The Three Way Battle of the Pandemic
The lesson covid has been teaching. (Or, you could see this as my covid notes #11, if you’ve read those.)
It gets to be a cliche to say that the pandemic is entering a new phase. But in the developed countries, with a majority of the populations now vaxxed up, the dynamic has changed. The situation in the undeveloped world, mostly unvaccinated, is another story which I will touch on further into this.
This event has played out long enough that it is possible to draw some conclusions about what has really been going on. If you start with a right understanding of the political realities of the world, of the USA, of Canada, and local governments, then you can even get something close to the right conclusions. The disinformation, the agnotology going on these days is so intense that figuring it all out requires some time and serious brainwork, but the internet when used right is still a wonderful tool.
Definitions
It is impossible to define precisely the various power complexes which influence events in different places in the world. Most of the world is still more or less under the sway of global capitalism or globalism, which in turn has its own factions within it. There are several countries which are outside of this domain and have their own covid stories.
The domain of global capitalism includes the developed world and the underdeveloped world, the continuance of the European and American imperialism of previous centuries. They are the former imperial powers and the former colonies. The former have monopolized vaccine production and are now mostly vaccinated. The latter cannot get vaccines and are mostly unvaccinated.
I am living in the developed world, the privileged world. Here in Canada we have done better than most countries at controlling the covid virus. This is because we good little Canadians have, still, a level of trust in government that allows compliance without strongly coercive measures. Our federal government has been probably the most aggressive on earth about scooping up available vaccine supplies, exacerbating shortages in underdeveloped lands.
Our biggest impediment has been the decentralized nature of government here. Several right wing provincial and local governments have impeded pandemic measures recommended by federal government and by competent public health administrators. The way this has played out is a good illustration of the three forces which are at work in helping or hindering the pandemic response in the developed world.
The Three Sides
At play have been industrial capitalism, financial capitalism, and civil society. To keep the political science lecture as short and simple as possible; the former own industrial production and demand an uninterrupted stream of profits. Toward this they want the biggest possible human herd of workers, they want them working all out all the time, and they want the herd growing.
Finance Capitalism controls the issue of money and focusses on owning property and the most lucrative businesses. Their revenue sources do not depend on keeping workers working. Slowing things down for awhile does not bother them. They would actually prefer there were less people in the world.
Some prominent members of global financial capitalism are invested in vaccine production. Some have been accused of doctoring their vaccines to produce infertility in women in some underdeveloped countries, and even among the poor of some developed countries. Some of these accusations have been proven in courts in various parts of the world.
Many members and sycophants of these factions of the ruling caste are really hostile to the idea there is even such a thing as civil society. This is the caste of normal humans with some real intelligence, character, and competence, who actually keep civilization going. They are the planners, the managers, the scientists, the engineers and, oh yes, the epidemiologists and public health administrators.
Good government means government by civil society in a symbiotic relationship with the public, mediated by a process of real democracy. In a crisis the appropriate experts take control of dealing with it. Government thus serves the public need and is under its control.
What we usually have is government which serves the interests of an oligarchy, a ruling class. As said above, the main types of oligarchy are financial and industrial capitalism. These despise the public and civil society, but depend totally on their expertise and their work.
The Pandemic Responses of the Main Socio-Political Actors.
The reactions of these three factors to the pandemic are this; the industrial capitalists refuse to see it as a problem in itself. They are the kind of people who see such a thing as a culling of the weak and useless. They are enraged that it causes a reduction in work and profit and an increase in government infrastructure and expense.
The financial capitalists are the people who never want to let a good crisis go to waste. Lockdowns and economic slowdowns, and vaccination programs, can all be turned to their advantage. They would love for covid to become a permanent feature.
Civil society ends up left to responsibly managing the crisis. It must attempt to gain the confidence of the public, in the face of various misinformation campaigns from oligarchic factions and sub factions, in order to carry out a sensible public health response to the pandemic.
The Dynamic Created by These Responses.
The pandemic comes. Civil society attempts, despite the severe cheapjacking of the public health and emergency management systems forced by capitalism, to carry out normal pandemic measures. These should not be hard to implement; the management of quarantine, and of backward and forward contact tracing, have been well studied over centuries and often well applied.
Incompetent right wing provincial and local governments, aligned to industrial capital, shove the health and emergency systems and their qualified people out of the way and then proceed to make a complete mess out of pandemic management.
Financial Capitalism pretends to support civil society efforts, but not in effective ways. It supports pandemic relief measures which prevent serious public disorder and disturbance of the revenue flow from mortgages and rents. It promotes the rapid development and deployment of vaccines, but only the ones they control and only to developed countries.
Industrial capitalism is rabid about covid. It refuses to accept it as a problem. It keeps talking about “forcing the economy back open.” It is hysterical about the increase in public debt, and any expansion of the government infrastructure that might be caused by pandemic measures.
Private industrial capitalism does not deal well with any kind of shock. It simply shuts down if it cannot make enough profit. Then it has a lot of trouble starting up again. It does not know how to pause for a few weeks or months while a quarantine takes effect.
