Are
the last hours of this yesterday
or
the instant when another tomorrow opens?
I
have lost the world
and
i don't know when
the
time to start again begins.
José
Emilio Pacheco,
High hours.
This
is the way the world ends
Not
with a bang but a whimper.
T.
S. Eliot
Urbi et orbi, the status quo is already
gone. An entity ... a paltry little entity of no
more than 20 nm, the SARS-CoV-2, unleashed and spread catastrophe around the
world. Let there be chaos! –the virus
decreed and the chaos went viral. Asia, Europe, Oceania, Africa, America... From the microscopic universe where nucleic
acids act, the chain reaction is transmuting everything: genetic codes, cells,
tissues, organs, organisms, societies, countries... Everything, from the most obscure
complexities of our global village and its flimsy geopolitical equilibria to
each and everyone of us, both healthy and sick: conceited sapiens that just a
few weeks ago were sure we understood and control everything. The virus shook our technological arrogance
and uncovered the fragility of modern superstitions, including the blind faithin out of context data. It left us exposed to uncertainty. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron,
did not reinvent the wheel when he declared our shared discovery: “Things have
happened, which we are obviously not aware of”.
For a while now, scattered coincidences
warned us that global capitalism and national States were dead men walking, but
walking nonetheless. Not few people have pointed out that the
visible cracks in the global order are structural. The issue is not theoretical anymore, and
today the evidence is unavoidable: the two great pillars of the current global
order, the political and economical, are stuck in their own helpless
ineffectiveness.
Just one year ago, Rana Dasgupta published
an extraordinary essay in The Guardian. In The demise of the nation state, Dasgupta presented the fall of the political
bodies that have dominated the world for almost five centuries. In that context, I wondered about the winds
of change all around, that sadly, did not seem hopeful. You could sense instability, everywhere you
looked around there is a monster ready to come out… What the hell is going
on? Well, turns out it was not a monster, it was
a tiny virus, something smaller than a bug that messed up life as we know
it.
The Max Plank emeritus director, Wolfgang
Streeck, recently published his book How
Will Capitalism End? (Verso Books, 2016). In a nutshell, he argued: “modern
capitalism is vanishing onto its own”. Well yes, but not only. Capitalism is not
reduced to people fighting over profit, instead, social orden carries this
economic dynamic: “a particular governance, particular contentment mechanisms in the
heart of the social system are responsible for the legitimacy of the capitalist
organization of the economy”. For example, it is responsible for the fact
that most of us do not think that it is absurd that a soccer player earns a
thousand times what an intensive care unit doctor does. In a dialectical manner, Dr. Streeck argued: capitalism collapses "due to its internal contradictions, and not
because it has defeated all of its enemies, most of which have saved it from
itself, making it develop new forms”. Modern capitalism has no enemies left, — even communist
China is now playing the game — , it is completely alone in the ring
fighting against itself, and it is loosing, vanishing onto its own. Whoops! But what if the band new coronavirus
becomes the rising challenger and thus savior of good old capitalism?
For orthodox marxism, and according to the
dialectical method, the new displaces the old. The force of change is the
motor. But maybe it has not always been this way,
maybe sometimes the old expires and perishes, even when there is still nothing
new and ready to replace it. Orthodox marxism is completely
anthropocentric —it couldn’t be other way coming from a humanistic origin— so then, it considers
that agents of change are only human. Historic forces collide, contradictions become
starker and change happens. And
everything works out! But evidently it has not always been like this. Drought, ice ages, pests and pandemics, are
simply not considered in historic materialism, and still over and over again
chance has intervened in the fate of our species. And chance does count: for example, after
more than a hundred thousand years of being confined in Africa, sapiens started to invaded the whole world
due to climate change, and for seventy thousand years the human pest has swept the
planet. Or what about here and now, in the heart of
our country: the first urban development of the Valley of Mexico, Cuicuilco,
lost its viability thanks to the eruption of the Xitle volcano. Archeological
records show that hundreds of people fled to Teotihuacán and abandoned
Cuicuilco.
Normality is a collective illusion which, as
it turns out, is really easy to wake up from. After this is over we will walk
out of home different: we will need to
recognize this and invent a new order. Nothing is written.
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