How the Coronavirus Crisis is Highlighting the Inequality of Capitalism

By Mike Hembury — SOAPBOX

“This is your free trial apocalypse. If you do not wish to renew your subscription at the end of the trial period, you must cancel your carbon emissions by 2030. Otherwise your apocalypse will automatically renew for the next million years.” — Rebecca Auerbach

When it came it wasn’t so much the strangeness that struck me, as the familiarity. As if the sudden grinding to a halt of late capitalist society was something that our culture has been preparing us for throughout our entire lives.

To a population raised on disaster movies, zombies and alien invasions, the coronavirus enters our lives with a vicious wink of recognition, one of those childhood monsters we thought we had banished to under beneath the bed.

Now everything is different. Now there is only life before corona, and life after, or perhaps better life with corona.

For anyone concerned with the broader health of the planet, the idea of a sudden systemic change, a.k.a tipping point is not new. It is the moment when quantitative changes suddenly turn into qualitative changes. A moment when the incremental pressure on a system has built to such an extent that the system is forced to shift to a new state.