Zombie capitalism and coronavirus time

Abstract

ABSTRACT At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal conditions to the zombie apocalypse visualized in popular media. Circulating through Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, dystopian photos and videos of abandoned streets, plazas, and malls resonated with harrowing scenes of attacking hordes of zombies in the Netflix series Kingdeom (2019-2020), whose second season premiered when most Southeast Asian cities experienced lockdowns. Global news agencies reported on the unsettling anxiety about contagion from foreign migrants and tourists, from which, despite intensifying social tensions, many ‘developing’ or ‘emerging’ economies in Southeast Asia derive their vitality. If the scholarship about zombie narratives tends to focus on the docile, subjugated bodies of mass labour, critiques of neoliberal capitalism highlight their insatiable, irrational consumerism. In contrast, this article explores how the steep downturns from travel restrictions and citywide lockdowns to fight the outbreak have exposed the dependency of developmental state capitalism for its rapid pace of material growth not only on the flexibility of migrant labour but also on the contingency of speculative investment from overseas. Whereas state capitalism is typically understood to deploy its resources in protected industries and state-owned enterprises to consolidate its political rule, its use of authority now appears to centre on reducing market risk. The resilient temporality of the novel coronavirus has led to a new cyclical capitalist normalcy of surging, declining, and resurging infections, which governments have struggled to manage through varied forms of lockdown and quarantine such as Circuit Breakers (CB) in Singapore, Movement Control Orders (MCO) in Kuala Lumpur, and Enhanced Community Quarantines (ECQ) in Manila, with the failed aspiration of economic stability.