[WSMDiscuss] [EXTERNAL] Re: Covid19: dead end to more of the same, or fork in the road?

Sun Apr 12 11:46:04 CEST 2020

Hi Tord,

Thanks for that!

And very good to hear that this isn’t so strong in your circles. With the US and UK so much in decline, the tendency of their parliamentary lefts to define themselves as the global centre of political gravity is … problematic. And I suppose in Ireland we’re particularly exposed to that for linguistic reasons as much as anything.

Thanks,

Laurence

Well written Laurence!

"In a sense this is fair enough – readers want to consume a product, and something like a Guardian long read is a prescribed form for a given audience: the think-y members of its largely Anglophone, to-the-left-of-liberal audience, looking to consume a certain kind of experience in the ten minutes they give to it. To ask a piece like this to propose movement strategy is a bit like asking the same of a TV box set.
But what marks the weakness of much of our movements, I think, is the extent to which activists circulate these pieces as though they might offer hope to hang on to – as though we are not, in fact, managing to sustain our own “intellectual means of production”, but gain pleasure from seeing “one of ours” in the Guardian, singing in the right key."

The last part I do not see much in our environmental, peace and solidarity circles in Sweden and or international connections. But I can guess there is a a lot anglophone clickbait people like that as you say so. And among the left you find a lot of obsession about Corbyn, Sanders or whatever is the recent hope for statecentric liberal left to believe there is hope for parliamentarian gains.

Less so in our circles that rather believe in simultaneous struggles in all countries beyond statecentrism or the other anglophone comical strategy, think globally act locally, long live grassroots and their local projects that I from above can write about. They do have an audience in Sweden as well together with the latest UN win win strategy together with corporations. But I do not see much of them either, they have their own ecochambers and seldom touch upon issue of opposing making public sector, nature and working condition a commodity or opposing wars.
Tord Björk
email: tord.bjork at gmail.com<mailto:tord.bjork at gmail.com>, skype: tordbjork, tel: +46 (0)722 15 16 90
address: Götgatan 7 A, 29133 Kristianstad, Sweden

