I was left with the advice of a Basque official: in case of infection with the virus, please let him stay sick in his room and, if possible, in the room with his own bathroom. The home settings of the most comfortable and superior layers of the middle class are not bad. What would the Nicaraguan waitress who looks after her elders and shares a room with three other women?

Without school, on the other hand, Basque families are not equal in technological equipment and cultural support for the home. It has to be seriously analyzed, because online education goes on for a long time and it can increase educational inequalities among children who were already large. It is an old issue in the sociology of education: by blurring school and its equivalent effect, the child will be more visibly modeled with the educational, cultural and economic capital of the family, increasing the impact of handicaps and inequalities of origin. In addition, children easily suck the anguish and fear of the family, and it is evident that these feelings accumulate in the face of what comes in precarious bodies and families.

In other words, the virus is class based, such as gender (and the nation, Spain more centralized). Tragedies are never built in an abstract and symmetrical way in the social space, misfortune never triggers the same consequences on the ground floor and in the attic of society.

But we've also discovered new lessons. Governments can, if they wish, encourage strong public intervention by socialising the resources that are in private hands. They have also been prepared to nationalise strategic companies. Well, we've learned that the will was the key, and who says we can't go any further, putting finances, food, the pharmaceutical industry or energy for the benefit of the social majority. The postliberal sense, and perhaps the anti-capitalist sense, has gained momentum: there is no natural law to enclose these spaces in the neoliberal logic of private benefit. Even more so in the state of emergency, but not just in the state of emergency. However, Naomi Klein showed us that shock situations can be used to rule out challenging temptations and strengthen the elite project (post-liberal gymnastics also at the beginning of the 2008 crisis).

The coronavirus clarifies the other big problem: you can stop injecting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but you have to reduce production and transport. Today's ecology and economy are incomplete.

But I am convinced that there is another lesson in the lessons. It will be clarified which animal is behind the coronavirus, if any, by the destruction of ecological habitats by the human being, or what specific aspect of its development is the last cause. But, in the meantime, I'm convinced that this experience that we're experiencing can be taken as a sample, to prove in flesh and bone what collapse, deglobalization or disordered contraction, fear in the streets and the army is. What is more, assuming that the economic and financial world that was about to explode by the virus is going to burst, and that the effects of deglobalisation and contraction are going to take root.

In 1940, Walter Benjamin prophetically advanced, from Marxism, that perhaps the revolution was not to climb the train of progress, development and modernization, as Marx had suggested, but to pull the emergency brake of that train. The machine operator is an automattic. The train runs, cannot stop or change direction. Absorbed by speed, it has no other destination than to leave the rails. It seems that it's being the coronavirus, not the anti-productivist Marxism, the hand brake of capitalism. Therefore, the contraction is not voluntary, it is not planned, it is not a reasonable self-limitation. It has not been organised fairly, so it has not given the citizens the least security.

The situation is truly complicated: the stagnation of capitalism will disperse suffering in tons, but its healthy activity, guided by the logic of constant exponential growth, unites us to an ecocist and suicidal path that generates even more suffering. In an economic territory burned after the virus, the recovery of the system cannot be an option. The emancipating project requires the contraction of human systems, but orderly (guaranteeing the material growth of various human groups, economic sectors and countries). Democratic and peaceful contraction for human systems to fit into a limited biosphere. And that these systems are articulated around justice in all its meanings: social justice, gender justice, international justice, with the unborn and other living beings.

At the moment, ecosocialism is not, but we have a detonating pathogen of the system, with the capacity to provoke a huge economic and social disaster, and with dark consequences from the point of view of class, gender and nation. It is understandable that Ada Colau’s claim, the pain of the hardest hit to stimulate growth and soften its friction by demanding public intervention. But it's disappointing to see that on the left there's that (auto)destructive script left. The dry script, as well as destructive, will become a permanent and deeper contraction, inevitably, with energy growth and material scarcity. We will be in a permanent emergency situation, will we use this small chapter of collapse as a warning?

This historical era has long been calling for a new cognitive framework: the normality of growth is over, and it is about whether the new normality will bring an emancipating alternative or even more savage capitalism. The challenge is to turn the intuition of the great Benjamin into a binding imaginary for this century, a successful strategy and a feasible program. Let's be the containment for strategic reflection. In addition to stopping, to start the change of direction.