from: https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2021/02/19/cui-bono-the-covid-19-conspiracy/
‘For whether or not the age of revolutions is over, the age of state-formation has only just begun.’
— T. J. Clark, Farwell to an Idea, 1999
Table of Contents
- What We Know
- The Conspiracy Paradox
- The Power of Nightmares
- Capitalising on the Crisis
- Disruption and Redeployment
- The Emerging Ideology
- Biosecurity as Cultic Practice
- The Authoritarian State
- Brave New World
- The Time Given to Us
Hegel remarks somewhere
that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the fall of night.
By this he meant that history is always written in retrospect about an
already realised world. In 1940, no-one could know what every
school-child knew in 1945: who won the Second World War. In five years’
time, perhaps, everyone will know the outcome of the current revolution
in Western capitalism. But by then it will be too late. The owl of
Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, will be on the wing, and we will be left
in the darkness. But if we are to keep the light of knowledge burning
in her lamp, we can at least try to awaken from the sleep of reason into
which we have fallen, and try to anticipate what monsters will emerge
from the dark.
1. What We Know
We are approaching the first anniversary of the coronavirus crisis in
the UK, and more and more people — on the Twitter account of the
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the Facebook pages set
up to share censored interviews with scientists, in the online
platforms not yet shut down for discussing the evidence against
lockdown, in the illegal meetings of friends in the homes of the people
that host them, in the thousands of discussions and exchanges that
happen at every act of resistance, every demonstration, every march —
know that this crisis has been manufactured. But what else do we know?
- We know now that Government strategies
for responding to a viral epidemic that had been in place for years
were abandoned in favour of the historically unprecedented policy of
national lockdown.
- We know that Government contracts for the campaign of propaganda worth £119 million were signed with PR firms 3 weeks before the first lockdown.
- We know that, in April 2020, the Cabinet Office approved over £216 million for advertising on what it called the ‘COVID-19 Campaign 20/21’.
- We know that the criteria for attributing deaths to COVID-19 were changed back in March to exaggerate the official number of fatalities.
- We know that 95 per cent of the deaths attributed to the disease are of people with pre-existing health conditions like cancer, dementia, heart disease or diabetes.
- We know that 84 per cent are over 70 years of age, and that the average age of those whose deaths are attributed to COVID-19 is the average age of death in the UK.
- We know that, a year into this so-called ‘pandemic’, just over 600 patients under the age of 60 without a pre-existing health condition have had their deaths in English hospitals attributed to COVID-19.
- We know that, in April last year, the World Health Organisation
issued instructions to medical practitioners that, if COVID-19 is
merely the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or ‘assumed’ cause of death, it
must always be recorded as the ‘underlying cause’ on death certificates,
whether this is ‘considered medically correct or not.’
- We know that the WHO’s recommendations on the use of face masks by the public changed in June following political lobbying
by the governments of, among other countries, the UK, and that even
then it was primarily to encourage compliance with other restrictions on
our rights and freedoms.
- We know that the first and only randomised control trial of the
effectiveness of face masks in stopping coronavirus transmission, which
was rejected by several leading medical journals, when finally published
reported that the benefits were ‘not statistically significant’.
- We know that, for a long time, the UK Government deliberately exaggerated
the number of so-called ‘COVID-19 deaths’ by including anyone who has
tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, no matter how long afterwards they died
and of what illness.
- We know that, even now, anyone who tests positive within 28 days of their death is still recorded as a ‘COVID death’.
- We know that, since August 2020, anyone who tests positive within 60 days of their death is also recorded as a ‘COVID death’.
- We know that, according to the WHO, 30 per cent of infections,
even in high GDP countries like the UK, are contracted in intensive
care units, meaning anyone dying in a UK hospital has an equivalent
chance of being designated a ‘COVID death’.
- We know that, even with the withdrawal of medical care for nearly 68 million people for the best part of a year, the age-adjusted mortality rate in 2020 was the highest in only 12 years, and that the population fatality rate from the coronavirus ‘epidemic’ is equivalent to a bad season of influenza.
- We know that, as even these inaccurately identified deaths have
fallen, the Government has turned to the promotion of RT-PCR tests for
the virus that, according to its own advisors at SAGE, have a false-positive rate higher than the percentage of the UK population testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 with these tests.
- We know that between 20 and 80 per cent of infections with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic, and therefore calling them ‘cases’ is medically inaccurate.
- We know from a study of nearly 10 million residents in Wuhan, the epicentre of the infection in China, that asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is statistically non-existent.
- We have known for the past 55 years that at least four coronaviruses circulate freely in UK on a seasonal basis, providing prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in around 30 per cent of the population before it reached these shores.
- We know that any RT-PCR test reliant on encoding the spike protein unique to coronaviruses can incorrectly detect as SARS-CoV-2
anyone having a common cold from other coronaviruses at the time of
sampling or carrying traces of dead and therefore non-infectious virus.
- We know that, despite this, the governments of England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland are using these meaningless statistics to
impose tiered lockdowns across the UK, in further violation of our human rights and civil liberties.
- We know that this is being done under legislation that only authorises such actions when justified by medical evidence that has not been produced for Parliament but merely alluded to in press conferences.
- We know that the predictions of escalating infections and increased numbers of deaths by senior medical figures employed by the Government have been shown time and again to be wildly inaccurate fabrications based on predictive models challenged by the most eminent scientists around the world.
- We know that, as of publication, 351 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments
have been made into law without a draft being presented to Parliament
in advance for debate, without medical or other proof being provided of
their justification or proportionality, and without an assessment being
made of their impact, and that every one of these pieces of legislation
requiring it has been rubber stamped in retrospect by virtual sittings
of that Parliament.
- We know that £22 billion of public monies
has been awarded in coronavirus-justified contracts without prior
competitive tender to privately-owned companies with financial links to
members of Parliament, the Government and their business colleagues.
- We know that more and more of the functions of the state are being outsourced to private companies unaccountable to the public that provides the money with which they are paid.
- We know that the coronavirus-justified restrictions imposed on the UK population since March 2020 have cost the country £280 billion, the equivalent of £4,112 for every man, woman and child in the UK.
- We know that, in contrast, the wealth of the world’s 2,200-plus billionaires increased by 20 per cent and US$1.9 trillion in 2020, more than in any previous year in history.
- We know that, by the end of 2020, the number of people in low to middle-income countries facing acute food insecurity will double to 265 million as a result of coronavirus-justified restrictions.
- We know that, under the cloak of this crisis, the Government and its
financial partners have massively expanded the surveillance, monitoring
and control of UK citizens through regulations, programmes and
technologies that are implementing the UK biosecurity state.
- We know that, at the peak of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in April, more than 40 per cent of acute care beds in NHS hospitals were unoccupied.
- We know there is strong evidence that, at a conservative estimate, at least half the 80,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020 were caused by lockdown restrictions
that denied UK citizens emergency, elective, social and community care
in order to free up hospital beds for an epidemic that was never in
danger of arriving.
- We know that the renewal of lockdown over the winter of 2020-2021 is killing thousands more.
- We know that this lockdown was decided back in July,
before the manufactured rise in so-called ‘cases’ consequent upon a
huge rise in RT-PCR tests producing an even greater rise in false
positives.
- We know that over the next five years,
hundreds of thousands more people in the UK will fall into poverty,
unemployment, bankruptcy and despair that will shorten their lives by
many tens of thousands of years because of restrictions justified by
these manufactured figures.
- We know that, although the GDP of the UK is rising slowly back to
pre-crisis levels, the restrictions that continue to be imposed on the
population are redistributing wealth from the public purse into the pockets of the rich and the powerful on a scale never before seen even in the UK.
- We know that the mental health of millions of UK citizens is being
deliberately and systematically attacked through Government-funded campaigns of terrorism, fearmongering and lies designed to reduce the population to compliance, obedience, resignation and despair.
- We know that self-harming and thoughts of suicide, particularly among British children, are increasing.
- We know that the fines for the newly-created crimes of not wearing a mask, meeting friends
or leaving our home without permission have been raised and will
continue to be raised to levels sufficient to financially ruin anyone
who disobeys Government regulations.
- We know that non-compliance with certain coronavirus-justified Regulations can now be punished with up to 10 years in prison.
- We know that the Government has looked at the legal barriers to making vaccination compulsory for a disease with a fatality rate of 0.23 per cent
across the population and 0.05 per cent for those under 70, and has not
ruled out making taking such a vaccine a condition of access to public
life.
- We know that UK police forces are being given more power with reduced accountability to enforce these regulations with increased brutality and greater impunity from prosecution.
- We know that the legal profession, the media, the press, academia,
the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry, the financial and
banking sector, the passenger transport industry, the civil service, the
security services, the armed forces and every other public institution
are collaborating in affecting the revolution of the UK into a biosecurity state.
- We know that this state is being implemented through the private
sector as much as through the public sector, with the information
technology industry, the healthcare industry, the education industry,
the tourism industry, the hospitality industry and the retail industry
all being compelled by coronavirus-justified regulations to enforce compliance with the technologies and programmes of the biosecurity state as a condition of using their services.
- We know that these technologies will not stop there, but under the
guise of monitoring and protecting our biosecurity, not only from
SARS-CoV-2 but from any other virus designated a threat to public health
in the future, are penetrating and influencing every aspect of our
private life, biological existence and social behaviour.
We know all this and more. But the question more and more people are
now asking is: why? Why is this being done, and to what end? Of what
benefit, and to whose benefit, is the impoverishment of the population
of the UK and of most other Western liberal democracies around the
world? Why would the governments of capitalist economies deliberately
set out to bankrupt millions of small businesses and drive tens of
millions of workers into unemployment and destitution? And what, if
anything, can we do to resist it? This article is my attempt to respond
to these questions, although not necessarily by answering them.
2. The Conspiracy Paradox
Cui bono, in Latin, means ‘to whom is it a benefit?’, or
more colloquially ‘who benefits?’ It was a phrase associated with the
Roman consul, Lucius Cassius, known in the Republic as an honest and
wise judge, who when trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime
always asked who stood to gain from it being perpetrated.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a question that is being asked with greater
insistence as the evidence of the crimes committed under the cloak of
the coronavirus crisis mounts up, and the hitherto hegemonic facade of
deception is beginning to crack. But there is still a barrier to the
wall of lies behind it being torn down, and that is the question of who
could possibly benefit from the destruction coronavirus-justified
restrictions are inflicting on the populations on which they are being
imposed by their governments, justified by their media and enforced by
their police and security forces.
On the one hand, the question seems almost childishly naïve, like
asking why the New Labour Government of Tony Blair fabricated the
so-called ‘dodgy’ dossier that justified the UK forming a coalition with
the US to invade Iraq on the threat of ‘weapons of mass destruction’
that never existed. The fifth largest oil reserves in the world is the
short and simple answer. But that answer, which every school child in
the UK today knows, was apparently sufficiently unknown — or
insufficiently believed — by the British public in 2003 to stop the UK
Government and media collaborating to take us into one of the most
disastrous military invasions in recent history. I’ve no doubt that in a
decade the children of Britain will know why they spend their days
masked before an Apple computer, have to update their biometric data
into an Android phone every week, have everything they read censored by
Facebook and everything they write monitored by Twitter, everywhere they
go recorded by Google, and everything they earn and buy overseen and
approved by Amazon; but by then it will be too late. We need to know
now.
And yet, despite the apparent obviousness of the answer, it is not
easy to put into words that everyone can understand and accept. The
reason for this, as I want to show in this article, is because it is the
wrong question. The current framing of this question offers only two
responses, and in doing so has successfully divided the country into two
hugely unequal camps. Either we are, in reality, facing a
civilisation-threatening virus to which our governments are responding
with degrees of incompetence and opportunism but to a genuine and real
threat to public health; or the whole thing has been
manufactured by a conspiracy of powerful individuals and organisations
whose names and initials we are all familiar with by now, and whose
immense wealth and influence enables them to grind the organ to which
our various governments are dancing.
I don’t believe either of these answers to be correct. I have spent
the past year showing why the statistical data, medical reports and
coronavirus-justified legislation do not corroborate the veracity of the
first answer. But I also don’t believe that the refusal to believe this
blatant lie means believing the easily-dismissed second answer that
there must — therefore — exist a conspiracy of political,
economic and technological powers which have either manufactured this
deadly virus in a secret lab in Wuhan or fabricated the effects of a
virus whose genome still hasn’t been sequenced. On the contrary, I
believe it is this binary response — a deadly virus or an even deadlier
conspiracy, neither of which is supported by what we know about the
world in the early Twenty-first Century — that has stopped the truth
about this crisis appearing to those who are looking for it.
