Viral end

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.