Strikes across borders and strikes for the highest wages The planet turns to the right as the balance ideologies mix in Supitua repression, moratorium on rights

What do you think the
politics of fear will bring?
On the street, a person cumbersome the body “first of all safety” But
the problem of the normal is that it always
worsens Bruce Cockburn, “the problem of normality”

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, which is spreading around the world as I write these lines, will surely be remembered as a time shift. In this long winter, as the borders close, the blockades and quarantines multiply, as people die and recover, there's a powerful feeling: when spring comes, we wake up in a completely altered landscape.

Among the people who are now in isolation, despite our fears and frustrations, aside from our pain – for those who have died or may die, for the life we lived in another time, for the future we hoped for once – there is also a sense of closure, of transformation, of waiting, of sleep. It is true: the horrors threaten the global picture, especially the way in which the virus – or our measures against it – will threaten some of us; some of us have been abandoned or devalued as a society. Many of us are already mutually exclusive. Many of us are already learning it, too late. And there is also a risk that the line between humanitarian and authoritarian measures will be broken. There is the geopolitical weaponry of the pandemic.

But when spring comes, as necessary, when we step out of hibernation, it can be the time for a deep, global struggle against the urge to “return to normality.” This normality was what set the stage for this tragedy and which may be even worse “the new normality”. Let's prepare as best we can, because we have a world to win.

Revenge of the new normality

I imagine that the struggles that are yet to come will define the desperate impulses to “return to normality”, or the great rejections to that normality. But this is not a melodrama manipulation.

On the one hand, there will be those who seek to return to the capitalist order of global revenge, which we would have become accustomed to: a nihilistic system based on global accumulation, which seems to be beating many of us without any judicial rule, without need, without individual intent for particular malization, and giving way to the worst kind of policy of revenge.

Of course, as always, we should wait for the demands for the beneficiaries of this system who have all the income from business – rich, political elites – to return to vengeful normalcy. But we should also expect that demand, from those who have been trampled, exploited and alienated by this system, the lives of those people have been limited to a slow death.

After many months of chaos, isolation and fear, the desire to return to normality can be tremendously strong, even if normality is an abusive system. The stage is ready to help this desire with a frenetic reluctance. Are we going to blame someone, especially those of us who have lost a relative? Will blood be shed figuratively or literally? Baptism of fire so that the old order, which has generated austerity and inequalities that have made this scourge so destructive, can revive in a purified way.

Of course, things will never be “normal” again: some of us, the privileged and the rich, could afford that illusion, but that illusion will surely lead to a majority that will work more, more and less, and that will suffer more risks and receive the worst rewards.

The debts of the pandemic, both literal and figurative, must be paid.

On the other hand, and perhaps at the same time, we hope that the voters and the rest of us will also open up calls to “not to return to normal”, but to embrace something worse. The chaos and deaths of the pandemic can be attributed to excessive democracy, liberality and empathy. At a time when the state is crouching its muscles and taking absolute control over society, many will not want to give up. We can still see, through this crisis, the use of repressive forces against civilians – as they are already using with migrants and imprisoned people – and I fear that many will justify it; the human sacrifice to feed the Gods of fear.

As a result of the pandemic, we can be sure that fascists and reactionaries will try to mobilize tropes of purity, purification, parasitism and pollution – rational, national, economic – to impose their long-term dreams on reality. The vengeful romanticism of the border, now more politicised than ever, will persecute us all in the coming years. The authoritarian “new”, whatever is apparent – the totalitarian state or the totalitarian market, or both at once – will act so that we can all recognise that we are now living in a cruel and competitive world – which we have always lived through – and that measures must be taken to block and expel people. On other occasions, authoritarianism can come hidden, mixed with the rhetoric used by science, liberalism and the common good.

However, it is almost certain that those who in recent decades have been greatly enriched and empowered, especially by interrelated technological and financial sectors, will strive to lead the reorganization of society and carry it out in neo-technocratic directions, taking advantage of its influences and resources, as well as the weakness and disorder of traditional institutions. To “optimize” social and political life, they will continue to offer their services of surveillance, logistics, finance and powerful socialized data empire with generosity.

