Mary Midgley would always refer to the philosopher’s job as one of maintenance: ‘If you have a problem with your pipes, you call a plumber. When you have a problem with your concepts, you call a philosopher.’ It is in this sense that we use the work of philosophers to clarify our most fundamental principles […]

While common-sense ideas of ‘Team Australia’ reached absurd proportions during the pandemic, the underlying logics aren’t new. They reinvigorate much older common sense discourses of settler colonial nationalism: triumph over adversity, unity in crisis, national identity forged in war time. And like most common sense ideas, they function to paper over the foundational contradictions that produce and sustain contemporary crises.

As I returned to À rebours in lockdown I found myself bothered by a raw-red throat and spells of breathless lethargy, eventually joined by worsening digestive function. Leftovers from my own brush with the virus six months prior—or perhaps just results of an extreme lifestyle change, it’s hard to tell.

On December 17, when we reach the end of the state of emergency declared under the Biosecurity Act 2015, prisons will continue to permanently traumatise over 42,000 prisoners held across so-called Australia, as well as over 1400 prisoners detained in immigration prisons.

Thinking about time is important. Our understanding of time can galvanise us, propelling us into action, or it can impede progress and positive change. Time can make us feel disorientated, fragmented, and untethered, but it can also provide new anchor points and insight into ourselves and our place in the world. Moments of crisis throw society into stark relief. If you don’t like what you see, now is the time to change it.

What it means is that this pandemic, and the near universal inability to properly contain and manage its spread, are a function of the particular material form that disability takes under capitalism. We must understand disability, itself a category historically located within capitalism before we can understand the pandemic. To avert another such global catastrophe in the future, we must confront the structures within which this most recent catastrophe is comprised.

If there’s still a chance to eliminate Covid, it won’t be through the kind of lockdowns we’ve seen to date. The fight against the virus now depends on direct politics: the democratic mobilisation of the entire population. That’s the only way we might sustain popular enthusiasm for the measures required.

From public housing tower lockdowns to the deployment of generals to leadership positions and soldiers to the streets, to the imposition of nighttime curfews that do little if any practical good, the Covid-19 pandemic has provided state and national governments with even more opportunities to look tough in the face of what is in essence, like climate change, a crisis of health rather than law and order.

By denying adequate income support during the current lockdowns, Morrison is gambling that desperation will eventually undermine restrictions and pressure state governments into lifting them early. The result will be what the Liberals always wanted: endemic Covid-19 and the normalisation of thousands of deaths. Those on the Left who fight against this scenario are entirely correct to do so. Those few who have opposed restrictions and lockdowns on this or that spurious grounds have lined up on the wrong side.

COVID-19 is one crisis among many, along with those that invest the climate, democracy and capitalism. Even as it subsides, those others will remain and intensify. If COVID-19 can have any lasting, constructive impact, it will be in teaching the working classes how to handle a crisis. The pandemic’s most significant legacy is the lessons workers globally take from this experience.

Over and over again, this pandemic has offered a simple lesson that we have refused to absorb: that precarious work with low pay and few, if any, protections is a blight on individuals and societies. Like our punitive welfare system, it distorts and dehumanises, makes individuals acutely vulnerable to health and financial stressors of all kinds, and is a disease vector.

The virus doesn’t have a front window that anyone can break in anger. Instead, it’s we that feel its slow, inexorable, uneven impact. While some can brace themselves against it, others are wondering if this time, they’ll be left to fall.

My grandmothers are only two of the aged care residents who have died during the coronavirus pandemic. They didn’t die of Covid, and don’t appear in the daily tallies released by the state and federal governments. In fact, they are barely mentioned at all. But their deaths were nevertheless the result of a failed public health response and were caused by the pandemic as much as any Covid-attributed death.

The pandemic feels increasingly like a historic inflection point and Coronation may, over time, come to be seen as the first film of a new era. Conveyed through the lens of a dissident, its sense of destiny about China’s rise – a common theme in state propaganda – is a vision that offers no triumphalism or comfort.

True security and safety only comes through people acting together. Legal rights and entitlements are the shadows, the remnants and echoes of the great motor of history: workers uniting in the struggle for safety, dignity and democracy.

One of the starkest and potentially lethal failures exposed by the pandemic is the broken and bloated prison industry, filled with the people successive governments have let down, from ten-year-olds to the elderly. Prisons were failed, overburdened institutions before the pandemic, and they are even more dangerous now.