Taking stock of the crisis of COVID-19
Daniel Feierstein, Douglas Andrew Town · 2022
This chapter raises questions about the ways in which we have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and how these may continue to transform social practices and representations of reality in contemporary societies. The focus here is not only on current disputes over representations but also on the potential impact of such representations on the social fabric and even on our capacity to imagine alternative realities. This chapter argues the need to resort to the Gramscian concept of “correlation of forces” – the gradual accumulation of political opposition to injustice until it takes hold in influential sectors of society such as labor unions and social movements – in order to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic can help confront neoliberalism and consumerism and the political challenges that this implies. The pandemic can be an opportunity for positive changes but it may also aggravate pre-existing trends, depending on which political forces take advantage of it.