Re: <nettime> Thoughts on coups

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au> 
wrote:
‘The unthinkable has to be thought.’ Sean Cubitt

‘An eco-state’ Brian Holmes

The wretchedness of Covid has gifted one important good. It is easier to 
*think the unthinkable* as the unthinkable has already happened. The 
revelation I’m referring to is not the pandemic (that was extensively 
pre-mediated) but rather to the extraordinary degree of latent human 
agency exhibited in the response.
The trouble is that we are in immediate danger of frittering this new 
knowledge away in our rush to snap back the old normal. I don’t want to 
sentimentalise the plague but it has radically opened up our sense of 
what we are collectively capable of.
If any serious individual in late February had argued that under 
conditions, other than war, that wealthy technologically advanced states 
were capable of shutting down 80% of the global economy, furloughing 
large swathes of the workforce along with 1.4 billion students and in 
the process bringing mass air transportation
to a grinding halt, the proposition would not just have been dismissed 
it would simply not even have been heard.
As the usually sober and measured political economist Helen Thomas 
declared in a recent podcast "We have to face up to the fact that we 
have been through something, as a world,.. that in some sense was beyond 
our imaginations
in the west at the beginning of this year." The appearance of this 
degree of agency lead the other participant in the discussion, Adam 
Tooze to declare this to be -THE shock discovery of 2020- “hands down, 
flat out, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened in modern 
economic history.”
All of which forces us to ask whether or rather how the same level of 
agency can be made available to address the far more profound and 
existential threat of the climate emergency? And why is it that in 
comparison with Covid the ecological crisis yields little more than a 
collective shrug of the shoulders ?
On the surface the reason for this is obvious. Covid is an imminent 
threat of death. Everyone rich and poor alike has been touched by the 
virus in some way. In comparison the threat to life through climate 
damage appears diffuse and distant with the gravest risks in the short 
term likely to be bourn by others. But its clear that this explanation 
is flawed when we recall that it is equally hard to make the argument 
that we are neglecting treatments and diagnosis of other fatal diseases 
likely to claim more lives than Covid. It seems that for reasons we 
don’t full understand we remain uniquely hypnotised by this virus. 
Perhaps its partly the element of surprise. "Its just not something we 
ever imagined dying from".
At least some aspects of the problem will be related to how knowledge 
circulates and delivered which in this case appears to have resolved 
into that most reductive of metrics; the ritual of the nightly Covid 
death toll.
So must we conclude that only fear of imminent death provides the 
communicative apparatus able to create the appropriate level of urgency 
? What would that look like? Nightly briefings on the increasing number 
of wild fires, floods and famines delivered from behind lecterns by 
worried looking ministers flanked by climate scientists.? Merely 
describing the scenario renders it immediately laughable but as we seek 
to rise to Brian Holmes’ challenge of creating an ‘eco state’ what would 
the alternatives look like ?
Just a month ago the scientific consensus was there was no way back to 
the pre- Covid life.  The best we could hope for was a combination of 
increasingly effective treatments combined with partially effective 
vaccines (like annual flu jabs) all of which would mitigate but not 
eliminate the virus. The oft-repeated mantra was ‘there is no silver 
bullet’.  But for once it appears scientific consensus was wrong. The 
vaccines look like being closer to being a ‘silver bullet’ that we had a 
right to expect. The ubiquitous cliché “the new normal” has been 
excitedly replaced by simply “getting back to normal” albeit darkly 
laced with the likelihood of mass unemployment.
We already see the ‘snap back” has begun as cities in China are roaring 
back into frenetic production encouraged by the regime’s rampant state 
managed capitalism. The likelihood is that we will not be far behind. 
But we must not forget that what we have learned means the terms of 
reference for these arguments have changed and radical action harder to 
dismiss
Nothing should detract from an extraordinary scientific and humanitarian 
achievement. But amidst the triumphalism we should not forget the 
widespread though largely unarticulated expectation that the difficult 
task of learning to live to with the virus would have provided the much 
needed social and psychological apparatus to help us make the sacrifices 
and the investment needed to begin mend the task of mending the damage 
crisis.
David Garcia
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