Crisis and Contagion is a selection of fourteen interviews conducted by Ian McKay of the Wilson Institute at McMaster University. Interviews with Nancy Fraser, Mike Davis, Mack Penner, Andreas Malm, and Merrill Singer explore capitalism’s organic crisis and the ways it has made this and future pandemics inevitable. Nora Loreto, Tithi Bhattacharya, Chandrima Chakraborty, Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Sanjay Nepal discuss the experiences of ordinary people in the pandemic. J. Michael Ryan, Laura Spinney, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky explore the long-term effects and likely historical legacy of a pandemic that has changed millions of lives–and, maybe, the trajectory of human civilization.

These scholars propose that to understand the impact of Covid-19, we have to understand the conflictual history of capitalism–and to ward off future pandemics, we need to start building a post-capitalist alternative to the disease-generating and highly unequal global neoliberal order. As capitalist forces work to shove what we have learned from the Covid-19 pandemic down the memory hole, Crisis and Contagion offers a must-read for those wanting to seize this moment of change and revolution.

IAN McKAY is a Halifax historian. He has an M.A. in history from the University of Warrick in England, and a PhD from Dalhousie University. He is the author of the seminal study The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentienth-Century Nova Scotia (1994).

Ian McKay's profile page