Beyond the crisis: transitioning to a better world?

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is not just a short-term public health emergency. Instead, it has laid bare a broader and deeper organic crisis, produced by the intrinsic tensions and contradictions of the hegemonic neoliberal capitalist order. I discuss this organic crisis in terms of its active amplification of human divisiveness at various levels – class, racial, national, cultural – which impedes the generation of solidarity and cooperation in the name of a ‘common humanity’, required if humans are to live in harmony among each other and with the planet. By reflecting on a diverse range of barriers to such a desirable future, from the erosive role of human passions to the escalating new cold war between China and the West and the fundamental divisions exposed by the existential challenge of climate change, I argue that to have a chance of a liveable and equitable common future, we need to maintain a critical cosmopolitan horizon against the grain of self-interested closures and exclusions which underpin the organic crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Organic crisis
• neoliberalism
• inequality
• racism
• climate change
• cosmopolitanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ien Ang

Ien Ang is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University (Australia) and the author of numerous books, including Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (2001) and, most recently, the co-authored Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China (2019).