Sidelines is a column by CGTN's Social Media Desk

Of all the memes featuring Bernie Sanders and his mittens, my favorite is him "sunbathing" in "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte."

The Vermont senator's aloofness captured on camera from Joe Biden's inauguration day fits neatly with the poker faces in Georges Seurat's classic post-impressionist painting. The idea of relaxing somewhere warmer might just as well have crossed the left-leaning political veteran's mind as something better to do than witnessing in freezing cold his progressive agenda being eclipsed by the glory of Biden's victory.

For the most devoted Sanders supporters, there is probably more that Sanders has in common with the French impressionists than with President Biden in terms of challenging the norm. The French painters who dared to defy the Acadamie des Beaux-Arts in the 19th century can see both beauty and struggle in ordinary bourgeois life on which the "fine art" defending snobs barely laid eyes. Widening social inequality serves the backdrop against which impressionism debuted and was later interpreted – also the iceberg Sanders believes could sink the Titanic.

Fair or not this argument may be to President Biden, wealth inequality that tore the Belle Epoque French society apart and preys on Sanders's mind today is a recurring issue of the industrial economy. Its significance moves capriciously up and down mankind's randomly shifting agenda. Yet whenever the issue is rushed to the fore, the big picture, unlike the impressionist painting's intermingling soft colors, is rupturing.

The rampant coronavirus pandemic is the latest force that causes the economic epidemic to spread again. Inequality, particularly income disparity, has shot up to the point of French President Emmanuel Macron declaiming that capitalism "can no longer work" if the world remains idle to the issue.

How serious has the problem become this time? Income is one of the major factors that affect wealth distribution. There won't be much left for people who have lost their employments to the pandemic. Data from the International Labor Organization (ILO) paints a particularly dim picture on that score: the working-hour losses – a measurement of unemployment – were roughly four times greater in 2020 than 2009, the year of global financial meltdown.

Around 114 million jobs were wiped out in 2020 relative to 2019, according to an ILO report published on January 21. The global labor income (deducting government financial aides) in 2020, the report continues, "is estimated to have declined by 8.3 percent, which amounts to $3.7 trillion, or 4.4 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP)."

In the meantime, even the carnage of a killing virus and the subsequent real economy recession couldn't stop capital from rallying in the global stock markets in 2020. The S&P 500-stock index, for example, left the year up more than 16 percent.

Causing job loss and the ensuing income shrink, the pandemic is taking lives indirectly, too. The hazards on people's health condition and their children's education are likely to be irrevocable. Worse, jobs susceptible to automation or on temporary bases have gone first and fast during the pandemic, deteriorating their holders' already shaky financial status.

The wealth gap might be less of an issue if the productivity growth is conduit to overall income rise. But the situation is far from that. A direct result of the widening disparity is the increasing confrontation between different social groups. The rise of populism is the most visible syndrome, probably manifesting in its extreme form in Donald Trump's politics. People's demand for changes to a system that benefits a few far more than the majority is legitimate. But legitimacy doesn't always guarantee a right path. Violence in the name of social and economic justice wasn't a rarity in 2020. On the other end, flying in the face of mounting anger, some leaders have found their hands are tied to push for reform.

If Macron and Sanders are spot on with their judgments on the system being plagued by inequality, tinkering it is not enough. But before the world can be ready for radical experiments, such as global progressive tax on wealth (radical depending on your belief in taxation's efficiency in redistributing wealth) or sparing more resources for unemployment caused by automation, a fairer distribution of COVID-19 vaccines across the world should be the priority in neutralizing the immediate disadvantaging effect of the pandemic, so as to give people their livings back.

Would Macron's choice of the word "capitalism" set off the powder keg for an ideological war? For two reasons let's hope it will not. First, the pandemic knows no boundary. Neither does it ideology. The Cold War, during which the global inequality was scaling up after the two world wars had dramatically leveled the playground, is a cautionary tale on what may follow the loss of mutual trust. Secondly, globalization has positioned every state on earth in a community of a shared future. The collapse of one part of it could send a shock wave that no individual state can resist alone, as evidenced by the 2009 financial crisis.

To right a dysfunctional system in the long run, how to appreciate the impressionist artworks may offer a lesson. At the advent of the genre, its critics were so obsessed with the ambiguous details stroked down the canvas that they failed to grasp the effect these details created as a whole. All they needed to do was take a step back and look at the whole picture.