We’re all staying home where possible now, afraid to go out and catch COVID-19 or a fine for being too close to your car passenger. The last month has been a whirlwind of government intervention in the social sphere, shutting down businesses and destroying jobs where people congregate and socialise, while innocent victims are losing their lives to a new virus that is ten times deadlier than the flu. The idea of the state banning public gatherings and compulsorily shutting down businesses was a theoretical one only months ago — yet now, it seems that we have accepted it as the necessary price for survival with barely a murmur.

Indeed, it seems that any agitation against the decisions of the Morrison and state governments in Australia has been where they have failed to close down potential super spreader sites, such as schools or shopping centres. Teachers’ unions have threatened wildcat strikes if schools are not closed to students; retail chains have shut their doors as business has nosedived anyway. Groups like Workers Organising Resistance have shared stories and advice on how to organise colleagues to protect themselves from unscrupulous bosses, dangerous work practices and the precariousness that comes with losing your hours and job when it’s closed by decree. Mutual aid groups have helped willing people do things like “adopt a healthcare worker” to aid workers on the front lines dealing with COVID-19 patients and in other stretched areas. A new togetherness, a consciousness of the debilitating effect of the crumbling of the processes of capitalism, is emerging — however, it does not seem to be one rooted in class consciousness.

In Australia, this effect reflects itself in the lack of politicised conversation around the measures taken to limit the spread of the virus. The pain that the lockdowns have caused to people across the country is not being discussed in the mainstream as systemic failures inherent to capitalism or our economic system specifically. The contradictions that have heightened during the crisis, like the unequal and irrational allocation of resources in a market system, have been dismissed as individualistic problems in demonising scared people as panic buyers, while underplaying the role of predatory profiteers by using stories of parasitic behaviour as quick hits to rile up viewers and readers. The dominant ideological position of the mainstream discussion of this pandemic’s effects has been one of a mere fall in economic activity and abundance, to be corrected quickly and without many negative effects to the general population — no worries, the governments are trying to save us.

Some sections of the revolutionary left worldwide have seen this moment as a potential moment for spontaneous revolutionary activity, while many others have questioned if it is. Others have used it as a triumphant vindication of supporting Sanders in the USA, or to rehabilitate Corbyn’s legacy in the UK (I might be stretching things to include them as revolutionaries). The calls for rent strikes and walkouts where the strength of the left is insufficient seems to be overreach, and in all probability, will merely pit the left against the rest of the population working hard, trying to survive while looking out for their own interests. Those trying to cheerlead for their favourite left figureheads would do well to think about how their responses to this crisis would have been any different, with the same contradictions of capital accumulation and the deadly spread of coronavirus piggybacking off social interaction acting against the best interests of people at risk of contracting the virus.

The need for social isolation has revealed the narrow avenue of building a strong left wing — an inability to raise consciousness past protests, small scale charitable activities and mutual aid, and electioneering. This weakness may further distance revolutionaries from the rest of society, and leave them unable to raise any class consciousness during this historical juncture.

We need to build social networks that allow people to easily participate and understand from their homes; we need to reach them online, through their mailboxes, on the TV and radio. We need to demonstrate the real reasons for the incredibly fast spread of this pandemic; the churn of human capitalists and workers in and out of countries along with capital, the globalised nature of human travel, the choice of uninterrupted capital accumulation over the health of workers and consumers who will die as a result of exposure. We need to get through to people that business as usual does not mean the same world will exist on the other side of this crisis.

We do this by getting people’s attention, building personal and collective relationships, offering material mutual aid and discussions of both personal and analytical accounts of their experiences in this moment. This is a time for helping people avoid eviction and starvation, and for showing people what has been the case all along — we are exploited so that all capital may continue to generate profits for the parasites unimpeded, and we don’t need them for the wants and needs of life.

This is not a time for revolution — it’s a time for building the left up and tearing the dominant social hegemony down.