Introduction: post-COVID transformations

ABSTRACT

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on post-COVID transformations. We raise three sets of questions relating to the implications of the pandemic for the sustainability of the present global political and economic system and the extent to which that system may as a result be undergoing transformation. First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on neoliberal hyperglobalization? Second, what insights do earlier pandemics along with other inter-related crises such as those of climate, inequality, social reproduction, and continued fallout of the global financial crisis offer for understanding the medium- to long-term implications of COVID-19. Finally, the special issue seeks to address the question of the extent to which the COVID pandemic may lead to progressive political transformations. We conclude with a summary of each of the individual contributions to this special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• global transformations
• hyperglobalization
• inequality
• crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic, that rapidly spread across the globe in the early months of 2020, has been nothing short of a colossal human tragedy. The World Health Organization has reported that by February 2022, 5.7 million people had died worldwide as a direct result of the disease (though the real figure may be higher).¹ Many millions more are likely to have suffered or are still suffering from the long-term effects of COVID. Beyond these direct medical impacts, countless livelihoods have been damaged or destroyed by the economic fallout of the pandemic, as well as by the restrictive measures adopted by governments to try and slow or halt its spread.

The pandemic has, as a result, raised urgent questions about the sustainability of the present global political and economic system. The global pandemic also raises important questions about what kinds of broader social, economic, political, and cultural transformations may be likely or possible in a post-COVID world. It is not yet clear whether such transformations will ultimately take a predominantly progressive or regressive character, though as the words projected onto a Santiago apartment building in the early days of Chile’s first lockdown read, ‘No volveremos a la normalidad porque la normalidad era el problema’ (we will not return to normal because normal was the problem).

Indeed, what quickly became clear as the virus spread across the globe in early 2020 was that the pandemic was intimately related with pre-existing crisis tendencies, including increasing inequality, ecological breakdown, and climate change, that have facilitated COVID-19’s emergence, enabled its rapid spread, and amplified its disastrous impacts on global public health. Understanding how these multiple global crises intersect and amplify each other is crucial for a critical understanding of possible post-COVID transformations and how political praxis could steer social transformations in a progressive direction.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of the pre-COVID ‘normality’ is how the impacts of the pandemic have not been experienced equally but rather have been profoundly shaped by and in turn further entrenched existing patterns of global inequality. Such patterns of inequality have manifested themselves both within and between countries. In the Global North, governments were relatively well placed to support stay-at-home quarantine orders and buffer the fallout of economic contraction with various forms of financial assistance, including existing social welfare schemes, support for paid furlough, and one-off financial assistance cheques.² In parts of the developing world, however, densely populated cities, inadequate public health infrastructures, greater vulnerability to slowdowns in demand for key exports and in tourism, all imposed a heavy toll on already marginalized populations. Furthermore, measures such as lockdowns that in wealthier countries proved valuable in buying time were much less effective in a number of developing countries, which were typically unable to buy up vital medical equipment such as ventilators and testing kits (Kahl & Wright, 2021, p. 213).

The pandemic has also deepened inequalities within individual countries. The well-off were typically able to keep their well-paid jobs and benefit from rising stock market values and house prices, while lower-paid workers were more likely to have jobs in sectors badly hit by the pandemic, such as tourism and hospitality, or had jobs with higher risks of exposure and lived in crowded accommodation.³ This deepening inequality and vulnerabilization served to exacerbate ongoing trends towards right-wing populist politics and authoritarianism (Cooper, 2021). As Freedom House has pointed out, since the pandemic began, democracy and human rights have deteriorated in 80 countries, as various governments responded to the virus by engaging in abuses of power, the repression and silencing of critics, and the weakening of key institutions, often with the effect of undermining the very systems of accountability needed to protect public health.⁴

As we enter into the third year of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it is an appropriate juncture at which to take stock and assess what impact the pandemic is likely to have in the medium to longer term. In many respects, however, the full implications of the COVID-19 pandemic may not be revealed for many years to come. But as the contributions to this special issue suggest, certain patterns can already be identified. The contributors to this special issue, therefore, seek to raise a number of inter-related questions.

