Exploring the Coronavirus Crisis
2020: CORONA IN AN AGE OF TRANSITION By Junaid S. Ahmad It is obvious that the coronavirus pandemic will be front-page news for a good part of 2020. And for good reason, since its human toll and social dislocation has been devastating. Though not theorized in this way, this crisis can also be understood as yet another significant marker of our ‘Age of Transition.’ The world system of the past five hundred years plus, one of epistemic racistsexist-colonial-capitalist Western hegemony, has been undergoing profound tectonic shifts that have reduced the ‘White Man’ – as a Fanonian political category – to a drunkard unable to stand up straight anymore. In other words, the limits of the existing colonial planetary political economy have been reached, and now we are just buying time to manage a neoliberal casino capitalist militarism producing destruction and mayhem in all corners of the globe. There are indeed three nodes of these global ruptures that will map out the direction of the world ahead. It is instructive to clearly identify them, so we know the beast that we are dealing with. The first is the very obvious decline in American power. Years ago, analysts would laugh at such a thought. The Cold War had been won by the US and the ‘end of history’ had ushered in the unipolar kingdom of America. Since that time, the promised ‘peace dividend’ has of course been a fraud, since Washington has literally been engaged in nonstop war in all areas of the planet, especially West Asia, during this time. Though it’s hard to see if the most powerful military machine in the history of humankind has been able to obtain a single definitive victory during this time. On the contrary, since the declared ‘war on terror,’ we’ve seen more or less the opposite occur, wars dragging on forever and costing millions of ‘less-worthy’ lives and trillions of dollars. The emergence of the US now as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic may indeed seem like a dramatic cause of the rapid decline of its economic and political muscle. But that would be a mistaken view. What this pandemic’s impact on America has exposed so nakedly are the weaknesses of an empire in decline for quite a while now. In fact, this precipitous turn toward the dark side has come much sooner than many of us thought. The scandals and obscenities of the sundry aspects of American society that its rulers have tried to conceal all these decades, the country’s broken health care system, its obscene inequality and utter indifference to the lives ordinary working Americans, its century of both state and private propaganda and policies that have ripped apart social solidarity in times of crises, its ‘American exceptionalism’ allowing its plundering elites to deflect blame for all of the country’s problems on non-white people and other countries that can be invaded and bombed at a minute’s notice – this is That is now glaringly being revealed to Americans on a scale that they have not experienced before. As opposed to the assessment of most analysts, I take the view of the most influential social scientist of the last half century, the late Immanuel Wallerstein, that American imperial decline started to begin in the 1970s when a rapidly reconstructed Germany-based Europe and a Japan-based East Asia became serious competitors to US economic hegemony. Facing this crisis of ‘profitability,’ the ruling elites began 41