So, we have had a similar cycle in most developed countries. The virus rises in the population. The hospital system is about to collapse. Civil society and reality finally convinces government to implement quarantine. It is strange why the term “lockdown” is used, with such harsh connotations, like we are all in a prison, playing into right wing libertarian propaganda against public health measures.
The spread of covid is stopped but no contact tracing is implemented so the time won by the “lockdown” is wasted. A growing split develops in society; on one hand those who have no choice but to work despite their employers refusal to apply proper virus suppression measures. On the other, those who can work from home or in conditions that limit vaccine spread.
Financial Capitalism and its Liberal and Socialist political fronts insure enough support to critical and vulnerable workers and businesses to prevent serious collapse. It supports civil society to keep the hospitals staffed. It does not back civil society to seriously challenge right wing government and take control of pandemic management.
Vaccines begin to be deployed. Industrial capitalism decides that this is the cheap technological fix they think solves all problems, and the economy can reopen. There is another needless fight as civil society struggles to get vaccine mandates into place so the pandemic can really finally end. The anti vaccination crowd is funded by the same people who fought against quarantine; industrial capitalists with libertarian ideologies.
Industrialists fear that vaccine mandates and “passports” might again interfere with full reopening of the economy. Once again, they are too short sighted and dogmatic to consider that the slowdown of the economy might have been shortened by doing things right in the first place. The economy will never really ‘reopen’ as it was before; many businesses will not recover, and people’s attitudes to work have changed.
In the end, civil society is burned out and disillusioned. Doctors and nurses quit in droves. This may eventually lead to a good end when it is clear that the only way to get them back is; serious systemic reform to insure that they have in future the resources to work with, and ring fencing the public health system from political interference.
Financial capitalism is altogether pleases with the results of the pandemic. Industrial capitalism is weakened. The pandemic has been used to tighten the NeoMalthusian social control the Financialists want.
The Developing World
By time the pandemic is settling down in the developed world, it is just getting going in the developing world, the third world, the “global south.” Civil society collapses totally, which suits industrial capitalism until it discovers once again that it also depends on civil society and the infrastructure it runs.
Financial capitalism prevents the effective deployment of vaccines in these lands. Good vaccines from Russia and China cannot be used. Only a small elite in these countries gets vaccinated.
The best thing for those financialists involved in “big Pharma” is that the virus becomes endemic, living on in these populations. This ensures that new variants, new mutations, will constantly emerge. Thus, there will be a permanents market for the vaccines which were developed in universities with public funds, but which somehow they have got control of for no money.
Outside the Sphere of Globalism
The results of the pandemic in various polities outside this sphere, or with an unclear alignment, are interesting. The two big demons in globalist propaganda are Russia and China. The latter has handled the pandemic brilliantly, the former very badly.
Russia was the first country to deploy a vaccine, Sputpik V, still one of the best. It has developed three other good vaxes. Yet it can’t get its people to take them; it has only a twenty five percent uptake and one of the worst per capita rates of infection.
There have been some very good and instructive analyses of how this happened. Basically, the Russian government decided to just leave everything up to the public. Every workplace, every store and restaurant, every person, was allowed to make its own rules.
Russia has had a history of authoritarian government which told everyone what to do in even the smallest things, backed up by harsh punishment. With a situation like covid, that was shown to not work. As students of mass psychology or organizational psychology will tell you, if you expect people to put up with great inconvenience, you have to convince them there is a real danger, and you know what you are doing.
Contrast this with China, where government did not clown around. They did things right from the start and after the first few months China has had no problems. Its economy is rolling along while almost every other country has had economic difficulties due to covid.
With every single new case that turns up, usually from someone coming I from abroad, a local quarantine is declared and a serious backwards and forwards contact trace is done. Other countries which have adopted this approach have had similar results. Some that started out with it and then were pressured into going off it have promptly developed a serious outbreak.
Most of these successful countries have been in east Asia. Australia and New Zealand have been curious cases. Culturally these are western countries and are locked into the globalist empire. They are “allied” with the United States although it is observed that they do not have much choice.
They are totally dependent economically on China. Yet China does not yet have the long range military power to protect them from the United States. The two countries are locked into the “five eyes” system of internal surveillance and political control, just as Canada is. Yet Chinas quiet but powerful and growing influence in these two polities is shown by the way the pandemic has been handled there.
To Conclude
It has also become a cliche in some circles to say the real pandemic is capitalism, but there is much truth in this. The entire idea of a public response to a public emergency is anathema to the libertarian ideology dominant among industrial capitalists. To financialists, a pandemic is just the kind of crisis they like to use to further their own agendas.
The danger here is that sooner or later another pandemic virus will emerge. Covid was actually pretty mild and should have been easy to control. Given the totally inadequate response to covid, a really bad one could wipe out a substantial part of the earth’s population, directly or through economic collapse and mass starvation.
As if the world does not already have enough reasons to move beyond capitalism, covid has given us one more. The good thing about covid is that it helps more people to see this. It points Canada toward government based on civil society, not by politicians and power servers for capitalist oligarchy.
If we are going to get through the rest of this century, public policy must be carried out by competent people put in place by truly democratic and meritocratic processes. The public sphere cannot be a battle ground for oligarchic interests.
I will develop this theme in subsequent blog posts. Watch for them.