Maybe the moment has come to take a step back from our exclusive focus on the pandemic, to allow ourselves to consider what coronavirus and its devastating effects reveal about us as a society.

The first thing that strikes the eye is that, contrary to the cheap motto ‘we’re all in the same boat’, class divisions have exploded. At the very bottom of our hierarchy, there are those – refugees, people caught in war zones – whose life is so destitute that, for them, the pandemic is not the main problem. While these folk are still mostly ignored by our media, we’re bombarded by sentimental celebrations of nurses on the frontline of our struggle against the virus. But nurses are just the most visible part of a whole class of ‘care-takers’ that is exploited – albeit not in the way the old working class portrayed in Marxist imagery was exploited. Instead, as David Harvey puts it, they form a “new working class”.

Read the full piece here.