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John Preston & Rhiannon Firth
CORONAVIRUS,
CLASS, and
MUTUAL AID
in the UNITED
KINGDOM
Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid
in the United Kingdom
John Preston • Rhiannon Firth
Coronavirus,
Class and Mutual
Aid in the United
Kingdom
John Preston Rhiannon Firth
Department of Sociology Department of Sociology
University of Essex University of Essex
Colchester, UK Colchester, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-57713-1 ISBN 978-3-030-57714-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57714-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Boris SV / Getty images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 Introduction 1
John Preston and Rhiannon Firth
2 The Viracene and Capitalism 11

3 Classed Practices: Pandemic Preparedness in the UK 29

John Preston
4 Mutual Aid, Anarchist Preparedness and COVID-19 57

Rhiannon Firth
Index113
v
About the Authors
John Preston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He

works on social inequalities and how they are produced and reinforced in
disasters and emergencies. He is the author of several books on disaster
preparedness including Grenfell Tower: Preparedness, Race and Disaster
Capitalism (2019).
Rhiannon Firth is Senior Research Officer in Sociology at the University
of Essex. She works on anarchist utopias, anti-authoritarian social move-
ments and prefigurative politics. She is the author of the book Utopian
Politics (2012) and is writing a second sole-authored book on Disaster
Anarchism (under contract).
vii
1
Introduction
Capitalism has been described as akin to the destruction of space by time

or time-space compression (Harvey 2000). In the world of 1918 news of
pandemic influenza was slow to spread and there were areas of the world
that did not know, until reasonably late in the pandemic, that there was
a disaster on a global scale. Substantive international travel was relatively
rare. Although the ruling class had always indulged in global ‘grand tours’
ships and rail provided the means of mass transit across the globe. The
‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918 was xenophobically and regionally named but had
a truly global spread. COVID-19, similarly, is also a pandemic disease
which spread globally through mass world transit but where information
on the pandemic is also shared quickly through social media and con-
stantly breaking news. Air travel brings about the rapid transit of capital-
ists, tourists and workers around the world and the virus spreads quickly
between countries. Leisure is commodified on a mass scale so that people
are brought together in giant stadia for football matches, racing events or
rock concerts. Work requires mass transit systems so that collectivised
workforces can be brought in and out of cities and towns sharing air and
facilities. The unemployed are required to show up to sign on for benefits
en-masse. Despite the increased efficiency of (underfunded) public health
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Preston, R. Firth, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57714-8_1
2 J. Preston and R. Firth
systems the virus continues to spread globally, accelerated by the creation

and maintenance of the capitalist world market. The shrinking of the
world market through communication and mass transit, concentration
of working-class populations and destruction of national borders as
described in the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 2002) also pro-
duce connected ‘human factories’ for viral production.
Worldwide pandemics are only one cause of human death on a mass
scale. The impacts of global poverty and immiseration, imperialist wars
and environmental devastation are much more effective human and plan-
etary killers. However, global pandemics can have massive and unequally
distributed impacts on mortality and health. The possible source of the
current COVID-19 epidemic has been identified as arising from profit-
able ‘wet markets’ (where live animals are sold) in Wuhan, China, where
the virus jumped from animal (possibly a bat or pangolin) to human
infection. This leap in infection cross-species has been common for other
sources of illness which begin as zoonotic and then progressed to human
to human transmission. In the case of this particular virus that jump
occurred quickly and efficiently. As a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the
virus that causes the disease COVID-19, has much in common with
other viruses of this type such as SARS and MERS. SARS-CoV-2 causes
respiratory infections and ultimately organ failure. It spreads primarily
through respiratory droplets (breath, coughs and sneezes). There is evi-
dence that the virus that leads to COVID-19 can exist on hard surfaces
for some time, particularly plastics, which led to concerns as to whether
the virus can also exist on banknotes and packaging. As SARS-CoV-2 is
a newly discovered virus not much is known about the virus’ epidemiol-
ogy other than that it is highly infectious even (perhaps a matter of weeks)
before symptoms begin to appear. There seems to be a range of illnesses
that might occur from the barely noticeable, through the mild (cough,
high temperature, sore throat) to the serious (difficulty breathing, destruc-
tion of lung tissue and multiple organ failure) and fatal. Primarily older
people and those with pre-existing conditions are impacted by the virus
which has a high mortality rate that exponentially increases with age.
Death and serious illness in the UK from the virus are more likely in
working class, black/Asian groups and those in areas of economic depri-
vation. The virus is potentially in the ‘sweet spot’ where a series of waves
1 Introduction 3
of global outbreaks amounting to 1918 proportions is theoretically pos-

sible and appears to be an increasingly realistic prospect. If a virus ‘burns’
too quickly through human bodies then the chances of spread are reduced.
Ebola, for example, where the death and incapacity rate is high and dev-
astating, has not become a global pandemic partly because victims die
quickly before they can spread the virus. The transmission route for Ebola
is also not as direct as that of viruses that can spread by respiratory means.
Influenza (the flu) spreads more easily as victims are not incapacitated
immediately and due to vaccines and other public measures the death
rate is not high. Less is currently known about transmission of COVID-19
but it seems likely that those infected can spread the disease without even
being aware that they have it as it spreads easily through coughs, sneezes
and surfaces. Unlike influenza there is no cure for COVID-19 and any
antibodies that are likely to develop might only offer short-term protec-
tion against the illness. Public health systems, many of which are already
impoverished by austerity, are quickly overwhelmed by the spread of the
disease as many of those infected will require intensive care beds or com-
plex forms of treatment. Because of its virulence, COVID-19 has taken
hold in various countries. Infections in China accelerated rapidly after
the reporting of the first cases in December 2019 and throughout the first
few months of 2020 there were outbreaks of COVID-19 in nearly every
country with initial ‘hot spots’ in South Korea and Italy. By early March
every country, particularly in Europe and North America, was impacted.
In the United Kingdom (UK) cases are growing at an exponential rate
with the first death in the UK reported on 5th March 2020 accelerating
so that by 12th of May there were 32,065 official deaths in the UK
although there are concerns that this figure is an under-estimate and at
the time of writing ‘excess deaths’ in the UK are estimated at over 55,000.
The UK is likely to have one of the highest death rates in the world by the
end of the pandemic.
This book considers the COVID-19 pandemic through a case study of
how the UK government is currently preparing the population at the
outset of the outbreak in 2020 and reflections on how this might produce
new solutions outside of the market or the state. The framework employed
is influenced by Marxism, Anarchism, class theory, social movement
analysis and critical analysis of preparedness.
In Chap. 2 we consider how COVID-19 is being deployed as an ele-

ment of a continuing class struggle between capital and labour. The argu-
ment is that capitalism creates and maintains capital at a multitude of
scales, including the viral, and that COVID-19 as a virus and its material
and discursive consequences are an active part of capital accumulation,
continuing class struggle and class formation. COVID-19 operates as an
element of class struggle in terms of a ‘war from above’ of the ruling class
in terms of its use as a ‘force of nature’ in eugenics and against surplus
populations, in creating new commodities and markets and as a justifica-
tion for the deployment of an increasingly authoritarian RSA (Repressive
State Apparatus) to ensure that workers continue to labour under increas-
ingly dangerous conditions. Chapter 3 considers the UK’s preparedness
plans as using ‘class practices’ which are tacitly designed to disadvantage
and divide the working class in favour of elements of the middle class and
examines the behavioural science underpinning pandemic preparedness
for COVID-19 uncovering its classed assumptions in terms of how dis-
tinctions, markets and altruism operate. It also considers how social isola-
tion and quarantine function as a classed practice and how government
policies make assumptions concerning housing, social practices and
resources as a form of violence against the working class. Chapter 4 con-
cludes the book by looking at alternatives to neo-liberal methods of deal-
ing with the pandemic through either marketisation, disaster capitalism
or a strengthening of the state and some form of ‘state capture’. Rather,
alternatives around social movements and mutual aid are suggested draw-
ing on anarchist and autonomist (anarchist/Marxist) perspectives.
Although mutual aid is always subject to co-option by state authorities
this book suggests new ways forward for resistance and the building of
autonomous communities in the current pandemic crisis.
In theorising the relationship between COVID-19 and capitalism, class,
crisis and resistance we draw on both Marxist and anarchist theory. In
terms of Marxism, we use Marx (Marx 1976) as well as neo-Marxists such
as Althusser in our arguments but we also draw on ideas from new work
on ‘value’ (Postone 1980, 1993, 2017), value critique (Kurz 2012, 2014)
and open Marxism (Bonefeld et al. 1992). We also use the work of cultural
sociologists who draw on broader, more culturally orientated, manifesta-
tions of class war on the working class (namely Skeggs 2013). We do
1 Introduction 5
not consider the advent of COVID-19 as a significant ‘break’ from capi-

