Review of Mike Davis (2020). The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism
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Review of Mike Davis (2020). The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism New York and London: OR Books. 205 pp. ISBN 9781682193037 (Paperback) Derek R. Ford 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Introduction Mike Davis’ The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (2020) is a revised edition of his 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door (Davis 2005), which was written during and about the Avian Flu (H5N1) outbreak. A particularly pathogenic strain of H5N1 virus was identified in chickens and turkeys in 1959 in Scotland and England, respectively, but the virus jumped to humans in 1997 and beginning around 2003 spread vociferously across much of the globe until fading in 2009, although not disappearing. Davis documents the different outbreaks and pathways of H5N1, contextualizing them in relation to other influenzas and SARS, to identify some of the structural geopolitical, social, and economic conditions of their emergence and proliferation and to tease out some of the factors that animate the hyphen between these conditions and the biological. In particular, Davis focuses on the Livestock Revolution, ongoing industrialization, urbanization, and the absence of both intra- and inter-state coordination and planning in the face of intensifying globalization, all of which owe in many ways to the capitalist mode of production.
Structures of the H5N1 Pandemic The scale and severity of the H5N1 virus, Davis (2020: 52) says, was ‘a destiny… that we have largely forced upon influenza’ through ‘human-induced environmental shocks—overseas tourism, wetland destruction, a corporate “Livestock Revolution,” and Third World urbanization with the attendant
* Derek R. Ford [email protected]
1
DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135, USA
Postdigital Science and Education
growth of megaslums.’ The suffering caused by pandemics is, in turn, forced upon people poverty policies of underdevelopment, disinvestment, and dispossession. The story mostly begins in the 1980s with the Livestock Revolution, the large-scale global restructuring of meat production through which massive agrobusinesses displaced subsistence-based and small-scale fishing, hunting, and animal husbandry. Many of the latter were driven out of business as capital increasingly dominated meat production and distribution. Others became contract farmers for agrobusiness, cogs in a vertically integrated global production system whose fates are tied ever more tightly to the fluctuations of the global capitalist marketplace. With more and more animals concentrated in smaller spaces, weak worker protections in the way of safety and health, the conditions for intra- and interspecies viral transmission, and transformation heighten. The larger the scale of production, the wider the radius of distribution, and the faster the overall circulation process takes shape. The densification of animal commodity production was accompanied by a similar densification of people in urban centers. Moreover, massive deforestation brings h
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