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 12:41 AM Laurence Cox <Laurence.Cox at mu.ie<mailto:Laurence.Cox at mu.ie>> wrote:
I share some of Jai’s feelings here – notably the “we who?” question.
Solnit writes brilliantly and inspiringly. Hope In the Dark is a fantastic piece of work. This one – understandably given the speed of events – is less so. There are inaccuracies (she is wrong about Ireland and about the Black Death). More to the point, there is also a mawkishness that doesn’t suit her:
We are only in the early stages of this disaster, and we are also in a strange stillness. It is like the Christmas truce of 1914, when German and English soldiers stopped fighting for a day, the guns fell silent and soldiers mingled freely. War itself paused.
And then war continued, with renewed force.
It doesn’t help, of course, that her examples are relentlessly US-centric, because they have to find light in a disaster:
The 2008 financial collapse led to 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising, which prompted a new reckoning with economic inequality and a new scrutiny of the human impact of exploitative mortgages, student loans, for profit-colleges, health-insurance systems and more, and that in turn amplified the profiles of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose ideas have helped pull the Democratic party to the left, towards policies that will make the US fairer and more equal.
“That aged well”, as they say.
But the bigger difficulty is with the “we” this is addressed to. It isn’t written for a movement vanguard of any kind; it is written to be consumed. It has been extraordinarily painful this past few weeks to see the sidelining of agency in so much that radical writers have produced: the repeated use of the preacher’s “we” simultaneously to decry “our” past sins and to invoke the possibility of “our” future awakening on the basis of some putatively common feeling – which exists no more in the Guardian’s English home than in the US or Australia where so much of its global readership lives. That fake “we” sits alongside the mechanical determinism of “bad thing X (the virus) will cause good thing Y” – which, as Gramsci observed a century ago, speaks to moments of despair but not for moments of active challenge to power.
This specific piece doesn’t erase agency altogether – but Solnit places her hope in the equivalent of “the next generation”, people experiencing a quasi-religious shift in meaning as a result of crisis, becoming better and more human. It is of course true for some – but as we can see anywhere in the world that people have experienced “the proximity of death in shared calamity”, there is no automatic effect of this kind. I’m not sniping to say that it may be an effect of privilege, and of being able to choose to encounter these situations as a visitor, to interpret them in this way, a bit like people who volunteer in hospices for religious or spiritual reasons. Their reasons may be good and the help is surely welcome – but how they experience them is probably not how most staff, patients or family experience them. One of the few reliable outcomes of repeatedly experiencing the proximity of death in shared calamity is trauma.
I live in a country marked by the mass graves and empty fields of a famine that killed an eighth of the population, forced another eighth into emigration within a decade, and another quarter over the decades that followed. Whole villages and in some cases wider areas were depopulated for ever; to this day you can walk into the hills and see the lines where starving people tried to grow food in the years that led up to the famine, and died, or left. Many towns and villages in affected regions only have a quarter the population they had before the famine. Half a century later, folklorists discovered Ireland as the last great peasant country in western Europe (etc.) and devoted huge effort to collecting its legends, customs and folktales. The famine was almost entirely absent from the stories that were told. The scale of the trauma overwhelmed the ability to narratise it – except occasionally to insist that those who died by the roadside were strangers, denying what in a world used to death from poverty was the most shameful fact – that the community had not been able to help its own.
Crises are deeply human, but that also means that we experience them *specifically*, not as a generic human experience – though in my experience white Americans and English people are particularly prone to mistake their own experience for universal ones, and have a media and publishing industry that places this fragment of humanity at the centre of the story. This same crisis is not being experienced in the same way everywhere, and will not be responded to in the same way everywhere.
But when you are selling a story to a commercial audience, “writing your coronavirus piece”, the rhetoric demanded by the medium takes over. You write for the imagined “we”, you talk about a notionally shared experience, you present the hope that is required by the genre in terms of some determinism or some magical solution. (Two other variants are to say that the virus will provoke a crisis of the established order which must have X outcome, or that it shows that we must … do whatever the author already thought was a good idea before the virus).
In a sense this is fair enough – readers want to consume a product, and something like a Guardian long read is a prescribed form for a given audience: the think-y members of its largely Anglophone, to-the-left-of-liberal audience, looking to consume a certain kind of experience in the ten minutes they give to it. To ask a piece like this to propose movement strategy is a bit like asking the same of a TV box set.
But what marks the weakness of much of our movements, I think, is the extent to which activists circulate these pieces as though they might offer hope to hang on to – as though we are not, in fact, managing to sustain our own “intellectual means of production”, but gain pleasure from seeing “one of ours” in the Guardian, singing in the right key.
That dependence on other people’s media, and on genres geared to passive consumption (there are also theoretical / academic versions, and radical publishing ones, and “cookbooks of the future”), frightens me. Our continued inability to talk to each other, and to ask “what shall we do, together?” is in itself a pretty sure sign that it will be other people, and other agendas, that determine what comes next. Writing without agency – or with magical agency only – is a secondary effect of this.
Laurence

