Renata Ávila (Avila) - Everything Must Change!: The World after Covid-19

Introduction: Everything Must Change, So That Nothing Remains the Same

Sreko Horvat

Since armies can reach each other regardless of the thousands of miles which lie between them, friends have to show that they are just as independent from spatial distances as enemies. So lets continue shooting our long distance missiles of friendship to each other in order to show those who are inventive only in order to destroy, that we are just as able to nullify space as they.

Gnther Anders to Claude Eatherly, 1959

In the famous novel of the mid-twentieth century The Leopard , Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa chronicles the struggle of the Sicilian aristocracy to survive in the face of civil war and revolution, the so-called Risorgimento . One of the most famous sentenceslater proclaimed by Alain Delon in Luchino Viscontis movie adaptation of the bookreads, Everything must change, so that everything remains the same. In a similar way, forced by the Covid-19 crisis, our contemporary ruling class is well aware that a deep transformation is taking place and that the only way for things to remain the same is the emergence of a new social and political arrangement that can keep them in power. What other proof is needed of the deep tensions plaguing capitalism but the spiking of Jeff Bezoss fortune by $13 billion in a single day in July 2020, And this is not the first time that the ruling class has openly proclaimed that there is a class war going on. Remember Warren Buffet, another billionaire, who famously said, Theres class warfare, all right, but its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning. With the Covid-19 crisis, which is exacerbating existing inequalities and enhancing the accumulation of profit for exactly those driving the planet toward mass extinction, it has never been so tangible that a brutal class war is happening. And they are, again, trying to win.

Everything must change, so that everything remains the same, proclaims the ruling class once again, clinging to the hope that they will manage to stay in power and continue the vicious cycle of exploitation, extraction, and expansionthe three E s of the world system called capitalism. Instead of investing in the hospitals and schools that were already victims of decades of austerity and underfunding, they are, once again, bailing out the companies responsible for the climate crisis and global injustice. Instead of protecting workers rights and using technology to abolish exploitation, the suffering of so-called essential (or frontline) workers has only increased with the Covid-19 crisis, while the situation is being exploited for the expansion and acceleration of surveillance capitalism. Instead of protecting the climate, further extraction of natural resources and destruction of habitats is leading to an age of pandemics, with even deadlier viruses than Covid-19 waiting just around the corner. Instead of defunding the police, almost everywhere police have responded to Covid-19 as to a war, transforming themselves into an army. As a recent commercial for the National Guard in the United States claimed, Sometimes the front lines are right in our backyard. It seems the famous call of the Weather Underground to Bring the war home! has suddenly been realized, only its cause is not a social movement or a clandestine revolutionary party, but a virus. From Minneapolis to Portland, Budapest to Istanbul, and Santiago to Belgrade, the capitalist war has now, indeed, become a civil war. I cant breatherepeated again and again by Eric Garner, George Floyd, and many other victims of structural racismhas become the predominant feeling of those suffering and dying from the suffocations of police brutality, air pollution, viruses, depression, anxiety, fear, and the myriad other symptoms of the expansion of capital into nature, animals, lungs, minds, and souls.

While the viruses of capitalism and racism ravage the world, this book itself is the product of a different kind of virus. Not only would this publication not have come to light without the Covid-19 coronavirus, but it is a product of the viruses of cooperation and internationalism that are aimed precisely at the virus of a world system that is driving us toward extinction. The plethora of critical voices that have emerged from self-isolation is a proofbye-bye, Maggie Thatcher!that there is such thing as society, even if we are often forced to behave and die as individuals. The project to document some of these voices, first in video conversations and then in this book, started in a room in Vienna in which I was confined to isolation in mid-March 2020, just as Europe became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic and before it would severely hit the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere. In those early days, states across Europe declared a state of exception with unprecedented restrictions on movement, and I was unable to return to my country, Croatia, for another two months. The only way to prevent myself from going crazy and falling into utter hopelessness consisted in hacking my way out of self-isolation by creating what we called DiEM25 TV: The World After Coronavirus. For those of us in the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, who are used to tirelessly traveling around the world, meeting people, and organizing on the ground, isolation was a new situation, as it was for every true internationalist. Suddenly, all that was left was the digital. And even this would soon be turned into what Naomi Klein called the Screen New Deal: the penetration of surveillance capitalism into our brains and souls, the further exploitation of cognitive workers, and the extraction of our affects and even our unconscious.

Yet, for a short time between mid-March and July 2020, which already seems like centuries ago, we succeeded in exploiting a crack in the Screen New Deal and launched an online television channel from our living rooms and places of self-isolation. Much more than just television, this was the creation of a common space, free to everyone, constructed by hundreds of activists and intellectuals from around the world. Rarely have so many people been connected through a single event like the Covid-19 pandemic, with billions around the world placed in some form of quarantine. Rarely have the people on this planet engaged in so much communication, and this despite widespread social distancingfor while there was physical distancing, the social resurged as never before. We have seen the worst of times and the best of times: on the one hand, a completely new situation of an unprecedented health crisis and, on the other, the necessity to connect and construct a world beyond the destructive notion of progress that dominates capitalist modernity. If the slogan of the World Social Forum was Another world is possible, ours is that graffitied in Minneapolis after the brutal murder of George Floyd: Another end of the world is possible. Over the course of 2020, it has become clear (even to those previously in denial) that the end of the world as we know it is everywhere. People are suffocating not just at the hands of a virus but of police brutality and a world system based on extraction, expansion, and exploitation. The climate crisis, the nuclear threat, pandemics, and racism: these are the four horsemen of global capitalism and its structural violence against nature, humans, and the future itself. If we want this to change, nothing can remain the same.