Speculating on the plan creates openings to transform the USFG into a caring state and shift capitalist logics. The alt alone fails.

The legacy of the 2019–21 biennium is yet to be fully grasped and processed, and often the urgency of chasing the next affective imperative (be it fear, terror, concern, relief, or indignation dictated by the virus’s iterations) can distract from looking back at how rapidly this period has transformed the world in ways unacceptable before 2019. Superficially, corporate capital in the form of techno-giants, big pharma, and the surveillance industry has managed to do the unimaginable: extract, evade, and profiteer even more than before, enabled by governments and central banks—the same governments and central banks advocating for the resilience, self-reliance, and autonomy of welfare states, individuals, and real economies. All the while, in many countries, the mantra of “public health on the brink of collapse” echoed as the best and most insistent advertisement for private healthcare in decades.

As more inhabitants of the planet seemed to empathize with experiences of being immobilized, terrified, and collateralized, the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis generated the Abolitionist Summer, with unprecedented multiracial and internationalist resonances. This was the most affirmative legacy of the biennium, alongside the activation of mutual aid infrastructures and all the practices of reciprocal nurture that kept most alive.

According to the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, August 12, 2020—the day the UK’s national income declined by over 20 percent as the London Stock Exchange saw an increase of more than 2 percent—was the symbolic moment of the decoupling of finance and the real economy. Continuing the trend that started after the 2008 financial crisis, in 2020 the global economy was supported by the proliferation of central bank money, independent of whether profit was made or not. Furthermore, the pandemic also determined a massive relocation of value extraction to digital platforms, which now adhered even more to people’s time, reproductive work, and eventually their lives. “Amazon,” Varoufakis explains, “is not a market; it’s a fiefdom. And it’s a fiefdom that’s connected to other fiefdoms, like Facebook, through the cloud services of Amazon, which are much greater and bigger than Amazon.com. It’s like a more technologically advanced form of feudalism.” In his postcapitalist utopian novel Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, Varoufakis depicts a world in which capitalism died in 2008 thanks to a utilities pay strike in Yorkshire. Inspired by speculative fiction and social-justice movements, what are some directions for imagining top-down redistribution into existence? A good starting point is the $427 billion in global corporate and private tax evasion in 2020—money that could be used to cover the salaries of thirty-four million nurses every year, thereby granting free healthcare to everyone. While rich countries are responsible for facilitating 98 percent of all global tax losses, impoverished countries are losing “tax equivalent to nearly 52% of their health budgets.”[footnote The State of Tax Justice, 4.] A true global challenge that requires international collaboration, tax justice can be achieved by global policy measures such as the automatic exchange of bank account information between countries, the registration of the beneficiaries of profits (“beneficial ownership registration”), country-by-country reporting of the profits of multinational corporations, a unitary taxation system for corporations to pay taxes where the real work is done (not where they declare profits), and, eventually, a UN tax convention, able to be enforced by tax collectors equipped and funded to do their jobs.

While the Tax Justice Network, an advocacy group consisting of researchers and activists, has pushed for these measures since 2003, Covid-19 has brought new challenges in terms of international tax abuse. The pandemic iteration of capitalism requires customized redistribution antidotes to what some have called the “Amazon model.”[footnote The State of Tax Justice, 10.] One antidote is an excess profit tax

on the large multinational corporations whose profits have soared during the pandemic while local businesses were forced into lockdown. For the digital tech giants who claim to have our best interests at heart but have been short-changing us out of billions in tax for years, this could be their redemption tax.

Another antidote is a wealth tax on asset values that have exploded during the pandemic, as in the case of Amazon shares, which have increased in value by $60 billion during the pandemic. What if profit was to be taxed where workers and consumers generate it? Corporate tax abuse isn’t new, but with inequalities dramatically exacerbated by the pandemic, is it not time to end the “moral bankruptcy of allowing value to be captured far from where it is generated”?[footnote The State of Tax Justice 2020, 9.]

What to do with a spare $427 billion then? Varoufakis might claim that this money isn’t even necessary, as the aforementioned central banks could just divert digital money from corporate finance toward common citizens, through a personal digital bank account, a portion of which would represent a form of universal basic income (UBI) not derived from taxation but rather from a sort of redistribution of global dividends. Italian feminist Cristina Morini slightly tweaks the notion of universal basic income, taking inspiration from the Italian feminist movement Non Una Di Meno. Moroni argues that with waged labor almost extinct and gendered reproductive labor a terrain of extraction for both techno-capitalism and the state, what is needed is “self-determination income,” in other words,

basic income which is self-determined, universal, and unconditional and which does not depend on job activity, on citizenship status or a permit to stay … An instrument for everyone for preventing gender violence and for providing autonomy and freedom from exploitation, labor and precarity.

