Work isn’t working anymore. COVID‑19 has thrown off the machinery of twenty-first-century capitalism, and as it stalls and sputters, turning over on its side, the gears and wheels lie open and exposed. This virus has revealed just how far economic theory has diverged from the actual process of earning a living. The unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression, while the stock market has rallied well past pre-pandemic levels. The fortunes of America’s very richest have risen $406 billion (U.S.) since the outbreak, and as they spend their money on spaceship photo ops, the spectre of hunger stalks the ground they are so desperate to leave behind: 26 million American adults went without meals or relied on charity for groceries last fall, and at least 4.5 million Canadians have experienced food insecurity over the past year. COVID is a disease of the working poor. The failures of the political response, both nationally and internationally, have been...
Stephen Marche is an essayist and a novelist. He wrote The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future and On Writing and Failure, among other books.
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