From Roman cities to New York to Gaza, the policing of coexistence is modeled on immunological metaphors that reflect the politics of their times. And while the ecocidal, urbicidal, and, ultimately, genocidal Gaza war signals a return to a model of kinship that demands purity everywhere, various flexible border regimes persist to serve the multiple needs of authoritarian capitalism, as Raj Patel argues in his contribution to the “Kin City” series.
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Among the most reliable indicators of kinship are borders. The most varied and biodiverse ecosystems occur in boundary conditions. Ecotones are where the edges of two worlds come together, and generate the conditions of abundant and deep ecological interconnection. On a large scale, this can look like a mangrove forest or the transition from rainforest to savanna. It can also occur at smaller scales.
Consider the human gut, an intricate ecosystem of boundaries and borders in which humans coexist with between 300-1000 different species of bacteria, along with fungi, viruses and archaea on both sides of the gut wall. These trillion-strong microorganisms, weighing as much as 2-5 pounds, carry 3.3 million unique genes – far more than their human host. Together, they allow humans to digest, excrete, control metabolism, and regulate emotions. It is also home to 70-80% of the human body’s immune cells, squatting the border between the intra- and extra-human world and kin.
The language of immunology and the politics of kin have marched in lockstep. The idea of immunity is a Roman colonial one. It derives from ‘munera’ – the duties that Roman citizens owed to the empire. In the process of conquering city-states, Rome found a compromise for colonized subjects. They would be freed from both the duties of service to the state and the benefits of Roman citizenship. This is why these free cities were Civitates liberae et immunes.
Immunity policing
Immunity is to be of a place and yet not of its governance, to be not-quite-kin. The history of biology reflects the politics of its time. Nineteenth century metaphors for medical immunity used the idea of national identity – of human cells repelling invaders at the border. These metaphors have evolved into an understanding of the immune system as a border patrol in which roving self cells roam the body looking for non-self beings to kill in a battle of kin versus nonkin. Yet, as pioneering biologist Polly Matzinger observed, this can’t be the whole story. If immunity is about self killing all others, pregnancy would be impossible. A child is a different being from their mother, so there must be something else going on than just a simple self-versus-other test.
In the 1990s, Matzinger developed a ‘broken windows’ theory of immune policing, in which the criterion of ‘foreignness’ is less important than whether a new agent is causing trouble: a ‘danger’ theory of immunology. In this model, life circulates in the body under permanent surveillance, which in the event of the slightest hint of trouble, will mobilize violent resources to meet the threat. Matzinger mirrored the policing theory of her day, in which the state, especially in New York City, used state power at the slightest infraction.
Today, a more capacious understanding of the human microbiome has led to a third strand of metaphors. Human and non-human gut bacteria play a critical role in breaking down complex molecules and facilitating the transfer of energy and nutrients across the intestinal wall. Recognizing that there is a vast and teeming ecology within the microbiome, the metaphor of immune response is neither national nor identitarian, but one of exchange across borders. Immune responses are now to be understood as economics-as-security-policy.
Gaza’s more-than-urban metabolism
If the site of the first policing of kinship were Roman cities, and the second wave of immunological metaphors derived from New York, the site of the third can helpfully be understood as pre-war Gaza. The flow of energy, labor, and capital from Gaza into Israel sustained Israeli industries and provided a source of profit, despite the ongoing efforts to isolate Gaza both politically and socially.
Before October 2023, the formal labor market admitted only 10,000 Gazan workers through its membrane – a fraction of the 100,000 who crossed in the 1990s. Their remittances, contributing 15-20% of working families’ income, flowed across a selectively permeable membrane. Yet these workers, earning 40-50% less than their Israeli counterparts, represent only the visible portion of a deeper metabolic relationship. In Gaza, the shadow economy was a means of survival, through tunnels, permit systems, and informal markets. At its peak, the tunnel economy generated $500-700 million annually and represented 25% of Gaza’s GDP. These informal networks handled 40% of Gaza’s total imports.
Israel’s control of Gaza’s metabolism is most evident in its management of basic resources. Gaza received only 30-40% of its energy needs, importing 60% of its electricity from Israel at a cost of $100 million annually. Water flows follow similar patterns of controlled scarcity – 90% of Gaza’s water is unfit for consumption, forcing reliance on Israeli imports at four times the price paid by Israeli consumers. The destruction of water treatment infrastructure, totaling $5.7 billion in damages since 2008, serves as a form of metabolic control, ensuring dependency while extracting maximum profit from the relationship.
Ultimately, though, the metaphor breaks here. Gaza’s relationship with Israel is now no longer one of extraction but of extinction. The famine in Gaza and the destruction of homes and farmland – with 70% of tree crops destroyed after a year of war – will take decades to repair. The destruction of Gaza and its cities is the destruction of the ecological, economic, and social systems on which Gazans depend. Moreover, the extermination of what Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN called ‘inhuman animals’ marks (1) a shift to the older languages of sterilization and annihilation, and (2) a return to a model of kinship that requires purity everywhere and the killing of – as Donald Trump has touted – ‘the enemy within.’
The possibility of radical and egalitarian kinship
It would be a mistake, though, to see these different ways of relating to kin and immunes as mutually exclusive. Perhaps the ultimate geography of immunology is to be found where I live, in Texas, where nationalist, policed, and economically exploited modes exist simultaneously. Texas is home to the most maximally policed workers in Texas: imprisoned people. Through a loophole in the US constitution, prisoners can be put to work as enslaved people, burdened with the duties of the state yet not fully of it, working as prison-laborers to produce food for McDonald’s and Walmart.
Add to this the news of the the re-election of Donald Trump, which will herald the return of the performative cruelty of extermination, an example of nationalism in its fascist style. Trump has promised ‘the biggest deportations in history,’ deepening the regime of detention camps and family separation at Texas’ border with Mexico. Yet not all foreign bodies are deported. The US agriculture system would collapse without undocumented workers. Such workers exist in a liminal space of extraction, economically useful and permissible, but only if they can be hidden from state surveillance networks and their associated mass media exploitation.
These variously flexible ways of policing the boundaries of kinship threaten to destroy its possibility. The duties we owe to each other are being dictated by a dying empire. As we face four years of what is likely to be a fascist presidency in the US, we must defend a universality of kinship to keep the destructive forces of national chauvinism at bay. The possibility of this radical and egalitarian kinship can be the only basis for a transformative anti-fascist politics of mutual obligation and care.