We've been witnessing a coordinated ideological project unfold for the last five years, and the left appears to have ceded the field almost entirely.
Between 2020-2021, estimates for excess mortality (globally) range from 5 million to 14 million and beyond.
Pharmaceutical companies raked in hundreds of billions over the same period, some portion of which inevitably was subject to capital spillage -- and during the same time there was vaccine apartheid and a strict favoring of IP against life across the globe.
Wealth inequality became significantly more compounded over the period during and after the official recognition of the ongoing pandemic; and so on.
And what do we now see in this year 2025? An onslaught of books and articles from ostensibly liberal and left-liberal publishers that discuss how a tepid government response with halfhearted lockdowns was a 'overreaction based on bad models and evidence' where the costs outweighed the benefits. That mask mandates were in many cases probably too heavy handed. That the pandemic either was never very deadly in the first place, or quickly became flu-like in its virulence.
See 'An Abundance of Caution' published by MIT Press.
See 'In Covid's Wake', published by Princeton Press.
But based on Biden's term and the sociological production of the 'end of the pandemic', this liberal revisionism has been mounting for years. This rewriting of history comes as no surprise.
What I am surprised about, however, is the vacuum of useful literature on the left -- where is the Marxist analysis of this critical historical moment?
We had a real-time demonstration of:
- How capitalism prioritizes profit over public health
- The mechanics of disaster capitalism in action
- State power mobilized for capital while abandoning workers
- International solidarity crushed by IP regimes
- The manufacture of consent around "acceptable" death rates
But beyond Radhika Desai's Capitalism, Coronavirus and War and scattered podcast episodes, I've found virtually nothing.
Did I miss something? Does history move too quickly for us?
I think the critical thing here is that only a pretty small section of the left is both able and willing to give you the analysis you want.
The NATO-leftist type people (think of the Vaush clique) will just follow whatever the liberal media says. If the liberal media says COVID is over, it's over.
Of the more principled leftists, I think there's a bit of an attention saturation problem, because between Palestine, the broader issue of imperialism, and climate collapse, it already seems like there's too many problems to handle with the rigor and principled criticism that they deserve. Furthermore, many of the leftists in this category will be unwilling to really tackle the COVID question because appropriately stating the scientific socialist position on it (demanding action to protect immunocompromised and elderly folks) runs the risks of fracturing orgs when many people inevitably resist the measures to curb plague rat behavior. Of course, there's the added bit here that it really isn't just about solidarity, if you're a person with a respiratory system you should be taking COVID precautions out of simple self interest.
Think of it like the problem with transphobia 20 years ago. Trans leftists who sufficiently understood gender were always around, but because the liberal left didn't believe they existed, and most of the "principled" illiberal left was of the mind that other struggles were already too much on their plates, they had to make space for themselves inside the left on their own terms over the next decades.