Capitalismo de risco. Landnahme, crise bifurcada, pandemia: chance para uma revolução sustentável?

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic is a medical catastrophe, which links itself to an economic and ecological pincer crisis. This constellation constrains the rich societies of the global North, but also the large developing countries, to a great transformation, that is, to a sustainable revolution. This is the main argument of this contribution: Covid-19, the increasing inequality and large scaled ecological dangers are understood as repulsions of a chain of Landnahmen, which undermine the pré conditions of global linkage. Landnahme is a concept that demonstrates the expansion of capitalist societies. Capitalism must expand in order to reproduce itself. The incorporation of a non capitalistic other consistently causes crises of social reproduction. Without the financial crash of 2007-09, the political interregnum of the post crisis years and the tendency towards bonapartist democracies the present Corona crisis cannot be understood. Spontaneously, neither the Corona pandemic nor inequality nor the environmental destruction conducts to a “Build Back Better”. The national State of emergency is at this position. Instead hard struggles for distribution and the erosion of solidarity additionally jeopardizes the transition to sustainability. If the overdue sustainable revolution remains blocked, capitalism itself becomes an incalculable risk. The contribution pleads for a public sociology of sustainability, which orients itself on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and creates a framework which enables to challenge the pressure for growth, the constrain towards market expansion and expansive accumulation of property.