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COVID-19 has momentarily reversed our collective myopia: it is now easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world. But Fredric Jameson, to whom this phrase is often attributed, also left us with a warning. Increasingly, he speculated, we see “the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” — in other words, the terminal logic of capitalism is apocalyptic. As the pandemic undoes capitalism’s logic, and the political establishment increasingly fights to preserve it, the future forks into new realms of political possibility. Our response could slingshot the world toward a better future, but it could equally accelerate the conditions for its decline. Since the outbreak of the crisis, the threat of economic collapse has been the guiding anxiety among the political establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. Stock markets are plunging, airlines are pleading for bailouts, and the price of oil is falling to historical lows. “This feels much worse than 2008,” said Jason Furman, one of Barack Obama’s top economic advisers. The response has flung wide open the “Overton window” of what is up for discussion. In the United States, Republicans could soon outflank Democrats in providing Social Security: Trump has suspended evictions and foreclosures, a measure that Obama refused to support even as millions were evicted from their homes in the wake of the financial crisis. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to do “whatever it takes” to rescue crisis-hit companies — echoing former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi’s infamous vow to rescue the euro at the expense of Greece’s economic sovereignty. In the UK, Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s stimulus package increased twice in the few days this article was being written. “We’ll find ourselves implementing most of Jeremy Corbyn’s program,” one Tory official said. But as the human toll mounts, the pressing need for a social response is becoming clearer. According to SurveyUSA, by March 19, some 9 percent of working Americans had already been laid off as a result of the virus, and one in four have had their hours reduced. From sick leave to medical bills, rent, and credit payments, many will struggle to see through an extended quarantine. And that’s in the United States. In India, where 90 percent of the workforce is either self-employed or casual labor, the devastation still to come is difficult to imagine. The coronavirus seems to be setting the bases for a seismic, civilization-defining shift. Ideas that were derided as fanciful just months ago are now rapidly shaping a new common sense — one that privileges people over profit, favors state intervention, and emphasizes the need for global solidarity. “Conventional capitalism is dying,” analysts at the Australian asset management firm Macquarie Asset Management commented, adding that we are headed toward “something that will be closer to a version of communism.” If this particular claim is a little hyperbolic, this situation clearly is ripe territory for the Left — but one that is also fraught with peril. In the neoliberal imagination, it is precisely moments of exception that legitimize a break with the technocratic norms of economic governance in favor of state intervention. When that moment passes, the status quo ante is not only expected to return — it is set up to return with new vigor as the exceptional crisis measures reinforce established power structures. From the United States to the United Kingdom, the interventionist, right-wing state could usher in a new era of state-led capitalism: a program of public handouts for megacorporations that leaves workers — quite literally — to die, while failing to address the climate and environmental catastrophes that loom on the horizon. The most urgent task for the Left today is to avoid ceding the narrative of crisis to the Right. We live in crisis every day: under capitalism, Walter Benjamin insisted, the state of emergency “is not the exception but the rule”. And if the Left’s demands are normally oriented toward the rebalancing of power in our political economy, the crisis must amplify those demands — not by competing for who can provide the largest payout to the quarantined, but by contesting the very terrain of exception. The Left’s case must not be that political change is needed as a response to the state of crisis, but that the crisis is itself a product of a system that for decades has privileged the few over the many. In other words, the Left needs to shift from a mode of reaction to a mode of invention — designing the responses that will carry us out of the crisis while planting the seeds for a postcapitalist future.

