Basic fucking common sense

Quinn the Eskimo Slobodian's "alternative worldview", the left's inversion of conspiracy and reality, and the real agenda of the vaccination regime

If you want to be able to understand how the dictatorship of capital works in this present world of ours, it sure helps to be a communist.

But it's interesting that leftists who love to talk about ‘capital’ on end in the most abstractly Spinozist and therefore meaningless terms (“capital is everywhere”, “capital has us in its grip”) never talk specifically about capital. In other words, they never concretise what the term means, neither in its relationship to labour, nor in its real enactment. You never hear a state-sponsored leftist, or a leftist by inclination, talk about Bill Gates, the richest landowner on the planet, or Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, who has secured a $ 10 billion computing deal with the Pentagon against Amazon, or Klaus Schwab, initiator of what we can safely call the most upfront and PR-rich restructuring scheme of neoliberal capital, The Great Reset©, for fear of being called a ‘conspiracy theorist’, as though stating the most obvious and obviously accessible facts and data - or simply reading Schwab's book of the same title -  were a big right-wing psy-op.

Instead, what you get on the left is someone like Quinn Slobodian. Slobodian, an apt executioner and representative of the PMC's center-left cynicism and disdain for people without a college degree, whose vocation naturally lies in impersonating a professor of history and writing for the The Guardian, dismisses the Great Reset as “the title of an airport book by the creative economy guru Richard Florida” and a slogan “increasingly popular among the anti-lockdown right” - move on, nothing to see here, folks. He continues:

“In its most implausible version, this conspiracy imagines that a global elite is using Covid-19 as an opportunity to roll out radical policies such as forced vaccinations, digital ID cards and the renunciation of private property.”[1]

In its most implausible version? What, then, in the world of Quinn Slobodian, is plausible? In the face of the latest decisions by the French, Italian, and German governments to shut the doors of restaurants, cafés, clubs, and entertainment facilities to everyone without a vaccination passport, and identification requirements for non-vaccinated caregivers, teachers, and childcare workers taking place at the time of writing, we are de facto dealing with forced vaccinations. And Quinn the Eskimo should not be putting up a straw man when he wants to make a point that is even less credible than the ‘missing credibility’ he finds in the Great Reset's testimonial, Prince Charles: for the renunciation of private property is not really an issue with the majority of anti-lockdown protestors on the streets of Paris, Rome, or Berlin.

But the PMC lackey has a simple and easy explanation for the public's suspicion of the unpredecented redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top during the pandemic  - or does he? “The great reset theory is nonsense, and will probably become a prime target for the many new research centres and initiatives studying “disinformation” that have mushroomed on university campuses since 2016”, contends Slobo, apparently without dying of shame at his own words.

In the face of Jeff Bezos amassing $ 86 billion US dollars in private wealth in the first months of 2020 alone, this dismissal of the great reset - which is a different name for managing inequality on a global scale by implementing new accumulation regimes, most prominently the Green New Deal and the wider applications of digitalisation - rings suspiciously hollow. You might even say it is reality-defying. Or, simply, quite ‘conspirational’, if by conspiracy we mean that reality is explained by an “alternative worldview” that helps to justify one's personal revenge fantasies (in this case, against lockdown critics), but lacks every reality-based evidence. Consequentially, capitalism itself, for people like Quinn Slobodian, becomes a ‘surreal reality’: “With surreal realities like these, where prominent members of the 1% really do appear to have gained from the pandemic, how much of a leap is it to persuade someone that the crisis has been orchestrated deliberately so that elites can amass power?” But critics of Covid authoritarianism always emphasised that the facts are plainly visible - there is no shady cabal pulling strings behind curtains. Neoliberal capital’s hard economic interests - and its denial by Schwab and others is proof of its continuing relevance - are even advertised by the WEF and its billionaire entourage. They practically rub it into your face. Addressing and criticising would be basic fucking common sense in a world not lacerated by the neoliberal-authoritarian fangs that the left has developed over the last years. The left, with luminaries like Quinn Slobodian, are everywhere too busy seeing fascists in critics of state authoritarianism. Poor Marx, for whom in something relatively innocuous like the concept of interest-bearing capital the ‘mystificaton is complete’, certainly hasn't talked to a lockdown-leftist, to whom the declaration of reality as a 'conspiracy theory' is the new discursive horizon. Mystification is the realm in which this new brand of technocratic Covid enthusiasts feels most at home in.[2] Consequentially, Slobodian writes like an Amazon diversity PR-executive when he states that “it’s social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the climate strikers, not boardroom initiatives, that offer a better lesson in how to gather popular support for the transformations we need.” Do whatever you want, but never address capital, inequality, or the bloody status quo.

What is behind this tricky inversion of ‘conspiracy’ and reality, is, needless to say, the left's dismissal of the analysis of power - its biggest failure to date. And that’s particularly regrettable in a time that sees the erection of the purest form of dictatorship since the pre-history of the Second World War. All talk about Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality crumbles to dust in the moment when actually existing authoritarianism rears its ugly head, as the saying goes. It’s almost as though what we learned is never applied, and the teaching itself - the ‘singularity of the Holocaust’, and other, though initially honorable theorems - made sure we would never be able to draw parallels, and thus, draw conclusions. Ironically, not the denial of authoritarianism, but the warning is decried as being ‘conspirational’ or ‘fascist’. As though someone in their right mind would think that mass masking of children, holding public events or concerts with people sitting in boxes (and declaring the performing artists criticising these measures as 'mentally unstable'[3]), or working class families of 4, spending 300 Euros for a "PCR-test", an arbitrarily declared "gold standard" of medical procedure, in order to spend a little time abroad, was appropriate - not to speak of the ensuing two-class society in a specific biopolitical sense that we are beginning to witness. And critics are - not entirely unprecedented in modern history - silenced. It is indeed “a constant propaganda pushing for totalitarianism masked as anti-fascist resistance against enemies of the state”.[4] And the worst part, as with every new form of gentle or not so gentle authoritarianism, is that almost everyone goes along with it.

