Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic came as a surprise and triggered changes in the structure of our world. Many of the prevailing logics, typical of the neoliberal capitalist model, were undoubtedly confronted by the force of nature. This, seen from an external and ambiguous perspective. Regarding this dilemma it is worth mentioning that this phenomenon, in its totality, is provoked by a virus from nature, and it has an effect on the very entrails of its nature’s constitution and variables. It should be no surprise that nature in the XXI century has become deeply altered, mutated, and transformed by late capitalism and globalization as well as by the great ambitions of power, control, and progress that end up affecting life itself.

The thesis of ^{Pavón Cuellar (2021)} is that the pandemic virus is driven by the virus of capital, the latter is even more deadly and threatening of species, nature, fertile land, and the future. The neoliberal capitalist project has, since the 1990s, been gaining ground, consolidating itself, and brought us closer and closer to the end of the world¹.

One of the phrases that quickly went around the world in the context of the Chilean protests of October 18, 2019 was written on a mural in the city of Santiago by the protesters “Another end of the world is possible.” This phrase did not encrypt what in an extremely short time gap would happen: the virus. The pandemic ended up exhibiting and, at the same time, producing a modification to the underlying logics in which everything was dragged along by capitalism.

As an effect of the process and the evolution of the pandemic, the priorities of goverments, the social differences of ethnicity (^{Marshall 2020}; ^{Sze et al 2020}) and gender (^{Woulfe & Wald 2020}; ^{Chang 2020}; ^{Chauhan 2020}; ^{D’Annibale, D. A. et al 2021}; ^{Estrela et al 2020}), the inequity in the regions of Latin America² and Africa, (^{Pavón Cuellar 2021}), the scarce social justice (^{Sánchez Vidal 2017}) and many of the pre-existing gaps were increased. It is from that complex pandemic scenario, that the false image of “Universality” (^{Althusser 1971}; Laclau, Butler and Žižek: 2000; ^{Larrain: 1979}) produced by the propagation and persistence of the virus, propitiated the ideological veil to collapse³. The pre-ideological (^{Žižek 2003}) conditions and the political disavowal after their collision activated new “processes of ideologization” (^{Ellacuria 2009}) and new forms of ideology. It is just a matter of time for them to show their outcome: The proposal is to de-globalize the pandemic in order to subjectivize the phenomenon and confront it according to the material and non-material needs of each geographical space.

Similarly, in the history of humanity there are similar events that invite us to consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a mere repetition of what capital needs for its expansion and proliferation. For example, the well-known Black Death, “despite the centuries that have passed since then, it is still recent and weighs in our imaginary, because it was, by far, the deadliest of the pandemics suffered by the European population, which, under its scourge and in less than a decade (from 1346 to 1355, approximately) (^Juaristi 98) overcame that historical crisis and began to articulate a false illusion of omnipotence that fell again with the arrival of Covid-19⁴.

We cannot affirm that nothing has been learned from plagues and viruses such as influenza, Ebola, AIDS, and cancer that have attacked and disrupted daily life throughout the last century. Indeed, there have been changes: improvements in health policies, increase of structures in charge of socio-cultural problems, as well as scientific advances focused on health and immunity. However, going back to square one is what has been happening since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, a return that does not ensure the future, it only manages to incorporate the crisis signifier in the world equation that composes the formula for approaching the end of the world or the new end of the world⁵.

Another fact to consider is that the rapid proliferation of the virus, in part, was driven by the same advances of the time, and we are only living and feeling what it is to be in our time, rethinking what it is like to live in the midst of the effects of capitalism, inevitably we are immersed in the weight of the construction of history in the present time. Althusser (1988) with his concept of “Geschichte” does not provide a starting point for questioning the viewpoints and perspectives from which we can observe reality or the realities that are active. Through the notion of the late Althusser it is possible to find a type of random history, far from repetition and from the endless return produced by the becoming. Perhaps, the socio-political, health and global dilemma unfolded and evidenced with the pandemic of the XXI century produces that, after the tiredness of repetition, a new chapter be reworked. Also a different opening emerges from the spontaneous, uncontrolled and predetermined actions, and that is what produces a fissure perpetuated by the co-construction of the reality(ies) of capital, the model and history itself.

