Is Barbarism with a Human Face Our Fate?

The article focuses on the impact of coronavirus pandemic on social changes and daily lives causing lockdowns and mentions regression threat to open barbarism. Topics discussed include collapse of health care and violence with public disorders, threat of president Donald Trump to invoke Defense Production Act and ramping up production of emergency medical supplies.

The Appointment in Samarra: A New Use for Some Old Jokes.

The coronavirus epidemic is not just a biological phenomenon which affects humans: it is also a moment of a profound global and ecological crisis that includes many human and nonhuman actors. To confront the crisis, a radical philosophical change is needed, which penetrates to natural, economic, and cultural processes. The amassing of dictatorial powers of state apparatuses evoked by the pandemic highlights their basic impotence and the fact that the system as we know it cannot continue in its existing liberal-permissive form. While the final outcome is uncertain what is most probable is that a new barbarian capitalism will prevail: many old and weak will be sacrificed and let to die, workers will have to accept much lower standards of living, digital control of our lives will remain a permanent feature, and class distinctions will become much more than now a matter of life and death.