The Working Dead: Capitalism, Mortality, and Their Discontents (panel)
The COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate infection and fatality rates among the working class, coupled with the increasing peril from climate catastrophe, has foregrounded the existential precarity of those on the unfortunate side of the wage relation and empire. This panel considers, however, that in the absence of full human flourishing—in Marx’s word, Gattungswesen—the proletariat is, in a sense, already dead prior to the expiration of their physical bodies.