Beyond the crisis: transitioning to a better world?

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is not just a short-term public health emergency. Instead, it has laid bare a broader and deeper organic crisis, produced by the intrinsic tensions and contradictions of the hegemonic neoliberal capitalist order. I discuss this organic crisis in terms of its active amplification of human divisiveness at various levelsclass, racial, national, culturalwhich impedes the generation of solidarity and cooperation in the name of a 'common humanity', required if humans are to live in harmony among each other and with the planet. By reflecting on a diverse range of barriers to such a desirable future, from the erosive role of human passions to the escalating new cold war between China and the West and the fundamental divisions exposed by the existential challenge of climate change, I argue that to have a chance of a liveable and equitable common future, we need to maintain a critical cosmopolitan horizon against the grain of self-interested closures and exclusions which underpin the organic crisis.KEYWORDS Organic crisis; neoliberalism; inequality; racism; climate change; cosmopolitanism 2020 was dominated by the Covid-19 crisis, an infectious disease pandemic caused by a coronavirus which was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has since spread throughout the world, killing almost two million people worldwide by the end of the year. However, the year also saw multiple other crises. In Australia, for example, from where I write this essay, the year began with unprecedented bushfires brought about by record-breaking temperatures and months of severe drought, burning down more than 18 million hectares of bush, forest and parks across the country, killing dozens of people and destroying thousands of dwellings and townships. In the United States, similar unprecedented fires also raged for weeks in the summer across the West Coast. A few months earlier, a crisis situation emerged with the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd, an African American man who lost his life after a white police officer violently knelt on his neck for eight minutes, preventing him to breathe. The movement quickly spread the world over, inspiring many subaltern racialized groups to protest against

Cosmoética y vacunas contra la COVID-19. Más allá de la propuesta cosmopolítica

“…Braidotti gives to this concept a vital and essential meaning, something that is present in the relationship between all living beings, with the Earth, with tectonic plates, with deforestation, genetically modified organisms or epidemics. That positive zoe remind us that we-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-convergence-together (Braidotti, 2019), or as Ang (2021) points out, the organic crisis in which we live currently. For this reason, the problems linked to the atmosphere, arable land, rivers, and, ultimately to the situation called Anthropocene or Capitalocene (Haraway, 2016), require a response that articulates a new collective subject that understands their interpenetration alongside other beings and material agents.…”

Rethinking trust within emergency collaboration: The significance of negative affects

“…In this paper, we explore such sad affects across such emergency organizing to rethink their role within emergency collaboration. We reject the temptation to dismiss these feelings as symbols of dysfunctional government (Ang, 2021;Briggs et al, 2020;Jones & Hameiri, 2021). Instead, we explore not what these sad affects mean but what they do within processes of emergency collaboration.…”

The capitalist virus

“…There is a tension between speaking of the pandemic as initiating a crisis – say, a crisis of mobility or an economic crisis – and approaching the pandemic as part of a deeper crisis that marks the contemporary human and planetary condition. Ien Ang (2021) invokes the Gramscian notion of organic crisis to argue that the pandemic is not a temporary disruption to business as usual but the symptom of a longer term and broader economic, political, and environmental crisis that permeates all levels of society. We are in sympathy with this view.…”