Reflections for a post-coronavirus world
maristella svampa1
It is necessary to abandon the rhetoric of war and acknowledge the environmental causes of the pandemic, alongside the health-related ones, and place them on the political agenda. This would help us prepare effectively to respond to humanity's greatest challenge, the climate crisis, and to consider a major eco-social and economic pact.
There have been many pandemics throughout history, beginning with the Black Death in the Middle Ages and continuing with the diseases that came from Europe and decimated the indigenous population of the Americas during the conquest. It is estimated that between 30 and 90 million people died from influenza, measles, and typhus. More recently, all that come to mind are the Spanish flu (1918-1019), the Asian flu (1957), the Hong Kong flu (1968), HIV/AIDS (since the 1980s), the H1N1 swine flu (2009), SARS (2002), Ebola (2014), MERS (2015 coronavirus), and now COVID-19.
However, we have never lived under a global quarantine, nor have we ever imagined that the establishment of a temporary state of exception, a health Leviathan, through nation-states, would be so swift. Currently, almost a third of humanity is under mandatory confinement. On the one hand, external borders are closed, internal controls are implemented, the paradigm of security and control expands, and isolation and social distancing are mandated. On the other hand, those who until recently defended policies of reducing the size of the state are now rearranging their rhetoric around the necessity of state intervention, condemning the austerity programs that severely impacted public health, even in the countries of the Global North.
It's difficult to imagine that the world before this year's great pandemic was a "solid" world, in terms of its economic and social systems. The coronavirus has thrown us into the arena where, above all, the major societal debates matter: how to envision society going forward, how to emerge from the crisis, what kind of state we need to achieve this; in short, and to top it all off, it's about considering the future of civilization on the brink of systemic collapse.
In this article, I would like to contribute to these major debates with a reflection that proposes to make precarious progress on some lessons offered by the great pandemic and to outline some hypotheses about the possible future scenario.
The return of the State and its ambivalences: the healthcare Leviathan and its two faces
Reformulating Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright's concept of the climate Leviathan, we can say that we are currently facing the emergence of a temporary health Leviathan, which has two faces. On the one hand, there seems to be a return of the welfare state. Thus, the measures being implemented worldwide involve decisive state intervention, ranging from governments with strong states—such as Germany and France—to governments with a distinctly liberal orientation, like the United States. For example, Angela Merkel announced a €156.000 billion health and economic package, part of which will serve as a rescue fund for self-employed individuals without employees and companies with up to ten workers; in Spain, the measures will mobilize up to €200.000 billion, 20% of GDP; in France, Emmanuel Macron announced €45.000 billion in aid and €300.000 billion in loan guarantees. The situation is so dire, given the job losses and the millions of unemployed this crisis will generate, that even the most liberal economists are considering a second New Deal within the context of this major systemic crisis. In the medium and long term, the question is always which sectors will benefit from these policies. For example, Donald Trump has already given a very clear indication: the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act is a two trillion dollar stimulus package intended, among other objectives, to rescue sensitive sectors of the economy, including the fracking industry, one of the most polluting and heavily subsidized activities.
On the other hand, the health Leviathan is accompanied by a state of exception. Much has been written about this, and we won't elaborate further. Suffice it to say that increased social control is becoming visible in various countries in the form of human rights violations, militarization of territories, and repression of the most vulnerable sectors. In reality, in developing countries, rather than an Asian-style digital surveillance society, what we find is the expansion of a less sophisticated surveillance model, carried out by various security forces, which can further harm the most vulnerable sectors in the name of the war against the coronavirus.
One question keeps echoing: to what extent do states have the resources to continue pursuing social recovery? This is something we will see in the coming years, as this process will be shaped by social struggles—that is, grassroots movements—but also by the pressures exerted from above by the most concentrated economic sectors. On the other hand, it is clear that peripheral states have far fewer resources, not least Argentina, given the near-default and social disaster left by Mauricio Macri's last government. No country will save itself alone, no matter how many progressive measures it implements. Everything seems to indicate that the solution is global and requires a radical reformulation of North-South relations within the framework of democratic multilateralism, aimed at creating nation-states in which social, environmental, and economic issues are interconnected and at the center of the agenda.