Today, everyone can freely access the information that government strategies for responding to a viral epidemic have been abandoned in favour of the historically unprecedented policy of lockdowns.[5] Furthermore, we can freely access the information that PR firms were contracted in multi-million-deals for the “Stay Home, Save Lives” and similar propaganda campaigns. Stories of ‘people suffocating’, people dying alone - without their families - ended up constituting the main narrative of fear and panic by the same tactic. “To achieve the desired shock effect” was, verbatim, the political rationale employed by the Robert-Koch-Institute in unison with the Ministry of Interior in Germany, as they contracted experts who did precisely that - and very successfully so.[6]

We also know that the WHO is an active aide to the erection of a regime it so conveniently profits from, being on the payroll of the biggest pharmaceutical conglomerates in the world. Not only did the WHO change the definition of a pandemic successively since the first outbreak of the H1N1 influenza in 2009, in order to legitimise large-scale orders with various pharmaceutical manufacturers.[7] It also “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’”[8], thereby vastly exaggerating the number of Covid death cases. We were informed about the lying about ICU capacities, we heard about the cancellations and attempts at intimidation of virologists, epidemiologists and even the scientific developer of the mRNA-vaccine, Robert Malone, who openly admits that the spike proteins developed by the vaccine in the human body have high cytotoxic characteristics.[9]

We know all that. And yet, taking the vaccine is presented, in a perverse emulation of the language of the student movement, as an act of 'solidarity'. Solidarity - with what? With a regime that blackmails its entire populace into accepting measures which are actively harmful to their lives, the lives of their children, and their future? In the language of forced vaccination, there rings the tone and reasoning of the “language of the commodity” (Marx), which is always the language and reasoning of capital, and which has never entirely managed without coercion. With the difference that, now, it is more obvious than ever - for the tone is getting increasingly ominous. It's as though the Dark Lord - the capitalist state, masking as instrumental reason - has always been patient with its little subjects, but now even his patience has come to an end. In his latest Substack, Matt Taibbi has summarised examples of the reason of capital - in a profoundly class-conscious disdain for the ‘human trash’ that will not listen to what capital and its PMC lackeys have defined as ‘science’  - in a quite stunning conversation between former political consultants for Obama and other Washington ‘poo-bahs’ on This Week with George Stephanopoulos: “If you’re going to get government-provided health care, if you’re getting VA treatment, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, anything — and Social Security obviously isn’t health care — you should be getting the vaccine. Okay? Because we are going to have to take care of you on the back end.” Or this: “Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth — and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another… [But] the reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld…Will Blue America ever decide it’s had enough of being put medically at risk by people and places whose bills it pays? Check yourself. Have you?”[10]

So this is, as the German saying goes, where the journey is headed. Here is the real agenda of the vaccination regime. Far from being a conspiracy, it is the reality we have to confront, like it or not. For who says that authoritarianism has no end in itself, if it serves the interests of a mode of production that can reinforce such a mode of governance whenever it sees fit? The philosophy of frugality receives a new and modern meaning against the background of Corona policy. Frugality now not only means "you cannot have nice things", it no longer only means to "tighten the belt", as the new rationale has already prepared the public with the help of the climate emergency movement. It is more than that: the Covid regime has shown poor people and workers who the real boss is. The rejects, the lepers, they are those who do not comply: you will not only not have nice things (this car, that house, these summer holidays), you will have gotten so used to your new life-negating reality that you will not complain about it either. Yes, sir: you will lose all of your civil and individual rights and not even notice it. With Social Security being fed to the dogs, even the right to live. And so will your unvaccinated children. With the Covid regime, the erosion of the social security system, the wet dream of every neoliberal, the Schwabs and Gates of this world included, now has received a plausible rationale, compared to which the individual attacks on workers' rights will look like blanks to the sky. And no one will mention it. Move on, nothing to see here, folks. It's just an airport novel.

We must make an end to this. The sooner, the better. Against the dictatorship of the Covid regime, against the left and its PMC lackeys, for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/04/great-reset-capitalism-became-anti-lockdown-conspiracy[2] Also see the brilliant review of the technocratic intellectual Benjamin Bratton's The Revenge of the Real by Nicolas Hausdorf at https://im1776.com/2021/07/20/epidemic-epistemes/. [3]https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/hippies-im-wind-251367371622. The stately paternalism in this article is something to behold. [4] Bahamas 87, Frühjahr 2021. [5] See https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2021/02/19/cui-bono-the-covid-19-conspiracy/[6] See https://www.gppi.net/2021/05/05/die-gew%C3%BCnschte-schockwirkung-erzielen, see also https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus225868061/Corona-Politik-Wie-das-Innenministerium-Wissenschaftler-einspannte.html[7]https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-086173.pdf[8]https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2021/02/19/cui-bono-the-covid-19-conspiracy/[9]

. [10]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-aristocrats?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjIzMzY1MSwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzkyODU3MTQsIl8iOiIyenZWdiIsImlhdCI6MTYyNzQ3NDYwNywiZXhwIjoxNjI3NDc4MjA3LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTA0MiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.FvQdxYSBTT1mX-J9jhw3K6cK65CpBF1DppZeK7VZxY0