This was supposed to be the year of getting back to normal. By spring 2022, fully two years since the coronavirus pandemic had arrived, it was clear in North America — and much of the rest of the world — that our collective journey through the worst of it was coming to an end. We were more exhausted than the virus was, but we told ourselves what we needed to hear — that “normalcy” was returning — in order to “end” the pandemic.

In the spring, I wrote about the pitfalls that attended the ascendant politics of normality. Even in the first few months of the year, it seemed, we could see the political ambitions that had emerged alongside the pandemic receding far into the background. And so it was that those ambitions — for instance, a broad reconsideration of work and its value in light of “essential workers,” and a renewed hope for state capacity — were replaced by the most basic desires: shopping sans mask, say, or traveling without COVID tests, entry apps, or quarantines. In Canada, the “Freedom Convoy” of early 2022, which was later emulated in other countries, was arguably sustained in some measure by the fact that so many people were sympathetic with its ostensible goal of ending pandemic restrictions. Of course, the convoy was at its root a flare-up of political energy on the far right, but even so, that did not stop some 46 percent of Canadians from sympathizing with the aims of its participants.

The pandemic was a shock — it was without precedent in living memory and the precedents that did exist were poor comparators. (There were no smartphones or internet in 1918 — try to imagine COVID restrictions without those!) COVID’s apparent suddenness disguised its deeper causes. As scholars like the late Mike Davis have shown us, zoonotic pandemics have been a live threat for some time. This is largely because of the extent to which our collective relationship to the natural world has been deformed by more than two centuries of life under conditions of industrialized capitalism. In that sense, the window of opportunity for meaningful normality is, for now at least, as good as nonexistent. Ultimately, the only viable solution for a world in which people — and the natural world — flourish rather than merely survive is socialism.