Page 8 - Issue 14

usually hidden from view, but crises have their own
ways of exposing their patterns to the naked eye.

Health, according to Michel Foucault, is the
epicenter of modern governance (he called it bio-
power). Through medical and mental health
services, he claimed, the state manages, watches
and controls its population. Although Foucault
would not have put it this way, we may say that
there is an implicit contract between modern
states and their citizens, based on the capacity of
the former to ensure the physical security and
health of the latter.

The crisis highlights two opposite things: that this
contract, in many places in the world, has been
gradually breached by the state, which has seen its
mission instead as enlarging the volume of
economic activity, lowering the costs of labor and
facilitating the transfer offshore of production
(among other things, of such key medical products
as masks and respirators), deregulating banks and
other financial institutions, and generally
responding to the needs of corporations. The
result has been, whether by design or by default,
an extraordinary erosion of the public sector.

The second obvious thing, visible to all, is that only
the state can manage and overcome a crisis of
such scale. Even the mammoth Amazon can do
little more than ship parcels, and even that only
with great difficulty in times like these.