CENTURY PANDEMIC: RECURRING AND NOVEL HISTORICAL EVENTS OF A GLO BAL CRISIS

Abstract

The unfolding Coronavirus crisis hitting States around the world is not just a general health crisis. It has economic, politic and social consequences too, attacking societies at their core. It is to be a war on virus, then, but a war in the context of well-defined social-historical conditions. Covid-19 is exacerbating all the imbalances and contradictions that capitalistic world-wide system produces. Mankind cannot avoid great natural disasters, like a viral infection, albeit the development of science and productive forces has made effective means available to intervene on the effects of these events, predicting or mitigating their consequences. But science and productive forces are subjugated, enslaved to the relations of production, subjected to the chaos of the markets and to the logic of profit. This global crisis, so tragically devastating, therefore poses itself as a great challenge. It reveals the mandatory need for a truly unified human race, for a new organization of collective life upon which to base most advanced and harmonic possibilities of the relationship between man and man and man and nature