Why China, where the outbreak began, managed to contain it

Jorge Alemán¹

A global catastrophe in the form of an epidemic has been predicted for some time. But if there's one thing that characterizes the current state of capitalism, it's that what is predicted, what is known to be going to happen, no longer has any practical effect. No warning, however truthful and horrible, can change the unlimited, headless march of Capitalism. As if it were definitively revealed that Capitalism and its technology are driven by a force, a structural pressure that no longer responds to any human need.

In this respect, it could be confirmed that capitalism is the consummation of metaphysics. It is a pure, spectral, and ghostly abstraction that spreads everywhere like the most perfect of all viruses. From a similar perspective It is not surprising that China, despite also being permeated by Capitalism, is the only place in the world that still maintains a civilizational principle of order to offer the world..

The word "offer" may be a euphemism in this case. The truth is that China generated the virus and at the same time has begun to contain it. There are at least two reasons that should be considered in this regard: firstly, in China, one only needs to look at its Communist Party congresses, They maintain the misguided idea that Capitalism is an instrument of China and not the other way around. This naiveté defies the logic of all Western Marxism, but for China, it has allowed capitalism to prevent the destruction of its rich and complex symbolic legacy. The second reason is that the knot that maintained the West's cultural hegemony was made of three terms that now function independently: the market economy, political liberalism, and democratic civic life.

These three terms have already been unraveled by Neoliberalism, whose sole interest is the accumulation of capital above any political order. It is evident that The symbolic power of Western states is in decline. And the current pandemic has revealed this in all its stark reality. These are the reasons why the West doesn't know what to do about the pandemic right now, and Europe, in particular, has had no choice but to not only observe how China is handling it, but also allow itself to be supervised by its experts. Anything that might curb the pandemic is expected to come from China.

In this aspect, The Coronavirus is the first serious eclipse of American dominance, which no longer seems to have any concept of Civilization.It remains to be seen how emerging countries, the only ones still capable of a different political invention, are able to reinvent a 21st-century Peronism, socialist in income distribution, sovereign with respect to the experiences of the Commons: the environment, public health and education, and that knows how to radicalize democracy while avoiding the neo-fascist drifts that now more than ever dispute the meaning of the experience of the Homeland and the Other that sustains it.

1- Jorge Alemán is an Argentine psychoanalyst and writer. Article published in the newspaper Página 12.

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