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Hi Brian…
            Very frankly, the ‘And yet…’ was just a sudden, last-moment add-on.  I had been through a long and exhausting day, and was very moved by Rebecca’s essay, and wanted to get my reply off to you and the list.  But there was something nagging - in my mind, in my soul – and so the best I could do at that moment was to say this...
            I’ve now had a chance to read her essay again, and am going to try and articulate at least some of what I think that nagging feeling was about.
In short, I said that because while remaining very beautiful, there’s also a certain innocence about her essay, such as in the following passage, which worries me :
… When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light. We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible while the ice of the status quo was locked up. We may have a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production and our future…
Yes, we might; but there are so any questions here.  First, who is this ‘we’ that Rebecca is referring to here, anyway ?  There are so many people out there at the moment who are struggling just to be able to survive, whose presents and futures have been crushed and destroyed, and who – in short - are not (at the moment, and like some of us are) having the luxury of enjoying the bluer skies that have appeared, and who are not going to, I suspect, be able for a long, long time to enjoy experiencing the clarity of vision that she portrays here so movingly….  And so I’m left with the feeling that she is really talking to a privileged minority who will survive the present epidemic all but untouched, and who have the strength and the wherewithal to ‘see’ and to act on that.
            Though there is a point at which she seems to be signalling a wider landscape –
“For many of us in the developed world, what has changed most immediately is spatial”
 -, for me her essay is also essentially North-centric.  But we aren’t and can't all be universal, and so I set this aside.  But I think that what I say above is surely true even for the North… and the structural location of the ‘we’ that comes across from the following passage is, for me, worrying :
When we are no longer trying to unlink ourselves from the chain of a spreading disease, I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about. Perhaps we will appreciate the value of direct face-to-face contact more. Perhaps the Europeans who have sung together from their balconies or applauded together for their medical workers, and the Americans who came out to sing or dance on their suburban blocks, will have a different sense of belonging. Perhaps we will find a new respect for the workers who produce our food and those who bring it to our tables.
Can you see what I mean ?
Second, there is also an innocence – that surprises me, frankly, given earlier work of hers that I've seen - where she also seems to all but ignore the depth to which the virus of capitalism and the project of neoliberalism has penetrated ‘us’ / such huge populations of the world, and the degree to which ‘we’ have now been programmed to ‘want’ to return to what we were doing before (and to just assume / understand / perceive that as the *only future that we can move to), to how we were consuming before, to how we understand ourselves and the world around us and to ‘enjoy’ it….  And where huge systems of artificial intelligence are now already in place all around us, in every facet of our lives, to penetrate us, and keep a watch on us, and ‘help’ us do this.  (And which, sadly, in most parts of the world we are surrendering to…)  And so where her doing this – and crucially, not talking about it at all - seriously worries me.
And there's also a certain hopeful innocence in her writing about how things might unfold, such as in the following :
I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
(‘It is to be hoped…’ ??  Really ?)
For myself, I suspect the ‘we’ who will enjoy this new clarity of vision may be a very small minority.  As I see it, there’s nothing inherently wrong with speaking to a minority, but she then – I think – needs to look beyond that and at the strategic tasks that this privileged minority then has before it.  And the gigantic nature of this task, of unprogramming and freeing, but without simultaneously struggling, as John Holloway has written, to ourselves then wanting to take power-over; which is a freedom struggle of a new kind.  As I see it though, this then is very different from the landscape that she has painted here.
            (Let me make clear that by using the term ‘minority’, I’m not signalling some kind of vanguard necessarily emerging – though this too is indeed what might happen, and which we also have to guard against.  I’m here referring here just about the minority – most of whom will belong to the privileged classes and castes – who will survive and ‘emerge’ well enough to be able to do this, relatively unencumbered… )
            None of this is to get away from the haunting beauty of her words; but I think – though I almost hate to say this - that we also need to not be so entranced by beauty that we lose our critical edge; for instance, with regard to this stunning sketch that she does :
There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup.
But stand back and look at this passage, and reflect on it…. “May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells…” ??  I know that this is an open statement, and hope, and it’s beautiful in that way; but we surely also know how stacked the world is…
Yes, I confess, Brian, I know I am badly afflicted with criticalitis.  But… what to do ?
Jai

On Apr 10, 2020, at 9:16 PM, Brian K. Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com<mailto:brian at radicalroad.com>> wrote:

"And yet?”.  Was not that precisely her point, Jai.  ?

Brian
On Apr 10, 2020, at 1:07 PM, Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net<mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net>> wrote:

Friday, April 10, 2020

Thanks you for posting this, Brian.  It’s very beautifully written, and deeply moving, and meaningful.  And clarifying….
            And yet…
            Jai

On Apr 10, 2020, at 11:49 AM, Brian K Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com<mailto:brian at radicalroad.com>> wrote:

~ apologies for cross-postings ~

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit
'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope
 In the midst of fear and isolation, we are learning that profound, positive change is possible.

