The economics of care in pandemic times

This article looks back at the Covid pandemic and, drawing on texts and concepts from the health self-defense movement, defends the assimilation of the negative commons perspective with a communism of disaster or care. In our view, the pandemic raises the question of workers’ exposure to a lethal risk as a result of the constraint of subsisting by working for organizations. As Yves Citton points out in this issue, this state of affairs invites us to imagine other models of social protection adapted to an economy of care for the negative commons. Looking back at the pandemic, using the concept of “diagonalism” proposed by William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, we see that it was the shortcomings of such an economy that helped drive crowds of freelancers to radicalize themselves on YouTube or Twitter, in a conspiritualist mode, while executives could telework via Zoom or Teams. An economy of neglect has thus replaced an economy of care.