We continue to publish texts produced as part of the FACB's internal discussion
on the protests against the measures taken by the authorities regarding theCoronavirus. Expect more on the topic. ---- The pandemic has changed societies
and economies globally, as well as the lives of each individual. These changes
vary according to latitude, but can be summarized and considered as a general
process. ---- Unprecedented debt ---- In the battle with Covid-19, governments
around the world are about to borrow more than ever before in modern history,
surpassing even the period of World War II.
From Germany to Japan, from Canada to China, the authorities took out huge loans
from central banks, which invested in measures to support business (in some
countries and workers) and protect the population and the economy from damage
caused by the pandemic.
At the same time, corporations, encouraged by unprecedented government support
for markets, are selling bonds like never before. In 2020 alone, global debt has
increased by $ 19.5 trillion. Data for 2021 are likely to deepen this trend even
further.
We can draw an interesting parallel with the financial crisis of 2008, when
governments used a similar scheme - pouring huge sums of money to save the
economy from the collapse of the financial sector. This debt was forced to pay
those who were not to blame for the crisis - the working class (including
pensioners, students and the unemployed) - in the form of measures to severely
restrict, freeze pensions and wages and reduce investment in public services,
which became known as "Austerity". There is hardly any doubt who will pay the
debt generated by the government's response to the pandemic. The inevitable
austerity will be introduced once the pandemic is over, when the economy returns
to normal. But while we wait for that to happen,
Information technology boom
The global pandemic has further accelerated the already accelerated pace of
digitalisation. This has affected all areas and its effects are mixed. On the one
hand, the digitalisation of public services is making them increasingly
accessible. On the other hand, digital education has exacerbated inequalities in
the education system and further marginalized children from poor families without
access to the Internet and computers. The rise of e-commerce worldwide has helped
accelerate the concentration of money and power in technology giants such as Amazon.
Social isolation
Prolonged lockdowns have paralyzed social life for months. Although with a proven
beneficial effect on the spread of the infection, social isolation has had an
extremely negative impact on the mental state of people, which has led to a
number of problems, including increasing domestic violence and exacerbation of
mental disorders among those predisposed to such. Lockdowns have also paralyzed
the organizational life of many political and trade union organizations, given
that online meetings cannot replace live meetings and mass events.
Panic and mass psychosis
The capitalist regime has shown its complete inability to manage a global crisis.
The state responded to the threat by panicking and began imposing indiscriminate
measures. In Bulgaria, this was clearly visible in the first days of the
pandemic, when with a single-digit number of new infections, the whole country
was blocked by a complete lockdown, while only a few months later with thousands
of new infections every day, not even basic measures were introduced. The
behavior of the authorities in the course of the pandemic passed smoothly from
panic to petty accounting. Whether there will be measures and what they will be
depended (and still depends) more on the immediate material interests of the
various business lobbies in the country than on the real need to protect the
health of the population. Capitalist logic has also poisoned the global
initiative to develop and distribute an effective vaccine. It turned out that all
the scientific capacity of mankind is concentrated in a handful of private
corporations, which used their hegemony in this difficult situation to make
fabulous profits by patenting the newly discovered vaccines and thus limiting
their spread. The results? Pfizer Bayontech sold $ 21.5 billion in just one year,
doubling the value of the giant corporation and making both its owners (who are
husband and wife) multibillionaires in just a few months. Modern is expected to
realize between 18 and 20 billion dollars in 2021, and the value of the company
increased by an incredible + 372%. The portfolio of the company's CEO, Stepan
Bansel, who owns 9% of the shares, swelled to $ 5 billion. At the same time, the
private patent on vaccines and the market principle of their distribution have
led to appalling inequalities in access to vaccination worldwide. While in rich
countries the average vaccination rate reaches 60%, in poor countries this
percentage is only 1%.
Boom of conspiracy theories
The global pandemic is an unprecedented event for our generation and extremes in
public response are to be expected. For some, the fear of a pandemic has
manifested itself in over-reaction, self-isolation, overstocking and paranoia. In
others, the fear was expressed in the denial of reality and the surrender of
conspiracy theories. This trend has been supported by several factors, some of
which are not directly related to the pandemic. On the one hand, the most obvious
are, such as the collapse of public education and information literacy of the
population.
But they are not enough to explain the spread of susceptibility to conspiratorial
thinking, which is by no means limited to uneducated marginals and middle-aged
people who have trouble navigating online.
