Podcast: Crises of Capitalism During COVID19, with Medical Anthropologist Dr. Edgar Rivera Colón

In this wide-ranging episode of DSA’s own Religion and Socialism podcast, Heart of a Heartless World, Dr. Edgar Rivera Colón, a medical anthropologist who trains African-American and Latinx activists to prevent HIV and AIDS in their communities speaks to host Elisa Batista on mutual aid, solidarity, and the crises of capitalism during the coronavirus pandemic. We face four crises that aren’t going away: economic, COVID-19, climate, and political. All are inter-related, and only a political strategy to bring about a more just and humane world can deal with them.

Click below for Spanish, or click here for the English version. 

Spanish:

. Dr. Rivera-Colon, who teaches in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, has long counseled that crises must tap into the best of us:

In times of great political and economic crisis, do the opposite of the temporal logic of that crisis — as Ignatius Loyola, one of my guardian ancestral spirits, would say: “Do the opposite (Agere contra).” Slow down in times of great upheaval and attend very carefully to the movements of political and spiritual desolation and consolation that animate your particular body-spirit and our shared body politic and local collectivities. Above all, make no life-changing decisions when you are in the grip of desolate feelings and your creative imagination is shocked into stasis or despair.

Please listen to the dialogues above. Let  us know how you’re coping in these chaotic times,