Despite state-sanctioned calls for ‘social distancing’, the idea of a virtual society decoupled from living, breathing humans remains a privilege afforded only to those who can, by the providence of capital distribution, retreat from the outside world. Shelf-stackers and delivery drivers, school teachers and security guards, fire and rescue services, utilities and waste disposal, medical staff and carers of all kinds: these ‘key workers’, as they have been rechristened, form a racialised and gendered ‘frontline’ for whom survival necessitates paid work at a time when work means proximity to other humans and their potentially lethal bacteria. That a period of lockdown and riots has been punctuated with all manner of heightened political action, from rent strikes and building occupations to mutual aid and labour organisation, demonstrates the collective need to resist a property system that risks the mass death of expendable humans. Black Lives Matter, in its insurrectionary manifestations, is a living counterforce to racial capitalism.Īnd yet the social was never only or even primarily virtual, and especially not during the first half of 2020. As the riots made clear, ours is a moment of entrenched racial capitalism: a social relation that secures ruling class power through the manipulation of racial, ethnic, and nationalist prejudice – what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as ‘a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organise relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories’.

This popular movement, gathered under the slogan Black Lives Matter, acted against racism, but not against racism alone. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of comrades took to the streets and fought the police and their allied fascists. In late May, beginning in Minneapolis when police murdered a man named George Floyd, the social rapidly and aggressively de-virtualised in the form of urban revolt: riots and looting abolitionist demonstrations and decolonial iconoclasm burning police stations and squad cars the construction of barricades and the establishment of autonomous zones. Outside of weekly trips to the grocery store, running in a hilltop woodland, and kicking a football with my four-year-old son, life would take place indoors, with the outside world entering materially by way of the post, and narratively via state news briefings and hyperactive social media feeds. For myself and many others in the United Kingdom, the social became virtual.

At least half a month too late, on 23 March, my country of residence was placed under lockdown, shuttering classrooms and parks and pubs and libraries and just about all places of free gathering. For the first half of 2020, life adjusted itself to Covid-19, a highly-contagious respiratory disease unheard of this time last year.

Wark capital is dead