talism (the categories of value, labour and profit are still in operation) as
capitalists remain fixated on the pursuit of profit and the expansion of its
social universe of ‘value’ (Postone 1993) even as they require the state for
bail-outs. Class relations and class struggle are inevitable relations in capi-
talist societies (Bonefeld et al. 1992) which are always antagonistic and
cannot be finally mediated through social reform or the state. In terms of
the latter, the state is not separate from capitalist relations (Postone 1993;
Tenkle 2014) and cannot be repurposed for revolutionary purposes (Kurz
2012). In line with anarchist perspectives a vanguard approach to revolu-
tion is critiqued in favour of autonomous working-class struggle (Kurz
2012) with a sensitivity to the ways in which social policy (in this case
pandemic policy) is used as a weapon against the working class (Skeggs
2013). Class war takes place on multiple levels and through cultural as
well as economic means. Hence the work of sociologists who have specifi-
cally looked at the ways in which cultural manifestations of class power,
and social policy, act as violence against the working class is used.
In the anarchist tradition the condition of resistance is the idea of the
‘social principle’ (an abstract theory), or ‘mutual aid’ (a correlate concrete
practice). Anarchist theory, alongside autonomist Marxism, open
Marxism and value theory, differs from theories that presume the state is
essential. These theories posit the possibility of grassroots agency and the
need to form non-capitalist autonomous lifeworlds to prefigure and build
the conditions for resistance. In the anarchist tradition, a seminal text
that we draw upon is Kropotkin’s (1897) treatise on the historical rise of
the state as a violent process of dispossession, enclosure and destruction
of communal folk knowledge. The state aids the powerful interests of
capitalists by seizing local institutions for the benefit of dominant minor-
ities, imposing servitude before the law, and enforcing conformity of
social roles within institutions (Ibid: 25). The individual is subjected and
deprived of liberties, obliged to forget social ties based on free agreement
and initiative in favour of a system where the state alone is able to create
union between subjects. Kropotkin argues that revolutionaries who seek
to achieve social change through state powers are misguided, because the
essence of the state is to hinder the possibility of free society (Ibid: 10).
All conflicts and projects come to be arbitrated by the state, so one per-
spective is always repressed and silenced (Ibid: 33).
Kropotkin’s alternative to the state is ‘the social principle’ which is the
practice of free association, social solidarity and mutual aid, and he draws
on a very wide range of case studies of human and animal groups to show
that those who are strongest are those where individuals learn to co-
operate and use mutual aid to support one another (Kropotkin 1902).
The social principle is not idealised as conflict-free, but importantly con-
flicts can be debated and resolved without outside force, and problems
large and small can generally be solved without unitarian co-ordinating
authority (Kropotkin 1897). This idea was taken up by the British anar-
chist writer Colin Ward (1973), who we also draw upon in our under-
standing of society, who made the political argument that in much of
everyday life groups like neighbourhood associations and musical subcul-
tures are examples of anarchy in action, even if the groups stated aims are
apolitical, from people with mainstream jobs and lives. Ward’s approach
to anarchism is tolerant and non-sectarian: the point is neither to pursue
pure anarchism nor to build a one-off event, but rather, to build and
expand the field of the social principle across as much of life as possible,
until it gets to the point where it strains at the limits set by state and capi-
tal, and bursts out into the whole of society.
The idea of society as an authentic ‘outside’ to state and capitalist
mediation and control in the form of a different social logic has been
alluded to in different terminology by many different anarchist, anti-
authoritarian, post-structuralist and non-statist Marxist philosophers, for
example Negri’s ‘constituent power’, Holloway’s between ‘power to’ and
‘power over’ (Holloway 2005), Castoriadis’ ‘socially instituting imagi-
nary’ (Castoriadis 1998), Virno’s (2004) multitude and exodus, Agamben’s
(1990) ‘whatever-singularity’ and Deleuze’s concept (1983), drawing on
Nietzsche, of ‘active force’. Deep ecologists and eco-anarchists have
extended the possibility of unalienated relationships beyond humans to
the natural environment (e.g. Zerzan 2012: 23; Merchant 1980), and
feminist and post-colonial thinkers have linked the domination of women
and dispossession of indigenous people to the enclosure and destruction
of local and folk knowledges, the reconstruction of which offers a poten-
tial site of resistance (Federici 2004; Mies 1986). There is also a political
1 Introduction 7
literature on horizontalism in Autonomous Social Movements (ASMs) of

the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with an ethnographic
element that places emphasis on movements that reconstruct direct/
unmediated relationships, showing how these movements do not seek
reformist change through statist structures, nor to seize state power, but
rather to ‘create free spaces in which self-determined decisions can be
made autonomously and implemented directly’ (Katsiaficas 1997: 5; see
also Day 2005; Sitrin 2007; Graeber 2009). All of these ethnographic
accounts echo Kropotkin’s distinction between two different logics: a
social logic of free association and direct, horizontal social relations
defined in opposition to a hierarchical political logic which requires rela-
tionships to be mediated by a state, or emergent states such as a counter-
hegemonic bloc or a fixed identity category. This distinction is an essential
condition of possibility for anarchist theory, since the first premise of
anarchism is that a stateless society is both possible and desirable, and the
way to move towards it is by practicing it in the here-and-now rather than
deferring to the future or relying on the leadership of vanguards.
While there are seemingly irreconcilable differences between most
mainstream forms of Marxism and anarchist theory and practice, which
have played out historically in fundamental splits in the Left, we do not
believe that these splits are insurmountable when it comes to affinities
between certain autonomous and open forms of Marxism, and the par-
ticular strains of socialist and communist anarchism we will also use.
They share general libertarianism and critique of the state; anti-capitalism;
sympathy for new social movements and tendency to broad-based (not
just workplace) resistance, for example supporting ecology, anti-war,
anti-nuclear, feminist, black movements; critique of alienation; valuing
of active horizontal social life-force (commoning, social principle, affin-
ity). They share central emphasis on critique of both state capture and
capitalist commodification. Both valorise broadly horizontalist modes of
struggle (rather than vanguardism) and similar visions of revolution as
arising from prefiguration and direct action and proliferation of everyday
connections and grassroots struggles.
There are also some important differences, which might lead to occa-
sional productive tensions between the two authors of this book, but we
believe nothing fundamentally contradictory. These include differences
in focus on source material and terminology. Open Marxists make heavy

use of Marx when referring to certain Marxian categories, even if used in
nonstandard ways (e.g. capital, totality, class/value-struggle, fetishism),
whereas anarchists tend to rely on canonical anarchist texts, and therefore
rely on anarchist terminology (e.g. totalising or hierarchical relations,
social/political principle, non-hierarchy, dis-alienation). Open Marxists
mostly view the state as a terrain of struggle and a subordinate effect of
class relations, anarchists see it as a primary antagonist. The open Marxist
pole of our perspective has a more explicit tendency towards human mass
collectivism, that the creative life-force exists at a collective level of human
labour, and individual-level phenomena are alienated (which might
restrict which struggles they can embrace and how). Some forms of anar-
chism are happier with small-group actions and subcultural isolation or
self-isolation than open Marxists are; and the more anarchist pole in our
argument is more focused on local community action than national pol-
icy context or population response. By the same token, the open/neo-
Marxist pole is sometimes happier with some forms of conventional
politics, working within institutions and using formal organisations stra-
tegically—whilst resisting and acting against and beyond. Views of ‘the
subject’ are slightly different; with Marxists viewing the subject as socially
constituted, with anarchists agreeing but viewing a kernel of authentic
desires (which form the basis of within-system autonomous resistance).
However, these differences are rather subtle, and they ought not to detract
from the force of the argument, in fact the structure of this book plays on
the particular strengths of the different theories, with Chap. 3 using vari-
ations on Marxist theory to critique the current policy context and to
expose the unequal capitalist relations it supports, and Chap. 4 using
anarchist theories to understand the perspective of autonomous social
movements mobilising mutual aid.
Obviously, this book represents a ‘live sociology’ of a crisis at one point
in time—at what might be called the ‘foothills’ of the pandemic. This
analysis tracked the ‘first wave’ of the pandemic through the initial idea
of quarantine, to the lockdown ‘stay home’ phase until the changing of
messaging and emphasis to ‘stay alert’. All sociology dates but there is
considerable risk in writing a book on this topic when the pandemic
might escalate further so as to make writing on this topic at this stage
1 Introduction 9
seem trivial, or (in an extremely unlikely scenario) the virus may mutate
to a less harmful strain or a miracle vaccine may be discovered. However,
the principles of the work remain applicable to other pandemics and cri-
ses of this type as well as to the ways in which the state and capital attempt
to colonise mutual aid and social movements in a crisis. In terms of
sources, this book was written based on information from government
directives, press articles and news reports that were in the public domain.
No human subjects were involved in the research and this book makes no
use of personal information. It was produced during the first wave of the
coronavirus pandemic in the UK March–May 2020. The authors have no
conflicts of interests in the writing of this book.
Throughout this book we will refer to the disease as COVID-19 but
also refer as ‘coronavirus’ and the ‘virus’. We hope that readers, particu-
larly from the sciences, will be tolerant of the flexibility of our
terminology.
References
Agamben, G. (1990). The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R., & Psychopedis, K. (1992). Open Marxism. London:
Pluto Press.
Castoriadis, C. (1998). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Day, R. J. F. (2005). Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social
Movements. London: Pluto.
Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive
Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.
Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland: AK Press.
Harvey, D. (2000). The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Holloway, J. (2005). Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto.
Katsiaficas, G. (1997 [2006]). The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous
Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Oakland: AK Press.
Kropotkin, P. (1897). The State: Its Historic Role (V. Richards, Trans. 1997).
London: Freedom Press.
Kropotkin, P. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, ed. W. Jonson (2014).

