Forget normality! The lessons of Covid-19, five years on.
Article: By Jim Donaghey. Illustration: Rory Robertson-Shaw
It's not very fashionable to talk about Covid-19. We'd rather blank out the whole episode. But, if we do, we forget some crucial lessons from the pandemic crisis.
Do you remember our collective refusal to ever 'return to normal'? Maybe the 'old normal' hasn't returned exactly, but we didn't want this miserable 'new normal', did we? Do you remember the sudden failure of the state to protect people or to provide for basic needs? Have you forgotten the thousands of mutual aid groups formed all over the UK? Do you remember how the government repressed that movement? Our collective amnesia allows the state's self-serving narrative to dominate and makes us too cynical about our prospects for meaningful social change. But we saw it with our own eyes! Let's not forget that.
New normals
One of the significant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in Spring 2020 was a refusal to 'return to normal'. It was a rallying cry, hopeful and radical. And, even despite the speedy return of the state and capital's business-as-usual, the moment of crisis did reveal how flimsy the 'old normal' actually was. People started asking questions that would have been unthinkable pre-COVID-19. They got organised.
As we know all too well, that moment of possibility was distorted into a squeeze on living standards and ramped-up repression. But that moment of possibility was real. We should cling to its legacy of radical thought and action.
In some ways, the crisis confirmed our expectations of the state and capitalism—they protected profits at the expense of people's lives, repression became more harsh, and rash of government scandals showed us all the state’s hypocrisy.
We were reminded that the essential parts of our lives are those least valued under normal circumstances. Forced isolation was hard—as even Boris Johnson himself put it, speaking from an NHS hospital bed, “There really is such a thing as society!” 'Low skilled' workers in hospitals, working the bin lorries, in shops and factories suddenly became 'key workers'. (Funny, that.)
Maybe the most important thing to remember is that people's ability to organise themselves was demonstrated in the explosion of mutual aid groups. We learned that the state and capital would not be on our side, if we didn't already know it. And the basic anarchist idea that we can remake the world on our own terms became completely obvious. That would have been hard to imagine during the pre-Covid 'normality', but we risk forgetting all that.
Lest we forget
Now, five years after the first Covid lockdown in the UK, the story is being re-shaped. The erasure of Covid-19's radical legacy is happening in three ways:
1. Social amnesia
People want to move on from the trauma of the pandemic. The World Health Organization declared an end to the 'public health emergency of international concern' on 4 May, 2023, but even by February 2022, a pub in County Donegal was fining punters €2 for just mentioning Covid-19 in conversation. New waves of Covid sweep over us, but hundreds of people dying doesn't get the media coverage now. Vaccinations are restricted to smaller categories of people, bringing us back around to the UK government's original 'herd immunity' plan to 'let Covid rip' (another Boris Johnson quote, incidentally). The mantra of 'getting back to normal' was spouted by the UK Government as early as Summer 2020, telling us to 'learn to live with the virus'. But what about the medically vulnerable? What about the estimated two million people suffering from Long Covid? For some, it's just not possible to 'get on with things'. The rest of us don't want to know —I don't blame people for wanting to forget the trauma of Covid-19, but we're throwing a lot of people under the bus, and letting the government off the hook for their continued negligence.
2. The official narrative
The UK government's own inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic crisis started in Summer 2023. This construction of an official narrative is another form of selective forgetting. It will assuredly arrive at a very different set of conclusions than those that are sketched out here. If Boris Johnson did jail time for the blood on his hands, that would be minimally satisfying I suppose, but the inquiry, like all government inquiries, will preserve the interests of the state and capital, with some performative wrist-slapping and piecemeal reform. And, even if it runs on schedule, they're kicking the can down the road until 2026 at the earliest.
The slithering testimonies of Johnson, Cummings, Sunak and Hancock have added insult to injury for those who lost loved ones, but the mainstream media has lapped up the spectacle of government ministers stabbing each other in the back (and the sweary language they've all been using on WhatsApp provides a bit of shock factor). It's all about distraction, deflection and performative justice. We're letting ourselves down if we forget our own experiences in favour of the officially approved story.
3. The Loser Left
I don't want to make a fantastical claim of anarchist victory emerging from the Covid-19 crisis, and I don't want to be glib about the death toll and the pandemic's miserable legacy, but we shouldn't let ourselves fall into the narrative of noble defeat. Jaded cynicism about our prospects for radical social change is too easy. Let's remember Covid as a transformative moment in a longer struggle; a moment that was all about people thinking and organising for themselves.
It's worth remembering the revolutionary feeling that pervaded the situation. For several generations, a lot of people have been cosseted from the experience of sudden, all-encompassing social change—and that lack of direct experience made calls for 'THE REVOLUTION' seem delusional. The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has taught us a lesson. Dusty old anarchist ideas were pulled into our lived experience. 'Normality' was up for grabs.
Don't forget that.
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