Rebecca Solnit<https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rebeccasolnit>Tue 7 Apr 2020  | | The Guardian
Disasters begin suddenly and never really end. The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be what they were at the outset of this year. The particulars are startling: companies such as GE and Ford retooling to make ventilators, the scramble for protective gear, once-bustling city streets becoming quiet and empty, the economy in freefall. Things that were supposed to be unstoppable stopped, and things that were supposed to be impossible – extending workers’ rights and benefits, freeing prisoners, moving a few trillion dollars around in the US – have already happened.
The word “crisis” means, in medical terms, the crossroads a patient reaches, the point at which she will either take the road to recovery or to death. The word “emergency” comes from “emergence” or “emerge”, as if you were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient. The word “catastrophe” comes from a root meaning a sudden overturning.
We have reached a crossroads, we have emerged from what we assumed was normality, things have suddenly overturned. One of our main tasks now – especially those of us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties – is to understand this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make possible.
A disaster (which originally meant “ill-starred”, or “under a bad star”) changes the world and our view of it. Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges. Change is not only possible, we are swept away by it. We ourselves change as our priorities shift, as intensified awareness of mortality makes us wake up to our own lives and the preciousness of life. Even our definition of “we” might change as we are separated from schoolmates or co-workers, sharing this new reality with strangers. Our sense of self generally comes from the world around us, and right now, we are finding another version of who we are.
As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were having trouble focusing and being productive. It was, I suspected, because we were all doing other, more important work. When you’re recovering from an illness, pregnant or young and undergoing a growth spurt, you’re working all the time, especially when it appears you’re doing nothing. Your body is growing, healing, making, transforming and labouring below the threshold of consciousness. As we struggled to learn the science and statistics of this terrible scourge, our psyches were doing something equivalent. We were adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world.
________________________________
The first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected. In fact, disasters, I found while living through a medium-sized one (the 1989 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area) and later writing about major ones (including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear catastrophe<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/24/the-school-beneath-the-wave-the-unimaginable-tragedy-of-japans-tsunami> in Japan), are crash courses in those connections. At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t.
I often think of these times as akin to a spring thaw: it’s as if the pack ice has broken up, the water starts flowing again and boats can move through places they could not during winter. The ice was the arrangement of power relations that we call the status quo – it seems to be stable, and those who benefit from it often insist that it’s unchangeable. Then it changes fast and dramatically, and that can be exhilarating, terrifying, or both.
Those who benefit most from the shattered status quo are often more focused on preserving or reestablishing it than protecting human life – as we saw when a chorus of US conservatives and corporate top dogs insisted that, for the sake of the stock market, everyone had to go back to work, and that the resultant deaths would be an acceptable price to pay. In a crisis, the powerful often try to seize more power – as they have in this round, with the Trump Department of Justice looking at suspending<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/donald-trump-coronavirus-emergency-powers-abuse> constitutional rights – and the rich seek more riches: two Republican senators<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/20/republican-senators-sold-stocks-before-markets-plunged-on-coronavirus-fears-reports> are under fire for allegedly using inside information about the coming pandemic to make a profit in the stock market (although both have denied wrongdoing).
Disaster scholars use the term “elite panic” to describe the ways that elites react when they assume that ordinary people will behave badly. When elites describe “panic” and “looting” in the streets, these are usually misnomers for ordinary people doing what they need to do to survive or care for others. Sometimes it’s wise to move rapidly from danger; sometimes it’s altruistic to gather supplies to share.
Such elites often prioritise profit and property over human life and community. In the days after a huge earthquake struck San Francisco on 18 April 1906, the US military swarmed over the city, convinced that ordinary people were a threat and a source of disorder. The mayor issued a “shoot to kill” proclamation<http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/killproc.html> against looters, and the soldiers believed they were restoring order.
What they were actually doing was setting inexpert firebreaks that helped fire spread through the city, and shooting or beating citizens who disobeyed orders (sometimes those orders were to let the fires burn down their own homes and neighbourhoods). Ninety-nine years later, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s police and white vigilantes did the same thing: shooting black people<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/new-orleans-reaches-settlements-for-police-shootings-after-hurricane-katrina> in the name of defending property and their own authority. The local, state and federal government insisted on treating a stranded, mostly poor, mostly black population as dangerous enemies to be contained and controlled, rather than victims of a catastrophe to be aided.
The mainstream media colluded in obsessing about looting in the aftermath of Katrina. The stock of mass-manufactured goods in large corporate chain stores seemed to matter more than people needing food and clean water, or grandmothers left clinging to roofs. Nearly 1,500 people died of a disaster that had more to do with bad government than with bad weather. The US Army Corps of Engineers’ levees had failed<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/decade-after-katrina-pointing-finger-more-firmly-at-army-corps.html>; the city had no evacuation plans for the poor, and President George W Bush’s administration failed to deliver prompt and effective relief.
