The horror films got it wrong. This virus has turned us into caring neighbours | George Monbiot
Across the world, Covid-19 has triggered community action on a vast scale. It's a powerful riposte to both government and private money
You can watch neoliberalism collapsing in real time. Governments whose mission was to shrink the state, to cut taxes and borrowing and dismantle public services, are discovering that the market forces they fetishised cannot defend us from this crisis. The theory has been tested, and almost everywhere abandoned. It may not be true that there were no atheists in the trenches, but there are no neoliberals in a pandemic.
The shift is even more interesting than it first appears. Power has migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilised where governments have failed.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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