From Virus to Pandemic: The Logic of Value as the Foundation of the Coronavirus Health Crisis

Abstract

After the declaration of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, vast literature has been developed worldwide. It reflects on the causes that led to the formation of the health crisis and the role of human action. In this sense, the article discusses the complex relationship between society-nature, in particular, the subsumption that capitalism exercises on human practices that, guided by the logic of value, produce a social metabolism that manifests how modern societies participate in the production of a natural environment, whose material and cultural order does not guarantee human health in its coexistence with the organisms that inhabit it. In this way, it is argued that the current pandemic results from the social metabolism that capitalism produces in its desire to accumulate value. The dislocation that the logic of value introduces into the structure of social reproduction gave rise to the emergence of social practices. Through medical and pharmaceutical development, agro-industrial and agro-food activity, as well as the abandonment of public health systems, among others, have produced a spatial order in which the emergence of the new coronavirus found the material conditions that enhanced its dynamics and finally led to the formation of a metabolic fracture that today manifests itself in the form of a pandemic.