First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on relentless neoliberal hyperglobalization? For at least the last four decades, the international economic system has been based on hegemonic norms of market-led development and pursuit of relentless commodification of labour, society, and nature, overseen in theory at least by a minimal nightwatchman state. In many respects, however, hyperglobalization can be identified as a key contributor to the emergence of the pandemic. Global Extractivism of resources, with its attendant ecological and social destructiveness (see forthcoming Special Forum on Global Extractivism and Alternatives in the Journal of Peasant Studies, guest edited by Barry Gills, Markus Kröger, and Anja Nygren, 2022) has accelerated significantly during the Era of neoliberal globalization. This link between global economic activity and disease should not be surprising. As Mike Davies has argued, multinational capital has historically been a key driver of disease evolution, through the burning or logging of tropical forests, proliferation of factory farming, the explosive growth of slums, and informal employment. The elimination of the barriers between human populations and virus-carrying birds, bats, and mammals along with the emergence of factory farms and giant feedlots act as incubators of novel viruses (Davis, 2020, p. 17).

Efforts (or lack of them) by national governments to tackle the pandemic have also brought into question neoliberal norms surrounding the ‘proper’ role of the state in the economy, and in particular, the question of state capacity and its role in crisis management. Indeed, it is a paradox that in 2019, the Global Health Security Index listed both the United States and the United Kingdom as the two countries with the highest level of pandemic preparedness, whereas South Korea was placed 9th, while China was placed 51st.⁵ Yet, the United States has seen 2766 deaths per million, and the United Kingdom 2370 deaths. In South Korea, on the other hand, it has been 134 per million and in China only 3.5.⁶ The previous ‘common sense’ concerning the presumed superior capability of major states in the global north versus the global south was turned upside down by the actual course of the pandemic across the globe.

State capacity plays a key role in explaining these divergences. It has been argued, for example, that the United Kingdom’s response to the pandemic was hindered by the regulatory state’s bloated bureaucracy and the National Health Service’s inability to procure medical supplies as just-in-time arrangements with overseas suppliers quickly broke down as a result of their vulnerability to global supply disruptions (Jones & Hameiri, 2021). Countries still possessing considerable state capacity, such as South Korea, on the other hand, were able to tackle early outbreaks while avoiding lockdown, while domestic pharmaceutical companies in close partnership with the state were able to manufacture medical supplies as well as export them to developed countries amidst global shortages (Kumar, 2021).

The pandemic has therefore brought into question the role of the state in the economy and whether we have witnessed the beginning of the end of (hyper) neoliberalism. As Apeldoorn and de Graaff point out, however, the binary logic of the retreat/return of the state potentially neglects the fact that the reconfiguration of the role of the state does not necessarily imply a fundamental break with global marketization or the end of neoliberalism (2022, p. 16). The potential fetishization of state capacity may also have profoundly regressive implications, as states deemed as having ‘performed well’ have also shifted the costs of tackling the pandemic on to the poor and vulnerable.

Relatedly, what role do the institutions of global governance have in pandemic management and global health more broadly, and how should such institutions be reformed in a post-COVID world? Tensions between the Trump administration and the World Health Organization in the early days of the pandemic were testament to how international cooperation can easily fall victim to geopolitical competition when perceived ‘national interests’ are at stake. Even more insidious, however, has been the aggressive resort to vaccine nationalism, whereby wealthy nations secured billions of doses of vaccines – enough to inoculate their citizens many times over – leaving citizens of poorer countries largely unvaccinated and leaving the world vulnerable to new variants emerging in unvaccinated populations. Indeed, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has described this stockpiling of vaccines as ‘one of the greatest policy failures of our times’.⁷ While programmes such as COVAX were devised in order to deal with such problems, they have been seriously underfunded. Issues have similarly been raised around the question of intellectual property rights waivers and their role in getting life-saving medicines to the world’s poorest peoples (Sariola, 2021). Such waivers have, perhaps not surprisingly, been opposed by the major pharmaceutical companies but they have also been opposed by leading Western governments.