My answer to the question — Cui bono? — rests on a paradox.
Its initial premise is a widely-accepted one: that, rather than
explaining this crisis, the various conspiracy theories about COVID-19 —
like most conspiracy theories — are a product of this crisis. But the
paradox I derive from this, which draws attention to what we mean by a
‘product’, is less commonly proposed: that, far from undermining the
ideological hegemony of the official narrative about COVID-19, these
conspiracy theories are a crucial part of the construction of that
hegemony. It is not by examining their claims, therefore, but rather
their functions — beginning with the question of whom they benefit —
that we can begin to understand what is happening, how it is happening
and, maybe, why it is happening.
3. The Power of Nightmares
I want to begin by challenging the explanatory power of conspiracy
theories in general, with the hope that, by doing so, it will undermine
the foundation on which the coronavirus crisis has been constructed. The
best place to start is with one of the most widely accepted and
institutionally supported propagator of conspiracy theories, Adam
Curtis. So embedded are his theories in our culture that I imagine most
people would not regard him as a conspiracy theorist, a term they would
reserve for believers in the ‘Illuminati’ or a ‘flat-earth’. But the
reduction of all conspiracy theories to occult or
scientifically-disproved beliefs is part of the function of what might
be called the ‘discourse’ of conspiracy theory that is increasingly
being used to dismiss all ideas and beliefs not sanctioned by the
institutions of the state, whether political, scientific, religious or
cultural. It has always struck me as curious that, despite the content
of his numerous and award-winning television programmes — all of which,
on the face of it, contradict and undermine what such institutions tell
us about the world and recent historical events — rather than being
banned or censored or marginalised are available on an almost permanent
basis on mainstream broadcasting platforms like the BBC, where they are
categorised as ‘documentaries’ and never bracketed with other
‘conspiracy theories’. This has led me to ask, Cui bono? — who
benefits from the production, televising, and availability of these
apparently subversive accounts of everything from the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism and the causes of the Iraq War to the power of the media
and the 2008 financial crisis.
What all of Curtis’s accounts share in common is this: that history
is made by a small group of individuals in positions of political and
corporate power, usually putting into practice ideas he traces back to
theoretical concepts developed years earlier by intellectuals and only
later made possible by advances in technology. It’s a persuasive model
of history whose theoretical simplicity is concealed behind the myriad
of intuitive and tenuous connections Curtis draws between public and
private organisations, whether Governments or corporations, and the
secret dealings of their leaders. Indeed, his latest series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head,
which is available to view on the BBC now, is an account of the rise of
conspiracy theories told through barely articulated connections between
individuals and events driven or guided by never identified forces.
Significantly, though, over the more than 8 hours of its 6 episodes, the
coronavirus crisis warrants only the briefest of mentions 10 minutes
from the end, where Curtis merely repeats the standard liberal response
about COVID-19 exacerbating inequalities in Western democracies. Some
conspiracy theories, it seems, are off-bounds even to a BBC producer.
In this respect, although more credible than, say, Hitler’s
conspiracy of Jewish bankers for Bolshevism, Curtis’s histories, in both
their theoretical model of change and in the methodology of their
telling, with archive footage bringing a veneer of history to
historically meaningless generalisations, are exemplary of conspiracy
theories in general. Power is located in the hands of a few individuals,
who are limited to the intellectuals and mavericks who formulate the
ideas, the scientists and engineers who develop the technology that
allows those ideas to be realised, the CEOs and bankers who fund their
implementation or the politicians and generals who put them into
practice. Like the old histories of kings and queens and the wars they
started, this is a history of the elite. The masses appear only as the
object of their manipulations, the foot-soldiers they send to war, the
victims they killed, and the civilians back home who waved their
national flags and corporate logos and cheered. What this model of
history does is two things.
First, such immense power and influence is attributed to this elite
that they are depicted as more than kings, almost as gods, employing all
the rapidly-evolving power of technology, whether that’s computers,
robotics, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, 3D printing,
nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing or the military
hardware they drive. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
is the title of Curtis’s 3-part film, televised on the BBC in 2011,
about the power of computers to create our perception of the world.
Second, and as a consequence of this depiction, the rest of us, the
masses of Western democracies, are depicted not only as powerless but
also as drained by this depiction of any historical agency whatsoever.
The spectacle of our own impotence in the face of the depicted nexus of
political, military and technological power becomes the object of filmic
consumption. And as the German critic, Walter Benjamin,
wrote of the spectacle of war under fascism, our alienation from
ourselves has reached such a degree that even the depiction of the
annihilation of our agency is now experienced as an aesthetic pleasure. Everything is Going According to Plan
is the title of Curtis’s 2013 film about how technocrats and global
corporations have established an ultraconservative norm behind the fake,
enchanting prison of the internet.
This, I believe, is why Curtis’s otherwise so traumatic accounts of
our manufactured impotence are so popular, so available for viewing on
mainstream media platforms that otherwise refuse to report on what is
happening in the world, so readily consumed by a UK public otherwise
indifferent to the suffering our Government inflicts on other countries
and peoples, and why they have become the primary model by which the
world is now explained and understood. In a choice between being told
that we are flies to the wanton boys running the world and blank
incomprehension at the vast and terrifying complexity of that world, it
seems we overwhelmingly prefer the first story for our evening’s
television. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
is the title of another 3-part film, televised on the BBC in 2004,
about how the US created a mythical enemy out of Islam in order to drum
up global support for its military interventions in the oil-rich Middle
East. So what’s wrong with this model of history, and what does it have
to tell us about the latest incomprehensible event by which we are being
terrorised into apathy and compliance?
Perhaps I should start by saying that I imagine the organisations and
individuals named in Curtis’s programmes, like the ones named in the
conspiracy theories about COVID-19, do all behave like conspiracists. I
haven’t forgotten the distinction made by an unnamed senior adviser in
the George W. Bush administration between a ‘reality-based community’
and a ‘faith-based presidency’. This was reported in the New York Times Magazine in October 2004, the same month the Lancet medical journal estimated that 100,000 ‘excess’ Iraqi deaths from all causes had occurred since the U.S. invasion began:
‘The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the
reality-based community”, which he defined as people who “believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”. I
nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works
anymore”, he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create
our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously,
as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you
can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s
actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.”’
This is straight out of the dystopian accounts of the power of
nightmares to create reality that is the bed and butter of Curtis’s
phantasmagoria. And just as the coronavirus crisis has produced a spate
of conspiracy theories about its origins, authors and ends, so the
threat of their irresistible power has given rise to an opposed
phenomenon, which the current crisis has formed into the some of the
most bizarre statements to be published in even the UK press. Since this
crisis has begun, anyone who attributes any influence or deliberation
or intentions to any organisation — whether that’s to previously less
well-known organisations like the World Health Organisation, the World
Economic Forum or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or to
organisations that have been at the forefront of recent political
debates, like the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund,
or indeed the UK Government itself — is immediately denounced as a
‘conspiracy theorist’. Faced with evidence of the power of these
organisations to ‘create our own reality’, our first resort, it seems,
is to denounce their existence, like children who hope that, by closing
their eyes, the monster at the bottom of their bed will disappear.
It’s not as famous or as often quoted as the line about philosophers interpreting the world rather than changing it, but in the same text
Marx wrote that ‘all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find
their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of
that practice’. So I want to start our awakening from the sleep of
reason by looking at the social practices of the coronavirus crisis, and
at how this can correct the conspiracy theory of an elite with their
hands, like the Wizard of Oz, on the gears of history. Let’s pull back
that curtain and look at the machine of history. We all know its name,
and despite all the renewed predictions of its death it hasn’t gone
away. On the contrary, it’s just going through a revolution — perhaps
one worthy of a new prefix — but its name is still the same. Capitalism.
Marx was right. When the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production — in legal terms
its property relations — a period of social revolution begins. ‘With
the change of the economic foundations’, he wrote,
‘the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly
transformed.’ The expansion into new markets of the neoliberal
capitalism that has dominated Western democracies for the past 40 years
no longer has to accommodate liberal democracy. What we are undergoing —
what we are colluding in producing — are the new political, legal and
social forms for a multinational biosecurity state. And no elite, no
matter how powerful, is in control of it, for the simple reason that,
despite the proliferation of immensely powerful international
organisations increasingly divorced from and opposed to the democratic
process, capitalism is a dynamic process that develops by conflict and
contradiction.
Capitalism has a grip on the world the like of which it has never had
before, and as it faces the long-heralded limits to that expansion it
is developing new forms and powers to extend that grip further over the
world’s diminishing resources. But there is no single government or
corporation ruling the globe, no secret society whose members sit on
every cabinet and board. The US Government is the greatest military
power the world has ever seen, and the United Nations has long been
superseded by far more unaccountable coalitions of state and corporate
powers whose activities are largely secret and getting more so. And the
power of technology to monitor and control the world’s populations is
expanding at an exponential rate in both breadth and depth. But the
world is not a single, supra-political block. There is no invisible hand
of the market-god ruling over us, for good or for evil; there are only
devils competing for his crown. The world undergoing this revolution in
capitalism remains a conflict whose battleground, now and for the
immediate future, is the coronavirus crisis. What makes that conflict
new for Western democracies is that the war being waged is a civil one,
of governments against their own people, rather than against other
countries. By looking at how this civil war is being waged, therefore,
we can begin to understand to what ends it is being fought. And,
hopefully, from better understanding the field of battle and our place
on it, we can stop being the canon-fodder of dictators both known and
unknown, desert the ranks of compliance, and start deciding ourselves
what battles we want to fight, how and against whom.
4. Capitalising on the Crisis
What is lacking in Curtis’s model of history — the conspiracy theory
of history — is its mediation through capitalism — what the German
philosopher and sociologist, Theodor Adorno, would have called its
‘dialecticisation’. In conspiracy theories, capitalism is the producer
of the wealth whose accumulation is the basis of power, the source of
the technology by which we are deceived, the cause of the periodic
crises that further tighten its grip on the world, the origin of the
wars fought for its expansion; but capitalism is never a site of
conflict itself. In conspiracy theories, the agents of history — whether
it’s the CIA, the WHO or the G7 — always act directly upon it. Their
agency is abstracted from the material relations of capitalism and
hypostasised as ‘power’. But nightmares, to refer back to Curtis’s
programme, do not drive the world, however much conspiracy theorists
like to attribute such influence to those that produce them for our
consumption. The material productive forces of capitalism drive the
world, and unless a nightmare benefits those having it, they will wake
up and the nightmare will vanish into the night. No war has ever been
fought that did not make those declaring it richer and more powerful;
and for a year now, despite the Government and its advisors repeatedly
telling us that ‘no-one wants lockdown’, enough people have been
benefitting from the coronavirus nightmare to keep the Western
democracies of capitalism asleep and terrified. Without those benefits,
all the power of nightmares at the disposal of all new technology
wouldn’t be enough to keep us dreaming. So let’s see if we can wake from
the sleep of reason and look with open eyes at whom it is benefitting.
I’m not going to discuss the corruption that most people in the UK
are aware of without it changing their opinion of the Government’s
narrative about the virus or answering their question of whom this
crisis benefits. I’ve recorded examples of this corruption throughout my
previous articles, whether it’s the tech companies being awarded
untendered contracts for the various programmes of the biosecurity
state, the manufacturers of medical supplies newly formed by Government
ministers to make and distribute masks and other requirements of
Government policy, or the pharmaceutical companies set to make billions
from the Government making vaccines mandatory. Benito Mussolini
reportedly defined the fascist state as when a cigarette paper cannot be
passed between the interests of the government and corporate interests.
But corruption in the UK is not only commonplace, it’s the norm.
There’s nothing new about Government contracts being awarded to the
friends of ministers and donors to the Conservative party. Such
practices don’t reflect a new stage in capitalism but, rather, a further
stage in the descent into the nepotism and unaccountability of what is
now a constitutional dictatorship. Instead, I’m going to talk about the
systemic changes to the superstructure — our political, legal and social
forms — that are both accommodating and implementing this new
revolution in capitalism. Because these changes are being implemented
not through sweetheart deals between political parties and their
corporate backers, but at a lower and far more pervasive level of
capitalism.
