1. A short thread on this very interesting conversation between @njtmulder @adam_tooze and Mark Mazower last week on coronavirus and big structural questions, trying to pull together a few of the themes, and perhaps butchering them in the process bit.ly/2Xk3NMc
2. The most striking part of the conversation was Tooze's notion of the "Blitzkrieg Anthropocene" - that we are realizing that the Anthropocene is not just a matter of slow trench warfare over decades, but sudden overwhelming attacks that upset our basic beliefs about what works.
3. So if we are not in a world of la guerre de longue durée, what happens next? Tooze, building on and arguing with Mulder, stressed the limits of wartime analogies - particularly ones that stressed the need for an enemy to mobilize state planning and solidarity.
4. But much of the rest of the conversation concerned the complications of agile response to unexpected threats. States in the US have looked to mobilize, but there are key limits on their and others' freedom of action.
5. The EU - as Mazower put it - has locked itself in a box of its own making (perhaps the French-German initiative, which happened after the conversation, is the first part of the magician's escapology).
6. Judicial authority - as Mulder described it - has taken on a new and important role in arbitrating which kinds of emergency responses are appropriate and which not. In Europe (as seen recently in Karlsruhe's ruling on the Bundesbank), and also in the US states.
7. Limits - both real and imagined - of debt and fiscal capacity. Mulder emphasized how politicians had internalized the notion that debt was bad over decades, and were now having to rapidly unlearn these lessons. But key difference with Global South, facing sov. debt crisis.
8. And maybe most interesting, the role of information and data. Tooze stressed how the response was radically different than to the lack of mobilization in 1918 global flu pandemic, and where we do not know how many poor Indians died, because imperial authorities didn't care.
9. One key difference today is the availability of data, which allows ILO to measure notions like the "Global Work Force," which would have been incomprehensible once. Reminiscent of the ambiguous relationship between data and neoliberalism described by @zeithistoriker
10. The trouble with data, from some people's perspective, is that it might reveal problems in a way that might justify collective actions to solve them (also: kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/… … )
11. So - in a highly imperfect summary, the coronavirus response, horribly inadequate as it is, is radically different than in previous historic junctures. It is also possible to _see_ it in ways that would once have been impossible.
12. But the capacity to improvise against the Blitzkrieg Anthropocene is unevenly distributed, thanks in part to structural barriers created in previous historical era to build a firewall between key aspects of the economy and politics.
13. and to differences in distribution of resources, continued hold of outdated ideas. This perhaps helps explain a phenomenon that didn't get as much attention as I expected given the participants, but that hangs over the conversation.
14. How the greatest freedom of action exists precisely for those actors who have been most protected from politics - Fed and central banks - and how they have sometimes been more willing than e.g. center-left politicians to contemplate radical responses.
15. But how the tools that they can employ are shaped and limited by the regulatory politics from which they arose. Finis.
