In Brazil, President Bolsonaro says that "our system cannot support a financial relief" for working families for much longer. Trump's response has also outlined the economic impact of the pandemic, leaving millions of people without a source of income.

Those numbers show how fragile capitalism is. How can a pandemic almost destroy the entire economy? Those who were left behind by capitalism already know the answer for years: .

The problem already existed before

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Capitalism's issues were obvious even before COVID-19. We just didn't pay attention because those problems didn't affect our little bubble. While we eat, drink, and buy expensive stuff, most people struggle to earn a living wage. While

we waste 1.3 billion tonnes of food

every year, other

815 million people don't have anything to eat

. So, how can we say capitalism was working before? When I have a fancy job earning 10 or 20 times more than most people, doesn't that mean I'm also part of the problem?

We need a more resilient system having a social safety net capable of surviving severe conditions. I'm not talking about communism. Just as capitalism, communism is also beautiful on paper, but it still doesn't work in reality. We need to get the best ideas from socialism, communism, capitalism, and neoliberalism to create what Paul Mason calls "Post-Capitalism." Or how I like to call it: an Autonomous Economy - a hybrid between Mason's ideas and Jacque Fresco's Resource-Based Economy.

Autonomous Economy

An Autonomous Economy is a transition to a system similar to the one imagined by Fresco: when we have socially responsible capitalism seeking the automation of our commodity chain until it becomes fully autonomous. By doing so, we would give people the freedom to do whatever they want with their time and lives.

Think about this: let's say all the money in the world is gone, what would happen? Well, we'd still have all the resources required to ensure everyone has a good life. What we'd need is a way to distribute those resources better. Automation, through artificial intelligence, is one of the possible paths to accomplish that. In capitalism, however, automation becomes a problem because it causes mass unemployment.

But we shouldn't have to fight against it. Automation increases our system's efficiency, freeing us from inhumane jobs that should be done by machines. We need to create a robust social safety net capable of supporting the transition to that system, allowing everyone to have all resources necessary to have a good life. A universal basic income (UBI) is one of the possible solutions. It would let everyone have a basic income for housing, food, healthcare, education, and leisure.

COVID-19 would be a much softer crisis if we already had such a system in place. We wouldn't need to risk leaving our houses for working or shopping. We would all have a guaranteed basic income. We could order our groceries online, and an automated system would handle everything: selecting and delivering your order without a single human being involved in the process. The same would happen for the grocery store: an automated network would provide all products necessary for the store. Both production and distribution would be done without humans.

Productivity would increase so much that we could reach the "zero marginal cost" mentioned by Jeremy Rifkin. Those optimizations in the commodity chain would ensure the whole population would have access to the resources they need. Eventually, money would become obsolete, and we'd get pretty close to the Resource-Based Economy envisioned by Jacque Fresco.

But while we keep having binary discussions (left vs. right), we won't attack the root of the problem. If you're sick and the treatment isn't working, your doctor will change the medication. The same is happening with our economic system: we need to think about an alternative treatment because the current one isn't working. That's a joint effort. Thinking the world is an eternal fight between communism and capitalism won't fix the issue. That fight should have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. We need new solutions now.