Coronavirus: The pandemic and the world-system
The director of Le Monde Diplomatique en Español offers a detailed analysis of the economic, social and political consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. How this situation was reached and the scenarios offered in the future.
By Ignacio Ramonet: A fact of total effects
Everything is going very fast. No pandemic has ever been so withering and of such magnitude. Emerged just a hundred days ago in a distant unknown city, a virus has already traveled the entire planet and has forced billions of people to shut themselves up in their homes. Something only imaginable in post-apocalyptic fictions ...
At this point, no one is unaware that the pandemic is not just a health crisis. It is what the social sciences describe as «total social fact», in the sense that it convulses all social relations, and shocks all the actors, institutions and values.
Humanity is living - with fear, suffering and perplexity - an inaugural experience. Verifying concretely that that theory of the "end of history" is a fallacy ... Discovering that history is, in fact, unpredictable. We are faced with an enigmatic situation. Unprecedented 1. No one knows how to interpret and clarify this strange moment of so much opacity, when our societies continue to tremble on their bases as in the face of a cosmic cataclysm. And there are no signs to help us orient ourselves ... A world is collapsing. When everything ends life will no longer be the same.
Just a few weeks ago, dozens of popular protests had spread globally, from Hong Kong to Santiago de Chile, passing through Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Algiers, Paris, Barcelona and Bogotá. The new coronavirus has been extinguishing them one by one as it spread throughout the world ... To the scenes of festive masses occupying streets and squares, there are the unusual images of empty, silent, spectral avenues. Silent emblems that will forever mark the memory of this strange moment.
We are suffering in our own existence the famous "butterfly effect": someone, on the other side of the world, eats a strange animal and three months later, half humanity is in quarantine ... Proof that the world is a system in which everything its component, however insignificant it may seem, interacts with others and can influence the whole.
Anguished, citizens turn their eyes to science and scientists - as in the past to religion - imploring the discovery of a saving vaccine whose process will take long months. Because it takes time for the human immune system to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take time to manifest ...
People also seek refuge and protection in the State that, after the pandemic, could return with force to the detriment of the Market. In general, the collective fear the more traumatic the more it fuels the desire for State, for Authority, for Guidance. On the other hand, international and multilateral organizations of all kinds (UN, International Red Cross, G7, G20, IMF, NATO, World Bank, WTO, etc.) have not lived up to the tragedy, due to their silence or their incongruity. The planet discovers, astonished, that there is no commander on board… Discredited for its structural complicity with pharmaceutical multinationals2, the World Health Organization (WHO) itself has lacked sufficient authority to assume, as it should have, the leadership of the fight global against the new plague.
Meanwhile, the governments helplessly help the irrepressible spread on all continents3 of this new plague. Against which there is neither a vaccine, nor a medicine, nor a cure, nor a treatment that eliminates the virus from the organism4… And that will last5… As long as the germ is still present in some country, re-infections will be inevitable and cyclical. This epidemic will most likely not stop before the microbe has spread to around 60% of humanity.
What seemed dystopian and typical of science fiction dictatorships has become "normal". People are fined for leaving their house to stretch their legs, or for walking their dog. We accept that our mobile watches us and denounces us to the authorities. And it is being proposed that whoever goes out without their phone be punished and punished with prison.
Long neoliberal autism is widely criticized, particularly for its devastating policies of outright privatization of public health systems that have turned out to be criminal, and they prove absurd. As Yuval Noah Harari has said: "Governments that have saved expenses in recent years by cutting health services will now spend much more because of the epidemic6." The cries of agony of the thousands of sick people who died for not having beds in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) condemn for a long time the fans of privatizations, cuts and austerity policies.
There is now open talk of nationalization, relocation, reindustrialization, pharmaceutical and health sovereignty. The world economy is paralyzed by the first global quarantine in history. Throughout the world there are crises of both demand and supply. Some one hundred and seventy countries (of the one hundred and ninety-five that exist) will have negative growth in 2020. In other words, a worse economic tragedy than the Great Recession of 1929. Millions of employers and workers are wondering if they will die from the virus or the bankruptcy and unemployment. No one knows who will take care of the field, if crops will be lost, if food will be lacking, if we will return to rationing ... The apocalypse is knocking on our door.
The only bright light of hope is that, with the planet in pause mode, the environment has had a breather. The air is more transparent, the vegetation more expansive, animal life freer. Air pollution that kills millions of people each year has receded. Suddenly, nature has once again looked so beautiful ... As if the ultimatum to Earth launched by the coronavirus was also a desperate final alert on our suicide route to climate change: «Watch out! Next stop: collapse. »
On the geopolitical scene, the spectacular eruption of an unknown actor - the new coronavirus - has completely disrupted the world-system chessboard. On all fronts of war - Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sahel, Gaza, etc. - the fighting has been suspended ... The plague has imposed, de facto, with more authority than the Security Council itself, an effective Pax Coronavírica…
In international politics, the terrifying management of this crisis by President Donald Trump deals a very hard blow to the world leadership of the United States that they have not known how to help themselves or help anyone. China, on the other hand, after an erratic start in the fight against the new plague, has managed to recover, send aid to a hundred countries, and seems to overcome the greatest trauma suffered by humanity for centuries. The future of the new world order could be at stake right now ...
