lockdown and other instances of the state’s response to the virus. This factor gives to state-targeted conspiracism an ‘authenticity’ in the eyes of its adherents that is lacking, for example, in the truly baseless fantasies that the virus is caused by 5G or that the vaccine injects a surveillance chip into people.7

For these reasons, COVID-19 has brought into relief and amplified several already existing ‘theories’ that draw on the conspiracism of subjectivism and personification to ‘explain’ lockdown and other state responses to the pandemic. One such manifestation is the belief that ‘the state’ has been hollowed out and has become the plaything of ‘hostile’ and ‘alien’ powers. As such, the state’s national interest has been usurped by either ‘foreign’ interests or the interests of a particular group (national or otherwise). More often than not, the personification of these powers is captured through the language of elites or of one specific individual (Burrowes 2020). It is precisely for these reasons that conspiracism speaks of the illegitimate actions of ‘the Global elite’, the ‘Cosmopolitan elite’, ‘the Rothschilds’ or, simply, ‘Bill Gates’ or ‘Soros’.

A similar phenomenon, and one that again pre-existed COVID-19 but has gained increasing currency, is the idea of the ‘Deep State’. Slightly different from the previous version of state-targeted conspiracism, the ‘Deep State’ alludes to the belief that state and other democratic institutions are but shams and empty vessels controlled by a surreptitious network of individuals who, like parasites, feed off and destroy the bodies in which they embed themselves. The commonality between both of these versions is the belief in the existence of a malevolent web of individuals that has either usurped or seeped into the state for no other reason than to undermine and destroy freedom.

Perhaps the clearest example of these phenomena is the notion that COVID-19 is a ‘hoax’. It is believed that the ‘purpose’ of this hoax is that it allows ‘the state’ the opportunity and excuse to (finally) destroy individual freedom, understood in this context as the freedom of the owners of private property, the market and related rights. Associated with this conspiracist fantasy is the belief that the alleged ‘myth’ of COVID-19 serves to further and complete an inescapable state surveillance of the entire population. In its more extreme accounts, the vaccine is allocated a prime role because it allegedly includes a microchip of some description or other.

However, there has been a recent and more populist iteration of this type of conspiracism, even though it stops short of the notion of a ‘hoax’. This was President Trump’s claim that the clandestine operations of the Deep State included, inter alia, ‘Big Pharma’ and federal scientific advisers, various departments of state and the Democratic Party jointly and severally, which conspired to hold back the release of a vaccine that would deprive both ‘the people’ and their president of a second Trump term. In this account, lockdown and other state-sanctioned restrictions are only a foretaste of the damage ‘the state’, now in the hands of usurpers, is said to have in store for the fate of individual freedoms.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have identified a confluence of factors from the perspective of the ideology of the free market from which conspiracy theories relating to the conflict between lockdown and the market emerge. It is a world in which the rights-bearing individual, reduced to the status of a commodity, is understood solely by their relationship to the market. Coronavirus appears as simply one ‘good’ among others, where the meaning of private rights entails sacrifice. Any state attempt to ameliorate such sacrifice is treated as no more than the outcome of malevolent personal forces, the purpose of which is, in a final inversion, not treated as providing for improved health, but rather contains a threat to life itself.

Just as, in social terms, the pandemic, lockdown and related measures have made visible that which had been ‘invisible’ (inequality in housing, the prevalence of domestic abuse, poverty, etc.), so too have they made visible a way of ‘thinking’ that is far from novel and which emerges from the very structure of the modern nation-state. However, what is relatively new is that the spokespeople for this anti-state conspiracism are not, as in the past, political and social outliers. Instead, they are embodiments of the state, such as Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro. Moreover, it is noteworthy that such opposition to the state’s response to COVID-19 is not a rejection of the language of rights in toto, but is often articulated through the language of private rights as if they were the only expression of social and political freedom.

Notes

1. Although most countries in the world experienced as least some form of national lockdown in the face of the pandemic, this chapter concentrates primarily on the UK with reference also to the USA.

2. For a full list of the relevant legislation in England, see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/coronavirus.

3. Hegel did, of course, recognize the rise of inequality within the market and the pressure the market itself places on people that obstructs this aspect of freedom.

4. For Hegel, ‘morality’ is limited to an expression of individual subjectivity and is sharply distinguished from the language of (collective) ethics.

5. It is this notion of self-ownership that is key to Hegel’s rejection of the legitimacy and legality of slavery, of the ability to own someone else’s body. It is this aspect of personality that separates the present era from that of ancient Rome, in which concepts of ownership were defined against other people, or rather other people as property, who were deemed to lack an autonomous will themselves (i.e. slaves, women, children).

6. The notion of personification is discussed in more detail below.

7. Even though such beliefs are baseless in the sense understood here, they still conform to the subjectivism, personalization and paranoia discussed here: i.e. that such things can be traced to specific individuals, for example Bill Gates.

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