Between April and July, we hosted 12 global conversations to analyse the fallout from COVID-19 and to articulate the changes we need for a better world.
The webinars were a grand success story, often with more than 1000 viewers from all over the world.
The top 10 takeways

1. Internationalism – Social movements limit themselves by working within national boundaries. The global nature of the crisis presents an opportunity to use the transformative power of solidarity, reach over divides, and reduce the disparities between richer and poorer nations.

2. Healthcare – Privatised healthcare systems cannot cope with pandemics like COVID-19. Big pharma withholding access to medicines have impacted upon those most in need. We must prioritise resourcing universal public health services across the globe.

3. Neoliberalism – States have not learned lessons from the last great financial crash in 2008. Rather than bail out CEOs and speculators, we should strongly invest in communities and workplaces, while addressing underlying structures of injustice.

4. Migration – The ‘border-security complex’ is expanding and normalising massive breaches of human rights. Migrants are being harassed and detained, and access to asylum is closing. Civil society needs to place those with experience of migration at the forefront of campaigns.

5. Authoritarianism – Emergency powers handed to state authorities tend to stick. The public should push for emergency laws to be transparent and temporary and seek to defend spaces of resistance when governments and vigilantes overstep the mark.

6. Ecology – The likelihood of future pandemics and climate chaos is rising. We to transition from fossil fuel reliance to localised renewable energy production, and move away from commercial agribusiness towards more agroecological farming methods.

7. Feminism – Women are underpaid and at risk, have been targeted by state authorities and abusive partners, domestic work is devalued. The women’s movement is building new inclusive power structures, and centring care and participation as the basis of social organisation.

8. Incarceration – Unsafe, overcrowded prisons unveil a crisis in the worldwide criminal justice system. They lack basic provisions and support for those incarcerated, often from poorer backgrounds. Society should make urgent moves towards decarceration.

9. Technology – Big tech’s growing power poses an unprecedented threat to democracy and privacy. We should work towards closing the digital divide between poorer nations and major economies, bring tech titans under democratic control, and reclaim our data.

10. Universalism – Access to even the most minimal services is denied to many. Activists will need to ensure that during an emergency the fundamental human rights of all citizens are not just protected but advanced, forming the basis of the society which emerges from this crisis.

Our latest report report pulls out the main analysis from those conversations, with a focus on the proposals and solutions put forward by activists and experts worldwide.

Read it here: https://longreads.tni.org/covid-capitalism-report

And sign up for our next webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_w1drZk5TSySWoUD1HMbwUA