The COVID-19 pandemic is a profound public health crisis, but this crisis is also forcing us to confront the brutal dilemmas posed by the logic of our economic system. The nationwide lockdown has disrupted the normal capitalist mechanisms. In doing so, it has ripped the cover from the impersonal networks of the markets to reveal our fundamental dependence on the labor and services of other people for the provision of our needs.

It has also shown, with devastating clarity, how tenuous our access is to even the most basic goods and services when such access relies upon employment that is itself dependent on the vicissitudes of the markets. As businesses have come to a standstill, those whose lives and livelihoods depend on the cranking out of jobs by capital’s economic engines are being cut loose. Worse still, the imperative of holding onto one’s livelihood, for countless working people, means putting your life on the line.

Even at the best of times, the scope and scale of coordination and mobilization needed to face the challenge of the pandemic and its economic fallout would be beyond the capacities of the capitalist market machine. But in the United States, that machine has been creaking and stalling. For decades, political and economic elites have been chipping away at the social safety nets that might provide some anchor for those left adrift in this crisis. The pathogen has invaded a system in the grip of a chronic pathology.