It’s becoming clear that whatever kind of ‘normality’ we return to after the COVID-19 crisis is over, it will be a lot different to the ‘normal’ we were used to just a month ago. A ‘normal’ that was dysfunctional and throwing too many people under the bus. A ‘normal’ we don’t want to go back to. A lot of people we know, inspired by the wave of mutual aid groups that have sprung up in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, are seriously thinking about the kind of radically changed world we want to live in. It’s in solidarity with this that we re-post the following from our mates at DiY CULTURE…

This was originally posted on the DiY CULTURE Facebook page

“Just as people are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly…The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.”

Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

Will things return to ‘normal’, following the global COVID-19 crisis? A return to an age of ruthless exploitation of the planet and it’s people, by a corrupt cabal of politicians, landlords, bankers, property developers, various mafia gangs and global corporations? A normal where thousands of empty properties stand as ghostly totems to global greed, on the same streets where working people are sleeping in tents and homeless people live ragged lives? Where people work all week to pay off a landlords mortgage and pension and where nurses are forced to use food-banks? Where the advance guard of capital – mass tourism, is destroying every environment it touches? Where 30,000 people die every day for lack of nutrition?

The list of societal wrongs is endless and overwhelming and we are trapped within it. But if we do return to life as it was before, a COVID-19 will happen again, and again, and again – the capitalist system of exploitation and greed works against nature and every notion of it, from landlordism to wealth accumulation, must be wiped from the face of our Earth.

Capitalism is the virus – direct-action, mutual-aid and solidarity will be the cure.

Post Scarcity Anarchism (the full book!)