The Probable Implications of the Coronavirus Crisis — Adam Tooze, Judith Butler, Radhika Desai

> Radhika Desai: “The present pandemic is certain to be different not because it is more lethal than previous ones (it is not), nor because it is causing havoc in financial markets (as most crises of neoliberal era have), but because it is exposing the weaknesses, distortions and imbalances of the productive apparatus that neoliberalism has shaped over four decades. Neoliberalism was supposed to reinvigorate capitalism, restore the ‘animal spirits’ allegedly dampened hitherto by the ‘dead hand of the state’. However, it never did that.”  // Recommended read: Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (Desai 2013)

> Adam Tooze: “It is once [we] have overcome that political, intellectual and existential hurdle… that economics enters back in. And it does so with a vengeance. […] The big idea of the 1990s that “the economy” will serve as a regulating superego of our politics is a busted flush. Given the experience of the past dozen years we should now never tire of asking: which economic constraints are real and which imagined?” // Recommended read: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Tooze 2018)

> Judith Butler: “The virus alone does not discriminate, but we humans surely do, formed and animated as we are by the interlocking  powers of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and capitalism.  It seems likely that we will come to see in the next year a painful scenario in which some human creatures assert their rights to live at the expense of others, re-inscribing the spurious distinction between grievable and ungrievable lives, that is, those who should be protected against death at all costs and those whose lives are considered not worth safeguarding against illness and death.” // Recommended read: The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political (Butler 2020)

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A person with a walker crosses a deserted Times Square, New York. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

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