Capitalism is typically understood as being derived from the noun
‘capital’, meaning the funds or stock that are the basis for commercial
or financial operations, and a ‘capitalist’ as someone in possession of
sufficient capital to use it in business enterprises. But capitalism is
also a cognate of ‘capitalise’, which means not only to convert into a
capital sum but also to use to one’s advantage, in economic terms to
make capital out of; and it’s in this sense that the function of the
coronavirus crisis within the changing relations of production and
ownership in Western capitalism is best understood.
As a registered community interest company, Architects for Social
Housing is contacted daily by a myriad of companies seeking to
capitalise on this crisis. These include architectural practices
promoting ‘COVID-secure’ designs of the new office space if and when
we’re permitted to return to work; designers promoting reconfigurations
of residential spaces into a space in which we can ‘work from home’;
various regulatory bodies informing us of the obligations of businesses
towards their staff in a ‘post-COVID world’; law practices selling
seminars in the changes to employment law in the wake of the latest bit
of coronavirus-justified legislation; financial advisors keeping us up
to date with the various Government grants available to businesses
negatively impacted financially by the imposition of
coronavirus-justified lockdown; medical suppliers advertising the
latest, most effective and most fashionable ‘COVID-compliant masks’ for
our employees; pharmaceutical companies selling cheap, easy and reliable
RT-PCR and Lateral Flow antigen tests for the regular screening of
staff; sellers of antibacterial door handles and touchless coffee
machines; invites to symposia in which figures in the industry will
explain the commercial possibilities of housing provision within the
changed economic landscape; tech companies promoting the safety,
security and benefits of conducting business meetings by their
particular video communications package; marketing companies offering a
free consultation in expanding our client base into the homes of a newly
relocated workforce; management consultants offering interactive online
seminars on the impacts of COVID-19 on the contractual obligations of
employer and contractor and how to manage risk; businesses advertising
‘webinars’ offering advice, support and guidance for small businesses
‘during the pandemic’; debt collectors offering ‘no collection, no
commission’ deals for companies falling into insolvency ‘due to the
pandemic’; retraining programmes for industry professionals on furlough
under the Government’s Job Retention Scheme; private health
practitioners offering to help us overcome the challenges of staying
healthy under lockdown restrictions; recruitment agencies with guides to
how to provide effective mental health care for employees ‘during the
outbreak’; IT companies renting hosted desktop bundles to run our main
line-of-business applications in the cloud since ‘it looks like
businesses will continue to ask their employees to work from home if
they can for the foreseeable future’; online continual professional
‘lockdown learning’ sessions on emergency lighting, cavity trays
aluminium roof tiles and concrete repair; interactive online seminars on
delay and extension of contracts caused by uncertainty during the
pandemic; ‘coronavirus hubs’ for the latest news and support for small
businesses; newly launched pharmacies run by banks to deliver repeat
prescriptions to our door safely together with ‘a reminder of when to
take our medicine’; concerned enquiries into how we are finding the
latest lockdown restrictions from a business listings company; an
interactive online seminar on how to complete a ‘robust COVID-19 risk
assessment before re-mobilising your workforce’; purveyors of a ‘mobile
COVID-19 barrier’ made to professional and commercial standard and
‘suitable for any space that requires distancing measures for personal
or public protection’; first aid training courses for employees to
ensure our organisation is ‘compliant with current legislation’; leaflet
distribution as the most effective way of advertising during the
‘current restrictions’ when more people are working at home; IT
solutions allowing employees to work from home under lockdown or if
we’re giving up renting office space for good; covert installation of
tracking devices for company vehicles featuring ignition start alerts,
driver monitoring, geo-zones and route violation, panic alerts,
road-speed limit alerts, virtual odometer, animated replays and more;
and invites to a virtual summit on how to ‘build back better’ for our
‘post COVID recovery’.
That’s just in the last couple of weeks, and just for our small
company; but it conveys, I hope, something of how all UK companies are
now attempting to capitalise on this crisis by offering new services
responding to the opportunities created by coronavirus-justified
restrictions. The word ‘lockdown’ has only negative connotations, and
the media is full of stories about the jobs lost, the businesses gone
into receivership, and the entrepreneurs declaring bankruptcy. That’s
all true, but, once again, it paints a distorted picture of what is
happening with the economy, much like Adam Curtis’s depictions of the
unassailable power of a secret elite. And like his films, this
inaccurate depiction of the changes to capitalism under its newly
emerging superstructure forces us to ask why this transformation of our
political, legal and social forms has been imposed and, at the same
time, prevents us from answering that question. And the desired result
is that we are faced, once again, with a choice between, on the one
hand, a civilisation-threatening virus and the unprecedented changes
they necessitate and, on the other, a secret conspiracy designed to
destroy capitalism for unclear ends.
But the truth is that capitalism is not being destroyed. Rather, capitalism is going through what Marx called
‘an epoch of social revolution’, when the once dominant but
increasingly redundant forms of its political, legal and social
superstructure have finally come into direct contradiction with its
economic development, and are now being disposed of with a rapidity that
has shocked the populations of Western liberal democracies into
acceptance. But with that rapid acceptance has come an equally as rapid
collusion.
One of the barriers to answering the question of why this is being
done, if not in response to a civilisation-threatening virus, is a
misunderstanding of agency. When we ask who is doing this and to what
ends, we implicitly frame the answer around a group of individuals,
corporations, governments or international organisations all working in
collaboration towards an agreed, desired and planned end. And that,
unsurprisingly, is not believable except to those who understand the
world according to the conspiracy theory of history. It was precisely
this that was meant when, in response to my last article, Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis,
which analysed how a virus with the infection fatality rate of seasonal
influenza has been turned into a civilisation-threatening pandemic, a
reader responded with the rhetorical question: ‘Are you suggesting a
worldwide conspiracy to subjugate humanity?’
It should be clear by now that I am not suggesting this, while not
denying that, by definition, the foremost concern of those in power is
to subjugate those who are not. But the question, which is not unique to
this reader, does more than answer itself (for the only answer to this
question can be ‘no’). In addition, it constrains the answer to a binary
choice, neither of which is supported by the way capitalism has become
the dominant economic system in the world, by asking the wrong question.
What this question does is mistake agency with intentionality, effect
with motivation. ‘What is the motivation? With what long-term objective?
And by whom?’ was what another reader asked me. My approach to
answering this question — and the title for this article — was suggested
by another reader, who wrote: ‘The question that I always come back to
is why? Cui bono?’ It’s a better question, because unlike the
first it doesn’t offer an obviously unacceptable answer; but asking
‘why’ this is being done is not the same as asking ‘whom does it
benefit’.
Benefit, whether financial or in power, may explain, as Lucius
Cassius believed, who committed an act, and especially a crime, but it
does not explain why something has happened. The man who sold his shares
in a pharmaceutical company the day its vaccine was announced to have
an efficacy of 95 per cent can with some assurance be identified as
having an interest in circumventing the normal procedures for
establishing the safety of that vaccine; but it does not explain why the
vaccine rose in value sufficient to make him, as it did the CEO of
Pfizer, three-quarters of a million dollars in profit in a single day.
Dr. Albert Bourla did not conspire with the US Government, the US Food
and Drug Administration, the World Health Organisation or any other
organisation to create the circumstances under which his company could
sell over a billion doses of an uncertified vaccine to the governments
of the world on the back of this crisis. On the contrary, he did what
every other business writing to the e-mail of Architects for Social
Housing has done: he sought to capitalise, both as a shareholder in and
the CEO of the company, on the existing market condition. Of course, as
the second biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, Pfizer has far
more money with which to lobby the UK Ministers who award the Government
contracts, far more capital to invest in producing a product accepted
by them in record time, far greater access to the media that creates the
climate of hysteria and fear in which that product is demanded and
accepted by the public, and far more funding to invest in the regulatory
bodies agreeing to bypassing normal safety measures to authorise the
use of their hastily developed product. As I have documented in my
article, Bowling for Pfizer: Who’s Behind the BioNTech Vaccine?,
the line between influence, bribery and malpractice is a legal one that
pharmaceutical companies cross repeatedly then buy their way out of
prosecution for doing so. But this is the case with any multinational
corporation of comparable wealth and power, and the global companies
capitalising on the coronavirus crisis have not been restricted to those
manufacturing or selling medical supplies — though that hasn’t stopped
Amazon, for example, opening its own online pharmacy. This is the way
capitalism works, not by conspiracy but by capitalising on the crises
that are endemic to its dynamic development.
It also works by producing the false narratives about itself that
Marx called ideology, in which conspiracy theories have assumed an
increasingly important role today. Adam Curtis is open — insistent even —
about his opposition to the historical materialist model of history
which, in an interview in February 2012,
he dismissed as ‘that crude, left-wing, vulgar Marxism that says that
everything happens because of economic forces within society’. This was
the same month unemployment in the UK reached a 17-year high of 8.4 per
cent as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, Iran suspended oil
exports to the UK and France in response to economic sanctions imposed
by the European Union and the USA, and finance ministers for the
Eurozone unilaterally agreed on a second, €130 billion bailout of the
Greek economy on condition the Government imposed austerity measures on
its population that included tax rises, cuts in pensions, a 6-day week
and state assets being sold to private-sector lenders. That’s about as
crude as economic forces get. 7 months later, in September 2012, as
Greek trades unions responded with a general strike and the US Federal
Government faced further reduction to its credit rating because of the
rise of debt to GDP, the UK informed the World Health Organisation about
a novel coronavirus originating in Saudi Arabia, Middle-East
Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which the WHO subsequently identified as
the likely cause of a future epidemic.
5. Disruption and Redeployment
Five years later, in a speech
delivered in October 2017 when he was still Minister for Digital and
Culture, Matt Hancock, now the Secretary of State for Health and Social
Care, told his audience from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the
Fourth Industrial Revolution:
‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution will change the kinds of jobs
needed in industry. Our strong view is that as a nation we must create
the jobs of the future. Digital revolution brings with it disruption.
The risk is not that we adopt new technologies that destroy jobs. The
risk to jobs comes from not adopting new technologies. Our task is to
support redeployment not unemployment.’
We’re beginning to understand the nature and extent of the disruption
this revolution will bring about, the number and kinds of jobs that are
being destroyed, the degree of unemployment and insolvency this is
already causing. But what are the new technologies for which UK society
is being destroyed? Into what jobs will we be redeployed in the future
that is now upon us? What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
This term is most closely associated with Klaus Schwab, who has been
one of the key world figures in directing our response to the
coronavirus crisis. Schwab is the author of several books whose contents
I’m not going to discuss here, as this isn’t what this article is
about, but which have attracted the critical attention of many of those trying to understand this historical moment. The first, titled The Fourth Industrial Revolution, was published in 2016 and went on to be a global best-seller translated into 30 languages. It’s sequel, Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Guide to Building a Better World, was published in 2018. And in July last year, Schwab co-authored with Thierry Malleret COVID-19: The Great Reset.
The scope of the revolution these books envisage and promote is
immense, with the reset applying not only to economics, society,
technology, geopolitics and the environment, but also to digitisation,
artificial intelligence, crypto currencies, energy storage and — which
is the cause of much of the speculation about his influence — the
engineering of the human being through biotechnology, neurotechnology
and virtual and augmented realties. But Schwab’s influence — although he
holds PhDs in Economics and Engineering and a Master’s degree in Public
Administration, has been awarded 17 honorary doctorates, including by
the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is an honorary
Professor of Business Policy at the University of Geneva — is not
limited to that of an academic and author.
In 1971, Schwab founded the European Management Forum, which in 1987
became the World Economic Forum (WEF), of which he remains, at 82
years-old, the Executive Chairman. Closer in time, in June 2019 the WEF
partnered with the United Nations; but its most important partner has
been the World Health Organisation (WHO). On 17 January, 2020, when
total deaths worldwide from COVID-19 officially numbered just 6, the WHO
adopted the protocols for detecting and identifying SARS-CoV-2 set out in the Corman-Drosten paper, ‘Diagnostic detection of 2019-nCoV by real-time RT-PCR’. Among its numerous methodological failings, which I’ve discussed elsewhere,
this paper recommended thermal amplification cycles of 45, far above
the 30 at which infectious virus can be reliably detected or identified.
