The coronavirus pandemic is rapidly threatening to escalate into a global crisis of epochal proportions. As the virulent disease holds the world in its grip, the disastrous handling of the outbreak in the United States and Europe also highlights a number of structural weaknesses in the political-economic configurations of the Western world. This is demonstrating in the most unambiguous terms just how ill-equipped market-oriented capitalist societies are to deal with an emergency of this scope and intensity.

There are at least three interrelated aspects to the current crisis, all of which expose fundamental flaws at the heart of the established order. The first and most important of these is, of course, the medical dimension: a public health emergency that takes the form of a relentless exponential increase in the number of detected cases, in the number of hospitalized patients, and in the number of fatalities. In the United States and many European countries, a repeat of the Italian scenario is now imminent, as the sudden influx of critically ill intensive-care patients threatens to overwhelm structurally underfunded or outright unaffordable public health care systems.

In the short term, the immediate priority of governments should therefore be to stave off the coming humanitarian catastrophe and save as many lives as possible. Yet it has rapidly become clear that bringing this raging pandemic under control will require much more than government officials “nudging” citizens toward behavioral changes. This strategy, which effectively seeks to privatize the costs of the crisis by placing the full burden of adjustment on individuals, is the ultimate market-conforming approach. As the dithering of several Western governments over the past weeks has amply demonstrated, a public campaign for handwashing, elbow-sneezing, and voluntary social distancing simply will not be enough to stem the rising rate of infections.