In any case, the shocking reality is that the most powerful powers and the most sophisticated technologies have been unable to stop the worldwide expansion of covid-197, a disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-28, the new great planetary killer.
Coronavirus
There is now open talk of nationalization, relocation, reindustrialization, pharmaceutical and health sovereignty. The world economy is paralyzed by the first global quarantine in history. Throughout the world there are crises of both demand and supply. Some one hundred and seventy countries (of the one hundred and ninety-five that exist) will have negative growth in 2020. In other words, a worse economic tragedy than the Great Recession of 1929. Millions of employers and workers are wondering if they will die from the virus or the bankruptcy and unemployment. No one knows who will take care of the field, if crops will be lost, if food will be lacking, if we will return to rationing ... The apocalypse is knocking on our door.
The only bright light of hope is that, with the planet in pause mode, the environment has had a breather. The air is more transparent, the vegetation more expansive, animal life freer. Air pollution that kills millions of people each year has receded. Suddenly, nature has once again looked so beautiful ... As if the ultimatum to Earth launched by the coronavirus was also a desperate final alert on our suicide route to climate change: «Watch out! Next stop: collapse. »
On the geopolitical scene, the spectacular eruption of an unknown actor - the new coronavirus - has completely disrupted the world-system chessboard. On all fronts of war - Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sahel, Gaza, etc. - the fighting has been suspended ... The plague has imposed, de facto, with more authority than the Security Council itself, an effective Pax Coronavírica…
In international politics, the terrifying management of this crisis by President Donald Trump deals a very hard blow to the world leadership of the United States that they have not known how to help themselves or help anyone. China, on the other hand, after an erratic start in the fight against the new plague, has managed to recover, send aid to a hundred countries, and seems to overcome the greatest trauma suffered by humanity for centuries. The future of the new world order could be at stake right now ...
In any case, the shocking reality is that the most powerful powers and the most sophisticated technologies have been unable to stop the worldwide expansion of covid-197, a disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-28, the new great planetary killer.
Coronavirus
The number of victims continues to grow ... At the time of writing these lines, the number of deaths exceeds one hundred and fifty thousand ... The number of the contaminated exceeds two and a half million ... And those confined to their homes are more than four thousand millions ... The latter had never happened either ... The words "confinement" and "quarantine" that seemed to belong to forgotten times and to the medieval lexicon have become common words. Those that best illustrate finally our current abnormal normality.
There is controversy, at the highest level9, about the origin of this virus that appeared in Wuhan (Hubei, China). Since patient zero10 has not yet been identified, that is, the first infection from animal to human, various speculations circulate. On the one hand, authorities in Beijing accused the US army of having manufactured the germ in a military laboratory in Fort Detrick (Frederick, Maryland) as a bacteriological weapon to stop the Chinese rise in the world, and of having dispersed it in China on the occasion of the World Military Games, a competition held in October 2019 precisely ... in Wuhan11. On the other hand, in the United States, President Trump himself repeatedly incriminated Beijing12, after influential Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, sometimes featured as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), blamed scientists The Chinese military13 had produced the new germ in a "virology and biosafety" laboratory also located ... in Wuhan14.
Widely disseminated by the conspiracy followers of the "theories of the plot" on both sides, these contradictory versions (there are others15) have been widely circulated on social networks16. They have little foundation. Sound scientific studies rule out that the new coronavirus is a design biological weapon released intentionally or by accident17: "Our analyzes clearly demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 is neither a laboratory construct nor a deliberately manipulated virus18." The professor of the University of Sydney (Australia) Edward C. Holmes, the world's best expert on the new pathogen, stated emphatically.
We still do not know many things about this infectious agent: we do not know, for example, whether it has already mutated or is going to mutate ... Nor why it infects men more than women. Nor what are the determinants that make two people with similar characteristics - young, healthy, without associated pathologies - develop opposite forms of the disease, one mild, severe or fatal the other. Nor why children hardly ever have severe forms of the infection. Not if the cured patients continue to transmit the plague, or if they are really immunized ...
But there is broad agreement among international researchers19 to recognize that this new germ has arisen in the same way as others before: leaping from an animal to humans ... Bats, birds and various mammals (particularly pigs) naturally harbor multiple coronaviruses. In humans, there are seven known types of coronaviruses that can infect us. Four of them cause various varieties of the common cold. And three others, of recent appearance, produce much more lethal disorders such as the acute and severe respiratory syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002; the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which emerged in 2012; and finally this new disease, covid-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, whose first outbreak was detected, as we already said, in the Wuhan seafood market in December 2019. This new germ would have the bat as "original host" and another animal not yet identified - the pangolin 20? -, as an "intermediate host" from which, after becoming particularly dangerous, it would have jumped humans.