At a stroke, this set the template for how to turn a virus with the
mortality rate of seasonal influenza into a global pandemic. This duly
materialised when, on 11 March, the WEF partnered with the WHO to launch
the COVID-19 Action Platform,
a coalition of the world’s most powerful companies that, by May 2020,
numbered over 1,100. That same day, the WHO classified COVID-19 as a ‘pandemic’.
In addition to this coalition, the World Economic Forum, which calls
itself the ‘International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation’,
has numerous partners
among the most powerful companies in the world, which it lists on its
website. In banking and capital markets these include ABN Amro, Allianz,
Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC,
JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Natwest, PayPal and
Visa; in information technology, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft and Zoom; in media, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, Facebook, Google
and Thomson Reuters; and in healthcare the by now familiar names of
AstraZeneca, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson &
Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer. And if that isn’t enough of a basis for a
conspiracy theory of COVID-19, Matt Hancock’s speech, which as good as
announced the lockdown measures that two years later began clearing the
ground for this revolution, was an introduction to the presence that day
of what the Minister for Digital and Culture called ‘the man who made
the Fourth Industrial Revolution a household phrase: Professor Klaus
Schwab’.
What are we to make of such an organisation? In an article published last December, the writer and environmentalist, Naomi Klein,
dismissed Klaus Schwab as a ‘Bond villain’, and accused those who cite
its influence on governments’ response to this crisis of
‘coronavirus-denialism’. Yet the distinction she makes between what she
calls ‘legitimate critiques’ of Schwab’s ‘dangerous ideas’ and what she
dismisses as ‘truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies’ appears to be
based on nothing more than the unwritten handbook of liberal etiquette.
It’s true that the World Economic Forum is neither the World Bank nor
the World Health Organisation, and we have to question why it has drawn
so much attention over other international organisations of unelected
individuals wielding immense financial power to influence the policies
of democratic governments. It would be naïve to deny that much of what
is being done under the cloak of the coronavirus crisis has been
anticipated and promoted in Schwab’s books, or to deny the power of the
corporations with which the World Economic Forum is partnered; but
perhaps, if Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg had written
three books on their plans to revolutionise the world, we’d be reading
them and not him. Amusingly, though, for a long time anyone who referred
to the ‘Great Reset’ online was contemptuously dismissed as a
conspiracy theorist, until it was pointed out that the phrase was openly
used on the WEF’s website.
Here, once again, conspiracy theories are not undermining the official
narrative about the coronavirus crisis but, rather, contributing to its
ideological hegemony. And other coronavirus slogans, such as ‘Build Back
Better’, which have been universally adopted by the political leaders,
media spokespersons and industry CEOs of Western capitalism, clearly
indicate agreement and collaboration between them on how best to use
this crisis and to what ends. But although dismissing this as a
conspiracy theory has influenced the public’s willingness to believe and
comply with their government’s response to the coronavirus crisis,
whether this collaboration is a conspiracy or opportunism ultimately
doesn’t matter to the ends to which it is being directed. From a
platform of Social Darwinism whose colours are revealed for all to see,
Schwab and Malleret declare:
‘The micro reset will force every company in every industry to
experiment [with] new ways of doing business, working and operating.
Those tempted to revert to the old way of doing things will fail. Those
that adapt with agility and imagination will eventually turn the
COVID-19 crisis to their advantage.’
The coronavirus crisis is not, of course, the first crisis to be
capitalised on in this way, although none has occasioned a revolution on
this scale. But whether it was the War on Terror that removed all
opposition to the programmes and technologies of the global security
state, the financial crisis that justified the fiscal policies of
austerity, the housing crisis that drove up property prices for
off-shore investors, or the environmental crisis that is opening up new
markets for capital investment, capitalism has always emerged from such
crises with its grip on the world a little tighter, the laws subjecting
its agents to scrutiny, regulation and prosecution a little weaker, the
gap between rich and poor even wider, and the structures for its
expansion more firmly entrenched in our economies. The so-called ‘crisis
of capitalism’ hailed by leftists before Marx and ever since presents
no threat to its continuation. On the contrary, each crisis removes more
of the restraints to its expansion, not only geographically into every
corner and resource of the globe and beyond, but ideologically, to the
extent that the very thought of an alternative to it has become
unthinkable, and biologically, into the bodies of its human agents.
It’s because of this expansion that to speak of motivation — as
though any agency that doesn’t serve capitalism can survive within its
suffocating embrace — is to misunderstand agency as human actions rather
than the historical contingency of collective social practice at a
given stage of development of the material forces of production. If
Western democracies have all collaborated in this revolution in
capitalist society — something those promoting the biosecurity state use
to dismiss those who question the medical justification for this
collaboration as conspiracy theorists, as though these countries have
never before collaborated on everything from economic policy and trade
agreements to economic sanctions and military invasion — it’s because,
first and foremost, it is politically and economically possible for them
to do so. More than that, it is necessary in order to create new
opportunities for investment and open new markets for exploitation —
such as the lithium reserves of Bolivia crucial to the development of
the technologies of the Green New Deal for capitalism and which
motivated the US-backed coup against socialist President Evo Morales. If
the movement of personnel across national borders under neoliberalism,
celebrated as the ‘freedom of the individual’ within the ideology of
multiculturalism, was necessary to the unhindered movement of capital
through global markets and into offshore jurisdictions, capitalism, in
this new stage of its development, appears no longer to need such
freedoms, which are extrinsic to its monopoly. What it needs — what it
is producing — is emerging all around us, in the new social contract
being drawn up between the individual and the state. But its existence
cannot be denied, except by those who deny the existence of capitalism
itself.
This is what I understand the Italian philosopher of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben, to have meant when, in Biosecurity and Politics,
one of his commentaries on the coronavirus crisis last May, he wrote
that, ‘having replaced politics, even the economy, in order to govern,
must now be integrated with the new paradigm of biosecurity, to which
all other needs will have to be sacrificed’. Biosecurity is undoubtedly a
newly-emergent ideology that has assumed dominance over our political,
legal and social forms, but that does not mean that capitalism, as the
economic structure whose stage of development has determined this
emergence, has been superseded by the ludicrous equation of furlough and
other state interventions with the dawn of a socialist utopia. On the
contrary, capitalism, which long ago refashioned the state into its
administrative arm, is now intent on realising its long-held dream of
refashioning the human being. In the 1960s, at the height of the
economic expansion that followed the Second World War, it was observed
that, if aliens were to visit our solar system and observe the planet
earth, they would think the car was the dominant terrestrial life-form
and humans merely the energy source that, once inserted, makes them
move. Sixty years later, it appears that capitalism will be satisfied
with nothing less than erasing our useful but outdated human agency and
replacing it with something more conducive to its survival in a world of
dwindling resources. It’s in this context, I think, that we should
understand the dystopian declarations of our very own Übermensch,
Klaus Schwab, when he says that a Fourth Industrial Revolution will
redefine what it means to be human through a ‘fusion of our physical,
our digital and our biological identities’.
6. The Emerging Ideology
But hasn’t this brought us back to the answer from which my paradox
was meant to offer an escape — of a vast, unstoppable, almost omnipotent
power, which I have merely displaced from a conspiracy of global
leaders to an abstract force called ‘capitalism’? Haven’t I swapped one
monster for another, which, despite being grounded in political economy
and terms like ‘the relations of production’, is just as mythical and
unslayable as any beast of the New World Order slouching towards Davos
to be born?
Hopefully this article will explain why this is not the case. Despite
what we are told at every moment of every day, and never more so than
during this pandemic, we do not live under a conspiracy but within the
conflict and change of economic forces. Because of this, it is possible
for the direction of these forces to change. I do not say ‘be changed’,
which would once again attribute an undialecticised agency to an equally
conspiratorial model of change, whether that’s a revolutionary working
class or some other, new agent of intentional history. I would like
nothing better than to see that revolution and a working class rise up
and give it agency, but that’s not going to happen in the UK, nor in any
country in which global capital has an interest (and global capital is
interested in our very genes). The capitalised Revolution in the
twenty-first century is as much a conspiracy theory to rock communists
and anarchists to sleep at night as the human face of capitalism has
puffed the pillows of social democrats and liberals through this sleep
of reason. Both must be rejected as answers to the questions we are
asking. Change will not come from some hypostasised agent of history,
but in the same way that the businesses of capitalism are implementing
the current change to the new political, legal and social normal of the
biosecurity state.
There is no single author of change, not in the world of
international markets. There are only the effects of millions of actions
and transactions of vastly different sizes and influence which, when
they converge with sufficient focus and force on a moment in time and
place, bring about a revolution. That time is now. If you don’t believe
me, look all around you. The revolution is on every mobile-phone app,
laptop screen, billboard, bus shelter, closed street, shut-down pub,
empty restaurant, supermarket queue, e-mail, fact-checked Facebook post,
censored Twitter thread and, yes, online article. It has its political
leaders, its financial backers, its propagandists and its armed
enforcers, but it couldn’t have happened without our willing
collaboration in this revolution. And this means that, although every
contrary action is being met with more and more oppressive regulations,
increased funding for its programmes, greater censorship of those who
expose its lies and harsher enforcement of punishments for those who
disobey its laws, the power to defeat the biosecurity state being built
around, between and within us lies with us, waiting to be manifested as
civil disobedience and resistance.
It’s a common perception that when the puppet dictatorships of the
Eastern Bloc were no longer believed in by their hitherto subjugated
people they simply dissolved overnight. That’s a Western dream of
liberty being founded on the consensus of the people rather than the
power of the state, and ignores the economic and political forces that
made the response of the Soviet Union to the dissolution of the Warsaw
Pact in 1989 so different to its previous responses to the Hungarian
Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. A conspiracy theory of
history can tell us nothing about this difference, except to attribute
retrospective success or failure to the conspirators. In contrast, a
historical materialist model of such political, legal and social change
must demonstrate how these changes were and are mediated through the
uneven development of the economic forces of a society.
A useful method for understanding such changes was proposed by the Welsh socialist, Raymond Williams,
who divided the ideological superstructure into the dominant, the
residual and the emergent. What Williams meant by the dominant ideology
is pretty self-explanatory, designating those political forms, legal
structures and social practices produced by the ruling class,
instrumental to their hegemony, and particular to the definite stage of
development of the productive forces of a given society. In the UK,
these dominant forms of ideology include the first-past-the-post
electoral system that has produced the two party-dominance of UK
politics for the past century; or the influence on the making and
upholding of UK laws by our membership of the European Union these past
20 years; and the multiculturalism that, over the past 40 years or so,
accommodated the global economics of neoliberalism.
However, since capitalism is always in a process of transformation,
it is also always in the process of discarding redundant forms of
capitalist ideology. Some, however, continue to have a function, and
these residual forms designate those structures which, although formed
at an earlier stage of its development, still play a role in its current
stage. Among these residual forms in the UK we might include,
politically, the function of a hereditary sovereign as the head of the
UK state; legally, the qualification of rights of liberty, assembly,
association, thought, conscience and expression by property rights; and,
culturally, the Christian religion and, more specifically, the values
of the Anglican Church, but also nostalgia for our lost empire and, as
we have seen, an easily revived patriotism when responding with
‘world-beating’ programmes to a supposedly civilisation-threatening
virus.
But just as capitalism is always discarding the redundant forms of
its ideology, so to it is always developing emergent forms, and it is in
them that we can best see the future to which the present has given
birth and is even now struggling into dominance. By the emergent
Williams meant ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new
relationships and kinds of relationships’. Among these emergent forms of
ideology in the UK in the early Twenty-first Century, we might include
the influence of smaller political parties, such as the UK Independence
Party, the Brexit Party and the Green Party, whose presence in the House
of Commons does not reflect the influential and even decisive role they
have played in recent UK politics; or the legal secession of the UK
from the European Union and its effects not only on international trade
agreements but also on human rights, employment laws and the future of
the Union itself; and, most recently, in place of the open borders of
multiculturalism, the inexorable rise of health and safety as the most
important values in a society. It appears that the middle-classes who
saw no harm in the impact of immigration on working-class jobs, salaries
and employment rights are now only too ready to close those borders
down when their own lives and livelihoods are felt to be under threat.
