The dearest currency in any crisis is time. During the pandemic, everyone from individuals to states sought after this currency, hoping to ward off the immediate consequences of the crisis. In the face of a real crisis, compromise rules the day, and those hoping to last must be willing to adapt to the exceptionality of circumstances and make a casualty of all norms. Typical procedures may be circumvented, rules suspended, precedents shredded, institutions dissolved. In the most dire situations, the mores and strictures regulating violence, around which society itself coheres, may be transgressed in favor of the most forceful means of effecting an end. The sacred may be profaned in the service of buying more time, paradoxically suspending the status quo in order to preserve some semblance of it. Normality is suspended in order to open an interval for future attempts to restore normality, to take a gamble on future contingency. But, far from guaranteeing exact restoration, such periods provide occasion for lasting shifts in power by putting the very constitution of prevailing social relations in question. The last year and a half of the global COVID-19 pandemic has sent tremors up numerous fault lines which have yet to fully resolve. The balance of class forces, mediated through all of social organization, has entered into a period of strenuous realignment as struggles escalate on multiple fronts. One of the most significant of these is the relation between landlords and tenants.

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