Confronting Agamben on the Pandemic: Biopolitics, Class Struggle and Surveillance Capitalism

Abstract

This paper evaluates Agamben’s observations on the COVID-19 crisis and its consequent crises that seek to revisit issues of the security state. Through this paper, I attempt to probe the contentious relationship between capitalism and human freedom, biological life and its politicisation thereof without taking recourse to the idiom of biopolitics. I seek to enumerate the ways in which Marxist postulates such as ‘class struggle’ and the ‘internal contradiction of capitalism’ are indispensable frames to think along while addressing the concerns of an anticipatory surveillance society by demonstrating the problems and limits of displacing immanent dialectics of antagonisms of class struggle with Agamben’s immanent sovereign logic of reproduction of biopolitics.