COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

Uroš V. Šuvaković

Abstract

The paper points to social effects produced by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are of such importance that they have largely changed the people’s life on the planet, leading to the deepening social stratification, substantially affecting geopolitical relations in the modern world, and even questioning science as a form of human knowledge of the world and its authority, which could not be imagined ever since the appearance of rationalism.

The starting assumption is that the COVID-19 pandemic is a direct consequence of the hyper-accelerated globalization process, which actually enabled it to cause huge social changes in the whole world in a short period. Global capitalism, based on neoliberalism (globalism) as its ideological foundation, is an ideal environment not only for the expansion of the pandemic caused by the newly discovered SARS-CoV2 virus, but also for causing a whole series of social consequences. However, all these consequences and the great number of occurring changes has not (yet) caused any change in the system. Global capitalism continues to fulfil its basic function: increasing the profit of the richest. People are still less important than making increasing profits, whereas it is evident that certain sectors of economy have enormously increased their profits, while others have reduced it. We do not believe that every time capitalism should be given a new name or an adjective denoting a new “distinction”. Capitalism is undergoing its global stage and it is of technological nature how its system goals are achieved. All those are moments in the development of the capitalist system, while pandemics also characterized earlier stages of capitalism (and other socio-economic formations), but they did not spread at this speed.

All this requires significant engagement of social sciences in the research of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly from the sociological aspect, and therefore the establishment of a new sociological discipline – COVID-19 sociology.

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