Crises as learning opportunities to avoid falling into false solutions
The pandemic highlights the extent of social inequalities and the enormous trend toward wealth concentration that exists on the planet. This is nothing new, but it does lead us to reflect on the solutions employed in other global crises. In this regard, the most recent global crisis, even if it had different characteristics, is that of 2008. Caused by the housing bubble in the United States, the crisis was financial in nature and spread to other parts of the world, becoming an economic upheaval of global proportions. It also remains the worst memory in terms of crisis resolution, the consequences of which we are still experiencing. With few exceptions, governments organized bailouts for large financial corporations, including their executives, who emerged from the crisis richer than ever.
Thus, in social terms and on a global scale, the reconfiguration was regressive. It is often said that the economy recovered, but the wealthiest 1% took a leap forward, and the inequality gap widened. Let us recall the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, whose slogan was “We are the 99%.” Millions of people lost their homes worldwide and were left heavily indebted and unemployed; inequality deepened; austerity measures and disinvestment in health and education spread across numerous countries, something dramatically illustrated by a country like Greece, but which extends to countries like Italy, Spain, and even France. On the eve of the Davos Forum in January 2020, a oxfam report It stated that the world's 2.153 billionaires possess more wealth than 4.600 billion people (60% of the world's population). In global political terms, it produced enormous tectonic shifts, illustrated by the emergence of new parties and authoritarian leaders worldwide: a reactionary and authoritarian right wing, encompassing everyone from the Tea Party to Donald Trump, from Jair Bolsonaro to Scott Morrison, from Matteo Salvini to Boris Johnson, among others.
On the other hand, while until a few years ago Latin America was considered to be moving against the grain of the right-wing radicalization process currently sweeping through parts of Europe and the United States, with its consequences in terms of increased inequality, xenophobia, and anti-globalism, it must be said that, in recent times, new ideological winds have been blowing through the region, especially after the rise of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the coup in Bolivia. It should also be noted that Latin America, although it survived the full force of this process, has also experienced a reversal of its own ideological shifts. "Commodities Consensus" Despite the economic and financial crisis of 2008, fueled by high commodity prices and large-scale exports, little remained of that period of neo-extractivism and prosperity. Currently, it continues to be the most unequal region in the world (20% of the population holds 83% of the wealth), the region with the greatest concentration and grabbing of land (thanks to the expansion of the agricultural frontier), and the most dangerous area in the world for environmental activists and human rights defenders (60% of the murders of environmental defenders in 2016 and 2017 occurred in Latin America). To make matters worse, it is also the most dangerous region for women who are victims of femicide and gender-based violence.
Thus, the resolution of the 2008 crisis and its negative effects are clearly felt today. These solutions, which accentuated the concentration of wealth and predatory neoliberalism, must serve today as an effective and convincing counterexample, calling for innovative and democratic proposals that aim for equality and solidarity. At the same time, they should make us reflect on the fact that even those countries in the Global South that, during the "Commodity Consensus," weathered the crisis and took advantage of extraordinary profitability through the export of raw materials, using neo-extractivist policies, did not succeed and cannot be presented as the embodiment of a positive model.