The second question is to examine what insights earlier pandemics along with other inter-related crises can shed on potential post-COVID transformations. It has been widely noted, for example, that previous pandemics such as the Black Death and the 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu brought about widespread societal transformations in their wake. There are instructive differences, however, not least the rapidity of the development of vaccines that have saved countless lives and reduced the potential death toll of COVID-19. Other crises, such as the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and the ongoing climate emergency, also provide valuable lessons as to the likelihood or otherwise of meaningful societal transformations. Indeed, many of the questions raised above concerning the fate of neoliberal hyperglobalization were also raised in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, and thus, there are lessons here for judging the potential for reforms that may help prevent the emergence of the next pandemic and the mitigation of its impact on public health. In addition, the climate crisis is a particularly important comparative case, not least due to the direct interconnections between the two, but also in terms of shedding light on how crises are addressed or otherwise.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, the special issue seeks to address the question of the extent to which the COVID pandemic may lead to progressive political transformations. The pandemic has to date led to a wide range of diverse forms of social mobilization and protest, thereby ‘ … revealing the nature of the COVID-19 emergency as a moment of political suspension and heightened social confrontation’ (Gerbaudo, 2020). In March 2021, The Economist reported that COVID-related protests had taken place in 86 countries since the start of the pandemic, and were typically driven by economic hardship, psychological exhaustion, and scepticism about governments’ handling of the crisis.⁸ The Black Lives Matter protests in the early summer of 2020, for example, were a response to police violence in the United States, but were also intimately related to how COVID-19 served to exacerbate underlying problems of racial injustice, isolation, frustration, and stagnation, and resulting higher unemployment.⁹ Many mobilizations have also had regressive aspects, however. Although anti-lockdown protests have been driven by class-based grievances relating to economic hardship, they have also frequently been associated with right-wing and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that look unlikely to form the basis of a post-COVID progressive politics. Indeed, a sober analysis of the current juncture suggests that tendencies towards an increasingly regressive world order appear to be more dominant at the moment: e.g. increasing global inequality, the deepening of nationalist populism and authoritarianism, the weakening of global health governance, continued economic fallout from the pandemic, the subordination of urgent climate change mitigation measures to the imperative of restoring capitalist growth, and further degradation of individual freedoms and life chances. In contrast, however, in many countries and communities across the globe, mutual aid societies came into action, offering vital help and support to others more vulnerable or suffering from the effects of the pandemic on their own life and livelihood. The widespread acts of mutual support that emerged from people themselves give testimonial to the potential for severe crisis to generate not only acts of resistance, but also acts of positive and progressive transformation.

Summary of the papers

Robert Denemark (2022) argues in his contribution to this special issue that pandemics have been a recurrent phenomenon, although as with COVID-19, their impacts upon states have been highly differentiated. States endowed with the capacity to provide public sanitation, enforce quarantines, and take preventative medical action tend to grow in strength, while those in decline and with poor and corrupt leaderships are likely to enter into a vicious cycle whereby those characteristics are reinforced by their failure to deal effectively with pandemics. Pandemics have also had a significant impact on the cycle of class conflict. Population decline can strengthen labour’s position and lead to wage increases, although labour shortages can ultimately lead to new methods of labour control, while alterations in labour and climatic conditions affect the possibility of future pandemics. Pandemics can lead to scapegoating along both class and ethnic lines, reflecting the fact that populations are not impacted by pandemics evenly, which can generate suspicion and resentment. Pandemics have a close relationship to broader global political change. Military victory and defeat can depend greatly on the dynamics of particular pandemics, with disease strongly shaping the fate of established empires and the rise of colonial expansion. As Denemark argues, many of these dynamics are discernible in the current crisis, even if their precise form has taken novel manifestations. As noted, the differential impact of COVID-19 can be seen in those countries which have still retained a considerable degree of state capacity compared with those that have largely been hollowed out. While the pandemic has not led to the high death rates as seen in the Black Death and the subsequent decline of feudalism, there is little doubt that COVID-19 has led to an intensification of class conflict. Furthermore, ethnic scapegoating has been prevalent with suspicion and prejudice in the West directed towards those of Asian ancestry. The pandemic has also intensified US–China tensions, leading not just to vaccine nationalism but potentially to new forms of alliances or international community between countries that have opted for Chinese and Russian vaccines. Denemark’s contribution also includes a brief appendix that considers challenges in the way we see disease and offers some quick and useful technical information.

