A collection of quotes on the themes of memory, Covid-19, and capitalism.
“Health policies are hurling us into a new political order, a new configuration of power, yet we remain largely unable to see the direction in which we are headed.”
– Marco d’Eramo[1]
“It’s hard to know what’s true right now. Everything feels heightened and accelerated, including the speed with which fact overtakes fiction, and a truth can mutate into a lie.”
– Karen Russell[2]
“It’s a great moment…All the red tape that keeps things away is gone and people are looking for solutions that in the past they did not want to see…Real change takes place in deep crisis. You will not stop the momentum that will build.”
– Andreas Schleicher, OECD education director[4]
“It is now clear that the dominant education policy preoccupation globally is how to deliver schooling without schools and degrees without campuses.”
– Ben Williamson and Anna Hogan[5]
“Amazon is all too happy to prey on the weaknesses of an increasingly feudal society, and to exacerbate them. Deindustrialized towns are easy pickings, local businesses don’t stand a chance, labor law is all but useless in twenty-first–century America, and there are hardly any limits on legalized bribery. In many ways, Amazon is the perfect mechanism for exploring modern America, if only because its tentacles may be the last things connecting us all.”
– Sarah Leonard[6]
“What a moment of crisis like this unveils is our porousness to one another. We’re seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.”
– Naomi Klein[7]
“If the virus passes and we go back to life as before, then this has taught us nothing.”
– Tithi Bhattacharya[8]
“We are adrift. What we are witnessing is the politics of death.”
– Pedro Carlho[10]
“We’re only a fifth of the way through the 21st century, but we’ve already sequenced the full human genome, figured out how to turn adult cells into stem cells, discovered ways to rewrite the genetic code of any living cell and brought down the cost of hacking genes by a factor of millions. If the 19th was the century of chemistry and the 20th that of physics, the 21st is the century of biology, in which we will aggressively reengineer biological systems to meet our needs.”
– Jamie Metzl[13]
“Ultimately, we can’t reform a system whose logic is to pursue every possible profitable enterprise, regardless of what it does to the health of animals and the natural environment or human beings. It is a system that will produce new killer pandemics along with the food we eat.”
– Brian Champ[15]
“The pandemic has shattered our illusions of safety and reminded us that despite all the progress made in science and technology, we remain vulnerable to catastrophes that can overturn our entire way of life. These are live possibilities, not mere hypotheses, and our governments will have to confront them.”
– Toby Ord[11]
“To say that capitalism’s ecological problem is structural is to say that we cannot save the planet without disabling some core, defining features of our social order. What is needed, first and foremost, is to wrest the power to dictate our relation to nature away from the class that currently monopolizes it, so that we can begin to reinvent that relation from the ground up. But that requires dismantling the system that underpins their power: the military forces and property forms, the pernicious ontology of ‘value’ and the relentless dynamic of accumulation, all of which work together to drive global warming. Eco-politics must, in sum, be anti-capitalist.”
– Nancy Fraser[12]
“In the face of biological complexity honed over billions of years of evolution, our hubris to manipulate complex systems we hardly understand could as much be our undoing as the mRNA vaccines now seem our salvation.”
– Jamie Metzl[14]
“A volcanic rage is rapidly rising to the surface in this country and we need to harness it to defend and build unions, ensure Medicare for all, and knock the bastards off their gilded thrones.”
– Mike Davis[17]
“We won’t go back to normal, because normal was the problem.”
– Vijay Prashad[18]
“Unlike health pandemics, the environmental crisis can’t be resolved through lockdowns, social distancing, and vaccines. It demands a radical restructuring of how society is organized, what we value, and how we relate to each other – issues that dwarf the already traumatic experiences with Covid-19.”
– Sam Gindin[19]
“At some point, we will emerge from this pandemic haze and start questioning not only what a new normal might look like but, more importantly, what we want it to. Or to put it another way: as we mourn the deaths, we may want to consider how exactly we should live.”
– Frances Ryan[20]
“Covid-19 has changed everything. If we choose the wrong path not only will we suffer the consequences, but so too will many generations to come.”
– Elif Shafak[21]
“Any meaningful policy has to upset the established power base and the political donor class. Any policy that doesn’t upset these people will be useless. To pretend that we can compromise our way through this while we wait for a magical, technological bullet that will keep temperatures down without costing us anything is beyond wilful ignorance now.”
– Carlo Fanelli and Heather Whiteside[16]
[1] D’Eramo, Marco. “Scientists or Experts?” New Left Review, Sidecar, 9 April 2021; Link to source.
[2] Karen Russell, “How the Coronavirus Has Infected Our Vocabulary,” New Yorker, 13 April 2020; Link to source.
[3] Ben Williamson and Anna Hogan, EdTech: Commerialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19 (Brussels: Education International Research, July 2020), 57; Link to source.
[4] Ben Williamson and Anna Hogan, EdTech: Commerialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19 (Brussels: Education International Research, July 2020), 57; Link to source.
[5] Ben Williamson and Anna Hogan, EdTech: Commerialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19 (Brussels: Education International Research, July 2020), 57; Link to source.
[6] Sarah Leonard, “How Amazon Exploited a Weakened America,” New Republic, 2 April 2021; Link to source.
[7] Marie Solis in conversation with Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism,’” Vice, 13 March 2020; Link to source.
[8] Sarah Jaffe with Tithi Bhattacharya, “Social Reproduction and the Pandemic,” Dissent, 2 April 2020; Link to source.
[9] Owen Jones, “The planet cannot survive our remorseless pursuit of profit,” Guardian, 19 March 2021; Link to source.
[10] Tom Phillips, “‘Saddest March of our lives’: Brazilians lament Covid devastation as critics decry Bolsonaro,” Guardian, 25 March 2021; Link to source.
[11] Toby Ord, “Covid-19 has shown humanity how close we are to the edge,” Guardian, 23 March 2021; Link to source.
[12] Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism,” New Left Review 127 (January-February 2021), pp. 94-127; Link to source.
[13] Jamie Metzl, “Miraculous mRNA Vaccines Are Only the Beginning,” Newsweek, 12 February 2021; Link to source.
[14] Jamie Metzl, “Miraculous mRNA Vaccines Are Only the Beginning,” Newsweek, 12 February 2021; Link to source.
[15] Brian Champ, “COVID-19, capitalism and climate,” Socialist.ca, 30 July 2020; Link to source.
[16] Carlo Fanelli and Heather Whiteside, “Crisis and Virus: COVID-19 in Context,” The Bullet, 30 July 2020; Link to source.
[17] Mike Davis, “Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell,” Jacobin, 27 April 2020; Link to source.
[18] Sam Gindin, “The Coronavirus and the Crisis This Time,” The Bullet, 10 April 2020; Link to source.
[19] Sam Gindin, “Political Openings: Class Struggle During and After the Pandemic,” The Bullet, 15 September 2020; Link to source.
[20] Frances Ryan, “Millions in Britain have struggled for years. Only in a pandemic are they seen,” Guardian, 15 September 2020; Link to source.
[21] Elif Shafak, “The world to come: The old world is gone,” New Statesman, 26 August 2020; Link to source.