Concealment of environmental causes and hyperpresence of war discourse
I previously stated that the social, economic, and political reconfiguration following the 2008 crisis was very negative. I would now like to focus a bit on the environmental causes of the pandemic. Today, we read in numerous articles, corroborated by various scientific studies, that the viruses that have been plaguing humanity in recent times are directly associated with the destruction of ecosystems, deforestation, and the trafficking of wild animals for the establishment of monocultures. However, it seems that the attention given to the pandemic itself and the control strategies being developed has not incorporated this central issue into its discourse. All of this is very worrying. Did anyone hear Merkel or Macron mention the environmental problems behind this in their speeches? Did you hear Alberto Fernández, who has gained legitimacy in recent weeks thanks to his strict preventative policies and his constant contact and decision-making with a committee of experts, ever speak about the socio-environmental causes of the pandemic? The socio-environmental causes of the pandemic show that the enemy is not the virus itself, but rather what caused it. If there is an enemy, it is this type of predatory globalization and the established relationship between capitalism and nature. Although the topic circulates on social media and in the news, it is not on the political agenda. This “epistemic blindness”—to use Horacio Machado Aráoz’s term—has as its counterpart the establishment of an unprecedented war-like discourse.
The proliferation of war metaphors and the memory of World War II permeate speeches, from Macron and Merkel to Trump and Xi Jinping. This is echoed by Alberto Fernández, who constantly speaks of the "invisible enemy." In reality, this figure can foster social cohesion in the face of fear of contagion and death, "closing ranks against the common enemy," but it doesn't contribute to understanding the root of the problem; rather, it obscures it and normalizes and advances social control over those sectors considered most problematic (the poor, prisoners, those who disobey the authorities).
The war rhetoric obscures and masks the roots of the problem, attacking the symptom but not the underlying causes, which are related to the societal model established by neoliberal capitalism through the expansion of the frontiers of exploitation and, within this framework, through the intensification of trade in wild animals from devastated ecosystems. Finally, the war-like approach is more associated with fear than with solidarity and has even led to increased surveillance of non-compliance with government-mandated measures to prevent contagion. There are numerous accounts, in Argentina as well as in other countries, that describe the association between war rhetoric and the figure of the "citizen policeman," acting as a vigilant watchdog, ready to denounce their neighbor for the slightest breach of quarantine. In short, it is necessary to abandon the war rhetoric and acknowledge the environmental causes of the pandemic, along with the health-related ones, and place them on the public agenda, which would help us prepare positively to respond to humanity's great challenge: the climate crisis.
Possible horizons. From the care paradigm to the great eco-social and economic pact
The year of the great pandemic places us at a civilizational crossroads. Faced with new political and ethical dilemmas, it allows us to rethink the economic and climate crisis from a new angle, both in multi-scalar terms (global/national/local) and geopolitical terms (North/South relations under a new multilateralism). We could formulate the dilemma as follows: Either we move towards a more authoritarian neoliberal globalization, a further step towards the triumph of the security and digital surveillance paradigm established by the Asian model, so well described by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, although less sophisticated in the case of our peripheral societies in the Global South, within the framework of a "capitalism of chaos," as the Bolivian analyst Pablo Solón argues. Or, without falling into a naive view, the crisis can open the way for the possibility of building a more democratic globalization, linked to the paradigm of care, through the implementation and recognition of solidarity and interdependence as social and international bonds. of public policies aimed at a "new eco-social and economic pact", which jointly addresses social and environmental justice.
Crises, it should not be forgotten, also generate processes of "cognitive liberation," as the literature on collective action, and Doug McAdam in particular, describes it. This makes possible the transformation of the consciousness of those potentially affected; that is, it makes it possible to overcome fatalism or inaction and renders viable and possible what until recently was unimaginable. This implies understanding that the die is not cast, that opportunities for transformative action exist in the midst of disaster. The worst thing that could happen is that we stay home convinced that the cards are stacked against us, leading us to inaction or paralysis, thinking that it is useless to try to influence the social and political processes that are unfolding, as well as the public agendas that are being established. The worst thing that could happen is that, as a way out of the systemic crisis produced by the health emergency, "the disaster within the disaster" deepens, as the African American feminist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor states, echoing Naomi Klein's concept of "disaster capitalism." We must start from the idea that we are in an extraordinary situation, a systemic crisis, and that the civilizational horizon is not closed and is still in dispute.
