While we must embrace the most robust demands to win greatly improved and fully accessible income support systems in these harsh times, we don’t want inadequate solutions that extend a peace offering to the neoliberal order. We need radical alternatives and bold plans of action. The concept of a basic income fell short before this searing crisis and it has even less to offer us in the face of it.

Inequality and class disparity have been on full display in the devastating coronavirus outbreak. On the one hand, Canada’s dependence on the work of undervalued and underpaid health care workers, cleaners and retail employees has been clearer than ever. On the other, these workers are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In March, one-third of workers earning $14 an hour or less became jobless or lost most of their hours of work.

​In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot-com meltdown of 2000 or the sub-prime meltdown of 2008-9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability.

The shifts occurring as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are historic and volatile. While the eventual depth and duration of the twin health and economic crises are still unknown, there is no doubt that global powers are again using the shock of a crisis to consolidate power and vie for global leadership.

When people emerge from their homes after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic they will be confronted by a greatly changed global order. A devastating public health crisis will continue to play out and a global economic slump that the pandemic has hastened and massively exacerbated will cast its shadow over the next several years.

This moment calls for global cooperation and solidarity, and on that front, Cuba provides a lesson for us all. We can start by demanding an end to US sanctions that stop Cuba from getting access to the resources it needs to fight this deadly pandemic, both for their own population and for the global beneficiaries of Cuban medical internationalism.

Workers ought to be made whole to mitigate their losses stemming from the current economic crisis. Systemic delays, inadequate resources, unpreparedness, crippled medical resources and, in some cases, outright indifference to the fate of hundreds of thousands of working people has compelled many to work in close proximity without adequate protection.

The current self-serving and anti-social posture taken by capitalists reveals they are content to let people suffer and die if this pandemic allows them to maintain or augment their wealth. The stakes could not be higher. Our response has the potential to make this horrific pandemic a crucial moment, or even the basis for a revolutionary transformation in social relations.

Pushing people into echo-chambers of their own solipsism is merely an extension of the way that many people live in both real and virtual worlds. In this sense, we are already socially distant–the more pressing concern is understanding the broader impacts of forced spatial distancing, especially upon society’s most vulnerable.

The influenza outbreak experienced in Winnipeg over a century ago, described in detail in Esyllt Jones’ Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg, echoes many of today’s crises caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, but it also offers a rough guide for what may come next.