The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has plunged the capitalist system into a deep crisis. Forty years of neoliberalism has left the public totally exposed and ill prepared to face a public health crisis on the scale of coronavirus. When trying to interpret, understand, and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works. The first level is a mapping of the internal contradictions of the circulation and accumulation of capital as money value flows in search of profit through the different “moments” (as Marx calls them) of production, realization (consumption), distribution, and reinvestment. This is a model of the capitalist economy as a spiral of endless expansion and growth. It gets pretty complicated as it gets elaborated through, for example, the lenses of geopolitical rivalries, uneven geographical developments, financial institutions, state policies, technological recon
Writings in Anthropology & Public Health