Williams’ key example of ideological emergence, however, is the
formation of new social classes. For some years now we have spoken of
two new class formations produced by neoliberalism. On the one hand
there is the ‘precariat’, which is distinct from both the unified
‘working class’ of E. P. Thompson and the so-called ‘lumpenproletariat’
or underclass known to Marx; and, on the other hand, the ‘elite’, which
is formed of more than the ‘bourgeoisie’, and includes a broader nexus
of power closer to what we once called the ‘establishment’, but in which
British Dukes rub shoulders with Russian oligarchs, Arab oil sheiks,
Chinese industrialists and US arms dealers.
But these new classes have been around for some time now, long enough
to leave a mark on the electioneering campaigns of our political
parties and the grant applications of sociologists. What is emerging
from the UK biosecurity state now in formation is something new and
different. The prediction published on the World Economic Forum back
in November 2016 that in the future we will ‘own nothing and be happy’
is a simplistic but suggestive indication of what is in store for us. No
doubt it will entail a continuation and acceleration of the hollowing
out of the hitherto almost sacred place of the middle-class, whose
consumer power is increasingly redundant to a capitalism confronting the
limits of its growth, for which control of the remaining resources and
not their greater consumption is the war being fought, and in which the
new currency is not spending power but social credit. The evisceration
of the petit-bourgeoisie as small businesses, independent shops, pubs
and restaurants are systematically bankrupted by lockdown. And, as a
result of this destruction, an exponential increase in a politically
voiceless, legally disenfranchised and economically immiserated
working-class of digital technicians and workers in increasingly
automated industries. Finally, producing and produced by these changes,
an even wealthier and even more powerful ruling class, freed of the
shackles of scrutiny and accountability, their wealth protected by new
laws, ruling by a technocracy to which only they have access, and
protected by the immensely increased powers of an authoritarian state
disposing of the technology of our oppression.
For a glimpse of what new ‘meanings, values, practices, relationships
and kinds of relationships’ are being produced by the coronavirus
crisis, we might look at the coronavirus-justified changes to the
dominant cultural form in the UK over the past quarter century and the
flagship of multiculturalism — professional football. In addition to the
vast profits being made by the multinational corporations, particularly
in the USA, East Asia and the Middle East, that buy the wealthiest
clubs in Europe in order to clean up their public image for new markets,
it’s long been recognised that association football is also a spectacle
that creates a sense of community within the increasingly fractured,
isolated and divided society we call the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland. One of the most curious consequences of this is
that, with the Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis
progressively banning all forms of community outside the nuclear family —
a residual but still functioning form of the reproductive bed of
capitalism — the absence of community from what was the dominant form of
our culture under neo-liberalism is now being artificially simulated.
We haven’t gone as far as South Korea, where crowd sounds in response
to games are played over the stadium’s loudspeakers during the match
itself, but the viewing of football games in the UK, which for the past
30 years at least has been for most viewers on television rather than in
the grounds in which they are played, recreates crowd reaction and
plays it over the televised footage of the games. Of course, football
programmes have been doing something like this for some time. Even on
matches that are televised live, the highlights are shown over a
background sound of crowd ‘murmur’. Now, though, that background has
been recreated with greater veracity. The swearing and abuse that
occasionally filtered through the television has gone; but the increase
in crowd reaction as a player runs down his wing or enters the
opposition’s penalty box is now reproduced, and the cheers and applause
when a goal is scored, and even the boos for a bad tackle, are carefully
synchronised by the programme director. Some stadiums even have
representations of the crowd, with generic images of smiling fans
standing in for the unruly human reality. In Germany and Italy, clubs
have reproduced life-size photographs of season ticket-holders in their
club colours to occupy their empty seats, tokens of their ongoing
financial commitment to club and sponsor.
What is being done here, I think, is two things. First, reality is
being augmented for what has come to be called our ‘viewing experience’.
Indeed, the companies screening this footage in the UK — Sky Sports, BT
Sport, the BBC and Amazon Prime — have said they are augmenting the
crowd reactions to make the deeply un-normal and meaningless sight of 22
players running around in an almost empty stadium while being yelled at
by their coaches ‘a familiar viewing experience’. The second thing this
is doing, therefore, is replacing the absence of community from this
spectacle with a virtual community; and, by normalising this on
televised programmes, which under lockdown restrictions are most of the
country’s primary access to the world outside their home, it is
accommodating us to the so-called ‘New Normal’.
This, I think, tells us something about the revolution we’re going
through: that our knowledge and experience of the world is being
deliberately and systematically restricted to the increasing numbers of
screens on which we increasingly rely to gain access to the world and
each other, and that the companies that control that access will dictate
exactly what we know and experience and therefore largely how we think
and act. From this perspective, the transparent lies, broken promises
and overt corruption on which the biosecurity state is being constructed
are less a product of the Government’s inability to produce more
credible foundations than a testing ground for what the population will
believe even when what they are being told contradicts not only the
evidence of their own eyes but everything they have known about the
world up till now. To do so, though, it must first remove our access to
the competing market of collectively experience reality — in pubs,
parks, shops, restaurants, gyms, sports, football stadiums, cinemas,
museums, concerts, the houses of friends, access to the country, travel —
whose inconvenient eruption into the lives of even the most online
subjects of the biosecurity state threatens the media’s control over our
thoughts, our behaviour, our spending, our politics. This is what
Schwab and other promoters of the Fourth Industrial Revolution mean by
the ‘Great Reset’, which is open about capitalising on this manufactured
crisis not only to revolutionise the political, legal and social forms
of a capitalist world that must change and develop in order to survive,
but also to change the people in it.
7. Biosecurity as Cultic Practice
In COVID-19: The Great Reset, published last July after the first lockdown had generally been lifted, Schwab and Malleret wrote:
‘During the lockdown, many consumers previously reluctant to rely
too heavily on digital applications and services were forced to change
their habits almost overnight: watching movies online instead of going
to the cinema, having meals delivered instead of going out to
restaurants, talking to friends remotely instead of meeting them in the
flesh, talking to colleagues on a screen instead of chit-chatting at the
coffee machine, exercising online instead of going to the gym, and so
on. Thus, almost instantly, most things became “e-things”: e-learning,
e-commerce, e-gaming, e-books, e-attendance. Some of the old habits will
certainly return (the joy and pleasure of personal contacts can’t be
matched — we are social animals after all!), but many of the tech
behaviours that we were forced to adopt during confinement will through
familiarity become more natural. As social and physical distancing
persist, relying more on digital platforms to communicate, or work, or
seek advice, or order something will, little by little, gain ground on
formerly ingrained habits.’
We can see how this revolution in human behaviour from our old
‘animal’ habits to new ‘technological’ behaviours is being implemented —
‘forced’ is the word Schwab and Malleret use — by looking at some of
the new social practices, meanings, values, relationships and kinds of
relationships being created by the emergent political and legal forms of
the biosecurity state. A crucial aspect of these have been analysed by
Giorgio Agamben in Medicine as Religion,
another of his commentaries on the coronavirus crisis also published
last May, in which he compared the ascendancy of medicine during this
crisis to the emergence of a new religion.
Agamben argues that modernity has had three great systems of belief:
Christianity, which is a residual but still functioning ideology, formed
before capitalism but adapted to its needs, capitalism itself, and
science, which Agamben calls ‘the religion of our time’. And while these
systems have occasionally come into conflict, for some time now they
have reached a more or less peaceful co-existence. With the coronavirus
crisis, however, this peace has shattered, with science coming into
direct conflict with both Christianity and capitalism. The focus of
Agamben’s article is how this conflict has been manifested, which he
says is not, as has happened in the past, through conflicting dogma or
principles, but in what he calls ‘cultic practice’, which in science
coincides with technology. On the character of this conflict, Agamben
makes a number of observations, four of which I want to look at here.
First, he observes that it is not surprising that this conflict with
both Christianity and capitalism has arisen in that field of science in
which practice precedes dogma, and that is medicine, which borrows its
fundamental concepts from biology. Unlike biology, however, medicine
puts those concepts into practice according to an exaggerated dualism
that draws on Christian concepts of good and evil. In medical practice,
disease is the evil whose agents are bacteria and viruses; while health
is the good whose agents are medicine and therapy; and as in every
dualism, its practitioners, in seeking to do good (eradicating a virus),
can end up doing a greater evil (killing more people through lockdown).
It’s in this context that we should understand the biologically
nonsensical declaration of Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, that he
will ‘stop at nothing to halt the spread of coronavirus’, which means
even if, in attempting what is a medically unattainable and even
undesirable goal, he kills and ruins far more people in the attempt.
Second, Agamben observes that, although Christianity has known
similar totalitarian tendencies, this was limited to certain cultic
practices, such as the monks who turned life into a permanent act of
praying. What we are witnessing now, in contrast, is a cultic practice
that has become ‘permanent and all pervasive’. While medicine was once a
practice to which we submitted when necessary by visiting a doctor or
undergoing a surgical procedure, the entirety of human life has now been
refashioned into what Agamben calls ‘an uninterrupted cultic
celebration’, in which the enemy, the virus, must be combatted
unceasingly and without possible truce. Again, it’s in this context that
we should understand the declaration of Chris Whitty, the Government’s
Chief Medical Officer, that ‘we will not get to the point where there is
zero risk’, a statement that condemns us to Hancock’s unceasing battle
against an invisible enemy, and effectively puts the country on a
war-footing for the foreseeable future.
And third — and this is the observation I want to extrapolate from —
Agamben argues that the cultic practice of medicine is no longer free
and voluntary but has been normalised as obligatory. Although the
collusion between religious and profane power is certainly not new, what
is completely new, he argues, is that this new obligation does not
apply to the profession of dogmas but exclusively to the celebration of
the cult. Profane power, manifested through the rapidly expanding
apparatus of the biosecurity state, now ensures that the liturgy of the
new medical religion is observed in actions. It’s in this that Agamben
sees the extent to which capitalism and Christianity, which he calls the
religion of Christ and the religion of money, have ceded primacy to
medicine. For to follow its liturgy and perform its cultic practices, we
have been compelled to renounce our freedom of movement, assembly and
expression, our work, our family, friendships, loves and social
relations, even our religious and political convictions. While the
Church has suspended religious services and turned its cathedrals into
vaccination centres, capitalism has accepted losses of productivity it
would never previously have countenanced — though doubtless, as with all
previous rises, in the expectation of recuperating its losses in future
opportunities for investment and expansion.
So what do these observations tell us about the social practices,
meanings, values and relationships emerging from the new political and
legal forms of the UK biosecurity state? In making the distinction
between dogma and cultic practice, Agamben means, by the latter, those
repetitive behaviours which have a purely religious basis and whose
assumed efficacy is therefore a matter of faith. The performance of
these behaviours, therefore, is not only a declaration of belief (the
repeated injunction to ‘follow the science’) but also of obedience to
the orthodoxy of this new Church of Medicine. And, like all orthodoxies,
the purpose of their repetition is to identify heresy and apostasy.
It’s in this sense that I will refer to the followers of this aggressive
new religion as the ‘COVID-faithful’.
To better understand this, we can compare the compulsive washing of
hands with disinfectant by the COVID-faithful when entering a shop to
the Christian practice of touching the forehead with holy water when
entering a church. I’m always struck by how the COVID-faithful come out
of shops with their just-disinfected hands raised high before them,
exaggeratedly rubbing them together in a public declaration that they
are ‘COVID-safe’. We might also compare the religious fervour with which
social distancing is maintained by the COVID-faithful, as a way both to
protect themselves from the evil virus and to recognise their faith
community, to the Christian practice of crossing oneself as a sign of
obedience to their God and to ward off the presence of evil. And like
the explicit instructions on how to make the sign of the cross depending
on which Church you belong to, Government instructions telling us in
extraordinary detail how to wash our hands function to sanctify this
formerly everyday act as a new cultic practice. Or, again, the carrying
of so-called ‘immunity’ passports as a condition of entry or travel or
passage across other symbolic boundaries can be compared to the crucifix
Christians wear to identify themselves as members of their faith, or to
the rosary with which they count off the prayers they have been
prescribed to atone for their sins.
