A collection of quotes on the themes of neoliberalism, Covid-19, and capitalism.
“The pandemic has destabilized economic institutions and laid bare the ideological swindle of neoliberalism with its plague of massive inequality in wealth, power, and access.”
– Henry Giroux[1]
“A report written by IMF economists in 2016 stated that ‘Aspects of the neoliberal agenda… have not delivered as expected’…It concluded with the following understatement: ‘the benefits of some policies that are an important part of the neoliberal agenda appear to have been somewhat overplayed’.”
– Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri[2]
“We’re reopening based on politics, ideology, and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.’”
– Thomas Frieden, former director of the CDC[3]
“Among the great lessons of this pandemic is that the four-decades-long era of neo-liberalism is responsible not only for such decadence as the widening gap between rich and poor, compulsory austerity following the near-collapse of the banking system, global warming and species destruction. We now see that blindly pro-market governments have on their charge sheet the running down of public health care systems and shifting health risks and debts onto individuals and households. The scandalous result is that in many settings, including the richest countries on our planet, public medicine is under-prepared and overloaded.”
– John Keane, political theorist[4]
“Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle’… There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged ‘spillover’ does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society.”
– Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti[5]
“The whole English response, almost from the beginning, has been an unfolding tale of individualism and new Conservatism.”
– Anthony Costello, former WHO director[6]
“The pandemic second wave arrived right on schedule—and still caught the Ford government by surprise.”
– Globe and Mail[7]
“Through the crisis, we have seen the way neoliberal capitalism produces scarcity out of plenty, isolation over connection, competition rather than cooperation. It is the deadly illness for which there remains no vaccine.”
– Iyko Day, cultural theorist[8]
“Capitalism harbours a deep-seated ecological contradiction that inclines it non-accidentally to environmental crisis; … those dynamics are inextricably entwined with other, ‘non-environmental’ crisis tendencies and cannot be resolved in isolation from them.”
– Nancy Fraser, philosopher[9]
“The state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve almost exclusively for government: healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration.”
– Pankaj Mishra, social theorist[10]
“In short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts aren’t just a background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself.”
– Rob Wallace, epidemiologist[11]
“On Monday, Ontario reported 700 new cases of COVID-19, a new single-day record. Also on Monday, Ontario casinos reopened their doors to gamblers. They say timing is everything in comedy and politics. In pandemics, too.”
– The Globe and Mail[12]
“It is this catastrophic entanglement of global capitalism and eco-colonialism that has brought us both the urgent epidemiological threat of the coronavirus and global climate destruction.”
– Bram Leven and Jan Overwijk[13]
“The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith…Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes.”
– Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti[14]
“The pandemic shows not only that the wages of arrogance is death; it also shows that death was the avoidable consequence of a declining modality of neoliberalism in three long-suffering countries.”
– Alfredo Saad-Filho, political economist[15]
“The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated an ideological breakdown. Breakdowns are not the same as death or revolutions. You can recover and be strengthened by the experience or just go back to how you were. You can recover and be changed by it. Or you may be altered fundamentally for good or ill. The outcome is decided afterwards and has to be achieved, it is never inherent in the crisis. And the outcome in this case could hardly be more important as it is a breakdown in globalisation itself. The pandemic has revealed an incompatibility between the economic market ‘dogma’ that claimed to shape the wealth creation of the world, and an expectation of the right to life that, it turned out, accompanied its growth.”
– Anthony Barnett, democracy activist[16]
“There are many causes, but the big one is treated as much a part of our world as gravity or the sun. Centres of capital the world over are funding deforestation and development on forest frontiers across the world, expanding the interface between animal disease reservoirs and newly placed livestock and the labour tending them.”
– Rob Wallace, evolutionary epidemiologist[17]
“It is hard to overstate the giddying scale and speed with which edifices and norms of neoliberalism naturalised like weather or mountains over several decades are being swept away.”
– Salvage Collective[18]
“Neoliberalism is spreading coronavirus faster than any ‘reckless teenager’ ever could.”
– Richard Dennis, Australian Journalist[19]
[1] HENRY G, RACE, POLITICS, AND PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: EDUCATION IN A TIME OF CRISIS (LONDON: BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2021), 183.
[2] Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, “Neo-liberalism: oversold?”, Finance and Development 53:2 (2016), pp. 38-40.
[3] Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live (New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown Spark, 2020), 319.
[4] Andrew Anthony, “Former WHO director Anthony Costello: ‘Opening public schools says something about our priorities,’” Guardian, 5 July 2020; Link to article.
[5] John Keane, “Democracy and the Great Pestilence,” Institute for Human Science, 10 April 2020; Link to article.
[6] JOSHUA J. MCELWEE, “POPE’S POST-COVID ENCYCLICAL ENVISIONS A LESS POPULIST, LESS CAPITALIST WORLD,” NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER, 4 OCTOBER 2020; Link to article.
[7]Globe and Mail, 30 September 2020; Link to article.
[8] Iyko Day, “The Yellow Plague and Romantic Anticapitalism,” Monthly Review, 1 July 2020;
[9] Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism,” New Left Review 127 (January-February 2021), pp. 94-127, citation at 120; Link to article.
[10] Pankaj Mishra, “Flailing States,” London Review of Books, 16 July 2020; Link to article.
[11] Rob Wallace, “Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak,” CounterPunch, 29 July 2015; Link to article.
[12]Globe and Mail, 30 September 2020; Link to article.
[13] Bram Ieven and Jan Overwijk, “We Created This Beast: The Political Ecology of Covid-19,” Eurozine, 22 March 2020; Link to article.
[14] Joshua J. McElwee, “Pope’s Post-COVID Encyclical Envisions a Less Populist, Less Capitalist World,” National Catholic Reporter, 4 October 2020; Link to article.
[15] Alfredo Saad-Filho, “Trump, Johnson, and Bolsonaro in the Swamp,” The Bullet, 20 July 2020; Link to article.
[16] Anthony Barnett, “Out of the Body of Hell: COVID-19 and the humanisation of globalisation,” openDemocracy, 21 May 2020, 8; Link to article.
[17] Mohammed Elmaazi, “Our economic system fuels outbreaks, says Evolutionary Epidemiologist who predicted the pandemic,” Monthly Review online, 20 May 2020; Link to article.
[18] Salvage Editorial Collective, “The Mask of the Red Death: Dispatch One from a Changing World,” Salvage, 21 March 2020; Link to article.
[19] RICHARD DENNIS, “THE SPREAD OF CORONAVIRUS IN AUSTRALIA IS NOT THE FAULT OF INDIVIDUALS BUT A RESULT OF NEOLIBERALISM,” GUARDIAN, 20 AUGUST 2020; Link to article.