VERGHESE

Imagine this: You’re stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean, along with a CEO, a doctor, a musician, a student, and an unemployed person. There’s a hole in the floor and the raft is slowly filling with water. It can hold the weight of only five people. One of you has to go. Who do you throw overboard?

The decision we make in this scenario tells us a lot about whose lives we value and why. Take that logic and expand it to a global stage and that, to me, is necropolitics: the calculus behind who gets to live and who must die.

Necro comes from the Greek root nekros, meaning “corpse.” Necropolitics then translates to the “politics of death.” Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes necropolitics as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” In other words, necropolitics is a framework that illuminates how governments assign differential value to human life. The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth. In the United States, if you’re a straight, white, abled, cisgender, wealthy, Christian man, this is great news for you. But the further away you are from those axes of privilege, the less your life is worth under the logics of necropolitics — and the more precarious your existence becomes.

Even if you’ve never encountered the term necropolitics before, you probably already understand it as a gut instinct. Have you heard of “collateral damage”? It’s a phrase we often associate with U.S. bombings in the Middle East. It suggests that some people may have to die to achieve an abstract societal good...Our governments rationalize their deaths as the only means by which the rest of us can lead better lives. This, to me, is the heart of necropolitics: One person’s life comes at the expense of a more vulnerable person’s death. Or, in Mbembe’s words: “The calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.”

In the sinking-raft scenario that opened this article, I would argue that a capitalist will choose the CEOs life over yours or mine in every instance. Capitalism drives necropolitics through the scarcity myth — that, during a global pandemic, for example, there are simply insufficient resources for us all, so some of us have to die. But that doesn’t have to be true. If we prioritize redistributing wealth and taking care of each other, there might be enough for everyone. 

Necropolitics is slow violence. It names the long, drawn-out state of dying that many marginalized people were condemned to from birth. People distanced from the dominant norm are trapped in what Mbembe calls a “death-world”: a form of “social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”

Necropolitics is a useful framework in that it teaches us “how to recognize the deadly workings of power.” It is also, it has to be said, a bleak one. In the face of such overwhelming violence, what can we do? Where do we turn? How can you survive a world that is predicated upon your death? 

Perhaps the only answer is to end this world and start building a new one. “We are meant to perish, but we are not disposable,” writes Che Gossett

Abolition is a radical project. It will require rethinking what we take for granted — capitalism, prisons, borders — and imagining instead a world that works for all of us, not just those born into power. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight, but it isn’t impossible. We can catch glimpses of what this new world will look like even today. During the recent mass power outages in Texas — a crisis of capitalism — mutual aid networks kept hundreds of people alive. People, more so than politicians or the police, kept each other alive. As Arundhati Roy writes, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Abolition is the vehicle to create a new and better world, one brimming with life, not death. A world where all of us can survive the sinking raft: Instead of throwing anyone overboard, we ditch the unsustainable raft and help each other swim to shore.

NAMRATA VERGHESE