Finally — although this in no way exhausts the comparisons between
the cultic practices of these respectively residual and emergent
religions — just as the rite of Holy Communion reaches its climax with
the transubstantiation of the wafer into the body of Christ, so its new
equivalent is the taking of the vaccine which, like the eucharist wafer,
purifies the impure body of the celebrant. Compare the exaltation with
which the vaccinated announce on social media the conversion of their
‘vile body’ — as the Church of England describes the human corpse during
The Burial of the Dead — into the ‘glorious’ body of those saved by
God. And in scenes of ecstatic conversion, most recently staged in our
nation’s cathedrals, these are accompanied by photographs documenting
the insertion of the sacred vaccine into their profane body, accompanied
by beatific expressions of their transubstantiation. Or perhaps a
better comparison would be with the Catholic rite of confession, which
must precede communion and which, like the vaccine, only confers
temporary sanctity, and must be renewed at regular intervals by the
priests ordained to administer its blessing.
In this regard, it is significant that the rite of communion was
historically used by the Church to expose those who refused to partake,
therefore identifying themselves as heretics or, worse, unbelievers. We
should never forget that the immense wealth of the Church was built on
the land it held through conquest, in return for duties performed in the
service of profane power, and from the tithes and rent extracted at the
point of a sword or, more recently, in a collection bag. As Agamben
reminds us, religions have always relied on profane power to enforce
orthodoxy with their spiritual power, and it is no different with the
new religion of medicine, which has shown no hesitation in using all the
powers of the state to enforce its cultic practices on heretic and
unbeliever alike.
There is one point, however, where I depart from Agamben’s analysis,
and that is with his assertion that the celebration of the new religion
of medicine is confined to the repetition of cultic practices, and does
not also require the profession of its religious dogma. Just like the
Christian Bible, which few have read but many can quote, the dogma of
medicine is equally unthinkingly quoted by the COVID-faithful, who
repeat its catechisms in response to any attempt to question or correct
the medically meaningless orthodoxies of the ‘New Normal’, whether
that’s maintaining social distancing, wearing a mask in public,
self-quarantining on the basis of an RT-PCR test, or the vaccination
programme. In this respect, the COVID-faith more resembles the
fundamentalist churches of the USA than Anglicanism or even Roman
Catholicism. Like all fundamentalisms, there is only orthodoxy and
heresy, complete and unthinking obedience to the word of the law or
criminal transgression. The very act of questioning is now silenced at
source. And as we are seeing with every new announcement by the high
priests of medicine immediately made into law by the Government and
enforced by the state, speech that is not authorised by dogma is now a
crime, condemning the speaker to isolation, inquisition, conversion and,
if its cultic practices are not embraced, punishment and imprisonment.
If you think such religious fundamentalism is a relic of the past or
the purview of extremist cults with little political or spiritual
influence over the materialist values of contemporary capitalism,
consider the rapid rise and influence on world politics of Islamic
fundamentalism over the past few decades. Or, better still, think of the
influence of Christian fundamentalism on the politics of the USA, the
greatest capitalist power on the planet, where no candidate for
Presidency can hope to hold office without declaring ‘God bless America’
and affecting, at least, to believe in an interventionist God capable
of saving its citizens from COVID-19 or any other plague of the devil.
Or, closer to home, think of how quickly the market fundamentalism of
neoliberalism has colonised the globe, substituting the value of the
market for all other values, to the extent that ‘profit’ and ‘value’
have become synonymous and interchangeable in the language of economics.
St. Ignatius de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, famously
said: ‘Give me the child till he’s seven and I’ll give you the man’. The
sight of British children, despite being effectively immune to
COVID-19, being subjected to the regulations, programmes and
technologies of the UK biosecurity state by the institutions that should
instead be educating, nurturing and protecting them from such cultic
practices, shows that our Government has similar plans for their future.
Just as the rights and freedoms we have so easily given up in order to
observe these practices won’t be returned, as many people still imagine
or hope, so too the habits we form in following these practices won’t so
easily be broken, least of all among our youth; and we’re already one
year into the indoctrination of a generation into the cultic practices
and religious dogma of the UK biosecurity state.
In the UK, at least, we like to think of ourselves as moving away
from religion and towards science, something which until now has
distinguished us from the USA. But as the rapid and almost total
conversion of 68 million people to the dogma and cultic practices of the
UK biosecurity state has shown, we are, to the contrary, returning to a
new religious orthodoxy. In Psalm 39, recited during the Anglican
ritual of The Burial of the Dead, the priest warns the living:
‘I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue. I
will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle while the ungodly is in my
sight. Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may
be certified how long I have to live. Take thy plague away from me.’
Who cannot hear in this liturgy the dogma of the UK biosecurity state
which, in an astonishingly short period of time, has found millions of
willing and obedient converts to its cultic practices? Add to that the
hold pharmaceutical companies have had over the US population for
decades and the culture of health and safety through medication and fear
they are exporting into the UK, and we have the material basis for our
mass conversion to this new religion.
But after nearly a year of disinformation, censorship and lies,
anyone who has not submitted to this cultic practice and its religious
dogma, and reads outside the corporate-owned media and its state
censorship of heresy, will know that the regulations, programmes and
technologies of the UK biosecurity state have not been imposed in
response to a virus with the fatality rate of influenza. And if, instead
of blindly believing in and perpetuating this self-deception, we start
to think about them as the emergent ideological forms preparing the way
for and implementing the next stage of the development of capitalism
after 40 years of neoliberalism, then our confusion and inability to
answer the questions of why this is being done, by whom and to what
purpose — which as we have seen are the wrong questions — can be
overcome.
8. The Authoritarian State
In The Doctrine of Fascism,
co-written with Giovanni Gentile in 1927 but only published in 1932,
Benito Mussolini, the President of Italy and Leader of Italian fascism,
wrote:
‘The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no
less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and
breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and
educational institutions; and all the political, economic, and spiritual
forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations,
circulate within the State.’
There is a difference between what Mussolini meant by a fascist
corporation, which was a government body that brought together
federations of workers and employers’ syndicates to regulate production,
and the commercial corporations that dominate the politics of Western
liberal democracies today; but it is hard not to hear in this definition
of fascism a description of the totalitarian reach of the UK
biosecurity state. Perhaps the most decisive political outcome of the
coronavirus crisis in the UK is the transformation of what was an
ostensibly democratic government into a technocracy whose new campaign
slogan is ‘follow the science’. In Italy, which has a history of
technocratic governments, this has already been implemented this month,
with President Sergio Materella,
faced with the impasse of the coalition government, appointing the
former head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, one of the
architects of European austerity, to form a new and supposedly
‘non-political’ administration. In its corporatised form, this is a
product of neoliberalism and before that of fascism, rather than an
emergent political form; but never before have Western democracies been
so ruled by a technocratic elite. Not even the unelected bureaucrats in
Brussels had as much influence over our destiny as the scientific
advisors who today decide what our civil liberties and human rights are
worth. This raises the question of the changing source of authority
within the biosecurity state, which on the justification of protecting
us from a virus has cancelled elections over the past year and for the
foreseeable future. For although capitalism, in the next stage of
development of its productive forces, remains the driving force of this
revolution, its emergent political, legal and social forms are
refashioning the state with extraordinary speed before our very eyes. So
what is this new form of authoritarianism disposed of by the UK
biosecurity state?
Revolutions make strange bedfellows, and resistance to them even
stranger. Where would the Bolsheviks have been without the German
Kaiser’s authorisation to transport Lenin from exile in Zürich to
Petrograd’s Finland Station? Where would the French Resistance have
found arms and ammunition without the financial support of Churchill’s
Government? How would the Methodist grocer’s daughter from Lincolnshire
have destroyed the UK’s industries and unions without the support of the
born-again B-movie actor from Illinois?
Last month the Socialist Campaign Group
of Labour MPs, led by former Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, published an
open letter to the UK Government demanding a ‘Zero COVID strategy’. This
includes ‘a proper lockdown that lasts as long as needed’, increased
capacity for testing and quarantining the public, a programme of
emergency measures to ‘help’ people to self-isolate, a functioning test
and trace programme to ‘target and isolate’ those with a positive test,
and the closure of schools until it is ‘safe’ to open them. Faced with
the manufactured hysteria of the public, it appears the only opposition
politically possible in Parliament is to compete to see who can demand
the longest lockdowns, the greatest restrictions on civil rights and the
harshest punishments for those who fail to comply with them. As a
result of this unprecedented hegemony, I’ve spent the last year looking
for and finding allies among those with whom I’d usually have no common
cause. Among them are the former Etonian and Justice of the Supreme
Court, Jonathan Sumption QC; the Anglican Conservative and Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens; the multi-millionaire businessman and tax exile, Simon Dolan; and the journalist and editor of The Spectator,
Toby Young. Although I could imagine spending an evening with Lord
Sumption discussing how to challenge the legality of
coronavirus-justified Regulations, and for some months I conducted a
guarded correspondence with Mr. Hitchens, I’m not sure I would accept an
invitation to anything with either Dolan or Young — but I have read
what they’ve written. I don’t belong to a generation that judges the
value of a public figure’s words or deeds on whether I identify with
their cultural tribe. I find Young’s red-baiting and Dolan’s
Trump-admiring as alien as I do Hitchens’ Christianity and Sumption’s
Conservatism; but it’s their views, words and deeds in response to the
coronavirus crisis that I’ve been interested in. And reading these this
year, I have been made aware of something I wasn’t aware of before.
I would guess these four outspoken critics of the Government would
define their political and social positions with very different terms,
or understand different things by those terms; but all four would, I
suspect, be called ‘libertarians’ by the COVID-faithful — ‘conservative
libertarians’ the first two, ‘right-wing libertarians’ the others.
Recently, Jonathan Sumption observed that a sign of the authoritarianism
creeping across the UK under the cloak of this crisis is that the word
‘libertarian’, by which he means ‘a believer in freedom’, is now used as
a term of abuse. As someone who has been accused of pretty much
everything from both the Right and the Left, it wasn’t of this
Twitterism that I was unaware. What has surprised me, though, is the
equation of the state — at least by the last three of these
commentators, Hitchens, Dolan and Young — exclusively with the
authoritarian Left. For Sumption, I suspect, it is not the state in
itself that concerns him, but rather the authoritarianism of the
Government elected to use its apparatus and the reluctance or
incompetence or cowardice of Parliament elected to oversee its use. But
for the other three, the refusal to see the exponentially increasing
encroachment of the state on our freedoms as anything other than an
expression of left-wing authoritarianism has led them to denounce the
emergence of the biosecurity state under the cloak of the coronavirus
crisis as a kind of socialist coup.
They are not alone in viewing the restrictions imposed on us by the
UK Government and enforced by the state apparatus as a socialist plot.
In the anti-lockdown protest in Trafalgar Square I attended last
September, there were placards not just comparing but flatly equating
coronavirus-justified regulations with communism. One could put this
down to a generation raised by the Murdoch news empire. But Peter
Hitchens has also publicly denounced the Conservative Party as
‘left-wing’ — largely, as far as I can make out, because he believes it
has taken its political ideology from New Labour, which is a reasonable
assertion, but which he regularly accuses of being a Trotskyist
organisation, which is not. In Toby Young’s on-line platform, Lockdown Sceptics
— which was recently generous enough to provide a link to one of my own
articles — one can find, alongside rational articles discussing the
lack of scientific basis to lockdown restrictions, articles by civil
servants outing the entire British Civil Service as ‘Marxists’. While
during the US election I had to ask Simon Dolan on Twitter not to
publicise his declarations of support for President Donald Trump as the
last bastion of hope against the final triumph of world communism
because of the damage he was doing to the popular front many of us are
trying to form against the implementation of the biosecurity state,
whose ideologues thrive on denouncing their opponents as conspiracy
theorists for making such statements.
Now, I can’t speak for Dolan and Young, neither of whom I’ve met, but
Hitchens is an intelligent man, although I find his views about
everything other than the coronavirus crisis antithetical to mine. So
how is it that they, at least, if not Sumption, denounce the
Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis as a form of left-wing
authoritarianism? It’s an important question, as it’s on this perception
that almost the entire Left in this country, insofar as it defines
itself as such, has come down on the side of the Conservative Government
of Boris Johnson more firmly and unanimously than his occasionally
rebellious back-benchers.
Under its mass conversion to the radical conservatism of identity
politics, the UK Left stopped viewing the world from a socialist
perspective a long time ago; but its argument — as far as I can follow
it — is that Johnson is a professed libertarian and has only been pushed
into doing anything at all to oppose this civilisation-threatening
virus by the demands of the Labour Party; while his true allies — among
whom they number Hitchens, Dolan and Young — represent his real views.
