Covid-19 was born in the financial centres of London, Amsterdam, New York and Hong Kong.
Finance capital’s insatiable drive for infinite accumulation is also driving the ecological degradations that are causing the pandemics: the interminable expansion of fossil fuel production; the continuous expropriation of subsistence farmers in the global South and their displacement by corporate agribusiness and factory farming; the persistent deforestation and commodification of nature.
It is the fatal combination of all of these that is exposing us, repeatedly and at a terrifying rate, to so many dangerous new pathogens. Covid-19 isn’t the first pandemic this century, and it certainly won’t be the last.