The same calculus is happening now. A member of the Brazilian opposition said<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/tp-captain-corona> of Brazil’s rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro: “He represents the most perverse economic interests that couldn’t care less about people’s lives. They’re worried about maintaining their profitability.” (Bolsonaro claims he is trying to protect workers and the economy.)
The billionaire evangelist who owns the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby claimed divine guidance<https://www.businessinsider.com/hobby-lobby-reportedly-leaving-stores-open-message-from-god-2020-3> in keeping his workers at their jobs when businesses were ordered to close. (The company has now closed<https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hobby-lobby-closes-stores-defying-coronavirus-stay-home/story?id=69975963> all its stores.) At Uline Corporation, owned by billionaire Trump backers Richard and Liz Uihlein, a memo sent to Wisconsin workers said: “please do NOT tell your peers about the symptoms & your assumptions. By doing so, you are causing unnecessary panic in the office.” The billionaire founder and chairman of payroll processing corporation Paychex, Tom Golisano, said<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/29/bankers-trump-economy-coronavirus-deaths>: “The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people.” (Golisano has since said his comments were misrepresented, and has apologised.)
Historically, there have always been titans of industry who prized the lifeless thing that is profit over living beings, who paid bribes in order to operate unhindered, worked children to death or put labourers in mortal danger in sweatshops and coal mines. There were also those who pressed on with fossil fuel extraction and burning despite what they knew, or refused to know, about climate change. One of the primary uses of wealth has always been to buy your way out of the common fate, or, at least, it has come with a belief that you can disassociate from society at large. And while the rich are often conservative, conservatives more often align with the rich, whatever their economic status.
The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits on the pursuit of self-interest.
Ultimately, a significant portion of conservatives and corporate leaders regard science as an annoyance that they can refuse to recognise. Some insist they can choose whatever rules and facts they want, as though these too are just free-market commodities to pick and choose from or remake according to one’s whims. “This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis,” wrote<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump-evangelicals.html?fbclid=IwAR1ChJXKIYTvBcrDKcjwU3UJJ6Dj1SeAbA82KPoTvRlYR2IphLKj8qZ_dzQ> the journalist Katherine Stewart in the New York Times.
Our rulers showed little willingness to recognise the ominous possibilities of the pandemic in the US, the UK, Brazil and many other countries. They failed in their most important job, and denying that failure will be a major focus for them. And while it may be inevitable that the pandemic will result in an economic crash, it is also turning into an opportunity for authoritarian power grabs in the Philippines, Hungary, Israel and the US – a reminder that the largest problems are still political, and so are their solutions.
________________________________
When a storm subsides, the air is washed clean of whatever particulate matter has been obscuring the view, and you can often see farther and more sharply than at any other time. When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light. We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible while the ice of the status quo was locked up. We may have a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production and our future.
For many of us in the developed world, what has changed most immediately is spatial. We have stayed home, those of us who have homes, and away from contact with others. We have withdrawn from schools, workplaces, conferences, vacations, gyms, errands, parties, bars, clubs, churches, mosques, synagogues, from the busyness and bustle of everyday life.
The philosopher-mystic Simone Weil once wrote to a faraway friend: “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” We have withdrawn from each other to protect each other. And people have found ways to help the vulnerable, despite the need to remain physically distant.
My friend Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate campaigner, wrote to me from the Philippines, and said:
“We are witness today to daily displays of love that remind us of the many reasons why humans have survived this long. We encounter epic acts of courage and citizenship each day in our neighbourhoods and in other cities and countries, instances that whisper to us that the depredations of a few will eventually be overcome by legions of stubborn people who refuse the counsel of despair, violence, indifference and arrogance that so-called leaders appear so eager nowadays to trigger.”
When we are no longer trying to unlink ourselves from the chain of a spreading disease, I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about. Perhaps we will appreciate the value of direct face-to-face contact more. Perhaps the Europeans who have sung together from their balconies or applauded together for their medical workers, and the Americans who came out to sing or dance on their suburban blocks, will have a different sense of belonging. Perhaps we will find a new respect for the workers who produce our food and those who bring it to our tables.
Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains.
I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” Wordsworth wrote<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us>, a little more than 200 years ago. Perhaps this will be the moment that we recognise that there is enough food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education for all – and that access to these things should not depend on what job you do and whether you earn enough money.
Perhaps the pandemic is also making the case, for those who were not already convinced, for universal healthcare and basic income<https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/17/universal-basic-income-ideas-are-part-of-emergency-coronavirus-plan.html>. In the aftermath of disaster, a change of consciousness and priorities are powerful forces.