Reloading a new repetition

COVID-19 fatigue now extends even to theory: since the beginning of 2021, it is usual to be tired of writing and reading new and new commentaries on the pandemic: the same situation dragged on and on. The weariness even extended to trying to make the same point over and over again⁶. The paradoxical thing here is that, although obeying repetitive and stable habits is supposed to make life tiresome, what we are tired of these days is precisely the absence of those stable habits: we are tired of living in a permanent state of exception, waiting for new regulations from the State to tell us how to interact, unable to relax in our daily lives.

Rainer Paris among many others, published in September 2020 “^{Die Zerstörung des Alltags}”- an essay in which he deplores the ongoing destruction of everyday life. He claimed that the pandemic poses a threat to the routines that hold a society together.

In this connection, the American producer Sam Goldwyn, after being informed that critics complain that there are too many old clichés in his films, wrote a memo to his scenario department: “We need more new clichés!”. He was right, and this is our most difficult task today: to create “new clichés” for everyday life. There are, of course, great cultural differences in the workings of this fatigue.

Byung-Chul Han (2021) is right when he points out that COVID-19 fatigue is much greater in Western developed societies because subjects live there more than elsewhere under the pressure of the compulsion to achieve:

“The compulsion to achieve to which we subject ourselves /.../ accompanies us during leisure time, torments us even in our sleep, and often leads to sleepless nights. It is not possible to recover from the compulsion to achieve. It is this internal pressure, specifically, that makes us tired. /.../ The rise of egotism, atomization, and narcissism in society is a global phenomenon. Social media turns all of us into producers, entrepreneurs whose selves are the businesses. It globalizes the ego culture that erodes community, erodes anything social. We produce ourselves and put ourselves on permanent display. This self-production, this ongoing “being-on-display” of the ego, makes us tired and depressed. /.../ Fundamental tiredness is ultimately a kind of ego tiredness. The home office intensifies it by entangling us even deeper in our selves. Other people, who could distract us from our ego, are missing. /.../ An absence of ritual is another reason for the tiredness induced by the home office. In the name of flexibility, we are losing the fixed temporal structures and architectures that stabilize and invigorate life⁷.”

One would have thought that if depressive tiredness is caused by the way we are all the time self-exposing in late capitalism, then the pandemic lockdown should make things easier (since we are much more time socially isolated, we experience less pressure to perform for others). Unfortunately, the effect is almost the opposite: our business and social contacts are to a large extent transferred onto Zoom and other social media where we play the game of self-exposing even more intensely, attentive of how we will appear there, while the space for socializing and relaxing that can escape the pressure to exhibit is largely eliminated. The paradox is thus that, with the pandemic, the continuous being-on-display is even strengthened by lockdown and home work: one shines with energy on Zoom, one sits tired alone at home.

So we can clearly see how even such an elementary feeling like tiredness is ultimately caused by ideology, by the game of self-exposing what is part of our everyday ideology. Mladen Dolar designated our predicament with a term borrowed from Walter Benjamin, Dialektik im Stillstand: dialectic at standstill, but also in suspense, awaiting anxiously that things will begin to move, that the New will explode. However, the feeling of standstill, the numbness and growing unresponsiveness which lead more and more people to ignore news and to stop even caring about the future, is very deceptive: it masks the fact that we are within an unprecedented social change. Since the rise of the pandemic, the global capitalist order has changed immensely, the big break that we are anxiously awaiting is already going on.

