The last time a pandemic began, the political actors who proclaim themselves to be the best leaders of the socialist cause sided with the monopolists against the workers. They pretended that the pandemic response by the American empire’s capitalist state, and the pandemic response by socialist China, were equally deserving of support. Which could have no effect other than to aid our class enemies.
They endorsed the coercive vaccination policies, even though China didn’t even have an equivalent of the USA’s mandates. And they acted like the lockdowns weren’t a cover for an unprecedented power grab by monopoly capital. However much the liberalism-compatible socialists affirmed that these measures were essentially justified, the truth is that the lockdowns were a way for the country’s officials to make it look like they were doing something after they’d already failed to prevent a massive outbreak. This made them assist in a psyop that was designed to distract from a bailout of the biggest banks and corporations, a takeover by big tech, and a forcible distribution of big pharma’s latest experimental medicine.
The next time our ruling elites carry out an assault upon the working class under the guise of public health, we can expect these “left” actors to take the same complicit stance that they took four years ago. And given the developments within liberal technocracy that we’ve seen lately, we can anticipate this coming attack to be vastly more damaging than the last one. Our class enemies have been able to both use Covid-19 as an opportunity to experiment on such a project, and put the workers in an even more economically and psychologically vulnerable place than they were prior to Covid. The established elements of the left aren’t going to take the right side in this more intense next phase of the class war, so principled socialists must get ready to help combat these designs of the elites.
The way we can start to do this is by seizing control of the discourse away from the narrative managers who are promoting the next bio-assault’s early psyops. This is something that much of the masses are already doing on their own. In response to the BBC’s uncritical reporting on the “Disease X” warning put out by the World Economic Forum, the vast majority of BBC YouTube commenters can be seen pointing out the narrative’s absurdity. They make it clear that we can’t be expected to passively accept this story that our most powerful institutions are telling us, especially when it’s so purposefully vague. How can we feel assured by the news that big capital’s academic centers are researching a cure for a new super-flu if this virus doesn’t even exist, and we just saw the health authorities lie to us numerous times? Our natural and correct impulse is to be skeptical.
In their efforts to counteract this skepticism, the narrative managers aren’t making any arguments that truly disprove what we’re concerned about. The Associated Press fact-checkers assure us that “Disease X” is totally hypothetical, a point which doesn’t refute the essence of what we’re saying. The WEF doesn’t need to be cooking up a virus in a lab for us to have good reason to believe the elites are planning new bio-attacks on us, because there are many different kinds of bio-related means for waging warfare. There’s unsafe vaccinations, something that Bill Gates has especially been propagating throughout his activities in the formerly colonized world. There’s economic harm created by public health mismanagement, something that the working class was recently subjected to and hasn’t recovered from. There are lockdowns that the government implements when it isn’t willing to provide the people with the necessary assistance, and that therefore have a deadly effect.
Whether the next pandemic will be manmade, or will come from nature (which is an ambiguous distinction in an era when our ecological crisis is creating greater pathogen risks), the way our ruling institutions respond to it will be the same. They’ll exploit the catastrophe by using it as justification for consolidating capitalist power, profiteering with vaccines that they aren’t transparent about, and crushing opposition towards their liberal totalitarianism. We could even view the WEF’s Disease X psyop, and the systemic violence that’s going to follow it, as the biggest maneuvers in the U.S. government’s domestic counterinsurgency.
U.S. hegemony is in terminal decline, and because of this, capitalism’s crisis of overproduction can only grow more severe. Without the ability to compensate for this crisis by exporting more capital into the peripheral countries, the U.S. ruling class needs to intensify its exploitation of the empire’s center. And Disease X could be the main thing it uses to create narrative precedent for the degrowth and repressive measures this entails.
Ten years ago, climate was the main narrative basis for this effort to justify the planned extreme austerity policies. The media was much more focused on the climate back then, and the highest-level elites were using the public’s growing horror to promote depopulation under an environmental cover. Then the narrative managers largely shifted their tactics away from this, at least for the time being. This is not because global warming stopped being a threat, but because the liberal technocrats wanted to start portraying “green” capitalism as having essentially solved the problem. Thereby, the media’s exaggerations of the extent of the problem went down. Which has translated to a new, subtler kind of climate denialism. As Kyle Paoletta of the relatively independent left-wing publication Harper’s concluded last year:
It is, I promise, not quite as bad as you once imagined, but it is worse than you’ve lately been led to believe. The seas will rise, the summers will get hotter. There will be more red-sky days, more storms, more jungles turned into savannas and savannas turned into deserts. Global emissions may peak in a few years, but the subsequent decline will probably be too gradual to limit warming to even 2.5 degrees Celsius—the level that the United Nations projects the world’s net-zero pledges currently put it on track to reach. None of that constitutes an apocalypse, but it does suggest a world destabilized by hundreds of millions of people going hungry and being forced to flee their homes.
Because the elites have no reason to be concerned about all those future victims of environmental violence, at this point they’re much more focused on disease in their degrowth propaganda. Depopulation is what will come from the liberal order’s response to both of these threats.
Few if any lives are going to be saved by the “progress” that liberals have supposedly made for the climate, and the next “solutions” they’ll sell for reducing viral fatalities are going to be as counterproductive as the last ones. Wherever the liberal-aligned socialists recognize these realities about our government’s bio-medical assaults upon the people, it’s not going to mean anything. Because these actors will nevertheless be in support of the bio-tyranny policies themselves. We must build a version of the socialist movement that doesn’t share this pro-ruling class stance on public health. That truly aligns with the People’s Republic of China on this issue, in that it opposes unjust mandates while resisting international monopoly capital.
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