From the Pandemic to Utopia

The Future Begins Now

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032355597
• eBook ISBN: 9781000855739
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The coronavirus pandemic forces us to rethink our contemporaneity. It has brought to the surface dimensions of human fragility that partially contradict the euphoria and human hubris of the fourth industrial revolution (artificial intelligence). It has also aggravated the social inequality and racial discrimination that characterize our societies. The book argues that the virus, rather than an enemy, must be viewed as a pedagogue. It is trying to teach us that the deep causes of the pandemic lie in our dominant mode of production and consumption. The systemic overload of natural resources creates a metabolic rift between society and nature that destabilizes the habitat of wild animals and the vital cycles of natural regeneration whereby pandemics become an increasingly recurrent phenomenon. In trying to take seriously this lesson the book proposes a paradigmatic shift from the current civilizatory model to a new one guided by a more equitable relationship between nature and society and the priority of life, both human and non-human.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE
• The 21st century presents itself
• 1 The pandemic and the contradictions of contemporaneity
• The end of presentism
• All that is solid melts into air
• The scale of the planet viewed by the virus
• Metaphors in progress
• The coronavirus, our contemporary
• 2 Abyssal capitalism: The pandemic as business
• Scene 1. Profiting from the pandemic
• Scene 2. Buccaneer capitalism
• Scene 3. Profiting from the post-pandemic: the legal industry and big business
• Scene 4. The value of life and medical and pharmaceutical research: investments, the cost of tests, vaccines, medicines and Big Pharma
• Conclusion
• 3 The open veins of inequality and discrimination
• Introduction
• Economic abyssal lines
• Racist-colonialist abyssal lines
• Sexist abyssal lines
• Religious abyssal lines
• Ableist abyssal lines
• Gray or intermediate exclusion areas
• The degree zero of human tragedy
• 4 Community resistance and self-organization
• Community resistance
• Rural and urban popular organizations in Latin America faced with abandonment by the state
• The indigenous peoples of Latin America
• Best practices of sub-national or autonomous political-administrative units
• Conclusion
• PART TWO
• The future starts now
• 5 Three scenarios: Between hell redux and kairós
• First scenario: everything as before and worse. Abyssal capitalism and the securitarian state of exception
• Second scenario: capitalist skin, socialist mask: the new neo-Keynesianism
• Third scenario: barbarism or civilization – alternatives to capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy
• 6 Towards an insurgent, intercultural and cosmopolitan declaration of human rights and duties
• Introduction
• Rights and duties to be shared in a conversation for humankind: a legal real utopia
• Conclusion
• 7 The paradigmatic transition: A world to accommodate many worlds
• The principles of transition
• Monocultures
• Ecologies
• Conclusion
• 8 First steps in the paradigmatic transition
• Nature does not belong to us: we belong to nature
• Health is a public good, not a business
• Without losing their respective identities, cities must be ruralized and the country must be urbanized
• Culture and art – understood as ecologies of multiple and intercultural artistic and cultural practices – are an essential component of the paradigmatic transition
• We cannot live without demodiversity any more than we can live without biodiversity
• In a time of intermittent pandemic, international relations must be guided by the principle of overriding public interest in the defense of life
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: What if we failed? To be read in 2050
• References
• Index