Interview
Naomi Klein: 'We must not return to the pre-Covid
status quo, only worse'
Katharine
Viner
Naomi Klein
What kind of world will the coronavirus crisis leave
us with? Interviewed for a Guardian Live event, the activist and author insists
that the climate, equality and fairness must be at the heart of the
post-pandemic recovery
Katharine
Viner
Mon 13 Jul
2020 06.00 BST
Naomi
Klein: For those of us who were teaching our students by Zoom, as I was – home
schooling, doing that juggle and figuring out how to bake – we had it really
cushy. Now I am back in Canada for the summer with my family, in quarantine
because in Canada, if you come from the US, you have to be in very strict
quarantine. I have not left the house in almost two weeks. I am actually
developing some phobias about leaving lockdown.
Katharine
Viner: There is a great quote in one of your recent essays from a tech CEO, who
says: “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.” It chilled me to the bone and
made me fearful for the future. And you have written interestingly about the
“Screen New Deal”.
Naomi
Klein: Silicon Valley had this pre-existing agenda before Covid that imagined
replacing so many of our personal bodily experiences by inserting technology in
the middle of them.
So for the
few spaces where tech is not already mediating our relationships, there was a
plan – to replace in-person teaching with virtual learning, for instance, and
in-person medicine with telehealth and in-person delivery with robots. All of
this has been rebranded, post-Covid, as a touchless technology, as a way of
replacing what has been diagnosed as the problem, which is the problem of
touch.
And yet, on
a personal level, what we miss most is touch. And so we need to expand the menu
of options about how we live with Covid, because we do not have a vaccine; it
is not about to arrive. Even if there is a breakthrough, it’s going to be many,
many months, possibly years before it can be rolled out at the scale we would
need it.
So how are
we going to live with this thing? Are we going to accept pre-Covid “normal”,
only much diminished, without the relationships that sustain us? Are we going
to allow our kids to have all of their learning mediated by technology? Or are
we going to invest in people?
Instead of
pouring all of our money into a Screen New Deal and trying to solve problems in
a way that diminishes our quality of life, why do we not go on a teacher-hiring
spree? Why do we not have twice as many teachers with half-the-size classrooms
and figure out a way to do outdoor education?
There are
so many ways we can think about responding to this crisis that do not accept
this idea that we have to return to the pre-Covid status quo, only worse, only
with more surveillance, more screens and less human contact.
Katharine
Viner: Do you see any governments talking like that?
Naomi
Klein: I was heartened to hear Jacinda Ardern talk about a four-day working
week as a solution to the fact that New Zealand is very dependent on tourism
dollars, and yet New Zealand is probably the country that has dealt with the
pandemic better than any others in terms of its fatality rates. It can’t fling
its doors open to tourists in the way that it has in the past, so there’s this
idea that maybe New Zealanders should work less, be paid the same and have more
leisure time to be able to enjoy their own country safely.
How do we
slow down? This is what I am thinking a lot about. It feels like every time we
slam our foot on the accelerator marked “business as usual” or “back to
normal”, the virus surges back and says: “Slow down.”
Katharine
Viner: We all love those moments of slowing down, but the UK government is
hellbent on getting back to normal, come what may. Everything opening, pubs
opening, it is desperate to get us to go on holiday. There is an urgency not to
change anything about how we live, just get back to how it was before.
Naomi
Klein: And it is madness. It is a very small percentage of the population that
wants to just fling the doors open. It is a majority that actually is much more
concerned about returning to work before it is safe, sending their kids to
school before it is safe. It’s sometimes framed as giving people what they
want, but this is not what the polling shows.
There are
similarities between the way Donald Trump has handled it and the way Boris
Johnson has handled it. They are turning it into some test of masculinity, even
in Johnson’s case after having the virus. Jair Bolsonaro was talking about how
he was an athlete so he knows he will handle it [the Brazilian president
revealed he has coronavirus shortly after this interview took place]; Trump was
talking about his good genes.
Katharine
Viner: I was interested in your views on why you think the civil rights
protests, in light of George Floyd’s death, have happened now? It seems
intriguing, in the midst of one crisis, that, around the world, there are these
huge demonstrations against racism.
Naomi
Klein: This is not the first uprising of its kind. But I think there were
certain aspects of it that were unique because of Covid and the outsized impact
of the pandemic for African Americans in cities like Chicago where, by some
counts, 70% of the fatalities from Covid were African Americans.
