Shortly before the deadline for sending the selected content of this issue of the Community Development Journal to the publishers, the editorial team received a message from Oxford University Press alerting us to the possibility of delays in the publication process due to the dramatic upsurge in COVID-19 infections and deaths in India. Like many other publishers, Oxford University Press outsources much of the journal production process, such as typesetting and copyediting, to India. The notification served as a reminder of the globalization of academic capitalism. More starkly, it signalled the catastrophic contribution of COVID-19 to intensifying what Achille Mbembe (2021) refers to as the ‘vicious partitioning of the globe’. In some parts of the world, mass vaccination has been accompanied by talk of post-COVID-19. Elsewhere there is talk of mass trauma, chaos and indignity as poverty and lack of access to healthcare are revealed to be the most significant pre-existing conditions that increase people’s risk of dying from the virus. Describing the privatization of healthcare in India as a crime against humanity, Arundhati Roy (2021) reported recently that because of the pandemic, oxygen has become ‘the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange’. Despite hellish reports and images from India of makeshift crematoria in which many of those who die from the virus are being cremated, protests organized by those who argue the risks of the virus have been grossly exaggerated continue. According to many of these protesters, instead of living through a pandemic we are being deceived by a ‘plandemic’ orchestrated by the global elite of Big Pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization, and a ‘casedemenic’ of repeated public announcements of the numbers infected by what they claim is a highly treatable minor illness. We need to pay more attention to this kind of organizing.