Naomi Klein says it best in this nine-minute video for The Intercept.
The Milton Friedman quote is crucial: "Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." In a crisis is certainly where we find ourselves, and it truly does come down to what ideas are lying around, and who has the platform to disseminate and implement them.
In late-stage neoliberalism, young people are in an especially tough spot, as all we know experientially is global capitalism. Upon the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously predicted, in his essay "The End of History," "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." While he was not completely right about liberal democracy reigning indefinitely around the world, he was on point economically: even China, with an authoritarian Communist leadership, has become the productive engine of the global capitalist market, and all nations have effectively been forced into the interdependent trade networks of global capitalism. We could qualify this is an advanced sub-era of the anthropocene: the capitalocene, in which all human markets around the world have been subsumed into the network of global capitalism (see Donna Haraway on this one).
The homogenization of economic organization bleeds into lived experience, which in turn bleeds into our collective imagination; this process is encapsulated in Zizek's/Jameson's oft-quoted dictum that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Mark Fisher picks up the theoretical baton, expounding on this unsettling premise in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (which you can download for free here for some juicy quarantine reading). He highlights some key apocalyptic/doomsday pop culture touchstones, such as "Independence Day," that illustrate his point. What he means by "capitalist realism" is "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it" (Fisher p.2). "Realism," a sub-genre of fiction, offers possible actual scenarios with verisimilitude. In our current economic and cultural state, Fisher fears that not only is this capacity for imagination atrophied, but that it is definitionally impossible, as there is no real-world referent for the verisimilitude of the fiction to gain its grounding. We are left with fiction without hope of realization.
This is not to say that vivid accounts of alternatives to capitalism in art and in historical reality do not exist: prior to the end of the 20th century, examples abound, such as the science fiction of Ursula K Le Guin and Octavia Butler, or the heyday of the Kibbutz movement. But in the reality of our day, real world instantiations of extra-capitalist living are few and far between.
Now, we are seeing with COVID-19 that 1) not only is "history," used by Fukuyama to mean the ongoing struggle of ideologies for ultimate supremacy over the whole world, far from over, but 2) now is the time to harness the potential of this unprecedented moment to mobilize our imaginations to envision that future toward which history is moving.
Will Hutton wrote in The Guardian about how right "[n]ow, one form of unregulated, free-market globalisation with its propensity for crises and pandemics is certainly dying. But another form that recognises interdependence and the primacy of evidence-based collective action is being born."
Zizek goes even further, stating, "I am not a utopian here, I don’t appeal to an idealized solidarity between people – on the contrary, the present crisis demonstrates clearly how global solidarity and cooperation is in the interest of survival of all and each of us, how it is the only rational egotist thing to do." Not only is this society being born, but it must be born in order to have a chance at survival.
I must note the unfortunate timing, because there is a person who has been imagining alternatives even in before the COVID-19 crisis: Bernie Sanders. Bernie has outlined a concrete vision of the United States in policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. These are not without real-world precedent (he frequently looks to Scandinavia as an example), but it may be near impossible to imagine in the United States. Up to this point, the concreteness of these plans is vital, something to grasp onto considering the abstract, incremental and structural nature of the challenges we face and amid the morass of evasive bureaucratic jargon of political discourse. David Roberts, in this excellent article on the impotence of authoritarian conservatism to fight the virus, chalks this disconnect up to a result of technology outpacing human evolution, causing a divergence or "décalage" between humans and the abstractions underpinning the quotidian phenomena of our lives.
In the present crisis, Bernie's farfetched yet detailed imaginings are rendered actual, material. In his presidential campaigns, Bernie has resonated with people whose daily reality is a prolonged "state of emergency" by the present standards: food and housing insecurity, lack of access to medical care, etc. Until now, their plight has been dismissed as the result of their own decisions or shortcomings (bootstraps rhetoric), or paid only lip service followed by insufficient social/governmental assistance. But now that the US populace in general, regardless of socio-economic status, is experiencing the existential fright of precarity, the only logical solutions seem to be Bernie's; in some instances, the triage we are seeing is the implementation (ironically, from Trump) of some of Bernie's and others' ideas, such as the government checks directly to families (universal basic income, like Yang championed, though only one-time, and now Bernie is advocating regular checks in the crisis) and the suspension of loans (though not indefinitely). But on the personal and community level, people around the country are setting up mutual aid Google Docs, volunteering in their communities to help the most vulnerable, and realizing that this feels good. This form of widespread solidarity does not have to sprout up only in times of emergency: it can be our daily reality if we ditch the deeply-embedded ideological mythology of rugged individualism. (Alas, if we were not so far into the primary process, I believe that the results would be vastly different.)
So, on the individual level, in our close quarantine circles, how can we cultivate this imagination of a better future, and collectively practice radical togetherness in socially responsible ways? And what would radical togetherness look like on the other side of this epidemic, when inevitably we must collectively reconstruct our communities: help small businesses reopen, get youth back to school, etc. Will we ditch our newly-made mutual aid Google Docs, or will they be our new normal?
This is what I will be meditating on in quarantine. I like what Zizek has to say about this free time—non-"productive" for many, as they have been fired or can't work: "Dead time – moments of withdrawal, of what old mystics called Gelassenheit, releasement – are crucial for the revitalization of our life experience. And, perhaps, one can hope that an unintended consequence of the coronavirus quarantines in Chinese cities will be that some people at least will use their dead time to be released from hectic activity and think about the (non)sense of their predicament." (He wrote this before the virus spread dramatically beyond China.) I think about this especially for kids, who can take this quarantine as a break from the never-ending onslaught of formal education. If you can, take some time to dig down, confront those inner demons, and stoke that fire of imagination.
Articles cited for further reading:
– Donna Haraway: "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin" — Environmental Humanities, 2015
– David Roberts: "The moral logic of coronavirus: Why helping people victimized by forces outside their control is a good idea." — Vox, 3/17/20
– Will Hutton: "Coronavirus won’t end globalisation, but change it hugely for the better" — The Guardian, 3/8/20
– Slavoj Zizek: "Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decide" — RT.com, 3/10/20
– Slavoj Zizek: "Clear racist element to hysteria over new coronavirus" — RT.com, 2/3/20