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Kurz, R. (2012). No Revolution Anywhere: The Life and Death of Capitalism.
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(pp. 17–76). Chicago: MCM’ Publishing.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.
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Merchant, C. (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution. New York: Harper Collins.
Mies, M. (1986 [2014]). Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women
in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.
Postone, M. (1980). Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the
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https://doi.org/10.2307/487974.
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University Press.
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Marxian Reading. Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual
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2
The Viracene and Capitalism
Introduction: COVID-19 and the Abstractions

of Capital
It could be argued that the term viracene should be used to refer to the cur-
rent process of viral pandemic destruction but unlike the Anthropocene this
is a short-term crust on a wider planetary devastation and asset stripping of
nature. Any phase that can be constructed is ephemeral when compared to
the devastation of capitalism which sees itself as being eternal, operating on
scales from the viral to the cosmic and unavoidably destructive of humanity
and nature. Both Marxist and anarchist analyses of capitalism contend that,
whether in pandemic or not, capitalism is always in crisis. For Marxists,
crisis emerges from the conditions of capitalist commodity production
which necessitates the antagonistic relationship between labour and capital
(Bonefeld et al. 1992) whereby the substance of value in capitalism (labour
power) consistently undermines its own ability to produce value (Kurz
2012, 2014) as capitalists are compelled (by the profit motive) to replace
labour with physical capital (Marx 1976; Postone 1993, 2017). For anar-
chists, this crisis is exacerbated by the imposition of hierarchical control and
ordering over national territories by the nation state which alienates
© The Author(s) 2020 11

J. Preston, R. Firth, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57714-8_2
and fragments social and community relations to the extent that it renders
people incapable of contributing to decisions that affect their health directly,
and of helping each other through mutual aid (Kropotkin 1897, 1902;
Ward 1973).
With this background, COVID-19, the viracene, appears within a
2020 context whereby the world economy was already in danger of crisis
with a massive backlash against the very capitalist idea of a ‘world mar-
ket’. Trade wars between China and the United States, rising economic
nationalism and isolation (the UK Brexit vote being one example of this)
and declining profits in various economic sectors (including airplane and
automotive production) had produced concerns about what the next area
of capitalist profitability was going to be. Industry 4.0, the idea that
industry could benefit from the principle of platform capitalism, artificial
intelligence (AI) and technological solutions that have revolutionised the
services sector were contenders for this. Another was the ‘green industrial
revolution’, supported by hedge funds and technology entrepreneurs,
which had the advantage of significant public support and a quasi-
revolutionary, but often reactionary (in terms of its comfort with capital-
ist business models), fervour (Bernes 2019). Yet another was the idea of
‘smart cities’ using sensors placed throughout the urban environment to
collect data and use it to automate infrastructure, resource and service
management (Ruhlandt 2018).
In this context of capitalist crisis as an eternal event in capitalism,
albeit with temporal and situational (historical) features, it is difficult to
see whether COVID-19 was a cause of a visible economic crisis or as a
welcome relief for capitalists and states to restate what was already hap-
pening in a capitalist world economy. During February, stock markets fell
by an equivalent which was not seen since the 2008 financial crisis and
commodity prices became increasingly erratic. There were cuts to (already
historically low) interest rates. On supermarket shelves around the world
and in online shops supplies of masks of various kinds, painkillers, toilet
rolls, hand-sanitisers, dried and canned foods and soap disappeared.
Where there were supplies prices were increased and price-gouging
became common as retailers also increased their prices. There was a sud-
den realisation by employers, who had previously been obsessed with
replacing workers with AI and robots, that workers would not be able or
willing to work. In context of pandemic crisis, employers realised that

they really needed workers and employees realised that they could not
necessarily depend on a long-term replacement income from the state if
they had to self-isolate for an extended period of time. In the UK the
state stepped in to temporarily pay a proportion of worker’s wages under
the furlough scheme. Despite efforts by WHO (World Health
Organisation) and other countries to distinguish the origin of the virus
from a particular national context (previous epidemics had been named
‘Asian flu’ or ‘Spanish flu’) there was an increase in xenophobia and rac-
ism. For some organisations this resulted in massive contradictions.
European universities, for example, who depended on Chinese students,
realised that these students would possibly not be able to travel to study.
This resulted in a rush towards offering online courses which would not
necessarily appeal to such students. Circuits of production, consumption
and distribution were disrupted or simply halted.
In the current COVID-19 crisis the whole economic system appears to
be ‘contaminated’ from banknotes to packaging and supply chains.
Labour itself becomes a possible source of viral contamination. Fears that
COVID-19 can spread via money and commodities were particularly
salient in terms of the objectification of capitalist relations. We already
experience ‘things’ in capitalism in a fetishised state (Marx 1976; Tenkle
2014). Commodities appear to be things of use (use value) and of
exchange (exchange value) but are in reality reified forms of human
labour. Money is also a commodity (for exchange) which is the ultimate
objectified form of value. Objectively, these things are human constructs
which (in any case) comprised human essences (labour power). Money
may be already literally contaminated with human sweat, urine and fae-
ces and the whiff of consumed cocaine but it is also embodied flesh in
terms of the labour power that produced the commodities which were
sold for money at a value greater than the money that was applied in their
production (Marx 1976). Similarly, there were fears around packaging as
if it were the only human component of a commodity whereas the com-
modity itself is made by human labour. Pandemics awaken us to the soci-
ality of commodity production in all of its forms and the ridiculousness
of the asocial nature of market relations in capitalism. We realise that we
are part of society and that we are also vulnerable to the relations of
others. We indulge in what has been called ‘panic buying’ by hoarding

certain commodities (particularly hand sanitiser, toilet rolls and pasta in
this current pandemic) whilst rejecting others (such as holidays and air
travel). Butler (2004) considers our sociality in terms of how far others
can be the ‘undoing’ of us and how relations between ourselves and the
boundaries between ourselves and others are permeable but relations of
class allow some (the ruling class) to escape labour and tactile consump-
tion. In a Marxist analysis what is seemingly concrete obscures and inverts
the real social relations. Analogously, Postone (1980) considers the Nazi
Holocaust by analysing how Nazi propaganda concretised the nature of
‘Aryan’ German labour whilst making the labour and investments of
Jewish people seemingly abstract and dishonest. COVID-19 presents an
equally false dichotomy between the abstract nature of money and com-
modities which are asocial and their contaminating properties as concrete
items. People become increasingly concerned with increasing the con-
sumption of what appear to be insubstantial commodities such as ‘con-
tactless’ payment and ‘streaming’ services which enter the house or mobile
phone wirelessly. COVID-19 is a perfect pandemic for an economic real-
ity of the immaterial so as not to ‘connect’ with the reality of physical
money, commodities or others who might harbour the virus. The
COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of the visceral nature of capitalism.
The precarity of working lives becomes central as those of us who are
working class, without inherited wealth or savings, realise that we are liv-
ing paycheque to paycheque. Despite the ways in which capitalism
attempts to interpolate life as frictionless with contactless payments and
unlimited home delivery of a cornucopia of commodities COVID-19
brings us face to face with the reality of commodity production and
demand and supply. In particular, working-class bodies, and working-
class jobs, in areas such as construction and food delivery, become increas-
ingly pathologised as visceral, physical, labour is thought to be a source of
‘contamination’.
Class and Class War as Multi-Dimensional

Capitalism creates its own dimensionality. The essence of capital, as self-
valorising value (Postone 1993) in the abstract is not tied to concrete
ideas of space and time and consistently seeks to destroy and disestablish
those laws (Harvey 2000). This might seem esoteric and even occult. On
the one hand capitalism seems to operate by the rules of classical political
economy and classical physics. An orthodox political economy approach
might envisage workers as selling their labour time to a capitalist who
produces products which are sold for money yielding a profit, the money
is then reinvested by the capitalist. This happens in ‘real time’ in that it
involves concrete production, circulation and exchange (realisation). In a
Marxist analysis capitalism consistently aims to increase exploitation and
economise time and space to maintain profits. Every moment of labour
time, and less than moments if possible, must be maximised. Circulation
and valorisation should take place as quickly as possible, preferably
instantaneously, and most preferably before even the commodity is pro-
duced (Postone 1993). Constantly undermining its own basis, capitalists
invest in technology and creating new commodities and new markets at
every scale (Marx and Engels 2002). Hence capitalism creates new dimen-
sions of commodities, markets and time (what Postone (1993) refers to as
abstract time).
This has two implications. Firstly, that capitalism itself operates at
every level of dimensionality and a level of abstract dimensionality which
is the ‘real’ nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism is both sub-quantum
and universal macroscopic in reach. No physical entity of any scale is
beyond marketisation (although anarchists would argue that where there
is intentionality at the level of desire communities can become autono-
mous unless or until they are repressed or co-opted). Secondly, that
COVID-19, as an entity that exists in a capitalist reality, enables the cre-
ation of a multiplicity of new markets and commodity forms, not only in
the form of a cure, but also in terms of markets in preparedness and
protection, devouring and reconstituting forms of labour in health, care,
protection and policing and creating increased financialisation in futures
and other financial assets. As well as in markets in viral treatments it is
technically possible to gain a form of property right over a virus. For

example, in 2012 Erasmus Medical Centre patented the genetic sequence
of MERS-CoV. There are questions in terms of the extent to which a
virus can be patented without modification, and it may not be possible in
certain geographical territories, but there are already discussions concern-
ing the possibility of patenting elements of SARS-CoV-2. This would be
in terms of aspects of the sequencing of this particular coronavi-
rus genome.
Like any form of property, capitalists attempt to accumulate by dispos-
session (Harvey 2000) by securing a natural form, namely the possession
of properties of the virus, as intellectual property and its exploitation for
future rents and profits. COVID-19, in opening up new markets and
forms of commodity, produces the potential for capitalism to expand its
‘social universe’ of commodities in all directions (Rikowski 2000) but
this also produces new fields and arenas for class conflict. COVID-19
will bring new forms of scientific labour into the enterprise of vaccine
and (potentially) virus production hence a commodity is being produced
on a viral engineering scale with all of the multi-dimensional aspects of
class conflict that exist for other commodities. The viral and anti-viral
industries present a new opportunity for profit and one would expect
finance capital to move from less profitable areas of the economy to the
‘COVID-19’ industry. The mobility and spontaneity of capital and its
flows are (as remarked on in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
2002) a remarkable modernist achievement but also alert us that the
motion of capital is continuous as it is always in crisis and always in con-
flict with the living force of labour (Rikowski 2000). Although capitalism
consistently seeks new markets and opportunities for exploitation, we
would reject the metaphor of a ‘virus’ for capitalism itself and it is not the
one which is appropriate here. Rather, capitalism operates on a multitude
of scales and creates its own scalar nature in terms of the alien dimension
of value. Capital moves between social forms, not in a viral sense, but in
a way that it is inimical to life itself. It is in that sense only that it func-
tions in a way similar to a killer pandemic, in opposition to living labour.
In the UK, as the ‘stay home’ message moves to ‘stay alert’ on 10th May
workers are urged to return to work across various sectors to maintain
capitalist production and circulation. In doing so they risk their personal
safety and health, and that of their families. The ‘sacrifice’ of living labour
into dead labour is one which is, in any case, demanded every day by
capitalism. In working-class lives disease, illness and early death are famil-
iar consequences of class war (and in opposition to this there are gallows
humour, resistance and solidarity) but these are accelerated through
working in a pandemic.
Viruses As ‘Forces of Nature’

