In this short video, Kristin Lawler talks about the protests sweeping the nation and argues that the pandemic has created a viral politics, a horizontal kind of contagion. She sees a kind of anarcho-syndicalism emerging from young people protesting on the streets against the racist attacks by police officers while learning about the relationship of racism to capitalist exploitation. The coronavirus has shown us that meaningful change is indeed possible through collective action, and that power ultimately lies with the people.

Kristin Lawler is Associate Professor of Sociology at College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, and also teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative. She is the author of The American Surfer: Radical Culture and Capitalism (Routledge 2011) and her most recent essays are "Labor's Will to Power: Nietzsche, American Syndicalism, and the Politics of LIberation" in Brill's 2019 volume Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory and "Radical America: the Long1930s and the Politics of Storytelling" in the upcoming edited volume Back to the 1930s? Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy. She is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and lives in the People's Republic of Brooklyn.

This is Left is a new d@w web series that brings together many voices from across the spectrum of left politics. With this series we hope to elevate left voices that offer progressive perspectives and analyses on how we got here, and perhaps more importantly, how we can move forward.