COVID-19 and Capitalocene

The global health crisis provoked by the pandemic has opened up a wide spectrum of political discussions, which transcend the debate of the classical dispute between left versus right or capitalism versus socialism. The discussion has now been placed into a broader field that would encompass all aspects of our existence (culture, politics, economy, health situation, environment, etc.) as a species. In other words, the pandemic crisis of COVID-19 forces us to focus on the balance between the zôê and the bios⁸. The zero point of the construction of any political and social project to come is no longer the great maneuvers of struggle for the destructuring (and even eventual destruction) of the capitalist economic project (accompanied by political neoliberalism) is at stake. However, the construction of a change in politics and economics must be observed and it should consider “life as such or natural life” (zôê) of all that makes up the set of species that inhabit the planet and the “human way of life” on which the possibility of existence of any political community, a bios politico, rests.

It is worth asking how this shift in interest from the human or nature occurs? and why now? However, the question of life and the place it occupies in the spaces of political dispute has always been present, although placed in the background. Thus, for example, we could suppose that the demand for social and economic rights presupposes - in an indirect way - the demand for the equal sustainability of the “human way of life” for all the subjects of the species, regardless of the geographical spatiality in which they are located (countries of the North or of the South; developed or developing countries). A different thing happens with “life as such”, which has been left in the background.

The non-equivalence, in terms of value, of animal and plant species with the human species has been a constant in the history of ideas and sciences. Modernity as heir to this tradition ended up potentializing the hierarchy between life and human forms through the distinction between culture/nature or human/non-human (^{Latour 2017}). In this way, human life was placed at the center of the debate on politics, generating an anthropocentrism in the various analyses and proposals around politics.

The reason for this renewed interest in the ecosystem and its relationship with capital and the state (legal order) is (re)updated with the COVID-19, the world-system theory (Wallerstein), social and environmental history that highlight the fact that economic and social dominations must think about the place of the Human in the scale of the planetary ecosystem.

This debate has been agitating in a semi-underground way the theoretical disputes of the last 20 years⁹. The works of several authors such as Bruno ^{Latour (1991}, ²⁰¹⁷⁾ or Naomi ^{Klein (2008}, ²⁰¹⁹⁾, have placed the climate issue at the heart of the debate as the heart of a global geopolitical dispute, in which what would be at stake are no longer international markets; value chains in production or capital. What is in dispute is the capacity to ensure a terrestrial space for the human species itself; what is in dispute is our very existence as a species.

For Latour this situation has substantially transformed the terms of the debate, thus the very vision of the future and of progress has been modified:

We have moved from a temporal version to a spatial version. In the progressive tradition, the future had no space. From now on, any temporal projection is superseded by the fact that we must also define the space in which we will have a future. This changes the game, and the ideas of progress, emancipation, hope (Latour 16).¹⁰

Indeed, for Latour, the question of the future and/or progress now necessarily passes through the question of the Anthropocene, that is, the impact that invasive human activity has generated on the planet’s ecosystems, to the point of being seen as a destructive force on a geological scale. The human footprint has ended up generating a geological epoch in the history of the planet (^{Steffen 2015}). The understanding of this negative impact of the human species has produced a field of debate within which it is sought to determine - on a timeline - from what moment the presence (footprint) of human life becomes a threat to the planet itself (^{Ortiz Crespo 2015}). In this context, the notion of capitalocene appears (^{Moore 2016}; Bonneuil 2017) from which it seeks to specify that the cause of the climate disaster that threatens the planet’s biosphere is the result of the capitalist mode of production and neoliberal policies. This is how the French historian Christophe Bonneuil explains it:

If the trigger point of the Anthropocene is still the subject of debate (The conquest and ethnocide of America? The industrial revolution and the birth of fossil capitalism? The atomic bomb and the “great acceleration” of the post-1945 era...), it is now widely recognized that what we are experiencing, much more than an “environmental crisis”, it constitutes a geological change and a new human condition (...) the Anthropocene was an Occidentalocene! In 1950, North America and Western Europe had Europe had emitted almost 3/4 of the greenhouse gases since 1750. While the human population has multiplied by ten in the last three centuries, the capital has multiplied by 134 between 1700 and 2008¹¹ (Bonneuil 53-54).

