Today, there are no clues as to the danger lurking outside my front door except for the eerie absence of people. Our lives are being restricted by a virus that is invisible to the naked eye, verging on abstraction, and yet it is terrifyingly real. Compare this to all the ways our lives are restricted by the many brutal rules, payments, and punishments of capitalism, which are now being revealed as actual fabrications that were subject to quick, substantive change all along—in other words, fake as hell.

The difference is: We can't change the fact that a virus is attacking the human species. We can change the fact that capitalists are attacking human life, too.

From arbitrary data caps being suspended by internet providers, to eviction bans, to suddenly-implemented protections for some workers, we are seeing that things we have long been told are impossible or unfeasible are suddenly OK. And as the estimates for how long our new world of "social distancing" will last stretch from weeks, to months, to a year, it's becoming more likely that when this is all over, we might not be able to return to "normal" even if we wanted to. But why would we want to?

It is clear that capitalism has failed us when people need support the most. The society we built on the premises of grift, waste, cruelty, and greed, is not one that can survive even a moderate disruption like a nasty virus without mass casualties and wrecked lives and bodies. What we urgently need, now and for the next crisis, is a society built more on resilience, solidarity, foresight, and compassion.

At this critical moment, when anything feels possible for good or for ill, we need to imagine how things can change for the better and to prevent future catastrophes. Almost nothing good comes to pass without mass struggle, and so it would be beyond naive to think that anything will happen "just" because it's plainly fucking obvious that it saves lives. Nobody knows what comes next, but it needs to be better than before. This is what it could look like. - Jordan Pearson

Free and universal healthcare

Last week, California Rep. Katie Porter questioned Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on the costs that an uninsured American would face to get tested for coronavirus: $1,331. Over the course of five minutes, Porter made Redfield agree to invoke a federal regulation that would let him, and him alone, waive the cost of testing.

On March 13, the House passed legislation to make testing free anyway, but the regulation that Porter’s argument hinged on could be applied to waive the person cost of any disease for any intervention, including testing, treatment, and even transportation. It’s easy to think of worthy diseases or medical bills with costs that the CDC could unilaterally cover en masse, especially when such illnesses pose a greater risk to the community at large than to a given individual.

Inadequate testing has hampered America’s response to the pandemic, but countries with universal access to health care have gotten it right: South Korea, for example, has tested hundreds of thousands of people, while the U.S. is lagging behind. But the cost and availability of Covid-19 testing is just a symptom of underlying problems in the U.S. healthcare system that the coronavirus is now laying bare.

We’ve heard the refrain from one politician in particular, Senator Bernard Sanders, that healthcare is a basic human right: after the burden of the pandemic has lessened, we can and should scrutinize how our current system held up against single-payer systems in Britain or Australia, and then change it for good. Not only will this effect so much change in people's lives that American society may never be the same, but it will make us more resilient for the next crisis. - Maddie Bender

Abolish ICE and prisons

When ICE determines whether to detain or release immigrants and asylum seekers, it uses a rigged algorithm that only returns one result: Detain. Now, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the tens of thousands of people this purposely-broken system has sent to overcrowded detention facilities are facing a deadly virus that is about to spread rapidly through incarcerated populations across the U.S.

ICE is now a public health hazard

Forcing people into packed and unsanitary detention centers "increases the risk of infection, meaning ICE is now actively endangering public health in its single-minded mission to arrest undocumented immigrants,” reads an open letter that Mijente is sending to companies in light of the Covid-19 crisis. In other words, ICE is now a public health hazard.