This is Jacobin Radio and I'm Susie We're

We begin today with writer Marxist environmentalist and urban

theorist Mike Davis who's publishing widely on the COVID-19 pandemic in

Jacobin the nation in these times, and elsewhere.

Fifteen years ago, Mike published The Monster at Our Door, the global threat of Avian

flu, and he sees the coronavirus and this pandemic plague as the

familiar monster now at our door. We get Mike's views on the huge challenges

coronavirus poses for humanity, the impotence of global

capitalism in its current neoliberal form to prepare for or confront this biological

crisis.

Mike writes that this medical Katrina exposes the woeful unpreparedness of our

disinvested public health system, as well as the stark class divide of health care in the US. The urgent

demand now is for an international public health infrastructure at minimum and

there's more. We then turn to Robert Brenner for his analysis of the

deepening crisis and its political implications. Brenner holds that the

economic meltdown was triggered by the coronavirus COVID-19, but not caused by it.

We get his account of the politics, that is, of the way wealth is now attained by political rather than the old-fashioned

means and how an alliance of top corporate managers and the very rich plus leading politicians from both political parties

have rigged the political economy in favor of the 1%. It's from this standpoint

of this transition from capitalism, back to feudalism, that we need to understand

how the crisis is unfolding and the various political responses to it from the establishment and from the left. All this when Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Weisman Radio. I'm Susie Weisman.

Today we're going to begin with writer, Marxist environmentalist and urban theorists Mike Davis,

...