For Bonneuil, climate disruption and the threat of the so-called sixth extinction¹² are first and foremost the result of a logic of organization of economic production in the service of the self-styled modern Western world, in which an idea of technical progress, whose centrality in a logic of accumulation of capital, of goods, of means of exploitation of nature and of the human¹³ is abounding. In other words, the “great acceleration” (the geological, morphological and climatic modifications on the main ecosystems of the planet) must be seen in the light of historical-economic events. The industrial revolution of the 19th century, followed by globalized capitalism and neoliberalism (^{Bourdieu 1998}) are events that have been shaping not only the forms of production and accumulation, but also the power relations around life itself (^{Esposito 2021}).

A new reading of the notions of capital, development, production, exchange and accumulation seems to be imposed on those who attest to the existence of this Capitalocene and Occidentalocene. Thus, for example, Bonneuil is indispensable for a new vision of the very notion of inequality. In the context of the Capitalocene, inequality should not only be measured in terms of wealth distribution, but also in terms of the “ecological and historical debt” of Western industrial countries (North America, Western Europe) towards developing countries. It is a question of taking into account the system of world-ecologies. The idea would be that in the face of the climate threat, all the exchanges that have a major impact on the fragile ecosystem that guarantees the bios must be observed.

While the Marxist notion of unequal exchange was concerned with a degradation of exchange relations between the periphery and the center measured in terms of quantity of labor, that of “unequal ecological exchange” explores the asymmetry that occurs when peripheral or dominated territories of the world economic system export products with a high ecological use value in exchange for products that have a lower ecological use value or even generate pollution. This ecological value can be measured in terms of the hectares needed to produce various goods and services, using the indicator “ecological footprint” (Bonneuil 55).

Bonneuil’s position joins that of other authors from the global South who have been demanding a new reading of development, for example, Arturo Escobar in his work ^{“The Invention of the Third World” (2007)} questions the vision of development based on the triad of Technology, Science and Capital, as engines of any possibility of social progress. This vision of neoliberal development that has been imposed (through discursive representation regimes such as “good development”) must give way to a new phase for the struggles for global biodiversity from the territories¹⁴. It becomes urgent to overcome the characteristic features of the advanced societies of the time: high levels of industrialization and urbanization, technification of agriculture, rapid growth of material production and living standards, and widespread adoption of modern education and cultural values.

For Escobar, classical Marxism focused its interest on the exploitation of man, on surplus value, on the accumulation of capital. Leaving aside the problem of the capitalization of nature, today it is urgent that contemporary Marxism turns its eyes to this great oblivion. From these notions we bet on a holistic critique of capitalism and neoliberalism, which tends to a renewed alternative and that elevates us above the debate Capitalism versus Communism¹⁵.

For that, as the French philosopher Barbara Steigler (2020) suggests when referring to COVID-19 that “evidently, this is an exceptionally serious phenomenon because, beyond the viral attack, the progression of the disease is linked to social inequalities and the ecological crisis. The continuous increase in chronic diseases makes populations more vulnerable to aggravated health risks.”¹⁶ The pandemic, with its rapid spread and its lethal consequences, is first and foremost the expression of a syndemic. That is, the convergence of an epidemiological factor (in this case COVID-19) and a set of unfavorable socioeconomic circumstances that have affected several vulnerable groups in terms of health and access to quality medical services (^{Montes: 2021}). The great challenge is to establish a new critique that returns to neoliberalism to fracture its tentacles of biopower, its “founding violences” in the economy, institutions, law and governance (^{Lazzarato 2020}) including the ecosystem-world and thus precede the new fascisms that would seek to re-domesticate, re-conduct society to order, using the category of Pandemic as a strategy of control of the social body, legitimizing states of exception to come, characterized by disjunctions: health/freedom or life/democracy.

