ONE

Beginning, Again
Martin Parker

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,

but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
(Maya Angelou)1

There is a great deal of horror around at the moment as

I write. Overwhelmed critical care departments in hospitals,
quiet funerals with no relatives allowed to attend, migrant
workers tramping home and the refugee and homeless dead
buried in unmarked graves. This is a book prompted by an
urgent optimism, but I must begin with acknowledging the
desperation, tears and hurt wrought by COVID-​19. With tired
eyes looking over face masks, and families crying for their dead.
Every generation appears to think that they are balanced on
the hinge of history, between a broken past and the possibility
of a better future. This global crisis intensifies that sense that
we are living through a moment that is pregnant with dread,
and consequently also of possibility. Crisis, after all, comes
from the Greek root krinein, to separate, decide or judge, and
in turn probably from the proto Indo-​European root krei, to
sieve, and therefore to discriminate between what we want to
keep and what we want to throw away.
The struggle for the future is what propels this book, trying
to make a particular intervention into current thought and
action. There are a lot of academics in these pages, but it is not
meant to be an ‘academic’ book. It’s a series of provocations,
short on sustained argument and references, but gesturing

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towards the idea that rebuilding after this crisis must involve
challenging pretty much everything that we know and do.

Bouncing back

One of the common metaphors used by politicians and policy

makers has been the idea that ‘the economy’ –​and we come
back to that later –​must rebound after all this is over. We have
seen graphs and bar charts of decline, and then the uptick in
‘growth’ that will follow. It will be tough, we are told, but we
can get our jobs back, buy a new car, have that foreign holiday.
There is a longing in this, a nostalgia for what we knew and
were familiar with. For some well-​heeled inhabitants of the
global north, boomers with pensions, the past few decades
haven’t been too bad really, so why wouldn’t we want that back?
The story works for the majority of people on the planet
too, not as a return to something that they have lost, but the
possibility of something that they have been promised. The
‘Western’ lifestyle of burgers and travel is no more than a dream
for most people in the global south, so they too are keen to
be told that economic growth will return, and their lives will
become closer to what they have seen on their phone screens.
Politicians are not going to tell you that you can’t have what you
want, otherwise they run the danger of not being re-​elected,
or having stones thrown at the windows of their palaces.
So the bounce-​back story works, but, rubbery metaphor
that it is, only if we let the 1% keep what they already have,
and stay in the realms of fantasy for the 99%. As the virus has
demonstrated, and many of the chapters in this book explore,
we are not all in the same boat. If you have a garden, a nice
house, money and work in a knowledge-​based occupation,
lockdown will not have been too painful. If you live in poor
quality or overcrowded housing, are a migrant or from an
ethnic minority background, or are in precarious employment,
you are much more likely to die. Like an acid eating away the
flesh, COVID-​19 has allowed us to see the bones of the social

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structure, to unveil the inequalities that mean some have to

travel to work in care homes and fruit-​picking fields, while
others self-​isolate and edit books. Nice work, if you can get it.
COVID-​19 has also allowed us to see infrastructure more
clearly, to see the roads and airports, the container terminals and
distribution depots, the supermarkets and smart phone apps.
Human beings have made a world that is profoundly entangled
(allowing the global spread of this pandemic in months) and also
profoundly concentrated (meaning that certain big companies
have benefitted massively). In that sense, rebounding could
all too easily be shaped by the patterns of infrastructure that
already exist. Since we have logistics, highways and trucks, let’s
use logistics, highways and trucks. And since these are owned
by big companies, and the media has an interest in selling us
the idea that we need what they have to sell, then the shape
of our straitjacket is already prefigured.
The danger is that, as the COVID-​19 crisis becomes less
urgent in the global north, we will see a rebound to carbon
capitalism on a global scale, as states, corporations and
consumers try to ensure that economies return to growth just
as extreme austerity measures are demanded to pay down state
debt. (And the heroes of the story will be strong government,
and then a list of the big corporations that have provided
us with supermarkets, pharmaceuticals, logistics, home
entertainment and social media.) Crisis will be forgotten for
a while, and human beings will once again imagine that they
really are the masters of the world.
If we bounce back, the ball thrown hard from US President
Donald Trump’s pudgy hand, then we could rebound to
a world in which choices and opportunities are radically
unequal, in which big companies such as Amazon, Walmart,
Netflix and others have consolidated their market dominance,
and smart surveillance protects the elites from the masses. It
doesn’t take much for this to become a recognizable cyberpunk
dystopia, with enclaves of smiling fools protected by snake-​eyed
guardians who threaten war on their enemies, while outside

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in the cursed earth the starving migrants roam.2 And this is

not even to mention climate change.