A dozen years ago I interviewed the Nicaraguan poet and Sandinista revolutionary Giocondo Belli<https://www.theguardian.com/profile/giocondabelli> for my book on disaster, A Paradise Built in Hell. What she told me about the aftermath of the 1972 earthquake in Managua – that, despite the dictatorship’s crackdown, it helped bring on the revolution – was unforgettable. She said:
“You had a sense of what was important. And people realised that what was important was freedom and being able to decide your life and agency. Two days later you had this tyrant imposing a curfew, imposing martial law. The sense of oppression on top of the catastrophe was really unbearable. And once you had realised that your life can be decided by one night of the Earth deciding to shake, [you thought]: ‘So what? I want to live a good life and I want to risk my life, because I can also lose my life in one night.’ You realise that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes.”
I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.
________________________________
I have mostly written about 20th-century disasters, but one analogy a bit further back comes to mind: the Black Death, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population, and, in England, later led to peasant revolts against war taxes and wage caps that were officially quashed, but nevertheless led to more rights and freedoms for peasants and labourers. In the emergency legislation passed in the US in March, many workers gained new sick-leave rights. Lots of things we were assured were impossible – housing the homeless<https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/oakland-hotels-housing-the-homeless-during-coronavirus-pandemic/2264355/>, for example – have come to pass in some places.
Ireland nationalised its hospitals, something “we were told would never happen and could never happen,” an Irish journalist commented<https://twitter.com/newschambers/status/1242518486150197248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1242518486150197248&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F2020%2F03%2F26%2Fireland-nationalizes-hospitals-duration-coronavirus>. Canada came up with four months of basic income<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52022506> for those who lost their jobs. Germany did more than that<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/world/europe/coronavirus-Berlin-self-employed.html>. Portugal decided to treat immigrants and asylum seekers as full citizens<https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/portugal-grants-migrants-and-asylum-seekers-full-citizenship-rights-during-covid-19/> during the pandemic. In the US, we have seen powerful labour agitation, and results. Workers at Whole Foods, Instacart and Amazon have protested at being forced to work in unsafe conditions during the pandemic. (Whole Foods has since offered workers who test positive two weeks off on full pay; Instacart says it has made changes to safeguard workers and shoppers, while Amazon said it is “following guidelines” on safety.) Some workers have gained new rights and raises, including almost half a million Kroger<https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/kroger-grocery-worker-in-texas-receive-pay-raises-new-benefits-during-coronavirus-outbreak/2343540/> grocery store workers, while 15 state attorneys-general told Amazon<https://www.cnet.com/news/state-ags-tell-amazon-to-boost-paid-sick-leave-during-coronavirus-crisis/> to expand its paid sick leave. These specifics make clear how possible it is to change the financial arrangements of all our societies.
But often the most significant consequences of disasters are not immediate or direct.
The 2008 financial collapse led to 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising, which prompted a new reckoning with economic inequality and a new scrutiny of the human impact of exploitative mortgages, student loans, for profit-colleges, health-insurance systems and more, and that in turn amplified the profiles of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose ideas have helped pull the Democratic party to the left, towards policies that will make the US fairer and more equal. The conversations stirred by Occupy and its sister movements across the globe incited more critical scrutiny of ruling powers, and more demands for economic justice. Changes in the public sphere originate within the individual, but also, changes in the world at large affect our sense of self, our priorities and our sense of the possible.
We are only in the early stages of this disaster, and we are also in a strange stillness. It is like the Christmas truce of 1914, when German and English soldiers stopped fighting for a day, the guns fell silent and soldiers mingled freely. War itself paused.
There’s a way that our getting and spending has been a kind of war against the Earth. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, carbon emissions have plummeted<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-pandemic-leading-to-huge-drop-in-air-pollution>. Reports say the air above Los Angeles, Beijing and New Delhi is miraculously clean. Parks all over the US are shut to visitors, which may have a beneficial effect on wildlife. In the last government shutdown of 2018-2019, elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco took over a new beach<https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-elephant-seals-point-reyes-20190523-story.html>, and now own it for the duration of their season of mating and birthing on land.
________________________________
There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.
But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure.
But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit. If you are overwhelmed – well, it is overwhelming, and it will take decades of study, analysis, discussion and contemplation to understand how and why 2020 suddenly took us all into marshy new territory.
Seven years ago, Patrisse Cullors wrote a sort of mission statement for Black Lives Matter:
“Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.”
It is beautiful not only because it is hopeful, not only because then Black Lives Matter set out and did transformative work, but because it acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering. The sadness in the depths and the fury that burns above are not incompatible with hope, because we are complex creatures, because hope is not optimism that everything will be fine regardless.
Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do is return to things as they were.
Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it. It is, I believe, what many of us are preparing to do.

