The COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Lens of Radical Political Economy

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has been ravaging the world since early 2020, has alreadyinfected over 700 million people and caused more than 7 million deaths. The pandemic and itsvast impact are not merely natural occurrences. Instead, they are part of a series of events rootedin the unbridled expansion of production. The COVID-19 pandemic merely illustrates and high-lights the enormous flaws and inconsistencies generated by the global capitalist system—issuesthat this special issue of RRPE seeks to explore in depth, as we outline below.First, the COVID-19 crisis starkly reveals the impact of capitalist production on natural eco-systems, wildlife exploitation and biodiversity degradation, global climate change, and the waythe productive frontier extends over nature. These are symptoms of a predatory model that jeop-ardizes the environment and even our existence.Second, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the extent of global interconnectedness, highlight-ing how deeply intertwined our challenges have become. The rapid spread of the virus across theglobe in record time made the vast differences and inequalities between Global North and Southcountries abundantly clear, particularly in terms of their economic, technological, and productivecapacities to respond to emergencies of this magnitude, and to develop life-saving vaccines.These inequalities reflect a hierarchical order that is the result of global capitalist production thatgenerates rich and poor countries as two sides of the same coin.Third, the pandemic was a process that showed highly unequal impacts across differentclasses. On the one hand, millions of people in every country in the world have lost their jobs,which led to a substantial increase in poverty, especially in Global South countries where statesare less capable of providing social protection. At the same time, the wealth of the richest peopleon earth grew exponentially since the start of the pandemic, which generated extraordinary eco-nomic returns and consolidated the concentration and centralization of capital.