Can our conception of politics be shifted from the capitalist trope of producing scarcity for extraction to an ecology of the redistribution of abundance? Morini’s self-determination income not only resonates with the postworkerist imaginations of time freed from alienation and devoted to care and art; it also provokes the question of what global citizenship looks like at a time when many countries are eroding the rights of elderly citizens, and “denizenship” proliferates at nauseating speed, with an ever-renewed arsenal of borders and incarceration.

While this period is certainly marked by a discursive emphasis on the public dimension of care and health, and while the virus itself brings forward a dimension of interdependence that one cannot unsee, the underlying idea “we are in this together” bears an estranging tone in the various settings, as states either abandon public health and safety, or enforce isolation and containment. But could interdependence become the foundation of politics? The Care Collective, born out of a London-based reading group, thinks so. In their book The Care Manifesto, they advocate universal care promoted by a state—“not a paternal, racist or settler-colonial state”—that can

enable everyone to cultivate what disabilities studies have called “strategic autonomy and independence,” while creating the conditions that allow for new relationships within and among the state and its diverse communities—relationships predicated on everyone receiving what they need both to thrive and to participate in democratic practices.

Inspired by mutual-aid traditions and social-justice movements, the ongoing practices that answer the question “how do we care for each other and the planet?” should be only the starting point for altering larger systems of cohabitation, like markets, constitutions, states, and neighborhoods. This is how we reach solutions and tools for redistribution, like a return to public space making, platform cooperativism, new municipalism, replacing outsourcing with insourcing, and replacing public-private partnerships with “public-commons partnerships” “in which co-operative institutions link up with public services and local citizens with an active stake in their organisations.”

Within the discursive moment of this biennium, the movement for black liberation and for abolition has been an indispensable and tireless space for projecting futures, imagining safety, health, and thriving not only for this generation but for many to come. With the Vision for Black Lives, which was first published during the post-Ferguson movement of 2016 and then rewritten in 2020, the Movement for Black Lives built a policy platform around the demand to end the war against black communities, especially black youth; black women; black trans, queer, gender-nonconforming, and intersex people; black disabled people; and black migrants. They also called for the abolition of all jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers; an end to the death penalty and the war on drugs; an end to the surveillance of black communities; and an end to pretrial detention and money bail. And while these demands sound very specific to the North American setting, are racism and mass incarceration really just North American? I am specifically thinking about the proliferation of privately managed maxi prisons in the UK—publicly funded, privately managed prisons that will eventually have to be filled somehow.

The North American movement for black liberation is a source of inspiration for at least two reasons. Firstly, the hegemony of the US means that its oppressive social and economic ideas can become influential in all communities directly impacted by its geopolitical reach, so understanding the consequences of those ideas is key. Secondly, movements like Black Lives Matter have had political and organizational victories in one of the most hostile and militarized civilian environments in the world. Their methods are thus a model for how marginalized communities everywhere can make their voices heard. In a time marked by terror and isolation, Black Lives Matter has made space for people internationally not only to unearth the roots of genocide in the past and expose the obscenity of racism in the present, but also to “radically reimagine public safety, community care and how we spend money as a society.” Black Lives Matter put abolition on the public agenda, provoking debates that went beyond merely defunding the police. While older generations, in “old media” like tabloids and talk shows, often dismissed the abolitionist option, younger generations were digitally exposed to imaginaries of futures in which climate justice, abolition, and queerness were embraced and uplifted. Those seeds of the future find support in policy initiatives like the Breathe Act, a revolutionary piece of proposed legislation unveiled by the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives in 2020. The Breathe Act redefines public safety and community care in an abolitionist direction, which is an indispensable dimension of present and future redistribution. The proposed legislation calls for

divesting federal resources from incarceration and policing, while investing in new, non-punitive, non-carceral approaches to community safety that leads states to shrink their criminal-legal systems and center the protection of Black lives, by allocating money to build healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities.

What if the Breathe Act were to inspire other countries to divest from privately managed maxi prisons or detention centers for migrants, and invest in public insourced quality healthcare and education, while redistributing self-determination income for all, irrespective of citizenship or permission to stay? From feminist theories and political practices to the Breathe Act, what is at stake are different conceptions of the state and the public good that transcend all previous models of welfare, since they make visible those same infrastructures of gendered and racialized extraction on which states were built and continue to thrive for the benefit of the few.

As abolitionist geographer Ruth Gilmore Wilson teaches, “if unfinished liberation is the still-to-be-achieved work of abolition, then at bottom what is to be abolished isn’t the past or its present ghosts, but rather the process of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” A horizon of redistribution in the context of the pandemic iteration of capitalism is intrinsically opposed to carceral practices and inspired by the longevity of what Gilmore Wilson calls “abolition geography,” which “is capacious (it isn’t only by, for, or about Black people) and specific (it’s a guide to action for both understanding and rethinking how we combine our labor with each other and the earth),” which “takes feeling and agency to be constitutive of, no less than constrained by, structure,” and which is “a way of studying, and of doing political organizing, and of being in the world, and of worlding ourselves.”