In her contribution, Silke Trommer (2022) examines the impact of the pandemic on global trade and health, along with their relationship to the global productive and reproductive economy. She argues that the pandemic has exacerbated socio-economic inequalities and insecurities amidst a broader crisis in social reproduction. In particular, the sharp decline in global trade has impacted upon supplies that are essential for social reproduction, such as drugs and medical equipment. The pandemic has also contributed towards the pushing of care work out of the productive economy into domestic settings. In terms of the impact of the pandemic on global trade governance, COVID-19 has led to a renewed debate about intellectual property (IP) rights for medicines and the efficacy of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) mechanism. While the TRIPS waiver proposed by the Biden administration in response to COVID-19 has met considerable resistance, Trommer argues that in any case, it fails to address broader issues surrounding the global distribution of medicines. In addition, the global IP regime anchored in trade agreements is just one aspect of a wider set of policies through which corporations rather than states govern global production networks. Legal provisions in trade agreements create health and social reproductive inequalities by benefitting corporations providing healthcare products and services. They do this through curtailing government intervention and spending in health and other areas relevant for social reproduction. Indeed, the COVID-19 era has seen no slowdown in the reaching of such trade agreements. Trade policy circles have failed to respond to the pandemic with a meaningful overhaul of global trade relations, and there has been no ideational shift whereby trade is understood as a tool for equitable and sustainable forms of social reproduction. This thereby leaves the exploitative nature of global trade relations and their ambivalent relationship with public health and social reproduction largely intact.

As noted, the COVID-19 pandemic is closely inter-connected with other crises such as the climate emergency and the GFC. Diana Stuart, Brian Petersen, and Ryan Gunderson (2022) argue that there are strong parallels between the failure of many states to adopt effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and failures to tackle climate change. Indeed, these failures are related given that the pandemic and the climate crisis can both be traced to the manner whereby the economic growth imperative has led to the transformation in the relationship between humans and nature. Focusing on the United States, Stuart et al. argue that these failures rest on denialism, individualism, and techno-optimism. Climate change denial takes explicit forms, such as outright rejection that anthropogenic climate change exists and scepticism towards the scientific basis of claims that climate mitigation efforts are necessary and justifiable. The earlier stages of the COVID-19 pandemic saw the Chinese government suppress information about the outbreak, while US President Donald Trump downplayed and minimized the crisis, spread misinformation, and even withheld the resources needed for testing. The common thread here is the strong resistance to measures that might negatively impact economic growth. Yet the failure to tackle the climate or COVID-19 crisis can take implicit forms, such as the promotion of individualism as pretence for collective inaction. With regards to climate change, there is an emphasis on such individual adjustments as veganism or flying less, which fall vastly short of what is required to make a significant reduction in global emissions. With regard to COVID-19, the Trump administration left individual state governors to tackle the crisis, which led to a wide disparity between liberal and conservative states in terms of the types and effectiveness of the measures deployed. Both crises saw the prevalence of techno-optimism as a shared pretence for collective inaction. With regard to climate change, this included focusing on alternative energy sources and improvements in efficiency to address climate change, despite the fact that such solutions are likely to be insufficient. COVID-19 similarly saw a heavy emphasis on vaccines as a silver bullet capable of avoiding significant alternatives, social changes, and economic downturn. The common thread here is that these justifications serve to maintain the status quo and benefit the wealthy few.