#NoGoingBack

The Extinction Rebellion Twitter hashtag is clear in its refusal

of nostalgia. That past is now another country, somewhere for
the history books. There are many such memes circulating
now  –​recovering better, building back better, closed for
good. These are frightening slogans in their uncompromising
demand for the future, their grim-​jawed sense that we must
let go of our fantasies and throw ourselves into something
unknown. (I don’t want this. I’m frightened. It’s easier to pull
the duvet up around my head and plunge into the next box
set.) But the climate crisis is coming, and as the water rises
and superstorms destroy cities, it will make COVID-​19 look
very small. Microscopic.
In an essay about politics and the pandemic from early
2020, David Runciman suggested that responses were divided
depending on how the commentator thought about the future.
For conservatives, he says, ‘the future is long, almost as long as
the past. It is a place where we will have to live, whether we like
it or not.’ This version of the future smacks of inevitability, of
recognizing like grown-​ups how much of the future is already
prefigured by the past. For radicals, Runciman says, ‘who itch
for action sooner, the future is both more remote and more
pliable. It is a place that can be what we would like it to be, if
only we put in the effort.’3 I suppose that the authors in this
book think that’s its worth putting in the effort.
So taking a deep breath, and using other meme metaphors,
this is a chance to pivot to a new normal, it’s a critical juncture,
a moment of decision, an opportunity  –​an assemblage of
clichés that is not itself a cliché, but should be a punch in
the head. All our routines have been broken, so we have a
chance to establish new ones. It is an irony that Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party,

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described Victorian capitalism in terms that seem to capture

the first half of 2020.

All fixed, fast-​frozen relations, with their train of ancient

and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-​formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy
is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind.

Even the gender seems appropriate. Locked down, locked in,

locked out, many people have had time to draw breath and
notice some things about the way that they live their lives.
Yet many of these changes have been positive. We will
have driven and flown less, bought less, walked more, cycled
more and cooked at home more. The air is cleaner and our
cities are quieter. We can hear the birds, and the sky is not
slashed by contrails. We might have done complex meetings
and projects virtually, such as this book, produced without a
single face-​to-​face meeting. We might have spent more time
with our families or housemates, helped neighbours or joined
some mutual support or volunteering group. Perhaps we will
have done some more gardening, crafts or art, or caught up on
decorating or DIY. We might have read a book that we always
wanted to read, or seen a film that has really made us think,
and that we wouldn’t have bothered with in busier times. We
will have wondered what we really need and remembered to
value some very ordinary things that we miss.
(And yes, as I said before, this experience is not universal and
is shaped by the already existing patterns of labour, care, spatial
and financial inequality and so on. Patriarchy, xenophobia and
exploitation did not disappear. Lockdown does not mean one
thing, but that variability also means that not all pandemic
experience is bad, or good. It means that we can see the world
we have made more clearly for a moment.)

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Whether valuing these quieter routines, or seeing the jagged

bones of the social more clearly, COVID-​19 has made us ask
questions about what we want to return to. What sorts of local
forms of resilience have grown, and what new communities
have been built? What sorts of organizations and businesses
have survived the crisis, and which have disappeared? Has
universal basic income become politically possible, and can
we imagine borrowing and stimulus measures for a green new
deal? What sorts of narratives about nations have encouraged
people to remember forms of co-​operation in adversity, and
how have different neighbourhoods coped with the demands of
collective support? Have less ‘efficient’ supply chains provided
better buffers against uncertainty, and have less financialized
companies had the reserves that allowed them to survive in
adverse circumstances? What mobilities of people and things
have been necessary, and when has it been better to stay still?

Politics and change

It is easy to demand change, to stand on a soap box and say that

something ought to be done, but without specifying who does
what and when. As if there were an audience of fixing monkeys
who would listen to our pronouncements and then go and make
things happen. This book could easily be seen to be an example of
that. Yet this book is just one tiny fragment of a torrent of writings
from across the political spectrum, from people across the globe,
who are trying to make sense of COVID-​19. Everyone has an
opinion about it, and for most people the central issue is what
lessons we learn. What should, or shouldn’t, we do in future,
whether that is a narrow matter of being prepared for another
pandemic, or a demand for system change. The idea that the virus
is teaching us something is common; the question is just what it
is saying. This is what I hear.
First, when discussing climate change the response is usually
that we can’t change, or that we are changing but these things

