Capitalism is the Virus

"Capitalism is the virus." The phrase gone viral these days on both Facebook and Twitter has begun to replicate itself on the walls of buildings.

Thus shows a picture taken by the Reuters agency photographer, Carlos Barría, who captured the image in an abandoned building in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.

The global campaign "Capitalism is the virus" was born in the middle of last month as a result of the ineptitude shown by a few developed countries to face the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are many around these days who blame the capitalist system for infecting the planet with environmental pollution generated by excessive consumerism. Today's world, with its fires, its temperature records, endangered glaciers, storms, and floods, is the boiler where apocalypse is cooked.

Also, capitalism in its best neoliberal version has proven that, by giving priority to profits in the field of health before the well-being of its citizens, they haven’t had the necessary medical supplies to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the world.

Just in the state of Louisiana, where the graffiti appeared, since the first known case was revealed on March 9^th, more than 21,500 cases of COVID-19 and 1,013 deaths have already been reached.

As expected, a system born from wars, exploitation, and looting, in times of coronavirus, has once again shown its egotistic essence. Instead of resorting to solidarity between nations to fight the pandemic, it has not only resumed the ancient practice of piracy, this time, not for gold, silver or spices, but of medical supplies, on top of that, as in the case of the United States, it has politicized its culpability by withdrawing the $ 500 million fund to the World Health Organization (WHO).

There are also many who wonder what is going to happen next when the pandemic is over. Just in the United States alone, two weeks of COVID-19 have left 17 million unemployed. According to IMF forecasts, the world economy will fall into a recession like never before. The U.S. bank Goldman Sachs warned on Tuesday that it expects that in the United States the economic crisis derived from the COVID-19 pandemic will be up to four times worse than that of 2008 and asserted that the unemployment figures could be similar to those suffered by the country during World War II, therefore it’s not hard to foresee that, after the virus, the hunger pandemic will spread.

According to the slogan of the Internet campaign: "Capitalism is the virus, Corona is the symptom", many are rallying behind the idea that the time has come to change a way of life that prioritizes saving banks and does not hesitate to sacrifice, "democratically", thousands of lives to keep the economic well-being of its plutocrats.