THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM IN THE FACE OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM IN THE FACE OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Summary/Abstract: The coronavirus pandemic throws a bright light on the unfair inequalities that undergird our society. In the United States, the pandemic disproportionately impacts the poor, the elderly, prisoners, native Americans, and black Americans. Workers risk their lives, their own as well as their families, without sick leave or health insurance, for the benefit of the affluent. More than twenty million Americans are now unemployed with no wages or savings to live on. The Navajo Nation has the worst coronavirus cases per capita in the United States. In the State of Georgia, eighty percent of the deaths due to the coronavirus are black Americans, when black Americans constitute less than a third of the State of Georgia’s population. The coronavirus pandemic lays bare the classism and the racism that inhabits and structures the society of the United States, which privileged Americans prefer to deny. Will the pandemic’s light lead to progressive actions on the part of the government that protect and respect the needs and rights of all people? Will the pandemic mean that social, educational, moral, and spiritual responsibilities take precedence vis-á-vis financial responsibilities, barbarically conceived in a capitalist economy (Banerjee and Duflo 2019)? Will the present reality in all its concreteness be persuasive in ways that moral arguments have not been?

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