Whether
it’s because they are the ones performing those at-risk jobs, without
protections, or because of the legacies of environmental pollution in their
communities, stress, trauma , unsafe workplaces and discriminatory healthcare.
Black communities are bearing a disproportionate burden of the fatalities from
the virus, defying this idea that we were all in this together.
In the
midst of this moment of profound trauma, those killings – of Ahmaud Arbery, of
George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor – slice through that.
But then
there is a question that a lot of people are asking , which is what are all
these non-black people doing at the protests? That is what is new, certainly at
this scale. Many of these demonstrations are truly multiracial; black-led
multi-racial demonstrations. Why is this time different?
I have a
few ideas. One has to do with the softness that the pandemic has introduced
into our culture. When you slow down, you can feel things; when you’re in that
constant rat race, it doesn’t leave much time for empathy. From its very
beginning, the virus has forced us to think about interdependencies and
relationships. The first thing you are thinking about is: everything I touch,
what has somebody else touched? The food I am eating, the package that was just
delivered, the food on the shelves. These are connections that capitalism
teaches us not to think about.
I think
that being forced to think in more interconnected ways may have softened more
of us up to think about these racist atrocities, and not say they are somebody
else’s issue.
Katharine
Viner: There’s a great line in the new introduction to On Fire, your latest
book, when you say: “whatever was bad before the disaster downgraded to
unbearable” – it’s an unbearable situation the way black men are treated by the
police.
Naomi
Klein: There is always this discourse whenever disasters hit: “Climate change
doesn’t discriminate, the pandemic doesn’t discriminate. We are all in this
together.” But that is not true. That is not how disasters act. They act as
magnifiers and they act as intensifiers. If you had a job in an Amazon
warehouse that was making you sick before, or if you were in a long-term care
facility that was already treating you as if your life was of no value, that
was bad before – but all of that gets magnified to unbearable now. And if you
were disposable before, you’re sacrificial now.
And we are
only talking about the violence that we can see. What we have to talk more
about is the violence that’s hidden, and that’s domestic violence. To put it
bluntly, when men are stressed, women get it in the face and so do kids. These
lockdowns are so stressful because families don’t have any reprieve from each
other and even the best family needs a little bit of space. Then you add layoffs,
economic stress. It’s a very bad situation for women right now.
Katharine
Viner: I know you spent a lot of the last year working on the Green New Deal
and the Bernie Sanders campaign. How does it all look now? Do you feel more or
less positive about the potential?
Naomi
Klein: On some level, it is harder. You mentioned Bernie and certainly my
preferred outcome would be a presidential candidate who is running a campaign
with the Green New Deal at its centre. I do believe we will only win this with
an interplay of mass-movement pressure from the outside, but also a receptivity
from the inside. I think that we had that chance with Bernie.
It is
harder with Joe Biden, but not impossible. At the end of On Fire, I gave 10
reasons in favour of a Green New Deal and why it is good climate policy. One of
those reasons is that it is recession-proof. We have this really bad track
record in the climate movement of winning gains when the economy is doing
relatively well, because the kind of climate solutions we get from governments
tend to be these neoliberal, market-based solutions, like climate taxes or
renewable energy policies that are perceived to make energy costs more
expensive, or carbon taxing that makes the price of petrol more expensive. As
soon as you have an economic downturn, the support for these policies reliably
evaporates. We saw that after the 2008 financial crisis. Climate has got a
reputation as being a bourgeois thing – the issue that you care about if you
don’t have to worry about putting food on the table.
What is
important about a Green New Deal is that it is modelled after one of the
greatest economic stimulus programmes of all time, during the greatest economic
crisis of all time, and that is FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression.
Because of this, the biggest pushback that I got when I released On Fire a
little less than a year ago was: “But we don’t do things like this when the
economy is doing well.”
The only
times that we can point to – and this is a hard truth – when our societies have
moved fast and changed big and catalytically are moments of great depression or
war. Yet we now know we can change quickly. We have seen it. We have
dramatically changed our lives. And we found out that our governments have
trillions of dollars that they could have marshalled this whole time.
All of that
is potentially radicalising. I do feel we have a chance. I would not describe
myself as optimistic, because this is a future we have to fight for. But if we
just look at moments in history when we have won big changes, they are moments
like this.
• Naomi
Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem chair of media, culture and feminist
studies at Rutgers University. The paperback of her 2019 book On Fire: The
Burning Case for a Green New Deal, is published by Penguin on 24 September
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