No Consolation

Preface: Blah Blah Blah

At the time of writing, over 6 million people have died across the world because of the coronavirus pandemic.¹ More than a hundred million jobs were lost in 2020 compared to the previous year,² while schoolchildren around the world had missed just under two trillion hours of in-person learning by September 2021.³

Inequalities have deepened even further. Young people, women and minorities already struggling to make ends meet in neoliberal societies have been the most severely impacted by the pandemic. Often working in sectors like retail and hospitality on precarious contracts with little protection, they have either lost their jobs or been forced to continue working at greater risk of contracting COVID-19.⁴

Nevertheless, the wheels of the capitalist world economy have kept on turning. Online retailers and entertainment giants like Amazon and Netflix have made a killing, becoming even more powerful than before. While people were losing their jobs or worrying about whether they would still be employed after furlough schemes were withdrawn, financial markets boomed. During the pandemic, markets like the S&P 500 Index – which tracks 500 of the largest companies listed on US stock exchanges – and the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached record highs.

One of the positive stories we heard during lockdown was the rediscovery of nature by the busy commuters of the modern world. We went on walks, worked in our gardens, listened to birds tweeting and worried about our impact on the environment. As a result, governments have been talking about ‘building back better’ – but what has this actually translated into?

‘Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah.’ This was youth climate activist Greta Thunberg in a speech in September 2021, a year and a half after the pandemic hit the West. ‘This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound ←xi | xii→great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises,’ she continued.⁵

For the largest, consumer-facing corporations – the Nestlés, P&Gs and Unilevers – climate change is now a marketing opportunity, a way to grab market share in a post-pandemic, pre-apocalyptic world. Building back better, even the Green New Deal – once a Trojan Horse for a socialist ‘just transition’ – are now slogans touted by the organic intellectuals of monopoly finance capital.

One of the conclusions of this book, which was written ‘on the hoof’, so to speak, is that we are witnessing a neoliberal restoration, not the long-awaited and longed-for death of neoliberalism and its replacement by something better. True, a war is being waged between progressive and reactionary sections of the ruling class, with the green capitalists and neo-Keynesians on one side and the oil barons and right-wing populists on the other. But whichever side wins, we, the people, will lose.

I say that the book was written ‘on the hoof’. What does that mean? I was in the middle of another book, on higher education, thinking that the pandemic would pass and the world would soon return to normal. But as the crisis wore on, and we Brits went into our third lockdown during winter 2020, I knew I had to understand what had happened, how the world had changed. So, I started reading. Not the early analyses of the left, but the conversation going on within the ruling class, in the reports of consultants like KPMG and McKinsey, and in the articles of The Economist and Financial Times.

It is this ‘inductive’ method that explains the structure of the book. It was impossible to describe the situation as it was emerging in logical, argumentative terms. So instead, I had to think in terms of ‘interventions’ – each chapter is, in a way, a separate essay on the pandemic from a particular point of view or problem. These ‘themes’ are idiosyncratic, they are based on what I saw as important. But I think we need a bit more personality in our critiques, don’t you? This is also why a near future narrative frames the book, to soften some of the edges of the theory.