Leanings

Not long after North America closed up shop, The New Republic published a piece, “Against Productivity in a Pandemic,” by its staff writer Nick Martin. More than ever, he argued, we should resist the endless demands of business as usual. “The obscenity of pretending that work and ‘the self ’ are the only things that ­matter — or even exist — becomes harder to ignore.” Of course, life today is anything but business as usual. Since Martin’s piece appeared in mid-March, millions and millions of people have lost their jobs, which painfully underscores the paradox of tying human survival to productivity. You can’t survive without work, but at the moment there’s less and less of it to go around. And if you can get some right now, it just might, quite literally, kill you.

Around the world, we are reckoning with our complicated relationship to our labour, as the crisis forces us to confront tough questions on terms that are not entirely our own. The circumstances may...