In terms of charting future trajectories, Paul James and Manfred Steger (2022) argue that the pandemic is likely to lead to two outcomes. The first is an intensification of what the authors refer to as the ‘great unsettling’, namely a set of complex social dynamics of instability and volatility that refers to the massive destabilization dynamics that have led to a reconstitution of the ecological, economic, and political life on this planet. The second is the growing prevalence of disembodied relations, namely those relations mediated by codes and signs such as digital technology, which are overlaying and remaking the more embodied and material processes of global integration and interchange, thereby transforming the human planetary condition. This argument is put forward through a comparison of COVID-19 with the GFC. Both crises demonstrate the disjuncture between embodied placement and abstracted relations. On the one hand, the sub-prime housing boom that preceded the GFC was strongly rooted in particular localities. Each act of buying a home in a local neighbourhood continued to be enacted at the level of embodied placement, e.g. in specific American cities. Yet the loans were lifted out of embodied placement and linked to global sub-prime mortgage financing as part of a disembodied process that had been underway for a couple of decades, through such mechanisms as residential mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps. The COVID-19 pandemic on the other hand was widely assumed to have its origins in Wuhan’s ‘wet markets’, if not as the source of the pandemic, then at least as a place of its initial spreading. Yet the embodied placement of disease transmission transformed into the more abstract national and global realm as fixed points in a matrix of epidemiological statistics.

James Mittelman (2022) deploys Fernand Braudel’s schematic of three speeds of time, namely the immediate moment, the medium term of a decade or decades, and the longue durée. He argues that these speeds of time correspond to overlapping periods of vaccine nationalism, viral globalization, and runaway capitalism. In the immediate moment, Mittelman points to the role of vaccine nationalism, noting that vaccination has been seen simply as a biomedical challenge of producing a successful vaccine rather than a more comprehensive trifecta of science, politics, and profit. Without focusing on human behaviour, it is impossible to understand the failure of political leaders to prepare for a potential pandemic despite numerous warnings, along with the role of philanthropists and their motivations that go beyond simple altruism towards capital accumulation. In the medium term, Mittelman draws attention to viral globalization, in which questions are raised about the availability, access, and affordability of vaccines more generally, and the extreme inequality in distribution amidst ongoing tensions between a planetary health crisis and vaccine nationalism. In the longue durée, Mittelman sees a post-pandemic age characterized by runaway capitalism in which there are both continuities and discontinuities with prior forms of capitalism. Runaway capitalism is characterized by three integrally connected forms: algorithmic capitalism driven by digital innovations, cognitive capitalism wherein the knowledge portion of commodities outstrips the physical components that produce them, and philanthropic capitalism, which is a market-based for-profit approach to solving intractable problems such as poverty and environmental degradation.

In her contribution, Rachel Zhou (2022) picks up these themes in examining how vaccine nationalism has exposed the dangers of nationalist responses to the global pandemic. In the first instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged in the context of a broader crisis of globalization including the GFC, increased tendencies towards nationalism and populism, and growing US–China rivalry. Within this context, Zhou goes on to examine the emergence of vaccine nationalism and its impact on poorer countries, including the extent to which COVID-19 has become a zero-sum geopolitical power game alongside a weakening of the WTO and global health governance more broadly. The COVAX facility has been under-resourced and its effectiveness has been undermined by unequal participation. Its funding mechanism heavily favours pharmaceutical corporations through providing them with a win–win situation regardless of whether their vaccines gain regulatory approval, and its reliance on philanthropic funding suggests vulnerability to donor fatigue. COVAX is an example of increased reliance on public–private partnerships, showing that private solutions and interests are privileged over public approaches. Vaccine nationalism thus represents a serious threat to global public health. Lack of timely access to vaccines in many lower-income countries may prolong the global threat of COVID-19, while short-term nationalist responses to the pandemic may lead to the re-naturalization of the nation-state, and the undermining of collective capacities in dealing with other impending global crises. As such, the coexistence of nationalist and globalist approaches to COVID-19 vaccines suggests simultaneous and contentious processes of globalization and deglobalization.

