I think if I start writing something it will focus on what was shaping up before the pandemic, & how it might influence what will happen after. I mean, aside from obvious stuff like the breakneck destruction of the planet 1/
first of all, all economists agreed that some sort of economic blow-out was coming, based on unsupportable levels of personal debt & the normal workings of the business cycle. A crash was due & Central Banks were pumping money furiously to slow or soften it 2/
2nd of all, there was an unprecedented wave of popular unrest over late 2019-e2020, much unreported, everywhere from Haiti to Hong Kong to the Gilets Jaunes to Sudan to... someone listed like 40 uprisings, non-violent or otherwise. This was extraordinary 3/
it's perhaps not entirely shocking as it seems to happen every ten years. 1999-2001 was the height of the Alterglobalization movement, worldwide uprising, 2011 of course saw Arab Spring, Squares, OWS... So we were due. But each time, disturbingly, there's less articulation 4/
Global Justice Movement had no top-down org but it had Indymedia, People's Global Action, a host of planet-wide institutions to connect struggles; the 2011 movements at least shared ideas and people moved back and forth between them 5/
this time half the people involved didn't even know about most of the others, or have any way to follow them closely (as the mainstream media largely ignored them). The other really significant movement was the #RevoltoftheCaringClasses (forgive the shameless branding attempt) 6/
that is, as productivity of the health, education, caring sectors decline owing to administrative bloat, digitisation encourages #bullshitization, more people are hired in these sectors under worse conditions, compensation, so all the strikes are teachers, nurses, care workers 7/
now of course those very people who had been rebelling or on the brink of it are the "first line workers" still on the job as the administrators who are their immediate class antagonists hide at home, & most of their potential allies are in lockdown 8/
in the UK, after World Wars, the left is swept into power. Why? Because working class people 1. suddenly have experience in socialist organisation & see it works, 2. since upper class people are automatically made officers, they have direct experience of what idiots they are, 9/
and of course 3. they come home trained in the use of weapons so the political class can't just entirely ignore their demands. This is being treated as analogous to a war mobilisation & there are some similarities, especially #2 applies & I keep hearing that 10/
e.g., "we knew the administrators running hospitals etc were useless, but now we see them as murderers." So all the pieces seem to be there for a revolutionary situation, except the normal role of intellectuals, providing a means of communication between struggles, is stymied 11/
how can the working classes recompose (to use the Post-Workerist terminology) around caring labour, what is the role of the communicative classes (if we can call them that) if they're all confined to their houses? 12/
I keep getting back to the poll last week that said only 9% of Brits want to go back to "normal" - but for 50 years not only our imaginations but our ability to talk to each other across class lines has been brutally attacked. How to undo this? 13/
