THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

IMPLICATIONS AMONG ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION, NEOLIBERALISM AND CAPITAL ACCUMULATION MOVEMENTS

Abstract

This article problematizes the pandemic of COVID-19, not as an isolated sanitary episode, as repeated ad nauseam by the media of neoliberal ideas. but as part of a global scenario of new zoonotic diseases that broke out in the last half century. It is argued that the causes are related to the current production model, particularly in its financial-rentier version, made possible by the spread of a generalized neoliberal rationality, according to Pierre Bourdieu. The UN Environment Program report indicates that anthropic utilitarian practices have disastrously impacted the environment. The methodology used consisted in a bibliographic review in the scope of social sciences about neoliberalism, contextualized by readings of news reports of the current pandemic moment and in Karl Marx's capitalist accumulation theory. From the theoretical-epistemological framework, it is concluded that the repeated dichotomous discourse between saving lives or the economy, is consistent with the hegemonic project of unlimited economic growth, promoted by the false liberal division among the spheres: market, society and nature, allowing to disregard the cycles of reproduction of life, inflicting ills on the planetary social body, such as that materialized in the context of the new pandemic, in view of the maintenance of a permanent historical flow of capital reproduction and accumulation.