Every day I wake up incredulous, asking myself if all this is really happening. The world is upside down. The forms of economic and social organization that have marked the last decades seem to have been canceled in only a few weeks; the dogmas that hegemonized discourse, widely refuted. No one dares to say anymore that salvation lies in the markets. On the contrary: Even the editorial team of the Financial Times calls to strengthen public services, fight inequality with redistribution, collect wealth taxes and introduce a universal basic income.
COVID-19, a tiny zoonotic product of aggressive jungle penetration promoted by industrial agriculture and extractivism, has largely halted neoliberal globalization. Large sectors of the capitalist economy are out of use or unemployed, - hotels, airplanes, cinemas and casinos, automobile production. The extreme fragility of sophisticated global production chains, which optimized costs by sacrificing labor and nature rights, lies open.
The Ecuadorian economy, an economy based on the export of large quantities of raw materials, the so-called extractivism, went into free fall: Oil prices went even negative; the floricultural, banana, and cocoa export sectors find no demand in international markets, tens of thousands of workers have been dismissed in a question of weeks. In COVID-19 times, even the historical relationship of plunder between the peripheries and the centers of the capitalist world-system seems to be suspended.