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____________________________
Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa
jai.sen at cacim.net<mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net>
Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900)
CURRENT / RECENT publications :
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press<http://www.pmpress.org/>
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press.  Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN<https://www.amazon.in/dp/9387280101/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1522884070&sr=8-2&keywords=movements+of+movements+jai+sen>, MOM1Flipkart<https://www.flipkart.com/the-movements-of-movements/p/itmf3zg7h79ecpgj?pid=9789387280106&lid=LSTBOK9789387280106NBA1CH&marketplace=FLIPKART&srno=s_1_1&otracker=search&fm=SEARCH&iid=ff35b702-e6a8-4423-b014-16c84f6f0092.9789387280106.SEARCH&ppt=Search%20Page>, and MOM1AUpFront<http://www.authorsupfront.com/movements.htm>
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press<http://www.pmpress.org/>

SUBSCRIBE TO World Social Movement Discuss, an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum on social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global).  To subscribe, simply send an empty email to wsm-discuss-subscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net<mailto:wsm-discuss-subscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net>

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____________________________
Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa
jai.sen at cacim.net<mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net>
Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900)
CURRENT / RECENT publications :
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press<http://www.pmpress.org/>
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press.  Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN<https://www.amazon.in/dp/9387280101/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1522884070&sr=8-2&keywords=movements+of+movements+jai+sen>, MOM1Flipkart<https://www.flipkart.com/the-movements-of-movements/p/itmf3zg7h79ecpgj?pid=9789387280106&lid=LSTBOK9789387280106NBA1CH&marketplace=FLIPKART&srno=s_1_1&otracker=search&fm=SEARCH&iid=ff35b702-e6a8-4423-b014-16c84f6f0092.9789387280106.SEARCH&ppt=Search%20Page>, and MOM1AUpFront<http://www.authorsupfront.com/movements.htm>
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press<http://www.pmpress.org/>
SUBSCRIBE TO World Social Movement Discuss, an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum on social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global).  To subscribe, simply send an empty email to wsm-discuss-subscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net<mailto:wsm-discuss-subscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net>

________________________________________
** Inspired by the World Social Forum, WSMDiscuss – the successor to a list named ‘WSFDiscuss’ started in 2005 - is an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practice, and theory of social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global), including the World Social Forum.  Join in ! **
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