Both Alf Gunvald Nilsen (2022) and Kwang-Yeong Shin (2022) provide detailed case studies of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted upon India and South Korea, respectively. As Nilsen argues, the pandemic was initially downplayed by the Narendra Modi government and there were inadequate attempts to strengthen the resilience of the country’s health sector. This was followed, however, by one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. The severity of India’s COVID-19 crisis was shaped by two pre-existing crises, namely that of social reproduction and the subsistence of the working poor, along with a crisis of India’s secular and constitutional democracy. This disjuncture between the harsh lockdown and the minimal efforts made at strengthening the country’s medical infrastructure owed much to the ‘centrality of spectacle’ in the political modus operandi of Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which, as with the demonetization debacle in 2016, served to bolster Modi’s strongman image and the loyalty of his support base while delivering little else. As Nilsen argues, the lockdown had a devastating impact on the working poor, a process that Nilsen refers to as ‘social murder’. Relief and economic stimulus from the government were limited, even compared to India’s poorer South Asian neighbours. The Modi government even used the crisis to push through further neoliberal reforms, both in the agricultural sector and with regards to new restrictive labour laws, thereby using the crisis as a mechanism for strengthening the machinery for social murder. The crisis has also coincided with a strengthening of hegemonic authoritarian populism, involving a scapegoating of Muslims, often through hate speech and vigilante violence, as well as through repression of political dissidents (activists, public intellectuals, lawyers, journalists) who have challenged the government’s claims to be acting in the interests of the people.

As noted above, one country frequently praised for its effective response to containing the virus, is South Korea. However, as Shin (2022) argues, this seemingly positive response rests on negative social trends involving an increase in precarious labour and a deepening of social inequality. As with India, the crisis served to exacerbate pre-existing crisis tendencies within the South Korean economy, namely the segmented labour market based on firm size, gender, employment status, and inadequate social production. Indeed, the abrupt economic slowdown revealed the precarity of informal work, including the self-employed and other atypical workers. The pandemic accelerated the expansion of the category of platform workers, who as elsewhere largely remain outside of social protection, and with whom even the definition of ‘worker’ is often in doubt and contested. The pandemic is likely to increase the tendency towards the application of robots and artificial intelligence, thus leading to further unemployment. The pandemic also had specific gendered impacts as women were disproportionately employed in the service sector and the closure of schools led many female workers to simply withdraw from the labour market.

In conclusion, the contributors to this special issue offer a number of suggestions as to what a post-COVID-19 world might look like and how post-COVID transformations might be channelled in a more progressive direction. Not all the contributors are optimistic about the prospects for such progressive transformations. James and Steger’s (2022) comparison of the GFC and COVID-19, for example, is somewhat downbeat due to their observation that the former did not lead to a shift towards positive social transformations and saw minimal reforms to financial markets. James and Steger do, however, note that long-term positive change will depend, as always, on political action. Other contributors to this issue see some potential in the resurgence of state agency and the manner in which support schemes have served to shift the prevailing discourse. Shin (2022) discusses, for example, how in South Korea, the crisis has led to increased calls for alternatives such as the basic income proposal. The latter has been promoted by one of the leading candidates for the 2022 presidential election, Lee Jae-Myung, on the basis of the successful experience of cash payments to citizens in Gyeonggi Province made during the pandemic.

Habibul Haque Khondker (2022) in his commentary highlights the importance of international cooperation. Crucial here is the role of political leaders and their ability to cooperate not just on the pandemic but on the inter-related crises of global warming and social inequality. Stuart et al. (2022) in their analysis of the similar discourses surrounding pandemics and climate change argue that there is a need to tackle false narratives, yet they also emphasize that the broader challenge is the transition towards social conditions that are resilient, healthy, and sustainable. Social and ecological well-being must be prioritized over economic growth. Since the fundamental driver of both climate change and pandemics such as COVID-19 is the economic growth imperative, a post-COVID-19 green recovery would need to move away from an obsession with GDP growth (see the recent Special Issue in Globalizations on Economics and Climate Emergency). Above all, it is current power relations that inhibit us from most effectively and justly addressing these crises and thus these power relations must be confronted.

Trommer (2022) argues that post-pandemic recovery requires an ambitious redrawing of global trade relations. In the immediate term, possible reforms of the trade and health nexus within existing institutions include the adoption of the WTO TRIPS waiver and the extension of flexibilities to bilateral and regional trade agreements and to work with non-state actors. This would involve challenging the power relations that uphold the unequal global distribution of products required to fight the pandemic and would include demands for a moratorium on trade negotiations, investment arbitration, and other clauses that directly impact health and social reproductive products and services. Commitments towards health and social reproduction across all instruments of international law should be honoured, including in particular those relating to human rights, labour, and environmental commitments. Broader efforts to shift our thinking about social reproduction, trade, and health require more reflection and consultation among all groups who partake in global trade relations. This includes not only state agents, business representatives, and investors, but also workers, consumers, carers, and citizens.

