Pandemic: eco-communitarian vibes

Ares ecomunitaristas

Abstract

This text contextualizes the pandemic phenomenon in light of the critical reception of Ecommunitarianism – an ethical theory formulated by Sirio Lopez Velasco, a Uruguayan thinker based in Brazil. This theoretical perspective revisits and advances – both with and beyond Marx – the diagnosis of the crisis of capital and the possibility of envisioning a post-capitalist horizon as a utopia. To this end, it seeks to reframe corollary concepts such as democracy by drawing on historically concrete examples – specifically, indigenous peoples who, in the present, offer valuable lessons on principles and values ​​not governed by market logic, i.e., the banking ideology of lucre and exclusion. I argue that, by moving beyond mere critique to offer concrete proposals, the Ecommunitarian approach – through the ethical application of its norms – serves as an indispensable guide for reinterpreting the pandemic. Ultimately, the aim is to restore an alternative way of life – allowing human and non-human life on the planet to breathe again in primordial communion with nature – in the face of the destructive suffocation of which the COVID health crisis is merely another sinister sign of our times.