Even if COVID-19 cannot always be fully commodified it acts as what
might be called a ‘force of nature’ within capitalist society (Marx 1976).
‘Forces of nature’ are those forces, which might be natural, or of human
origin, which facilitate the functioning of capital in some sense. There are
several examples of this in Marx’s work including natural forces such as
tides, rain and the sun, which can act to speed the manufacture and
transportation of goods or the production of crops and forces of human
origin such as roads and communications infrastructures that can reduce
circulation times and increase the chance that capital investment is valo-
rised in the sale of products. A virus is a tool of capitalist mobilisation in
that it is a ‘natural force’ that propels certain forms of capital. For exam-
ple, it destroys certain branches of industry and leads to new branches of
industry in developing research tools and vaccines and other civilian and
military operations. COVID-19 is becoming part of capital itself in terms
of being inextricably linked to these processes now and in the foreseeable
future. This idea of a ‘force of nature’ separate from capitalism can also
produce an analysis by governments of the virus arising from outside of
capitalism and as a threat to capitalism. The virus appears to be an exter-
nal entity threatening commodity production, circulation and exchange.
Capital (as involving self-valorising value) cannot survive without these
processes. Hence the state can justify ‘extraordinary measures’ to save
capitalism and the notion of worker sacrifice in terms of returning to
work. In the UK there has been an emphasis on loans and other financial
packages to business of an extraordinary level and the changing of laws
and regulations to make capital more flexible. For example, restrictions
on pubs and restaurants being able to deliver takeaway food have been
lifted and safety requirements regarding Personal Protective Equipment

(PPE) for care homes and the NHS (National Health Service) have been
relaxed. The state acts as a form of finance capital but without changing
the centrality of capitalism as a system of value production. This is a
transfer of risk from capitalists to the government. In other countries,
such as Greece, perhaps because of previous austerity which has favoured
a strong state, the approach has focussed more on the national takeover
of private resources and an authoritarian approach but in all Western
countries the nexus between capital, state and authoritarian governance is
equally strong and even welcomed (albeit temporarily) by large propor-
tions of the population.
ugenics, Surplus Population

E
and ‘Viral Immiseration’
Capitalism is contradictory as it needs labour to survive whilst consis-
tently expelling labour as it replaces workers with fixed capital. Even
before COVID-19 capitalists expressed concerns regarding a ‘residual’
population whose jobs would be replaced through technology and new
organisational forms. The substitution of labour by AI, robotics and
machine learning, without new industries to develop jobs, was a com-
mon trope in news media worldwide. A significant part of the move
towards restrictions on immigration and an increasingly populist and
authoritarian agenda was that immigrants could be replaced through
technology. Rather than ‘native’ workers, robots and AI would take over
the role of immigrant labour.
The problem of ‘excess’ labour and technological unemployment is not
new to capitalism. Marx’s use of ‘surplus’ population cuts through several
of his concepts. In many ways, the human host of the unique commodity
‘labour power’ is tolerated by capitalists and life itself is an inconvenience
to capital as well as being an entity that must be tamed if the capitalist is
going to maximise the rate of exploitation. The costs of sickness and
fatigue are frequently passed from the capitalist to the worker or to the
state form where possible. Surplus population also refers to the ‘industrial
reserve army’ of the unemployed, the size of which increases and decreases
according to the demand for labour power in various industries (Marx
1976). It can also refer to those portions of the proletariat whose labour
is not utilised in various industries due to legal or moral restrictions on
the basis of some characteristic (such as age). These various forms of ‘sur-
plus population’ are often the subject of discussions on eugenics that have
re-emerged recently in work on evolutionary biology and psychology, IQ
testing and socio-genomics on the right. However, discourses of over-
population on the grounds of environmentalism have also emerged on
the left.
This is reflected in various ways in the current COVID-19 crisis. Some
politicians have a belief that the virus should be allowed to reap its way
through the population. On the ‘Good Morning Britain’ television pro-
gramme on 9th March 2020, Boris Johnson stated that ‘One of the theo-
ries is perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow
Coronavirus to move through the population without really taking as
many draconian measures’. This rhetoric of a robust population needing
to ‘get things done’ has obvious parallels with the Brexit slogan adopted
by Johnson: ‘Get Brexit Done’. The reporting of the age distribution of
COVID-19 victims shows that older populations (particularly those over
70) are particularly susceptible to the virus. Some forms of reporting in
the media have suggested that this means that COVID-19 is not particu-
larly serious when compared to other infections such as pandemic flu.
Underlying these assumptions is a particularly capitalist view of the
diminished value of human life of those who are older than 70 since they
are not often active in the labour market. In addition, the way in which a
xenophobic portrayal of the virus as affecting people of a particular
nationality such as Chinese people is used negatively in the popular press
and on social media. This has resulted in a number of xenophobic and
racist attacks on Chinese people in the UK. Thirdly, arguments concern-
ing healthy practices and unhealthy areas (e.g. that things will ‘improve’
when the temperature increases and the virus moves to the Southern
Hemisphere) are elements of eugenic thought that enter into media and
social media conversations. All of these elements are part of a capitalist
ideology of the value (or not) of certain populations.
In these circumstances, concerns of social justice are particularly

obscured and the lack of attention to these issues has been previously
remarked on by other authors in their analysis of pandemic prepared-
ness. Some of these issues were foreseen in terms of a future pandemic
influenza epidemic, which could be particularly applied to the
coronavirus:
In preparing to deal with the likely challenges of an influenza pandemic,

including very limited future vaccine supply and lack of availability of
appropriate antiviral medications, all levels of governmental public health
should focus on inherent barriers to a fair distribution of benefits and bur-
dens. These include entrenched racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic dispari-
ties in health outcomes, lack of bidirectional communication, and unequal
access to medical care, as well as the conditions that make these popula-
tions vulnerable in the first place. Even during winters with influenza from
flu strains that have changed only a bit, low vaccination coverage among
ethnic and racial minorities and persons living in and near poverty is a
persistent problem, particularly for hard-to-reach populations (eg, injec-
tion drug users, elderly shut-ins, and undocumented immigrants). Failure
to prepare to respond appropriately to the needs of these populations dur-
ing an emergency can serve to exacerbate racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic
disparities in infectious disease outcomes, and thus may leave even those in
the dominant population in a more vulnerable position. (Kayman and
Ablorh-Odjidja 2006)
Garoon and Duggan (2008) in a critical discourse analysis of thirty-

seven pandemic preparedness plans reveal the way in which the disadvan-
taged are ‘masked and neglected’. None of the plans explicitly referenced
groups who were economically disadvantaged. They suggest that:
Failure to address social as well as biological vulnerability thereby poses the

danger of repeating the differential trends in mortality observed in 1918—
meaning individuals and groups disadvantaged in the status quo ante would
suffer a significantly disproportionate force of mortality. Thus, the plans’
apparently uncontroversial aim of minimizing morbidity and mortality
should in fact raise critical questions: Whose illness? Whose deaths? (Garoon
and Duggan 2008, 1135–1136)
As can be seen, the realm of eugenic policy for pandemics applies to

the classed and socially unjust aspects of the ways in which populations
are expected to be managed. Indeed, it is quite possible that once state
support for workers is cut back, there is a return to austerity and capital-
ists depend on a process of ‘viral immiseration’ (forcing workers back to
work even if they become ill or die from the virus) by reducing wage sup-
ports and benefits to ‘starve’ workers back to dangerous work.
Although the emphasis of this book is primarily on class and hierarchy,
it must be noted that the biopolitical and necropolitical consequences of
the pandemic also apply unequally to people according to structural
inequalities associated with other intersecting characteristics such as race,
gender, ability/disability, age and sexuality. As has been discussed, the
racial and ethnic dimensions of COVID-19 have been emphasised by
some populist politicians, for example, Donald Trump has referred to the
virus as the ‘Chinese Virus’ reflecting fears in the administration of
Chinese domination of trade and a long-standing anti-Asian and nativist
streak in US politics. This is played out at the micro level in terms of
micro-aggressions against Asian people for wearing masks, travelling on
public transport and even physical aggression in some cases. There has
also been a xenophobic backlash on social media against small (primarily
Asian-run) shops in the UK that are selling products such as toilet rolls
and hand sanitiser at high prices. There are also racialised implications for
already disproportionately immiserated communities, particularly (in the
US and UK) the working-class black community, whose lack of access to
good food, housing and community and safety renders them much more
vulnerable to not only the biological dangers of the virus but also to
physically and mentally unsafe conditions during lockdown, and dispro-
portionately repressive security and policing measures if they inadver-
tently break rules that were made without consideration for their
conditions. There are also gendered aspects of the pandemic in terms of
assumptions of who will provide ‘care’ when state resources, such as
schooling, are withdrawn alongside a middle-class emphasis on house-
hold management and home education, as will be considered in the next
chapter.
As the virus has a differential impact on those with certain underlying

