A note from LeftEast editors: we reprint this statement of the Alliance of MENA socialist, with the kind permission of the organisation. The statement was originally published in Spectre Journal. The COVID-19 pandemic has given new urgency to the need to abolish prisons, refugee camps and the inhuman capitalist carceral system. Prisoner and refugee populations […]
Categories
Putin’s Virus Moment
The current situation in Russia has reached “a perfect storm”: the pandemic here coincided with the collapse of the national currency, as well as the political crisis caused by Vladimir Putin’s proposals to change the Constitution. At a time when every world political leader seeks to show himself as a sovereign capable of declaring a […]
Coronavirus has revealed yet another contradiction of capitalism: the capitalist tendency to globalize as a solution for the profitability crisis has undermined the capitalist capacity to profit. The virus has exacerbated an already deepening capitalist crisis into a catastrophe and illustrated how vulnerable global capitalism is to any external risk. Globalization, which emerged as a […]
In moments of heightened crisis, such as today’s, one of the first strategies of a state is to defer its pretense of universal social solidarity, directing its energies towards the social groups it prioritizes but normally cannot single out. This same tendency often leads to postponing of its efforts to negotiate difficult social, economic, and […]
Categories
Time for a Universal Basic Income?
During the last six months or so, I have paid more attention to the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a potential central element of a future-oriented social protection system, implementable on a scale from the local to the global and all points in-between. Although this demands a separate text, I continue to […]
All pictures by Michele Lancione. Published first in: Society + Space Magazine (www.societyandspace.org), republished here with the authors’ permission. On circulation and solidarity Twenty-four, twenty-four hours to go, we want to be instructed While it may appear that we have paid insufficient attention to the real dangers of the crisis underway thus far, we want […]
The essay will unfold in two parts. The first focuses on what we call bioterity, the ways in which the war against the virus extends austerity regimes into the very biological mechanisms of human existence, and where these mechanisms’ legitimate existence become further removed from a discernible social life. The current mode of governing the crisis in Italy will serve as the primary means to elaborate this notion.
Thus, we have to organise and politicise. If anything, the current crisis has demonstrated that the capitalist economy, despite all its hubris over the last couple of decades, is embedded and subordinate to society and not vice-versa. The next crisis will, there’s no doubt about it, demonstrate that the society is embedded and subordinate to nature and not vice-versa.
My wife and I have been in the middle of a lock-down for quite some time: no need to be afraid of it. What you need to be afraid of is inaction induced by a false sense of Western superiority. You can live with the lock down.
The second set of guidelines has been passed on by comrades in Germany. They are authored by physicist/data scientist Ben Maier, who researches the spread of infectious diseases. His material was initially posted on the self-publishing Medium.com platform and has since been distributed widely, including by mainstream media outlets. We repost it here with the author’s kind permission.