UPDATE April 30
Itty Abraham's article (2020) on The India Forum on "Four Future Scenarios". Professor Itty Abraham is a political scientist and STS scholar who works in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Abraham talks about the "universal, uneven and endless" moment of COVID19 pandemic, positing four scenarios dominated by:
(1) pro-state progressive optimists: those who see this moment as end of neoliberalism and belief in the capacity of to learn. He gives Korea as an example of a successful public health system resulting from years of popular struggle that wore down authoritarian infrastructure.
(2) end-of-globalization pessimists: those who believe international cooperation is at an end, the future of "relative international autarky". Gramsci's concept of the interregnum, a state of turmoil, bringing a new world polarity
(3) disaster capitalism pessimists: reinforcement of capitalism during crises exemplified by 9/11 and 2008 financial crisis. Relevant for US specially, close to "living with the bomb" scenarios of WWII. Lessons from the global anti-nuclear movement?
(4) techno-optimists: view this moment as latest challenge to human ingenuity, Whiggish reading of the past, learning from victories over diseases of the past. What lessons from HIV epidemic?
Original Post April 17
Pedro's and James' responses to this question show the many ways in which thinking about the future post-COVID19 is resolutely tied to thinking about the crises of neoliberalism and sovereignty. They ask critical questions: How would political organization and mobilizing shift in response? Is it possible to imagine a "left-leaning" economics that is not nationalist? I want to respond to and build on these responses by asking one question: For whom is a non-neoliberal future possible?
I ask this question because I want to be attentive to people who have been thinking and practicing non-neoliberalism long before COVID showed how fragile neoliberalism of the global North is. I want to build on those who have long before realized how the logics of neoliberal capitalism were: (1) constituted in the global North through testing and experimenting elsewhere; (2) built on ongoing racial capitalism projects globally; (3) resisted in multiple ways globally. By asking this question, I want to build upon the work of scholars who have shown that neoliberalism was, and continues to be, a transnational project. And that the ways of resistance and organizing would therefore be transnational too. Is it possible to think about a future without stitching the past? In my response, I provide links to the works I have read before, or I am currently reading, that ask similar questions.
When I hear and read about how COVID-19 has disrupted neoliberalism in an unprecedented way, I am reminded of the tendency to exceptionalize Trump, analysed in an exceptional way by Jonathan Rose and Yarimar Bonilla (2017), who point to a crisis of liberalism that the election of Trump brought upon many public intellectuals and scholars. They ask, "Has anthropology produced the kind of knowledge about the United States as a settler state that is required to understand the current moment?" Can we invoke an inclusive United States that never was? I am reminded of one of the CENHS podcasts I listened to, where Kyle Powys Whyte talked about "settler apocalypticism" in thinking about the Anthropocene and climate futures, in thinking about conceptions of time, morality and responsibility in times of crisis. His words will stay with me: "What does it mean to think of an indigenous futurity when we don’t take today’s world for granted, but actually look at it as a apocalyptic and dystopian world?". Do we take today's world for granted when we think about how COVID has disrupted neoliberalism? For Whyte, the world at present is dystopic.
What vocabularies do we have to talk about crises when we live in a world that is a palimpsest of crises? I think we could look elsewhere, places that have been exceptionalized as places of ever-unfolding crises. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nutall, in their article on "Writing the World from an African Metropolis" (2004), contemplate how to write about African cities in a way that doesn't portray them as failed projects of incomplete modernity arising out of colonial European encounters. When we talk about African cities, they ask, why is it that we are left with images of decay and breakdown on one hand, and survival and velocity against all odds on the other? Why are we left with images of weakened or ineffectual state, even in scholarly conversations? These questions are important because precisely these images were used as justifications for testing and experimenting neoliberal policies in the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s-present, which would replace a weak and inefficient state in the global South.
I point to Mbembe and Nutall's line of questioning also because they recognise that crisis-thinking is epistemological, it points to the "limits to the capacity of epistemological imagination, to pose questions about what we know and where we know that from”. How do we talk about African cities like we talk about other cities? They argue that the first step would be to recognize that African cities are already fully located, and have been, even before trans-Atlantic trades, in global circuits of finance, labor, and capital. This does not mean that we don't talk about failure, but that failure is not exceptionalized in a way that feeds Africa's representation as "intractable, mute, abject, other-worldly”. The challenge is to think with subjects and places that cannot be easily located. This bibliography on how migration/borders is intersecting with COVID-19 is one example where we would need vocabularies that neither exceptionalize nor provincialse.
The question of political organizing and mobilizing in times of crisis therefore needs to build on movements and organizing that have resulted out of long histories of exclusion. How does movement-building look like from those who have learned to organize in a state that was to them mostly oppressive and withdrawn? Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani (2020) reflect on what a transnational perspective on movement-building and organizing looks like. Their excellent article points to early Black radical internationalism and organizations, indigenous internationalism, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation movements, for example. In short, we have much to learn from responses by ongoing anti-imperialist movements during COVID-19 which have called for cancellation of neocolonial debt, land repatriation, reconfiguration of gig and hustle economies, just to give a few examples.
In thinking about future and learning, I also found reading Guilberly Louissaint's (2020) article “Hygiene” is the Future: Lessons from “Post”-Cholera Haiti quite refreshing. Reflecting on the aftermath of COVID-19 responses, he notes: "the haunting of the COVID-19 epidemic will remain, not just in the memories of the things and ones that have been lost, but also in a haunted public. Governments will be consumed by the constant effort to manage our new enemy by implementing rigid, authoritarian policies, in which hygiene predominates and the invisible world becomes a target... I depart with the wisdom of Clyde Woods’ “Haiti is the Future.” It is poetic to think that worlds that were seen with no future, but ruins have lived the current reality of COVID-19 time and time again."
