Bruno’s Newsletter #4

A health official in the United Kingdom explained at the beginning of the pandemic that, at first, no restrictive measures were put in place because no one knew it was possible — let alone easy, as he put it — to impose a lockdown in a modern society. Without the pandemic, we might never have found out. Like the hero of a bildungsroman, we had to wait for an unexpected crisis to discover the true extent of our powers. The crisis left scars but also awoke new and unsuspected forces.

Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It is a plausible formulation, even in its comical effect. And yet, the pandemic proved the opposite. Capitalism was remarkably easy to replace, or at least to transform. All that was needed was a genuine environmental crisis, a crisis where the external conditions for a capitalist economy were suddenly removed. Once the economy turned away from the physical world, its possibilities were radically expanded.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.