When faced with great social and political crises, our usual response as socialists is to look for historical parallels and consider what lessons can be drawn from them.1 The Covid-19 pandemic that has ravaged the globe since early 2020 poses… Continue Reading
A spectre is haunting the world—the spectre of pandemic.1 Invisible to the eye, and indeed even to all but the most powerful electron microscopes, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has nonetheless created panic around the globe. It has brought the world economic… Continue Reading
Around 2.7 billion workers worldwide have been affected by full or partial lockdown measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic—around 81 percent of the world’s 3.3 billion workforce. The world economy has seen nothing like this. Nearly all economic forecasts for… Continue Reading
A pandemic is first of all a public health crisis. But when containing the infection requires a dramatic reduction in social contact, it rapidly becomes a workplace issue. Under normal circumstances, each day millions of people are concentrated in often… Continue Reading
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. Walter Benjamin, 1940, Notes for “On… Continue Reading
It is tempting to see pandemics as unpredictable, cataclysmic incursions of nature into human society.1 Yet the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) is anything but a “natural” phenomenon. Epidemics and pandemics happen in a social, political and economic context,… Continue Reading