Noam Chomsky and Srećko Horvat, March 25, 2020.

Srećko: Noam, you witnessed the Second World War, the bombing of Hiroshima, and many important historic events from the Vietnam War, the 1973 oil crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and, more recently, the financial crash of 2007–2008. In terms of your background in being a witness and protagonist in major historical processes, how do you see the current Covid-19 crisis? Is it an unprecedented historical event? Is it something that surprised you?

Noam: My earliest memories, which are haunting me now, are from the 1930s. I can recall, when I was a young child, listening to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies over the radio. Though I couldn’t understand the words, it was easy to understand the mood and the threat, and, I have to say, when I listen to Donald Trump’s rallies today, it resonates. It’s not that he’s a fascist—he doesn’t have that much of an ideology, he’s just a sociopath, an individual concerned with himself—but the mood and the fear is similar, and the idea that the fate of the country and the world is in the hands of a sociopathic buffoon is shocking. Covid-19 is serious enough, but it’s worth recalling that there is a much greater horror approaching. We are racing to the edge of disaster, far worse than anything that’s happened in human history, and Trump and his minions are in the lead in racing to the abyss. In fact, there are two immense threats that we are facing. One is the growing threat of nuclear war, which has been exacerbated by the tearing apart of what’s left of the arms control regime, and the other is of course the growing threat of global warming. Both threats can be dealt with, but there isn’t a lot of time. Covid-19 is horrible and can have terrifying consequences, but there will be recovery. As for the other threats, there won’t be recovery. If we don’t deal with them, we’re done.

Saskia Sassen and Srećko Horvat, March 27, 2020.

Saskia: I do find this coronavirus event a telling event. It enters the picture at a moment when we already had quite a few unsettlements. The question of climate change, which many of the younger generations are really gathering around, is something that we elders have never taken very seriously, but we are also being pulled in now, because we realize something has changed. And one way of thinking about that something that has changed is that we have crossed the limits of a system. With one foot, we have stepped out—and it’s just a bit too much. We are dealing with systematicities that can’t quite fully narrate themselves. I want to look at this microbe as an invitation for us to sit down and think. This invisible microbe that is without smell, without sound, is a call to attention to things that we hadn’t thought about.

David Graeber and Maja Kantar, April 15, 2020.

Maja: Suddenly, when a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic happens, we can see that everything that was deemed impossible somehow becomes possible, whether that is writing off the National Health Service’s debt in the UK, the nationalization of private hospitals, or squatting a McDonald’s in Marseilles and turning it into a food bank.

David: There has been a thirty- to forty-year war against human political imagination. In the 1930s through to the 1960s, it was just assumed that we were living in a somewhat terrifying, but nonetheless exhilarating, new age where almost anything was possible. Creations such as the United Nations or the space program were epical feats of statesmanship. This is inconceivable now. We are given this line that there are economic machines beyond our control that are propelling us toward a better future and we just have to trust in them; we certainly can’t intervene in history. Today, it has gotten to the point where even those in power can no longer control the mechanisms they have created—they seem at a total loss in the face of urgent calls for them to mobilize on a global scale.

Roger Waters and Yanis Varoufakis, April 20, 2020.

Roger: The question is: How do we arrive at a place where we can make even a small amount of progress? Where we can implement even something as simple as a nuclear arms reduction deal—something you would think anybody with an IQ above room temperature would immediately agree with? If Bernie Sanders was to become president of the United States, perhaps he would do that. But he won’t because he’s been railroaded by the Democratic National Committee for the second time—the only viable candidate who might have made any impression upon the Trump voting base has been wiped out because he doesn’t represent the plutocracy that is the United States. Biden obviously does. Biden is perfect: he’s got the false teeth and he has horrible ideas about everything, so he’s perfect!

Yanis: Biden has no policies, he is simply the depository of all the policies of the status quo. It is very easy to lose heart, because every time there is a glimmer of hope it is snuffed out, whether it is Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. So, what do we do about this? Firstly, we have to take a leaf out of the books of the bankers and the fascists. Because the bankers and the fascists understand one thing: that the only way to succeed is through internationalism and solidarity. We need to learn from this. We need to build a progressive international movement that has one agenda for the world but finds its specializations in different parts of the world.