By way of closing

Undoubtedly, we are facing one of the most complex pages of global society in the last century. Not since the Second World War and its end in 1945 has there been a scenario of such misery in different corners of the globe. Of course, we are not going to compare the 70 to 83 million deaths caused by World War II with the 3 million deaths caused by COVID-19, but the pandemic has wreaked havoc at all levels of our societies. The poorest segments of the population cannot afford to stay at home and must continue to work. The policy implication is that social protection measures in the form of food or cash transfers must be complementary to physical distancing measures (^{Bargain and Aminjonov 2021}). In turn, the pandemic revealed that poverty is more strongly impacted by external-situational and less by internal-dispositional causes. Therefore, the financial security of working-class individuals can be easily destabilized by factors beyond personal control (^{Wiwad et al. in press}).

The relations of production change in each territory and it is sufficient to demonstrate that this principle retains its validity when applied to the various classes. With the pandemic, certain productive functions have disappeared or are relegated to second place, other functions have been created, etc. In this way, a constant and progressive regrouping of classes has changed social forms and relations, since the physical distancing is accompanied by a social distancing that has been encapsulated from the ontological foundation of digital capitalism when it enables pseudo-approaches with an ephemeral character, causing distances by having less and less time available, which is paradoxical with the amount of hours we spend connected, in the face of which a situation of frank conflict or incomplete harmony prevails. Therefore, class psychology is determined by the totality of the living conditions of each class and in many spaces there is a psychology of weariness and disgust with life.

In the past, hunger strikes in tsarist prisons were acts of class struggle, of protest in order to fan the flame of a conflict, as a symbol of solidarity (^Bujarin 260). Today, the pandemic has dynamited a regrouping of forces. Social psychology emerges to be a kind of storehouse for ideology. The ideology of the struggle in the pandemic crystallizes in a program, in a system of demands such as the social struggle for the recovery in Chile of the money appropriated and stagnated in a system of forced savings by the Pension Fund Insurers created in 1980 [AFP]. The vast majority of people receive pensions of approximately 210 US dollars, while the armed forces and their families receive large amounts. Due to the economic difficulties caused by the Pandemic, the political party Federación Regionalista Verde Social began the political struggle to achieve the first withdrawal of 10% of the workers’ money, but the second and third withdrawals would not have been possible without the struggle of non-governmental and social organizations.

Sartre expressed it very well in Materialism and Revolution, when he argued that the members of the ruling class are (were) convinced that the oppressed classes are (were) part of nature, for the sacred men and therefore, they should not command. In this case, the major economic groups have developed an extraordinarily secure business for their businesses, at the cost of paltry pensions for the people who have been oppressed for years. However, it is not enough to be oppressed to be revolutionary. Sartre reminds us that the Canuts of Lyon, the workers of the June 1848 days, were not revolutionaries but revolters, since they fought for an improvement in the conditions of their lot but not for its radical transformation (^{Sartre 1960}).

In this analysis, it is important to add the role of philosophy in order to safeguard ethnic (social) justice and to go against governmental hegemony (^{Ziarek: 2020}). The ideology of philosophy is to get to the root causes and the ultimate reason for the pandemic is our relentless destruction of nature and even ruthless exploitation of animals (^{Oksala 2020}). Philosophy has a relevant role in modifying the existing conditions and as self-consciousness of the zeitgeist¹⁷, it presents its belief systems and to be revolutionary it must make explicit a critical thought that, when linked to action, becomes militant and allows the development of the consciousness of the people in the social structure and enables the bios politiko to take off, leading to a more natural coexistence of the zôê.

The time has come to conclude this article. We have already said it at the beginning: the pandemic has evidenced new processes of ideologization and although certain tendencies exist, it is necessary to de-globalize and subjectivize the phenomenon to be analyzed according to the needs of each territory. Since the first semester of 2020, there has been a worsening of the inequality that plagues our nations and while the pandemic continues its course, the most dispossessed continue to be the most affected. The management of the pandemic should seek new ways of solidarity, of collaboration to speak of a new “empowerment process” to found a new balance of the social body, not only on an economic basis, but on a revolutionary, conscious and solidary psychology, where a history of harmoniously constituted societies can begin.