With respect to public health and economic recovery, the Covid-19 crisis requires an immediate concerted and coordinated transformative response. This is clear and irrefutable. To fail do so, in a timely and comprehensive manner, dramatically increases the risk to the immediate common good. As we proceed down the path of crisis mitigation, it adds value to unpack an important underlying given – the backdrop of globalization.
Neoliberal globalization is a contested and noxious phenomenon. It’s a two-sided coin of centralized corporate ownership and world-wide decentralized production. In effect, as a market-based system globalization is fraught with interlocking contradictions that undermine stability. Increased global integration generates growing levels of inter- and intra-state income inequality. Global economic standardization/homogenization fosters production-supply chains that link far flung economies, facilitates global market-based growth, induces carbon-based climate change, and increases the probability of cascading market and societal collapse.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a mere prelude to the destabilizing impacts that will sweep through the planet, once the gale force of global climate change is fully unleashed. Assuming that climate change continues unabated, ecological distortions will set the groundwork for wide-ranging societal risks and disruptions. Scientists and analyst have made a strong case that global climatic change will inevitably trigger inter-connected domino-like repercussions that will result in: agricultural breakdowns; wildlife, species, and biogenetic extinction; fresh water shortages; pathogenic transformations and the eruptions of novel forms of viral growth; urban demise and chaos; mass waves of trans-migratory climate refugees; and generalized economic/political destabilization.
Global/national dislocations are not individualized events, they are inter-connected processes. In complex domains, like that which characterizes the current moment, simplistic one-dimensional approaches are ineffective and ultimately self-defeating. Our existing toolbox does not include innovative policy frameworks and conceptual language that encourage and supports a more decentralized, human-centered, and sustainable socio-economic landscape. The crafting of current responses to the pandemic are framed by legacy thinking with feedback loops to noxious globalization.
Confirmation bias – the tendency to interpret new information in ways that favors one’s preconceived manner of thinking – constrains our ability to address the overarching Covid-19 crisis and the attendant economic dislocations in innovative and robust ways. In short, we continue to be mired in the old-time religion of macroeconomic growth, Keynesian disciplinary pieties, and top-down stand-alone solutionist perspectives. In brief, legacy thinking narrows policy prescriptions to an ad nauseum repetition of risk-prone forms of unsustainable market-based growth and degraded ecosystems.
Mainstream policy prescriptions, addressing the overarching crisis, generally revolve around conventional state-sponsored corporate “solutions.” Of course, these top-down “solutions” – include the obligatory tip-of-the state budgetary hat to small- and medium-size firms and workers. Considering the urgency and magnitude of the crisis, conventional mitigation response(s) make limited short-term pragmatic sense. Yet, considering the dire circumstances, conventional and limited is not good enough. It falls grievously and dangerously short. Overall, crafting a market-based legacy strategy that overwhelmingly rewards large-scale firms – at the expense of the larger majorities – is economically short-sighted, politically obtuse, and morally questionable.
The current crisis is a transformative moment in American history. Its effects will be felt for years to come as the U.S. social structure grapples with massive systemic unemployment and tarnished and delegitimized institutions. Discontinuities, of this order of magnitude, open the door to countervailing social movements and the possibility for transformative change. Considering the dimensions of the prevailing crisis, the current juncture may be a pivotal moment to start thinking and organizing around alternative future(s). It would not be beyond the pale to reimaging dismantling our existing centralized mega-technological system, and replacing it with a simpler socio-technical arrangement that revolve around human-centered intermediate technology that constrains unsustainable consumption and ecological degradation.
This prospective framework, should not be crafted on a blank slate. In the best-case scenario, restructuring would take a hybrid approach that combines novel ways of doing things with appropriated modified compatible practices and techniques drawn from the pre-existing order. The particular mix between new forms and practices and the reworked and grafted inherited forms remain to be worked out as an evolving political project. Ultimately, the newly configured assemblage(s) should reflect local regional histories, bottom-up mobilization, and popular democratic engagement.
Considering the magnitude of the untenable risks that we are currently facing, in effect, transformative engagement is not an option, it’s a species-driven survivalist and social justice imperative.
Arturo-Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is an urban planner and the former chairperson of the “Newest New Yorker Committee” of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and various Latin American universities.