COVID-19 and the Left

Elena Louisa Lange is a philosopher and political commentator. She was lecturer and Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Zurich until 2022. She is the author of Value without Fetish: Uno Kōzō’s Theory of ‘Pure Capitalism’ in Light of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (2021) and co- editor of Conformist Rebellion – Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left (2022) and several collections on Asian philosophy. Today, she is the editor-in-chief of Café Américain, a new political magazine.Geoff Shullenberger is a cultural theorist, managing editor of Compact magazine, and host of the Outsider Theory podcast. He was formerly Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, USA. He has written extensively about the intersection of cultural theory and the internet, the decline of academia, conspiracy theory, the recent evolution of a biopolitical technocracy, and more. His work has appeared in various outlets, including American Affairs, UnHerd, Tablet, The New Atlantis, and others.

• Introduction: the tyranny of fear: the historical rupture of the COVID-19 pandemic and the left’s response Part one: Orientation: the politics, culture, and ideology of fear 1. From the void to COVID: explaining the left’s support for pandemic authoritarianism 2. The revenge of the hyperreal: the simulation of crisis and contemporary left politics 3. The return of ‘doublethink’: how George Orwell’s dystopia became the cue for COVID-19 ideology and the left’s power grab Part two: Covid and Emergency Capitalism 4. The rise of the COVID-19 industrial complex 5. Bureaucratic momentum and COVID-19 6. COVID-10 and the emergency loop of implosive capitalism Part three: COVID-19 and the left in Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia 7. The opera of the phantoms: how the Canadian political establishment memed itself into absurdity 8. The professional-managerial class in the UK: managing the ‘Covoid’ 9. The German left as Schmittians: how the state of emergency became an ‘anti-fascist’ paradigm 10. Middle-class consciousness: COVID-19 measures and their social base in Australia