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Never Waste a Crisis!

Now is a good time for progressives to think about what we should encourage and what we should resist during the current crisis and in the...

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Here are some articles on COVID-19 which I have found especially insightful.

General

COVID-19 and the Circuits of Capital
"The underlying operative premise is that the cause of COVID-19 and other such pathogens is not found just in the object of any one infectious agent or its clinical course, but also in the field of ecosystemic relations that capital and other structural causes have pinned back to their own advantage."

Coronavirus spells the end of the neoliberal era: what's next?
"If we can change the basis of our global civilization from one that is wealth-affirming to one that is life-affirming, then we have a chance to create a flourishing future for humanity and the living Earth."

Charles Eisenstein - The Coronation
"We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life."

John Keane - Democracy and the Great Pestilence
Among the great lessons of this pandemic is that the four-decades-long era of neo-liberalism is responsible not only for such decadence as the widening gap between rich and poor, compulsory austerity following the near-collapse of the banking system, global warming and species destruction. We now see that blindly pro-market governments have on their charge sheet the running down of public health care systems and shifting health risks and debts onto individuals and households. The scandalous result is that in many settings, including the richest countries on our planet, public medicine is under-prepared and overloaded.”

Global South

Adam Tooze - The Coronavirus is the Biggest Emerging Markets Crisis Ever
"In the West it was the virus that triggered the financial crisis. In the large emerging markets of the world economy ... the financial shock wave is running ahead of the disease. Back to back, the two crises threaten to create an overwhelming maelstrom for emerging markets whose impact on the world economy will be far greater than any rogue U.S. president or trade war."

  • South Africa
Pandemics don't heal divisions -- they reveal them. South Africa is a case in point

Food in the time of coronavirus: why we should be very, very afraid


  • India
"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."


  • Bangladesh

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya - While the virus does not discriminate, health systems do
'terms like "isolation", "quarantine" or "social distancing" have no resonance among the residents. Most publicly available communication and social media posts are copied from Western outlets, meaning they are not translated and lack cultural context.'

Global North

Three possible endgames for Australia ... that might not work elsewhere.




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