Opinion: Capitalism Has Failed Americans in This Crisis

My mom is a travel nurse. She is an older woman, and doing her job means traveling and working in close proximity to patients with COVID-19. She lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in a state that (like Texas) has not expanded Medicaid, has insufficient public health infrastructure, and has a threadbare safety net for workers. My brother was let go from his job at a Chevron subsidiary this year due to his health. My sister, a valet at a casino, has been laid off from her job because of the coronavirus. Both live with my mom and depend on her for housing – and she’s been without work for months and is almost out of money. She has to get back to work soon, health risks be damned. However my family fares during this crisis, the material problems we struggle with will be waiting for us after it ends.

We know the recommendations for avoiding the coronavirus: Work from home. Wash your hands. Practice social distancing. But what about grocery store workers, and nurses like my mom? What about tenants of older buildings whose water is frequently shut off, or our homeless neighbors? What about victims of domestic abuse, for whom social distancing means being trapped at home with an abuser? When people without secure housing, health insurance, or stable employment are asked to shoulder even more instability, the weight becomes too much. We start to crack under the pressure, and society cracks with us.

The early narrative around the coronavirus focused on individual failures to practice social distancing and side-stepped the ways our systems have failed us. That our anti-science president was able to downplay the seriousness of a pandemic while our senators dumped stock in apparent violation of insider trading laws is a systemic failure. That our for-profit health care system cannot test for COVID-19 fast enough and leaves families with crippling debt on top of the fear of losing someone is a systemic failure. That those without paid sick days have to go into work even when they have symptoms of a contagious virus is a systemic failure. That our elections compel people to risk their lives to exercise their right to vote, rather than implementing mail-in voting, is a systemic failure.

Capitalism has failed everyone in this crisis, but capitalism was failing most of us long before. In the long run, capitalism will fail us all by continuing to prop up a fundamentally unstable economy and leaving climate change on the back burner until it’s too late.

As a society, we have a choice to make: Accept the precarity of capitalism and return to business as usual after this crisis, or demand a better world. Capitalism will never address the root of these profit-driven problems. The money to be made in human suffering is exactly why reforms that would improve our lives are so difficult to win. I read recently that everyone is a socialist in a crisis, but we have a window to explore what socialism can offer beyond now: a real democracy, a system that works for the vast majority of us, an economy for people and not for profit. If we are serious about the climate crisis, we must be serious about democratizing the grid and getting our energy system out of the hands of the fossil fuel industry. The people running capitalism won’t do this for us. We have to do it ourselves, and it will be a fight.

The COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity to rethink our systems before they collapse. If we take on the struggles of our neighbors as our own, if we refuse to leave each other behind when this particular crisis ends, we just might be able to look back on this moment as a turning point rather than a harbinger.

Either way, it is a reckoning with capitalism. Let's do our thinking now, so low-wage workers stocking grocery shelves can see the light of a society that will fight for them at the end of their tunnels. Let's do our thinking now, before time runs out.

Marina Roberts is a member of Austin Democratic Socialists of America. She is a community organizer working with her neighbors on mutual aid projects and political advocacy around the COVID-19 crisis.

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