This corporate dystopia can have a human face: basic incomes, hyper of new epidemics, personalized medicine. They are already coming with gifts to help this emergency: exploring disease vectors, banning misinformation, offering assistance to states through population data.

Under the mask will be the reorganization of society to better adapt to hyper-capitalist metaphism, but as it is driven by capitalist contradiction, for most of us it will be the neofeatheist: a world of data management and risk that only a few will be able to exploit.

They'll tell us it's for our well-being.

Our vengeful refusal

Contrary to all these fatal results, there will be those who oppose the return to normality or the embrace of the “new normality”: “those of us who know that the problem of normality worsens”.

We are witnessing the emergency situation caused by the crisis and seeing extraordinary measures take place, demonstrating that the demands of austerity and the need for the neoliberal regime were, to a large extent, false. The Divine Market has collapsed once again. A few weeks ago a number of measures are being carried out in many places which would be unimaginable. These measures include the suspension of rent and mortgages, free public transport, the expansion of basic incomes, steps to pay debts, the uptake of privatized hospitals or infrastructure that the public has once had for public welfare, the release of imprisoned persons, and the obligation of Governments to oblige private industries to direct their production towards common needs.

We have heard reports of a significant number of people refusing to work, demanding savage labour measures and their right to live radically. In some places, homeless people are driving away from empty houses.

We are looking, contrary to the paradigm of capitalist value that has enriched a few at the expense of many, at what works are really valuable: the care, the services and the front lines of the public sector. There has been an increase in the basic radical demands regarding policies of care and solidarity, not only as an emergency measure, but also as a perpetuity measure.

The right-wing and capitalist Think Thank you are terrified. They fear that in the coming weeks and months they will go to shitty for the responsible work they have done for half a century to convince us of the need for neoliberalism, for the transformation of our souls. The sweet taste of freedom – real and interdependent freedom, not the solitary freedom of the market – is on the palate as a long-forgotten memory, but it quickly becomes bitter when its sweetness is removed. If we do not defend these material and spiritual achievements, capitalism will come to vengeance.

Meanwhile, people in quarantine or semi-isolation, thanks to the use of digital tools, are discovering new ways of mobilizing to serve and support those who need it most in our communities. Gradually we are recovering the powers of common life that we had lost; our secret heritage was hidden in sight. We are relearning to become a cooperative species, while removing the claustrophobic surface of homo oeconomicus. At the end of a capitalist order of competition, mistrust and endless movements, our ingenuity and piety reappear, like birds in a free sky and without toxic fog.

When spring comes, there will be a struggle to preserve, improve, weave and organize that innocence and mercy, to demand that normality does not return and that there is no new normality. Throughout the world, in recent years, there has been an unprecedented level of mobilisation and organisation by movements against vengeful capitalism; sometimes around election candidates – such as Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in EE.UU – but also around other campaigns such as the anti-necro-liberalism protests in France, the anti-liberalism in Hong Kong.

Those fights before 2020, one by one, are important in themselves, but I think they're going to be remembered as a training ground for a generation, which now has to give a turning point in history. We have learned to kneel a capitalist economy through protest without violence, in the face of tremendous and technologically growing oppression. We are learning to become ungovernable in the face of states and markets.

Equally important, we have learned new ways of caring for each other without waiting for the state or the authorities. We are once again aware of the power of solidarity and mutual support. We're learning to communicate again and to work together. We've learned how to organize, how to respond quickly, how to make collective decisions and how to take responsibility for our destiny.

As heroes of all the beautiful epic, we're not prepared, we haven't completely completed our training, but luck won't wait. Like all true heroes, we must be content with what we have: each other, nothing else.

As the world closes its eyes to go into this strange, dream-like quarantine -- except for those health workers, services and first level care workers who cannot rest at the service of humanity, or who do not have a safe place to dream -- we have to prepare to stand up. We are at the height of a tremendous condemnation, of rejection of a return to normality and a new normality; that vengeful normality brought us this catastrophe, and it can only lead to more catastrophes. In the coming weeks there will be time to cry, dream, prepare, learn and connect as best as possible.

When isolation is over, we will wake up in a world where competitive regimes for the normalization of revenge will be at war with each other; it will be a time of great danger and opportunity. It will be time to stand up and look in the eyes.