conditions and older individuals most governments have provided special
protection for those groups. In the UK as of the end of March 2020 plans
were put into practice to ‘shield’ 1.5 million people from the virus by
advising them to stay at home for twelve weeks with the possibility of
food parcel delivery to their homes. This involves the state making value
judgements and this approach has also been criticised in the UK as being
part of a ‘herd immunity’ approach of reducing social distancing so that
economic activity can accelerate. This policy has also been advocated by
the President of the United States. The ‘sacrifice’ of some individuals for
the ‘greater good’ of the economy has obvious eugenic implications.
Finally, sexuality is indirectly invoked as the HIV epidemic (where gay
men were amongst the original group of victims and which has, homo-
phobically, been linked since with this group) has been cited by a British
politician from the Brexit Party, Anne Widdicombe:
I’m all for sensible precautions but I cannot help feeling that we are going
mad over coronavirus. We have had the scare of SARS, bird flu, Ebola and
of course AIDS. None proved as devastating as feared. We need a sense of
proportion in the face of the financial markets going into meltdown, aero-
planes being grounded and shops shutting their doors. It is nasty but, given
the recovery rate, it is not the Black Death. (The Independent 2020)
To consider HIV/AIDS as a ‘scare’ is to make assumptions about vic-

timhood centred on heteronormative, and anti-scientific, standpoints of
the virus as only impacting on certain populations. There are numerous
ways in which these intersectional characteristics operate with the classed
dimensions of oppression and these will be referred to throughout
this book.
ommodification, Disaster Capitalism

C
and the Repressive State Apparatus
As considered above, at the time of writing capitalism has already pro-
duced a range of new commodities in response to COVID-19 directly
related to health and vaccines but it also produces commodities that are
part of ‘prepping’ for disasters. Prepping has, until recently, been seen to
be an activity which was on the fringe of societies, indulged in by con-
spiracy theorists who often have right wing, or otherwise extremist, views.
The ruling class, who have been buying islands, bunkers and private secu-
rity militias, have made prepping respectable and there are now a whole
range of elite commodity lines for the upper middle classes including
high-quality masks:
“En route to Paris,” Gwyneth Paltrow wrote on Instagram last week,

beneath a shot of herself on an airplane heading to Paris Fashion Week and
wearing a black face mask. “I’ve already been in this movie,” she added,
referring to her role in the 2011 disease thriller “Contagion.” “Stay safe.”
Ms. Paltrow did not pose with just any mask, unlike, say, Kate Hudson and
Bella Hadid, who also recently posted selfies wearing cheaper, disposable
masks. The Goop founder and influencer of influencers instead opted for a
sleek “urban air mask” by a Swedish company, Airinum, which features five
layers of filtration and an “ultrasmooth and skin-friendly finish.” (Williams
and Bromwich 2020)
For the ruling class the virus has displaced environmental crisis, nuclear
war and existential threats of AI as the most prescient crisis. As one of the
authors has discussed previously (Preston 2019) it is the ruling class,
rather than survivalist blue-collar Americans, who are the primary market
for prepping in contemporary crises. It has been reported that the ruling
class are retreating to private islands and bunkers, paying for their own
private tests and treatments and advancing doctors and physicians huge
sums of money to accompany them to their retreats. This allows the rul-
ing class to resist the barriers to travel that have been imposed on other
citizens through the chartering of private flights:
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CHAPTER XXIII
CŒUR DE LION
It seemed as if fortune was anxious to compensate Nancy for the
sudden shattering of her operatic dreams. The very first agent to
whom she went on her return to London greeted her with something
like acclamation.
“Why, Miss O’Finn, I am glad you’ve looked in this morning. Mr.
Percy Mortimer”—the agent’s harsh voice sank to a reverential
murmur—“Mr. Percy Mortimer has had some difficulty with the lady
he engaged to play rather an important part in his new play at the
Athenæum, and his secretary wrote to me to ask if I would send
some ladies to interview him with a view to his engaging one of
them. He requires a tall dark lady of some presence, and of course
with the necessary experience. This would be a splendid opportunity
for you, Miss O’Finn, if you happened to please Mr. Mortimer.”
“Naturally I should like nothing better than to be at the Athenæum,”
said Nancy in a voice that was nearly as full of awe as the agent’s.
“It isn’t so much the salary,” he pointed out. “In fact, Mr. Mortimer
does not believe in paying very large salaries to the actors and
actresses who are supporting him. He thinks—and he is undoubtedly
right—that to have one’s name on the programmes of the Athenæum
is the equivalent of several pounds at most of the other London
theatres.
“Now, don’t talk too much about it before Mr. Mortimer has even
seen me,” Nancy begged.
“He’ll be at the Athenæum this afternoon at half-past three. I’m
only sending along two other ladies. And I think you’re just what he
wants.”
Mr. Percy Mortimer was something more than a great figure of the
London stage; he was an institution. Everybody agreed that should
Her Majesty decide to create another theatrical knight Percy
Mortimer was undoubtedly the one she would select for the
accolade. The prime cause of his renown in England was that if
there was ever any question of choice between being an actor or a
gentleman he would always put good breeding before art. This was
held to be elevating the drama. If by chance the public disapproved
of any play he produced, Percy Mortimer always apologised before
the curtain on the first night and laid the blame on the author. Two or
three years before this date he was acting in a play by a famous
dramatist who became involved in a sensational and scandalous
lawsuit. Percy Mortimer did not take off the play. He owed something
to art. But he paid his debt to good breeding by expunging the
author’s name from the playbills and the programmes.
Nancy had to pass the vigilance of various chamberlains,
constables, and seneschals before she reached the Presence, a
handsome man with a face as large and smooth as a perfectly cured
ham.
“Miss O’Finn?” he inquired graciously, with a glance at her card.
“Of Irish extraction, perhaps?”
She nodded.
“A part is vacant in my new play,” he announced. “The public is
anxious to see me in historical drama, and I have decided to produce
Mr. Philip Stevens’s Cœur de Lion. The vacant part is that of a
Saracen woman who has escaped from the harem of Saladin. It is
not a long part, but it is an extremely important part, because the
only scene in which this character appears is played as a duologue
with myself.”
Mr. Mortimer paused to give Nancy time to appreciate what this
meant.
“Here is the script,” he said. “Perhaps you will read me your lines?”
Nancy took a deep breath and dived.
“Thank you, Miss O’Finn,” said Mr. Mortimer. “One of my
secretaries will communicate my decision to your agent in the course
of the next twenty-four hours.”
He pressed a bell, which was immediately answered by a
chamberlain to whom was entrusted the task of escorting Nancy
back into the commonplace of existence.
And the very next day when Nancy, who was staying at St.
Joseph’s, went to her agent, she was offered the part at a salary of
£5 a week.
Not only was Cœur de Lion a success with the critics, who hailed
Mr. Philip Stevens as the morning-star of a new and glorious day for
England’s poetic drama; but it was a success with the public. This, of
course, made the critics revise their opinion and decide that what
they had mistaken for a morning-star was only a fire-balloon; but the
damage was done, and English criticism suffered the humiliation of
having praised as a great play what dared to turn out a popular
success. One or two papers actually singled out Nancy’s
performance for special commendation which, considering that the
part did not look difficult and that she played it easily and naturally,
betrayed astonishing perspicacity for a dramatic critic. She found
pleasant rooms in St. John’s Wood, quite close to the convent.
Kenrick made several attempts to see her, and on one occasion
waited for her outside the stage-door. She begged him not to do this
again as it might involve her dismissal from the Athenæum, because
one of Mr. Mortimer’s ways of elevating the English drama was to
make it an offence for any of the ladies of his company to be waited
for outside the stage-door.
For three months everything went well for Nancy except that the
expense of London life was a constant worry for her, although she
tried to console herself with the thought that she had already saved a
certain amount of money, and that after her success in Cœur de Lion
she might expect to get a larger salary in her next London
engagement. Otherwise she was happy.
Then one night early in April she was informed by the stage-door
keeper that a gentleman who would not leave his name had been
inquiring for her private address. Nancy supposed that it was Kenrick
again; but the stage-door keeper remembered him well. This was a
much older gentleman with curly white hair who was quite definitely
a member of the profession.
“Of course, I didn’t give him your address, miss. But if he calls
again, what shall I say?”
It was her father. What should she say? Nancy’s conscience had
touched her from time to time for the way she had let her father drop
out of her life ever since that day he had failed her so badly. She did
not know if he was acting in London or in the provinces, or if he was
not acting anywhere. His name had never been mentioned all these
months of touring. On no railway platform had she caught a glimpse
of him as two “crowds” passed each other during long Sabbath
journeys. He might have been dead. And now here he was in her
path. What should she say?
“Ask him to leave his address, will you? And say that I will write to
him.”
If her father dreaded another such a disastrous visit as the one
she paid him four years ago, he need not leave his address. If,
however, he did leave it she would have time to ponder what
response to make.
Michael O’Finn did not call again at the stage-door of the
Athenæum, but two or three days after this his daughter received a
letter from him at the theatre.
544 Camberwell Road, S. E.

