Pandemics are not just natural or biological phenomena. The different historical modalities of capitalism - mercantile, industrial, financial - and its consequent forms of colonial domination, have implied particular forms of organization of nature, which are correlative to increasingly aggressive modalities of appropriation of natural resources and the force of work. The capitalist practices of extraction, circulation, consumption and disposal of natural goods and merchandise also imply important modifications of the microbial ecosystems. Microorganisms are displaced from their ecological niches, pushed to produce new jumps between species and favored in their circulation between different populations. In this way, under certain material conditions and social inequality, these microbes give rise to emerging diseases, and these to new pandemics.

Frank Molano returns to the history of the capitalist world ecology the great pandemics of the black plague, smallpox, malaria, cholera, the "Spanish flu", AIDS and covid-19. In this journey, his intention is clear: to offer keys to understand that we cannot face the pain and death caused by these diseases without an analysis of the social conditions that promote them, both now and in the last five centuries of dominance. capitalist.