“La « guerre au virus » est une guerre qui nous est menée”
Manifeste Conspirationniste, 2021
Some of us said early on that the rupture presented by the Covid regime – a rupture within life as we knew it – was only the foreplay to something much more sinister. We caught ourselves as extras in a movie about our world going crazy in real time, and yet it seemed that the goal was not yet achieved. Cui bono?, we asked. Is it about control? Definitely. The development of a neofeudal society of digital slaves? Most certainly. But that the elites would stick to the screenplay so meticulously, even rushing the timeline, was surprising even to the most pessimistic of us.
The WHO, for example, recently appointed Susan Michie who earlier lived out her violent fantasies by proclaiming that “masks will be here forever” as the new Chair of its “Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights”. A psychologist by profession with no medical training to her record but making up for the lack by specialising on manufacturing consent and manipulating behaviour, would soon be “nudging” states, so the WHO’s plans go, into rigorous vaccination, masking, and lockdown regimens. A professor at UCL and member of the British Communist Party, that is, a paradigm Trotskyist, Susan Michie channels a particular legacy to be welded into technocratic elite institutions like the WHO. In an interview with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers[1], Michie responded to accusations of her political leaning purposefully streamlining public discourse and opinion towards a certain direction. But while she claims that “My politics are not anything to do with my scientific advice”, she simultaneously offers a whiff of the main ideology that her ilk – unelected leaders whose only purpose is to make the coming legal and factual disenfranchisement of individuals look expedient – promotes, and that is collectivism.
In the history of radical left thought, “collectivism” and “the collective” were always revered as desirable goals for a future “communist” society, notwithstanding the fact that both Marx and Engels despised nothing as much as herd mentality, or rather, revered nothing as much as collectivism’s opposite, individual freedom. The emphasis is on the individual human being, a concrete universal, not on particular freedoms such as that of private property or privilege. In fact, individual freedom was so essentially ingrained into human nature for Marx that it was, in fact, tantamount, and not just “one property among many” of the individual. Freedom, he said in relation to Prussian censorship laws, “is so much the essence of Man that even its adversaries realise (verwirklichen) it, by fighting its reality.” For Marx, there is no escape from the political project that would realise freedom as the telos of human existence: communism. It would always come back with a vengeance to those who deny its centrality to the political project proper. But Marx’s communism has not only little to do with that of the British Communist Party (or any other left-wing party, communist or other, for that matter). It is its opposite. This would already be clear from the fact that a BCP member holds a cadre position in one of the world’s most powerful capitalist institutions. Michie, however, also needs to sell the idea of subjugation, which she, in accordance with Alex Callinicos, the complete editorial board of New Left Review, University professors, or any of the gazillions of Trotskyist pseudo-radical splinter parties, calls “collectivism” and of course fully endorses. She makes the case, as UnHerd put it, “that the new science of Public Health is collectivist by nature, seeking to provide group-wide solutions to health challenges, and so it fundamentally downplays individual rights.” Make no mistake – downplaying individual rights is to be sold to us as a great thing, the consequence of 28 months of Newspeak in which the concept of solidarity, which is always being dragged up, stands for the exact opposite of what it means. Michie:
“What I don’t see a lot of amongst my colleagues maybe, but certainly the media, and especially the papers that you mentioned, would be much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, rather than taking a sort of more collective population approach. But the reality is that this pandemic has shown everybody that no individual is an island, we are very interconnected, and no one community or no one socio-economic group within society can think that they can solve it for themselves and protect themselves, because it is not like that.”
Note the blend of cheesy Simon and Garfunkel lyrics with the appeal for Orwellian dimensions of totalitarian control. The individual became a public nuisance because of a terrible idea of “society” on the left, in which “our bodies do not belong to us”, as Sunetra Gupta, a staunch socialist, recently told me in person. So much for a “socialism” that is indeed no longer distinguishable from its national form. Less Strasser, more Goebbels, and his talk of “Volkskörper”, where not individuals own their own body, but the “Volk” (the People) owns a collective “body”[1]. And so much also for the political horizon of “lockdown skeptics” – Gupta was one of the signees of the Great Barrington Declaration – who only have a problem with “authoritarianism” if it’s not feasible in the Global South.
Gupta’s claim reminded me of German politicians who were firing up social division with vaccination mandates and claimed that “collective freedom”, whatever that is, ranked higher than individual freedom. As said Hendrik Wüst, member of the CDU: "It's about showing the vaccinated … that we won't allow people to continue to put their individual freedom above the freedom of society as a whole.” What is the freedom of society as a whole? Correct – a society of slaves. Such nonsense used to be the stuff of German legendary satirist (and only) late night talk host Harald Schmidt whose Hitler impersonations made Bruno Ganz look like Maya Angelou.[1]
Downplaying individual rights is a hard trend in the political class from the hard to the centre-left. Since Corona, natural law - values intrinsic and inalienable to human nature, such as the right to dignity, life and liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, recognition as a legal person, the prohibition of torture and slavery etc. – is likely to be increasingly levelled against the executive power of the state, at the expense of the legislative and the judicial. Not only Michie’s totalitarian vision, but many an op-ed in high-ranked educational and political journals and papers serves to train us for the upcoming historical stage (if it were up to them) of the abolition of the individual civil subject and its replacement with the digital slave. One of these, the Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, recently featured an essay[2] whose perfidy consists in passing off its totalitarian neoliberal agenda as a critique of neoliberalism – and that is somewhat of a novelty in mainstream discourse. (Admittedly, it is not new in radleft circles who could not have identified the neoliberalism of the pharmaceutical regime if their life depended on it. And it didn’t. To the contrary).