As an analysis, this has as tenuous a purchase on reality and logic as
the contrary view from the Right, that the Conservative Government and
civil service have been infiltrated with Marxists and are instigating a
Communist coup under the excuse of protecting us from a virus that
doesn’t exist. But what both these views share — what they are both
predicated on — is the apparently unshakeable conviction that the modern
state — ‘welfare’, ‘nanny’, etc. — is an invention of the Left, and
that the Right, by contrast, is defined precisely by its wish to
dismantle the state and allow the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s market
to tell us what we do and don’t value. From this shared perspective, the
Left views the state as protective, communitarian and redistributive,
and therefore wishes to expand it through longer lockdowns, more
restrictions and harsher penalties; while for the Right, in contrast,
the state — as demonstrated precisely by the restrictions justified by
the coronavirus — is oppressive, authoritarian and anti-individualistic,
and should therefore be dismantled, starting with lockdown. But for
both these positions, raised as they have been by the same ‘free-market’
ideologues of neoliberalism, there appears to be no such thing as a
right-wing state.
Both these positions rest on a shared misunderstanding — or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say, on a shared ideological representation
— about how capitalism works today, as if we were still in the domestic
markets of the Eighteenth and early-Nineteenth Century and the monopoly
capitalism of competing imperialist states in the Twentieth Century had
never happened, let alone the late capitalism of multinational
corporations, globalised markets and liquid capital. This has led
ideologues of ‘free-market’ capitalism to denounce the Great Reset as
antithetical to the holy grail of capitalist competition, and compare
the Brave New World it wants to impose on us to communism, as if Schwab,
Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg and the other CEOs of the corporations that
monopolise global capitalism were all born-again Marxists.
It’s hard to understand exactly how this perspective can be held by
anyone who lives in a world in which the two largest state powers,
offering competing but increasingly similar forms of authoritarianism,
are the USA and China. One might argue — although I wouldn’t — that
China’s state capitalism is the historical realisation of the
authoritarianism to which every communist government leads; but it’s
hard — I would say impossible — to argue that the USA, whose state
apparatus holds a large portion of the globe in its military, political,
economic and cultural grip, represents anything other than a form of
authoritarianism. On the contrary, I would argue that, even in its
waning, the USA disposes of the most powerful state apparatus the world
has ever known; and that with that waning its implicit authoritarianism
is becoming more explicit, more totalitarian, more dictatorial, as it
seeks to hold onto its waning economic power with its waxing military
might. With social democracy fast fading into one of the briefer
experiments of political history, the right-wing state is emerging
before our eyes in a new formation that is perhaps foolishly compared,
if only for want of a new term, to fascism. But this, it seems to me —
rather than a communist coup by General Secretary Boris — is the
historical context in which we should view the coronavirus crisis and
the implementation of the regulations, programmes and technologies of
the biosecurity state it has justified across the liberal democracies of
Western capitalism. So what is the Brave New World this right-wing,
authoritarian state is building around, between and within us?
9. Brave New World
In the author’s foreword to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, the English novelist and essayist, Aldous Huxley, concluded:
‘All things considered, it looks as though Utopia were far closer
to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Today,
it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single
century. Indeed, unless we choose to decentralise and to use applied
science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means,
but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only
two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national,
militarised totalitarianisms, having as their consequence the
destruction of civilisation; or else one supranational totalitarianism,
called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid
technological progress and developing, under the need for efficiency and
stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and
you takes your choice.’
Half a century later, UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, taught us that
the first rule of lying to a country is: the bigger the lie, the more
‘the people’ want to believe it. When his New Labour Government sent the
UK to war against Iraq in 2003, Blair lied to us about the threat of
Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn’t exist, the British media
universally promoted these lies, and anyone who disagreed publicly was
silenced by the state. But in addition to these lies, we were subjected
to a media campaign of images of Iraqis suffering under the rule of
President Saddam Hussein and appealing for our help. The result was half
a million Iraqi dead, 80 per cent of whom were civilians, 5 million
Iraqis fleeing the country, the theft of its oil reserves by Western
corporations, the unending War on Terror that has made us all targets of
terrorist attacks for the rest of our lives, the progressive erasure of
our human rights and civil liberties under the guise of protecting us
from terrorism, the political destabilising of the Middle East and the
creation of millions of refugees.
In an interview in 2008, the novelist and former spy, John le Carré,
commenting on the military response of the US and its allies — including
the ever-subservient UK — to the attack on the World Trade Centre in
September 2001, denounced the stupidity of waging a so-called War on
Terror by comparing it to a war with which we’re all now familiar. ‘You
might as well make war on influenza’, he said. Thirteen years later,
that’s the war the governments of Western democracies are waging today
under the cloak of COVID-19 — not against WMD-possessing Muslims in the
Middle East this time, but in a civil war waged on home soil against
their own citizens. And like the War on Terror, its justification is a
lie sold to the public by the media in order to terrify us into
believing in a threat that does not, and never has, existed. There never
was a war between Western liberal democracies and Middle-Eastern
military dictatorships, Christian soldiers and Islamic terrorists,
Europeans and Arabs. There was, and still is, the war of the military
and industrial complex of global capitalism for diminishing global
resources. The battlefield has expanded to include the entire Western
hemisphere; the prize for the victors is even more lucrative than the
oil resources of the Middle East; the new weapons employed, collectively
designated by the term ‘lockdown’, are killing even more people than
the US military; and the victims now include the lazy, conceited,
morally indifferent, politically naïve citizens of Western liberal
democracy that have repeatedly voted for their governments to turn the
rest of the world into its killing fields. But the aggressors are still
the same, and their goals haven’t changed.
The lesson we still haven’t learned from this humanitarian and
geopolitical catastrophe is that appeals to camera by weeping
individuals — then the victims of political oppression, torture and war,
now the doctors, nurses and patients in the so-called ‘war’ on COVID-19
— relating personal experiences ‘on the front line’, as the UK
Government has designated our hospital wards, are no basis to policy.
Doctors have one concern, and perhaps rightly so: the health of the
patients in their care. But Government policy must look at the total
impact of the actions they set in motion, and the facts from countries
around the world show that lockdown not only has no effect on reducing
deaths from COVID-19, but that it has been, and will continue to be, the
cause of tens of thousands of deaths of those deprived of medical
diagnosis, treatment and care under coronavirus-justified restrictions.
The question this raises, however, isn’t whether the doctors wheeled out
to make appeals to the camera to obey Government Regulations are lying
to us deliberately for what they see as a more important cause than
truth (the patients under their medical care), whether they are being
manipulated by the Government and media into doing so, or whether they
are cynically manipulating the public to their own financial benefit and
career prospects from the revolving door between pharmaceutical
companies and regulatory bodies. I imagine, as with most things, that
it’s a combination of all of these, with the more powerful the position
occupied, as I have shown in previous articles, the more corrupt the
person occupying it. But the question we should be asking is what the
perpetual threat of lockdown justified by the medical profession is
enabling our technocratic Government and its corporate financiers to
prepare for our future.
As its scientific and medical advisors advised it to do last July,
the Government gradually forced the entire country into lockdown between
the autumn and winter of 2020, and it looks like we will stay under
lock and key until Spring 2021 at the earliest — although the
Regulations under which the restrictions have been imposed don’t expire
until mid-July 2021. By the time we emerge, tier by tier, from our
prisons, there will be such mass unemployment, redundancies, poverty,
destitution, ill health and despair that the population of the UK will
effectively be on a war-footing, ready to be redeployed under the
equivalent of martial law (we have been under a de facto State
of Emergency for some time). And it’s under these conditions that
further regulations, programmes and technologies will be imposed upon us
as a condition of our release, and the always obedient population of
the UK will do whatever it takes to survive short of rebelling.
I’m neither an economist nor a soothsayer, and I’m reluctant to add
my predictions to the despair that is dissolving what resistance there
is to the biosecurity state. ‘Terrifying’ has been the response of many
readers to my recent articles about the UK’s COVID-19 vaccine programme.
But if I risk looking into the future, I’d imagine a system of social credit
based on that in China will be implemented on the back of some form of
Universal Basic Income. This will essentially be an extension of our
current benefits system of Universal Credit, but which will be tied to
digital currency and whose ‘awarding’ will be additionally contingent
upon our compliance with every demand and requirement of the UK
biosecurity state. This will include tracking our every movement,
interaction and contact through QR-codes; regularly updating our health
status into a centralised data base; annual vaccination made either
compulsory or a condition of returning to work; regularly submitting
biometric samples for testing; carrying digital health passports at all
times in order to access public services like travel, medical care and
welfare benefits; the automation and regulation of the home as a
quarantine block; mandatory mask-wearing in all public places; payment
with blockchain currency programmed with conditions of use and traceable
to the behaviour and health status of the user; and, of course,
obedient acceptance of whatever new ‘rethink, reskill, reboot’ job the
state assigns the millions of unemployed and impoverished workers
granted a Universal Basic Income. In case we’re not clear what that will
involve, it won’t mean a career in cyber-security, as the Government’s
ill-advised propaganda campaign by the National Cyber Security Centre
tried to suggest last year with a spectacular lack of success. A more
representative job would be a worker operating in tandem with mobile
robots to locate, retrieve, sort and package pharmaceutical products in
one of Amazon’s new warehouses.
The consequences of any deviation from these obligations and
protections will be simple: removal of social credit and basic income,
followed, for persistent offenders, by the huge fines we’re already
seeing become the norm for the new offences of not wearing a mask,
holding a party, leaving your home without a reasonable excuse, or not
taking a test when instructed to do so. It’s been suggested that we’re
approaching the time when an equivalent to the geo-fencing of
satellite-linked livestock systems will be used on humans; except that,
rather than an electronic tag shocking us into staying within our
allotted boundaries, a universal basic income, linked to our digital
identities, will be used to control our access to the basic needs of
life, such as housing, food, water and healthcare. If that sounds like
science fiction, it was recently announced in Germany that anyone
refusing to quarantine will be forcibly detained for ‘testing’ in
facilities built for the purpose until such time as the state deems them
sufficiently ‘bio-secure’ to release back into society. That Germany, a
country obsessed with rewriting its past, should announce such measures
shows just how confident the technocrats of the biosecurity state have
become.
And the UK hasn’t been slow to follow. While writing this article, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care made The Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2021
into law. Under these Regulations, UK travellers returning from or
through so-called ‘red-list’ countries from which travel to England and
Wales is banned will now face fixed-penalty notices of £1,000 for not
taking an RT-PCR test upon 2 days of returning, £2,000 for not taking a
second test 6 days later, £5,000 for not quarantining in a hotel room
for 10 days upon return or following a positive test during quarantine,
rising to £8,000 for a second offence and £10,000 for a third and all
subsequent offences; pay for the above tests plus fees of £175 per
person for every day quarantined in an airport hotel, effectively
banning travel for all but the wealthy and Government officials granted
immunity; and, finally, a prison term of up to 10 years for those who
incorrectly identify the country from which they’re returning. To put
this last punishment in its criminal context, 10 years is the maximum
sentence for making threats to kill, possession of firearms, non-fatal
poisoning, burglary with intent to commit rape, indecent assault,
indecency with children under 14 and rioting; and 3 years more than the
maximum sentence for carrying a loaded firearm, racially-aggravated
assault and sexual offences involving minors. The significance of these
absurdly disproportionate punishments shouldn’t be lost on us. Like
George W. Bush’s messianic aide, they tell us loud and clear that the
consensus-based reality we thought we knew is over; that this isn’t the
way the world works anymore; and that, from now on, the technocrats of
the biosecurity state will be creating their own reality.
Legally, all this can already be done already under the Coronavirus Act 2020 and — at the time of publication — the 372 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments made into law,
349 of which were made without a draft being laid before Parliament,
evidence for their proportionality being presented for debate,
assessment made of their impacts or consultation with the community. All
the Government is waiting for is the final crushing of the UK
population through a winter campaign of terrorism, immiseration,
bankruptcy, increased surveillance and fines, and media coverage of
spectacles of disobedience and punishment, in which the virtual mob of
social media will be encouraged to participate. The recent re-arrest of
anti-lockdown campaigner, Piers Corbyn, for distributing leaflets
against vaccination; the concerted slur campaign by the BBC, the Guardian
newspaper and across social media against the former pharmaceutical
industry scientist, Dr. Michael Yeadon, for challenging the medical
basis for lockdown; and the BBC’s stage-managed attempt to discredit
Jonathan Sumption that produced howls of indignation and denunciation on
mainstream and social media — are examples of how ready the UK public
is to participate in this climate of witch-hunting and self-righteous
indignation. This isn’t dystopian fearmongering; this is the future that
awaits us, and so naïve and obedient have we been throughout this
crisis that there is now nothing to stop it becoming our present.