Along these lines, certain doors must be closed (for example, we cannot accept a solution like the one in 2008, which benefits the most concentrated and polluting sectors, nor more neo-extractivism), and others must be opened wider and strengthened (a State that values the paradigm of care and life), both to consider how to overcome the crisis and to imagine other possible worlds. It is about proposing alternatives to current globalization that challenge the ongoing destruction of nature and ecosystems, that challenge a concept of society and social bonds marked by individual interest, that challenge commodification and the false notion of "autonomy." In my opinion, the foundations of this new language must be both the establishment of the care paradigm as a socio-cognitive framework and the implementation of a broad eco-social and economic pact, at both the national and global levels.
First and foremost, it is crucial to value the care paradigm, as we have been emphasizing from the perspectives of ecofeminism and popular feminisms in Latin America, as well as from feminist economics; a relational paradigm that implies the recognition and respect of the other, the awareness that survival is a problem that concerns us all as humanity and involves us as social beings. Its contributions can help us rethink the links between the human and the non-human, question the notion of "autonomy" that has generated our modern conception of the world and of science, and place at the center notions such as interdependence, reciprocity, and complementarity. This means reclaiming that those daily tasks linked to sustaining life and its reproduction, which have been historically devalued within the framework of patriarchal capitalism, are central tasks and, moreover, constitute the quintessential ecological question. Far from the idea of false autonomy to which liberal individualism leads, we must understand that we are interdependent beings and abandon anthropocentric and instrumental views to embrace the idea that we are part of a whole, with others, with nature. In the context of a civilizational crisis, interdependence is increasingly interpreted in terms of ecodependence, as it extends the idea of care and reciprocity to other living beings, to nature.
In this context of global humanitarian tragedy, care—not only domestic but also healthcare—as the foundation for sustaining life takes on greater significance. On the one hand, this entails a revaluation of the work of healthcare personnel—women and men, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, intensivists and general practitioners, nurses and orderlies—in short, all healthcare workers, who face the daily challenges of the pandemic, with the restrictions and shortcomings of each country. At the same time, it demands an abandonment of the market-driven approach and a redirection of state investment toward care and assistance. On the other hand, the voices and experience of healthcare personnel will be increasingly necessary to place the inextricable relationship between health and the environment on the public agenda, in the face of climate collapse. We face not only other pandemics, but also a proliferation of diseases linked to pollution and the worsening climate crisis. We must remember that medicine, despite the profound commodification of health that we have witnessed in recent decades, has not lost its social and health dimension, as we can see today, and that from now on it will be directly involved in the great societal debates and, therefore, in the great changes that await us and in the actions to control climate change, together with environmental, feminist, youth and indigenous sectors.
In Argentina, the government of Alberto Fernández has given numerous indications of the importance it places on care as a defining task and value of the new administration. One of these was the creation of the Ministry of Women, Gender Policies, and Sexual Diversity, as well as the inclusion of prominent professionals in the government, whose feminist contributions permeate various areas of the State. This move toward incorporating feminism as a State policy should also translate into a broadening of the public agenda surrounding care. It is hoped that the women who now hold public office will take on the task of connecting what currently appears obscured and absent from public discourse: the close relationship between care, health, and the environment.
Secondly, this crisis could well be an opportunity to discuss more global solutions in terms of public policy. A few days ago, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) proposed a new Marshall Plan that releases $2,5 trillion in aid to emerging countries, including debt forgiveness and an emergency plan for healthcare and social programs. The need to reshape the global economic order, which would include a debt jubilee, now appears feasible. The possibility of implementing a universal basic income also seems real, a debate that has been reignited by a pandemic that is destroying millions of jobs and exacerbating job insecurity through teleworking arrangements that extend working hours.
However, this New Deal needs to be considered not only from an economic and social perspective, but also from an ecological one. The worst thing would be to legislate against the environment to revive the economy, exacerbating the environmental and climate crisis and North-South inequalities. Several voices are highlighting the need for a Green New Deal like the one launched by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. From Naomi Klein to Jeremy Rifkin, many have taken up the topic in terms of linking social justice, environmental justice, and racial justice.