2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 17, 1899.
My beloved daughter,
How many times since last we met have I picked up my
pen, how many times have I laid it down again with a
groan of paternal despair! That you had reason to
complain of me I will not deny. My head is bowed before
your just and natural ire. But the sight of your name—your
dear, dear name—although you share the second portion
of it with that least worthy of God’s creatures, your
wretched father—the sight of your name, I repeat, in the
cast of Cœur de Lion watered with hope the withered plant
that in happier days and in the glory of his blossoming
prime gave that tender shoot to the world, which is your
sweet self.
I will not attempt to condone my fault. I will not attempt
it, I say. At the moment when I should have been standing
upon the doorstep of that humble habitation in which I
sojourned for a space to welcome you with open arms and
tears of joy, I was, owing to a combination of unfortunate
circumstances, prone upon my bed in the first-floor front. I
have not to warn you, my child, against the evils of drink,
because in you glows the pure and temperate soul of your
beloved mother. At the same time I should lack all the
noble instincts of paternity if I did not remind you that
“virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish
of it.” That being so, do not allow yourself to be tempted
by even a solitary glass of champagne. Water, pure,
wholesome, pellucid water is the natural element of a
being like yourself. But to come to the point of this letter.
Two years ago, weary of being “a walking shadow, a poor
player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” I
longed to be “heard no more.” I was at that time lodging in
the house from which I write this despairing epistle. In a
moment of folly I proposed to link myself in matrimony with
my landlady’s daughter. The wretched woman accepted
my hand. The Tragic Muse would be rendered dumb by
the task of painting my misery ever since that inauspicious
day. Ay, even Melpomene herself would stammer. One
word, one word alone can indicate a dim and shadowy
outline of my existence, and that one word is Hell.
You will observe that I have resumed after a blank. That
blank I wish to draw over my life for the last two years. But
I have now reached a lower depth, a gloomier abyss,
where in addition to all my other ills the spectre of famine
looms above me. The wolf is scratching at the door. In a
word, unless somehow or other I can raise the sum—a
bagatelle for a Crœsus or a Rothschild, for me a burden
heavier than Atlas bore—the sum of £158. 14s. 3½d.
within the next week, I and my wife and my mother-in-law
will be in the street. I do not for an instant imagine that you
yourself have such a sum handy. You are like your father
only a poor stroller. But it has occurred to me that you
might be acquainted with some fortunate individual who
could advance you this amount to save your father from
destitution in company with the two least attractive
companions that can be imagined for such an existence.
I beg that you will not attempt to visit me. Since I gave
up brandy, this house appears to me as what it
undoubtedly is—a mercenary hovel. Yet I am “fain to hovel
me with swine and rogues forlorn in short and musty
straw.” In a word, I am better off in 544 Camberwell Road
than “to be exposed against the warring winds, to stand
against the deep dread-bolted thunder.”
My beloved Nancy, do your best for me. Overlook my
failings and come to my aid.
“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;

Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg
That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”
These words addressed by the hapless Lear to his

unnatural daughter Regan I take from their context and
utter to one who has ever been a Cordelia.
To that most wretched of earth’s creatures
Her
Father.
Nancy was not deluded by the laboured rhetoric of this letter. She
understood that her father’s need was serious. She had the money
that would relieve him. She must send it immediately. To be sure he
had failed her four years ago, but had she not allowed her bitterness
to make her unnatural? Was she not to blame a little for this
disastrous later phase of his career? Oh, yes, more than a little.
Moreover, that money in the bank, since her break with Kenrick, had
never lain there comfortably. It had never seemed to belong to her as
genuinely as once it did. The sum her father required so gravely was
more than Kenrick could have spent on that Italian adventure of
hers. She took out her cheque-book and sat down at the table. Or
should she go and see him in Camberwell? She read her father’s
letter again. No, it was clear he did not want her to be a spectator of
his wretchedness. But at least she could invite him to her rooms—
yet could she? That would mean talking about Letizia, and perhaps
he would want to see her. Was it very heartless of her not to want
him to see Letizia? After all, he had not suggested visiting her. She
would send him this money and she could decide later what she
should do.
Nancy received a long and emotional letter of thanks, in which her
father said that he was feeling very low, but that without doubt her
rescue of him from the desperate position in which he had been
plunged would rapidly restore him to health. Meanwhile, he begged
her again not to dream of visiting him in Camberwell. When the
warm weather began in May he would come and see his beloved
daughter.
But when the warm weather came in May, Nancy read an obituary
in The Era of that ripe old actor, Michael O’Finn, a fine comedian and
a tragic actor of no mean ability.
CHAPTER XXIV
DECENNIAL
Cœur de Lion suffered from cardiac depression in the heat of July
and ceased to beat half-way through the month. Although Mr. Percy
Mortimer offered Nancy a part in his autumn production, he did not
offer her a higher salary. Not only had she been unable to save a
penny in London; she had had to draw heavily on what remained of
her savings when she had paid her father’s debts. No doubt, if she
stayed on at the Athenæum she should gradually establish herself
as a London actress, but should she ever save any money? She felt
that she lacked the temperament to become a star. Even if she had
had the consuming white-hot ambition, she did not possess the
necessary personality. For one thing she was too useful an actress.
She would always be given parts that were difficult to fill, obviously.
She would never establish herself as the one actress who could play
one particular kind of part. Nevertheless, to refuse a good part in the
forthcoming production at the Athenæum was not an easy thing to
do. Another conspicuous success would mean a rise of salary for the
next production and, were there nothing for her at the Athenæum,
she might surely count on a good engagement at another theatre.
Then there was Letizia in London, and it was so jolly to be able to
see her almost every day. She seemed to grow more amusing and
interesting and adorable all the time. There were many years yet
before she should be wanting that money to launch her on whatever
career she chose. Would she choose the stage? Probably. Plenty of
personality there. With the natural sense of the theatre she must
inherit from both sides she would stand a splendid chance of
becoming a really renowned actress. But what a much greater
chance she would stand if she were not hampered by the urgent
need of a livelihood. Not that Nancy intended her daughter to be
aware of her amateur status. If she chose to be an actress, she
should begin under the impression that there was not a farthing
between herself and starvation in the event of failure. But once she
secured a London engagement, why, then the money to dress
herself, the money to be able to turn up her nose at a small salary,
the money to flick her fingers in the face of any manager—— But
Letizia’s début was a long way off yet. She might not choose the
stage; and was it risking so much for her mother to stay on and enjoy
the amenity of acting in London?
Nancy was on the point of settling for the autumn with Mr.
Mortimer when an actor with whom she had played in two provincial
companies before Bram’s death offered her £7 a week to go out on
tour with him in a repertory of Robertson’s plays—£7 a week in the
country was the equivalent of £10 a week in town. Nancy flung away
any hope of fame, flung away the amenity of the London stage, flung
away the pleasure of seeing Letizia every day, and became once
more a strolling player, wandering the next ten years up and down
the length of England, in and out of Wales, over to Ireland, and
across the border into Scotland. She never sang any more except at
festive gatherings to celebrate some Bohemian occasion; but if she
sang no more on the stage, neither did she play another
adventuress. Her engagements were nearly always with number one
companies for number one towns. Having once achieved £7 a week,
she never acted again for less, and without stinting herself too much
or denying herself a month’s rest she managed to put by £100 every
year.
Until Letizia was twelve she was allowed to spend the summer
holidays with her mother, who was, of course, always on tour in
August, so that Letizia had plenty of experience of theatrical life in
her impressionable childhood. At the age of eleven she fell very
much in love with a good-looking actor of forty-five, a member of the
company with which her mother was touring. At first Nancy was
amused by this precocious passion and had many jokes about it with
Mr. Bernard Drake, the object of Letizia’s adoration. But when,
notwithstanding the bracing air of Blackpool, Letizia began to grow
thin and pale and hollow-eyed and altogether thoroughly love-sick,
Nancy became anxious about her health and begged Drake not to
encourage her little daughter by any kind of “let’s pretend.” The next
week the company was playing at Douglas, and Letizia was no
better in spite of all sorts of amusements and thrills that included a
personal introduction by Mr. Drake to several freaks then being
shown at one of the halls by the sea for which Douglas was famous
in those days.
“What is the matter, Letizia? Aren’t you enjoying your time with
me?”
They were sitting among the heather beyond the town, looking at
the calm sea and the curve of the long marina.
“Oh, yes, I’m enjoying myself terribly,” said Letizia in woebegone
accents. “Only, in another month I shall have to go back to school.”
“But the holidays aren’t half over yet,” her mother pointed out.
“No, not yet,” Letizia sighed. “But they will be over.”
“Would you like to invite Mrs. Pottage to come and stay with us
next week—no, next week is Llandudno and Rhyl—the week after at
Hastings?”
“No, thank you, mother. She’ll only laugh all the time at
everything.”
“Letizia, do not be so ridiculous. It’s only during the last fortnight
that you’ve not been laughing at everything all the time yourself.”
“I don’t think I shall ever laugh again,” Letizia groaned.
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I want so dreadfully to be grown up.”
“Well, you can’t go on moping for the next seven years, my dear.”
“Will I be grown up in seven years?” Letizia asked, brightening.
“That isn’t so very long, is it? I’m more than half-way already....
Mother?” she resumed.
“Yes?”
“When does a bearded lady begin to grow a beard? I couldn’t
suddenly become a bearded lady, could I, when I was grown up?”
“Of course not, you noodle.”
“You’re quite sure?” Letizia pressed.
“Positive.”
“The bearded lady was very nice when I shook hands with her,”
said Letizia pensively. “But I wouldn’t much like to kiss her if I was a
man, would you?”
“Not at all,” Nancy declared with a grimace.
“Mother?”
“What now?”
“Do you think she’d mind if I asked her if she had any bits of beard
when she was eleven?”
“No, darling, I don’t want you to meet those freaks again. I can’t
think why Mr. Drake ever introduced you to them. It was very
naughty of him.”
Letizia turned a pale and reproachful face to her mother.
“I think Mr. Drake is the nicest man who ever lived,” she
proclaimed solemnly. Then in a voice that strove to to be nonchalant,
she asked how old he was.
“About forty-five.”
“Mother?”
“Still another puzzle for poor me?”
“Is fifty-two frightfully old for a man to be?”
“Very old indeed.”
“Too old to marry?”
“Much too old,” said Nancy decidedly.
Letizia uttered a sigh of unutterable despair, and in spite of
everything that her mother could do, in spite of a boisterous visit
from Mrs. Pottage to Hastings, she remained in a state of gloom all
through the summer holidays. Moreover, Sister Catherine wrote to
Nancy half-way through the next term that she was so worried about
Letizia’s health that she thought it would be wise if she went to
Belgium early in the New Year, as London did not seem to be suiting
her. Nancy wondered if she should say anything about her
unfortunate passion for a middle-aged actor, but decided that it might
give a wrong impression to the nuns and kept silence. She was glad
she had, when soon after Letizia’s arrival in Belgium she received a
letter full of excitement and good spirits. The sickness of love was
evidently cured. But that it could endure so long at the age of eleven
made Nancy a little anxious about her daughter’s emotional future.
Four years passed while Letizia was at school in Belgium. There
were changes among the Sisters of the Holy Infancy. Mother Mary
Ethelreda died and was laid to rest in the soil which her ancestors
had held long ago by the sword. Sister Catherine was elected
mother-superior. Sister Rose became head-mistress of St. Joseph’s.
There were no changes in Nancy’s existence apart from the change
every week from one town to another. She never heard of Kenrick
nowadays. He had passed out of her life as if he had never been.
Mrs. Pottage was growing old, and for the first time since Bram’s
death Nancy visited Starboard Alley to celebrate the old lady’s
seventieth birthday.
Aggie Wilkinson was there looking now almost as old as Mrs.
Pottage and in some respects a good deal older, though she was still
alluded to by her mistress as if she were in short skirts.
“Pore little thing, it does her good to get about a bit on those
crutches of hers. She likes a jollification as much as I do myself.
She’s been helping me with the birthday cake, and which I don’t
mind telling you is a proper mammoth and no mistake. It ’ud make
Mong Blong look like a fourpenny lemon-ice.”
Mrs. Bugbird was there, and Nancy thought that she too looked a
proper mammoth, so much fatter had she grown with the years.
“It’s to be a nice cosy little party,” Mrs. Pottage announced. “In fact
we’re all here now except one.”
With this she winked at Mrs. Bugbird, who shook with her
accustomed laughter, though she was now so immense that she
could scarcely fall off any chair, and not very easily fall off a sofa.
Nancy gratified her hostess by displaying a great deal of curiosity
about the missing guest.
“He’s my one and only left,” Mrs. Pottage said. “No, I’m joking. He
isn’t what you’d call a suitor at all. In fact, he wouldn’t suit anybody.
He’s just a nice quiet old fellow called Hayhoe who likes to pop in of
a evening and smoke his pipe in my kitchen. He’s been in Australia
all his life, and when he come home again he found all his friends
and relations was dead and buried. So the pore old boy’s a bit lonely,
and he enjoys himself telling the tale to me about Australia, and
which seems to me from what I can make out of it a much larger
place than what you’d think. And on Sunday to pass the time he
blows the organ. He says that’s the only way he can go to church
without missing his pipe, though whether because the organ has
pipes and to spare or because he’s for ever puffing at the bellows I
never could rightly make out. He’s entertained Mrs. B. and I a lot this
last winter, and he’s very handy with a hammer and nails. In fact, we
call him the jumping kangaroo among ourselves. Hush, here he
comes.”
Perhaps Mr. Hayhoe was abashed by the presence of a stranger,
for he certainly did not jump about at all that afternoon, but sat small
and silent in a corner of Mrs. Pottage’s room until he was called
upon to help cut the cake, which he did with the air of performing a
surgical operation.
“Well, I shall certainly do my best to live a bit longer,” Mrs. Pottage
declared when she was responding to the good wishes of her
guests, “for the longer I live, the more I enjoy myself. Oh, dear, I do
wish I’d have been a month or two younger though, and then Letitsia
could have been with us this afternoon. She has been away a time.
Talk about Brussels sprouts, she will be a Brussels sprout by now,
and no mistake. You mark my words, Mrs. Bugbird, that child’ll come
home a walking maypole.”
And certainly Letizia did seem the most enormous creature to her
mother when they met again, with her skirts half-way between her
knees and her ankles and her dark-brown wavy hair in a tight pigtail.
“Fancy, having a flapper for a daughter,” Nancy exclaimed.
“I know, isn’t it too perfectly beastly, mother. I hope Sister Rose will
let me fluff my hair out again. After all, I’m only just fifteen, and I
don’t want to be grown up before I need be. But I don’t expect she
will. She was always the strictest of the lot. I can’t think why they
made her head-mistress of St. Joseph’s.”
Sister Rose felt that it was her duty to try and quell some of
Letizia’s exuberance, and throughout the next year Nancy was
getting letters from her daughter about “rows.” With all her strictness
Sister Rose seemed much less capable than Sister Catherine of
keeping her pupils in order; or perhaps it was that Letizia was now
one of the big girls and consequently involved in much more serious
escapades than those of the juniors. Then came the most
tremendous row the school had ever known, according to Letizia.
St. Joseph’s School,