Recognizing the inter-connected nature of the COVID and climate crisis, Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta (2022) put forward a number of concrete proposals inspired by the New Deal reforms for making our social world more resilient. The proposals are not meant to merely tackle the global pandemic but also address the serious vulnerabilities and inequities that it has exposed. The first proposal is a reorganization of the pharmaceutical sector, involving the establishment of a Health Impact Fund that through public funds would reorient the recovery of the costs of innovations away from the sale of branded projects towards public funds. This would motivate pharmaceutical companies to invest in often neglected diseases that impact upon livelihoods in the developing world and shift attention towards fighting communicable diseases at the level of populations. Since the sales price would not be the main source of profit, companies would have strong motivation towards ensuring that their products would reach the poor, thus creating more scope for disease eradication, and there would be less focus on marketing expensive and often inappropriate drugs. The second proposal relates to averting the climate catastrophe through a Green Impact Fund based on similar principles that would promote innovations. Pogge and Mehta also note the need for a shift away from nationally oriented approaches that focus on the extent to which a country is able to reduce emissions domestically towards one that focuses on its external activities, such as the building of coal-powered energy plants overseas. Third, Pogge and Mehta propose the reform of the global tax system in a way that lessens inequality. This involves eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, stemming the abuse of tax havens through a global minimum tax, reducing the risk of recessions through reinstating the Glass–Steagall Act, implementing a financial transaction tax globally, and ensuring fair value for natural resource sales. Pogge and Mehta argue that these reforms are not only transformative and realistic, but that they are also mutually reinforcing, such as with the reform of the global tax system a significant enabler of reforms to the pharmaceutical industry and the addressing of the climate crisis.

In sum, the hopes of countless millions around the globe for progressive future social transformation remain much as they have been for recent years prior to and during the global pandemic (reliant on critical analysis of the present multiple and overlapping crises of capitalist modernity and upon popular mobilization to transform these relations into a more just world). The COVID pandemic did not profoundly alter the existing global system or structure. It revealed again most of the fundamental crisis aspects of the existing global capitalist and international order. There is thus the possibility that, by revealing these fundamentals once again so immediately to vast numbers of people who have suffered as a consequence, that the pandemic will act as a further catalyst for radical social change for years to come.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Gray

Kevin Gray is a Co-Editor of Globalizations and is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. His research relates to East Asian political economy, rising powers, labour and social movements, and democracy.

Barry Gills

Barry Gills is an Editor-in-Chief of Globalizations and a Professor of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has written widely on World System theory, neoliberalism, globalization, global crises, democracy, resistance, and transformative praxis.

Notes

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2 Covid-19 Government Response Tracker. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/covid-19-government-response-tracker.

3 Goldin, I. COVID-19: How rising inequalities unfolded and why we cannot afford to ignore it. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/covid-19-how-rising-inequalities-unfolded-and-why-we-cannot-afford-to-ignore-it-161132.

4 Freedom House. Special Report 2020: Democracy under lockdown. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/democracy-under-lockdown.

5 Nuclear Threat Initiative and Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Global health security index 2019: Building collective action and accountability. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www.ghsindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-Global-Health-Security-Index.pdf.

6 Statista. Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths worldwide per one million population as of February 10, 2022, by country. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/.

7 BBC News. (2021, December 23). Global Covid vaccine rollout a stain on our soul – Brown. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59761537.

8 The Economist. (2021, March 27). As the pandemic rages on, so do protests about it. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/27/as-the-pandemic-rages-on-so-do-protests-about-it.

9 Nakhaie, R., & Nakhaie, F. S. (2020, 5 July). Black Lives Matter movement finds new urgency and allies because of COVID-19. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-movement-finds-new-urgency-and-allies-because-of-covid-19-141500.