This issue of
Monthly Review includes three articles addressing questions of epidemiology and health: John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease”; Vicente Navarro, “What Is Happening in the United States?”; and Jennifer Dohrn and Eleanor Stein, “Epidemic Response: The Legacy of Colonialism.” Taken together, they cover a wide range of issues: economic, ecological, epidemiological, and political. But for each of them, the current COVID-19 crisis necessarily looms in the background.
Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis is simply an external, “black swan” event: something that has entered from outside the system, constituting a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under co
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at
Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.
The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financializatio