What is not fully understood is why, if we already live with six other coronaviruses and have them globally controlled, this new pathogen has caused such a colossal pandemic? What is special about this germ? Why has its speed of infection exceeded the expectations of the best health authorities in the world?
Without a doubt, as has been repeated a lot, conditions other than the virus such as the current speed of communications, hypermobility and the intensity of exchanges in the era of globalization have favored its spread. Obvious. But then why did SARS in 2002 or MERS in 2012, also caused by new coronaviruses, not "globalize" in the same way across the planet?
To answer these questions, the first thing to remember is that “Viruses are troubling because they are neither alive nor dead. They are not alive because they cannot reproduce by themselves. They are not dead because they can enter our cells, hijack their machinery and replicate. And in that they are effective and sophisticated because they have spent millions of years developing new ways to circumvent our immune system21. » But what specifically distinguishes SARS-CoV-2 from other killer viruses is precisely its silent irradiation strategy. In other words, its ability to spread without raising suspicions, even in its own victim. At least during the first days of infection when the infected person does not have any symptoms of the disease.
We do not know for sure why the virus travels so quickly, but what we know is that, from the moment it penetrates - through the eyes, nose or mouth - into the body of its victim it already begins to replicate exponentially … According to researcher Isabel Sola, from the National Center for Biotechnology in Spain: «Once inside the first human cell, each coronavirus generates up to 100,000 copies of itself in less than 24 hours… 22» But also, another unique and cunning feature of this pathogen is that it concentrates its first attack, when it is still undetectable, in the upper respiratory tract of the infected person, from the nose to the throat, where it replicates with frenetic intensity. From that moment, that person - who does not feel anything - becomes a powerful bacteriological bomb and begins to massively spread the deadly virus around them - simply by talking or breathing - ...
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/262989-coronavirus-la-pandemia-y-el-sistema-mundo
Keep translating the article and get informed
We still do not know many things about this infectious agent: we do not know, for example, whether it has already mutated or is going to mutate ... Nor why it infects men more than women. Nor what are the determinants that make two people with similar characteristics - young, healthy, without associated pathologies - develop opposite forms of the disease, one mild, severe or fatal the other. Nor why children hardly ever have severe forms of the infection. Not if the cured patients continue to transmit the plague, or if they are really immunized ...
But there is broad agreement among international researchers19 to recognize that this new germ has arisen in the same way as others before: leaping from an animal to humans ... Bats, birds and various mammals (particularly pigs) naturally harbor multiple coronaviruses. In humans, there are seven known types of coronaviruses that can infect us. Four of them cause various varieties of the common cold. And three others, of recent appearance, produce much more lethal disorders such as the acute and severe respiratory syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002; the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which emerged in 2012; and finally this new disease, covid-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, whose first outbreak was detected, as we already said, in the Wuhan seafood market in December 2019. This new germ would have the bat as "original host" and another animal not yet identified - the pangolin 20? -, as an "intermediate host" from which, after becoming particularly dangerous, it would have jumped humans.
What is not fully understood is why, if we already live with six other coronaviruses and have them globally controlled, this new pathogen has caused such a colossal pandemic? What is special about this germ? Why has its speed of infection exceeded the expectations of the best health authorities in the world?
Without a doubt, as has been repeated a lot, conditions other than the virus such as the current speed of communications, hypermobility and the intensity of exchanges in the era of globalization have favored its spread. Obvious. But then why did SARS in 2002 or MERS in 2012, also caused by new coronaviruses, not "globalize" in the same way across the planet?
To answer these questions, the first thing to remember is that “Viruses are troubling because they are neither alive nor dead. They are not alive because they cannot reproduce by themselves. They are not dead because they can enter our cells, hijack their machinery and replicate. And in that they are effective and sophisticated because they have spent millions of years developing new ways to circumvent our immune system21. » But what specifically distinguishes SARS-CoV-2 from other killer viruses is precisely its silent irradiation strategy. In other words, its ability to spread without raising suspicions, even in its own victim. At least during the first days of infection when the infected person does not have any symptoms of the disease.
We do not know for sure why the virus travels so quickly, but what we know is that, from the moment it penetrates - through the eyes, nose or mouth - into the body of its victim it already begins to replicate exponentially … According to researcher Isabel Sola, from the National Center for Biotechnology in Spain: «Once inside the first human cell, each coronavirus generates up to 100,000 copies of itself in less than 24 hours… 22» But also, another unique and cunning feature of this pathogen is that it concentrates its first attack, when it is still undetectable, in the upper respiratory tract of the infected person, from the nose to the throat, where it replicates with frenetic intensity. From that moment, that person - who does not feel anything - becomes a powerful bacteriological bomb and begins to massively spread the deadly virus around them - simply by talking or breathing - ...
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/262989-coronavirus-la-pandemia-y-el-sistema-mundo
Keep translating the article and get informed