Toward a Politics of Solidarity The measures necessary to provide relief to the vulnerable are not difficult to envision. Spain has requisitioned all private hospitals, putting them under the control of regional health authorities. Economic and social measures to support small businesses, independent workers, and the unemployed have been implemented in countries such as France, Belgium, and Italy. In the United States, the implementation of an “emergency Universal Basic Income” (UBI) is seriously being considered to curb the economic impact of the coronavirus on everyday people. Grocery workers in several states are being classified as “emergency workers” to receive benefits such as childcare. We can expect similar policies to appear across the globe. But these measures are not auguries of a progressive future. Rather, they are expressions of a system structurally incapable of coping with the calamity before it — these are piecemeal emergency measures that struggle to plug gaps in employment, housing, health care provision, logistics chains, stock prices, and so on, without redressing their underlying causes. In other words, they are policies that attempt to redress market failures — not to move beyond the constraints of a market-based economy. As Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation , capitalism’s marketization of land and labor disembedded the economy from the principles of social life. But, as COVID-19 makes abundantly clear, society cannot be regulated by markets alone. The frenzied search for total speed under globalization has prioritized the flow of labor, goods, information, and capital over the well-being of workers and the environment. As the wealthy board their private jets, and CEOs of multinational companies continue to stall coronavirus relief bills, those quarantined in their neighborhoods look on from their balconies at the world they have been left with. Indeed, there is much to learn from looking at those left out of the political response — the homeless, undocumented, or refugee and migrant populations, who are weathering the pandemic without societal support. As the European Union closed its borders, it doomed the refugees in Lesbos to an uncertain fate as they are confined to camps with substandard sanitary conditions. It would take only one case of COVID-19 to spark an uncontrollable string of deaths. In Italy, as shelters are closing, the homeless are being fined for being outside and testing positive for the virus. The pandemic makes tangible the deep friction between the necessity of material equality and a prevailing political ideology that ensures prosperity for the few. The Left’s response must be to unwind the structures of global inequality that contribute both to the virus’s spread and to its lethality. That response begins by marshalling the new norms established during the state of exception — the wide fiscal space for public spending, the expansion of the social safety net, and the demand for solidarity — toward a recovery that is as just as it is sustainable. As we begin to emerge from quarantine, the most pressing impacts will be on people: months without a job, many will struggle to get by even in countries with robust social safety nets. But if the pandemic strengthens the ability of capital to discipline workers, our response to it must not be to weaken the mechanics of exploitation. It must be to strike at their very heart — permanently dismantling work’s grip on our lives. The rush for increased automation and robotization of industries adds impetus to this project. Automation already threatens to displace millions of jobs, and has only increased since the COVID-19 crisis: Chinese companies are scrambling to automate production to replace quarantined workers. Others will undoubtedly follow suit. The first demand for recovery, then, must be to restore the workweek incrementally. As we exit quarantine, workers must force a radical shortening of working hours — building up toward, at most, a four-day week with no reduction in pay. There is ample evidence that a four-day week enhances productivity and well-being, and nations might find themselves with happier citizens and a more vibrant economy as a result. It also cuts emissions through reductions in infrastructure use and travel. But, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams stress in their book, Inventing the Future , the most important benefits are structural. The reduction of working hours strengthens the bargaining power of workers and unions: as working hours go down, so does the supply of labor. The demand for a shorter workweek could then be a key defense against the consolidation of state-backed monopoly capitalism. As politicians across the aisle recognize the need for a financial safety net during the coronavirus crisis, the precedent has been set for schemes such as UBI to become implemented long-term. One principle behind the UBI is that it contests the disciplining power of wage labor, freeing people to choose jobs that are rewarding over those that are well-paid. It is, then, a corollary to the demand for a shorter workweek. But as our movement has advocated, a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) offers a more progressive pathway to guaranteeing that we share in the benefits of innovation and technological progress. UBD would be financed by the very companies benefitting from technological change — industries left relatively untouched by the COVID-19 outbreak. The strengthening of labor’s bargaining power can unlock other demands. As COVID-19 sees states scramble to secure testing, treatment, housing, or other social necessities for their increasingly vulnerable populations, the Left must marshal its organizing power to seal these gains — recognizing them as fundamental rights rather than privileges. These gains cannot stop at national borders. The COVID-19 outbreak makes clear that we cannot weather a pandemic as long as countries with underdeveloped health care systems — such as the United States — fail to guarantee a basic standard of care for their citizens. So, the Left must cohere around a global care standard, an international commitment for states to dedicate a percentage of their GDP to social security infrastructure: education, housing, and health care. Wealthier nations could contribute an additional amount, which would be used to repair the legacies of colonialism and economic extraction that ravage the Global South. The money could be raised by reducing military spending and defunding the IMF and World Bank, further advancing the goals of peace and prosperity. Finally, the response must be green. Remember, we are also in the midst of a climate and environmental crisis, with soil depletion, melting ice caps, heating oceans, and mass extinction threatening our futures — and chronic air pollution aggravating the spread and deadliness of COVID-19. The interdependence of equality and social stability expresses itself as much in the domain of health care as in the domain of ecology. As with the pandemic, climate and environmental breakdown hits the poorest and most vulnerable first. Every job lost because of COVID-19 must be replaced with one that repairs, rather than depletes, our natural world. In other words, the pandemic must slingshot proposals like the Green New Deal, which marry economic recovery with principles of social justice. But to bring such proposals to life, the Left will need to pioneer new modes of organization and mobilization — both during the quarantine and beyond.