Sisters of the Holy Infancy,
5 Arden Grove,
N. W.,
May 15, 1906.
Darling Mother,
There’s been the most frightful row, and it looks as if
one or two of us will get the boot. I don’t think I shall
because I’m not in up to the hilt. But it’s all very
thunderous, and Reverend Mother has been sent for to
deal with matters. What happened was this. You know the
backs of the houses in Stanwick Terrace look down into
our garden? Well, one of the girls—I’ll mention no names
because a deadly system of espionage has been
instituted—we’ll call her Cora which sounds an evil and
profligate name. Cora met a youth, well, as a matter of
fact, he’s not such a youth, because he’s left Cambridge.
So he must be about 22. Cora met him during the Easter
Hols, and was most fearfully smitten. So they arranged to
correspond. In fact she considers herself engaged to him.
Which of course is piffle, because she’s only sixteen. She
asked me to be one of her confidantes now, and later on a
bridesmaid, and get hold of her notes. Oh, I forgot to say
that this youth lives in Stanwick Terrace. So, he used to
put them under a flower-pot on the garden wall. But the
silly idiots weren’t content with notes. They found that they
could easily signal to one another from their rooms, and
they arranged a code. Two candles in the window meant
“My darling, I love you madly”; and all that sort of piffle.
Cora used to work her messages with the blind, and I and
Joan Hutchinson, the other girl who shares a room with
her, got rather fed up with her pulling the blind up and
down in a passionate ecstasy. So I said, “Why don’t you
go out and talk to him over the garden wall? We’ll let you
down with a sheet, which will be rather a rag.” As a matter
of fact that’s just what it was; because the beastly sheet
busted, and there was poor Cora dancing about by the
light of the moon in a nightgown and a mackintosh. Sister
Margaret, who has apocalyptic visions every night,
thought Cora—oh, I’m sick of calling her by a false name,
and anyway if some stuffy old nun does open this and
read it, well, I hope she’ll enjoy it. I do hate espionage.
Don’t you? We’ve only had it here since Sister Rose
succeeded to the throne. Well, Sister Margaret was
looking out of her window just as the sheet busted and
dropped Enid Wilson—that’s the girl—down into the
garden. She at once thought it was a miracle, and rushed
to Sister Monica who sleeps in the next room and banged
on her door and said. “Oh, sister! Our Lady has just
descended into the garden.” Tableau vivant! There’s a
picture for you! Of course Joan and I were simply in fits.
Anyway there’s the most terrific row on that the school has
ever had. Enid is convinced that she’s going to be
expelled. Investigations by the authorities have discovered
all about her darling Gerald. Apparently one of the
gardeners found a note and gave it to Sister Rose. Joan
Hutchinson and I are in pretty well to the hilt for letting
Enid out of the window, and so at any moment you may
receive a curt note from Reverend Mother to say that I am
incorrigible and please accept delivery.
Heaps of love,
Your sinister child
Letizia.
That’s what Sister Rose thinks I am. She said to me, “I

cannot help thinking, Letizia, that you have played a very
sinister part in this sorry affair.”
Nancy immediately wrote a stern letter to Letizia, reproaching her