An important, and perhaps key, factor in the current conspiracy explosion is the
growing distrust of institutions around the world. The last 40 years, marked by
the rise and peak of neoliberalism, have witnessed the complete emptying of the
content of the already façade democracy, with the traditional political clash
between left and right completely erased. Until the 1980s, although centrist, the
main parties clashed over issues of economic development, such as the opposition
between Keynesianism and monetarism in the postwar period. After the complete
victory of monetarism in the 1980s and the collapse of welfare states in the East
and the West, even this reformist political clash was erased and replaced by a
cultural clash - for or against gay rights, for or against abortion, and so on. .
At the same time, market reforms have stripped the state of its artificially
grafted social obligations and exposed its main function - repressive. This
development naturally led to a pervasive collapse in trust in traditional
parties, official institutions and the state as a whole. But this collapse of
confidence comes at a time of unprecedented working-class weakness worldwide.
Thus the rift between societies on the one hand and the state and the capitalist
economy on the other is not realized in a revolutionary upsurge, but finds a vent
in populism, nationalism and conspiracy theories. Their growing popularity,
especially during a pandemic, is fueled by the widespread misunderstanding of the
processes described in the above points of this statement. The concentration of
power and money in technology giants leads to fear of technology and
modernization, the lack of class analysis of global political and economic
processes leads to their explanation with a global conspiracy, and the fear and
lack of perspective - to antisocial behavior.
Dissatisfaction is controlled by nationalist, right-wing populist and religious
organizations, which play the counter-revolutionary role they have historically
always played - to divert analysis from class antagonisms and criticism of the
state and capitalism to easily digestible racist and conspiratorial explanations
for the crisis. Thus, in the unprecedented power of corporations like Pfizer and
Bayontech, society is harnessed to see a secret conspiracy of some abstract world
elite, instead of a logical consequence of the capitalist development of world
politics and economics in recent decades. While class analysis would undoubtedly
lead millions of people to see the empowerment of corporations as a historical
stage in the class struggle in direct connection with their particular experience
as workers and would encourage them to act against the capitalist system,
conspiracy theories confuse people with crazy ideas about secret conspiracies and
rulers of the world, which detach them from reality and struggle and push them
into a dead end. The principle of the organization of religious mechanisms of
power, whose "mysteries" are available only to the initiates, states: "No secret
gives greater power than a secret which does not exist, because it cannot be
revealed." In the same way, there is no stronger enemy than the non-existent,
because he can never be defeated. The boom in conspiracy theories is a direct
expression of the victory of liberal individualism, which erodes societies and
educates the individual in anti-social behavior. The principle of the
organization of religious mechanisms of power, whose "mysteries" are available
only to the initiates, states: "No secret gives greater power than a secret which
does not exist, because it cannot be revealed." In the same way, there is no
stronger enemy than the non-existent, because he can never be defeated. The boom
in conspiracy theories is a direct expression of the victory of liberal
individualism, which erodes societies and educates the individual in anti-social
behavior. The principle of the organization of religious mechanisms of power,
whose "mysteries" are available only to the initiates, states: "No secret gives
greater power than a secret which does not exist, because it cannot be revealed."
In the same way, there is no stronger enemy than the non-existent, because he can
never be defeated. The boom in conspiracy theories is a direct expression of the
victory of liberal individualism, which erodes societies and educates the
individual in anti-social behavior.
The crisis from an anarchist perspective
Anarchists must not allow themselves to be carried away by populism and
conspiracy theories. We must stand firm for all measures to protect human life
and health during a pandemic, and attack the profiteering and systemic problems
that have already led to the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands. At the
same time, we cannot turn a blind eye to the state's authoritarian approach to
imposing anti-epidemic measures, and we must oppose any attempt by the state to
use the state of emergency to militarize public control and the police.
Particularly harmful in this respect are the measures for compulsory vaccination
of workers under threat of dismissal, which are not only repressive and
authoritarian, but also have the opposite effect in the fight against the spread
of the infection. Many people wonder Is the state so concerned about people's
health that it resorts to such measures? The answer is no. Mass vaccination is
without a doubt the most effective way to deal with the infection and protect
ourselves and our loved ones. But behind the mass vaccination campaign organized
around the world is not a concern for our health, but purely economic interests.
The state and the capitalist interests it represents have an interest in
returning the economy to its normal functioning. This cannot happen without a
mass vaccination campaign to control the infection as quickly as possible. But is
there an alternative to the authoritarian approach and compulsory vaccination?
The answer is again no, not in modern capitalist society. The state is a satrap
not only by vocation but also by necessity. The state authorities have no choice
but to use coercion, precisely because of the people's complete distrust of the
institutions on the one hand and the widespread individualism and anti-social
behavior nurtured among the people by this same neoliberal state for decades.