It’s important to understand that the removal of our freedoms, the
destruction of public services, and the impoverishment and control of
millions of workers is not an unavoidable consequence of the New Normal,
but rather the scorched earth on which the Fourth Industrial Revolution
is being built. Just as happened during the First Industrial
Revolution, when millions of agricultural labourers were forced off the
land and into a highly regulated life of repetitive factory labour, the
working class must first be impoverished before they accept the new
conditions of labour and life. And just as the body of the
nineteenth-century worker was regulated and regimented by the discourses
of hygiene, criminality and productivity to which factory work and
urban life subjected it — governed by the clock, monitored by the
foreman and policed by the cop — so the millions made unemployed by the
destruction of their livelihoods under lockdown are being subjected to
the surveillance, monitoring and control of their biological existence
under the regulations, programmes and technologies of the UK biosecurity
state.
In this state, in which artificial intelligence is at once policeman,
judge and jury, our digitally monitored ‘homes’ will become the prisons
in which we will be quarantined should we fail to comply with the
obligations of the biosecurity state. At the same time, as is already
happening, the home will also be the workplace to which we will be
confined until we have met our designated quota of productivity, to be
paid in social credit that will — as it already does in China — monitor
and control both the extent and the content of our expenditures
according to our compliance with state directives. But the UK
biosecurity camp will extend beyond our homes. As the Italian architect
and filmmaker, Robin Monotti,
said in a recent interview, we are witnessing the formation of a
Western Bloc in which travel both within countries and between national
borders is either prohibited or permitted only under strictly enforced
compliance with biosecurity programmes and regulations constituting a
new Iron Curtain. And just as information from beyond its borders was
restricted in countries in the former Eastern bloc and Soviet Union, so
too the information to which the public in this new Western Bloc has
access is being controlled and censored in a manner we wouldn’t have
believed possible only a year ago. Above all, the overtness of the
propaganda for the biosecurity state, a mixture of saccharine visions of
a post-COVID future and violent threats of punishment for
non-compliance with its laws, is something we’ve never seen before in
this country, not even during the lies of wartime.
From the totalitarianism of this regime, however, comes some cause
for hope. Contrary to the beliefs of the COVID-faithful who denounce
anyone questioning the medical necessity of these restrictions as
‘conspiracy theorists’, the coronavirus-justified restrictions under
which we are living in this Western Bloc are far from universal. Many countries around the world
have not imposed them, or did so to a far lighter degree and are
beginning to lift them; while other countries, without anything like the
number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the UK, have imposed equal
or even harsher restrictions without medical justification. To those who
look beyond the increasingly restricted and inward-looking world shown
to us by the corporate-owned UK media, the global conspiracy theory to
which these media corporations reduce any challenge to the UK
biosecurity state is in reality mostly confined to the Western
democracies undergoing this revolution in capitalism. This explains the
level of censorship, disinformation and lies to which the
corporate-owned media has committed itself. For who would believe in a
civilisation-threatening virus and consent to the removal of their
rights, liberties and politics in perpetuity, when other countries have
returned to something like the social relations and civil liberties they
had before this manufactured crisis? This alone indicates that this is a
crisis of capital and not of health, designed to increase control of,
and not to protect, the population.
But who is looking, and in sufficient numbers, to turn civil
disobedience and resistance to these restrictions into a movement that
will overthrow this constitutional dictatorship? Not the so-called Left,
whose long stupefaction, not only in this country but in all Western
liberal democracies, has prepared the way for this moment of total
obedience to the authority of the UK biosecurity state. Taking comfort
from dismissing this already present future as a ‘conspiracy theory’ is
the Left’s way of closing its eyes to what is happening in front of our
faces, and to our faces. Its crowning ignominy is that, confronted with
the most decisive and long-prepared revolution in modern history to an
authoritarian and right-wing state whose presence is now all around us,
it denies that it is even happening.
10. The Time Given to Us
In Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics,
published in 2019 from the text of his Reith Lectures earlier that year,
Jonathan Sumption concluded with this dark and, in hindsight, prophetic
warning:
‘Prophets are usually wrong. But one thing I will prophesy. We
will not recognise the end of democracy if it comes. Advanced
democracies are not overthrown. There are no tanks on the streets, no
sudden catastrophes, no brash dictators or braying mobs. Instead, their
institutions are imperceptibly drained of everything that once made them
democratic. The labels will still be there, but will no longer describe
the contents. The facade will still stand, but there will be nothing
behind it. The rhetoric of democracy will be unchanged, but it will be
meaningless. And the fault will be ours.’
When this crisis started, I think most people were genuinely
terrified of the virus. Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know
that, unless you’re over 70 and suffering from cancer or some other
life-threatening health condition, COVID-19 holds no danger for you. Or
should we say, based on the number of people under 60 without a
pre-existing health condition whose deaths have been attributed to
COVID-19, it holds about the same danger as death from falling from or
on stairs and steps. So for some time now, the COVID-faithful have tried
to cover their earlier fears with declarations of altruism about
‘saving granny’ and other Government-invented excuses for their
behaviour. But the fear is still there, and it’s growing. But the fear
now is not of a virus with a fatality rate equivalent to one of the more
severe seasons of influenza. The fear is that that what many people
have been saying since the beginning is true: that this is a
manufactured crisis, and that to pull it off means a collaboration of
the most powerful governments and corporations in the world to create
the totalitarian nightmare we’re beginning to see take shape. And it’s
this that is terrifying everyone into compliance.
Between a future that will surpass the worst dystopias of science
fiction and a viral pandemic that will threaten us for the rest of our
lives, the overwhelming majority of people in the UK have chosen to
believe in the latter, no matter the absence of evidence for doing so.
The extraordinary violence with which the COVID-faithful respond to
anything that threatens to dispel this illusion is testament to the
strength of their fears. And in a way, I don’t blame them. I wish we
were facing something as mild as a civilisation-threatening virus
requiring nothing more than mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing,
contact tracing, immunity passports and compulsory vaccination to defeat
it or even hold it at bay. ‘Just wear the mask!’, as we are told with
increasing desperation by those desperate to believe it will do
something to stop this terror. But the truth that the majority of people
are refusing to believe is that what we’re facing, what is happening
right now, and which will only get worse in the future, is far worse.
And that really is terrifying.
Recently, I was out drinking with a friend in Peckham. As night fell
the mist rolled in, the streets were deserted, the parks cleared, those
with a reasonable excuse to have left them returned to their homes, the
headlights from the cars dimmed, and the moon rose in a ripple of
clouds. I stopped in a supermarket to warm my hands in the heater at the
entrance, then we finished a flask of whisky outside the library. The
cycle home along the canal and through the park was the equal of any
scene from Bladerunner. It’s a strange, alien world out there,
populated by automatons emerging from Schwab’s dream of the fusion of
humans and digital technology, biology and artificial intelligence:
faceless, expressionless, incapable of independent thought, apparently
without memory of anything they knew about the world before this crisis,
obedient to the commands from the outsourced brains in the tracking
devices they call ‘smartphones’. The world we thought we lived in has
been stripped away, and the shambles it has revealed is what we truly
are as a nation, perhaps as a civilisation. It’s like every billboard
and advert has been torn down, and the slave workshop of production
behind it has been exposed. The gravediggers of history are upon us, and
the smell of decay is everywhere.
Judging by the masked faces in the supermarkets in London, even
allowing for the increased obedience of the population in the capital,
I’d guess about 90 per cent of the people in this country are still in
stern denial about what is happening, that they still believe this vast
upheaval really is in response to a virus, that the complete overthrow
of everything we knew and thought unchangeable in our lives and society
is merely temporary, and that if we just continue to obey what the
Government tells us to do — just a little while longer, until Easter, or
summer, or the year after that; if we just take the vaccine, wear a
mask at all times, upload our biometric data into our tracking devices
every week, produce a digital health passport on demand, and all the
other programmes of the UK biosecurity state — then one day we’ll go
back to that world that no longer exists. Like belief in an afterlife in
which all our sins will be forgiven, it must be comforting to live
under such a delusion.
But the truth of the world is otherwise. The truth is, that world is
over. The truth is that we’re already in a world that is far worse than
the disaster we were sleep-walking into before this crisis; that the
totalitarian nightmare that is already upon us, even though most of us
don’t know it, is our future, and that it will only get worse. The truth
is that with every day that passes, while we sit obediently at home
waiting patiently for our freedoms to be returned, the building blocks
of our prison are being laid around, between and within us, and that
there is nothing within our current political and legal system to stop
it. There may have been, once, a long time ago; but the institutional
structures and political will that might have prevented this disaster
have been stripped away and hollowed out by 40 years of neoliberalism.
All we have to do now is decide what to do with the time that has
been given us. That time starts now, yesterday, a year ago, a decade
ago, with the turn of the millennium, starting tomorrow. It is the time
of now, and try as we might to refuse its presence, it is all around us,
as palpable as the life we once lived and are now forbidden from
living. Recognising this truth, acknowledging the force of the virtual
reality that has usurped the world we thought we knew, standing up and
facing it instead of cowering in fear, is the first step in resisting
and not collaborating in the violence of its vast deception — even if
that means no more than refusing to participate in the murder of truth
on which it is being built.
I’m not alone, of course, in recognising this, and our numbers are
growing as the biosecurity state rises up, enclosing us in a prison that
even the COVID-faithful may one day be forced to acknowledge. I agree
with Klaus Schwab. We’re in the midst of the greatest changes to our
society and ourselves since the First Industrial Revolution nearly two
centuries ago; but it’s to anything but the Brave New World to which he
assures us we’re heading. To the contrary, we’re being inducted into a
technological totalitarianism which, as I’ve written before, will make
those of the Twentieth Century look like crude prototypes in comparison.
Unless we stop this now — through civil disobedience to coronavirus
programmes and regulations, through resistance to their enforcement and
normalisation, and ultimately through overthrowing and replacing the
political system that has allowed this to happen — the rest of our lives
will be lived according to systems and technologies of surveillance and
control the like of which even now we can’t imagine, and the lives of
our children will be many times worse.
Minerva’s owl has taken wing. The streets of Bladerunner’s abandoned
planet look comforting beside the strangeness of Peckham on a winter’s
evening under lockdown. What terrors, what horrors, what unimagined
shapes have been so rapidly assumed by that dull world we so recently
inhabited. How quickly all that was solid has melted into air, all we
once held sacred has been profaned — and by our own hands. But when will
we be compelled to face with sober senses the real conditions of our
life, our real relations to each other? Because it’s to their reality,
and not the conspiracy theories of our impotence or the fantasy of
return to a world that no longer exists, that resistance to this
nightmare will awaken.
Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing
Further reading by the same author:
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis
Our Default State: Compulsory Vaccination for COVID-19 and Human Rights Law
Bowling for Pfizer: Who’s Behind the BioNTech Vaccine?
Five Stories Under Lockdown
Bread and Circuses: Who’s Behind the Oxford Vaccine for COVID-19?
The Betrayal of the Clerks: UK Intellectuals in the Service of the Biosecurity State
Bonfire of the Freedoms: The Unlawful Exercise of Powers conferred by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984
When the House Burns: Giorgio Agamben on the Coronavirus Crisis
The Infection of Science by Politics: A Nobel Laureate and Biophysicist on the Coronavirus Crisis
The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 2. Normalising Fear)
The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 1. Programmes and Regulations)
The Science and Law of Refusing to Wear Masks: Texts and Arguments in Support of Civil Disobedience
Lockdown: Collateral Damage in the War on COVID-19
The State of Emergency as Paradigm of Government: Coronavirus Legislation, Implementation and Enforcement
Manufacturing Consensus: The Registering of COVID-19 Deaths in the UK
Giorgio Agamben and the Bio-Politics of COVID-19
Good Morning, Coronazombies! Diary of a Bio-political Crisis Event
Coronazombies! Infection and Denial in the United Kingdom
Language is a Virus: SARs-CoV-2 and the Science of Political Control
Sociology of a Disease: Age, Class and Mortality in the Coronavirus Pandemic
COVID-19 and Capitalism