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take time, or that we can only change some things but not
others. The past 50 years has been one of missed opportunities,
of warnings unheeded and strategic marketing and public
relations funded by oil company budgets claiming that science
was wrong, of meetings where rich countries protect what
they have and poor ones have to live with the consequences.
But the rapid and massive response to the virus demonstrates
just how much can change and how quickly. It shows us that
this is about political will, not economic or infrastructural
inertia. Hospitals can be built in weeks, homeless people can be
housed, basic income can be guaranteed, and carbon emissions
can fall drastically. Charles Eisenstein’s essay, ‘The coronation’,
contains a nice analysis of the paradoxes of corona giving us the
opportunity for a ‘reset’.4 Not just vague promises, or cautious
reform, but really radical change. We have seen that happen
over the past few months.
Second, the nature of the economic needs to be rethought.
For the past century, business and economics schools in
universities have been teaching that something called ‘the
economy’ has a particular set of rules and imperatives. It is
almost as if ‘the economy’ is assumed to be a demarcated
sphere of action –​something to do with tax, investments,
finance –​that underpins what happens in everyday life. For
many people the economic sphere is external to their lives,
something that affects their ability to live in a safe home,
eat good food, clothe their children, but that they have no
control over. The glimmering skyscrapers of New  York,
London and Tokyo are where the market lives, and it’s best
not to upset it in case it chooses to take vengeance. But this
disembedding of the economy from everyday lives makes no
sense, because the economic is never separate from all the
other ways in which we might describe ourselves and the
others we care about. It is one part of a complex system that
allows human lives to be lived well or lived badly, and its
abstraction from those lives simply makes it more likely that

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it will benefit some and hurt many others. The economy

needs to be reclaimed.5
Finally, because of who I am and where I live, many of
the authors in this book tend to be from the city of Bristol
and the south-​west of England. In some sense, this makes
the book parochial, because there are no voices here from
the global south, and only a few from outside the UK. But
this groundedness is also important here too, because it
points to the idea that demands for things to be done are
often local ones. They happen in streets, houses and cities,
because politics (just like economics) is not restricted to
what happens in elected chambers and global climate change
meetings such as COP26 in 2021. Indeed, we could argue
that the response to COVID-​1 9 has been depressingly
national, with comparisons between states being weaponized
to claim higher testing rates, lower death rates, faster
response times, quicker releases from lockdown and so on.
Many of the authors in this book, including the academics,
are involved in local and regional activism. They have taken
to heart the idea that what they do, in their cities and their
lives, matters. Mutualism, care, community are words that
refer to things that are close to us, whether that is Bristol,
Barcelona, Belo Horizonte or Bulawayo. Nation states are
important, but they are not the only places where politics
gets done, and they are very rarely sites for radical change,
being often already co-​opted by people and organizations
who are invested in the status quo.
Any crisis asks questions of common sense. It exposes the
problems with existing arrangements, provokes responses that
were previously unthinkable and collectively reminds us that all
that appears to be solid can very easily melt into air. Arundhati
Roy has suggested that the pandemic is a ‘portal’, an opening
into a different world, and she is very clear –​writing about the
US and India –​that this could easily be a world of sickening
inequality and suffering.6 Or it could not, so let’s dispose of
nostalgia, and make the future with courage.

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This book

At the start of lockdown in the UK, in March 2020, I asked

people I knew whether they would be interested in writing
short essays about the possibility of a better future after
COVID-​19.7 I told them that I would be requiring the text
very soon, that I  would only allow them 4,000 words and
very few references, and there would be no money in it. I also
worried that, in the middle of the chaos, my forced optimism
was tin-​eared, misunderstanding the gravity of the times. I even
thought about calling the book ‘Covidtopia’, deliberately
jarring so violently with the mood that my intention could
not be mistaken. I also worried that this was a bad idea, an
opportunistic excuse for another book that no-​one needs,
and that I should do something else instead. Like collecting
shopping for elderly neighbours, or learning how to make
facemasks from old dishcloths.
But within a week, I had received well over twice as many
offers of chapters as I  needed. Other people seemed to be
thinking the same as me. Lots of other people, all wanting to
grow something good from all this shit. Even by shrinking
the chapters and growing the book, I still had to reject half of
them. So imagine this book twice the size, ten times the size,
with essays on changing legal structures for companies, on play,
on children, on transport and holidays, on consumption and
marketing, on compassion, nature, housing, meat, activism,
social media, universities and, and, and …
What you have here is a document of a particular time, of
a moment when the world seemed to be becoming undone,
and many people started to imagine that it might be stitched
together differently. It was a moment before Black Lives Matter
activists toppled the statue of the slaver Edward Colston in
Bristol. While the shops were still closed. Before the second
wave. And before whatever else has happened since I wrote
these words. This series of mini-​manifestos, and all the chapters
that never got written, add up to a collective longing for a

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different way of life, a different way of relating to each other,

and to the non-​humans that surround us. As you read this now,
whether COVID-​19 is still present or has become history, try
to think back to this moment, that splinter in the eye of history.
We should make this mean something, in the name of those
who have died and those who come after us. The pandemic
was a dress rehearsal, a warning, a reminder that the human
relationship with the non-​human (whether virus or planet) is
at breaking point. There must be no going back.

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