lost. While everyone is exposed to the virus, it is becoming evident that some are more vulnerable than others, not just due to their age, but also because of persisting social inequalities. Those who have borne the brunt of austerity measures are also the most vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has shone a light (if we can call it that) on the plight of those in poverty, without a job, without a home, without food and with poor health. The virus has exposed the cracks in our societies – cracks that have been widened by decades of austerity measures and disinvestment in public services and social safety nets. All this makes it hard not to think that it is ‘the worst of times’.
In the midst of such despair, we look out of the window and see civil societies in action: neighbours are helping neighbours; volunteers are delivering food to families; charities have ramped up their work despite dwindling donations; and hundreds of thousands of people are volunteering to reduce the burden on essential public services, notably, the National Health Service (NHS) – the only legacy of the post-war welfare state that has not yet been fully privatised and neoliberalised. To further blur the boundaries of the so-called three sectors, businesses are providing free services to communities: laundries are washing key workers’ uniforms; restaurants are delivering hot meals to hospital staff; hotels are opening their doors to homeless people; and supermarkets are donating to food banks. Similarly, public sector key workers – notably, nurses, doctors and carers – are working around the clock to save lives, and the government is promising to ‘do what it takes’3 to protect businesses and families. All this makes it easy to think that it is ‘the best of times’.
Thus, there is no escape from the entanglement of hope and despair. And nor should there be because lying in their intersection is a political force that enables us to imagine how we might be otherwise, and engenders the condition of the possibility for alternatives to neoliberal social orders. The COVID-19 pandemic will abate sooner or later but its wider socio-economic impacts will last for many years to come. There will be a ‘new normal’ but what it will look like depends largely on the mobilisation of civil society, understood not simply as the provider of voluntary services, but crucially as a contested ‘public sphere’ infused with power and politics in which tensions and contradictions are played out, with uncertain outcomes. It is in this sense that civil society can be seen as the embodiment of hope in the midst of multiple and related crises, and the mobiliser of what Block (1986 [1954–59]: 43) famously called an ‘ontology of the Not Yet’, enabling citizens to step out of the undesirable present, rather than staying hopeful in it.
Notes
1The value of goods and services produced over a specific period of time.
2The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 (the Lobbying Act 2014).
3The phrase first used by the UK Chancellor of Exchequer when he presented the government budget in February 2020.
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