for not appreciating what the nuns had done for her, and by the
same post she wrote to Mother Catherine, pleading for a lenient view
of what she assured her was really more a thoughtless prank than a
serious and premeditated piece of naughtiness.
Perhaps Mother Catherine decided that Sister Rose’s methods
tended to make her pupils rebel against them by outrageous
behaviour. At any rate, Sister Rose went to take charge of the house
at Eastbourne and rule the indigent maiden ladies provided for
therein. Sister Perpetua came down from Beaumanoir to be head-
mistress; and there were no more letters from Letizia about rows, for
Sister Perpetua, like Mother Catherine, was never strict for the sake
of strictness, but wise and holy and human.
That year Nancy was acting in the North, so she spent Christmas
at Beaumanoir with Mother Catherine. Snow was lying thick on the
moors when she arrived. It reminded her of that Christmas eleven
years ago when Mother Mary Ethelreda was still alive.
Mother Catherine had changed very little with passing time. Her
tranquil azure eyes had lost none of their fiery compassion, none of
their grave and sweet comprehension. By half-past three when
Nancy arrived at the convent a dusk heavy with unladen snow was
creeping over the moor, and the candles were already lighted in the
Reverend Mother’s parlour.
“I have been so distressed over Letizia’s behaviour,” said Nancy. “I
cannot think what happened to her last spring.”
“Don’t upset yourself about her, my dear child,” Mother Catherine
replied, patting Nancy’s hand. “She is quite herself again now, and in
any case it was really nothing more than the normal exuberance of
youth. Frankly, I am pleased to find her relatively much younger now
than she was before she went to Belgium.”
“But I was so shocked at her apparent ingratitude,” Nancy sighed.
Mother Catherine shook her head.
“She is not ungrateful. You must remember that she has been at
school many, many years now. I can easily understand that St.
Joseph’s must be seeming irksome, and that is one of the reasons
why I am glad to have this chance of talking over with you a plan that
is in my mind. I must tell you that dear Mother Mary Ethelreda left the
Community very well endowed, and there is a fund set apart for the
benefit of any girls who show any kind of artistic promise. They are
to be helped to achieve their ambition, no matter what it may be. As
you know, Letizia has definitely made up her mind to go on the
stage....”
“She has not said so to me,” Nancy interrupted.
“Well, that of course is just what you would expect. Parents and
teachers must always expect to be suddenly confronted with the
inexplicable reserve of the young. Just as she wrote you a full
account of that foolish business with Enid Wilson and Joan
Hutchinson, so she has given me her confidence about her career. I
fancy that the instinct to entrust a secret to an outsider is a normal
one. You would be expected to regard her theatrical hopes with a
professional eye just as I should be expected to regard her
escapades with a professional eye.”
Nancy nodded her agreement with this.
“Very well,” Mother Catherine went on, “if Letizia is going on the
stage it is important that she should now concentrate on deportment,
elocution, dancing, singing, and all the graces that will adorn her
vocation. Another of our pupils longs to paint, and another who
shows signs of having a really lovely voice wishes to become a
singer. I propose to send these three young cousins of the Muses for
a couple of years to Italy with a dame de compagnie. Thus each one
will be able to study what will most help her afterwards.”
“To Italy!” Nancy exclaimed.
“I don’t think Letizia will ever have a voice as good as her
mother’s,” the nun said, with a smile. “And that reminds me, will you
sing Adeste Fideles for us at the midnight Mass?”
“Oh, I never sing nowadays,” Nancy replied, the tears standing
bright in her eyes at the thought of the delight that was in store for
that little daughter—a walking maypole now perhaps, but still so
much her little daughter.
“But you must sing for us,” Mother Catherine insisted. “We want to
hear your voice roll out above our thin notes. It is so dreadful, this
news that the French Government has forbidden midnight Mass in
any of the French cathedrals or churches this year. What woes that
wretched country is calling down upon itself! It will hearten us to hear
your voice singing that wonderful old hymn.”
Nancy felt that it would sound like affectation to refuse after this,
and into her voice at midnight she put all the triumph, all the
gladness, all the gratitude in her mother-heart.
So, for the next two years Letizia was writing home to England the
most absorbing accounts of Rome, where she and her companions
spent most of their time, though on different occasions they visited
all the famous cities of Italy. While up and down the length of
England, in and out of Wales, over to Ireland, and across the border
into Scotland wandered her mother.
CHAPTER XXV
THE COMMON CHORD
Nancy was considerably startled when Letizia at the age of
nineteen entered the chorus of the Vanity Theatre. She had old-
fashioned ideas about the dignity of her profession, and the chorus
of the Vanity did not appeal to her as a worthy or suitable medium for
the début of an actress who wanted to take her career seriously.
“Oh, but it’s so reassuring, mother,” Letizia exclaimed. “Can’t you
understand how reassuring it is not to be chosen for your talents, but
simply, solely, and entirely for your looks?”
“Yes, but the girls in the Vanity chorus are such a mixed lot. And I
don’t like their outlook on life. It’s nearly always hard, mercenary,
and, well, to speak quite frankly, my dear child, immoral.”
“I’ll be the shining exception,” Letizia vowed.
“Ah, yes, it’s all very well to say that. But you’ll soon be liable to
take your tone from your surroundings, and become like the rest of
them. Dear, it’s no use for me to pretend that your engagement at
the Vanity is anything but a dreadful disappointment to me after your
education, because it is—a dreadful disappointment.”
“Mother, try to believe I know what I’m doing. I’m not proposing to
remain a Vanity girl. But the Vanity chorus is just what I require after
such a careful bringing up. It will cure all the prunes and prisms of
convent life; it will give me poise; and it will teach me the way of the
world, of which at present I’m really hopelessly ignorant. I’m only just
nineteen, and I must look fairly nice already or Mr. Richards would
never have engaged me.”
Nancy contemplated her daughter. She had not turned out so tall
as she gave promise of being when she came back from Belgium.
She was a full inch and a half shorter than her mother, and much,
much slimmer. She had the fine Oriano profile with her mother’s vivid
complexion and rich blue eyes ringed with a darker sapphire, and
her mother’s deep-brown wavy hair. Yes, she certainly did look “fairly
nice.” But still, the Vanity chorus—it was a disappointment. Nancy
had made up her mind that Letizia should begin her stage
experience by going out on tour with some sound Shakespearian or
Old Comedy company. She would not earn much in the way of
salary, but that would teach her how to be careful with money. And
then after a couple of years of knocking about the provinces and
playing all sorts of parts she could concentrate upon getting a
London engagement and setting out to be famous. Now without
taking anybody’s advice Letizia had gone off and interviewed John
Richards and been engaged by him for the Vanity chorus. It was
obvious that she could not live on her salary in such surroundings,
which meant that her mother must give her an allowance if she was
to be protected against the difficulty of trying to live up to a standard
beyond her means without being exposed to temptation. And Nancy
did grudge her savings being drawn upon to maintain a position in
the Vanity chorus. However, the harm was done, and she was too
wise to offer any more opposition for fear of making Letizia decide
out of contrariness that the Vanity chorus was the end of an actress’s
ambition. So, she offered her an allowance of £20 a month and put
off on tour with a determination to save an extra pound a week from
her own salary of £7. Of course, she never told Letizia that her
allowance was being drawn out of her mother’s savings, but let her
understand that it had been left for that purpose by her father.
The memory of Lettie Fuller and her short swift career upon the
Vanity stage, bright and light as the dance of a butterfly through the
hours of a Summer morning, should still be so fresh in the minds of
play-goers that there is a kind of embarrassment in writing about it.
Anyway, Lettie Fuller was our Letizia, and in the years 1910 and
1911 she was the spirit of youth and London as no doubt to-day that
elusive and lovable spirit is incarnate in some other young woman.

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Defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom :

Islam and Secular Citizenship in the Netherlands,

Inclusive Young Adult Fiction Authors of Colour in the

ISBN 978-3-030-57713-1 ISBN 978-3-030-57714-8 (eBook)

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2 The Viracene and Capitalism 11

3 Classed Practices: Pandemic Preparedness in the UK 29

4 Mutual Aid, Anarchist Preparedness and COVID-19 57

John Preston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He

Capitalism has been described as akin to the destruction of space by time

© The Author(s) 2020 1

systems the virus continues to spread globally, accelerated by the creation

of global outbreaks amounting to 1918 proportions is theoretically pos-

In Chap. 2 we consider how COVID-19 is being deployed as an ele-

not consider the advent of COVID-19 as a significant ‘break’ from capi-

literature on horizontalism in Autonomous Social Movements (ASMs) of

in focus on source material and terminology. Open Marxists make heavy

Kropotkin, P. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, ed. W. Jonson (2014).

Introduction: COVID-19 and the Abstractions

© The Author(s) 2020 11

willing to work. In context of pandemic crisis, employers realised that

others. We indulge in what has been called ‘panic buying’ by hoarding

Class and Class War as Multi-Dimensional

technically possible to gain a form of property right over a virus. For

Viruses As ‘Forces of Nature’

lifted and safety requirements regarding Personal Protective Equipment

 ugenics, Surplus Population

In these circumstances, concerns of social justice are particularly

In preparing to deal with the likely challenges of an influenza pandemic,

Garoon and Duggan (2008) in a critical discourse analysis of thirty-­

Failure to address social as well as biological vulnerability thereby poses the

As can be seen, the realm of eugenic policy for pandemics applies to

As the virus has a differential impact on those with certain underlying

To consider HIV/AIDS as a ‘scare’ is to make assumptions about vic-

 ommodification, Disaster Capitalism

“En route to Paris,” Gwyneth Paltrow wrote on Instagram last week,

544 Camberwell Road, S. E.

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;

These words addressed by the hapless Lear to his

St. Joseph’s School,

That’s what Sister Rose thinks I am. She said to me, “I

Nancy immediately wrote a stern letter to Letizia, reproaching her

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2 The Viracene and Capitalism 11

3 Classed Practices: Pandemic Preparedness in the UK 29

4 Mutual Aid, Anarchist Preparedness and COVID-19 57

Introduction: COVID-19 and the Abstractions

Class and Class War as Multi-Dimensional

Viruses As ‘Forces of Nature’

ugenics, Surplus Population

Garoon and Duggan (2008) in a critical discourse analysis of thirty-

ommodification, Disaster Capitalism