https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2021/12/23/the-omicron-death-wave-part-two/
https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2021/12/20/the-omicron-death-wave/
In between Christmas and New Years seems like a good time to conclude this line of thinking and series of three articles. I can get on to other topics in the New Year. These two pieces have been well read and perhaps this readership will continue with me as I get into these related topics.
The first part was about how we got to this point. What was the history of the pandemic up until now, the forces that prevented it being efficiently dealt with. Read it here.
The second part was about what the consequences will be moving forward. There is no real way to predict the future but it is a good bet that the pandemic will continue until the forces of oligarchy become afraid of it going further and take the proper measures to end it. At the end of the pandemic life is likely to be a lot worse for most people than before. Read it here.
There are other scenarios to be considered going forward. One is that the subordinated classes could coordinate world wide to take down governments serving a narrow elite and force an end to the covid plague by forcing an end to the capitalism plague. The most effective vaccines would begin to be produced in sufficient quantities and distributed all over the world freely and efficiently.
That is a fantasy for the world’s Trotskyites, but it is not likely to happen that way. It is a marker post for what is within the range of what could be possible. The real responses of the working classes will be less decisive and coordinated.
However, serious interventions from below are starting to happen in countries where the population is being hit harder or are generally better at doing that sort of thing. A serious uprising will not happen first in quiet Canada, where people tend still to believe what they are told, and that government is really looking out for them.
Some countries are going to collapse, not just due to covid, but also due to processes of disintegration which were at work before covid but are accelerated by it. How hard countries are hit seems to have little to do with their relative wealth or the exact type of political system. Some of the wealthiest countries have had the most deaths per capita.
Africa has done well, despite a low vaccination rate. Latin America has done poorly. India has done poorly. China and most east asian countries have done well. The United States has done the worst. Europe, especially eastern Europe, has done badly.
The places where covid is likely to lead to a breakdown of the present order are the United States and the European Union. A discussion of the disintegration process of these two entities would fill a series of blogs by themselves. Both are unable to carry out counter-epidemic measures due to a breakdown of political authority and disintegration of public systems due to austerianism.
The decline of the USA began with the Austerian and Financialist drives under Reagan. It is now nearly bankrupt and still trying to start wars it cannot fight. Counterdemic measures are made impossible by the breakdown of the public health system and by the prevalence of antigovernment ideology.
This anti government libertarian ideology has been promoted by the industrial capitalists as a way of attacking the aims of the financial capitalists. These right wing forces seem to be winning the street fight against the phoney left forces put up by the financial elite. They have already had one dress rehearsal for a coup.
In Europe, economic decline dates from the launch of the Euro currency and the control of the economy by the Brussels bureaucracy, which dates from the turn of this century. The resistance to counterpandemic measures has come from right wing nationalist groups in the various nations. Their disconnected thinking ties covid with the European Union they want to break out of.
Briefly, in the worst hit countries resistance to the incompetent response to the pandemic gets tied up with resistance to the prevailing governance regimes and blames those governments for the pandemic. Right wing resistance is focussed on blocking counterpandemic, not on demanding it be done right. From there, of course, most of the phoney and ideological left gets turned to supporting wrong and incompetent measures from bad governments, as a way of fighting the right wing.
Counterintuitively, the countries with the best chances of defeating ‘herd immunity’ and ‘vaccine only’ and coming out of the pandemic in a better place, are the countries where the counterpandemic response has been relatively good, and the pandemic itself less severe. That is, countries like Canada. We even have the model of the Atlantic and territories governments, which have managed the pandemic very well.
The success of any infection rebellion would depend on its ability to stay focussed on the goal and not get side tracked into other agendas. That goal would be really mundane; to have the system which had been in place to deal with pandemics and other emergencies like this relaunched. It is supposed to be run by the national, provincial, and local medical officers of health (MOHs) and in a health crisis politicians are supposed to get out of the way.
We have a public health act and an emergency measures act in Canada. We have a constitution in the country with a notwithstanding clause, and a charter of rights which government is allowed to override for any reason which can be reasonably justified. The federal government has powers of reserve and disallowance over the province.
We can argue some other time about whether some of these powers have lapsed from disuse. We have needed them used. One of the most sorrowful things to reflect on in these years has been the failure of the incumbent prime minister to use these powers, considering what use his father would have made of them if such a crisis had occurred in his time.
To conclude, an infection rebellion would be mostly about forcing politicians out of the way who cannot do their jobs, or have the wrong idea about what their job is, and getting the right people’s asses into all the MOH chairs. From there it would be a fairly simple matter to end the pandemic in Canada. We could be as the few countries which have done it right; able to get off the endless rollercoaster and live normally within our borders.
Alas, to do this would require something which Canadians have never been very good at. Even nations which have a tradition of it have been unable to get it going in recent years. Why, is a topic for another blog, or ten.
This is, to engage in some serious civil disobedience. Given the way offensive austerian types are entrenched in our political processes, it may require some seriously uncivil disobedience for a prolonged period. The alternative is a great deal of unnecessary disease, death, and disability, lost potential and opportunity, and a loss of real freedoms, not imaginary ones.