What Are We Going To Do With This C̶r̶i̶s̶i̶s̶ Opportunity?

Everything is changing. Great. What good are we going to do with this critical juncture?

Too on the nose? Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Before we start: Until Friday, March 7, I’m offering a sale: 10% of an annual subscription for a year and a free copy of my book. So far, nearly 80(!) of you have taken me up on the offer. Thank you! (P.S. If you’ve signed up, I’ve sent you an email asking for an address to mail the book to; if you didn’t receive it, check your spam folder in case it was diverted.)

If you haven’t yet, please consider joining. With everything that’s coming, there’s a lot of work to be done. I’m excited to do much of it right here, with you.

Okay, now on to business.

Whenever I do a panel or talk on current events, the question invariably comes up: What, if anything, gives you hope? When I was writing my book, someone told me that you have to make the final few chapters about hope, or else nobody will buy it. People will accompany you into the valley of despair, but by god you’ve got to lead them back out of it by the end. Nobody wants to be left in the valley of despair. Too much despair.

I think that’s good advice for books and for life, though we shouldn’t ignore or downplay the risks we face. Today, we are facing a wave of crises that threaten our security, physical, material, emotional. Name it, and it’s threatened. Lots of things conspire to crush us: the collapse of American democracy, tariffs, talk of annexation, climate change, a shifting and unpredictable global order (with its consequences of global re-armament and potential nuclear proliferation), unaffordability, wealth inequality, corporate and state attacks on worker power, and plenty more.

In the face of *gestures* all of this, it’s tempting and easy to give in to defeatism, to nihilism. But these threats are also a critical juncture, an upheaval in the way we do things that offers an opportunity for us to decide we’d like to do things better, and then to proceed to do just that. Not to be too schmaltzy about, but we’ve reached a fork in the road and we can decide collectively to take a better path. Wouldn’t that be nice?

A critical juncture exists when previous ways of doing things are suddenly called into question, made obsolete, otherwise less viable than they’d previously been, if not impossible, because of events. Things can change fast and in big ways, even things that had previously been considered sacred and permanent: think of the Second World War and how the state system and distribution of global power changed, for instance. Or the First World War. A lot of these junctures come from war.

The pandemic was a critical juncture. In the fast of disaster, we talked about building back better. For a moment there was even the illusion of widespread unity and shared purpose towards justice for workers and a healthcare renaissance. Not all critical junctures are seized and made to work for better, though, as we learned. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t seize this one. We can. And that gives me hope.

The surge of Canadian nationalism that has accompanied threats from the Trump administration is an instance of possibility. People are taking to saying how much they love their country and want it (i.e. us) to succeed. We don’t need to leave “Canada” in the abstract here. We can say we want nice things for ourselves. We can also imagine a world in which we seize on this energy and put it to good use. We could rebuild the welfare state. We could re-industrialize — with an industrial policy that takes seriously national aims over foreign trade deals, and even national ownership where necessary. We’ve done it before. It’s a critical juncture! Everything’s on the table!

This piece isn’t about the specifics of what we ought to do, though. For now, I’m merely offering an opening statement, a suggestion, an urging — we are in a crisis, and we should use it for good.

Your good, however, might not be mine. We may have competing visions of what ought to be done and how. In moments like this, we see an uptick in struggle made plain, in battles over the future made clear for all to see. These struggles will be premised on material and ideological disagreements, bound to various interests, of which class will be preeminent. Rich and powerful people will fight hard to re-order the world in such a way that protects their material interests (see, for example: crypto and AI), but the rest of us have a chance to do the same for ourselves — for the many, rather than for the few.

We shouldn't think of critical junctures as shiny, happy moments of mass harmony. These junctures are moments of possibility amidst conflict, external and internal. They imply struggle, disagreement, and clashes of power. We can navigate them more or less constructively, but they are still clashes. But the fact remains that these junctures are full of possibility as old ways taken for granted are suddenly up for debate or even scrapped in whirling real-time as they become unfit for purpose.

The old order is dying. What should we replace it with? This is the question we need to ask and answer, starting now. The worst thing we can do is check out or concede and let the powerful decide for us. We can decide for ourselves what to do. So, let that work begin as we make our way through this cr̶i̶s̶i̶s̶ opportunity.