Socialism for the Rich

A Sunday Afternoon Essay: American Capitalism’s Dynamism is a Myth

Immigrant laborers in Lakewood, NJ, muster for jobs. (Hank Kalet, 2022)

If one wants to understand how American capitalism truly functions, one needs to go back three years to the height of the pandemic.

It seems so distant now, but the failures of our economic system were laid bare at the time — the reliance on low-wage and vulnerable labor, the supply chains that ground to a halt, the failure to have enough personal protective equipment on hand, combined to send unemployment rocketing upward on a par with the rising death toll.

People like Rigoberto Mejia,

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A post shared by Hank Kalet (@kaletwrites)

a truck driver I talked with, spent their adult life working but found themselves on the sidelines during Covid. I interviewed Mejia and others in 2020, and his story is fairly emblematic of the stories at the margins.

The construction company he drove for closed. He lost his job. Got Covid. He was in the United States on “temporary protective status,” a refugee from violence in Honduras.

In some ways, Mejia is an example of the dynamism of the American economy. He arrived in the nineties, paid taxes, worked hard, and bought a house. In other ways, he is an unfortunate reminder of capitalism’s shortcomings, a victim not only of the pandemic but of the shortsightedness of the American healthcare system and its thirst for profits. A victim, as well, of an immigration system that forces many into the underground economy. He qualified for unemployment, but his wife — who is undocumented— didn’t. They earned too much for basic assistance, and we forced to rely on charity.