Thus the state and the capitalist system find themselves trapped in the effects
of their own policies, which force them to expose their repressive nature. The
state has not just lost its ability to persuade, but on the contrary - any
information that comes from state or supranational institutions is rejected a
priori by ordinary people. In some cases, this would be healthy skepticism, but
in the context of a pandemic, it is social suicide. The average citizen is
sufficiently exploited,
The average person, the ordinary worker, was cut off from his organizations and
from his role as a political entity, producing his own analysis and pursuing his
collective political interests as part of the working class. In the place of the
worker appeared a depoliticized, individualized being, a product of the
Transition, struggling under the also individualized and depoliticized notion of
"citizen." This citizen is detached from his community and from the very idea of
the existence of a community of interests and is provided as an object, not a
subject of politics (and economics). The citizen is the object of political
campaigns, in the same way he is the object of marketing ones. Both consumer and
product. Characteristic of this product of the transition is the binary thinking
developed as a result of the complete depoliticization and the dominant liberal
individualism ”. This binary thinking does not allow for multi-layered analysis
and in-depth insight into political issues. It is thanks to him that skepticism
towards the state and official institutions turns into sheepish trust in casual
online charlatans.
As with any liberal movement, the class composition of the anti-wax movement is
dominated by small businessmen, but the crowd is a colorful clowning that
includes New Age hippies, libertarians, far-right organizations, and socially
disoriented middle-aged housewives.
The campaign against vaccines is completely dominated by the neoliberal context
in which it takes place. It is essentially liberal in the spirit of the classic
liberal campaigns, which focus on the individual consumer, and are expressed in
the field of consumerism on the principle of "vote with your money" - "I will not
shop in this store because it does not offer organic products. ”For example.
Similarly, the denial of vaccination as a form of boycott emphasizes individual
choice and personal integrity, while rejecting social responsibility as part of
the conspiracy against the individual. It is no coincidence that the anti-wax
movement plagiarizes its slogans from popular liberal protest movements, such as
the slogan of the abortion movement - "My body, My Choice!"
Anti-vaccination is above all a rebellion against public health as such. It is no
coincidence that the leaders of the protest are, on the one hand, religious NGOs
that have been attacking the social system and public education for years, and on
the other, far-right parties and organizations such as Vazrazhdane, whose
political agenda prioritizes public health privatization. At the same time, the
private anti-wax industry generates tens of millions of dollars from gullible
people, paying for "alternative health consultations" and treatment with
dangerous veterinary drugs.
Both the state response to the pandemic and the conspiratorial movements below
are the result of the helplessness of the capitalist system to mobilize the
masses to deal with collective problems. This inability is rooted in the
individualistic foundation of capitalism, which for more than 300 years has been
waging war not only against the workers but also against the idea of the
existence of a society in general. The conspiracy movements and their calls for
salvation singly fit perfectly into the capitalist campaign against society.
What is the alternative? Many people are tempted to speculate on "how a classless
/ communist / anarchist or whatever alternative to today's society would cope
with such a pandemic." I personally do not like setting such abstract challenges
and embarking on empty theorizing and drawing utopias. Suffice it to say that in
a communist classless society, organized on a free and democratic principle, the
question of the authoritarian application of anti-epidemic measures would not be
on the agenda at all, as the public institutions themselves would be built on a
voluntary basis from the bottom up. therefore, they would enjoy full public
trust, without which they would be impossible. In today's capitalist society,
there is no alternative. States have no choice but to use coercion,
Some people on the left are trying to find potential in resistance movements, but
I think that's a fantasy. The mobilizations against the measures are dominated by
small businessmen united by their individual material interests and angry
apolitical masses united by their own disorientation. The small businessman
expects the privileges that have been granted to the big players, as he sees
himself as part of the "business community", but has been left to bear the
effects of the crisis (almost) on an equal footing with the workers. This is the
reason for the anger of small entrepreneurs, who form the core of protests
against measures and vaccines. But apart from the class composition, what
determines the reactionary nature of the protests is that the movement is based
on the opposition of individual rights to general well-being.
Anti-wax protests are an expression of a combination of anger, disorientation and
lack of perspective. This makes them the ideal environment for the far right. So
the fact that the far right dominates the protests is neither a coincidence nor
the result of insufficient activity by workers' organizations. By joining these
protests, the left can only be marginalized and serve as a useful idiot and a
mass of conservative political forces drawing on the protests. The period that
will give the left room for expression will come when governments ask the working
class to pay for the crisis, imposing austerity.
Eugene
https://www.anarchy.bg/
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