In the context of this pandemic, there have been some signs. For example, Chris Stark, CEO of Committee on Climate Change The UK's CCC argued that the injection of resources that governments must inject into the economy to overcome the Covid-19 crisis must take into account commitments on climate change; that is, the design of policies and strategies that are not only economic but also a "green stimulus." In the United States, a group of economists, academics, and financiers, grouped under the banner of green stimulus (green stimulus) sent a letter In which they urged Congress to push even harder to ensure that workers are protected and that businesses can operate sustainably to avoid the catastrophes of climate change, especially in an economy marked by the coronavirus.
With Enrique Viale, in our latest book, "A Compass in Times of Climate Crisis" (forthcoming from Siglo Veintiuno), we point in this direction and therefore propose thinking in terms of a grand eco-social and economic pact. We know that, in our latitudes, the debate on the Green New Deal is little known, for several reasons ranging from economic urgencies to the lack of a historical connection with the concept, since in Latin America we have never had a New Deal, nor a Marshall Plan. In Argentina, the closest thing to this was the Five Year Plan Under the first Peronist government, which had a nationalist and redistributive objective, Argentina was not yet emerging from the economic crisis. It had a fiscal surplus, and grain export prices were high. The country had benefited economically from the European war, which gave the Peronist government an opportunity to create conditions of relative autonomy, directing its redistribution policy toward the urban working class.
Thus, there is no reconstruction vision here linked to the memory of the Marshall Plan (Europe) or the New Deal (United States). What exists is a vision of social consensus, tied to Peronism, in which the demand for reparations (social justice) remains associated with a hegemonic idea of economic growth. This idea may appeal to an industrializing ideal, but always in conjunction with the extractive export model, through the Eldorado shale formation (Vaca Muerta), agribusiness, and, to a lesser extent, open-pit mining. The presence of this extractivist/developmentalist vision does little to help consider the paths to a "just transition" or to undertake a national debate within a global framework regarding the grand eco-social and economic pact. Rather, it distorts it and makes it decidedly dangerous in the context of the climate crisis.
This does not mean that there are no emancipatory narratives or concrete utopias available in Latin America. It is important to remember that new political frameworks exist in the region, emerging from local resistance movements and eco-territorial movements (rural and urban, Indigenous, peasant, and multicultural, including the recent mobilizations of young people for climate justice), which propose a new relationship between humans, as well as between society and nature, and between human and non-human. At the local level, prefigurative and anti-systemic experiences are multiplying, such as agroecology, which has seen significant expansion, even in a country as heavily reliant on genetically modified organisms as Argentina. These reterritorialization processes are accompanied by a political-environmental narrative, associated with "good living", post-development, post-extractivism, the rights of nature, common goods, the ethics of care and the just socio-ecological transition, whose keys are both the defense of the commons and the recreation of another link with nature as well as the transformation of social relations, in terms of social and environmental justice.
The goal is to build a genuine national and global agenda, with a range of public policies geared towards a just transition. This undoubtedly requires not only a deeper exploration and debate on these issues, but also the establishment of a North-South dialogue with those who are envisioning a Green New Deal, based on a redefinition of multilateralism grounded in solidarity and equality.
No one says it will be easy, but it's not impossible either. We need to reconcile with nature, to rebuild with it and with ourselves a bond of life, not destruction. The debate and implementation of a just transition agenda can become a rallying cry to combat not only dominant liberal thought, but also the collapseist and dystopian narrative prevalent in certain left-wing circles and the persistent epistemic blindness of so many developmentalist progressive movements. The coronavirus pandemic and the imminence of collapse open a process of cognitive liberation, through which not only can political imagination be activated by the need for survival and the care of life, but also the intersectionality between new and old struggles (social, ethnic, feminist, and environmental), all of which can lead us to the threshold of a holistic, comprehensive, transformative way of thinking, denied until now.
1- Argentine sociologist and writer. Conicet-UNLP.
[+] Thinking about the pandemic
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