The author of said article, a Berlin Free University professor called Philipp Lepenies, is so excited about replacing the theory of neoliberalism with totalitarian real-life neoliberalism that he crashes head-on into a wall of incoherent half-truths and lies. Like Michie, he criticises neoliberalism for destroying the sense of “community” and “cohesion” and from there derives the hare-brained and factually false thesis that neoliberalism suffers from “state phobia". Pace Pinochet, Reagan’s and Thatcher’s wars against unions, and WTO member China’s state totalitarianism.[3] Detached from the reality of neoliberal policies, which always were and still are only enacted by states and their governments, Lepenies claims that
“[what] the neoliberal worldview produces … is not an idea of community and togetherness. It is the world view of self-sufficient individuals who are only connected to each other through the functioning of the market. Hence Margaret Thatcher's provocative assertion that there is no society, but only individuals. It is an expression of an intensifying extreme individualisation with little regard for the next person, the general public and the harmful effects of one's own consumptive actions…”
Therefore, we must not only rely on the state to tell us what to do, but obediently accept when the state demands that we renounce, have bans imposed on us, and submit ourselves to the state’s “prohibitive” mission:
“The rejection of prohibition and renunciation, the idea of the illegitimacy of state regulation of behaviour and "paternalism", spring from such a world view of disconnectedness and opposition. Good politics, legitimate politics, is then solely a politics of default [i.e. the state is not allowed to interfere in private matters]. The Leviathan is no longer a structure that provides support and security for all, but only the monster state that tries to undermine individual freedom from the outside. Or as Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, put it so wonderfully: the state is the monster that is breathing down your neck and stepping on your toes. Neoliberalism is thus characterised by a pronounced phobia of the state.”
Laugh as you will, but the newest discursive psy-op – neoliberalism bad, so we need a more rigorous one – is indeed quite successful. Because the idea of the ruling class, i.e., the left, are indeed the ruling ideas, the critique of neoliberalism in the name of the “collective” and an ideology of renunciation, prohibitions, scare tactics and top-down decisions by the executive branch of state power is to be welcomed by “us”. But, as Professor Lepenies laments, there is still too much resistance to this vision:
“The fact that citizens could also be persuaded by means of coercion (sic) to get a life-saving vaccination in order to protect the lives of all - or at least that those defiantly unvaccinated could be sanctioned - did not seem to be an option...Instead, it was striking how strongly and how early the federal government of the time made it clear that even in this extreme situation it valued the autonomous freedom of decision of the individual as the highest good and, for example, ruled out compulsory vaccination from the outset…”
“Federal government still hesitant to introduce fascism”. Quelle horreur. (As an aside, in the endless list of Orwellianisms, “persuaded by means of coercion” is probably my favourite).
So, what is new? When, in 2011, a scientific advisory board of the federal government published an early version of Schwab’s The Great Reset, a thick document called "World in Transition - Social Contract for a Great Transformation", it was thoroughly rejected in public opinion. The “Frankfurter Allgemeine” bashed it as having a “strange understanding of democracy”, the “Welt” rejected its “eco-dictatorship”. But Lepenies himself makes no mystery of his silent satisfaction that these rejections are no longer pervasive in 2022. Public opinion since Corona has shifted into growing acceptance of open dictatorship, if only to keep the unkempt “Querdenker” away from social life. Also new is the tendency that democracy is no longer a desirable value, freedom falsely “discovered” as a “neoliberal” trope, which it of course never was. That is the specific novelty and perversion of now being governed by a left-wing ruling class: that the founding idea of Marxist communism – a society of free individuals – can now be marketed as “neoliberal”, and with it, a free and emancipated society discredited forever. With that logic, “anti-capitalist” leftists will manage the shift towards a society of control and totalitarianism better than neocon warmongers or Mrs. Thatcher herself ever could.
The time, for them, is ripe. But so is ours. Because if they cut off our electricity and stick N95ers on children’s faces, we will resist – some sooner, some later. In history, as Hannah Arendt assessed, we saw that, the more oppressive the powers that be, the greater the struggle for freedom. We’ll be back with a fucking vengeance.
Cover boy: Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore (video still for “Master and Servant”, 1984)
[1] Check this out, even if you don’t speak German (trust me)
[2] https://www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2022/august/verzicht-als-erste-buergerpflicht-gegen-die-politik-des-laissez-faire
[3] See also George Hoare’s and my essay “It’s Alive”:
[1] Also very popular in fascist Japan that referred to itself as “Kokutai” (National body).
“persuaded by means of coercion” Lol if they weren’t authoritarian jagoffs they’d be great comedians. Thank you for speaking out against this fake leftist elitist bullshit, we need more voices like yours always
The British Communist Party have never been Trotskyist, you are perhaps confusing them with the CPGB/Weekly Worker group. If anything the former party are a descendant of the Stalinist communist parties.