The storm of creative destruction. Understanding the "damage-remedy" logic of capitalism in times of pandemics

Abstract

This essay aims at investigating what role capitalism, in its ideal-typical logic, plays in times of pandemic crisis. The research hypothesis consists in abandoning a one-sided idea of capital-ism, which is the dominant one in the neoliberal version, to recover, instead, that of "creative destruction", as the most constitutive logic of the phenomenon from its origins and also the most promising for scientifically explaining the relationship between capitalism and pandem-ics. Attempts will be made to demonstrate the scientific inconsistency of a reading that rigidly and dogmatically sets antithetical interpretations of capitalism against each other, and to con-struct, instead, one that combines the possibility of divergences. Finally, the question will arise as to what implications can be drawn from this incidence of the logic of creative destruction in capitalism and whether this is such as to impose deterministic results, as well as supposedly at the level of common sense or generalization, or whether there is still room for manoeuvre and guidance by science and politics in particular.